Sunday Open Thread

Robert Cruickshank — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 02:24:39 +0000

Feel free to use this as an open thread for anything HSR related. Some recent HSR news items:

With a British general election looming and the Conservative Party riding high in the polls, it’s good to hear that the Tories will support the London-Scotland HSR project if and when they get elected.

Amtrak will launch wifi on the Acela trains in March. I keep hearing that wifi on the Capitol Corridor between San José and Sacramento should be happening soon, but no date on that has yet been made public.

Vietnam plans to adopt Shinkansen technology for a link from central Hanoi to the airport. Last summer Vietnam announced plans to use Shinkansen tech for the cross-country link from Hanoi south to Ho Chi Minh City.

Hong Kong NIMBYs are protesting plans to build an HSR link to the mainland, while the Economist wonders how China will pay for the massive cost of its HSR construction binge. The answer appears to be that the government will subsidize the construction to a large extent, which is the smart strategy, though the details matter. The Economist compares China’s HSR plans to America’s big 19th century railroad construction efforts, and it’s worth noting that those efforts were constantly plagued by debt problems. In fact, on at least three different occasions, railroad-related debt problems produced financial panics and threw the nation into Depression (1857, 1873 and 1893). Yet nobody would say that the railroad construction was a bad idea – the US would never have become a global industrial power without them. Of course, a better way to build it could have been done, and when it came time to build the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s, memories of the 19th century railroads were strong, which is why government directly subsidized the construction cost of the interstates.

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