Other People's Rail: Amtrak, commuter rail, rapid transit news & views outside New England

[TheRatmeister]

I've seen pictures and news stories about a few giant Chinese rail stations like this one, and some just seem... odd. This one has been open since 2020, but I can't find any pictures of people actually using it. I can't find passenger count numbers. It's such a massive station, but it seems like they only planned to have one subway line go through it. So it's large enough to handle a million people a day, but... one subway line? That isn't even built yet?

Obviously China is building a mind-bogglingly incredible HSR network. So maybe I'm missing something, or I'm reading poorly translated news sources, or something. But this station (and some others like it) look kind of useless. Or at least, they were made giant for the sake of bragging about making a giant building, and not for much practical transit needs.

HSR in China is a complicated story. Some amount of it is either built for political reasons (see the lines to Xinjiang or Tibet) or just built for the sake of building something and pumping GDP up. Obviously there is a debate about whether transit and HSR should be profitable but there is a line somewhere and routes that are unable to cover the interest on their construction costs or even just electricity are probably on the wrong side of that line.

 

[stick n move]

I've seen pictures and news stories about a few giant Chinese rail stations like this one, and some just seem... odd. This one has been open since 2020, but I can't find any pictures of people actually using it. I can't find passenger count numbers. It's such a massive station, but it seems like they only planned to have one subway line go through it. So it's large enough to handle a million people a day, but... one subway line? That isn't even built yet?

Obviously China is building a mind-bogglingly incredible HSR network. So maybe I'm missing something, or I'm reading poorly translated news sources, or something. But this station (and some others like it) look kind of useless. Or at least, they were made giant for the sake of bragging about making a giant building, and not for much practical transit needs.

As I mentioned that station is in Xiong’ an which is a completely new from the ground up built from scratch city. Its still a massive construction site. Right now the station is really far away from the finished part of the city, basically out in the middle of nowhere because only a small part of the city is completed. Eventually the part around the station is going to look like those pictures. Not many people have moved in yet so theres not much demand for such a massive station right now.

The purpose of the city is to take pressure off of Beijing, all of the govt offices and non essential services of Beijing are being moved to Xiong’ an to free up space in beijing. Also there is a megalopolis being developed called jing-jin-ji which is beijing, tianjing, and hebei which are all slowly merging together into one megaregion and this falls within that area, its 100km south beijing.

One thing I havent liked from the start is they havent built any subway lines and are instead focusing on the “future” transit modes like autonomous cars and buses. I think this is a mistake esp for a city which is planned to hold 5 million people. Eventually I bet they will change course and build subway lines. For now its a massive construction site which has gone up blazingly fast. This is one of Xi Jinpings personal pet projects the way Shenzhen was for Deng Xiaoping, so the whole power of the state is being wielded here. The difference is Shenzhen was a free market capitalist experiment and this city is a socialist experiment where its being entirely built by the state to hold state functions.

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/chinas-xi-urges-progress-his-city-future-project-2026-03-24/

Jing-Jin-Ji - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

HSR in China is a complicated story. Some amount of it is either built for political reasons (see the lines to Xinjiang or Tibet) or just built for the sake of building something and pumping GDP up. Obviously there is a debate about whether transit and HSR should be profitable but there is a line somewhere and routes that are unable to cover the interest on their construction costs or even just electricity are probably on the wrong side of that line.

Their construction costs are also pretty high relative to other countries in spite of dirt-cheap labor, in part because the blank-check nature of the authoritarian gov't spending doesn't lend itself to good oversight (i.e. "Why bother minding costs when the government is going to print enough money to get this done any which way?"). It's a popular myth that they're building good things cheap when the rest of the world sees them underbidding for competitive foreign contracts (which the government is also subsidizing), but they're really kind of sloppy at project management in-practice. Alon Levy has written a lot about how the People's Republic (and, similarly, other authoritarian governments) don't do costs very well at all.

Along with many other economic indicators that this "manifest destiny" spending spree of theirs isn't sustainable.

 

[as02155]

Honestly, we just can't compare to really anywhere in East Asia, at all. They build new transit lines, stations, bridges, transmission infrastructure, housing developments for hundreds or thousands of people, as a matter of course. I swear to god, if people in California saw the scale of housing development that occurs in e.g., South Korea, they'd just start convulsing and never stop.

Just as a reminder, it typically takes a near-society-ending or full-society-ending type of disruption to cause this. It's absolutely true, and absolutely unhelpful to compare to other countries - as comparision is often the theif of joy.

 

[aquaticko]

Just as a reminder, it typically takes a near-society-ending or full-society-ending type of disruption to cause this. It's absolutely true, and absolutely unhelpful to compare to other countries - as comparision is often the theif of joy.

Well, this is some bs nonsense if ever I did hear.

Yes, it’s true that all over Europe and Asia, they had hugely disruptive and destructive events in the last century of the sort the US hasn’t.

No, it’s absolutely not true that that means we have nothing to learn from them about how to build things more quickly, safely, efficiently, cheaply, equitably. Besides, have you seen the rapid devastation we inflicted on most of our major cities to plow highways through their centers? And what American, these days, doesn’t think we NEED some kind of society-wide disruption??

I love that your coda is basically, “better things aren’t possible”. Wonderful contribution.