this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
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Mildly Infuriating
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I cant find statistics on total occupancy rates, but I never saw a high speed train in China that wasnt mostly full, and they mosty sell out days beforehand, so Im pretty sure that's just someone making shit up. As far as domestic debt due to infrastructure spending, apply your model to Japan.
Turns our neoliberalism was always full of shit, a jobs program that produces useful infrastructure is infinitely better than leaving people unemployed or subsidizing walmart's wages.
I think people forget that many of the highways in The Westβ’ were created as part of glorified jobs programs too.
These projects run like utter shit now in places where work is tendered out to corporations now of course, because they're being driven by private bodies whose sole motivation is profit, not the creation of useful infrastructure. In my own country HS2 is a beautiful example of this.
Do you have any clues why privatization was so much more destructive in the UK than Japan? The JNR breakup increased ticket prices, decreased service, and made the system overall much more inefficient (Nagoya has subway, rail, elevated rail, bus, elevated bus, ferry, gondola, run by 16 different companies, tokyo has vital subway lines run by different companies, so you pay nearly the cost of a 24 hour pass for using this one transfer), but regulation and infinite loans stemmed the bleeding. You still have rail service to the boonies, even if its an unmanned platform or a guy who shows up twice a day to check shinkansen tickets. The destruction to the UK rail system seems much more permanent.
Honestly I don't know enough about the way that it's run to give a correct answer!
I mean even pre-privatisation the rail service was being reduced (Beeching's cuts etc.) so there's clearly a cultural element at a government level, but the actual running of the rail firms is pretty opaque; there's a lot of subcontracting, and the profitability is high, with reinvestment in the railway services not being proportional to that. I suspect that the culture around rinsing public services for private gain isn't quite so dominant in Japan, but again, I couldn't comment on that really.
We also have relatively old infrastructure, comparably narrow gauge railways that we would struggle to update because the country was built up around it, but this might be a bit of an old-fashioned take. I'm sure some transport historians could set me right!
I think that person's logic goes like, "government run" = "artificially propped up" = "doesn't count as real growth".
It's the final form of capitalist indoctrination to only be able to reason about other systems through its lens.
It's almost as if infrastructure is there to facilitate growth and economy and not to turn a profit.
Do the same math for roads: How many percent of the roads in your country (or any other country) turn a profit?
Do the same with water works, sewage and so on. All these things have benefits far greater than immediate profit.
You need roads so that people can get to work and to places where they can spend money and so that goods can be shipped. And all of these things generate taxes and economic benefit, which in turn finance, among other things, road building.
It would be entirely stupid to think that every piece of infrastructure needs to finance itself and turn a profit, while completely forgetting the actual purpose and benefit of the infrastructure.
Ok, let's assume you read the article. Quiz question: who owns the China State Railway Group Co Ltd? (Hint: it's in the name)
Also, I guess you didn't just invent the "stated goal" of the China State Railway Group, so it should be quite easy for you to find said stated goal in their actual stated goals (http://wap.china-railway.com.cn/english/about/aboutUs/201904/t20190408_92993.html), correct?
If you had bothered to actually read the article and if you had bothered to actually research anything at all about the topic at hand, we probably wouldn't have the discussion.
The reality is the high speed rail it China is not solvent and is operating at a tremendous loss. That's just reality. The question is if that loss serves a larger benefit to Chinese society. It's a gamble either way.
Again, the same applies to e.g. the road network in the USA. Infrastructure is there to facilitate economic growth and freedom. Without roads it's much harder to transport goods, get people to work, give people the mobility to move to jobs that are farther away while still being able to live closer to where they want and so on and so on.
And the same applies to public transport as well.
Only supreme idiots would argue that roads should turn a profit. And public transport is much cheaper at transporting people than roads.
It's !mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world that people don't understand what infrastructure is and what it's there for.
I don't necessarily disagree, but it would be silly to compare roads to high speed rail. One has a much higher barrier cost to entry while the other model offsets the cost by distributing it across the population. Yes, yes I know. I'm not saying one is better than the other. I'm just explaining the roi based on the startup cost. But yes, of course the benefits of infrastructure extend beyond the price to manage it. But there comes a point when the return is negative. Many of the Chinese high speed branches are crossing extended distances to literally nowhere. Only a portion of the network is serving an extremely densely populated area. So it's a bit of column a and a bit of column b.
The same holds true for roads as well: Build a massive highway somewhere in the mountains where nobody lives and it will cost a ton of money while having very little benefit. And highway bridges and tunnels are also very expensive to build.
For comparison, I pulled some numbers from Germany. High speed train tracks cost β¬25mio/km (not counting bridges or tunnels). Highways cost β¬20mio/km (again not counting bridges or tunnels). So it's not that far off.
On the other hand, maintaining a high speed track is much cheaper, at around β¬70k/km pa., while maintaining a highway costs β¬390k/km pa plus another β¬180k/km pa. administrative cost.
But the real kicker is capacity: A 2-lane highway has a capacity of 3000-5000 vehicles per hour. At an average occupancy of 1.2 people per car, that's 3600-6000 people.
An Austrian Railjet for example, can carry around 1700 people and you can run them at 3-minute intervals on a high speed track. That's a total capacity of 34 000 people per hour. They are usually not run at that frequency, because that's vastly more than what's ever necessary, but you get the point. High speed rail has such a massive capacity, that it's virtually unlimited, for a price that's very comparable to a regular 2-lane highway.
When it comes to cargo, low-speed rail is even much more efficient than trucks on roads, with the major downside being that you have to unload the cargo to trucks for local distribution.
But my main point here is that roads aren't some holy heal-it-all solution that's never a waste of money while rail needs to be profitable on its own, like a lot of people seem to perceive it. A highway is not more of a basic human need than high-speed rail.
Overproduction of commodities is certainly a problem for capitalists. But the workers get to enjoy a lower cost of living. Like I would much prefer we built ghost cities (Chengdu was derided as a ghost city at one point) than have a decades long housing crisis with no signs of improving unless we deport millions of people.
Did you know that most of China's debt is held domestically?
Yeah, sure. China has a debt to GDP of 88.6%. That's not great. Luckily we don't have that problem in western capitalist countries, right?
I also didn't only post numbers for the US.
LOL thanks for your unfunded BS CIA.