China By High Speed Rail: Fill & Download for Free

How advanced are Chinese speed trains?The Chinese high-speed rails have a quality all on its own, because it’s so massive. There are more than twice as many high-speed trains in China as the rest of the world combined. The picture below is an early morning photo at the train station of a second-tier city in China.Tier 1 cities like Beijing have a couple hundred high-speed trains stopping at the city every day.And the Chinese Spring Festival is just a mad house - an estimated 3 billion person/trips take place within a 2-week window. It would be the equivalent of every American taking 10 trips during Christmas, or every European taking 5 trips during Christmas. All the train tickets are gone within like 10 seconds after they become available.The Chinese high-speed rail system made 1.5 billion trips last year, growing 30% a year. It’s just absolutely massive!

Eastern China is one of the most populated regions on earth. I have taken the high speed trains there and given how many people have to be moved daily the unit economics works there.There are no equivalent population zones in the US. The region closest is the Atlantic coast (DC - NY) and US runs Amtrak there. I don’t think it has very many takers. Not because the train is slow, but because it is a pain to get to the station from your home.I used to take these trains in the Baltimore — DC route and it would take me hours of changing buses to get to the station and back. And it is no fun doing in the winter when windchill of -20C is blowing in your face. I did that only because I was a poor graduate student who could not afford a car. And the cost of high speed rail would defeat that purpose.The ease at which we could take trains in China, India and Europe is not the same as it is in the US. And that is not because of train’s speed, but because of how the urban areas have sprawled to prevent any easy last mile connection.

Who's got the most advanced rail system in the world and when will the USA catch up?Right now, China arguably has the most advanced and STRESS-TESTED high-speed passenger rail system in the world. The size of the high-speed rail tracks (25,000 km), the number of bullet trains to handle (2600 daily), the size of the country (the fourth largest country in the world), the size of the population (1.3 billion plus), combine to make China’s high-speed rail system the biggest and the most INTENSE system in the world.When you are traveling through such a big and crowded country, you are talking about going from -30 degrees Celsius from the North, to + 30 degrees Celcius in the south on daily basis, crossing mountains, rivers, deserts, and cities, managing through rain, hail, tornadoes, snow, flood, everyday. In travel hubs like Shanghai, there is a high-speed train launching out of gate once every 90 seconds. During the Chinese New Year in 2017, 180 million people traveled by high-speed rail within a 3-week window. Tracking Spring Festival: 357 million travel by train during Chinese New Year Its centralized train ticketing system handled 6 billion clicks per hour. And this high-speed rail system achieved one of the safest record in the world. No other high-speed rail systems in the world has this kind of scale and intensity, and has been so stress-tested. Not even remotely!If you want to get a sense of the enormous scale of China’s high-speed rail system, compare it to the US, where roughly 100 million people travel more than 50 miles during the Christmas season, of which, about 5%, that’s 5 million people, traveled by air. Record number of Americans to travel during Christmas holiday: AAA You saw how busy the airports got? Well China clocked 180 million people traveling by high-speed rail during their Spring Festival. This year 400 million high-speed rail tickets are already sold. So double the capacity in a year.Right now, the US does not appear to have the same incentive to go the high-speed rail route, because the US simply doesn’t have the same population density as China. Both the airline industry and the highway transportation industry are quite entrenched, and a high-speed rail system WILL eat into both of them, for sure.During the last Christmas season in the US, 100 million people traveled for the holidays. Of which, 5 million traveled by air, and the others traveled by road.During the last Spring Festival in China, the Chinese made 2.8 billion trips. Of which, 5 million trips are made by air, 5 million by sea, 200 million by high-speed rail (expect 400 million this year), 200 million by regular rail, the rest by road. 2.8 billion trips expected during Spring Festival in ChinaIncredible images show China's fleet of 220mph bullet trainsThe Americans are couch potatoes compared with the Chinese. If you don’t have the same kind of paying traffic, how do you pay for a new rail system?