The current issue of The New Yorker features a lengthy look at China’s Wenzhou train disaster of last July, calling it “the disaster that exposed the underside of the boom.” Author Evan Osnos examines both the minutiae of the crash, which officially left 40 dead and 192 injured, along with the societal context: “Scandal, of one kind or another, has become the backbeat to China’s rise.” This incident, more so than many others, has been the tipping point for China’s citizens and the global community to tsk-tsk out loud about the quantity of eggs being broken for the country’s ... Read More
Could China’s Communist Party Have Jumped the Shark at Wenzhou?
October 15, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
China’s High-Speed Crash Leads to Legitimacy Crisis
July 29, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
As their peers elsewhere, young Chinese readers have devoured the Harry Potter series. They would doubtless flock to see the final film that debuted in dozens of other foreign markets July 13. But in China, the film's release has been delayed — and not for the usual political reasons. Harry Potter, after all, features a story Chinese leaders should enjoy: a small band of committed followers triumphs over great odds (shades of the Long March and the road to the 1949 founding of the People's Republic of China) and a time of chaos gives way to peace and prosperity (reminiscent of China's Reform ... Read More
High-Speed Rail Will Impact America’s Freight Trains
June 15, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The recent controversy over high-speed rail in America has obscured one fact about trains that defines — and pretty well explains — the main trend in rail traffic in the U.S. and Europe over the last few decades: Americans move a lot more freight by train than Europeans. That's a good thing. Moving cargo that way keeps trucks off the road. And the European Union's emissions-reduction goals for the year 2020 have forced Europeans to admit to using more commercial trucks than they'd like, in spite of their own high fuel prices. "Europe's dependence on trucks stems from the failure of ... Read More
How High-Speed Rail Died in Texas, Thrived in Spain
June 8, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Once upon a time there was sharp controversy in Spain over a plan for a high-speed rail line from Madrid to somewhere in Andalusia, which lies southeast of the capital, toward Morocco. Critics derided it as "train to Africa," meaning no one would ride it, anticipating the "train to nowhere" jokes about bullet trains in California. And when then-Prime Minister Felípe González finally routed it to his hometown of Seville, the Andalusian capital, critics called it a vanity project for the ruling class, which would ride on the backs of the Spanish people. This was in the late '80s and ... Read More
High-Speed Rail Can Cover Its Operating Costs
June 1, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Just three weeks after Florida Gov. Rick Scott made a point of thumbing his nose at $2.4 billion in Washington subsidies for a short high-speed rail line, saying it would be a money hole, his own state's Department of Transportation released a study claiming quite the opposite. The Florida DOT had commissioned an independent study on ridership and profitability for the proposed high-speed link between Orlando and Tampa. The research groups, Wilbur Smith Associates and Steer Davies Gleave, projected healthy ridership for the train and a $10.2 million operating surplus for 2015, the line's ... Read More
California’s High-Speed Rail Won’t Go Nowhere
May 25, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Since California announced it had funding for a short, Central Valley leg of its planned high-speed rail system, critics have made a point of (disingenuously) scratching their heads. Ed Morissey at Hot Air argues that rail officials in California have "managed to break ground in an effort to connect two central-state communities so small that one of them is unincorporated, for service that will connect fewer people than live in Anaheim." If he meant Borden and Corcoran, the two rural end points of the line, they have a combined population somewhere north of 25,000. But the main stations ... Read More
Plugging High-Speed Rail Into Germany’s Power Grid
May 18, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Germans, feeling the bite of necessity, have announced another use for their electrified rail network: It can carry green energy, too. The German rail system has several thousand miles of high-voltage transmission lines that can be modified to broaden the national energy grid. And because of a seismic shift in German policy, the government has to find a quick solution to a daunting problem, namely how to move large amounts of renewable energy from one region to another. Wind turbines spin in the northeast, for example; but cities are growing in the south and west. The German grid would need ... Read More
Terrorist Attacks on Railroads Would Be Difficult
May 11, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
A Polish 14-year-old caused a lot of damage in downtown Lodz three years ago by rigging a TV remote control that let him switch track points on the city's tram system. He derailed four trains and injured dozens of people. "He treated it like any other schoolboy might a giant train set," Miroslaw Micor, a police spokesman in Lodz, said at the time. "But it was lucky nobody was killed." Since the raid on Osama bin Laden's house in Pakistan uncovered some notes about a future vision of derailed American trains, it's worth remembering that the idea isn't terribly new. America's huge rail ... Read More
High-Speed Rail’s Weak Link Is Security
May 4, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
One of Germany's busiest high-speed rail routes is the link between Hamburg and Berlin. I've been using it for months. On the days when I need to be in Hamburg, I roll out of bed around dawn, shuffle through Berlin before traffic starts and find a seat on the train just in time to scowl out the window over a cup of mediocre coffee. Ninety minutes later I'm in Hamburg. The trip takes three hours by car. When Deutsche Bahn renovated the 160-mile stretch in 2004 to allow the current speeds, it wiped out the market for business flights, just as a good high-speed rail corridor in California ... Read More
Start Slow With Bullet Trains
May 2, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The prospect of building new rail corridors in the U.S. must seem expensive and daunting, as it did to Europeans 20 or 30 years ago. Old American track, in many cases, is too rickety or crowded for modern electric trains to vault between major cities at speeds that compete with short-haul passenger flights. To upgrade the U.S. rail system in any significant way, there will have to be at least a few dedicated high-speed lines, on whole new rights-of-way. The cost will be staggering. And what if the people don't come? "No one will ride this train," was a refrain on message boards in Florida ... Read More
