It's probably faster than an airplane if you also factor in the time lost at airports going through meaningless queues.
this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
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n China, the trains are awesome and pretty much everything else sucks hard.
Chinese train stations are a fucking nightmare compared to the rest of the world. First, they have a funneled entrance from the subway that goes through multiple choke points. For example, at Shanghai Hongqiao, you're in a mob of hundreds, forced to go up two long escalators.
Next, people there don't have freedom of travel, so there is a security check to actually enter the station, where they look at your papers and make sure you're approved for your destination. The queues are super long and people constantly cut in line. It's rage-inducing.
Then they subject you to a baggage check, metal detector, and frisking.
Now you're inside the station, but you can't just go to the platform. Instead, you wait at a secure gate until maybe ten minutes before scheduled departure. Again, it's a giant mob of people, trying to form a line in a station that's also just overcrowded. They finally open the gate and everyone rushes through and down to the platform.
You have to arrive an hour ahead of your train's departure else you're going to have a very stressful time.
I
This guy Chinas
This guy this guys
people there don't have freedom of travel
What?
What's confusing about that?
Sounds just like taking a flight at an airport.
Also hellish
Oh wow, another person on Lemmy who has actually been to China.
That's the huge advantage of trains in my opinion. Instead of having to drive out to the airport, and deal with check in, boarding, and so on, you just go to the train station downtown and get off downtown of the city you want to go to. That alone saves a ton of time and hassle.
Than and Bar Car!
pretty countryside with an ice cold beer in hand is amazing
Trains are awesome in general. This train in particular looks freaking great!
Some airports are located closer to cities downtowns for this reason.
That's not very common for a good reason given that airports create a lot of noise pollution.
Are airports louder than train stations? Near freight trains and air port and the freight trains are much worse for me personally. Though I would hope passenger train systems are designed for less noise.
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I worry that the more useful and prevalent high speed trains become, the more the population will use them… and the more likely the long useless queues will also move to trains.
Trains can have more stations to spread out the load, but then they won’t be as high speed.
Still, I’ll happily take advantage of the currently short queues.
In airports it's usually the security theater that causes the long queues.
I feel that could be resolved by adjusting ticket prices and providing alternative options, like regional buses/coaches. Another possibility is adding more doors to each carriage, spreading out queues across the platform, but at the cost of less seating
Where I am, the regional/inter-city train costs are very competitive with the alternatives, and sometimes enable more flexibility with travel. It's still nowhere near the affordability of some parts of Asia though, and is overpriced IMO. My biggest gripe though has got to be only 2 doors on each carriage side, one at either end. And they're narrow AF, good luck carrying a bike on board. What sadist designed these trains 😭
I think this is unlikely to happen. Going through security is one of the big sources of useless queues at airports, which trains don't have. Trains also tend to have more doors to get, which should reduce the length of queues to get on the train.
Canada is pathetic.
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I wish when governments said they want to be competitive with China they did like the one thing China does that would raise our quality of life. As in make trains.
People: Can we have competitive with china [trains]?
Governments: we have Competitive with china at home.
Competitive with china at home: Low wages and no labor rights.
Don't forget surveillance and erasure of minorities!
China: working from 9 to 9 six days a week, with lower wages
And there are some Americans working similarly because they have rent to pay
So you're saying they are getting paid for overtime
Probably working 2 jobs without OT
Chinese only get one salary and still expected to work that much
I wouldn't consider US min wage with US prices a whole salary.
In 2021, 1.4% of workers in the United States were paid hourly rates at or below the official minimum wage. The percentage of hourly paid workers earning the prevailing federal minimum wage or less declined from 1.9% in 2019 to 1.5% in 2020, which remains well below the percentage of 13.4 recorded in 1979. Around 44.3 percent of wage and salary workers paid hourly rates at or below the federal minimum wage were aged between 16 to 24 years.
In the US it's usually 2 part time jobs or 1 ft and 1 or or 1 ft and gigs. Regardless the idea isn't that they make enough with one job and get spending money from the other. It's basically that you need to make as much as the top 15% of earners in the US to be ok in most areas. So we work as hard as we can to survive
Big cities like Beijing or Shanghai in China are much worse, lower wages and rents north of $1000 and salaries of about $1350
Workers cram into one apartment just to have a place to sleep
You must not have ever seen a couple of folks making min wage renting a room just to survive. America may not be quite at that disparity level but it is rapidly approaching
Couple of folks? There are like a dozen workers bunking in Beijing apartments because it's just not affordable
I remember how maglev was supposed to be the future when I was growing up but most European projects went way over budget and were eventually scrapped so I'm really happy to see that the Chinese finished this thing and that it actually works and delivers in terms of speed.
This feels so much more futuristic than boring tunnels.
Unfortunately, the west’s political systems disincentivize projects that take longer than an election cycle. Everyone needs short term wins to secure re-election and it has stopped us from doing most things that inherently take a long time to show results.
And all the NIMBY's who definitely don't want a train line going "here" where they live, since it would be way better "there". And then the local politicians who listen to them.
My knowledge might be outdated but my understanding is that maglev is still unreliable and frequently breaks down or has to operate at slower speeds. Not yet a completely mature technology I think... but very interesting for sure.
My knowledge might be outdated but my understanding is that maglev is still unreliable and frequently breaks down or has to operate at slower speeds. Not yet a completely mature technology I think... but very interesting for sure.
Nice to read a wholesome post about China once in a while
I hope there are not too many tunnels or that they found a way to relieve the pressure when going through them at high speed. This is a thing I noticed in France when taking the TGV (300kmh), when going inside tunnels at a rather high speed, there is a lot of pressure, it kind of feels like a plane landing, but shorter and more intense
Tom Scott just did a video recently of the Japanese Maglev in which it goes to 500km/h so 310mph meaning it was faster than this Chinese test...
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