Not quite as absurd as the rail network planned which will see travel between London and Beijing possible in just two days, but some may think the idea of bullet trains in California is pretty darn crazy.
The Chinese already helped out with building the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1860s, in the form of thousands of emigrants who helped lay the tracks. One hundred and forty years later, and California has sought help from China again for building these bullet trains, with 20 per cent of parts originating there. Not to mention the knowledge involved in building bullet trains, which China’s got spades of. Despite the US being so vast, train travel hasn’t really caught on yet – with cars and planes proving more attractive. Bullet trains would definitely help suck people into the “greener” way of travelling, so I think this sounds like a great plan. [NY Times PopSci]
Image Credit: Occam
Daniel
Saturday, April 10, 2010 at 11:38 AMIt’s funny that you’d think it would be a million times easier to send someone to another side of the country via a really fast train network instead of pushing them into the sky and keeping them their safely for hours!
I dunno, just the thought of flight over land transport seems like the more “time consuming” alternative in terms of development.
I suppose it would be easier to create a bullet train network linking each australian city to the asian continent because there’s more land in between – So that would be a nice thing to have after linking asia to europe, especially for the non-flyers.
Matthew Rodgers
Sunday, April 11, 2010 at 5:01 PMits all about infrastructure Daniel. Train tracks take up space all the way from the departure point to the destination, space that is wasted whenever the train is not actively travelling on them. Planes require much less space to set up their infrastructure. Admittedly, airport terminals are large and expensive, but they can be put anywhere there is space, often well outside the main city, plus they do not require any infrastructure in transit.
Add to that it will always be faster to fly than to travel by land (its a simple problem of friction) and flying will always be the most popular method of long distance travel.
That said, I still think the bullet trains are a great idea, more options is always a good thing
boc
Saturday, April 10, 2010 at 2:04 PMI remember reading a report that almost all of China’s bullet train technologies and know-how was stolen from France(?).
A European company was contracted over there to work on a bullet train rail project and was required to hand over all their ingenuity. The Chinese company then turned around and had them kicked out of the country.
Chinese news announcement, “We built our own bullet train with our own technology and know-how”.
Wonderful how Chinese business works.
cob
Saturday, April 17, 2010 at 9:38 PMActually you’ve been making up garbage. There was never any tech transfer and no such contract took place. No need to be jealous of others achievements.