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Sustainable Transport in China

By | | Transportation
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The government of China recently released a paper called Sustainable Development of Transportation in China. It doesn’t have a lot of new information — the data it uses are only current through the end of 2019 — but it does make one assertion I’d like to examine in more detail.

An expressway and rail line leaving Shanghai, China. Photo by Pyzhou.

According to chart 3, on page 12 of the Word version, the share of passenger travel that goes by highway declined from 93.5 percent in 2012 to 73.9 percent in 2019. The difference was taken up by railway transport. This makes China’s high-speed rail program, which grew from 6,000 miles in 2012 to 22,000 miles in 2019, look like a great success. Continue reading →

More Expensive Than It Should Be

By | | Housing
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The Economist reports that housing in China is “cheaper than you think.” The magazine-that-calls-itself-a-newspaper’s measure of affordability is the average price of a 100-square-meter (1,076-square-foot) home divided by average household income.


Older mid-rise homes in Shanghai are torn down and replaced with high rises. Flickr photo by Paolo Vasta.

In megacities such as Beijing and Shanghai, such a house costs nearly 15 times the average incomes of those cities. Not to worry, says the Economist: in medium and small cities, housing is only about 8 times average incomes. As of November, the national average is 8.9 times.

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The Railroaded Not Taken

By | | Transportation
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Reeling from a scandal in which ministry employees allegedly embezzled at least $28.5 million, China has dismantled the Ministry of Railways and replaced it with a state-owned company. Managers of the new China Railway Co. had hoped that they would be given the Ministry’s assets but not its debt. However, the government says they will have to deal with its debt as well–all $428 billion of it (2.66 trillion yuan).

China’s high-speed fail.

Restructuring will not save China from that debt, which either taxpayers or creditors will have to cover–it certainly won’t be repaid out of rail fares. The debt is roughly $73 million for each of the 5,840 miles of high-speed rail lines built by the Ministry. This suggests that China got off cheap considering that California is planning to spend close to $300 million per mile for its high-speed rail, while Amtrak wants to spend $345 million per mile ($151 billion divided by 438 miles) building a new Boston-to-Washington high-speed rail line.

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China Suspends New HSR

By | | Transportation
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Railway Age reports that China’s Premier Wen Jiabao has suspended “approval of new railway projects” while it investigates the recent accident that killed at least 40 people.

Jiabao also said that the country would “reduce the average speed of new high speed trains at their early stage of operation.” Another report indicates that the government has ordered one of the Chinese manufacturers to stop making bullet trains “because of an improperly working automatic safety system that was causing delays on its Shanghai to Beijing line.”

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More on China’s High-Speed Rail

By | | Transportation
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An American blogger in China makes some interesting points about China’s rail system. The country’s existing rail network is currently being used to capacity by freight (mainly coal) and conventional passenger trains. In fact, the number of passenger trains has pushed a lot of coal traffic onto trucks and highways.

The high-speed rail network was supposed to get passengers off the conventional rails, in turn allowing freight trains to get coal and other freight off the highways. But the high-speed rail fares are so high that ridership is low and the vast majority of rail riders are sticking to the conventional trains. The result is a surplus of passenger capacity without alleviating the shortage of freight capacity.

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