China's entire high speed network (42000km) was funded on only $900 billion of debt... Yet HS2 is estimated to cost $130 billion and California HSR $128 billion. For comparison, the Beijing-Shanghai high speed rail cost $38 billion (inflation-adjusted) and the Beijing-Tianjin line (China's first HSR) cost about $3.3 billion (inflation-adjusted).

London-Birmingham is a distance of about 160km, Los Angeles-San Francisco is a distance of about 560km, Beijing-Shanghai is a distance of about 1060km, and Beijing-Tianjin is a distance of about 110km (all straight-line).

Edit: another comparison, Japan's Chuo Shinkansen, which is pioneering high-speed maglev technology at scale and involves an absolutely astronomical amount of tunneling, is estimated to cost only $60 billion for 266km.

[–] what_is_a_name@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In general. Construction can be made very cheap in dictatorships.

The other thing making things cheap is scale.

China did a lot of things well, but especially on point 1 - we need to hold the line.

Lots of projects are expensive in the west because we care about nature, quality, worker safety and the communities impacted by the work (but also because this all opens the doors to malicious bad faith legal battles that make projects stupid expensive)

[–] zephyreks@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Japan isn't a dictatorship, nor are France or Spain.

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