http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/2011-07/01/content_12817512.htm
Regular service starts today: 834 miles, 4hr 48 min., fare 555 yuan ( $85.76), built in 3 years, one year under schedule. Next stop: naysayers!
In the 50’s the US made the decision to invest in the Interstate system to enhance the transportation capabilities of the country.
In the 2000’s China made the decision to invest in HSR to enhance the transportation capabilities of the country.
Different countries, different times, different decisions.
The decision made in the 50’s for the Interstate system: are you implying that choice means we cannot therefore try something different 50+ years later, that we don’t need any updates in our transportation system? In any case I think you will find China is also heavily investing in its own interstate system of highways. It really is not an either/or choice. Nor is the US so unique in its transportation needs.
And are we such blase followers of rail news that an 800 mile HSR doesn’t register a peep of excitement, even if it is happening overseas? Not unless it’s a CN bridge fire, somewhere or UP heritage locos.
Unfortunately, the politics of today can’t envision tomorrow, let alone next year or next decade or half a century from now. While we built the Interstate system, it was built to standards for a 50 year life expectancy…that 50 years has come and gone and we are loath to invest the necessary funds to maintain or improve it.
The next quarter bottom line accounting cycle never supports long term capital investment opportunities and that has generated problems in the business community from where it originated…witness the exit of the heavy industry and manufacturing base of this country.
The arguments that are used against HSR are of the short sighted what kind of profit will it turn next quarter kind. Tomorrow is coming no matter how deeply we stick our heads in the sand.
You sure got that right. That “next quarter bottom line accounting cycle” may be, at least in part, a consequence of performance evaluations in the corporate world closely tied to promotions and compensation through stock option bonuses. So folks figured out quickly that to get ahead and get the big bonus, the long term success of your company was irrelevant. What mattered was the next year-end. The place where that philosophy is not prevalent has been in start ups, particularly tech and other newer technologies and concepts, where revenue is all reinvested salaries low, stock held privately, and the objective is long term growth. And those are the companies that have been responsible for most growth in our economy, while the established players focus on cost-cutting (cutting jobs and going overseas) as the main way to increase profits. Investments where the payoff is 5-10+ years forward are non-starters.
Well that should translate into NYP - CHI in 5 -1/2 Hrs including stops at PIT/CLE - TOL /. Now some one will bring up our HSR “gap”. RE: Missle gap of 1960s - 1980s. But a lot cheaper??
To believe this, and make this statement, you simiply have to deny reality.
The massive long term investments being made by the railroad industry prove it to be false. How anyone could know about the Sunset Route double tracking, the BNSF’s double tracking of the Transcon, CSX’s new intermodal facility at N. Baltimore, OH, CN’s acquisistion of the EJ&E, etc. and say this is beyond comprehension.
These investments aren’t going to pay off next quarter or even in two years. They are long term thinking. (Boeings new plant in South Carolina is another example of “Going Long”.)
Heck Fire, if only the next quarter or the next two years was all that counted, nobody would ever buy a new locomotive - they don’t pay off in two years.
I perceive this to be little more than sour grapes. If things don’t go as you want you assign bad motives to the decisio
Sure, it’s a generalization (“at least in part”). And sure, there are fine examples of “going long.” But a person would have to be blind to not be aware of a trend toward the short term in corporate America over the past 30 years. Try to resist the ad hominem attacks.
I’ve worked in Corporate America those past 30 years. I’ve never seen any company that I’ve worked for focus on the short term at the expense of the long view.
It is simply impossible for a US manufacturer (Abbott, Ford, Caterpillar, Boeing, etc.) to get anything more complex than a Hula Hoop to the market within two years. They’ve got to make the long term commitments. And they do. They make the long term investments in R&D, market research, plant, equipment, etc. and wait years and years for the hoped for payback.
Same thing with the railroads. The railroads have to fund track capacity expansion projects internally. They take the cash they earn and put it back in to the railroad. They do this because their analysis shows that, long term, investing in the extra capacity will pay for itself and then some. The short term maximization strategy, which you falsely claim drives things, would forego such investment in plant (and equipment) and simply auction existing capacity to the highest bidder. This short term approach would maximize earnings over that short term, but it wouldn’t maximize the net present value for their owners. So a long term view is taken.
This “They only look at the short run” claim is simply a criticism leveled at decision makers who don’t decide they way you want them to. They’re not stupid, they’re not “Greedy”, and they are rational. They can be wrong (GM’s Saturn), but they’re rational.
Can you provided some examples specific to the railroad/transportaiton industry where a quest for short term ga
“sour grapes” and "if things don’t go as you want you assign bad motives to the decision makers’ are unwarranted attacks. I have had no stake in those decisions except through investments, so it is not personal to me with grudge holding, etc.
Apparently progress in passenger train service does not interest you, as it falls outside your area of involvement. I see no reason to respond to your irrelevant (to this thread) comments.
It’s just so disheartening to see other countries making such progress and investment in the future, when here in the “Great and Mighty” US, we can’t even fix the frikkin potholes in our crumbling roads.
How is it that 50 years ago, and only 10 years after a huge war, the US could afford to build an entire interstate highway system, whereas today…
Let’s see… we have 10% unemployment, many of them collecting government $ (luckily for them such a system exists); we also have an infrastructure that is well past it’s prime…how about instead of paying folks to stay at home as their job marketability suffers, let’s put that unemployment money to good use and rebuilt this country such that it once again becomes a respected world player.
That’s what I thought they were going to do with the stimulus money, but pork won out over infrastructure.
~40% apparently was used for tax cuts.
Well, China has the money and we don’t. So our failure to install sweeping new HSR is not just an event in a vacuum. It is just one tiny setback in an ocean of setbacks that are developing for us. The cause is the epic U.S. financial collapse that is now just beginning. Many are in denial about it because there is no way to measure the problem or the speed of its onset. There is no obvious endpoint to our financial resources, so it is easy to assume we will never reach it. And the empire of public spending marches forward, refusing to acknowledge that there is an endpoint.
I have seen some news about China heading for the same predicament. They are joined at the hip with the U.S. economy and our problems with it. Moreover, China is suffering a backlash for the financial mismanagement of their HSR expansion. It seems that when you throw a massive amount of money at a public project, a lot of that money goes elsewhere. So a substantial amount of boondoggle has crept into China’s new HSR, and it is adding it
OK, put it in perspective then, not in a vacuum, as you say. Back in the day when America was moving towards greatness and building our transcontinentals, we had an enormous debt (the bloody and costly Civil War).
Public debt in 1860 totaled $64.8 million (the annual budget of the federal government at the time was $63.1 million). The war cost the nation $5.2 billion in direct expenditures, financed in a variety of ways so that the debt had skyrocketed to $2.2 billion by 1865. And the building and financing of those railroads over the next decade or two were hardly without enormous fraud and financial manipulations. But I guess if the cautions we hear today had been as rampant then as now, we would have done nothing. As another poster pointed out with the Interstates, some of the same environment prevailed then as well. So we do have choices, not just in HSR: risk and growth vs caution and stagnation and ultimately mediocrity.
[quote user=“Bucyrus”]
Well, China has the money and we don’t. So our failure to install sweeping new HSR is not just an event in a vacuum. It is just one tiny setback in an ocean of setbacks that are developing for us. The cause is the epic U.S. financial collapse that is now just beginning. Many are in denial about it because there is no way to measure the problem or the speed of its onset. There is no obvious endpoint to our financial resources, so it is easy to assume we will never reach it. And the empire of public spending marches forward, refusing to acknowledge that there is an endpoint.
I have seen some news about China heading for the same predicament. They are joined at the hip with the U.S. economy and our problems with it. Moreover, China is suffering a backlash for the financial mismanagement of their HSR expansion. It seems that when you throw a massive amount of money at a public project, a lot of that money goes elsewhere. So a substantial amount of boondoggle has crept into China’s new HSR, and it is adding its
The 4hr 48 min run is with only one stop in Nanjing. Looking at the timetable it looks like there are 42 HSR trains each way per day just between Beijing and Shanghai (84 total). Some trains make as many as 7 intermediate stops, but adding only 42 minutes to the time. I guess that is an example of what henry6 and others call real passenger service.
At the end of the Civil War, as you point out, the public debt was slightly more than the annual federal budget. According to the U.S. Treasury, the amount of the public debt at the end of 1865 was $2.7 billion.
Thanks to very robust economic growth, by 1899 the public debt, which had been paid down to $1.99 billion, was undoubtedly a smaller percentage of GDP than had been the case at the close of the Civil War.
From 1869 to 1879 the US economy grew at an average annual real rate of 6.8%, according to Professor Milton Friedman, who was a Nobel prize winner in economics and a highly regarded economist. By the 1890s the U.S. economy had surpassed Great Britain’s.
Growth rates and GDP numbers before 1929 must be treated with caution. Economists disagree on the exact figures. The Bureau of Economic Analysis’ (BEA) on-line GDP numbers only go back to 1929. In other words, the historical data, depending on
The U.S. is still the largest manufacturing country in the world. According to the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. share of world manufacturing in 2010 was just over 21%, which is about where it was in 1995. It has hovered around 20% of the world total since 1982. Manufacturing in the U.S. has increased every year since 1982, except for the recessionary years of 1990-91, 2000-01, and 2007-08.
The Japanese account for approximately 12% of the world’s manufacturing, down from 21% in 1995. Chinese manufacturing represents 15% of the world total, up from approximately 4% in 1995.
The value of U.S. manufacturing grew from approximately $875 billion in 1995 to approximately $1.6 trillion in 2010. Taken alone U.S. manufacturing would be the 9th largest economy in the world.
I have withdrawn the NAM numbers regarding manufacturing employment and compensation. Unfortunately, several people missed the key point, i.e. the U.S. is still the largest manufacturing country in the world, and jumped on essentially irrelevant points.
Suffice it to say that the differences between the BLS statistics, which deal only with employment and the NAM numbers, are mostly a function of timing, categorization, location, and the statistical methodologies used by the BLS.