alt Hacker NewsChina can do it because they have a command economy and the government can just take property to do what it wants.
To do this in the USA you'd have a thousand different emminent domain claims to get through, at least some of which will be contested, you'll need to pay the property owners fair market prices for the land you are taking, there will need to be environmental impact studies, planning commission approvals, fights with every interested locality over station locations and ammenities and how many trees will be cut down. China doesn't have to worry about any of that they just do it.
Replies
I think this narrative is kinda trueish but I still dislike it because it masks the real problem. Those property rights and review processes don't actually get us any benefit, they just allow a small number of people to grift the state and blow up costs for no reason and frequently for self-enriching nefarious reasons. So it's not like there's an upside to our system. This narrative suggests "well, we don't have great trains but at least we're free, unlike the Chinese" which I think is a load of shit.
People do get railroaded in China, it's true. But people get railroaded here in the USA too, because they have to live next to a loud choking freeway that gives them cancer and alzheimers, instead of a clean train line. And it costs $300 for car payment insurance etc to get anywhere which is basically a tax. 3 children a day have to die in car crashes because our whole society has been captured by the automobile. And in any case, they built all these freeways by railroading immigrant and black communities all over the place anyway. We got the worst of all worlds. Honestly net I think it sucks more than chaiqian because at least under their system you can ride the fucking train.
And even aside from this, China has way more civil engineers than the USA does and those engineers have many large projects under their belts. I think they are also just way better at executing large projects on time and under budget. Their engineers simply are better than ours. They build bigger things faster and cheaper than we do full stop.
The US built stuff though. Not even that long ago.
Subway systems don’t take all that much land from private parties and are effectively too expensive to build here. Not to mention how long they take.
It’s because we decided it must be this way. If we decided (as a society) building stuff was important we could do so. It will take an existential crises for this attitude to shift though.
When you propose building quite literally anything here you will have people saying “no” crawling out of the woodwork. We decided to empower such people both legally and socially.
While I don't disagree with you as you described the US situation, many places out there have societies and government regulations closer to the US than China and they have built successful railway networks, including high speed ones. Many countries in Europe, for example.
It might be useful to compare the US with those countries instead, and find out what differs in the US so it's holding it back.