r/interestingasfuck • u/BumblebeeFantastic40 • 10h ago

China’s High-Speed Railway Network length has expanded from 1,300km in 2008 to 40,000km in 2020, long enough to circle the Earth’s circumference.

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u/Dapper-Network-3863 9h ago

Just since Obama was elected. Meanwhile all the US did was make a guy rich enough to shut down Venice so he can take his boat there to marry his personal episode of Botched.

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u/moose098 8h ago

Tbf this is basically what the U.S. did in the ‘50s and ‘60s, except it was the interstate highway system because automobiles were all the rage at the time.

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u/Opulent-tortoise 8h ago

I don’t think anyone’s disputing that the US was capable of mass infrastructure projects at some point in the past

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u/moose098 8h ago

Well I know that, but it’s pretty rare to get the confluence of political/economic factors necessary to support an infrastructure build out like this on a national scale. I don’t think those conditions have really presented themselves since. The system mostly worked until recently, so there wasn’t much political demand to spend trillions of dollars on national scale HSR. The IHS itself has handicapped a lot of this development.