Comment by jmyeet

So every time a post about successful public transit comes up, we get the full gamut of responses:

- "This wouldn't work in the US because of X". X is usually land area. Ok, but what about China?

- "We should fix some [corner case]" like the cost of parking;

- "It's too expensive here". Why is it expensive?

The key theme from all of this is central planning. You might be tempted to say that Japanese railways are private. Yes and no. And they certainly didn't start that way.

Back to the article, I find it weird to write an article in 2026 about the effectiveness of railways without talking about China. China is only mentioned once and that was in terms of passenger numbers.

Also, China's railroad network largely didn't even exist in 2005, certainly not the high speed rail. Look at the top metro systems by rail length [1] and 11 of the top 12 are in China (Moscow is the outlier). All of those systems are pretty new too. Chengdu at #4 was started in 2010.

According to this [2], Chengdu's population in 2010 was ~7.5 million. So you can't really argue the city was designed for it or it built early.

Most arguments against regional and metro rail systems can be debunked with "But China".

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems

[2]: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/20480/chen...