[philwelch]

China has about three times the US population and it’s almost entirely concentrated along their coast. Passenger rail makes sense for that kind of population density. Where the US has similar density, it has Acela, which is the profitable part of Amtrak.

China also has a massive construction bubble that the government keeps propping up in order to delay the inevitable correction. As a result they overbuild a lot of infrastructure, including passenger rail, well beyond the point of diminishing returns.

[lmm]

> China has about three times the US population and it’s almost entirely concentrated along their coast. Passenger rail makes sense for that kind of population density.

But they have high speed rail across the sparsely populated interior as well - not as dense as the network on the coast, but it's there and it successfully competes with flying. So the sort of network that the west half of China has should be possible in the US.

> they overbuild a lot of infrastructure, including passenger rail, well beyond the point of diminishing returns.

Maybe. Or maybe they sensibly plan ahead and build infrastructure that will be needed in the near future. Time will tell.

[philwelch]

> Or maybe they sensibly plan ahead and build infrastructure that will be needed in the near future.

If they were making sensible plans for future population growth in Xinjiang, they wouldn’t be committing genocide there.

[lmm]

That's a nonsense non-sequitur and you know it.

[philwelch]

How is it a non-sequitur? It doesn’t make sense to build infrastructure to support population growth in an area where you are deliberately reducing the population.

[lmm]

They're not expecting to reduce the population. The claims of "genocide" are based on a rather stretched redefinition to include forced cultural assimilation. And the US has more than its fair share of both forced cultural assimilation and deliberate efforts to reduce certain populations, so even if we accept your arguments then that's still no reason to have worse transportation.

[philwelch]

The birthrates in Xinjiang are plummeting as a consequence of forced sterilization. Your genocide denial aside, the demographics of the region don’t favor your argument.