China's High-Speed Rail Now Moves Twice as Many Passengers as Its Airline Industry

Five years ago, China didn't have a high-speed rail at all. Now tickets to ride on its network of ultra-fast trains routinely sell out, even though they leave every five minutes, and Chinese citizens are conveniently blazing across the nation at double the speed of the fastest American train. The high-speed rail system is so successful, it moves twice as many passengers as the nation's airline industry.

That's the picture painted by an in-depth report on the new era of train travel in China from The New York Times, and by all accounts, it's an insane transportation achievement, if there ever was one.

"With traffic growing 28 percent a year for the last several years," the Times writes, "China’s high-speed rail network will handle more passengers by early next year than the 54 million people a month who board domestic flights in the United States."

That is remarkable. China has rolled one of the most advanced, low-emissions, rapid transit systems in the world, and it did so in five years. It got off to a rough start, sure—tales of super-fast 300 mph, entirely empty trains making lonely voyages to Shanghai were a press favorite.

And there were perhaps tragic consequences to that breakneck, build out speed, such as the high-speed collision in Wenzhou that claimed 40 lives. Then again, it's not like our heavily regulated, slowpoke trains are accident-free, either.

Before we break out all the 'Look at China Eclipsing American Superiority Again' headlines, we should probably note that this impressive achievement comes at a cost—there are advantages of wielding a massive command-style economy, sure, and to doing mostly democracy-free politics. One of them is that the party leadership gets to build its high-speed rail lines where and when it wants to, and families who live in the way get to move.

Comparisons are already being made to the US's lone modern high-speed rail project, California's San Francisco to Los Angeles line, but they mostly miss the meat of the problem. CA's rail is stalled out because there are a huge number of land rights issues, local concerns, and municipal policy snags in every city that the California train is slated to cruise through. And it takes an immense amount of time and money to address all of them, but that's what we have to do, because we're trying to run a democracy. These are the same reasons that Elon Musk's future-transit idea, the Hyperloop, would probably cost a lot more than he's optimistically projected.

That said, China's rail system itself should be aspired to. As rising oil prices make jet fuel prohibitively expensive and congestion continues to gridlock our highways, we're going to start wishing we had a clean, comfortable, and fast alternative to our aging transportation network. High-speed rail are a front runner for the long-distance mass transit tech of the future, as this system demonstrates—in fact, China is counting on it.