China No. 1 in high-speed rails
- Source: Global Times
- [02:39 July 02 2010]
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World's busiest
Chinese railways are the busiest in world, especially during the Spring Festival when millions of people head home for family reunion.
To solve the capacity shortage facing the lines between heavily populated major cities, China stepped up its railway-development program last year, promising to increase the passenger network to 12,000 kilometers by 2020. High-speed rail service is part of that effort.
The government will build 16,000 kilometers of high-speed rail lines to link the major cities across the country by 2020, with travel speeds averaging over 200 kilometers per hour.
When completed, the length will account for more than half of the total length of all the world's high-speed rail systems.
In December, a high-speed railway linking Wuhan and Guangzhou began operating, slashing travel time between Wuhan and Guangzhou from 10 hours to less than three hours.
The daily passenger capacity of the service increased to 83,820, with 87 percent of seats being sold.
A 1,318-kilometer Beijing-Shanghai line, set to open in 2012, will cut the trip between Beijing and Shanghai from 10 hours to five.
It's a 221-billion-yuan project, dubbed the most expensive program in Chinese history, exceeding even the cost of the Three Gorges Dam, the world's biggest hydroelectric project, which cost 203.9 billion yuan.
However, Yin Kunhua, a professor at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, warned against using the rapid construction of high-speed railway lines across the country to make a good impression or to show off.
"There is a dangerous thought that we must have the best, the most advanced, which is not necessarily what we need currently," Yin noted. "We should consider efficiency as well as cost in the public investments, which usually lack scientific study beforehand."
Kang Juan and Liu Linlin contributed to this story
