When in China...train system rocks!

I had my first experience on the high speed rail in China last Friday. I went from Changchun (where my lab is) to Shenyang for a 4th of July party the US consulate threw. (Random aside--ran into a fellow Swattie there; talk about coincidences!).

First, tickets. I'm still not sure how to get them online, though I know you can. However, they have lots of little shops where you can buy train tickets, and conveniently, one is a five minute walk from my hotel, en route to school. One of my labmates led me there to help me get tickets. One way was 142 RMB, or about $24, for the 'gaotie' 高铁 (high speed rail).

The train station was easy to get to when I took the trolley, and it's really big and clean looking. You end up in one giant waiting space for all the trains, with a lot of chairs and little shops (it was the same style in Shenyang), and when they called your train about 10 mins before boarding, you line up and show them your ticket to go down to the platform.

The seats were comfy and the cars were air-conditioned, so the 'gaotie' was a pretty comfortable ride. BUT, the best part is how fast it is. The distance from Changchun to Shenyang is about a 3-4 hr drive. I think that's about the same distance as New York City to Boston. The train ride was ONE HOUR AND FIFTEEN MINUTES. And it made two stops along the way. The party was at noon, so I left Changchun on a 9:30 am train and I got back to Changchun that night around 6:30 pm. That's like going from NYC to Boston in one day and having several hours of fun in between. As one person at the consulate put it, when I was chatting with him, "we went and had dinner in Changchun one evening just for kicks and then realized that it was actually doable". Can you imagine living in NYC and then thinking 'oh I'm going to go to Boston for dinner and then come back home'??? Or you could actually pull off a commute, since it took me 1.25 hrs on the train, and that's the regular distance or even shorter that many ppl in the US commute every day! If the US had a high speed rail, I can't imagine how the dynamics would change. A trip from San Francisco to LA, normally a 6-7 hr drive that could easily be longer with the amount of traffic there is could turn into a 2 hr train ride. Shorter distances between NYC and Philly or DC would probably be 45 minutes at most.

And the best part in China was that it was really cheap--$24. I guess that's not considered cheap in China, but for that technology and to go that far in such little time, I would expect a lot more. If a high speed rail does ever open in the US, I wouldn't be surprised if tickets were $50-$75 at the cheapest. Someone suggested to me that the US doesn't have the population levels needed to to sustain the high speed rail system. I think if such a thing existed, people would start using it. People don't now because it's expensive and slow, so sometimes driving a car is just as easy. If it was as fast as the high speed rail in China, I think many Americans would prefer it to cars or planes for traveling between cities. No more crazy security checks, ban on electronics for half an hr at the beginning and end of the trip, much comfier and less crowded, and no more crazy transfers halfway in the wrong direction to get to where you need to go. I want the 'gaotie' in the States!!!