CHANGSHA, China — The cavernous rail station here for China’s new high-speed trains was nearly deserted when it opened less than four years ago.
Not anymore. Practically every train is sold out, although they leave for cities all over the country every several minutes. Long lines snake back from ticket windows under the 50-foot ceiling of white, gently undulating steel that floats cloudlike over the departure hall. An ambitious construction program will soon nearly double the size of the 16-platform station.
Just five years after China’s high-speed rail system opened, it is carrying nearly twice as many passengers each month as the country’s domestic airline industry. With traffic growing 28 percent a year for the last several years, 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.
Li Xiaohung, a shoe factory worker, rides the 430-mile route from Guangzhou home to Changsha once a month to visit her daughter. Ms. Li used to see her daughter just once a year because the trip took a full day. Now she comes back in 2 hours 19 minutes.
Business executives like Zhen Qinan, a founder of the stock market in coastal Shenzhen, ride bullet trains to meetings all over China to avoid airport delays. The trains hurtle along at 186 miles an hour and are smooth, well-lighted, comfortable and almost invariably punctual, if not early. “I did not think it would change so quickly. High-speed trains seemed like a strange thing, but now it’s just part of our lives,” Mr. Zhen said.
China’s high-speed rail system has emerged as an unexpected success story. Economists and transportation experts cite it as one reason for China’s continued economic growth when other emerging economies are faltering. But it has not been without costs — high debt, many people relocated and a deadly accident. The corruption trials this summer of two former senior rail ministry officials have cast an unfavorable light on the bidding process for the rail lines.
The high-speed rail lines have, without a doubt, transformed China, often in unexpected ways.
For example, Chinese workers are now more productive. A paper for the World Bank by three consultants this year found that Chinese cities connected to the high-speed rail network, as more than 100 are already, are likely to experience broad growth in worker productivity. The productivity gains occur when companies find themselves within a couple of hours’ train ride of tens of millions of potential customers, employees and rivals.
“What we see very clearly is a change in the way a lot of companies are doing business,” said Gerald Ollivier, a World Bank senior transport specialist in Beijing.
Productivity gains to the economy appear to be of the same order as the combined economic gains from the usual arguments given for high-speed trains, including time savings for travelers, reduced noise, less air pollution and fuel savings, the World Bank consultants calculated.
Companies are opening research and development centers in more glamorous cities like Beijing and Shenzhen with abundant supplies of young, highly educated workers, and having them take frequent day trips to factories in cities with lower wages and land costs, like Tianjin and Changsha. Businesses are also customizing their products more through frequent meetings with clients in other cities, part of a broader move up the ladder toward higher value-added products.
Li Qingfu, the sales manager at the Changsha Don Lea Ramie Textile Technology Company, an exporter of women’s dresses and blouses, said he used to travel twice a year to Guangzhou, the commercial hub of southeastern China. The journey, similar in distance to traveling from Boston to Washington, required nearly a full day in each direction of winding up and down mountains by train or by car.
He now goes almost every month on the punctual bullet trains, which slice straight through the forested mountains and narrow valleys of southern Hunan province and northern Guangdong province in a little over two hours, traversing long tunnels and elevated concrete viaducts in rapid succession.
“More frequent access to my client base has allowed me to more quickly pick up on fashion changes in color and style. My orders have increased by 50 percent,” he said.
China relocated large numbers of families whose homes lay in the path of the tracks and quickly built new residential and commercial districts around high-speed train stations.
The new districts, typically located in inner suburbs, not downtown areas, have rapidly attracted large numbers of residents, partly because of China’s rapid urbanization. Enough farm families become city dwellers each year to fill New York City, part of a trend visible during a series of visits to the Changsha high-speed train station over the last four years.
When the station opened at the end of 2009 in an inner suburb full of faded state-owned factories, the neighborhood was initially silent. But by 2011, nearly 200 tower cranes could be counted building high-rises during the half-hour drive from downtown Changsha to the high-speed rail station. On a morning last month, only several dozen tower cranes were visible along nearly the same route. But a vibrant new area of apartment towers, commercial office buildings and hotels had opened near the train station.
China’s success may not be easily reproduced in the West, and not just because few places can match China’s pace of urbanization. China has four times the population of the United States, and the great bulk of its people live in the eastern third of the country, an area similar in size to the United States east of the Mississippi.
“Except for Boston to Washington, D.C., we don’t have the corridors” of high population density that China has, said C. William Ibbs, a professor of civil engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.
China’s high-speed rail program has been married to the world’s most ambitious subway construction program, as more than half the world’s large tunneling machines chisel away underneath big Chinese cities. That has meant easy access to high-speed rail stations for huge numbers of people — although the subway line to Changsha’s high-speed train station has been delayed after a deadly tunnel accident, a possible side effect of China’s haste.
New subway lines, rail lines and urban districts are part of China’s heavy dependence on investment-led growth. Despite repeated calls by Chinese leaders for a shift to more consumer-led growth, it shows little sign of changing. China’s new prime minister, Li Keqiang, publicly endorsed further expansion of the 5,900-mile high-speed rail network this summer. He said the country would invest $100 billion a year in its train system for years to come, mainly on high-speed rail.
The Chinese government is already struggling with nearly $500 billion in overall rail debt. Most of it was incurred for the high-speed rail system and financed with bank loans that must be rolled over as often as once a year. Using short-term loans made the financing look less risky on the balance sheets of the state-controlled banking system and held down borrowing costs. But the reliance on short-term credit has left the system vulnerable to any increase in interest rates.
“Even well-performing railways capable of covering their cash running costs and interest on their debt will almost certainly be unable to repay the principal without some long-term financing arrangements,” said a World Bank report last year.
Another impact: air travel. Train ridership has soared partly because China has set fares on high-speed rail lines at a little less than half of comparable airfares and then refrained from raising them. On routes that are four or five years old, prices have stayed the same as blue-collar wages have more than doubled. That has resulted in many workers, as well as business executives, switching to high-speed trains.
Airlines have largely halted service on routes of less than 300 miles when high-speed rail links open. They have reduced service on routes of 300 to 470 miles.
The double-digit annual wage increases give the Chinese enough disposable income that domestic airline traffic has still been growing 10 percent a year. That is the second-fastest growth among the world’s 10 largest domestic aviation markets, after India, which now faces a slowdown as the fall of the rupee has made aviation fuel exorbitantly expensive for air carriers there.
High-speed trains are not only allowing business managers from deep inside China to reach bigger markets. They are also prompting foreign executives to look deeper in China for suppliers as wages surge along the coast.
“We always used to have go down south to Guangzhou to meet with European clients, but now they come up to Changsha more often,” said Hwang Yin, a sales executive at the Changsha Qilu Import and Export Company.
The only drawback: “The high-speed trains are getting very crowded these days.”
中国高铁运营里程破一万公里，占世界45%
27/09/2013｜中新网
9月26日上午，随着南昌西、福州、莆田、三明北4个车站首发动车组列车的开行，中国第一条连接海峡西岸和中部内陆腹地的快速铁路——向莆铁路正式开通运营。至此，中国高速铁路突破1万公里，约占世界高铁运营里程的45%，稳居世界高铁里程榜首。
中国铁路总公司有关负责人称，向莆铁路自南昌西站引出，途经南昌、抚州、三明等地市通往福州，并在福州市永泰县分线通往莆田，运营时速200公里，两端分别与正在建设中的沪昆客运专线和既有的京九铁路、东南沿海铁路等路网干线相连接，对完善赣闽区域和全国路网功能具有重要意义。
截至2012年底，中国高速铁路总里程达9356公里。今年以来，随着宁杭、杭甬、盘营高铁以及向莆铁路的相继开通，高铁新增运营里程1107公里，中国高铁总里程达到10463公里，“四纵”干线基本成型。
向莆铁路通9月26日通车，中国高铁运营里程破一万公里，占世界45% 。
高铁运营里程的增加，极大地方便了旅客出行。每天数千列高铁穿行神州大地，运送逾150万名旅客往来东西南北，使铁路旅行时间普遍缩短了一半以上。
以向莆铁路为例，南昌与福州间的最快旅行时间由原来的11小时压缩至3小时12分，南昌与厦门间的最快旅行时间由原来的17小时压缩至4小时50分，出行时间缩短了70%以上。家住南昌的李洁，就读于厦门大学。过去，从南昌坐火车去厦门，得晃悠上17个小时的车程。向莆铁路开通后，从南昌到厦门只要不到5个小时的车程。
向莆铁路为客货共线快速铁路干线，是福建省第一条连接内陆腹地的现代化铁路，设计时速200公里，里程632公里(江西境内241公里、福建境内391公里)，设南昌西、三江镇、大岗、抚州北、抚州、腾桥、南城、南丰、西城、建宁北、泰宁、将乐、夏茂、三明北、尤溪、中仙、长庆、永泰、涵江北、莆田、杜坞、福州等22个站点，其中南城、南丰、建宁、泰宁、将乐、尤溪、永泰等7个站点为新设站点。
据介绍，向莆铁路福建境内桥梁和隧道总长度约占87%，其中青云山隧道长22.175公里，穿越整座青云山，是亚洲第四、中国第三双线单洞特长隧道。
据了解，向莆铁路原设计线路是由南昌市南昌县向塘镇至莆田市，故而得名。
“这条铁路的通车运营，大大缩短了赣闽两省的时空距离，江西、福建两省将分别形成以省会城市南昌、福州为中心的省内主要城市1至2小时一体化生活圈，两省省会间也将形成3小时交通圈，实现千里赣闽一日往返。”南昌铁路局副书记万军说。
向莆铁路路线图
同时，该铁路连接江西等中部地区和海峡西岸经济区，开启“山海协作”的新里程，对于促进中部地区和东南沿海地区人员、物资、信息、资金交流，加快海峡西岸经济区和中部地区崛起战略的实施将发挥重要作用。
高铁运营里程的增加，推动了综合交通运输体系的转型升级。在高铁开通的地区，长途汽车客运公司、航空公司纷纷推出价格促销、服务扩容、线路调整等竞争新招，空铁联运、公铁联运等“跨界”服务也日益成熟，高铁“快递”更成为今年搅活物流市场的一条鲶鱼。
高铁逐步成网，还促进了区域一体化与新型城镇化。宁杭甬高铁的开通运营，将上海—南京—杭州串联为“城际出行金三角”，城际出行时间被控制在1至2小时以内。长三角城市群因此成为我国高铁运营里程最长、运行线路最多、停靠站点最密、运输量最大的地区，也成功支撑起昆山、余杭等卫星城市的快速发展。而随着向莆铁路的通车运营，铁路在武汉构成了7小时左右的“米”字形高速交通网，旅客在武汉乘坐高铁、动车可以快速抵达长沙、郑州、合肥、南京、南昌、石家庄、广州、深圳、上海、济南、杭州、青岛、福州、厦门等14个省会城市和旅游热门城市。
2011年4月，向莆铁路沙溪特大桥顺利合龙
2011年10月10日，向莆铁路京山特大桥连续梁胜利合龙
高铁正成为我国铁路运输的生力军。自2007年动车组首次在我国投入运营至今，全国铁路动车组列车累计发送旅客已突破15亿人次，动车组旅客发送量占全国铁路旅客发送总量的占比已由2007年的不足5%增长到目前的近27%。预计到“十二五”末，我国高铁里程将达1.8万公里左右，包括时速200—250公里的高速铁路1.13万公里，时速300—350公里的高速铁路0.67万公里，基本覆盖我国50万以上人口的城市。
此外，高铁沿线地区利用良机，发展旅游业。比如，闽赣两省旅游局就联手发布旅游优惠措施：向莆铁路开通之日至12月底，沿线50多个主要景区集体优惠让利，推出八折以下门票的相关优惠，有凭动车票免费的景区、五折优惠的景区和八折优惠的景区。
