“If you take the ‘K’ train,
You,
Will get to Huangbaiyu in Liaoning.”
For those who don’t know what I’m talking about and think I’m going crazy on this year of independence, I encourage you to watch this video, hearken back to the swing era to broaden your musical tastes, appreciate the genius of Billy Strayhorn, and then return to read the rest of this post.
And for those with an encyclopedic knowledge of China’s train schedules and lines, yes, I’ve taken some liberties in writing the lyrics. I do realize that no trains go directly to Huangbaiyu, but it just fit so perfectly in the rhythm and it was the first step in my trip to Huangbaiyu. But I digress…
Now that I’ve hopefully lightened your mood and gotten a song stuck in your head, perhaps you’re ready to read a bit about the principles, prices, and promise of rail travel in China both within and between cities. I’ve become quite the connoisseur of train travel during my time here in China, and so have some stories, thoughts, and lessons to share on the subject. Furthermore, key to any sustainable or “eco-“ city is a good transportation system, and China is poised to develop that piece of the puzzle faster than anyone else, providing promise for the green dreams of the Party leadership.
Let’s start first though with the experience of rail travel between cities. I find there is something wonderful about falling asleep in one city and waking up early the next morning to find yourself visibly in a different world watching trees and towns whizz by as you approach your destination. I guess I’ve never lost the romanticism for trains that captivated me as a child, and perhaps that’s why I’m devoting a whole post to it now. In fact, I’m fond of joking that I wanted to be an engineer even as a kindergartener, but didn’t know what type. (There is video evidence that I wanted to be a train engineer—the kind that drives the trains—when I was 5. I got the engineer part right, but now I work on a bit more stationary objects.)
Train travel in China is far cheaper than flying, so if you’re willing to take the nighttime trip for 11 hours from Beijing to Shanghai or 16 hours from Shanghai to Hong Kong, you’ll save a few kuai, have the opportunity to rest in a bed or a seat, and maybe see a bit of the country while you’re at it. There are five classes of tickets on most Chinese trains: soft sleeper, hard sleeper, soft seat, hard seat, and standing room. Having experienced all of them, I’ll address each in turn so that future travelers may draw on my experience to choose the class that is best for them.
Soft Sleeper
It doesn’t get more luxurious than this on China’s trains. You are given a very slightly padded mattress with a blanket and pillow in a cabin with three other occupants and plenty of headroom to sit up and read or work from the privacy of your own bed. The door to your cabin even closes, blocking out the smells and slurps of other passengers enjoying their ramen for dinner (because it seems that is the must-have meal for traveling long-distances on trains) and giving you some privacy and peace for your rest. Lights get turned out at 10 pm promptly, but if you, like me, need to stay up and work, a private bed light is available for use. Some trains even come equipped with a TV at your feet so if you want to watch the train’s programming, enjoy. For my overnight from Shanghai to Tianjin, the soft sleeper was the only ticket available, and though it is quite a bit more than the hard sleeper, the next class down, it does give a nice rest and the added privacy was great.
Hard Sleeper
Personally I think this is the way to go. It is cheaper than a soft sleeper and honestly, the beds are not much less comfortable, if any. Sure there’s no TV at your feet, and there is no partition to close out the ramen and late night card players, but even with the added two people in the room, you get a good night’s sleep and are refreshed in the morning. At my last hostel in Shanghai, a group of us joked that the only difference between a soft and hard sleeper is the 50% greater chance of having someone snoring in the hard sleeper! Overall though the ride is fine, the amenities are good, and the bed is clean so you can hop aboard, fall asleep to the rocking of the train on the rails, and wake up in a new city the next morning.
Soft Seat
I only ever rode this class on short journeys in China like from Shanghai to Suzhou or Hangzhou, and it was very similar to what I am used to as train travel back in the U.S. The seats are two to a row with a central aisle, some facing another row across a table, others in row after row of forward-facing seats. They do recline, which was nice, and have a little table where you can set a book or water as if you are on an airplane. These little comforts make the few hour trips to Nanjing, Suzhou, or Hangzhou zip by as you are busy reading or snacking. Watching the countryside morph outside the window is fun, especially on fast trains where speeds reach over 200 km/hour. At only a bit more cost than a hard seat, this is the best class for short trips.
Hard Seat
You can take any of the classes listed above for your train travel in China, but if you really want to get a sense of what it is like for Chinese citizens to travel, and I mean the masses, not just the elite from Shanghai, then steel yourself for an interesting experience, and buy a hard seater. Unlike the slightly more expensive soft seat, these chairs do not recline, are attached in groups of three and facing a central table that barely extends past the first seat in the row, and true to their name, leave you with a sore tailbone after a long ride. If you have to take them overnight, it’s an experience—double over to try and catch some sleep or if you are lucky to have an inner seat, lean on the table. I hear that sometimes the trains are so lightly filled that you can extend across a row and sleep nicely, but I never saw this. Oh, and if you have to get up to use the bathroom (which you may have second thoughts about when you see), have fun picking careful steps through the hordes of people crowding the floors to try and sleep. They bought standing tickets, and are doing whatever they can to get a little rest. Yet despite these inconveniences, I actually do suggest that you try it. It is a true Chinese train travel experience, as one fellow hard seat passenger told me. Life happens in this class as people eat, drink, talk, sleep, and sometimes have to attend to children who have made messes of themselves. Depending on where you are headed, you might be shoulder to shoulder with a student returning home for the weekend or a farmer carrying two large gunny sacks of rice or fruit from his village into Shanghai for selling. You never know what to expect, and if you can stand the night of poor sleep, sore rear, and fire hazard of a central aisle, take a hard seat and experience the real China, not the pampered luxury of the soft sleeper.
Standing Room Only
For the same price as a hard seat, you can have the opportunity to stand for the entire trip! But hurry because this is a special offer only valid until the train departs. That’s right, even moments before leaving you can score a standing ticket and enjoy the challenge of sore feet and trying to find a seat for the entire ride. While not so bad for a short ride from say Beijing to Tianjin (1.5 hours), there are a lot of people who do this for an entire night, and I was lucky enough to be one of them. At every station, there is a mad dash from the standers to find a seat that was vacated by a ticketholder reaching their destination. Then you sit and pray that there is no one who bought that seat from this station onward. Most of the time you lose the gamble and are forced once more to stand. Arrive early on the train for the best leaning or crouching spots (between cars or against rows of seats). However if you are unlucky in getting these spots and need a place to sleep, just do like the other Chinese and bring a newspaper to sit on in the aisle or stretch out on under the hard seats. It’s not so bad if you don’t mind being woken up every time that another passenger needs to use the bathroom. Oh, and the carts for food come by about every 15 minutes until 11 pm kicking you out of your nice seated position to flatten against a table or row of chairs to let them loudly rumble by selling overpriced food. A true Chinese experience, and one that is not really worth the money. Just book early and get a hard seat for the same experience with a little less inconvenience.
Intercity Transit
Well that’s a bit of a run-down on train travel for those planning on heading to China and going anywhere by train. Now a bit about the importance of train travel in this country and my thoughts on its role in creating a more sustainable China. Let me start by giving a recap briefly of how emissions from transportation stack up. In the United States, emissions from transportation are about 30% of the overall footprint of the country. While much of this comes from road vehicles, especially passenger cars and long-distance trucks, a significant portion comes from air travel. Per mile traveled, flying has the highest carbon emissions of any form of transport. This is not surprising considering the amount of power required to life a plane and its passengers off of the ground and the fact that all of this power is supplied by burning petroleum based fuels (as a brief aside, there are developments on biofuel and fuel cell hybrid airplanes that are exciting and promising, but FAA testing takes a very long time, so don’t hold your breath for these technologies any time soon). Furthermore, in looking at institutional carbon footprints (say for a college like Harvey Mudd, for which I helped review the carbon assessment), air travel is about the hardest category to reduce. Individual users have little control over the mileage traveled (if you have to go from LA to Detroit, it is a set number of miles and no alternate routes are better), the fuel efficiency of the vehicle, or the fuel used. After planes, it is a tough call as to whether planes or cars emit more carbon. Trains can be classed into the freight engines that burn coal and oil for operation which have high carbon footprints. Electric trains like light rail or newer passenger trains though have a smaller footprint which is dependent on the regional electricity grid. That means that an electric train in say China where 76% of electricity is from coal will have a larger carbon footprint than a train in California where 40% of electricity is natural gas.
If we break things on a per capita basis, then train travel gets a boost over cars. As I said before, planes are still the worst—even with 400 passengers, the amount of fuel required to move the plane and its load at 500+ mph through the air is so great that the individual carbon footprints are enormous per mile traveled. Per passenger, the footprint is between 90-120 grams CO2 per seat per kilometer (Reference). However when you drive in your car alone, your footprint is also fairly sizeable, but substantially lower at 20-30 grams per seat per kilometer, if shared by 1.5-2.2 people. If there is no one else to split the emissions with, this number would be higher—in the range of 30-60 grams per seat per kilometer. Carpooling is better, but trains and buses are the best. They are essentially carpooling on a mass scale. Simply because of the number of people on board, your individual carbon footprint for the travel is significantly reduced which is an important factor for considering sustainable cities. Assuming an average load factor for a train of 65-75% (perhaps an understatement for China currently), the footprint works out to between 10-20 grams per seat per kilometer depending on the speed of the train. A train may have a higher absolute carbon footprint than a car, but per capita it is much less and that is the number about which we care—how do we move people where they need to go in the lowest carbon manner per person.
Before deciding that train travel is the way to go for China, let me consider here the one other option for long-distance travel: the bus. China does have a network of long-distance buses which even include a sleeper class for those long trips, and prices are comparable to the trains. Environmentally, they are even on par with trains, at least in the Western world, with footprints of 10-20 grams per seat per kilometer assuming a load factor of 85% (probably appropriate for China, though Chinese buses are likely much more inefficient than their Western counterparts, so this number is likely to be higher). The footprint question must also be viewed long term. The rise of fuel cell buses could easily reduce the carbon footprint of travel to nothing (provided the hydrogen is produced from renewable sources) whereas reducing the footprint of trains would require powering the whole Chinese grid on renewables (a proposition the government is seeking to achieve, but not for at least 50 years—development is still king, not reducing carbon). Hydrogen powered trains are possible as well, but unlikely to appear anytime soon (though I could be proven wrong, and hope I am)! Electric buses are not currently feasible for long-distance trips unless rapid charging is easy and made widely available, and even if it were, then reducing the footprint of the buses would have the same challenge as the trains unless refueling stations were self-sufficient and not grid-connected.
The other aspect to bus travel is the infrastructure of Chinese roads. I took one long-distance bus during my stay, from Shanghai to Beijing. As I had a schedule to keep, I ensured that I caught the bus that was supposed to arrive at 6 am. Now because of traffic conditions, I was warned that it might not arrive until around 9, which still would have been alright. As I nodded off around midnight, we were comfortably cruising at about 120 kph down the highway, looking like we would arrive in Shanghai at our scheduled 6 am time. Seven hours later I awoke to find our bus parked in the middle of the highway with everyone else. Looking out my window, I could discern no possible reason for this stop except that it was a bit foggy (perhaps too foggy to drive?), and no police, fire, or ambulances were visible. If an explanation was offered for our lack of movement, it was given in Chinese only and so I am still clueless as to why we stopped. Two hours later, at 9 am, we finally got moving again, and I saw no evidence of an accident, road work, or anything else that would have caused our delay. We finally arrived in Shanghai at 12:30 pm, 6 ½ hours late. Now trains are not always on time either—in fact in my 6 overnight train rides, only one arrived on time, but the longest delay of the other 5 was only an hour (and that on an 18 hour trip from Shanghai to Hong Kong). Delays are far less likely on rail trips where rights of way are predefined and uncontrolled variables (i.e. accidents and traffic) are much more limited. This simple guarantee of rapid arrival gives an advantage to trains over buses. If dedicated intercity bus lanes were built, this advantage could be negated, but such construction would be enormous, especially in China, or would require dedication of already built lanes and likely an increase in traffic for other drivers, much to the chagrin of Chinese travelers I’m sure.
So now we have three options for intercity transit that we’ve weighed: bus, airline, and train. Now of course private cars can be added to that list, but aside from the All-American road trip (I’m not sure there is such a thing as the All-Chinese road trip—bus tours seem a more common occurrence here) which has other, intangible benefits (the joys of hitting the open road with family and friends, facing the trials of overheating engines, digging in to a burger as big as your head next to truck drivers named Mo at the local greasy spoon, and gawking at the world’s largest hairball or some other sideshow oddity), I’m discounting this immediately as inefficient both from a user and environmental standpoint. Personally, the ability to sleep, read, or work as I travel is a big plus that cannot be obtained if I am driving. After weighing the environmental issues of each, let’s turn to the social aspects in which the clear winner in China is rail travel. As I said before, if you want to travel like the Chinese, book a hard seat on the train. Trains provide vital links currently between Western and inner cities and the Eastern hubs. Passenger trains even help transport food long distances from the local growers to markets in other towns and cities such as Shanghai. In my hard seat and standing adventures, I saw numerous men and women carting carpetbags full of produce onto the trains and then unloading them in their arrival city.
The trains also provide a link for families. Many students from inner regions seem to leave their hometowns for opportunities to study at better universities or work in the Eastern region, and on weekends when the desire to visit home overcomes them, they hop aboard a train and in a night are back with their family. Several citizens whom I met were traveling in this manner—one said it was his yearly trip home aside from important holidays. On the other hand, the cost of airlines prohibits these from being used by many in China except the business class and those who are based in Shanghai or Beijing. For many, the hard seat on the train is the only affordable means of transportation. And if you have to get to market or family in a limited time, the reliability of trains is a significant advantage over the comparably priced buses. Buses are still needed to go where trains cannot—I took a couple of buses in my last weekend in China to get between towns in the middle of the country because trains had circuitous routes between the towns that would take too long for my schedule. However for the majority of travelers, and especially those who plan ahead, train travel is the best way to get between their hometown and where they work, live, or vacation.
In America, we romanticize about train trips. Long distance train travel has become a vacation for those who have the luxury of time to travel to New York from LA in a week rather than a day. For even commonplace travelers going from college back home or visiting family, trains simply take too much time according to our internal Internet age, instant gratification calculations. As a result, the cost has risen to be on par with that of flying, providing none of the advantages of Chinese rail travel. Our higher standard of living as well makes travel more expensive simply because in America we could never have a hard-seat and standing section on the train—no one would take it. Can you imagine Amtrak piling 130 people into seats and then stuffing the same amount into the aisles for a trip from Seattle to San Francisco? No one would buy those tickets. Yet my guess is that this market helps keep costs down for trains in China. With minimal services provided to these riders, the cheap fares multiply quickly into profit that can help keep down costs of other class tickets as well. Add to that the fact that train travel is far more popular in China than the US (with 1.3 billion people there are always plenty who need to go somewhere), and we can see why China’s rail system is still a profitable enterprise whereas in America subsidies can barely keep the industry alive. I wish I could draw lessons from China’s rail system for America, but at the moment I am at a loss. The social systems that make intercity rail travel profitable and popular in China are not present in America, nor will they be again. The biggest lesson I can draw from this is that sustainability in buildings and transit requires local solutions that take in local social, economic, and cultural factors. Intercity rail may not be the answer for the US, but perhaps there can be a low-carbon form of transit that is. And who knows, in 20 years perhaps rail travel in China will have gone the way of the US. If so, another solution may be necessary to handle the changing social and cultural factors in China.
One last note on intercity transit on the topic of high-speed rail. China is currently the leader in high-speed rail development (big surprise since they are leading just about all development). They originally worked with Siemens on the technology for the Beijing-Tianjin high-speed line but have adopted the manufacturing systems internally and now produce their own trains much cheaper under a state-owned enterprise (one gentleman from Siemens with whom I spoke was not so happy about this). In fact, the only evidence you can see of Siemens’ involvement is a logo on some windows of the Tianjin line.
Now, China is exporting high-speed rail technology including to California. China is itself investing in miles and miles of new lines to cover all of the major cities in the country, the number of which is growing rapidly. This will drastically cut travel times and perhaps increase the number of users on the systems, but can it do the same in the US? High-speed travel in China works because the prices are still lower than airlines, but in reading reviews and commentaries on the California proposition for high-speed rail between San Francisco and Los Angeles, some were predicting ticket prices to be up to $100-150 round trip. When Southwest offers one-way flights for $49, why wouldn’t businessmen prefer that? They’d also arrive two hours earlier. If the US wants to seriously adopt high-speed rail, it needs to consider the cost factors—that’s what makes it work in China. PR can only go so far, and the environmental benefits can only be pushed to so many consumers. At some point you have to hit consumers in the pocketbooks to get widespread ridership. I hope that this scenario plays out in California and the cost is reduced—after all, voters did approve the measure which is now supposedly being funded over the next 30 years or so with our huge negative $25.4 billion surplus. And when the project is completed, will the technology be obsolete? After all, Japan and even Shanghai have begun to adopt Maglev technology in limited areas. The speed, quiet atmosphere, and smooth ride of these trains could surpass high-speed rail in the future if the price point is low enough (right now the 5 minute ride to the airport in Shanghai costs about US$7—RMB50). But the speed is unmatched. In just the brief ride to the airport, something that would take half an hour via subway but 5 minutes by Maglev, check out the top speed!
Yes, that says 431 kph. And for any engineers or scientists out there, if you ever get the chance to ride one of these, do it. It is worth the money. Think about the principle of operation, enjoy the smooth ride and banked turns, and appreciate the forces the system generates and the power that must be required to operate the train. It made me almost giddy as a science-minded person (I know that sounds nerdy, but I don’t care—once a Mudder, always a Mudder).
Intracity Transit
Given the growing importance of light rail in transit discussions worldwide, I think it is only appropriate that in a post entitled “Ridin’ the Rails,” I give some time to the role of railways in cities as well. To start, looking at transit from an environmental standpoint, we can weight options using the same embedded energy and carbon footprint calculations we considered for intercity transit. Here, common forms of transit include light rail, buses, carpool/vanpool, and private autos. The table below compares the embedded energy and carbon emissions for these sources of transit in the United States—I could not find comparable data for China
| Mode of Transit | Average Number of Passengers | Energy Required (BTU per passenger mile) |
| Vanpool | 6.1 | 1,322 |
| Light Rail | 22.5 | 2,784 |
| Car | 1.57 | 3,512 |
| Bus | 8.8 | 4,235 |
Data taken from US Transportation Energy Data Book 2006
Adapting this data for China means reviewing a couple of facts. First, I can speak from firsthand experience to say that the average numbers of passengers for both light rail and buses are much higher than those for the US. One morning at rush hour will tell you that packing people like sardines into a train is more than 22.5 per vehicle, and when you can’t find a seat on the bus you know more than 8.8 people are present. Second, in some cities in China, buses are still highly inefficient and thus the energy may be higher.
Now again, the emissions numbers presented could change with widespread adoption of hybrid, electric, or hydrogen vehicles, but barring hydrogen vehicles or EV charging stations powered by renewables off the grid, these solutions will be limited to the same emissions per kWh of energy as light rail or PRT (both of which are electrically run). Again, we can also add in social factors to consideration of transit options for a city. As I mentioned in my “Living Laboratory” post, streets in Beijing are very different form those in Shanghai. They give much more preference to the automobile, relegating pedestrians to small sidewalks without easy means of hopping from one side of the street to another. Long blocks complicate the problem. Unfortunately, as reported by China Dialogue, too many Chinese cities are adopting these practices even as they try to bill themselves as “low-carbon." While the issue of this billing is another discussion in itself and stems from a lack of understanding of what that term means, the social point is more important for the present discussion: by building for cars, not only are walking and cycling not promoted but actively discouraged. From a low-carbon standpoint, this is the last thing that we want. On the other hand, following the example of the Puxi side of Shanghai (Pudong looks a lot like Beijing), keeping street widths down and incorporating a good light-rail system can help promote walking and obviate the need for so many cars. Now Puxi is not the ultimate example—it still has a fair amount of roadways and cars—but it is a better model to follow than Beijing and one in which public transit is embraced as a vital transport method for the city. It is still infeasible in this paradigm to eliminate cars, but at least Puxi encourages their reduction through building programming which encourages walking and comprehensive subway system that provides easy access all over the city. In fact, within Puxi at rush hour, it is probably faster to take the metro (which will get you to your destination between any two points in about 45 minutes as long as you are only traveling in Puxi) than to drive. The point is that from a social standpoint, light rail which is typically elevated or buried gives much more preference to pedestrians, creating more vibrant cities and allowing people to enjoy their travel more—again you can read or work instead of drive.
So what makes this system so successful? Unfortunately for many American cities, the success of such systems begins at the city planning phase—a phase which most cities have long since passed. Shanghai developed as a compact city out of necessity—much of the population even today is dependent on biking, walking, or public transit because of economic constraints that prevent purchasing a car. Los Angeles, on the other hand, was built on the backs of those who had the money to buy cars and wanted to show them off. So for cities which naturally developed in a compact manner as Shanghai did, public transit and light rail can be successful. For those that did not, it’s a much harder sell and frankly much harder to effectively implement. Success though is not guaranteed from a compact city. Good, comprehensive planning of the light rail network is necessary as well. Shanghai had two lines for a number of years—one north-south and one east-west. It then planned an additional 21 to be built out over several decades which would create other east-west and north-south corridors, but also loop lines and more diagonal pathways across the city thereby creating effective transit corridors for getting between any two points in the city. By contrast, LA’s light rail has developed as a largely radial network with origins coming from Union Station or as spurs off of Union’s lines. This framework makes it difficult to travel from A to B unless A, B, and Union lie on the same line.
With these two factors, I think it is possible to create an effective mass transit system in a city. It is still not guaranteed that the transit will be effective, but with these two as a base, it should be a much easier sell and easy to demonstrate that reduced travel times are possible, greater social benefits can be accrued, and environmental benefits can be attained. For larger more spread out cities that fail to meet the first criterion, an added system is needed. It is infeasible for light rail to reach all corners of a spread out city, say LA, to the level where everyone’s destination is a reasonable walk from the nearest station. This is where personal rapid transit (PRT) could play a role in solving the question of the “Last Mile”—always the hardest question to answer: how do we move people the last mile from public transit to their destination efficiently and sustainably. This technology is being piloted in a limited range at London’s airports and in Masdar City in the UAE, my next stop. So stay tuned for more on PRT (or look it up if you are impatient).
One other trend is emerging that could create effective public transit solutions, and that is Bus Rapid Transit, or BRT. This system features buses that run on dedicated lanes and feature subway-like stations. Passengers enter and exit from opposite sides of the bus, expediting flow of people, and entering passengers have already purchased their tickets prior to boarding, thereby cutting idling time as well. This not only saves emissions from idling (as does the dedicated lane and lack of traffic) but also efficiently moves people throughout the city quickly. Curitiba, Brazil, is the ultimate case study of BRT and one of the first adopters, but China is rapidly exploring the option. Unfortunately, China is held up a bit by poor implementation—dedicated lanes are often set up but rarely are the special stations created properly if at all, thereby eliminating a significant portion of benefits from BRT systems.
In addition to the environmental benefits that come with BRT or light rail systems in cities, there is a definite social benefit to returning much of the cityscape previously dedicated to roadways to the pedestrians and people. In China, there seems to be a peculiar phenomenon whereby streets are used for night markets, day markets, or really selling wares of any type (legal or pirated). These shops constrict flow on sidewalks to the point where it may take 20 minutes to fight from one end of a block to another (the Wudaokou district in Beijing is a great example of this). Yet by returning a wider section of pavement to the people, this phenomenon could be preserved while allowing those not interested in shopping to quickly pass. This isn’t the only aspect of Chinese life which happens in the street. There is a lot of commercial shopping as well, but also a number of public gatherings. The most vibrant spaces I’ve seen have been streets late at night when tables and chairs are set up for locals to sit, chat, drink, and be merry—all on the sidewalks and encroaching over the curb into the thoroughfares, now deserted for the evening. So returning greater swaths of asphalt to the people could enhance and make safer these activities.
Well, I guess that is a long-winded discourse on the pros and cons of rail transit in China. I hope this post was interesting as it danced a bit between travel tips, anecdotes, and facts about the emissions of various transit forms. I feel like it may be a bit disjointed because of those elements, so please, if anything is unclear ask me and I’ll be happy to try to elucidate.
Update
This article popped up on the Wall Street Journal this morning (November 18, 2010) about China's high-speed rail manufacturers. It discusses how China's adoption of Siemens', Kawasaki's, and others' technology is leading them to compete against their former mentors in the worldwide market for high-speed rail. It is interesting I think both from an IP issue as well as considering how the railway scene may be changing both in and out of China.
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