But there are plenty of chinese infrastructure projects that have languished for lack of use. Look at the olympic venues. Once the novelty of ribbon cutting is over, once the recuring costs start piling up, this project too may slow down.
Chinese airspace is already incredibly congested and unreliable. They just had to build a new 100-million capacity airport for Beijing because of a lack of capacity at the existing airport.
The alternative to not continuing to build up rail is that people start not making trips within China due to the difficulty. (Obvious grandstanding projects like HSR to Urumqi and Lhasa not included.)
China has about 30000km of highspeed rail. Pretty sure that counts as widespread. Sure, it's going at a leisurely 250–350km/h, not the 600-1000km/h from the article. But I don't think anyone claims that each train has to go 1000km/h from now on.
It is time but also energy. At 1000kph a train (at sea level) has massively more drag than an a380 at altitude. Even on electric, these things may have a greater carbon and financial cost than proponants want to admit.
An electric train can have near-zero carbon footprint, because electricity can be generated from nuclear fuel, sunlight, wind.
An electric airliner is still unattainable. Synthesizing jet fuel using electricity is of course possible, but must be massively less efficient than using that electricity directly in electric motors with efficiency > 0.95 and recuperative braking.
The carbon footprint of building the railway, likely with massive amounts of concrete to use to support the rails, and the steel for the rails (to say nothing of maglev infrastructure) — that's going to be huge. Building a pair of airports should be much less expensive.
Nearly every country’s Olympic venues fall into disuse. That’s one reason why the Olympics are probably best held in the US or UK or France, etc. where countries already have the resources. When countries like Greece or China built these resources they basically went into disuse immediately after. Even the Olympic village built in Atlanta cost more to refurbish than it would hlikely have taken to build from scratch, because these things are built in tight deadlines, and only really need to last about 2 weeks, so all sorts of shortcuts which make them unviable for non olympics use end up being taken to get them done by the deadline.
That's strange, because the olympic stadiums are perfectly fine, holding concerts, sport events and the likely routinely. I wonder where people got the idea that Beijing Olympic Stadiums are dilapidated, it's more like the exact opposite.
All of the venues used for the 2010 Vancouver Olympic games are used extensively, the only two I don't personally know if they are used extensively are the Whistler Sliding Centre, and the Whistler Olympic Park.
Canada Hockey Place (aka Rogers Arena): Vancouver Canucks NHL team home stadium and concerts.
Cypress Mountain: Very popular local mountain for ski/board and snowshoeing.
Pacific Coliseum: Used for PNE, concerts, and events.
Richmond Olympic Oval: Popular skating rink
UBC Doug Mitchell Thunderbird Sports Centre: Amateur sports teams and other events.
Vancouver Olympic/Paralympic Centre (aka Hillcrest Centre): Now used as a rec center.
Whistler Creekside (aka Whistler Blackcomb): The go-to location for ski/boarding nearby.
Whistler Olympic Park: Unsure.
Whistler Sliding Centre: Unsure.
> All of the venues used for the 2010 Vancouver Olympic games are used extensively
Vancouver seems like an exception though. Canada is a wealthy country where the average person is likely to participate in sports (skating, hockey, skiing) that facilities were built for.
Also they didn't have to build new ski resorts, since the area already had some of the best ski resorts in the world.
It's a very different scenario in a country where people have far less discretionary income to spend on sporting venues.
