I wonder if china would contemplate banning domestic air travel at this rate
They probably won't even have to ban it. The convenience of being able to hop on a train downtown, and hop off downtown in another city beats having to go to the airport any time.
Capitalist ghouls will always sacrifice the environment for their personal convenience
Living somewhere with a good train network, I agree with this entirely. There is no better way to do long distance travel than a train. Infinitely more comfortable than air travel with far less hoops to jump through. I can show up ten minutes before my train leaves, grab some good food for the trip. Have way more space than you would on a plane without spending ridiculous sums of money.
I basically always take a train for domestic travel. Very often it ends up being faster than air travel, with less time spent before departure/arrival and train stations being more centrally located within the city.
It wouldn't shock me, though I doubt they'd outright ban it, I could see them severely limiting it (eg: if the median train transit time is less than x hours, no flights can run that route). China is big enough that some domestic air travel will still make sense for highly specialized jobs or emergency travel.
Maybe they will reduce the number of flights, and it is definitely doable to ban very short distance flights, but i doubt they would be able to completely stop air travel to and from the more difficult to access regions such as Xizang/Tibet any time soon even if they wanted to. I think what we are more likely to see is the eventual development of hybrid and electric airplanes.
Then again, i'm only extrapolating from what i am observing at the moment, but things can always change rapidly and much more drastically than current trends indicate.
One should never say that something is impossible or not doable especially for a socialist society. A socialist superpower can achieve virtually anything, and no project is too ambitious when you have a government that can marshall the collective forces and creativity of a whole society toward a common goal. It just takes political will.
Truly amazing. If you love trains it looks like China is the place to be
Read the title as if the train was a sleeper agent trying to evil-y link two places in China together
Gonna have Star Trek level transporters soon. Trip will take 10 seconds.
