Comments by "Ggoddkkiller" (@ggoddkkiller1342) on "$44 Million Loss per Day | High-Speed Rail, the Gray Rhino Impacting China’s Economy | Ghost Rail" video.

I've never understood the logic behind constructing very high speed and extremely expensive rail network because wealthy populations can already travel fast with airlines then why would they choose rail network unless it is more luxurious like Shinkansen? Here in Turkey our entire high speed rail network is 250 km and i can confirm 250 km is far cheaper to both construct and operate than 350 km because our tickets are insanely cheap. A high speed train ticket between capital Ankara and Istanbul costs 55 lira while a bus ticket is 100 lira and a plane ticket is around 170 lira and train takes 4 hours (There are a dozen stations on route), bus 7 hours, plane 1 hour so high speed train is almost twice faster than bus but half the price!! And it is why vast majority of students etc low income population are using the train not buses or planes. You might think there must be government subsidies same as China but nope, akp regime is instead increasing the costs by giving biased contracts and even then TCDD lost only 1.3 billion lira in 2020 which makes like 150 million dollars. So we can very well construct rail networks which will be faster and cheaper and benefit everybody but 250 km top speed doesn't sound as good as 350 km, 500 km or 100,000 km high speed network so there is always a political moronity involved...
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@ultimateedgelord3586 Not really, here in Turkey our entire high speed rail network is 250 km and i can confirm 250 km is far cheaper to both construct and operate than 350 km because our tickets are insanely cheap. A high speed train ticket between capital Ankara and Istanbul costs 55 lira while a bus ticket is 100 lira and a plane ticket is around 170 lira and train takes 4 hours (There are a dozen stations on route), bus 7 hours, plane 1 hour so high speed train is almost twice faster than bus but half the price!! And it is why vast majority of students etc are using the train not buses or planes. You might think there must be government subsidies same as China but nope, akp regime is instead increasing the costs by giving biased contracts and even then TCDD lost only 1.3 billion lira in 2020 which makes like 150 million dollars. So we can very well construct rail networks which will be faster and cheaper and benefit everybody but 250 km top speed doesn't sound as good as 350 km, 500 km or 100,000 km high speed network so there is always a political moronity involved...
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@redakteur3613 TCDD's financial statement is public and there is no government subsidies but ofc at the end again government is paying any losses like 150 million dollar in 2020. Also 55 lira is for students, there are discounts for many services in Turkey like over 65, ghazis etc get significant discounts. While adult price is 70 lira, still far cheaper than buses which doesn't offer any discounts as they are private companies. I think 250 km rail network would be profitable and benefical for a lot of people in most countries but ofc it's political value is quite low, in fact it could be moronically used to slander governments like ''Japan started 500 km construction while our country can only do 250km'' etc.
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@kevinc1200 Trains got bought from China but Turkish companies constructed the line which means there was even extra cost of importing trains even then it is far far cheaper than China's own network. There is just no way this was the actual cost of construction and operation rather local governments just added their other expenses to the rail projects perhaps because there is such a heavy government support for rail..
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@kevinc1200 For Ankara-Istanbul line most probably entire system got imported not just train cars but in recent lines Turkey uses it's own train cars and systems which means producing those is cheaper than buying. For HSR one of the biggest cost is actually constructing the line as it must be straight line with very low slope, in fact currently a part of Ankara-Istanbul line being replaced with tunnel route as it was too circular and forcing trains to reduce their speed. Turkey is 82% mountainous country which makes constructing such projects like HSR a lot more expensive while China is only 33% mountainous country!! And china always produced their own train cars and systems so actually China should have lower costs than Turkey not almost 10 times higher and this severe difference can't be explained with business model etc. The only thing which can explain it corruption in local governments, for example local governments might have added road, highway etc costs to HSR project as well after all they are getting goverment subsidies for HSR but not for highway..
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