How China’s high speed rail KILLED the short haul flight

[Music] 25 years ago i remember sitting in a geography lesson at school watching a scratchy vhs tape about china it was full of bikes pollution and lots of factories and how china was going to change a lot over the coming 30 years what you see behind me is a result of that change the glittering luja's way financial center which was more than just a handful of buildings a few years ago and now has the second tallest building in the world which is hidden by clouds today but nowhere has that change been more profound than the railway network which can get me from here in luja's way to here in rural jiangsu home of china's largest bamboo forest and we're going to learn more about how china is saying bye bye planes hello bullet trains in our fastest ever episode of fully charged [Music] [Music] the year is 2008 and in the north of china there's been a construction boom thanks to the olympics it was also the site of the first bullet train line between beijing and tianjin which reduced the journey time to just 30 minutes to travel the 75 kilometers up until very recently to travel between beijing and shanghai would take between 12 and 20 hours on the train even though the railway net was very extensive the trains were quite slow uncomfortable and the average speed of a train in 1993 in china was 30 miles an hour fast forward to today and we have over 38 000 kilometers of high-speed railway network the pace of change has been phenomenal and this is fundamentally shifted about how we live work and play in cities now the railway network in the past was extensive it went all across the country but it was serviced by trains like this and what's important to remember is that the last steam train was in commercial operation up until 2005. three years before the first bullet train that's staggering and that's how fast things have changed people use these trains to go around the country to maybe visit relatives once per year but now you can get on the bullet train it's cheap it's easy and it's very very fast and this this really really famous photo of a guy who learned to drive street steam trains like this and there's a photo standing outside the steam train on his first day of work and then there's a photo from just a few months ago where he's standing outside a bullet train which is what he drives now that is how fast things have changed in china that he's gone from steam trains to bullet trains in his working career it's staggering so if you think the bullet train is fast and very impressive which it is it's a bit of a slouch compared to this this is the maglev the magnetic levitation train and this travels at a top speed of 431 kilometers per hour this is the fastest commercial train in the world and it's been the fastest commercial train in the world for 20 years but this really does point to the future of what intercity travel will look like trains like this as fast as this even faster than this which can go from one location to another in a matter of minutes this does 30 kilometers in seven and a half minutes [Music] so as you can see we're doing our top speed which is limited to 300 at the moment i think they're limiting it uh at certain times of it does go up to 431 i've been on it when it's done that but it's amazing to think that this is the future of transportation and it's in commercial operation here today in shanghai and it's hold this top speed record for 20 years already but i think that's all going to change in the next few years as japan and china develop their own long distance maglev lines this is a demonstration line it's not very long and it connects the airport to somewhere downtown in shanghai but it just shows that the technology is ready available and it can be done [Music] so it's important to remember that the bullet train has basically killed domestic flights under 500 kilometers there's very very few uh left in china because of the growth of places like this this is hong chao railway station it's one of the biggest stations in china there's 30 platforms here almost all bullet train uh platforms and they serve something like a billion people over just chinese new year or lunar new year in that festival a billion people travel on the trains a lot of them on bullet trains um there's something like 9600 trains on the overall network now can you imagine if they all had to drive or take flights it doesn't bear thinking about so that's the long distance medium distance travel but the bullet train is really starting to eat into those longer journeys around china domestic flights are really struggling at the moment and it's because of this it's cheap you can easily get on there's no faffing around you know with security checks like an airport so a journey from beijing to shanghai yes it takes four hours where the flight only takes two but with the bits at the airport on either end this is actually quicker so i use beijing to shanghai as the example but some other equivalents in the u.s would be la to san francisco and in the uk london to barcelona so that's the distance we're talking from those between those two cities so just imagine if you can replace those flights of two two and a half hours with a bullet train of just four hours that's a huge amount of co2 out of the atmosphere and it means that it's really a good start to greening our transportation system not just locally but between cities and between countries so here at the bullet train station in hong kong as you can see there's tens of bullet trains behind me it's absolutely phenomenal our train is about to arrive these trains are never delayed i suppose it helps with the speed very punctual uh we're going to the first carriage right the head of the train so it's gonna be quite exciting i'm going to show you just how good these trains are in terms of the experience so smooth just effortless i mean this has been so easy we don't even need a ticket just use your passport go down uh onto the platform and that's it so let's just wait for our train i think we've got maybe five minutes to wait and then that's it here comes the bullet train these things look what a great looking thing right we need to get a wig along because we're at the wrong end of the train so we need to go down to get our seats let's go [Music] so i've never really reviewed a train before but here i am and i have to say that this is very different from the trains that we have back home in the uk which are somewhat rattly um and and a bit noisy this is super quiet so quite in fact that i almost have to whisper um so we're actually in the the first class which is only slightly more expensive so this ticket we're going to a place called wushi 140 kilometers away takes 30 minutes ticket for uh second class is 50 rmb this ticket is about 90 rmb so very very cheap to go 140 kilometers now that is within commutable distance of shanghai 140 kilometers away people come into the city do business you know maybe work here for a couple of days and so it just expands that network even further afield which is uh incredible now one thing i'd like to show you is uh this little coin trick this isn't actually a coin this is a camera filter but i want to show how smooth these are so you can put this on here and it won't even move so we could have that on there for the whole journey and it wouldn't even move another couple of very quick features i want to talk about is they've got a qr code on each of the seats and there's attendants who come along they've got food they've got drink they've got hot meals they've got things like instant noodles they've got everything and you just scan it on your cup phone and they come over and deliver it to your seat that is amazing so why would you go on an airplane when you always feel a bit weird and a bit gross afterwards when this you can travel in style you can travel very comfortably get to your destination in probably the fastest time of all of the transport options so i'm going to sit here enjoy the view out the window as we travel to wuxi [Music] so there's one rather large size elephant in the room that we haven't spoken about that is emissions you're probably thinking why they're replacing diesel and coal powered steam trains with an electric train powered by a coal-fired power station yes it's not perfect 60 of china's power comes from coal however they're aiming for carbon neutrality by 2060 and this is just one little step on the journey there they can't do everything at once but little steps towards getting there and the important fact to know is that if we didn't have any high-speed trains not just in china but across the world we'd be producing an extra 1.2 billion tonnes of co2 per year that's the equivalent of the whole of africa that's not good and there's one other thing i want to tell you and that is how much kilograms of co2 are produced for each different transportation type so usefully i've got three lines here so let's take the red line that's planes so on a typical 400 kilometer journey they produce about 75 or 76 kilograms of co2 per passenger a car the yellow line produces about 55 kilograms of co2 per passenger the blue line the bullet train produces just three kilograms of co2 per passenger it's clearly the greener solution and it's the first step of course evs in the car category are another step and in this step the planes hydrogen planes could be an answer as well but they have to start somewhere and they have to start greening their network in one place and that is with the bullet trains and my god they've done an amazing job so far [Music] it's amazing to think that just a few hours ago i was in the middle of shanghai in one of the busiest places in the city and now i'm here in a sea of bamboo on some sort of time warp bridge but the most important thing is how i got here it's using a bullet train we didn't have to drive here and we didn't have to fly here and that's what's so great it's opening up vast waves of the country for people to move live work and play of course it's not a perfect system but this will take little step by little step in terms of greening our transportation networks so that's all we've got time for i hope you've enjoyed this episode we have plenty more coming from china very soon we have all of our lovely links around this video including youtube memberships and patreon and if you have been thank you for watching [Music] farnborough amsterdam san diego sydney the number one festival for clean energy and electric vehicles is coming to you whether it's fully charged live in europe supported by mobility service fully charged live uk supported by lv we cannot wait to see you there well i hope you enjoyed that episode with elliot everyone enjoys episodes with elliot he's really really popular i keep getting told that amazing oh we love elliot he's so brilliant yeah whatever anyway here's another episode that has elliott in it over here is the latest episode that may have elliot in it if 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Channel: Fully Charged Show

Views: 371,142

Keywords: electric car youtube channel, why should i buy an electric car, green energy comment, renewable energy youtube, new transport ideas, green technology review, renewable energy comment, renewable energy electric vehicles, electric vs ice cars, latest news on renewable energy, fully charged show live, ev show, fully charged show, robert llewellyn, electric cars, fully charged, China, bullet train, train, Shanghai, sustainable, high speed rail, transport

Id: BCLuWr1iHok

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 25 2022