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Before watching the video, I was thinking all maglevs were just gagetbahns since there's little difference in how maglevs are used vs conventional HSR, but 380 mph and 100+ mile long tracks make a qualitative difference as it competes with aircraft after you consider boarding, taxiing, time to get to cruising altitude, etc. This is especially important given how much CO2 per passenger mile small aircraft generate.
Also if the US can spend trillions on wars, and has a similarly sized economy, I'm sure the Chinese can afford socially beneficial projects like this even if ticket prices never cover operating costs.
Indeed, at one point in the video he points out how the current rail network in China cost the same as US military budget for a single year. A maglev network would basically make domestic flying obsolete I think. If you can just go to the rail station downtown, hop on, and get off downtown of another city, that's straight up better experience than having to go to an airport, wait for boarding, etc. It's also far better for the environment.
China's HSR has an issue in that it doesn't go to the city centers, you still have to take a metro or bus to get there.
I can't imagine how difficult it's gonna be getting land for maglev. Shanghai's maglev was supposed to connect the Hongqiao and Pudong airports, but they got NIMBY'd by property owners who wanted a bigger setback and used FUDD to organize protests.
What kinda property owners? Do you happen to have a news link or some such? Were those landowners or what?
I can't find any English-language papers covering the protests that did any actual journalism.
There's quite a few that covered the protests, but only in service of the typical "ccp bad, the people yearn for freedom" story, so they didn't bother with such details.