Gerald Ollivier: High-speed railway brings sustainable mobility in China

TansFORM is publishing a series of interviews with senior specialists from the World Bank, looking at China’s rapid development in the transport sector and the role the bank has played over a course of 30 years. They will share their insights on the experience and lessons China has learned.

China’s high-speed rail started with a 113-km demonstration line built for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. In merely ten years, China now boasts a 25,000-km network, the longest in the world. 

Q: How did China come up with the idea of building high-speed railway?

In retrospect, around the year 2008, Chinese national railway network was under severe capacity. All the main corridors were already very congested and people were not really able to move fast within the network. As China was developing at a very rapid growth rate, you could see that people were expecting better quality of service, and their demands for travel were also bound to increase very fast.

Under such a backdrop, China looked at the option of high-speed railway as a sustainable option for future mobility of its citizens, because the high-speed rail does several things: it creates opportunities for people to access new jobs, it gives access of easy mobility to people; it improves efficiency significantly; and it also provides a safe and green transport solution for the future.

All these elements turned out to be true: When I did surveys on passengers when new high-speed rail lines were opened, I could hear from them that they were able to meet more clients, visit research centres, and even travel to three or four cities within a week – which they were not able to do earlier. And by doing that, a certain economic mass was created to the country that didn’t exist before. On a bigger scale, when you look at the traffic today, in 2017, you had 1.7 billion passengers on the system that didn’t exist 10 years before. It’s a very big number, yet it’s even more fascinating that more than half of the trips were business related: It means that 850 million people were going to their jobs, meeting customers, discussing research and development, exchanging ideas.

Also, at that time China’s rail network was not geared to provide easy mobility simply because the network was very congested, and particularly true for women. So as part of World Bank programme, we supported six high-speed rail lines in China to connect some of the more remote provinces. For instance, we connected cities like Guiyang [in Guizhou province] with Guangzhou [in Guangdong province]. And suddenly we saw new patterns of movement: women started traveling on these high-speed rail lines. Our statistics show that 49% of passengers between Guiyang and Guangzhou were taking generated trips, which referring to trips they would not have taken if that rail line didn’t exist. So, the convenience and the quality of access led to that.

High-speed rail network also brings significant gains in efficiency. For most of the lines, we saw reduction in travel time between 60 to 80 per cent. Let me illustrate in the case again of [railway from] Guiyang to Guangzhou. Before, it took 21 hours of very tedious, painful trip to go from Guiyang to Guangzhou by railway. Now it takes four hours and nine minutes.

Safety is another dimension of the sustainable mobility. Imagine 1.7 billion people every year traveling by road, how many accidents would you have? We did the evaluation in 2015 looking at statistics, etc, and concluded over 150 lives per year would be saved as a result of having those people traveling by high-speed rail, instead of by highway.

Last but not the least, it’s about thinking about long-term needs for green transportation. High-speed rail is substantially more carbon efficient than the other alternatives: 50 per cent more than a car and 60 per cent more than an airplane.

In a nutshell, this is why the high-speed rail was not designed as a transportation project, it was designed as part of shaping the China of the future, connecting regions that are outliers in the west and the south to the wealthy provinces of the east.

Q: What are the economic rationales behind China’s high-speed rail network that other countries can learn if they want to plan their own high-speed rail?

Ultimately, a system like high-speed rail requires very high densities of population and passengers using the system, because it is an expensive system. When we looked at the entire network in 2015, a good USD400 billion has been invested in the high-speed rail system, that was a very substantial investment. For this investment to make sense, it needs to make sure the network is being used by a lot of people, otherwise the system becomes very costly.

I want to illustrate the concept of ‘break-even point’: in China, the cost of travelling on a high-speed rail at 250km/hour is 0.5yuan/km per passenger. If there’re only 10 million passengers, the cost will be increased 1 yuan/km per passenger; and if you were to go as low as five million passengers, it will cost 1.5 yuan/km each.

Therefore, unless the densities of traffic are expected to reach of 15 or 20 millions or more, the country would end up pay a lot for it. I think that’s the first element, making sure the line goes through areas of high [population] density, which China is very lucky to have, but that is not the case everywhere else.

Q: What do you think are the key reason that made China possible to develop high-speed rail system in merely 10 years? And what are the applicable experience for other developing countries?

Before China started constructing high-speed rail way, it had been upgrading its network for over two decades, improving efficiency and quality of operations through six speed-up campaigns. So, it meant that China has trained thousands of engineers to be more acquainted with new technologies. China even attempted own high-speed technologies in the early 2000s. From that lesson, it decided to learn more from technologies that existed outside the country. China embraced technologies from Japan, Germany, France and Canada, looking at those technologies and starting the first batch of high-speed trains through cooperation with them.

The [high-speed rail] programme was embedded in the five-year plans [for national development], which brought a certain level of assurance - actually a pretty strong assurance - that the programme would be implemented. With a clear endorsement from the central government, an eagerness from provinces to move forward, as well as the Ministry of Railway, you had a mix of the authority, the capacity, the vision and the financial resources that enabled of this to happen.

For other countries to develop high-speed rail, a standardized approach is needed to roll out such a system. The complexity of the high-speed rail means there is a very steep learning curve both for regulators and the implementing agency, the contractors, the consultants that work with it. The first lesson to learn is how to quickly go and look at the entire system and to move forward with implementation. The second is to have a core technology team that has the competency to understand both the construction phase and the future operation phase. And this does not happen overnight, it requires intense training at all levels.

Q: What impressed you most in the process of working with China, what are the roles World Bank has played?

First it was a very humbling experience. I came from a country that has been quite successful in high-speed rail. France has one of the world’s largest three high-speed rail networks, it’s been established for a long time, operating successfully. Yet every year China is putting the same size network into operation - adding 2500km per year into the system between 2008 and 2017. The idea of working with this kind of scale and pace was very humbling. So, what could we really add to a process where thousands of engineers and construction companies were engaged?

First of all, the high-speed rail is an economic story, it requires thinking very carefully about the integration between the rail lines, the stations and the urban context. We worked very closely with China Railway Corporation, the successor to the Ministry of Railway, to have those conversations about what do you do around the stations, and how do you capitalize on the new accessibility you have secured. We also started discussions on the wider economic impact of high-speed rail: the impact emerged from those 850 million business trips, the momentum-creating economic opportunities within the country. So, we helped China Railway Corporation and National Reform and Development Commission develop guidelines on how to evaluate the wider economic impact of the high-speed rail.

Beyond the analytical pieces, we also shared some of the experience from other countries in terms of testing and commissioning of high-speed rail, because those are very complex process, whether you deal with the static commissioning or dynamic commissioning.

Last but not the least, in terms of our contribution, we worked with China Railway Corporation in upgrading the quality of maintenance of the system by bringing in totally new equipment that have never been use in China before, through partners with companies in US and Germany, so China can maintain that fast network more efficiently.