You got a fast train

In her 1988 debut single, Tracy Chapman sang about using a fast car to escape her predicament. Whether in 1988 or 2024, a car remains the most judicious choice to escape most cities in the US. But were she singing in China in 2024, she could instead allude to the country’s vast high-speed rail (250≥km/h) network to get her away even faster. The In China at the end of 2022 there were over 40,000km of high speed railway lines, an order of magnitude more than the second largest network, in Spain. It represents the largest scale implementation of technologies which were pioneered in Japan, followed by several European countries, from the 1960s onward. As an entirely electrified form of transportation, high-speed rail decarbonizes the links between distant cities in a comfortable and efficient manner.

Source: Statista, International Union of Railways