Development of High-Speed Rail and Maglev Transportation System in the Greater China Area

As the economic grow, intercity travel demand has increased dramatically in the Greater China Area. Traditional railways can hardly satisfy the passenger and freight travel demand, high speed rail is hence proposed and constructed after 1990s. This study aims to integrate current development of both rail-based and Maglev high speed trains in this area. From 1997, Taiwan kicked-off its high speed rail construction by importing the technology of Japanese Shinkansen. The Taiwan High Speed Rail is a 15-billion US dollars project. To save the cost of construction and management, the BOT model was applied. Though not totally satisfied, this project is still successful and ready to operate in the 4th quarter of 2006. China is preparing its high speed rail services by upgrading current networks. The capacity and operating speed are all increased after 5-times system upgrade. The 6th upgrade will be initiated in 2006. By then, trains will run at a speed of 200km/h in a total distance of 1,400km in 7 different routes. From the white paper published by the Ministry of Railway in China, there will be totally 8 rail-based High Speed Train services. Four of them are North-South bound, and four of them are East-West bound. 5 of the 8 High Speed Rails are now under construction, the first line will be finished in 2009, and the 2nd one will be in 2010. By 2020, there will be totally 12,000 kilometers high speed rail services in China. The 250 billion US dollars construction cost still leaves some uncertainties for all these projects. Finally, the future of the Maglev system in China is not so bright as rail-based. Shanghai airport line could be the first, also the last Maglev project in China if the approved Shanghai-Hangzhou line cannot raise enough 4.4 billion dollars to build it.