If the HSR network were frozen today at current run-rate of ~3.4B px/year for the next 30 years, this would aggregate to 124B passengers traveling ~43T kilometers, or ~7.1 light years.
This gets you to Luhman 16, the third-closest known star.
This gets you to Luhman 16, the third-closest known star.
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Amortized across 124B passenger rides comes out to $8 per ride and 2.3 cents per km.
Avg. mfg. wage is ~$8/hour today, so the amortized upfront build cost per ride is about 1 hour's worth of avg. mfg. work today.
The typical ~348 km trip takes up ~13.2 kWh, or around half a days worth of typical power consumption.
An EV with two passengers would be ~105 watt-hours per px-km.
A fully packed EV can be nearly as efficient as HSR but cars are most often used by a single person/driver.
In '24, China will consume around ~10,000 TWh.
So this is equivalent to ~0.5% of total power consumption in China a year.
This compares with est. ~78 TWh for the entire light NEV fleet.