China's high-speed rail gets World Bank vote

The mainland's high-speed rail has a promising initial traffic, the World Bank said in a paper released yesterday, praising the world's fastest expanding high-speed rail system again after another paper in July said construction costs of high-speed rail in the country are a third lower than in other places.

The new paper said the mainland's high-speed rail traffic reached 672 million trips last year, increasing four times from 2008, and that more than 2.9 billion passengers had taken a high-speed train trip in the country between April 2007 and October this year.

"China has the world's largest and still expanding high-speed rail network, but whether ridership would materialise has been the subject of much debate," the World Bank said. "Traffic can be expected to continue rapid growth over the coming two decades."

The bank has supported six railway projects with design speeds ranging from 200km to 350km per hour. Railways with maximum speed of 250km per hour or more are considered high-speed.

"In 2013, China's high-speed rail lines carried more passenger-kilometres (214 billion) than the rest of the world combined, about 2.5 times the volume in Japan and four times the volume in France," the lender said.

The paper is one of a series the World Bank has done over the years to evaluate the economic impacts of high-speed rail projects in China.

It presented case studies of one of the busiest routes and a relatively lightly used intercity route, and conducted a survey together with the China Railway Corp, the national rail operator.