【2011.07.26 纽约时报】动车碰撞引发的中国高铁建设问题

醉花露〃

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/27/world/asia/27china.html?pagewanted=1&ref=asia

Crash Raises Questions on China’s Push to Build High-Speed Passenger Rail Lines


By DAVID BARBOZA and SHARON LaFRANIERE

Published: July 26, 2011





SHANGHAI — The train collision on a high-speed rail line in eastern China last Saturday that killed 39 people and injured 210 others has raised fresh doubts about the safety of one of the largest, most expensive public works projects ever undertaken.

Those concerns come as Beijing is investigating corruption accusations against high-ranking railway officials and allegations that some unqualified companies may have been awarded contracts for part of the $400 billion project.

High-speed rail’s excellent safety record in Europe and in Japan — not a single fatality has occurred in Japan since the technology was introduced in the 1960s — has led some experts to ask if China is moving too swiftly to build about 12,000 miles of track by 2020.

“There appear to have been some irregularities in the high-speed rail program,” said Richard DiBona, a transportation specialist at LLA Consultancy in Hong Kong. “Maybe this was corruption or substandard work, or perhaps things were put into place too fast.”

The government’s only explanation for Saturday’s accident has been that a lightning strike disabled equipment, allowing a train carrying about 550 passengers to strike the rear of another train with more than 1,000 riders on a viaduct near the city of Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province. Eight cars derailed, with four hurtling off a bridge.

Immediately after the accident the government dismissed three more railway officials without explanation, and announced a thorough investigation into its cause. But a news conference scheduled for Tuesday was postponed.

Several rail experts have said they doubt that lightning was the sole cause of the crash. They questioned why safety mechanisms failed to warn or slow the second train.

“This is extremely rare,” said Vukan R. Vuchic, a rail expert at the University of Pennsylvania. “I’ve never heard of lightning doing that, but if it did, everything else would stop too. And the signal system should keep trains at a safe distance.”


In China, a torrent of public criticism continued Tuesday, with bloggers and citizens asking why the government was not more forthcoming about the cause of the crash, why parts of the wreckage were buried at the site and why a toddler was found alive in the wreck even after railway authorities had said there were no further signs of life.

The government moved swiftly to compensate victims’ families, agreeing to pay one family 500,000 renminbi, or more than $77,000, according to the official Xinhua news agency. The government described bonuses of 10,000 renminbi, or more than $1,500, for families who signed compensation agreements quickly.

The state-run news media have played down questions about the cause of the accident, but newspapers published accounts from two railroad employees.

Jiang Xiaomei, identified as the manager of the train that was struck from behind, was quoted by a state-run newspaper as saying that a thunderstorm had forced her train to slow down and to wait about 20 minutes at its previous station. Six minutes after her train left the station, she said, it slowly came to a stop on the tracks and paused for five or six minutes. It had just started moving again when the other train plowed into it.

After being thrown to the ground, she told the newspaper, she got up and tried to contact the engineer and conductor, but the intercom was dead. Half the cars had emergency lighting; the rest were pitch black, she said, so passengers opened their laptops and cellphones for light.

A railway communications officer, identified only as Mr. Liu, told The Beijing Times that after the accident, he was sent to check the communications system of the first train, which was working, he said, raising the question of where the communication breakdown occurred.

A schoolteacher from Fuzhou, Zhu Yalan, 26, said she was traveling in the third car of the second train when it rammed into the first train.

“Several minutes before we were supposed to arrive in Wenzhou I heard a bang, and then there was violent shaking,” she said by telephone from a hospital in Wenzhou, where she was treated for injuries.

“When I got out I saw many people and fire trucks and a lot of injured passengers. I didn’t know my car had actually fallen off the bridge until I came out.”

The accident occurred less than a month after the government opened its bullet train service between Beijing and Shanghai, a high point of the high-speed rail program, and just over five months after China dismissed its minister of railways, Liu Zhijun, for “severe violations of discipline.”

After Mr. Liu’s dismissal, Chinese newspapers and magazines published accounts that said he had illegally steered huge construction contracts to friends. Several experts speculated that some construction covered by the contracts may have been shoddy and could eventually pose safety problems.

China has defended the high-speed rail project as a national priority and has said it will eventually deliver huge economic benefits despite its cost — more than $400 billion through 2020 — and heavy debt load.

In recent months, the government seems to have tried to appeal to the public by reducing both fares and the size of some luxury compartments. It has also slowed the speed of some trains, saying that will help improve efficiency.

If China admits to safety problems with the high-speed rail line or scales it back, it would be a devastating blow to a project that is seen throughout the country as a source of national pride — and in the United States as a troubling indication of how far America has fallen behind in rail technology.

Given the overall safety record of high-speed rail, and the fact that trains remain the primary mode of transport for hundreds of millions of people in a country whose development has been partly driven by migrant labor, some experts cautioned against expecting the government to curtail the huge project.

“There’s no other tool more efficient and safe for moving people around,” said T. C. Kao, a railways expert who teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “China can’t depend on the interstate highway and they can’t depend on airlines. This is the only way — look at how many people they have.”