Limit construction of high-speed rail, stop construction of high buildings

The fate of 1,881 cities will change! Limit the construction of high-speed rail, stop building high-rise housing, road width. In 2021, it will change the fate of many cities, especially smaller ones

Recently, The State Council office forwarded a notice of opinions with several requirements.

For example, it is strictly prohibited to build subways and light rails in the name of intercity or municipal railways.

If the utilization rate of high-speed trains cannot reach 80%, parallel lines are not allowed.

Only provincial capitals and megacities with a two-way passenger flow density of 25 million or more per year can adopt the 350 km/h standard.

It seems that the government has long been aware of this problem: the indiscriminate use of infrastructure to boost GDP at the local level will inevitably lead to a large amount of waste of resources and ineffective investment.

By the end of 2020, China had more than 140,000 km of railways in operation, including 37,000 km of high-speed railways, more than two-thirds of the world's total high-speed railway, making China the only country in the world with a complete high-speed railway network in operation.

However, except for a few beijing-Shanghai, Beijing-Tianjin lines can achieve profit, other lines are in a loss.

For example, the Zhengzhou-Xi High-speed railway in central and western China has been operating for two years with less than 50% occupancy rate, resulting in a loss of 1.4 billion yuan. Zhengzhou Bureau, which could have made a profit of 400 million yuan, lost 1 billion yuan.

There is also the Guangzhou-Guizhou high-speed railway. The ticket revenue is only 1 billion yuan a year, but the interest paid to the bank is 3 billion yuan every year, not counting the water, electricity, labor service, parts loss, maintenance and other expenses.

Zhengxi, Guiguang is just an epitome, sandwicked between the two ends of the metropolis between the third and fourth tier cities, the situation is even less optimistic.

Economic reference, a former two years doing a survey, henan much of form a complete set of high-speed automobile passenger depot, such as hebi someplace at ordinary times even less than 10 people, 7 ticket Windows opened one, parking lot is stopped only 1 coach rolled, zhengzhou, xuchang layer 2 of the waiting area is useless, many cities bus load rate of less than 20%, The station alone is losing more than 10 million yuan a year.

In fact, railway losses are not just a problem for us, but for the whole world.

China Economic Weekly once disclosed a set of data, there are only two high-speed railway lines in the world that are recognized as having a balance of income: the Tokaido Shinkansen in Japan, which opened in 1964, and the Paris-Lyon southeast line in France, which opened in 1981. French high-speed rail was still in the red in 1995.

At the end of the day, it is the movement of people that is the core factor that determines whether railways can be profitable and whether investment can be recovered.

The beijing-shanghai high-speed railway revenue each year hundreds of million, the full load factors has reached 81.6%, three municipalities directly under the central government throughout Beijing, tianjin, Shanghai and hebei, shandong, anhui, jiangsu four provinces, with 27% of the population of permanent residents, create 35% of the country's GDP, shanghai-nanjing, shanghai-hangzhou, hangzhou three high-speed runs through the urban agglomeration of China's most densely populated, productivity is the most developed Yangtze river delta.

Where there are people, there are rivers and lakes, and high-speed trains with passengers can make money.

What we need to do now is to let the government and the market belong to each other.

The low pricing of government subsidies for universal high-speed railway is the level of transfer payment to low-income people, the extension of fiscal transfer payment and social welfare.

High-speed railways should be further market-oriented and set prices by enterprises, rather than burdened with heavy financial subsidies after huge investment.

A few years ago, we often saw fierce competition and even fights between the people in county towns for the parking of high-speed railway stations. I don't think there will be any more.

In addition to restricting the construction of high-speed trains and subways, high-rise buildings in smaller cities have also been banned.

Recently, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development issued a draft to strengthen the green and low-carbon construction of the county, which mentioned that: the majority of new residential buildings in the county are 6 floors, and the proportion of 6 floors and below is not less than 75%. New houses are no more than 18 storeys high.

In fact, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development issued a notice last year, requiring small and medium-sized cities to strictly control the construction of new super-tall buildings, and the majority of county houses should be multi-storey.

This time, the draft is more detailed, and it seems that the wind of high-rise construction is stepping on the brakes, not just in words, but in concrete.

Compared with high-speed trains, small cities have no lack of enthusiasm in building tall buildings and filling up facade. In the first and second tier cities where land is expensive and population is concentrated, high-rise residential buildings are excusable. However, there is no shortage of land in small cities. An expert named Lu Ming once collected a database and analyzed more than 280 prefecture-level cities and municipalities in China. Among them, 272 cities have new towns in their localities, and more than 90% of them are planning to build new cities.

The result was doomed from the start: lots of empty high-rise housing, overstretched local finances, wide, empty streets and vain competition for infrastructure.

A forced urbanization of the peasant family, not only separated from the dependence of agriculture, but also can not enjoy the convenience of industry and commerce, which is awkwardness, not up and down.

In addition to the height limit, the draft also mentioned measures such as limiting the area of concentrated hard land in the county square to no more than 2 hectares, limiting the width of the red line of county roads including green belts to no more than 40 meters, and turning small cities into "narrow roads, dense networks and small blocks".

Now, the number of counties and county-level cities respectively reached 1494 and 387, a total of 1881, starting this year to limit high-speed rail, housing, road restrictions, means that the fate of the 1881 cities is about to change, but also represents a vigorous era of infrastructure, has become the past.

Lou Jiwei, the former Minister of Finance who always dares to speak out, also said that in the next five years, up to a quarter of provincial fiscal revenue will be used to pay off debts.

The urgent task now is to put risks in the cage, while the long-term mechanism needs to be achieved by getting rid of land finance, expanding new economic growth points, improving the financial distribution system, and transforming industries and economies.

Simple words: open source and reduce expenditure, must have some focus.

Open source, is the inevitable thing to do in the future, throttling, but now have to do.

Therefore, starting in 2021, restrictions on overconstruction of high-speed trains, high-rises, roads and public facilities are only the first step, and smaller cities that used to be big spenders will have to tighten their belts in the future.