Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition
- Thread starter Blackstar
- Start date
- Alt. History Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
While the HSR probably wasn't the most efficient spending of resources, it should be noted it's so low speed it wouldn't even count for HSR in our time. Making it 'merely' really speedy dedicated passenger rail.
And dedicated passenger lines in areas with a lot of rail traffic can make a bit of sense, the major difference in speed between passenger and cargo rail makes it fairly challenging to utilize rail nearly as efficiently when they're both combined on the same rail network. This is basically because if you want to use the higher passenger train speeds, you need to leave very large gaps between your cargo trains. And at the same time the cargo trains makes it hard to run more constant passenger trains over the rail as there isn't really a way to pass them and everyone will get stuck behind the same cargo trains.
As such, in high traffic rail areas like West Russia probably has, it can lead to a substantial capacity gain, and we did see that to an extent with the HSR allowing some more coal and other goods to come in. Admittedly compared to the canals this probably wasn't the most efficient way to gain more access to coal, but some more goods and a more efficient passenger transport will still be a benefit one can continue to use. It's just that some other things, especially now in hindsight would have done far more so yet.
Well hats off to @Blackstar in managing to get the voters at times caught up in suboptimal investments despite their best efforts and future knowledge. Guess this is a good experience in showing how people in bureaucracy and investment can get distracted or overly focused on something and end up off track at times.
And dedicated passenger lines in areas with a lot of rail traffic can make a bit of sense, the major difference in speed between passenger and cargo rail makes it fairly challenging to utilize rail nearly as efficiently when they're both combined on the same rail network. This is basically because if you want to use the higher passenger train speeds, you need to leave very large gaps between your cargo trains. And at the same time the cargo trains makes it hard to run more constant passenger trains over the rail as there isn't really a way to pass them and everyone will get stuck behind the same cargo trains.
As such, in high traffic rail areas like West Russia probably has, it can lead to a substantial capacity gain, and we did see that to an extent with the HSR allowing some more coal and other goods to come in. Admittedly compared to the canals this probably wasn't the most efficient way to gain more access to coal, but some more goods and a more efficient passenger transport will still be a benefit one can continue to use. It's just that some other things, especially now in hindsight would have done far more so yet.
Well hats off to @Blackstar in managing to get the voters at times caught up in suboptimal investments despite their best efforts and future knowledge. Guess this is a good experience in showing how people in bureaucracy and investment can get distracted or overly focused on something and end up off track at times.
- Location
- The great frozen north
In our defense, for much of the Malenkov era the passenger rail was a "Get this megaproject done soon or else SupSov will rake us over the coals" thing, and also the whole reason they asked us for it was because forcing passenger rail to share tracks with freight resulted in an entire passenger train getting incinerated by burning rocket fuel so we were quite enthusiastic (Come to think of it, we didn't fully eliminate that risk yet, not until the HSR gets extended to Ural and Central Asia....). But after The Voz started electrifying it, yeah I agree we got caught up in the "glorious red TGV" hype.
BTW, at what time in history OTL did the USSR get around to building a paved road network across the entire Union?
I was getting ready to spit fire hotten than our flag at The Voz for putting all our railroad engineers out of a job for a decade, so thank you for alleviating our concerns. "Rolling stuff out in the west and stopping there" sounds like a way Russia would screw stuff up alright, but how much of that was our fault? IIRC we generally took road projects as they came up (admittedly slowly). Anyways, I feel like until the recent panic the playerbase managed to remain very ignorant of just how lacking the network was east of the Urals.
BTW, at what time in history OTL did the USSR get around to building a paved road network across the entire Union?
- Location
- The United States
- Pronouns
- She/Her
The answer there depends very heavily on what you defined as a paved road network, arguably never in the full sense. Even by the end of the Union, despite being a far more massive country the road network was smaller than a third of the American one in terms of paved roads. High-density road networks were systematically deprioritized to a large extent because of the perceived reliability of rail, leading to well, conclusions, and significant economic inefficiencies. There is a reason that even while being geographically smaller countries both China and India have matched American paved road lengths.
- Pronouns
- Viewer
Wow, so we have the same road brainworms as the OTL USSR had.
- Location
- Wall Gazing
To be fair, given the same amount of fuel a railroad can move the same amount of goods much further then can be done by truck. This means its very important for an industrializing / developing economy to prioritize rail over ground vehicles as the basis of its transportation system. Its just that railroads are by definition on rails and as such does not have the flexibility of road travel. Nor does it have the ability to stop by individual farm houses.
Of course, its even more energy efficient to move things by barge, but if you aren't the US and haven't been blessed with the largest navigable waterway system on the planet, aka the Mississippi River Basin, you have to make such a water highway first. And moving that much earth doesn't come cheep, as the builders of the Panama and Suez Canals will tell you.
Still we have gone a bit far without filling in the road network to act as the capillaries to the railroad arteries of our logistics network. plus the canals acting as our veins.
I do think we need the canals a lot right now if only to solve our coal deficit and ease our logistics woes, and the roads will get us the 'depot to door' logistics we still need to connect the hamlets and farmsteads to the rest of the Union.
Of course, its even more energy efficient to move things by barge, but if you aren't the US and haven't been blessed with the largest navigable waterway system on the planet, aka the Mississippi River Basin, you have to make such a water highway first. And moving that much earth doesn't come cheep, as the builders of the Panama and Suez Canals will tell you.
Still we have gone a bit far without filling in the road network to act as the capillaries to the railroad arteries of our logistics network. plus the canals acting as our veins.
I do think we need the canals a lot right now if only to solve our coal deficit and ease our logistics woes, and the roads will get us the 'depot to door' logistics we still need to connect the hamlets and farmsteads to the rest of the Union.
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I think it's because folk are thinking of roads like we have in the modern west ie. that paved roads reach everywhere and what people need is mass public transit options. That even rural communities have dedicated gravel roads that work year round.
But we're talking a situation where millions don't have access to any paved roads, making some communities very unacessible in bad weather (raputista) to the point where they can't even get to the train station or have buses drive them around, let alone the luxury of a personal vehicle (which should not be understated, is a great and freeing luxury that I hope we get to the point that should people want a car, they could easily acquire one).
HSR is great! Fantastic, and I am sure will be easily upgradeable in the future with even faster options. But it's not going to go to every rural village in Tanu Tuva with only a few thousand people in it, miles and miles away from major cities.
I don't have any answers, I barely understand how our system works, I would be unable to make any solid recommendations on what to do in terms on dice and so on. But roads matter so much to economies, and they don't have to end up like the nightmare we see in modern America.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
The problem is that without a decent road network, the high speed rail cannot help poor people who don't live within, oh, ten kilometers of an express train station. And you can't put express train stations every fifteen kilometers or so to provide good coverage for that, because that in large part defeats the purpose of high speed rail.
Furthermore, with the road network as cramped as it is, economic development is forced to concentrate in areas where the roads are at least mediocre... which means that the "primary cities" like Moscow, Kiev, and Leningrad get all the attention and new industry, perpetuating the problem you're hoping to solve. Just having a rail link from one city to the next doesn't help if there's no way to get from the railroad stations to the places where someone might want to actually build something.
We're not going to see full Union-wide economic development without a good road network.
What exactly do you think "integrate" means?
The ability of people in Georgia or Armenia to get to cities farther up into the Russian core faster, with the train trip being, say, four or six hours instead of taking a full day, is good, but exactly what, materially speaking, is the benefit here?
I gather that we did at least lay out much of the passenger rail with higher speeds in mind, so upgrading will be more a matter of mass-producing better trainsets than of having to lay truly massive amounts of new track.
Voz has kind of been wrongfooted here by the fact that the USSR has been working on an express passenger rail network since, I don't know, the late 1940s it looks like, and right now in the 1960s and early '70s, the Shinkansen and soon the TGV will be completely redefining our entire concept of how fast "really fast train" can be.
Practical express passenger locomotive speeds didn't change much from the 1930s up through the 1950s, with 150-200 kph being "very fast." But in the 1960s the bar got raised quite high, quite fast, and things like 300+ kph started getting a lot more achievable.
Hm. I know we've electrified a lot of rail, but I wonder if the USSR is going to be thinking about doing what France originally planned for the TGV and using gas turbine locomotives for high speed rail.
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- Location
- Philippines
Before we continue debating on what could have been, we can at least agree that while hsr isnt as efficient, it is now there and we can work from there to improve things. Improving roads seems to be an outright necessity now and im worried the average person outside of the west of russia will start getting strange ideas for what an ideal car looks like.
Im worried the conditions may cause people to think bigger, rugged and gas guzzling vehicles are the only option to get anywhere outside of any other transport method.
We have the capability to make efficient, accessible public transport. But that is with the understanding that every form of transport is expected and given enough support to accomplish.
While we have shifted to a more balanced dice spread between roads and rail, it should noted we accomplished that by decreasing rail dice by a big margin than any major increase in road dice.
I still want to improve agricultural profitability and this seems like another option to get there. Not to mention the city service integrations we could do once the roads allow people to move around easier.
Im worried the conditions may cause people to think bigger, rugged and gas guzzling vehicles are the only option to get anywhere outside of any other transport method.
We have the capability to make efficient, accessible public transport. But that is with the understanding that every form of transport is expected and given enough support to accomplish.
While we have shifted to a more balanced dice spread between roads and rail, it should noted we accomplished that by decreasing rail dice by a big margin than any major increase in road dice.
I still want to improve agricultural profitability and this seems like another option to get there. Not to mention the city service integrations we could do once the roads allow people to move around easier.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Well, the US is physically large but (not unlike the USSR) has enormous stretches of mostly useless and uninhabited wilderness, so that tends to reduce the required density of the road network...
Yeah, that's a valid concern. Right now, it's basically impossible to drive anywhere in large stretches of the USSR, even just to get to the next village without walking, unless you use some kind of big ruggedized all-terrain vehicle.
And it's not like Russian culture hasn't had trouble with obsessing over things being 'rugged' and 'macho' historically...
Worse, because most of our voter base is also angrily reacting against the drawbacks of 21st century America with its suburban car culture and contributions to global warming, giving us reasons to oppose road construction that are anachronistic for the in-quest Soviets like Voz.
A lot of our voters hold a grudge against America for building up such a car-centric transportation system; Voz wouldn't feel that way.
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Lurking_Badger
Cheese Enjoyer
- Location
- Wisconsin
If we don't build paved roads, what are we going to do with all of the asphalt from oil production? Export it? Use it as a filler in buildings? Put it in consumer products? There are probably tanks and warehouses full of the stuff waiting to be used.
- Location
- Italy
It's not quite that Blackstar tricked us, because she explicitly and REPEATEDLY stated how fear of roads was just silly and overblown, as we're in a completely different situation compared to modern usa.
the more apt comparison is... well, imagine if people decided that developing the internet is bad because it leads to social networks, or that videogames don't deserve to exist exclusively because of gacha games full of microtransactions.
We have a country with shit roads (except, and mostly recently, in the western URSS), and there was an absurd fear of "going too far" with roads because... it might lead to suburbs? or because roads can just be replaced by more rails?
that's just ridiculous.
It IS also true that we had other stuff to do, of course, and roads are admittedly unsexy compared to many other infra projects.
Still, it's something we can fix in time.
we're not putting any railroad engineers out of a job. we still have a very extensive railways network that needs maintanance, after all.
and the roads in the west thing is DEFINITELY our fault, 100%, because if we wanted to go continue building them in the east, all we needed to do was... finish the ones in the west and then continue with the unlocked ones in the east.
It's not exactly rocket science, it was simply the following stage of the project!
It means that people aren't stuck in their own city and is forced to get a job there but that they can intermingle across urban centers. I have never said HSR is good for rural areas i explicitly stated that it would be good to connect smaller urban areas to bigger urban areas which meant that it opens up many opportunities as they aren't stuck in their own communities.
I don't think anybody needs to go to the Russian core to get a job usually service jobs concentrate on a few areas so allowing more people caucasus to go to these areas where they concentrate in the caucauses is good for them. Most people don't live in the same city as they work in in modern day and that will also happen here. While roads might be better for the economy and allow many people to travel to a different city daily rail will just mean that this process isn't limited to people rich enough to buy a car.
Edit: disclaimer because apparently this is needed roads != bad they are the best way to stimulate economic activity as they allow trade and movement of goods in the most flexible way and they are likely the infrastructure with the best ROI
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I have some very bad news.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Someone who lives in the Urals can't commute to Moscow by train by high-speed rail, unless by "high-speed" you mean "literally breaking the sound barrier." The Urals are something in the vicinity of 1500 km from Moscow, or more. Even with high speed rail, the practical radius of commuting is still something in the vicinity of 200 km.
There are a lot of places in the Soviet Union that are more than 200 km away from the nearest 'primary' city or even 'secondary' city (to use the quest turn posts' own language). To actually have uniform economic development, you need to create more urban centers that have real economic activity and viability, which means more roads.
Furthermore, the high speed rail lines are lines, and only a few of them radiate outwards from any given city. And stations on a high-speed rail line must be sizeable, double-digit numbers of kilometers apart, or the trains can't accelerate enough to make their "high-speed" designation meaningful. And bad roads mean that for purposes of commuting reliably, it's impossible to travel more than, oh, a single-digit number of kilometers to get to the train station. Only a tiny minority of the people who even theoretically live within high-speed rail commuting distance will actually live within convenient walking or all-terrain vehicle distance of one of the high speed rail stations.
Within the context of the quest's USSR, you're thinking of the benefits to a hypothetical poor person who lives within convenient walking distance of a high-speed rail station. That is a very small minority of all Soviet workers, so you're really not getting anything out of them. The vast majority of Soviet cities and towns do not have a high speed rail station and never will, and to get the benefits would need regular road connections (permitting, say, bus routes) to the nearest high speed rail station.
This doesn't make sense. Did you forget a "not" in this sentence? As written, the problem is that service jobs tend to concentrate not just in any region, but specifically in regions where the economy is strong enough that people nearby are willing to pay the service workers to do their jobs.
Service sector job concentrations follow the pre-existing patterns of the economy. They only move slowly, and when they do move, it's usually to places that have something attractive that would motivate them to move in, such as "cheap access to single-family housing in the suburbs" or "a booming regional economy."
Honestly, ideally we kind of want to minimize this trend, because it makes it inevitable that people will be doing a lot of driving in individual cars. Commuter rail helps, but it can't be everywhere and you just can't build a rail network dense enough to cover everywhere people want to go. It's much better if the typical person who lives in a moderately sized town can find a job within several kilometers of where they live, which may technically be in "another city" but in practice isn't nearly as demanding in terms of bus/tram/rail/car traffic and infrastructure.
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Ashheap
Friend-shape little shrimp smoking remnants
- Location
- Bottom of the pot
Ok, someone need to go back and check how many time we have screwed up by neglecting smt for a while and then have to scramble to compensate for it, cause I member at least 2 times we did this (last was electricity, we tried to do away with coal plant too soon :0).
This is comedy gold, a bunch of radicals, hoisted by own 'forward thinking/hindsightedness'.
There need to be at least a timeline for adopting all these new fangle things or a mechanism for spotting our hyper-focus, where's the cybernetic ppl?
This is comedy gold, a bunch of radicals, hoisted by own 'forward thinking/hindsightedness'.
There need to be at least a timeline for adopting all these new fangle things or a mechanism for spotting our hyper-focus, where's the cybernetic ppl?
10ebbor10
DON'T PANIC
- Location
- Present
It happened to roads, specifically, 3 times IIRC.
Once when we failed to gravel them, then when we failed with the catchup gravel program, and now.
Nah the navy is significantly larger than OTL and Kosygin hasn't even been swinging it around in foreign policy anyways. Other things we slept on are probably water, the canal network, agricultural consolidation/chemicalization, and oil extraction/plastics. Also kinda car production, although we've just been kinda treading water on cars rather than actively hurting ourselves.
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- Location
- UTC+0
- Pronouns
- He/Him/They
We left Khabarovsk to rot for a few years after laying down the initial machinery lol
- Location
- Italy
Agriculture wasn't really a problem, and in fact we never had any famines, so I'd say we did well there (though it was mostly due to stopping Stalin from being... well, Stalin, at least on that).
canal and oil, definitely. Canal mostly for the infra benefits, in particular to move coal, and oil for the extra rpt we could have had.
We were we actually behind on cars? I thought we were doing fine on that, and we kinda could NOT go faster mostly due to having to keep up our steel production.
10ebbor10
DON'T PANIC
- Location
- Present
We could have printed more money, and also IIRC we build the plants in order of reverse efficiency, with the costly option of building entirely new facilities being done first, and expanding existing facilities later.
- Pronouns
- Viewer
In terms of money and amounts we are behind, I think we are half of the goal Voz wanted to hit, since instead of doing expansions first, the ones that make the most money and cheapest we build new types of car plants. Mind you new types of cars are good, but it would have been better to do expansions first. Like, when we finished the recent expansion Voz mentions how they can no longer meet the original goals of producing enough cars to meet domestic demand because we did the expansions so late.
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Ok time for another round of circle arguments lets go
To clarify further no these won't be fast as light trains they won't even be bullet trains or just EU HSR they will be pure passenger lines that goes faster because they are electrified and doesn't need to content with freight. This means that yes they will never get to Moscow but they will take smaller cities populations to bigger cities in the same general area or just other small cities. While yes 1 hour to 1,5 hour commute might suck it isn't something completly heard of and it will give people more options.
Next yes we need more urban centers and that will require roads i will point at all the previous times i said that roads are good and we need to build them but that it doesn't make rails bad and that they will serve a purpose in the future. We are planning to build roads there in the next plan so i don't see why building HSR there will somehow mean there will be no roads and as i have repeatedly stated roads and rail are different things and serve different purposes.
About the line speed as mentioned by others and as i will reiterate one more time these are not what we consider high speed it is just passenger transport. Secondly yes the people needing this service is not everybody but saying it is a minority living within a city having access to a train station is just wrong most cities it will take maximum an hour to get to a train station and that is me being skeptical about it. Yes this won't help all the dirt diggers but nothing easily will. Giving them roads will help them and allow them to slowly dig themselves out of their hole and allow them to have a better life until a SOE takes their land or just makes them so deeply unprofitable that they will need to move to the city anyway. Also while not every city has paved roads yet some do and we have build many bus plants so while busses will be rare i don't think they are some mythical being i would think most semi big cities where you can't just directly walk across in reasonable time frame would have a bus route or if they are favoured by a regional offical maybe 2.
Yes i am thinking about these people and yes they are not a majority but that has been our entire mission statement from the start we build a bunch of bus plants this turn and are building steel, car, and other industries deeply suboptimal places to spread out the wealth if we wanted to run by what benefits most and just go full for efficency then the ideal would just be building the Moscow-Leningrad area into a gigantic urban center and force people to migrate their for jobs which we are already doing some of but i feel like most people don't want that.
Lastly i will state once again so the immediate comment after this isn't just "why not just build more roads" yes we should build more roads lots more road it is good for the economy and the people living in areas with bad access to goods and will help the economy circulate better. This is jsut an argument to say that while building roads will help everything it isn't as if it will make HSR worthless if anything it will just make HSR even better which is why i am all in favour of building even more roads as transportation of goods and strengthening of smaller urban areas will mean that the money earners will earn in places where service in demand will follow them out which leads to the services following and wealth distribution increases (this requires roads i am not saying don't build road).
I will admit that i might not have been clear enough about what i meant what i meant was there is naturally going to be bigger cities in the caucasus either for historical purposes where they just naturally grew bigger or because vital industry exists there like oil or steel. These cities are naturally going to attract the big service industry SOE's as they likely need a regional capital, a central location they want to branch out from, or they just want to hit the place where it is easiest to turn a profit. This will just mean that there will come uneven development in any region from the biggest urban centers and that will always happen when we incentivises profit and efficiency.
To clarify further no these won't be fast as light trains they won't even be bullet trains or just EU HSR they will be pure passenger lines that goes faster because they are electrified and doesn't need to content with freight. This means that yes they will never get to Moscow but they will take smaller cities populations to bigger cities in the same general area or just other small cities. While yes 1 hour to 1,5 hour commute might suck it isn't something completly heard of and it will give people more options.
Next yes we need more urban centers and that will require roads i will point at all the previous times i said that roads are good and we need to build them but that it doesn't make rails bad and that they will serve a purpose in the future. We are planning to build roads there in the next plan so i don't see why building HSR there will somehow mean there will be no roads and as i have repeatedly stated roads and rail are different things and serve different purposes.
About the line speed as mentioned by others and as i will reiterate one more time these are not what we consider high speed it is just passenger transport. Secondly yes the people needing this service is not everybody but saying it is a minority living within a city having access to a train station is just wrong most cities it will take maximum an hour to get to a train station and that is me being skeptical about it. Yes this won't help all the dirt diggers but nothing easily will. Giving them roads will help them and allow them to slowly dig themselves out of their hole and allow them to have a better life until a SOE takes their land or just makes them so deeply unprofitable that they will need to move to the city anyway. Also while not every city has paved roads yet some do and we have build many bus plants so while busses will be rare i don't think they are some mythical being i would think most semi big cities where you can't just directly walk across in reasonable time frame would have a bus route or if they are favoured by a regional offical maybe 2.
Yes i am thinking about these people and yes they are not a majority but that has been our entire mission statement from the start we build a bunch of bus plants this turn and are building steel, car, and other industries deeply suboptimal places to spread out the wealth if we wanted to run by what benefits most and just go full for efficency then the ideal would just be building the Moscow-Leningrad area into a gigantic urban center and force people to migrate their for jobs which we are already doing some of but i feel like most people don't want that.
This i completly agree with as i stated earlier the service sector will likely cluster in old historical capitals or oil boom towns which is why i think transport there is so important and why i think rail will help spread the money from that booming economy to surrounding areas.
I also agree here it would be ideal if everybody could just get a job in there own town and live close to home and do everything close to their home so the worker has more free time. Furthermore yes we can't build infinite rail and i won't argue for that but HSR is the passanger rail which will allow someone to go to the town next over easily without having to get a car. HSR is not just a linking of major cities it has the effect of also linking lots of smaller communities and allowed workers to commute more which Blackstar highlighted multiple times in the blurbs for the big HSR network.
Lastly i will state once again so the immediate comment after this isn't just "why not just build more roads" yes we should build more roads lots more road it is good for the economy and the people living in areas with bad access to goods and will help the economy circulate better. This is jsut an argument to say that while building roads will help everything it isn't as if it will make HSR worthless if anything it will just make HSR even better which is why i am all in favour of building even more roads as transportation of goods and strengthening of smaller urban areas will mean that the money earners will earn in places where service in demand will follow them out which leads to the services following and wealth distribution increases (this requires roads i am not saying don't build road).