Slashdot Mirror
First Maglev Installation Going Up
berniecase writes "After hearing about the 500kph Maglev in Japan on Slashdot, I caught wind of this installation which is going up in Norfolk, Virginia. It's the first Maglev installation in the US. Here's another photo, too."
The photo made me do a double-take. I thought, no magnet in the world could lift a train that high! I figured slashdot was spoofed until I realized that it was the crane holding the train that far above the track.
Maglevs are more expensive, more complex, and require more power than a standard monorail or lightrail, and considering that even the Disneyland monorail can reach 75mph, what is the point of a 40mph maglev?
I wish I could say that this was new, revolutionary technology. But I can't. I first heard about it close to 30 years ago in Scientific American.
But it's cool as hell. Hope it's just the first of many.
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
Neat. Hover trains. Anyone know how much electricity it takes to go a mile?
Ralph:Should we take the hover bus, or the non-hover bus
Bart:(looks at his money)hmm...non-hover bus...
It seems to me that maglev trains seem to high tech (read expensive) for practical use in the near term (next 20 years). Of course maybe we'll finaly have fusion power by then to run them so, maybe it will work out after all.
[Lyle Lanley] Well sir, there's nothin' on earth like a genuine, bonafide, electrified, six-car monorail!
What'd I say?
[Ned Flanders] Monorail!
[Lyle] What's it called?
[Patty & Selma] Monorail
[Lyle] That's right, monorail!
[All chant] Monorail, monorail, monorail...
[Ms Hoover] I hear those things are awfully loud
[Lyle] It glides as softly as a cloud
[Apu] Is there a chance the track could bend?
[Lyle] Not on your life, my Hindu friend
[Barney] What about us braindead slobs?
[Lyle] You'll be given cushy jobs
[Grampa] Were you sent here by the devil?
[Lyle] No, good sir, I'm on the level
[Chief Wiggum] The ring came off my pudding can
[Lyle] Take my pen knife, my good man
I swear it's Springfield's only choice
Throw up your hands and raise your voice!
Monorail!
What's it called?
Monorail!
Once again!
Monorail!
[Marge] But Main Street's still all cracked and broken
[Bart] Sorry, mom, the mob has spoken
[All] Monorail! Monorail!
Monorail!
Monorail!
[Homer] Mono- d'oh!
I wear pants.
I'd guess much of the cost would be for building the track and acquiring the land to build a track. Building a track also requires time to move people previously living on that land elsewhere. So to alleviate the high cost of track, I propose removing that metal base of burden. That's it! A vehicle that needs no track but still moves at fast speeds without touching the ground for long distances. I know! I'll call it an airpl... oh wait.
`I told those 3-year-olds they're watching a very historic moment,' she said, adding that they may not have grasped the significance.
The significance being that the U.S. is farther ahead of any other nation in developing useful, efficient, profit generating public transportation.
Oh wait....or maybe that this is the only time anyone sees this train and doesn't think: "how long until a bailout?"
I'm a friend of a friend of the working class.
this has been seriously talked about, planned for, for over a decade, and the US is just getting around to starting to build the infrastructure for this?
what with the problems of air travel right now (expense, overcrowding, & safety, to name a few), something like a mag-lev system would be awesome for continental travel; say, LA to Phoenix, DC to Boston etc.
it just makes so much sense that it will probably never be utilized in the proper manner.
*sigh*
When I was a young kid, about sixteen years ago, I was introduced to magnets/magnetism, and like any budding engineer, I asked my parents why couldn't you have a big metal tube that was magnetised 'north', and a train covered in metal that was mangetised 'south'.. no friction!
;-)
They couldn't figure out any reason why that wouldn't work, although I couldn't figure out a very good way of propelling the train at that time. My best solution was to stick a giant fan on the back of the train and have it push itself along!!
It's quite funny, therefore, to see maglev come along in the last few years. I feel like 'I invented it!' Of course, that's not true, but I'm sure lots of people have great ideas without ever learning about the idea before, and then are bitterly disappointed when they find it already exists
Unfortunately, my creative skills have dropped off somewhat in the past sixteen years, and now I'm doing drone work.. hmm.. perhaps these technology companies should be employing some smart 5 year olds..
mogorific carpentry experiments
You should build a 40 mph maglev before you try building a 300 mph maglev. The first automobiles were not faster than horses.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Don't get on board if you have piercings. Very painful.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
After hearing about the 500kph Maglev in Japan on Slashdot, I caught wind of this installation which is going up in Norfolk, Virginia
Yeah and at 40 MPH, America is _almost_ there!
I hope someday we get maglev cars like that new movie:
http://www.minorityreport.com/
I thought it would be a few centimeters, at best.
--
Ask the Ya-Hoot Oracle Anything!
with a short run track, I expect that it would not be practical to accelerate to 400 mph.
It would probably take as long to merely get strapped in for a high speed run.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
you do realize that its being hoisted by that crane, don't you?
$14 million dollars to transport people 2/3 of a mile. Get a bike, rollerblades, skateboard, Segway or use those two fleshy things that go into your shoes. Why don't they test this somewhere more useful or at least a longer test track.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Oh bother.
There is a BIG difference between this MagLev train and the Japanese one - this one uses conventional copper wound magnets, NOT superconductors like the Japanese version. While there is great expense in keeping superconducting magnets cold, they are certainly more efficient conductors of electricity and can create much stronger magnets. The Japanese train is about 60MPH faster than this one.
Last year Washington's governor, Gary Locke, was pictured "pushing" a small maglev device along a track and talking about how this would help solve the atrocious traffic problems in Seattle... nothing came about it and now there is a proposal to make a monorail that runs along the I-5 corridor, but the voters in this state are stupid and won't ever approve anything that makes them pay more taxes, nomatter how beneficial.
There are some great technologies that can increase transportation and decrease traffic and polution, but without support of taxpayers a lot of states will never see these solutions in use.
sig.
For American non standard metric system, 500 kilometer per hour is approximately equivalent to 310 miles per hour.
``I told those 3-year-olds they're watching a very historic moment,'' she said, adding that they may not have grasped the significance.
Folks, I know you might not like hearing this but there are "bigger fish to fry" at this perilous time. We need to not be spending money so foolishly. More money needs to be put into the welfare system, money to enforce the drug laws, gun laws, and to generally make sure our law enforcement agencies are very well funded to crack down on criminals and terrorists. We can't afford not to. It costs money to make sure children of poor families are provided for and drugs and guns are seized. Think about it before you voice support for this wasteful project.
Sometimes I look at things like this and wonder, "Wouldn't it be great if I could board a maglev in Seattle and be in Chicago in eight hours? Wouldn't it be great if this only cost me a hundred bucks? Wouldn't it be great if I could walk around, sit in a seat that's large enough to be comfortable, maybe get into a serious game of cards? Or maybe even park my car on the train and take it with me for another hundred bucks? I wonder when that will happen?"
Then I realize that people have been asking that for decades, and that nobody's done anything about it. Because we don't give a damn about building new infrastructure, or even repairing the old stuff.
The national highways, power dams, the moon...all that behind us, all that in our past. America's lost her ambition. What a shame.
Finding God in a Dog
Ok, cool, lovely, wonderful even that this technology is *FINALLY* being implemented in some quasi-useful form in the USA, (Shucks, even more neat-o that it's here in littl' 'ole Virginia!) but for Pete's SAKE, could they have at least TRIED to avoid the painfuly cliche, hasn't-been-amusing-for-thirty-YEARS headline?
"ODU's maglev train on track to future"
"Duh-yuk! Gorsh, that kinda funny. Cauze it's like a train, and it's all furture-like. Maw shore will get a hoot outta that!"
Gawd, I SWEAR some people just don't even TRY anymore!
**The preceding pointess rant was brought to you by the letters N, B, M, E, and the Step 1 examination. Any useful information or insightful contribution has been long since overridden by the mechanisms of aminoglycoside antibiotics and the complete structure of the Brachial Plexus. Help me, dear GOD, help me, just let me die. Thank you
Wouldn't it be pretty easy for some malcontent to kill hundreds of people by parking a car or hoisting some other heavy object onto the tracks of a 500kph train? You wouldn't even need explosives. The bodily trauma of violent deceleration in a train car careening about at 500kph is surely enough to kill anyone.
This seems like it should be a huge issue. Airplanes moving at 500kph are largely safe because (a) it does so when there's nothing to run into but air, and (b) it's extraordinarily hard (though obviously not impossible) to intervene maliciously with their normal operation.
How is this problem being addressed in Japan? Or is it? Or am I just paranoid?
I'm not impressed, really. I can see the strings.
"Derp de derp."
The title says it's the first, and then the story says there's already one in Japan. Well, I suppose that doesn't count, not being in the US. And I expect the Maglev at brum international airport, uk, didn't exist either.
When I was an assistant in a High School Physics Lab, I tried tinkering with a model train track and one train axle. First I soldered the axle so it would conduct electricity. Then I put some square magnets under the track (same polarity facing up) and connected the tracks to a DC power supply (one track positive, one track negative). It looks neat.. like a single axle moving by itself!
The Buttered Toast Array?
We need one of these traveling to and from every major metropolitan area and Vegas!"
If only because I'm reminded of magtubes in Alpha Centauri.
:)
Man, that game rocks.
Go mag-o-rail! Proving once again that such technology isn't a Japanbyville idea!
The mag-strip on everyone's BART ticket would be instantly erased them moment they stepped on board...
Oh well, my recollection skills have also fallen in use. Yeah, whatever ones repel each other. (You can tell I'm no engineer now)
mogorific carpentry experiments
Virginia! It sure will be great to have a bunch of hillbillies running this thing.
"Hay paw! Joe Bob done gots the fly on his britches stuck to the magnet again!"
This Slashdot article is quite USA-centric. If this is truly the "First Maglev Installation Going Up", then how can there exist maglev trains in Japan? Not every Slashdot reader is a USAian.
cpeterso
Then it would be a CRANE-LEV, not a MAG-LEV, wouldn't it? And it only defers the problem. Now you have to move a crane very fast...
--
Ask the Ya-Hoot Oracle Anything!
Someimes I look at things like this and wonder "Wouldn't it be great if I could flap my arms and fly to the moon?" That's about as likely as a maglev from Seattle to Chicago showing a profit on a $100 fare.
I play Nerd-Folk!
I wish I could say that this was new, revolutionary technology. But I can't. I first heard about it close to 30 years ago in Scientific American.
You're right but for me the thrill is not that it's finally being built but that the Americans managed to catch up. For those unfamiliar with the maglev story, here it is:
Decades ago MIT came up with the idea for the maglev train and even went so far as building a scale-model prototype (there is actually a black-and-white film clip somewhere of it in action). However, funding dried up and America decided not to pursue the technology. Hey, everyone loves their car, right? So why bother building an expensive mass-transit system. Of course, the answer is because not every country in the world is as obsessed with cars as America. Germany and Japan both realized the potential market for this and began development. And in contrast to the Americans, researchers in those countries actually had the full support of the government. Japan and Germany have no qualms about using government money to help subsidize non-military commerical technology. By the time America started to realize that maglev could be a great new market, they were way behind.
But somehow, and I don't honestly know how, they have been able to catch up to the frontrunners. Everyone loves an underdog, right? Even if USA isn't the first one to field a system, I'm still impressed they were able to realize their mistake and come from behind.
GMD
watch this
Southwest has democratized the airlines!
I'd put the crane on a maglev train. Problem solved!
"Old man yells at systemd"
Check this. Ok, it's being decomissioned for being shit, but it's still better than nothing ;-)
I remember going on this when I was a kid in the 80s. Don't remeber much about it, except that it wasn't long enough and didn't have enough corkscrews.
Anyone else remember it...?
Last I heard Pittsburgh and The Baltimore/DC area were fighting for federal funding to build a maglev train. Anyone hear anything about that recently?
I didn't know CmdrTaco was a BBC editor:
The two cars hovered just a centimetres above the track, kept their by magnetic force, providing a smooth ride.
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
Here in Germany, where high-speed trains are fairly common (the ICE2 goes up to something like 280 km/h, or about 170 mph, though only on top-quality track), there has been some debate for some years about building a maglev passenger train -- but the usual NIMBY problems keep coming up.
To add to the irony, the Greens -- who you would think would want to support mass transit, especially one like maglev -- have often blocked its implementation in Germany on environmental grounds (disturbing habitats, etc.).
There there is the situation in the USA.
On the other hand, maglev could in theory revive passenger train service in the USA. I believe that one of the main reasons it has failed in the States is simply economics -- because of the greater distances involved, the net cost per mile of track, the total cost to maintain a (much onger) average stretch of track, and therefore the ticket price for getting from point A to point B is higher than in Europe, where population density is far higher and a greater potential for train service exists. Another drawback in the States is again because of the distance: with Amtrak's usual trains (which are abysmally slow by European standards) it takes forever to get anywhere. So you pay more for worse (slower) service, and the train company has less surplus money to invest in new technology or track improvements. No wonder Amtrak is so terrible.
(Consider the irony that the USA is generally considered to have the most modern freight rail in the world -- but passenger rail is a joke.)
The initial cost of a maglev line is probably a lot higher, but I would imagine that its TCO would be much lower than conventional trains -- and given its far higher potential speeds, it could really compete with airliners (at least on the East and West Coasts, where there is a high enough population density to pay for it).
But the whole train-related mass transit infrastructure is missing in most American cities (thanks in part to the American love of cars) -- okay, so you got to the main station, but then what? How do you get around? Is there a well-integrated tram/bus/subway/coach system? Most cities just don't have that (certainly nothing like in Germany or France). So even if someone is willing to take the (substantial) financial risk and heavy investment load of building a maglev network in the States, there are still a lot of practical issues to deal with beyond just the train lines.
So, sad to say, even though maglev technology was developed to a large degree in America, I don't see it happening in the near future. In spite of the problems mentioned above in Germany, I do think that there will be several trunk lines running maglev service in Germany in the next few years (probably Cologne-Hannover-Berlin and Hamburg-Hannover-Frankfurt-Munich at the least).
By the way, one of the main companies working on maglev is TransRapid. Check out their site (especially the Projects section) for a lot of info about the subject, including about possible maglev lines in the States.
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
This thing is about a 10 minute drive from my home. I wonder if I could sneak down there and get a peak at it...
:0
plop
In fact, according to the presentation on american-maglev.com, it could be relatively cheap, as you only need space to put pillars every x metres/feet, rather than huge long strips of land.
The only really expensive part is the electricity to power the train's magnets, and if we can push the critical temperature of superconductors even higher than it is now then that would be vastly reduced as well. Admittedly the SC material would probably be quite expensive to manufacture, but that's not certain (like many things in the field of superconductivity)
[The critical temperature of a superconducting material is the temp. below which it drops into the superconducting state.The current maximum is 138K = -135 degrees C = -211 degrees F. This is much higher than the boiling point of liquid nitrogen.]
where would you rather have your money spent:
1. US Military (build huge stockpiles of advanced weapons, aircraft and troops for defense from that other major superpower, um, Iraq (?)
2. a maglev which, at a cost of 1 trillion, could be built within 6 years based on a 50% reduction in the military budget (currently about 396,000,000,000).
damnit! what do we have to show for all that money getting spent? 'freedom and democracy' i hear. BULLSHIT, freedom from whom? has there been a real attempt by a legitimate threat to conqur the US within the past 20 years? have we done anything with our massive military that could not have been done with a reasonably sized one? i don't even feel like arguing these points anymore -- i'm getting closer to taking the advice of those people who don't like my ideas and just leaving the country.
*the military has brought us some good technological advances (computers...) but what about solving the problems we already have like making a clean maglev for folks who need to go visit thier family across the nation?
please don't reply. this is probably a flame -- you all know there is way too much money in the military anyways.
fear is the mind killer
Why not spend the $ upgrading the old crappy-ass tracks from Richmond to DC?
it would probabbly mean that it is not (actually we are already pretty sure about this, arn't we?) super-conductor mag-lev, but instead just really, really power-hungry conventionaly electro-magnetic levitation.
This would not, should not, and probabbly could not ever be made into a real commercial train; the margin of safty is simply so much less than superconducting maglev
My life in the land of the rising sun.
You might want to have a look at the German maglev "Transrapid" which is running in circles since 20 years now and will finally be build in China.
It does 310 mph / 500km/h.
http://www.transrapid.de/en/index.html
k2r
Not being an expert on US land prices, I can't be sure, but that doesn't sound too cheap.
A waste - an utterly complete waste.
Think about it - it is a train that only goes 40 mph, only travels a small distance (as one poster here said, he could walk it in 5 minutes), and sucks electricity like a pig. Where are the advantages?
Sure, it looks and sounds cool, but until electricity if free (or near free), it is a near worthless application of the technology (that of magnetic levitation and propulsion - I realise that there ARE some practical uses of the tech, but not "people mover" - yet). What are the advantages of this train over, say, a standard small light-rail train? Or something smaller like a BART system?
If smoothness of ride is wanted, why not use "sprung" linear ball bearing tracks, and a smooth bottom train, coupled with propelling "booster" wheels (like that used to get roller coasters away from the stations) along the track every so often, activated as the train approached, deactivated after it had gone by (heck, make it cheaper - drop the ball bearing track and use good sprung bogeys, with a bottom friction plate on the train).
What further galls me is the idea that this is planned to be extended, for larger area use. The cost for this (and light rail) is very high, but there are other alternatives. Phoenix, AZ recently passed its own "light rail initiative", called Transit 2000 - the original website is gone, but "they" chose to go with a standard light rail system. There was a competing system, which was passed over (more on that in a bit). Funny thing about the Phoenix system - I haven't heard much of anything on it since the initiative passed the voters (ie, the tax got passed) - likely it is being funneled and used to line pockets. Plus, I haven't got the slightest idea how they plan to put it in the area proposed - if you live in Phoenix, and look at the map of the route, you know that there is NO WAY IT WILL FIT, at least not without serious restructuring of a major freeway.
Anyhow, as far as the other system is concerned? The other system was Doug Malewicki's SkyTran. The concept seems sound, he has presented his plan in a clear fashion on his website. I still hope one day he will get the funding to make this invention a reality (hell, if he could just sell his Robosaurus he could probably get a prototype going)...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
the one time I could have gotten a story posted on slashdot and I don't even recognize it. I live in the city next too Norfolk, Portsmouth. they were originally trying to sell this idea to Virginia Beach as a way for tourists to get around but it jsut wasn't practical. So then they sold it to ODU (Old Dominion University). from what I understand this isn't costing ODU anything which is great. Whats sad is I've known about this for like a year or more and jsut didn't think it that noteworthy. cool things happen here all the time. :)
-
There seem to be 2 main camps when it comes to mag-lev.
1. You put the propusion/levitaion in the car.
2. You distribute the propulsion/levitaion between the track and the car.
#1 while being more challenging from a performance standpoint, has some pretty hefty dollar per-mile advantages. I think this type of design is more likely to be put into use here in the US. TCO is likely to be low. A track maintenance problem would likely be nothing more than alignment or (if the track supplied power to charge the batteries) power delivery. But because of the engineering issues (greater car weight leading to most of them), I doubt mag-lev will come to the US until further advances in power storage and high temp superconductors come down the pike.
#2 Is much 'cooler' in terms of what can be done today, but I imagine initial build cost as well as TCO would be much higher than #1. A track based propulsion || levitation system would dramatically increase the cost per mile of track. Not to mention if there's a problem with the track (an this is more likely with a complex track) that whole run becomes unusable until someone can go out to BFE to fix it. (can you imagine going out to the middle of nowhere to install a new section of track?) TCO would be HUGE.
I see top speed is 40 mph. Really sad when Seattle's 1960s Monorail has a top speed of around 60 mph.
...
Now, if we had jetpacks, that might be interesting
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
hmph. Slashdot is so US-centric it's laughable. What about all of us in other parts of the world who've seen maglev come and go? The title of this article is inflamatory and should be changed to reflect to true story here: that the US is always the last to get anything.
that being said, i'd like for y'all to flame me for even posting a wicked stupid reply like this.
Sipping on Jolt and Dew. Laid back. With my mind of my cubicle and my cubicle on my mind.
I originally posted this story with the tagline "First Maglev installation in the US is almost up and running," but it looks like it's been horribly, horribly chopped.
Also, I put this in Slashback, because I didn't think it was worth posting as a general story. I guess Hemos didn't agree, but he could have cut down the headline a little better.
What happened to the big scare about electromagnetic radiation? Remember the stories about people getting cancer from living underneath power lines? Rememeber people getting their houses checked with gauss meters? These folks are sure to come out of the woodwork if maglev trains are ever built.
It doesn;t have room to get that fast. It is capable of going 300, but doesn't have the room. Can your car go 100mph down yor driveway? No. Same princiaple.
Monorails are in the air and have only several accidents since they started over 100 years ago. The disney monorail carries more passengers than all of denvers RTD/LTR and still no accidents. It is funny when ppl push light rail, they never mention the hidden costs of lost lives, or slowness due to being stuck in traffic.
I have been driving under this construction (at Old Dominion University) every day for the past year or so, but never paid it much thought. Now it's on slashdot, and I feel compelled to go look at it......go figure.
During the first trial run they had the power turned up too high on the magnets. You can see in the photo that the train is levitating a good 15' above the track. This caused stability problems and the power has been reduced in subsequent trial runs.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
studies were done and it was found to be null, I heard about it from a guest lecturer in engineering we had a few weeks ago.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
I'm informing you in this message that your use of decimal is disturbing to geeks. Why did you choose to use decimal? I'd really like to know. We may have ten fingers, but we don't even use decimal for time. Decimal is clearly for stupid people. I think it likely that you do not know what radices mean, or else you would be using hexadecimal. Read about hexadecimal at intuitor and repost your comment using hexadecimal. You may use "0x" as a prefix or "h" as a suffix for the numbers. Intelligent people despise decimal--so try to show some intelligence. So do you know what hexadecimal is? Reply to this and prove it, otherwise we will assume that you are stupid.
Personalized message:
Hmm?
I have a much better and cost effective solution!
/. readers: You get karma!
MahaLev: Maharishi Levitation, teach everybody
Transcendental Meditation - get a yogi to act as a conductor,
and have everyone onboard chant "aaoouuumm" as the train raises itself from the tracks.
And as a bonus for
Who picks this junk?
I can't remember where I read it (maybe here, maybe ScienceDaily), but the real news is that some female scientist made a nanoscale magnet with an electron microscope that was incredibly strong. As soon as some chemical genius figures out a way to mass-produce the atomic structure (instead of building one-atom-at-a-time), we can levitate really heavy things without using any electricity at all.
Again, that pathetic photo of the "train" being lifted by a crane onto a Disneyland monorail track was too much. Who picks this stuff?
I dont know, seems more like a Shelbyville idea to me.
Dont eat yellow snow
I'm a Student at ODU where this train is being built. And I've seen a lot firsthand about this probject and also heard alot.
1) The concret colums were installed a year ago, but it wasn't till this year they layed down 40 feet of metal track (installed 3 months ago)ontop of them to rest the car on.
2) There is a bend futher down the track in a long S shape that is said to be too sharp.. So forget 40 mph.
3) Rumors said that if everything goes great, it will be exteneded all the way to Washingon DC.
4) Since all the magnetic technology is inside the cars, no maintances is needed for the track, making it cheaper
5) They can get the car to move forward, the current trick is to getting it to stop..
6) Asked around to see if I could apply for the driver job.. Found out the thing is fully automatic.
So what if MAglev can go 500 kph.. Steel Wheel on Steel Rail (i.e. France's TGV) which is been in prod for years has top test speed just as high.
The high-temperature superconductors are
too fragile for big magnets. You need to
use metallic superconductors, which means
you need liquid helium.
I sure don't want to sit on a public train
with a bunch of smelly bums.
For $trillion, you can get the B2 at discount
prices. The cost only went up to $billion
because the fixed R&D and factory costs are
divided by how many planes you purchase.
So let's buy 1000 at $200 million each.
Then let's build a cheap B52 replacement based
on the Boeing 777 airframe. Let's get 1000 of
those too, for under $100 million each.
Hmmm... money left over.
We need the F22. They're about $133 million
right now, but ought to go for $80 million
or so if we buy 5000 of them. Let's do it.
Then put the rest into Pershing II ICBMs,
neutron bombs, and laser weapon research.
"I've sold monorails to Brockway, Augdenville, and North Haverbrook and by gum it put them on the map!"
[insert witty comment here]
What was the other word besides 'cromulant' from the Jebediah Springfield episode? I can never remember.
Ummm, Jon, aren't you supposed to be dead...? - Otter(3800)
Let's take the I-17 route for instance - where will these trains run? I can only think of two areas off the top of my head: 1) the freeway median (ie, in the center of the freeway), or 2) along the access roads (ie, on either side of the freeway).
There are problems with either of these methods.
To perform number "1", you would have to either build an elevated track, or take up both the north and southbound HOV lanes, effectively removing a lane from commuter use. Now, in theory this is OK, because those same commuters should use the train - guess what, they won't. Instead, we'll have half empty trains running, and gridlock as usual, but worse, because we have eliminated a lane (or possibly two, if they create a new HOV lane). Furthermore, how do you get past/under the overhead crossings? The only way to do it is to take over the HOV lane - no other way. There isn't room to add another lane past the emergency lanes on the right hand side of the road - because you would be cutting into the above freeway level access roads. If you elevate the train in the center, then you have to restructure (and redo signals) at the overhead crossings, mucking up traffic on surface streets (people drive like shit here, as they do everywhere - I can just see the accidents if there is a train in the middle of the crossing).
So, for number "2", you have to either take up an access lane (reducing the two we have now going in each direction down to one in each direction), place the train overhead (that would look real pretty, and I am sure for the length of the run it would be cheap), with the access road running under it, or how about this: declare eminent domain on the houses and businesses that are in the way along the highway, and just get rid of the buildings, etc in the way, then build there! Yeah, that will go over great (although they did do that with the 51). It still doesn't account for the major restructuring, etc needed to get around the off-ramp areas - especially funky ones like the East/West cloverleafs at Thunderbird, or the massive turnoffs at Bell (though I don't remember if it is extending this far north). Still, some of the other turnoffs are just as crazy - so I can't see how they will fit it in.
Suffice to say, I will be very interested to see how and where this whole thing goes, and how they plan on implementing it. I will also be interested in seeing how many people really use it, and whether traffic will improve. My money is on that very few of the people it is meant to serve will actually use it. Furthermore, it won't help the the many people who now live in Anthem - you think they will "Park-and-Ride" - ha! If it gets built at all (thanks for the site link, still, something tells me the money will quietly "disappear")...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Thank you for pointing it out - maybe I should pay attention to the maps better. There isn't an I-17 path.
Hopefully what you say about the Red Line will carry over to the light rail. I am also wondering if in the future the line will be extended to ASU West - would make a good way to get between the two campuses.
As far as Anthem/I-17 - hopefully this thing will be extended in that direction in the future. Should be interesting to watch...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon