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Transrapid (MagLev) Test Successful In China: 405
theBunkinator writes "Use your favorite translator (+ unit converter) to read about the first successful beyond 400km/h (~250MPH) test of the MagLev train in China. News Blurp in German at tagesschau.de. The offical Transrapid site is bilingual, with choice of German/English. Pictures & Video, too. Beats the Autobahn any day. Probably beats a plane in many situations as well."
"Magnets: Not just for your fridge anymore."
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Seeing China's current economic condition, it's probably just a repainted 1964 World's Fair monorail.
which is described here. And it's network described here
none Yet.
Shall we compare emmissions output? Both sound and nasty chemicals...
Passengers can now go 405 kilometers before they're hungry again.
Please note that you can already travel at 300Kmh using the TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse, 'High Speed Train'), in France, since since 1980...
Not 400Kmh, but it works very well.
More informations can be found here.
(There is a nice flash map of the french railways).
If this is like every other "high speed" trains, then it can only keep its maximum speed for short periods of time.
I believe it's more related with the environment (i.e. "let's not hit a cow") than anything else. So I wonder if they developed a system to allow a constant high speed (other than "we don't care about cows")?
The ENIAC Demo Competition
I'm missing something ???
The French TGV already drove over 515km/h.
And that was in 1990 !!!
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
The cruising speed of a typical commercial jutliner is about 550 mph.
The speed of sound is about 761 mph (sea level, bleah bleah.)
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
If anything this thing will make airtravel therefore easier by getting people to and from the airport faster.
I recently had to go to london from amsterdam and checked out the three different methods. Boat, train (via channel-tunnel) and plane. Plane beat the other by a few hours. Mostly because of the number of transfers(?) and the inevitable waiting time this entails, required in the other two.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
5 or so years ago this would have been reported as
"Under the guise of a civilian transporter the Chinese goverment demonstrated a potentially terrible military weapon, capable of accelerating several tonnes upto half the speed of sound"
Just think, if Iraq had just done this we'd declare war.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
The Transrapid would've cost us about $38 million per kilometer and additional annual costs of $215K. For comparison, ICE train tracks (Inter-City Europe express tracks) cost $16.5 million per km and around $165K annually.
It gets worse. There's a 30km test track in Emden, and the train has never been up to it's supposed max speed of 500 km/h. The distance from the Munich airport to the city center is only about 20km, and the thing needs 5km just to get up to 300 km/h. Planned costs were set at $1.6 billion (with a "B" as in, "bwooaaaahhh!") -- expected costs around 50% more. Planned completion was 2006 and expected 2008-2010.
Munich dodged a bullet, but now faces over a year of public transport hell as the main through-tunnel for all S-Bahns is upgraded to increase capacity from 20 to 30 trains an hour. (All S-Bahn trains pass through this tunnel, resulting in massive delays whenever there's a problem even near the tunnel, which extends some seven stations, 5 in the tunnel and end points.) To make things worse, the video schedule displays along the lines run Windows and crash at least once a week. Luckily, the trains don't.
woof.
There's often a Simpson-esque rally in the US press whenever another country pulls this sort of thing off. People often ask "Why can't we just covert/reuse existing railways."
The problem becomes one of how you define straight. These tracks need to be really straight for long lengths to get such numbers, and while your typical subway or Amtrak route looks straight, that's only when viewed at lower speeds (under 60MPH). Even then, lots of these routes are shaky. Take it up to over 100 and suddenly, it's not so straight anymore.
Anyone who's taken their car to really high speeds on public roads can usually attest that a straight road at 70 isn't as straight at 120.
...has been highly controversial over here. The state-funded Transrapid consortium has developed a high-trech train and then, when asking the German government for a track to deploy it live, suddenly found that actually noone in Germany cared for it.
Germany, being a rather small country, yet with a very high density of population, has a very good and highly accepted high-speed railtrack system. (Japan and France are still far better, but still.) The Transrapid offers very little time benefit per direction, yet requires massive construction work for its tracks. Most people here say - why bother? Why do we have to pay billions of tax Euros for a 30 minute benefit?
The Transrapid consortium has struggled during the last years to find an excuse on where to build its track in Germany and why, and so far, plans are still going back and forth.
------------------
You may like my a cappella music
If your goal is just to reduce friction, why not simply float the train on an air cushion, like a hovercraft? It seems like it would eliminate a lot of the complexity.
The air cushion could be fairly efficient compared to military hovercraft, since the ground clearance could be an inch or so, instead of feet. Your track could be prepoured concrete instead of electromagnets.
I'm probably missing something.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
This story implies that the maglev was running at the same speeds it would operate at commercially. There's a big differance between that and the world speed record. To quote TGV themselves from their site
"Running at over 500 km/h (311 mph) with a specially prepared trainset on brand new track is an accomplishment, but one should not expect such speeds to be possible in commercial service anytime soon."
If the maglev speeds are reproducable in a production - ie passenger carrying - environment then this is a major achievement and certainly seems to be what they are aiming for.
Hmm, 450km/h, 959 persons, every 10minutes a train.
This amounts to a throughput of 5754 persons/h.
For a single lane Autobahn: 130km/h, distance between two cars, 170m. This amounts to 765 cars per hour. A typical car carries up to 4 persons.
3060 persons/h.
A typical Autobahn has at least 2 lanes, several have 3.
This makes roughly 6kP/h or 9kP/h. So one could say a Autobahn with 3 lanes has twice the troughput than the Transrapid.
But, this is the theoretical limit. The numbers for the Transrapid is devised from the implementation with two trains on the tracks.
Double the number of trains you get the the same throughput.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
This train line is actually pretty darn impressive. I was in Shanghai three weeks ago, and to get from the city to the airport, we took a highway that for much of its length runs parallel to the train "tracks". The train's path is, for at least a good portion of the trip, elevated on huge concrete pillars, thus avoiding cows and other earthbound wildlife. The train itself looks pretty cool, too.
Shanghai, BTW, is a very nice city- at least the areas I saw. I got the impression there is, relative to many other Chinese cities, a lot of money there.
This is precisely what a country with a GNIPC (gross national income per capita) of ~750$ (see WorldBank) needs these days.
The Raven
At least it wasn't:
404: Maglev not found
Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but copyright will always protect me.
Sorry about previous post. Hit "return" when reaching for "shift."
/. article.
I myself have discovered (by living in São Paulo and having a girlfriend in Rio de Janeiro) that traveling by bus is already better for me than traveling by plane.
First, it's much more comfortable. The buses have seats that are much bigger and much farther apart (front-to-back) than airplanes. I am not a big person (173 cm and about 65kg, or about 5'8" and around 145 lbs) and I feel cramped in commercial airliners. Imagine tall and/or heavy people!
Besides that, on a bus, the seats really recline (not the almost imperceptible 5 "recline" of an airplane seat), making it possible to sleep, which I now cannot do on airplanes (I used to be able to, but they are forever cramming more and more seats in, and thus limiting more and more the space each passenger has, and they have now surpassed my comfort limit). Additionally, there is no limitation on when you can recline the seat (there is no takeoff and landing) or on what kind of electronic devices you can use (it's nice to be able to use my cell phone to make or receive calls while en route) or when you can use them (again, no takeoff and landing).
Also, you don't have to pass through really invasive security procedures to get on a bus. I also discovered something surprising: even though the bus travels much slower than a plane, I don't lose much time taking a bus. In fact, it's much better. Let me explain.
If I take a plane, I have to get to the airport first. And I have to be there at least an hour before the flight (it would be 2 hours if I were in the US, but I am fortunate to live in a free country... if anyone thinks this is a troll, I'll be happy to discuss it with you. But basically, I enjoy many freedoms I couldn't dream of having in the US). After standing in a line to check in, I have to answer stupid questions, show ID, and check my luggage. Then I have some time to kill before the plane leaves. I usually get some kind of soft drink in the departure lounge (waiting area). Oh yeh... I have to show ID and my ticket to get in there. With all the noise and hurrying people around, it is all but impossible to make any kind of use of this waiting time by, say, reading. Then they call us to board. I then have to get in another line, present my ticket, and go to the plane. I then find my seat and sit down. I can try to read during this time, but again, there are people all around making a lot of noise and hurrying and arranging their stuff. Then the plane takes off. I can now try to read, but within a few minutes, the flight attendants come around with drinks. In the case of the São Paulo to Rio flight, the whole flight lasts only about 40-60 minutes (depending on direction, weather conditions, and air traffic at the destination). In the case of longer flights, the attendants come around several times to offer drinks and/or food.
After the plane lands, it taxis to the gate. This can add another 5-15 minutes, depending on traffic. Then we are released into the terminal, which usually involves another wait while people block the corridor to take down the 74 bags they just couldn't check and had to bring on board. The one time I saw a flight attendant enforce the limit on the number of bags a couple could carry on, I literally applauded, and did I ever get dirty looks from the couple.
Next we all go to baggage claim, which can take anywhere from seconds to forever. After that, either I meet my ride or go to car rental to get a car.
In the end, I don't really save any time taking a plane instead of a bus, even though the flight part of the journey by plane takes 40-60 minutes and a bus trip takes 5-6 hours. Taking the bus has the added advantage that I can arrive at the bus station without a reservation, buy a ticket for the next bus, go down and wait a few minutes (not 45 like in the airport, plus buses are rarely late, while airplanes always seem to be) before getting on the bus. I can than either sleep (not possible in the airplane due to comfort and time constraints) or actually do some work or just relaxing reading. If I had a laptop, I could do work too. Also, buses have much more flexible hours. In the Rio-São Paulo example, the last plane (and you've gotta reserve that several days in advance) leaves around 10:00 PM. There are buses leaving with relatively high frequency until about 1:30 AM, and there are others that leave at even later hours, though not as frequently.
Now imagine a train, which can offer all the advantages of buses, plus it doesn't get affected by traffic and can travel at 400 kph (about 250 mph). Add in that it can be much more energy-efficient than a plane, has an even lower risk of accidents, and (Steven Seagal movies aside) an even lower risk of hijacking than a bus, since it has very limited possibilities in terms of alternate routes (i.e., it can only go where there are tracks) and basically cannot be used as a weapon (except possibly against a vehicle on a road at a train crossing or another train). Basically, there's no comparison. A maglev train would blow away an airplane for everything except trans-oceanic travel. And best of all, it would probably be much cheaper than an airplane flight. I started taking buses because my girlfriend and I couldn't really afford to be flying back and forth every weekend, and the bus is a much, much cheaper option. I expect a maglev train ticket would be more expensive than a bus ticket, but less expensive than a plane ticket. I traveled extensively in Europe by train, and the prices were quite reasonable, even for the TGV (Train de Grande Vitesse (or sumfin' like that), which just means "high-speed train" in French) between some Swiss city (Geneva?) and Paris. And if you think about it from a business point of view, the marginal cost of adding space for more passengers (by adding more cars, not by cramming the passengers in like sardines like the frickin' airlines insist on doing) is very low. So if there is less demand, you send less cars. If there is more, you add some. So the "full flight" problem is reduced without large additional costs... wow.
If I were a stockholder in a major airline, I would be even more worried now than before thinking about high-speed maglev trains... as a consumer of mass transport, I am definitely more happy than before thinking about these things because of the
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
The test site (which can be seen on the Transrapid site is quite close to the Dutch borders. As my dad works as a journalist in that area, he had to do a story on it once. Which included a few rounds in the train on the 8-shaped test track in Lathen, Germany. Due to some luck I normally never encounter I had the oppurtunity to go with him and thus also do a few rounds on the track. And I must say, it is nothing less than impressive. We didn't go faster than about 340 km/h, but doing that a few meters above the ground in a very silent train was an unforgetable experience. For short-long-distance (100-500 km.) this is an ideal solution. Clean, fast and just ultra-slick. I hope this system will now finally get some more attention, because it deserves it and is a very good replacement for short-distance flying and long-distance car driving. Hurray for Transrapid!
Fine, almost honor pre-calculus.
1. There are no single lange Autobahns, at least not in Germany. (They might have em in Poland, but as far as I remember, there are no designated lanes anyways and, secondly, that's not called the Autobahn.)
2. The average car does not transport four people, but around 1.3.
3. Serious (empirical!) studies give us better numbers for the number of car throughput: A Swiss study mentions up to 115 000 cars / day, 4800 per hour. According to guidelines used in planning of roads, the acceptable throughput for a 2x2-lane Autobahn is 20.700 to 70.000 cars/day, so it's far less than the figure mentioned. (Source) That's data for both directions.
4. Assuming 40.000 cars/day (in accordance with the guidelines), we end up with 2166 persons per hour.
In the post-9/11 world, any country considering any kind of mass transport must ask what kind of target opportunity it represents? I think, unfortunately, that this will be much easier to attack than an airplane at 35,000 feet. Every foot of rail will have to be alarmed, patrolled, and inspected. With more passenger capacity than an Airbus A380, how long will the security checkpoints take? A full day?
While it may now be technologically practical, it remains impractical for political reasons.
The Transrapid was ready to market in 1980. Nine-teen-eighty, I say. Endless debates and 22 years later it finally gets implemented. Of course not in germany. At least this time it's the chinese and not the americans that get it on with german tech. :-)
That been said, it shure is an engineers wet dream and a beaty in means of transportation. I'd love to see this baby ready for use throughout central europe. Cars are outdated. Germans, for instance, spend 4.5 billion man-hours in traffic-jams per year! It's really time we got puplic transport to be the way to travel.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
An advanced rail system like this might be slightly ahead of its time for China if the marketplace alone were determining when some company would build it.
It's kind of sad, though, that here in the United States we probably won't see anything like this for many more years.
It's strange, though. The Peoples Republic of China is a mixture of a market-driven and command-driven economies.
Likewise in the United States, where heavy government subsidies in the 1950's built up the interstate highway system.
Now, of course, the automobile dominates passenger traffic and the trucking industry dominates freight and our potentially efficient rail infrastructure is a government-subsidized crumbling ruin that neither the auto, trucking or oil industry is interested in seeing re-emerge.
But railroads will re-emerge as the most efficient means of transportation for people and freight. Computer controls for regulating rail traffic will succeed sooner than they will for automobile and truck traffic.
All it will take for the re-emergence of rail in the United States is some painful increases in the price of oil. Then we can go to Europe, Japan and now China to learn the technology that we've been neglecting.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Well, I don't know about germany, but here in america we certanly driver closer then 170 meters! Perhaps 170 decimeters :P
Ever learn the two-second rule for driving? The trick is, you're supposed to always be at least two seconds behind the car in front of you, three or four seconds if the roads are slippery or it's raining or dark (or all three).
You measure this by using bridges, signs, etc. as benchmarks -- wait until the car in front of you has passed the landmark, count "one-onethousand two-onethousand", and only then should you reach the same landmark. If you pass it beforehand, you're too close.
So suppose you're driving 120 kph (the usual speed limit on the Autobahn, if there is one defined). 120 kph ~= 33 m/s. So by the two-second rule, you'd have to be at least 67m away from the car in front of you.
Suppose you're doing a more typical speed on the Autobahn (even when there's a speed limit, it usually is roundly ignored). Most people drive around 140 kph (though you usually are getting run over by Mercedes and BMWs doing 200). That's a minimum distance of about 78m, assuming it's a bright sunny day with dry roads.
If it's raining, you should double that; near or below freezing, at least double that again; low visibility, double that once more. IOW if it's raining, freezing and foggy, you probably shouldn't be on the road at all. ;-)
Seriously, if you follow the two-second rule and keep in mind that you're supposed to double it in some circumstances, you're never rear-end anyone, and probably never get rear-ended either (since the person behind you *also* has more warning as a result).
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
Health problems: No. The main RF hazard is radiation powerful and high-frequency enough to heat your tissue. The magnetic field has yet to be demonstrated harmful, though many continue to try. (I used to work with MRI, which involved a 1.5 Tesla superconducting primary magnet.)
;-), and so on. Sadly, it was 9/11 that gave trains a boost, when airports became even more aggravating. The train's time will come. ("We have the technology. We can rebuild [it]."
Why not here: Lobbyists. On one hand you have the money-losing Amtrak, on the other the money-losing but politically influential airlines. More important than airlines perhaps are those who really fear roads: the automobile industry. That industry includes not just auto mfrs, but also tire mfrs, gasoline suppliers and vendors, and so on. Rail service has a much smaller umbrella.
America is stalled on rail because for years roads were emphasized, and subsidized. Los Angeles, where I grew up, is the classic example of car dependency and mediocre mass transit. People say that areas such as these are "not suited to mass transit" but forget that the layout of the city was determined by cars. Thus cars lead to more cars. In balncing one form of transportation against another, the hidden cost of pollution and auto fatalities and such are rarely assessed. (Yes, people die on trains, too.)
In the Northeast Corridor, where I now live, trains should totally overcome the shuttle, which offers almost no time advantage for a downtown DC to downtown NYC traveler. The problem facing Amtrak, which is only one of many users of the lines, was to get funds to upgrade and electrify the tracks. Congress resisted, citing their operating losses and thus confusing annual deficits with capital investment. Over $2 billion was required to introduce Acela service, which still can only travel at a fraction of its normal speed over much of the route because of antiquated curves and grading.
I don't endorse Amtrak, but see that its challenges are not fairly apprised. being subject to political control, for example, it must maintain unprofitable routes, while not being able to fully exploit the profitable ones, or develop new prospects. Even if Amtrak is successfully denounced, if anything that strengthens the case for rail by implying unexploited possibilities are there.
I love rail service; you get a first-class (big) seat, can get up and walk around, can arrive 30 seconds before the train rolls, don't have a safety lecture about the motions to go through before you die anyway
I'd rather have slower trains with better coverage/low prices than an insanely expensive fast train that doesn't run anywhere near where I live.
High-speed trains? Don't expect my support until the NJ Transit Raritan Valley Line is electrified and goes direct into NYC. (A much easier project than building a maglev or upgrading tracks to high-speed capability).
I have a train line 10 minutes from my house. It's great, despite being a non-direct diesel. The Northeast Corridor is faster and would be nice, but the NEC is "fast enough" without having super-expensive upgrades being done.
Also, for long distances, trains just don't compete economically in the US. Amtrak (the only long-distance provider) has prices that are on average equal to or greater than air travel. In a number of areas you can compare Amtrak prices directly to local commuter rail - On the Northeast Corridor in New Jersey, NJT does New Brunswick, NJ to NYC in only 10-20 minutes more than Amtrak. NJT's round-trip price is 1/4 that of Amtrak's one-way.
The problem is that Amtrak has to use their profitable lines (NEC, etc.) to subsidize the much less profitable (in fact, overall money-losing) Midwestern lines.
I think the solution is to give up on rail where it won't work - For long runs in the Midwest, air has won and trains can't compete. For selected areas (Northeast Corridor, i.e. DCNYCBoston), form smaller companies to operate those lines. They can probably offer the service at much lower prices then, which will provide a large gain in ridership for those lines.
Unfortunately, thanks to Amtrak's prohibitive cost, it's cheaper to hire a limo service to go from central Jersey to Washington, DC (Yes, people do this. Apparently a significant portion of the business of many of the area's limo services are now for DC runs). It's faster to drive than take the airplane, and while the train is the fastest, it isn't worth the insane cost. Train travel could easily beat air travel in the Northeast, but it has to be reduced in price so that it can compete first.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
How come there aren't any of these in the U.S? I would have thought that U.S being ahead in technology (or atleast money), they would have one of these running somewhere by now.
I wrote about this in a previous article (see the final paragraph). One of the problems (in addition to those already listed by others) is that the US Government wasn't willing to put up any research dollars to fund development of the MagLev train -- the idea for which was actually created at MIT (there's even an old videotape of the minature prototype experiment somewhere). Other governments were more than willing to fund the research even though it was going to benefit private companies. Needless to say, the combination of government money and private companies that look beyond the next fiscal reporting period to determine the allocation of their R&D budgets resulted in the US quickly being left in the dust.
GMD
watch this
I have driven in Germany many times, and can attest to fellow North Americans that the Germans take their driving far more seriously. They obey the speed limits right down to the km/hr., where they exist (secondary and city roads and many parts of the Autobahn), and on the stretches of Autobahn that are unregulated, they obey rules very carefully about slower traffic keeping to the right, proper signaling, passing etc. North American driving looks very sloppy in comparison. The sections of the Autobahn that are unregulated are (by comparison to here) beautifully engineered, built and maintained (flat, smooth, properly banked turns, etc.).
A few years after the wall came down, I drove from Berlin to Bavaria through the former east (Leipzig, etc). There was massive Autobahn (and everything else) reconstruction was under way. There were sections of new road that were like a glass table interspersed with sections that were like an old washboard - quite a difference. Oh, and there were a lot of Trabants on the road in the "former East". For those who haven't seen them, picture a small toaster on wheels with blue smoke billowing out the back (2-stroke engines) and a top speed of about 80km/hr. (~50 mph). I remember seeing a Trabant pulling a trailer that had a brand new Mercedes 500SEL on it and thinking it ironic. After passing another Trabant on a slight curve on the Autobahn, I looked in my rear-view mirror and saw its passenger side door fly open. The car is so narrow that the (large) driver was able to reach over the passenger, grab the passenger door handle an slam the door shut while still steering the car.
Interesting curiosities: I was told that in Germany, if you come up behind another car and want him to move over, you can be charged for flashing your lights at him and that you can also be successfully sued for giving another driver the middle finger gesture.
Sigs are bad for your health.
Yes, I was overtaken by one of those guys having fun a few years back. I was doing a nice safe 130 and he was doing what looked like 220+ (Carrera.) Thirty k down the road I found out what it looks like when a Carrera goes under a Polish truck. The truck had taken itself off the carriageway after the collision and dragged the remains of the car under it, though I doubt the Porsche driver was terribly interested by that time. That and a few other remains I've seen on the autobahns helps me to prefer planes and TGVs when I need to go somewhere quickly. And I think I'd take my chances with terrorists on a maglev ahead of Chinese taxi drivers any day.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
You really need to learn more about the MagLev train and what advantages it would offer over "200 year old technology" before you post (and someone mods you as Insightful???). Here's a very brief primer on MagLev that will hopefully help you realize the importance of MagLev. You should do a google search and find out more.
What would you trust more, a well developped and well researched almost 200 year old technology (the first steam train ran in 1804 [schoolnet.co.uk]), or a new, extremely complex technology that has yet to carry it's first passenger???
Who the hell modded this as Insightful? Sheesh!
GMD
watch this
I rode a Japanese maglev demo track in Japan, around 1985. The system worked very well, and I've been a believer ever since. It glides with an unspeakable smoothness. If you didn't look out the window, you wouldn't even know that you're in motion. (Well, except during speed changes -- during departure "takeoff", you're pinned to your seat like a jetline taking off, but without the jet's vibrations.)
To declare the maglev dead on the basis of the costs and untested-ness of the first designs is ridiculous. The first commercial jet airplanes were expensive and guzzled fuel -- and the industrial infrastructure wasn't yet there. Many years later, with successive refinements in technology, and gearing up of supporting industries, modern jetliners have pushed down the costs of travel and transport to incredible new lows.
When the Havilland Comet and the Boeing 707's first came they were immediately popular, but had their share of detractors. It took successive generations of planes, notably the popular 727's and the 747's to really show off the potential of jetliners.
And then there's the fleets of 737's that let's us now freely move about the country on low-cost airlines.
Granted, train tracks are fixed and can not be "rerouted" to quickly adapt to changing markets. But where there are markets with enough current air/car traffic (Eastern sea-corridor being the obvious one; So/No. California and Las Vegas being a likely candidate), the maglev is a potential optimization.
I for one would love to use the Maglev to go from L.A. to S.F. Trains are likely to have higher up-time and lowered cycle time compared to airplanes, and would more likely have last-minute "walk on" convenience (even in today's security-minded environment).
Let's just be glad the Chinese are willing to take the first-mover disadvantages on new technology problems and costs (they clearly want the first mover advantage on prestige and willing to pay for that). From their experience, only improved systems can result!
Feeding the troll...
Are you for real?
Er, well, yes...
Having passed the advanced drivers test in the UK I can assure you that hardly anybody drives the two second rule in the UK and now I am in the states I know nobody does it here. The UK drives at about one second gaps and the Us less than that.
In some areas of the US, yes, that's true. But not all. And the question was, how far apart do cars drive from one another? Well, they are supposed to drive two seconds apart. What they really do is of course another issue entirely.
Yes, I stick to the two-second rule anyway. (It's called defensive driving.)
The problem is at motor/highway speed two seconds leaves enough of a gap for some dofus to pull into. There goes you're breaking distance and you're wonderful two second rule. Fall back and the next dofus does the same. Repeat ad nauseum until you get a clue that nobody else respects you're breaking distance.
Yes, people do jump in front of me -- but they also jump in front of you when you only leave one second (or less!). The point is, why not leave yourself and them enough space to do it safely?
Additionally, if you follow the two-second rule, once they jump in front of you, they will already be farther away from you than otherwise -- so you don't have to brake (just let off the gas a little). And if you don't have to brake, neither do the people behind you, and behind them, and so on (the good old accordion effect).
As an added bonus, you'll run far less risk of rear-ending someone -- and the driver who rear-ends another car is almost always at fault and has to pay the damages. So not only do you save risk in terms of safety, you save risk financially as well.
The key to safe driving is to be courteous, don't hurry and keep your distance (the two-second rule is to guide you in that). If you take the attitude that everyone else is automatically a doofus, and that it's your right to tailgate and drive over the speed limit, then you're clearly driving aggressively and contributing to the problem.
As an aside, I just *love* it when I see people getting out of their wrecked cars (where they had been speeding and tailgating) after rear-ending or spinning out or whatever, and protesting to the cops "I'm a really safe driver! All my friends say so!"
On crowded roads the two second rule is not possible to implement.
The hell it is. All you have to do is back off.
If traffic is only moving at 30 kph, like in a traffic jam, then the two-second rule says you should be 16m away from the next car -- a little more than two car lengths. That's not really that much. If you're only moving 10 kph, then it's about 5m. BFD.
Instead you pay far more attention to what's going on around you constantly have the escape route planned.
And guess what? The two-second rule gives you a built-in escape route automatically and buys you some split-seconds in which to make a decision when things get critical. That can mean the difference between a close call and a totalled car (and injuries).
It also helps to have the largest newest vehicle you can afford.
Ah. I see. Peace through superior firepower...yes, let's all get bigger cars! That'll solve everything!
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
I have driven in Germany many times, and can attest to fellow North Americans that the Germans take their driving far more seriously. They obey the speed limits right down to the km/hr.,
Uh, what part of Germany was that? I *rarely* see Germans pay much attention to the speed limit, unless of course they know there's a radar camera nearby (in which case they slow down for maybe a few seconds).
I've lived in Germany now for almost ten years (Hannover-Hamburg area) and speeding (and trying to run red lights) seems to be the national sport.
where they exist (secondary and city roads and many parts of the Autobahn), and on the stretches of Autobahn that are unregulated, they obey rules very carefully about slower traffic keeping to the right, proper signaling, passing etc.
That I agree with -- indeed it's often a shock to be back in the States and drive there, where passing on the right is pretty much normal (even if it's technically illegal).
OTOH it's not that big a deal, since the speed differential between any given car and the average speed is *far* lower (cars in the States drive about 70 +/- 10 mph; in Germany it's about 85 +/- 30 mph because of varying speed limits by type of vehicle) so passing on the right isn't that big a deal.
North American driving looks very sloppy in comparison. The sections of the Autobahn that are unregulated are (by comparison to here) beautifully engineered, built and maintained (flat, smooth, properly banked turns, etc.).
Yup, it never ceases to amaze me how perfectly built the Autobahnen are. But OTOH think about it this way: with the high speeds, you *have* to have a perfect surface -- otherwise the car would go flying at the first pothole (or take out the whole suspension).
Interesting curiosities: I was told that in Germany, if you come up behind another car and want him to move over, you can be charged for flashing your lights at him and that you can also be successfully sued for giving another driver the middle finger gesture.
Yes, both are true. Honking or flashing your lights at someone to get them to pull over is called "Nötigung" (basically means "forcing") and is punishable by law. Tailgating is also considered a mild form of Nötigung. In both cases you're encouraged to take down the license plate and turn them in (though I don't know if the plaintiff gets anything for doing it).
However, the converse is also true. If you're in the left lane and only doing 80 kph, others can sue you for blocking the road.
Using the finger is an offense in Germany on or off the road, actually, as is insulting someone (calling someone an a**hole is subject to fines). This results in rather interesting twists of conversation -- Germans have gotten rather good at verbally assaulting and insulting people without ever actually calling them anything...
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.