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China Abandons Long-Distance Maglev Effort
Ralph Lee writes "China has chosen to abandon its Maglev train effort from Beijing-Shanghai, according to this AP story: 'Besides cost, "the maglev technique was excluded because it does not match the wheel-track technique used by railways in China," the report said, citing Wang Derong, vice-chairman of the China Transport Association.... The scrapping of the 9-year-old maglev project - two weeks after the country's first maglev, a short stretch in Shanghai, began regular operation - represents a setback for the development of the technology in China, which many had seen as one of its key markets.'" The short 18-mile MagLev run mentioned earlier remains in operation, but China is not going to use magnetic levitation for the planned 750-mile Beijing-Shanghai link.
Normal trains can now be gotten to rather extreme speeds and still be safe. Is there any real point to maglev trains anymore other than "cool its floating"? Other than neatness why are people even persuing this technology? maglev seems to be all but dead in the United States - Is this just an extension where other countries are abandoning an aparently pointless technology?
Even if the long distance Maglev is scrapped, the development of high-speed railway links is still a good thing.
Trains like the TGV or ICE have proven that it was feasible to run such a service at up to 320km/h, please passengers (most of the time), have no major impact on the environment AND be profitable.
Maybe it's still too early for the Maglev, or maybe the technology isn't that attractive for its associated costs...
I believe that the world should not sit and watch Maglev train projects in China get scrapped. Personally, I think maglev trains could change the way we travel today. They are quiet, stable, and they run on electricity.
Of course, other things (like... trains) run on electricity, but with the potential speed of an airplane, I don't see why maglev trains shouldn't be a great victory for the environment.
This said, electricity isn't always environmentally safe. But the future holds many other ways of creating electrical energy from recyclable and healthy sources - wind, water, waves - and when they get more publicly accessibly, fuel cells (hydrogen). As of now, these cells are too expensive and pollutive to create in a large scale.
The progress that maglev trains or vacuum tunnel trains (also magnetic, I believe) create for the ways we transport ourselves today, is worth a lot, in my opinion. Therefor, my view is that the world should finance China in creating this. Not as a good deed, but as scientific collaboration in making maglev trains publicly accessible and, in the future, cheaper.
This might sound unreasonable, but what better place to start this is there than China - where they REALLY need to transport their masses quickly and reliably more than anywhere (except, possibly, India). Given time, this will gain us all.
All this is a bit unclear, but feel free to comment with your opinions.
Funny I am writing from Shanghai at this moment.
The airport maglev is kinda interesting in the way that nobody actually rides it.
Price conscious people takes the bus to major transportation hubs, and convenience / time consicous people takes the taxi (which is only like 15 dollars compared to 10 dollars that the maglev costs - besides the point that the other end station is nowhere near the city and you have to take a cab anyway so it's not that much faster)
so, after a buttload of money, it's not making any of it back except wow points - it might be worth it for an airport shuttle, but you'd bet money has everything to do with it.
that said, I am still taking it in a few days just for the wow factor - but after that it's all taxi since it's so cheap.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
You don't really need ultra high speed to beat the airlines. A typical airline journey involves up to two hours waiting at the departure terminal, and half an hour in the disembarkation process at the other end.
On the train? Turn up 10 minutes before it leaves to ensure you don't miss it, get on, find a seat, spend under 5 minutes disembarking at the other end. Also, train stations generally are placed more conveniently than airports which by necessity have to be out of town. It's much easier to put a railway station in the middle of a city.
A TGV-style train going 180 mph will beat an airliner door-to-door on some surprisingly long journeys. If China builds a standard high-speed conventional rail link, it'll probably be good enough.
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To make this more concrete, consider the given 750 mile distance between Shanghai and Beijing. Between Hiroshima and Kokura in Japan, the bullet train averages 262 km/h, so with few stops along the way it isn't unplausible that a newly built line could average 220 km/h over the entire distance.
In that case, the trip by train would take about five and half hours. And that time is spent calmly on board a train, where one can read, work, make phonecalls, and possibly even use the Internet. Compare that to a 90 minute flight, plus at least two and half hours of airport travel, embarking, taxying, disembarking, security etc etc.
Except for exceptional cases, conventional high speed rail always beats flying when the distance is less than 1500 km.
As rail speeds increase, so does the damage that can be done by a terrorist. A 650km/h maglev sounds interesting at first sight - but how much damage could be done by a well placed bomb? Although the thing contains no fuel on board, the combination of released kinetic and magnetic energy would, I guess, be pretty destructive. And because the infrastructure (track) is so expensive, the cost of any damage would be enormous.
Now consider a conventional technology HST. At 300km/h the kinetic energy is less than a quarter that at 650km/h, and the risk of major track damage from a derailment or explosion is less. My conclusion: the risk to a conventional HST from things on board is far less than a maglev. Chances are that the security on a high speed maglev line would be as intrusive and time consuming as that on airplanes. So in fact, the real city center to city center time for a maglev might not be significantly faster than a conventional HST. And it costs more. It's the usual balance: faced with the choice between spending shitloads of money on a technology that may actually have few benefits, and very much less money on a technology that is known to work well, governments do not have the same choices as private citizens. While, as a private individual, I might have a hankering to do my commute in a Porsche, even though it won't be any quicker or more comfortable than my VW, governments should be accountable for public money and make the "obvious" economic decision.
And in China, where most people are still desperately poor, the government has even more responsibility to make the economic decision rather than the vanity decision.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Last time I was at Wal-Mart, I was thinking: Gee it's sure a shame that China hasn't benefitted from trade agreements. They only produced a token 80% of the stuff in this store. Clearly, we need to do more.
> Clearly, we need to do more.
:)
No, if the poor coutries wanted "more" of what the US deals out, they would have agreed to the Cancun trade round. They rejected it because it sucks, just like the TRIPS agreement.
(and America making use of foreign sweatshop labour is not a form of charity, y'know.)
What the developing nations want, is for the US to take it's foot off their throats so that they can work on building their own economies. Instead, coutries without decent educational systems are currently sinking funds into the prevention of illegal sharing of software and music. Countries with AIDS epidemics are banned from producing the treatments. (and on a less serious note, countries without decent mass transport infrastructures cannot build maglev trains
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I was a China Studies major in college, and lived in Beijing for a semester. In the spring of 2001, you would have had a hard time convincing me that a majority of the people played by IP laws. Pirated DVD shops, pirated software shops, knock off/factory defect clothing shops, etc, everywhere. I have read that the government has cracked down a great deal, in Beijing anyway. Some friends went back in 2002 and said there were fewer shops selling pirated goods. So things probably are changing.
The problem is that the arbitrary nature in which China has been ruled with since 1949, ie whats good today is bad tomorrow and the opposite, has meant that many in China simply choose to ignore the government. Hey, if my government were Communist I'd ignore it too. However, this poses a problem for China's economy because respect for laws and lack of court system that can effectively deal with those that ignore IP laws and signed contracts means some potential business partners get screwed and leave the market. Ultimately, China does have similar IP laws on the books as developed nations, but no effective way of enforcing them. Mod me down for being a bit off topic, but that's how the cookie crumbles.