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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.
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...
maglev is cheaper to run and maintain in the long run, but given that rail technology (existing rail technology) is cheap, prevalent, easy on industry, and doesn't require as much beaureaucratic rubbish and nonsense as maglev does (welcome to a world where 'intellectual property' is serious business...), then it stands to reason that the chinese gov't is simply taking the 'cheapest right here right now' option.
... and not just the 'so-easy-grandma-can-use-it' kind of standard, but industrially standardized... i.e. thousands of contractors can make rail, and thousands of contractors can make the foundries to make the rail, etc.
the big draw to existing rail systems is that they are -standardized-
due to patents, maglev is a minefield of dangers in the licensing/sub-licensing realm. either invest in -tons- of research to find work-arounds to other teams' intellectual property, or put all that money back in the tried and true: rail.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
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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Ummm... any large-scale engineering effort of these sorts of things are usually a -very- international effort.
... thats just a tad ignorant my friend, and extremely blissless.
This does matter, to China, and any other government with strong business to maintain, on an International level.
Flippantly assuming that just because the Chinese are the 'Bad Guys' they'll ignore all business regulation, well
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
If it were truly cheaper to maintain in the long run it would be in much wider use, ESPECIALLY in command economies like China. Welcome to the world of Economics.
Uh, whatever. Just because the current administration has budgets and targets to meet, does not mean that they're going to be ambivalent when choosing the 'best option'.
Maglev is unproven on grand-order scales. Rail is seriously proven technology, and more to the point: standard. If the Chinese gov't want to outsource the mfr/design/engineering of super-fast rail-based carriage systems, they can: because these systems exist in an International market, and will be developed. As has already been noted, existing rail systems can be developed to support high-speed/efficiency carriage platforms.
Were there actually maglev implementations committed and standardized in such areas as Europe, the US, perhaps even Australia, then China may have invested a little more in the long-run into grand-order scale (i.e. not just going from here across town) engineering required to do maglev across their vast distances.
They had the potential to do maglev, and do it well, but they also had the potential to end up with a lame duck system which nobody else was using, and therefore which became expensive in the reality of the New World Economy.
Welcome to that, by the way...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
We're not talking about the subway station on the corner. Maglevs would only be used for very long-haul routes, meaning you would be going to a central train station serving an entire metropolitan area. There would be a lot of people and luggage there, trying to get processed. And given the extreme speed, you would have to search everyone for bombs, weapons, etc. Sound familiar?
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.
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.
What does speed (physics, not pharmaceuticals) have to do with bombs, weapons etc?