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Virginia MagLev Project Back on Track
Raven42rac writes "After much delay, the $14 million Maglev train project is back on track at Old Dominion University in Virginia. All the petty lawsuits have been settled, and a much needed $2 million grant has been approved. Let us hope that this sets a precedent to Americans to not litigate ourselves out of the science and technology markets due to petty disagreements and greed. We do not need to be our own worst enemy. I, for one, would much rather ride a Maglev monorail with others, than drive a gas-guzzling car by myself. (And I apologise for the pun in the headline.)"
I'm glad the project is back on track again, but the 'petty lawsuits' were apparently contractors who weren't paid.
Hardly petty in my opinion - I'd be sueing if I wasn't paid for work I'd done.
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
Shelbyville already has one.
-h
"I, for one, would much rather ride a Maglev monorail with others, than drive a gas-guzzling car by myself"
Why would you want to be stuck on a train that goes from somewhere you're not (requiring you to get from where you are to the initial station) to somewhere you don't want to be (requiring you to get from the final station to where you want to go) via places where you don't want to go at times you can't choose, sitting across from a drunk and alongside someone who's coughing and sneezing all over you, rather than drive in your own car by yourself from where you are to where you want to go at whatever time you feel like?
Certainly there are places where the roads are so bad that trains are preferable (e.g. London), but in the vast majority of cases, trains really, really suck.
Maglev is extraordinarily expensive, noisy, and an engineering solution to what is a civil problem - commuting.
If maglev is what it takes to move people off the roads, I pity our civilization.
What about ordinary (cheap) trains, faster conventional trains (like Europe's TGVs) or living closer to work, or working more via Internet, or carpooling?
The best way to avoid commuting is for people to move back into the cities, to walk to work, to downsize the huge companies into smaller human-sized organizations, to live on a human scale. The best way to connect large countries is through high-speed trains that use conventional rail technology. It does not happen today for one simple reason: the artificially low cost of travelling by car and by air (thanks to subsidies on roads and on fuel).
Ceci n'est pas une signature
When I was a student, I rode a $100 bike to class. Building a $14 million monorail to do the same job sounds like overkill to me.
"Let us hope that this sets a precedent to Americans to not litigate ourselves out of the science and technology markets"
For example, yet another lawsuit against the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant (what is this the tenth, twentieth, thirtieth?). The truth of the matter is that this is exactly the reason that the nuclear industry has shut down. Insurance costs are too high because people are sucessful at suing a plant so that it will never make any profits (Diablo Canyon) or voting it closed (Racho Seco Nuclear Power Plant).
"ODU Board of Visitors member William M. Lechler also has voiced skepticism. ?It sounded like it was going to be a difficult process,? he said in December. ?They really had to have a breakthrough in technology.?
"Morris has insisted that breakthrough will happen once the $2 million federal grant money flows."
That's a pretty big assumption.
I've always found it interesting that in the US (with the possible exception of major cities) adults are almost always expected to have a car. The are many explanations for this phenomenon, e.g. lower population density, individualism, suburban sprawl, low gas prices, major urban development after the introduction of the car, bad public transportation. But for many explanations, it's not really clear what is the cause and what is the effect. There are of course positive (freedom, independence of time tables) and negative sides (environment, dependence on oil, health/obesity) to having cars for everyone.. But it's an interesting difference between the US and many (most?) other countries in the world.
And what new would we have learnt that way? Surely a university has a duty to innovate. Most research money is down the drain when looked at from a short-term practical perspective. It's only further down the road (when we run out of petrol) that we'll be glad for the work done on this prototype.
--
USA: home of the world's largest terrorist training camp.
Throwing good money after bad. BTW, the ODU campus isn't really that big.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
I remember reading an article very recently in a newspaper about how Maglevs might actually produce much more noise than a standard train...just a point...
$14,000,000 is peanuts for any kind of real transit system. raven42rac says
I strongly suspect that this particular project is not a substitute for driving a gas-guzzling car. On any campus I have ever been on almost no-one drives a car to get from one spot on campus to another. I strongly suspect this monorail system is substitute for riding one's bike, or going by foot.
Surely all citizens of democracies can go where they want? What relevance has this got?
I don't understand the relevance of the size of the country. Wouldn't people fly if they were travelling a very long distance?
I'm from the UK and this is also true in the UK. I'm pretty certain it's true in Germany and France, and I suspect most EU countries too. I don't understand how that addresses why Americans are so keen on cars.
This is clearly relevant, but doesn't address the cause-and-effect question.
I don't understand that at all.
I'm not posting this to be awkward, I really am interested in how the situation in the USA got to be how it is.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Or at least punish the people who mod them up.
Go right ahead - it's called metamoderation.
Black holes are where God divided by zero
I think there isn't nearly enough contempt and elitism in the tone of voice in this submitter.
Where's the demand for the 'heads of the nonbelievers of the maglev'? or the crimes against humanity committed by evil 'automobilists'.
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
I lived over 15 years in atlanta metro, rode MARTA quite a bit,it has plusses and minuses. You've pointed out a plus, but there are minuses too (last I was riding it). Such as non 24 hour service (example, the state says don't drink and drive, yet bars are allowed to stay open past when MARTA is running). That also discriminates against tax payers and citizens who do business in off hours, night shift workers, etc, and makes it impossible for a lot of people to use it even if they wanted to. And here's another critical minus, it's subsidised severely by people outside MARTA'sservice area who will almost *never* use it, and it's a big part of the cost of running it. MARTA's fares are around one dollar *under* true costs. If they were funded fairly upfront and then have the users pay for it at the true rates it would be a... err "more fair fare".
..eliminate congestion! Stop creating the artificial need for more people being forced to travel into and through major urban areas. We are atthe point in time with technology and business that the "need" for over centralised choke points in commerce and government is being propped up out of a state of inertia mostly. The never ending construction on atlanta metros roads for example, tends to nullify any improvements because there's always some place that is a bottleneck. People moved to the suburbs to get away from the downtown area, it's time to really take the next stepand de centralise the urban areas. Eliminate the so called "need to travel" and you won't need as much "urban transit" schemes like expensive train systems and more roads. And just "getting to hartsfield" is nuts, they quite simply built the airport on the wrong side of town, they KNEW that in advance, the bulk of the traffic that uses hartsfield comes from the north side, and they knew that way back when, but it was a political decsion to put in on the southside, for some obvious reasons given the nature of atlanta politics. That created a severe artifical "congestion" in traffic patterns that didn't need to happen in the first place, but then they needed the "solution" of more rail and roads. Government is responsible for helping to create a problem that they then used as an excuse for 'the solution". It's cuckoo, Heglian, and obvious.
I say it would be a lot more cost effective if they really tried to get universal broadband out to everyone using these tax payers funds, rather than further insisiting on over crowding the cities, either from cars or mass transit of people. the way to eliminate congestion is to
I've always been "pro car" but when I was working at the Pentagon I came across the most social form of public transportation I've encountered, SLUGGING.
The I-95 corridor from Quantico to DC has two HOV-3 lanes. Very few people actually use these lanes (a waste IMO) because it is hard to find friends that are willing to carpool with you.
Then, a long while back, people started parking their cars at the commuter lots and literally hitching a ride with total strangers up HOV lanes to DC.
By the time I started Slugging, it had evolved into it's own little system without any government influence. I would go to Potomac Mills mall in Woodbridge, VA and park at their commuter lot. I had a choice of getting a ride to 14th street in DC (next to a train station) or I could go directly to the Pentagon (which also has a train station). Everyone would patiently stand in line and wait for the next car to give them a ride.
Slugging lines became a community. People that broke in line (whether they be in cars or on foot) were scorned by the group. Everyone pretty much got along great. From my time there, I never heard of any crimes committed when slugging. I also got to know a lot of the people who were riding. Some of us became fast friends. It was also a good opportunity to network with others.
There were some basic rules for slugging that everyone stood by. For one, the driver couldn't charge you. That was against the law anyways. Secondly, any driver could refuse to pick you up, though I never saw this happen. Riders could also refuse to ride with any driver. That made sense because some of those cars were crap.
There were many funny stories I could tell during my two years of slugging. I can honestly say that I'd do it again. It really was a fine example of simply living and getting along with your fellow human being.
If you live in the DC area, you can find out more by visiting http://www.slug-lines.com/ They even have a lost and found if you leave something in your drivers car. I actually had the chance to return a guys laptop that he left in my car. We are still friends today.
IMO, this is just one more fine example of how good man CAN be.
cheers
There is nothing inherently safe about liberty. That's why so many people died protecting it.
Why? For speed?
Conventional trains routinely hit 320 km/h FOR LONG STRETCHES AND DURATIONS (not just for 10km portion out of a 700 km journey), and have gone as fast as 515 km/h in tests.
The sheer complexity of the switches (*) guarantees that the resulting network will be much less flexible than an ordinary conventional high-speed rail whose switches are of the ultra-simple time-tested conventional design.
What does speed gives you? Since the energy expenditure squares each time the speed is doubled, you soon hit a wall where the energy efficiency drops well below an aircraft.
For example, a 1200 km trip (New-York_Chicago) Speed time saved* Energy How much more than
100 12 10000 at 100 km/h
200 6 6 40000 4 times
300 4 2 90000 9 times
400 3 1 160000 16 times
500 2.4 0.6 250000 25 times
600 2 0.4 360000 36 times
700 1.71 0.29 490000 49 times
* from previous time Fucking slashcode that won't let PRE pass. Fuck it (and cowboy neal too, at the same time).
So, each time you increase speed by 100 km/h, your energy use soars so much that for saving a paltry quarter-hour, you spend 13 times more energy than needed to go at 100 km/h!!!
This is the reason french TGVs only run at 300 km/h. They are designed for 400 km/h and routinely hit 450 km/h for demos but running them at 400 km/h would be too expensive for the tiny amount if time gained.
A high-speed maglev runs at the surface, where the air resistance is waaaaay much higher than for an aircraft at 35,000 feet. So the energy expenditure per seat IS GOING TO BE HIGHER than an airplane!
Even though the speed of sound is much higher on the ground than at 60,000 feet (where Concorde used to fly), 1000 km/h maglev trains will need very long viaducts and tunnels to avoid becoming high-speed stomach wrenching roller-coaster rides.
The only way a maglev could be useful is running within an evacuated tunnel in a long journey.
In theory, the trains could run at the orbital speed of the altitude they are; energy expenditure would then be zero (all you'd need is to accelerate the train to speed, and you'd recover most of that energy by decellerating it at destination). But the costs of digging tunnels that would be so perfectly aligned, immune to geological havoc (crossing from one tectonic plate to another isn't really a walk in the park) and to keep the thing perfectly evacuated would likely be prohibitive (and maintenance guys would need to work in spacesuits...). Such money should be spent instead for a space elevator.
Would a maglev train really be back on track?
Idle hands are the devil's workshop, but idle minds are much worse
In France where I used to live, crime is high in the suburbs. Living in the city is for the upper middle class.
(well, of course there are some rundown popular areas downtown, and a couple upper middle class suburbs, but you get the picture).
Yes, real estate is more expensive downtown than in suburbia, BUT living next to every theater / museum / school / park / night-club you'll ever need, or going to work without having to get into the damn car every time definitely is worth the premium.
Granted, it is an expensive luxury to live in the city, and many lower middle class families were forced out by rising real estate prices. Yet the reason the upper middle class is still there is that it's so much more convenient to live in the city. I for one cannot even imagine not living there.
And you know what? Maybe the fact that you're never more than 5 minutes away from the underground is the key. Right now I'm living in Stuttgart, Germany, a city of 700,000, and they've got over 20 underground / light rail lines. Even in this relatively small city I know I can be in any other city area within 20 minutes, only through public transportation. In a much larger city such as Paris, one is never more than 30 minutes away from any other city area (unless you're living in a galaxy far, far away).
Because city planners did their job right, a car is not needed. (ok I've still got to rent a van whenever I've got to move bulky stuff around but other than that...)
Higher taxes? Maybe. But I'm actually saving money since I don't need a car.
As an outer New York City resident , I've been riding the bus, subway, and railroads for ten years now. First to get to school, then to my job. Recently I got a car, and I've reached an epiphany.
There is no toll bridge or road that I won't cross, no traffic jam that I won't bear, no gas tax that I won't accept, and no garaging fee that I will not pay so that I never have to take public transportation ever again.
In my car I control the comfort level, the climate, the music or radio that is played (or not played), the passengers that are picked up, the route that is chosen, the speed that is used, the stops along the way.
Gone are the class-loads of students who get on, headphones on full blast, who still try to have a conversation so they need to shout to hear each other. Gone are the old people who could do an entire day of shopping at a department store and carry their bags onto the train, but still demand that you give up your seat because they're too weak to stand. Gone are the pan-handlers who run a gimmick hoping for some spare change.
Hello liberating highways, drive-throughs, beautiful bridges, awe-inspiring tunnels, sprawling landscapes, incredible cityscapes, and the world flying by on fast-forward.
Hello, great America. I want to drive you just thinking about you. And I'll pick up a caramel Macchiato along the way.
Fuck public transportation.
I don't want to se another penny of public money poured into "Developing" this "Already-proven technology." A quick look at the history of railroad-building shows that non-public railroads were and are built to haul freight and that passengers are a secondary consideration, if they are considered at all. In Europe, where railroads quickly became a state monopoly, passenger service was promoted because it gave the legislators something they could brag about and whose cost their constituents would presumably support. Or, they were built for military purposes like the Prussian State Railways in the 1850s-1860s.
Maglev has no discernible future as a commercial proposition if conventional rail can go as fast. No one seems to know how to interline freight on to or off of maglev from conventional rail. Changing from another mode and then back again eats up the profit earned from speed (if any, this is freight we are talking about, after all.) Further, if a railroad train loses power, the train stops, almost always upright on its rails. If a maglev train loses power, the train will not "Coast" to a stop! The heirs and assigns of the purple jelly that used to be its passengers will sue that line out of business and no insuror will want to take the risk of insuring maglev. It seems they have come to this conclusion already. Private maglev companies won't exist or if they do they won't survive the first failure of a train or a track segment.
Bottom line: everyone likes tech and wants a chance to play with the toys. Many want to see this technology pursued, but no one seems to want to invest substantial private money in it. Suggest the maglev enthusiasts turn their energies to finding out what free-market forces are at work and why, and address the issues that that investigation turns up. I suggest that that is the best way to save maglev. It may be the only way.
Japan is roughly the size of California and has four times the population. Trains work great in areas where everyone has access to them. The problem in the US is that people are much more distributed. There are six cities in the US where trains are cheaper than buses (off the top of my head, I think that they are New York, LA, Chicago, Baltimore, Miami, and Philadelphia). This is ignoring subsidies, just cost per passenger/mile.
In Japan, trains make sense. They run in areas that can support them. In the US, they mostly do not. Most of us do not live in areas that can support them.
Trains are subsidized too. The government often pays for the track (particularly for commuter trains).
Similar maglevs have been built. Birmingham Airport had one from the mid 1980s to 1995. It was too hard to maintain, and was replaced with a cable-driven system.
Even as a pork program, the Old Dominion University system sucks. Better taxpayer-supported overpriced transit systems have been built at Southern universities. The Morgantown, West Virginia Group Rapid Transit System is a futuristic system started during the Nixon administration and opened in 1975. It's automated, with 3.6 miles of line, five stations, and little eight-person cars. It's an advanced system; all stations are "offline", and cars pull off the main line to stop at stations, rather than blocking the main tracks. It actually works, but it's way overbuilt for the usage it gets.
wasn't sure if it was really was a train of some kind. thought maybe it was a piece of modern art or some kind of political statement because i've never seen the thing move
The real subsidies that affect the US preference for cars as opposed to trains are socialized roadbuilding. The public wants its roads, and any time you build more roads, making commuting easier, you make more housing development possible because more people can now live where you built the roads, and once a new area is opened up for housing, it tends to build more houses than the roads can really support, so there's more pressure to make the roads bigger. Residential streets in suburban land developments are essentially funded as part of the costs of building the houses, either explicitly or indirectly, but the regional connector roads get heavily subsidized. And especially as most of the US economy moves to a white-collar services model and stops being manufacturing-oriented, this also makes it easier for offices to move out of the core cities, decreasing the reasons for people to live downtown. Sometimes they go to edge cities, sometimes to quasi-residential areas.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I am a stundent at Old Dominion. One of my professors in the Aero Dept who was burdened with helping manage this project refers to it as "the stupid train." According to him, it hasn't been just contractual problems holding up the project, there have also been some engineering challenges... but I can't remember the details. Something about track vibration, as I recall.
As someone else pointed out, it's a straight shot for only 3/4 mile. I can't for the life of me understand who thought a MagLev train was right for this project. MagLev's only make economic sense for long distance, high-speed runs, where the decreased friction boosts their efficiency. This silly thing only runs a few blocks between center campus and some of the outlying student housing. It will NEVER approach a speed where it will become efficient.
Just think of the power required to hold the damn thing up while it coasts along at maybe 25-30 mph. This thing is not only sucking huge amounts of money now, it'll continues to do so way into the future. But like most pork-barrel projects, once it's been started, people are reluctant to cut their losses, no matter how wasteful or stupid it is.
I recall China built a maglev running between Shanghai and its airport. That makes a bit more sense... several miles, with only stops at the ends. I wonder how its doing...
First, I wouldn't say it is in a rural area. There is a large population in our region. We suffer from sprawl pretty badly, but the figures say we have more technology jobs in Southeastern Virginia than in the state's capital region, Richmond. Norfolk is next to Virginia Beach (400k), Portsmouth, Suffolk, Hampton, Newport News, Chesapeake and others. At least 1.5mil, if not more.
FROM WHAT I UNDERSTAND, the maglev system worked when it was in Flordia on the test track, because the rails were on the ground. There are videos on the American Maglev site of it moving before the ODU system was put together. Once the ODU setup was constructed, they hit a snag. The rail flexes from the weight, and the system tries to adjust for it by adjusting power to magnets, which causes the rail to react, which starts an oscillation loop or something. Ooops.
The system here is opposite from the German Transrapid system (which is totally bad ass, btw). The guideway in the German system is more intelligent / has electromagnets / something, where as the one at ODU most of the guts are in the actual cars. This means the guideway is much cheaper to deploy. If you have ever seen it, the guideway is pretty frigging narrow, it would be easier to handle right of ways for such a thing.
It is a shame the contractors haven't been paid, and it is a shame it hasn't gotten further. From what I understand they are finally getting their hands on the money. It would be interesting to see a cost break down.
If you think about it, 14 million in what could be a better transportation solution for cities is chump change. Companies spend $3 million on blanket Windows software licenses. The theory is if/when it works it could spawn a new industry and our region could gain new businesses that support it.
People complain about the money going to the monorail, yet they don't complain about their tax money going to schools where many of the students are from out of country and leave when they are done with their education. Granted there are private interests working here, but I fail to understand the hatred for the creation of something new and something better.
Lastly, they are started to talk about this stupid light rail stuff here, that is little trollys that run on conventional rails. Lame, gradings obstruct traffic, they are slow. Elevated maglev is the answer! HOORAY!
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!