Slashdot Mirror
Japan to Launch Maglev Trains by 2025
SpeedyTrain writes with a link to a story on the Mainichi Daily News site about the future of mass transit in Japan. Despite problems with Maglev technology in test-bed scenarios around the world, Japan has committed to building a line between Tokyo and Nagoya by 2025. The experimental system will allow trains to run at up to 310 miles an hour. "The new magnetically levitated, or "maglev," trains would slash the 100-minute travel time down the country's busiest transportation corridor and are envisioned as a successor for Japan's iconic bullet trains, or shinkansen, first introduced to the world in 1964 ... [a] spokeswoman declined to give an estimate for the cost of linking the capital with the Nagoya area about 269 kilometers (168 miles) to the west. But Kyodo News agency said the whole project would cost about 9 trillion yen (US$76.3 billion) and be divided between the company and the central and local governments."
Drill baby drill - on Mars
"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Drink deeply or not at all."
I think I'd rather have the trains.
Never underestimate the Japanese. If they set a firm goal that is obtainable then watch out. In the past when they set a goal for themselves they usually achieve it. 20 years is plenty of time to get the technology figured out. The interesting thing will be how they pull it off.
Here is another thing to think about. This opens the door for small startup or research groups that could potentially win a contract if they can create a viable working and safe system. If the little guy can do that then there is some money to be made from the technology both there and around the world. By announcing this the get the people who think they can do it better then the others. Think of the chance and getting your technology in place there like the Xprize for space flight.
I would be more surprised if they didn't pull this one off looking back at history.
Procrastinating life a way at a rapid rate of speed.
I'm sure plenty of Japanese companies see this shortened commute as a great opportunity to get an extra hours work out of their employees.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Per car in the Nozomi (the express-est of the express bullet trains), there's something like 15 rows of seats with 5 seats per row with 16 cars per train. The two Green Cars (first class, sort of) are a little more spacious - 4 seats per row, but not much more.
The route I presume will be from Tokyo/Yokohama to Nagoya which along the same shinkansen route that continues on to Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe, Hiroshima, goes underwater and ends up in Hakata in Kyushu. Most of the passengers go from Tokyo to Osaka, but I understand why they're not doing the Maglev train all the way to Osaka yet, it's fairly flat up until Nagoya, then there are a lot of hills between Nagoya and Osaka.
I love the trains in Japan. I'm sure they will do this one just as well as they did the shinkansen.
While the article is scarce on technical details, that is an immense sum of money. (Perhaps, in part, due to the landscape?) If the numbers at Wikipedia are correct, it is seven times the cost per unit length of the Shanghai TransRapid track. It would seem unimaginable for an Inductrack system to cost this much though.
So, I have to ask, why? Inductrack is a brilliant design, and would make Maglev's much cheaper and better in just about every way. Inductrack is a completely passive levitation system, which requires no electromagnets or control circuits to maintain stable levitation. You can't buy a finished system today, but the theory is proven, and it would almost certainly be a more sensible investment.
Inductrack is a direct extension of ideas which made possible the passive magnetic bearings in earlier Flywheel Energy Storage systems. Basically, it uses a linear Halbach Array instead of a cylindrical one. Very cool technology, all around.
All of the above.
Tokyo growing further... hard to picture. If you've ever been there, the city just seems to go on and on forever. Check out the satellite view -- look at how it stretches its tendrils across the country. To give a sense of how zoomed out that is, here's the state of Connecticut at the same zoom level.
In Tokyo, I remember never having a sense of where in the city I was. You just sort of disappear into the subways and reappear in a different setting.
"It felt almost as good as stealing cars from grandma." -- Margaret Thatcher, probably.
The track should be routed via Shizuoka and Nagano so it can double as a high-energy collider. Though probably not at the same time.
The planned route is quite different than the current shinkansen. It would run from Tokyo west to Kofu, through Nagano and Gifu prefectures. Much of the route is mountainous so there would be numerous tunnels. You'll find a proposed route at www.linear-chuo-exp-cpf.gr.jp. The site is in Japanese but even if you can't read Japanese, there are many illustrations.
The reason the Japanese can concentrate on development without worrying about security is that they dont go into other countries and piss off a bunch of other people. Do you really think if the US military was not deployed in 150 countries all around the world Americans would still have to worry about terrorism? I dont think so. So a bunch of Muslims want to kill a bunch of Jews. What do we care. If America would just get out of the middle east and stop supporting Israel with money and arms I am sure the Mullahs would be too busy blowing up Israelis to care about blowing anything American up. Terrorism is just the cost you pay for having imperialist foreign policies. The Japanese learnt the hard way that an Imperialist foreign policy is not good. Unfortunately or fortunately America has not lost a war fought on its own soil in almost 2 centuries (the last war America lost was when the Canadians whooped Americas ass in 1812) so for Americans war is just a game and they keep supporting imperialist policies. Given the overwhelming strength of the US army terrorism is pretty much the only way the other side can fight back. It is kind of like how the founding fathers had to use terrorism to gain independence as there was no way they could stand up to the might of the British army.
**Life is too short to be serious**
Cost is no object. Profit is unnecessary. All that matters is that construction continue. Japan has dammed all but maybe one river (many of them multiple times), built tunnells through mountains so that villages of less than 100 people can have a bullet-train stop(!! move over Sen. Stevens !!), paved many a riverbed in concrete, eliminated dirt from the cities (almost every square inch is paved), etc., etc.
... could this happen in the US?).
I recall visiting a dam in Nagano that had special turbines so the water could be pumped back *up* into the reservoir behind the dam during the night (luckily the next dam was less than a mile below!) so that extra power could be generated by this dam in the day during the summer so Tokyoites could have air-conditioning. This dam used more power than it made, obviously. (Economically, this scenario might actually make sense, but it is interesting to think about
When I lived in Tokyo they tore up my street every few months relaying pipes. First gas, then water, who knows what else. Then a few months later, since the street had been patched so many times, they repaved it. Streets that are 3 years old are routinely torn up (including the concrete kerb) and repaved. They always looked like they still had years and years left of service in them. In the 30 years my family's lived in Northern Virginia (affluent, high-traffic area) I can only think of 1 or 2 times certain major roads in town were repaved.
From small: http://regex.info/blog/2007-03-25/403
To large: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akashi-Kaikyo_Bridge
The likelihood of the projects (for instance the Akashi Kaikyo Bridge) recouping investments is papered over and never taken seriously, except to BS the public or to rationalize the hidden logrolling which is required to acquire the budgets necessary to build the projects.
--
learnjapanese.poddedcell.net (Step Up Nihongo)