Maglev On the Drawing Boards

longacre sends along a Popular Mechanics article on the growing interest in magnetic levitation trains in the US. It's unclear how many will actually get built here, at $100 million per track mile. (In recent years we've discussed maglev projects in China and Germany.) The article has a map of many proposed transportation projects in the US, some of them maglev, and a video of a General Atomics maglev prototype in action. On a related note, an anonymous reader recommends this article on a proposed maglev wind-power turbine, said to offer the promise of replacing 1,000 conventional wind turbines.

Comments

To the ****** commenting on price

[SmallFurryCreature]

Google for the cost of highway construction and one of the gems you find is this http://www-pam.usc.edu/volume2/v2i1a3s2.html link.

Read it and weep. 100 million per mile? Most costly project was 1 billion per mile and plenty of other projects are higher as well.

Now google a bit further and you find more "reasonable" costs of 20 million per mile being quoted but it makes it bloody clear that roads are very expensive indeed.

Yes sometimes they are cheap at a 1-3 million per mile, if the highway is simple and the conditions are ideal. This is however rarely the case. If you follow these kinds of projects you will also know that there are always complicating factors. For instance the straight road sections might be cheap, but the points where they connect to the rest of the road network, that is where the money really starts to bleed away. As for when you need a bridge or a tunnel. Just forget it.

Also offcourse not all highways are the same. One going through open desert vs one going through a city has huge extra costs in the form of safety, sound reduction and landcosts.

A further thing you might want to ask, how costly is maintenance, and what is the capacity of this network? It is less hassle to replace tradiotional rails then it is too resurface a road. How long is this 100 million per mile going to last you before more millions are needed to maintain it?

Then there is the question of what you get for it, if this 100 million dollar per mile track means you don['t have to construct/upgrade 10 road systems per say 20 million dollar per mile, then you are actually saving money.

But please slashdotters, next time you feel like posting about how costly something is, do a bit of research first. Although I really wish reporters would do it as well.

Germany

[thefirelane]

As someone living in Munich... I can tell you the German Maglev train is going nowhere. Everyone is opposed to it, except one politician who wants it as his 'swan song'.

They can either put in a Maglev for 1.2 billion euro for a 10 minute trip, or build a normal express S-bahn for 1 million for a 20 minute trip.

Maglev really makes no sense at all, but what do I know, maybe its more of a Shelbyville thing

Re:How much is that in ...

[rho]

I've seen numbers anywhere from 5 to 12 billion dollars a week. It's hard to calculate exactly because there's a mess of hidden costs--medical and the like.

Re:How much is that in ...

[AvitarX]

With the aging equipment and copious amounts of private labor the cost is about $700,000/year for each soldier and support.

(based on spending requests), (200,000,000 total/year). The cost of the war in Iraq and Afganistan combined is 3,000,000,000/week (triple your estimate), with 80% of that being for Iraq.

My source is: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/28/AR2007082801984.html?hpid=topnews and based on bills the white house wants passed.

Re:Need track upgrades, but not this

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree there needs to be a track upgrade. In the US, railroads are the only one of the major transportation systems (road, rail, air, waterway) not maintained by the government. Instead, the railroads themselves are responsible for maintenance + upgrades. That's expensive, and not likely to happen unless there's an economic reason to do so.

Also, most of the trackage in the US is owned by freight railroads (Union Pacific, BNSF, etc). Amtrak has to pay for the right to run trains on those rails. High-speed passenger trains require significantly higher quality/more expensive tracks than freight trains do, so Amtrak or the gov't would have to pay the freight railroads to upgrade the trackage. Sadly that's unlikely to happen soon.

Re:Free 747s for everybody would be cheaper.

[norton_I]

Copper is a better conductor than gold.

Freeways cost as much per mile

[bussdriver]

I talked to a MN state employee who told me it was easily over 100 million per mile for new freeway and in the downtown its over a billion per mile. This was about 5 years ago during a discussion about the lack of funding for bridge repair and how we were 10 years behind on funding and it would take a disaster before the idiots fixed it. (fyi: MN was the state who's downtown bridge collapsed earlier this year; which will likely cost over 300 million to build without lightrail support.)

One also has to keep in mind that costs are hard to compare because of math differences: LANES (quotes are often for 1 lane), contractors, unions, graft, bridges, maintenance, quality/type, CO2, and often buying the LAND is left out... that could be the most expensive part too.

Some googles:
Light Rail biased
Extremely car biased; almost crazy
AK State Estimated Costs, excluding land

Re:How much is that in ...

[david.given]

The official Pentagon figures are 6.8 billion dollars a month, or approximately 9 million dollars an hour. Which means that one hundred million dollars would pay for slightly more than eleven hours worth of war.