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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.
The Japanese, who probably ride more miles of rail than any other country in the world, rely on plain old rails. Even the famous Bullet Trains run on rails.
Sometimes it feels like Americans are trying to put the cart before the horse when they don't even have anything to put on the cart.
can't seem to make money on the current economies of rail travel. Even at the lowest estimates ($5 million a track mile) I doubt either of these rail systems could make this technology profitable.
Public transportation all over the world requires government funding. Here in the US we seem to think that private companies and capitalism are the answer for everything. Unfortunately for us, this system usually enriches a select few people, provides goods and services that are mediocre at best, and cost quite a bit of money for the users of those goods and services.
The Northeast is particularly bad. Years ago, my wife was commuting to North Jersey - for the cost of her monthly train pass, (nj transit and path) and her monthly parking pass - she could have bought a nice BMW. (Instead she drove a VW Jetta to the train station).
If these companies can't make the current economics work with that kind of revenue, maglev has no hope of ever becoming a reality.
-ted