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Magnetic Levitating Trains Get Go-Ahead In Japan
An anonymous reader writes "They've been on the drawing board for 40 years but the politicos have finally approved routes for the 500kph maglev trains to replace bullet trains." I wonder if they'll let me test out maglev rollerblades on the track.
leave it to the japanese to set the bar.
500kmh eh? wouldn't that be more useful in places with HUGE distances to trek, like, canada or usa, or the russian frontier? haha.
i'm sure we westerners will steal the technology when it become cheap enough to implement. it's gonna be a looong while.
You need to remember that you don't have that costly climb to 10 km. It will probably be a lot cleaner.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Bikes are nice but they are an option only for people who live relatively close to their working place. Weather can also be an issue. Here in Finland it can be a real pain cycling to work through half molten snow.
:)
Also, trains can carry at least hundreds of people at the same time. Also, a crowd of hundreds of japanese riding their bikes to work would look funny
2) You don't have to carry an entire trip's worth of fuel with you.
Also you don't need a portable energy source (like fossil fuel) You can use normal infrastructure energy including the more clean types. The problem with Cars and Airplains is that they need to carry their energy with them and convert it in real time, So fossil fuel is good at that, A lot of energy in a small package that is controllable, and affordable.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
3) You don't need to use fossil fuels in the first place.
If this was a viable alternative to air travel
The airliners have nothing to fear. Since the trains levitate, the TSA will simply declare that they have authority over security for them, and they'll make sure its just as much of a hassle as flying.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Not only of the passengers, train, and endpoints/stations, but now you have to protect the entire track too. All it takes is some terrorist group with RPGs going around blowing up sections of track, causing train derailments.
Deaths and injuries from train derailments due to poor maintenance and simple human error vastly outnumber deaths and injuries due to terrorists.
In fact I'd go so far as to say, to the best of my knowledge, the number of deaths and injuries due to terrorist attacks on trains in the United States is, ummm, zero.
And that's with virtually no security at all.
Two thoughts on this. First, yeah, why do you guys do that? What is it about Americans that they want their towns to be so mindbogglingly inconvenient? I don't know about you, but I like to be able to, I don't know, pop out for some milk and fresh tomatoes, stroll down to the fountain where the pretty girls walk by, go for a coffee or a beer or an ice cream, perhaps even walk to work! This is supposed to be a democracy—why build such misery for yourselves?
Second, HSTs, like aircraft, connect hubs, not suburbs. Starting and stopping works better than with a plane, but it still puts a hell of a dent in your average speed, which is your selling point. The population density of the US is more than a quarter of that of the EU; that means that the distance between hubs is on average only doubled—and the fact that there's nothing much happening in the midwest only argues in favour of trains by pushing up the density on the sides. Indeed, if we take the (sadly American) argument that we cannot take any risks and we can only deploy technology where we are sure it is justified, well, France has HSTs. If you need a population distribution like that of France to do this thing, then—if I read these maps right—there ought to be HSTs (and I mean like TGV, not Acela) from Boston to DC, from New York to Chicago, and within the states of California and Florida.
Of course, what's really going on is that America just doesn't do infrastructure, because the country is hung up on a psychological model of 'winning' against the 'competition' by holding back your neighbours. That's why businesses talk all the time about 'market share' and in times of difficulty fire R&D and boost marketing. If you built a train system, other people could use it! Perhaps even—OMG—poor people! Then how would I know I was better than them?
(And I'm not making this up. I'm living in San Jose and hearing what the people around me are saying about the light rail, the BART extension, the HST project.)
Exactly, but so long as AMTRAK is in charge of managing this it will never happen. Acela had the potential to steal massive amounts of travel from the airlines. If you could do Boston to NYC in 2 hours by train it would be faster/cheaper than flying.
Its the politics and half-assed shortcuts that are preventing it. Would it take financial capital to start up? Sure. But if done RIGHT it would return on its investment pretty quickly. However Amtrak is constantly doing it wrong. They need a dedicated line, with maybe 2 inter city stops. The train needs to run full out the entire time its not stopped. I'm not 100% certain of the route Acela uses, but if it stopped once in RI and once in CT you could be doing 150mph the entire time in between. Even at $100 per ticket thats far better than flying. How many Boston to NY flights are their daily?
In general the US just has a broken view of how train infrastructures should work. The best model for a place like the US is a hub system. You designate major metros that have inter city traffic as hubs (NYC, Boston, DC, Philly) You run limited highspeed inter city trains between them. Dedicated lines for the majority/all of the trip. Once a person gets to the city they can use conventional rail to travel to surrounding areas if they so choose. Having intercity trains slowed waiting on local traffic or making local stops is just a terrible idea.
I ran an itinerary of a Boston to LA train trip on Amtrak and the number of stops was just silly. Amtrak just needs to realize its cheaper to ignore some areas and improve travel times and they will be able to be competitive with airlines. If I could do Boston or NYC to Chicago with say 4-5 stops Same thing for Boston->NYC->DC, and be able to do it at 150mph on average, then $100/ticket 1 way would be more than reasonable, considering you'd be looking at double that for a plan ticket.
As mentioned in one of the above posts, the key is flight time + airport time + 20% > train time between 2 cities. The 20% makes up for the fact that people will consider slightly longer for a significant savings in cost.
Yes, because they're *magic* levitating trains, which don't need electricity made by burning nasssty coal, right?
Sorry, I don't mean to be snarky, and you may well have been thinking of Japan's nuclear-powered grid, but I see too much of this sort of thinking. "I'll buy an EV so that I don't burn gas!" Uhhh... yes, you do that.
" There is a rational explanation for everything. There is also an irrational one. "
I remember reading a report that said that for the cost of the "stimulus checks" that the government wrote last spring (150billion), they could have built a 300+mph train from SF to Chicago, using 2 tracks, one for eastbound, one for westbound. Future projects would be cheaper, since that included wiggle room to iron out a few problems. so that's what, 5-6 hours from SF-Chicago, with all the legroom you could want, large bathrooms, dinner cars, etc? No more feeling like cattle, no more airport body cavity searches. Something 600-1000 people per train, trains leaving every hour or less.. My god that would clear up roads and airports.
I was just thinking about that yesterday. If we stimulated the economy by way of good old fashioned public works projects instead of just cutting checks for everyone, we'd leave a much more useful legacy to society than a few million houses with an extra plasma TV each. On the other hand I suppose it's good that people got a chance to pay down credit card bills and take some debt out of the system.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Check your math. The glide ratio impacts the efficiency the whole way, uniformly. (Technically the L/D ratio, but they're nearly the same thing; I'll treat them as such here.) Assume your glide ratio is a conservative 10:1; the Gimli Glider demonstrated 12:1 with a 767-200. Climbing to 10 km at a slope of 1/5 uses 3x the cruising fuel for the first 50 km (3x the fuel per km travelled, but mostly done at lower speed; it's not a 3x change in throttle setting). The glide down then uses no fuel for the last 100 km, or half the fuel for the last 200 km. Either way, you get the energy back.
Energy losses in aircraft come from drag, and not much else. There's a second-order effect resulting from reduced L/D during the high AoA ascent, and another due to reduced AoA at low speed / high air pressure. As a result, you get the majority of the potential energy back, but obviously you don't recover the energy lost to drag -- but that portion is properly accounted as the cost of covering distance, not the cost of the climb and descent.
you'd first have to address the problem of (sub)urban sprawl. public transportation is incredibly efficient with good urban planning. but since the 1950's urban sprawl caused a shift away from transit-oriented development. people began relying more and more on personal transportation. with the advent of the superhighway, introduced by Eisenhower's Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, people began commuting 50-60 miles to work and population density began to thin out.
but now that private vehicle ownership is considered the social norm, with public transportation out of vogue, the public highway system is being stretched to its limit. traffic congestion has become a major problem in most urban areas. and with skyrocketing gas prices, many people are finally starting to realize the stupidity of dreaming of living in sprawling suburbs and bedroom communities far and removed from job opportunities.
the rise of car-dependent communities basically makes it impossible to walk anywhere. and everything is too spread out due to leapfrog development and single-use zoning for public transportation to be practical. add on top of this the incompetent management of commercial transit systems in many areas, and you end up with completely unusable public transportation. in my area it takes me 2 hours to get to a medical clinic by bus when it only takes me 10-15 minutes driving my car.
High speed rail could work well but here in the US we have a very good interstate highway system. Yes gas is expensive. But guess what? even at the highest price point this summer it was still cheaper to drive on the highway then to take a train. And you know what? driving is faster. Faster AND cheaper. People will move ro trains when they are 20% or so LESS expensive than cars. The car has the great advantage of gong from door to door.
Within a city cars can move slowly but outside on the highway it is easy to go 65 or 70MPH If the car gets 30 miles to the galon it costs less then $10 an hour to operate. No train tickets are o cheap as $10 per hour on travel time.
One more thing. Carpools. I can but my entire family in the car travel but if I took a train I'd have to buy a ticket for each person. Trains work only if traveling solo. Carpool give a 2X to 4X advantage to cars.
What is really needed are zero emission cars that are fully automatic and self driving Once we have those we don't need trains
You're right about defining the problem, but wrong as to why. 60 years ago, HST, if they had existed, would have worked very well in the US. That was before the suburb culture started here, just at the beginning of the car culture, and a time when the US was laid out much like Europe; big dense cities, small dense towns, and not much (farms or forrests) in between. When president Eisenhower, Europeans might remember him as the Supreme Allied Commander for the Allies during WWII, decided to build the interstate highways; copying Germany; to ease troop movements around our country and to help speed moving consumer products around our country, everything changed.
(As an aside ALL US military bases, expect the "secret ones cough cough Area 51" are near Interstate highways. They built the highways that way on purpose.)
Anyway, you had cheap cars, a population with the money to buy them and a "big house and a yard" (the suburban dream which I grew up in), and now highways which made it easy to live there and move to the cities. Before those highways, we had trains that connected most, if not all of our towns. The one I grew up in, like so many towns in the US, was centered at the time around the train station that, in Monroe NY's case, linked it with NYC. By the time my parents moved there, and I came into the picture, in the 70s, the town center was shifting towards the land nearer the highways. The local train system had collasped, and Amtrak was created out of many collasped commercial passenger train lines. They were all killed by the highways; and cheap gas. That process was replicated in small towns throughout the US. (That train line is now a bike/walking path that extends throughout the whole county; rather pretty actually.)
It's not that we hate trains, hate poor people, or infrastructure in general, it's that air fare was cheap at the same time cars, and living in the suburbs was cheap. The government continues to pour billions, collected in 48cents per gallon gasoline taxes, into those high ways.
My point being that the highways killed the trains with help from the Boeing 707/747(yes I know other aircraft from other manufactures helped, but I'm just making a point). The problem is that no one realized how much of a mistake we all made until the gasoline crisis of the 70s, which was quickly forgotten when gas got cheap again in the 80s.
If you want to see, and use, the best mass transit system in the US, come to NYC. The commuter rail is complained about, because it doesn't have enough trains/cars/lines. Here, people love it, and everyone uses it. Subway, Metro-north(east side of the Hudson River and into CT), Long Island Railroad, and New Jersey Transit. We have a new Air Train monorail that connects two of those commuter rail lines to two of our 3 airports, we are building a new subway line (#2 finally after a 40 year wait) in parallel to the heavily overcrowded #6 aka Lexington ave line.
Yes, some parts of the us know the value of rail, NYC in particular, but the rest will likely be taught the value in the coming years as gas, in spite of the recent drop, will rise again.
- Mike
Once you've lost your temper, you've lost the argument - Me