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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.
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As long as they don't go over water, then you need POWER!
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.
This sort of project makes a lot of sense in a place like Japan where there are a few places with very dense population separated by rural areas.
America is one of very few places in the world with sprawling suburbs that make transportation projects like this unfeasible. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try, but it will be exponentially more difficult than for us than for a country like Japan, or even most Eastern European countries.
Anyone know how the energy usage per passenger compares with a large jet?
I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress -J Adams
Our university has had this technology on our campus for almost 10 years now. If you're wondering how it works check out Dr Lawrence Weinstein's page on maglevs. Our current problem is vibration which makes riding at any speed intolerable. AEN
You were able to take out 3 letters from Magnetic but you got Levitating right...?
About seven years ago I would have thought this was the epoch of cool. Now I think it's cool, but not even in the top 100 of cool civics works projects. Once I started riding my bike to work fast doesn't impress me like it once did. On the other hand Copenhagen has redid it's infrastructure to have protected bike lanes all over the city and residential districts are close to work. Now that's cool.
We are the Borg...
Anyone else read that as "Magic Levitating Trains" ?
Not really. Though now you reminded me of Hogwarts Express.
To make it worse, I had to concentrate so I wouldn't type "Hogswatch Express", which would have been pretty embarr... oh, never mind.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Well, to most people, they would be Magic Levitating Trains...
http://truckbearingkibble.com/comic/2008/09/22/doctor-anachronismus/
Freudian DiscWorld slips are more embarrassing than reading Harry Potter?
I like both, but DiscWorld definitely has more geek-chic.
which is totally what she said
I've sold monorails to Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook. And, by gum, it put them on the map.
Thanks, no really - I wanted my milk to come out my nose
Never let a mediocre career stand in the way of a good time
What are you going to mistake 'Levitating' with?
That's all I can think of.
Those are really hard to kill.
Anyone else read that as "Magic Levitating Trains" ?
I read that as "Magnetic Leviatans"... whatever that means.
And I hate those stupid blog stories anyway.
Here's a real article with actual information:
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nb20081022a1.html
Let my new 7-digit UID be a lesson to all - write down your passwords.
Well, looks like Transport Tycoon Deluxe is a few years late in its estimates, strangely. I guess that makes up for SimCity 2000 being (apparently) more than a few years early with microwave power.
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
That's "Jiggawatts!"
On second thought, let's not go to the internet. 'Tis a silly place.
we have a ballot measure this November to borrow $10 billion dollars (and receive matching amounts from fed) to build a bullet train line half a century after the Japanese did it. According to the planners, maglev was rejected because there are no large-scale deployments. Why do we never get to leapfrog technology in the US?
Great, it finally looks like we might start catching up to where the Japanese were 40 years ago, and now they have to go and make the jump to MagLev.
Yeah, I'm voting for Prop 1A - been following it since '97 or so (the proposition was originally supposed to appear back in 2000 or so, but they keep pushing it back). Expensive, and I doubt it will get the ridership they are projecting until a lot of additional work has gone into local transit in the destination cities, but I'm hopeful that it will kick-start our state and local governments into looking at options besides "build more roads".
500 kph(km/h) = 310.685596 mph
I wanted my milk to come out my nose
Milk out of nose? Okay...
NOSE
Change N to P: POSE
Change S to L: POLE
Change P to M: MOLE
Change O to I: MILE
Change E to K: MILK
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Technically, this can be done now.
How many times have you seen terrorists blowing up train tracks with RPGs in the U.S. or Europe lately?
... would be only 250 kph with zero wait, nonstop direct. The huge expense (and questionable success... see what happened at ODU) of maglev would not be necessary.
To do that, you have a main line, and then side branches with stations. On the side branches, people get on, and an engineer takes them out onto the main line in front of the train. The trains dock (basically at full speed), and lock together.
Meanwhile, the back unit drops off the back, to proceed to the next station. Trains could go through, basically every half hour, and all rides would be one way, nonstop, direct at 250 kph (150 mph).
When you get on the train, you slide your ticket through a reader, and are instructed which car to proceed to. Additional color coding can also help.
That's for Japan, which would use a basically linear system.
It's slightly more complicated for continental countries, requiring the main trains to travel in circuits -- but basically the same.
With electric propulsion, and today's computers, GPS, and measurement, the system shouldn't be all that difficult.
You end up with less wait than a nonstop flight, much cheaper transport, a lower carbon footprint, and comfortable travel.
Add into that the possibilities for ordering meals and having them delivered piping hot, and it would replace most of your short-hop air travel. Now use the meals to make the tickets significantly cheaper the way Vanderbilt did on his NJ-NYC ferry, and you'd have a huge commercial success.
That's not to say that one wouldn't need to design in certain protections, and that there wouldn't be hurdles to overcome, but the design would far outperform a 500 mph train that travels twice a day, at costs close to that of airfare.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Great Scott!
Is it safe to bring my laptop or any magnetic media storage device?
But... the future refused to change.
Those are vulnerabilities of existing rail and road structures too, though. I mean, damaging a major road bridge at rush hour could probably cause as much havoc as derailing a maglev. More so floating bridges like the one out in Seattle. And aircraft aren't exactly reknowned for their imperviousness to rockets.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
America is one of very few places in the world with sprawling suburbs that make transportation projects like this unfeasible. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try, but it will be exponentially more difficult than for us than for a country like Japan, or even most Eastern European countries.
The 'exponentially more difficult' part is why we shouldn't try to use rail to solve transportation problems. We're just too spread out. Rail only connects a very narrow corridor of people, and moreover, fixes their location indefinitely. If cities re-configure, the rail can't be reconfigured without lots of money.
If, on the other hand, we reconfigured cars so that they were capable of forming dynamic trains, we could get a lot of the benefit of trains without the drawbacks. For instance, trains move lots of vehicles more cheaply than a single vehicle because the locomotive bears the cost of pushing air out of the way. That not inconsiderable expense rises exponentially with speed. In a train, it's spread out over the vehicles following the locomotive but in a car, the single car bears the entire expense.
If cars drafted behind each other, they could share that savings that trains have. For that to work, it would require the cars to be able to communicate between themselves to sort out common destinations and speeds.
In practice, you'd jump on the highway per normal and your car would start querying other cars how far down the road they're going. When it found another car that was headed the same way for more than a mile or so, they'd sort out who would be lead car and who would draft and arrange themselves accordingly. The person in the lead car would continue to drive, but all the cars trailing him would be tucked in within an inch or two of each other. Their car's computers would be telegraphing to each other what the lead car was doing in terms of accelerating/decelerating so that they would do the same at the same time. When someone's destination exit arrived, the car would telegraph to the following cars that it was peeling off and the other cars would momentarily disconnect while the car pulled out of the train and then the remaining cars would re-connect. In the case of the leader, second car up would become the leader. Tail car peeling off wouldn't affect the train at all.
For a car to be allowed to join a train, it would have to carry a digitally signed certificate saying when the last time it was checked out for safety so members of the train would be confident that one of the cars wouldn't fall apart while they're within inches of it and that it was able to stop itself within a standard distance. If you didn't want to join a train, or you joined a train that made you uncomfortable for some reason, you'd turn off the feature and just drive yourself. But if you're a commuter, letting someone else drive the same route day after day, has a lot of appeal. A common commute of 20 miles would give you 20 minutes to yourself to do whatever while someone else drove.
With reaction times removed and cars bunched up within inches of each other, highways can carry more cars at higher speeds. Currently, we slow down when the highways get congested because we have to account for reaction times to propagate down the road. With the cars handling reaction time issues, they can speed up quite a bit.
Add a little intelligence to our cars and suddenly our highways become much greener.
Besides the fact that LOTR is a set of three books, boring is completely perceptual. Tolkien wrote as though he were a storyteller, speaking to his audience. His target audience was not you, rather adults with a higher reading level in a time where attention to detail was well-regarded and the story-teller style was somewhat popular. Besides this, one can get a very strong insight into how Tolkien felt about property from his traditionalist standpoint.
The Hobbit was written for children - more specifically, his kids. It has a much lower reading level, slightly above the Harry Potter books.
"Little is much when little you need."
Sorry, neither obscure Shakespearian words nor proper nouns are allowed.
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.
Cherry Littlebottom? Sounds like the sluttier sister of Strawberry Shortcake.
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