Slashdot Mirror
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As long as they don't go over water, then you need POWER!
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.
Meh just buy it now on credit. I'm sure the japanese will lend us the money. It's foolproof!!
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.
except being far apart you have the problem of getting the track actually built. While I don't know much of the Russian frontier, or much of rural US... I know there is a whole LOT of empty land in Canada, rocky, swampy, forest covered nothing. Plowing a train route through the Canadian Shield is not just difficult, in many places it's pretty damn impossible. The hardest rocks in the world cover most of eastern Canada, and despite not being a steep as the Japanese Alps, the sheer hardness of the rocks would make blasting/tunneling prohibitively expensive. On the flip side of that, one would need MASSIVE bridges to cover many of the dips and rivers in Quebec and Ontario.... It is just all around cheaper to fly over it all.
The Tokyo/Nagoya run was likely picked as a first attempt as it is fairly flat and there is an absurd amount of travel between the two centers. At about 20 million people in the greater Tokyo area, and over 8 in the area around Nagoya, these are two of the thee largest cities centers in the country... add the two together and you have almost as many people as there are in ALL of Canada.
They have the demand, money, and geology for it.
the preceding post was not spell checked... suck it.
Those are really hard to kill.
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.
Yeah, we are really being pummeled with terrorist attacks over here in the US. All of the place. They are something we should definitely not advance our horrid land-based transit system for.
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!
Now, perhaps, but until when? Oil spiked to almost $150 a barrel this year. If it goes up to $150 and STAYS THERE, the airline industry as we know it will simply disappear.
you had damn well better have a VERY effective train system installed BEFORE that happens.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
That doesn't really have any bearing on my point. People complain about complexity of endeavors whenever it comes to upgrading our infrastructure. Canada had adverse conditions to running rail, and yet the succeeded. It seems pretty clear to me that rail can be used effectively in just about any environment, given proper planning and execution.
Also, relying solely on one form of transportation, whether it be air, rail, ship, or car, is a mistake. Continuously improving all forms of transportation is in the best interests of our society and economy. Remember 9/11? Every plane grounded. How many flights are delayed due to weather? Likewise for rail and roads with earthquakes. IMHO America is embarrassingly behind on rail. We used to be known for our daring innovation and technological know-how. Now it seems like we just want to whine and collect profits.
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.
Have you traveled around the United States? In many places we have geology for that too. Unfortunately, many of these cutting edge ideas won't get off the ground because of the current deficits and millions of Joe Plumbers who will fight for every cent spent outside their pocket. I will not be surprised to hear that things like high speed trains and ability to use cell phones for purchases will be linked to socialism and "'em Asians." While the whole world is trying to march forward this country seems to be taking one step back at a time.
But let's focus on geology for now. There are many valleys and flat places around the U.S. that scream "give me a train!" You can put a train between San Francisco and Los Angeles without fighting the terrain too much. Will Californians do it? Does not look like it because nobody wants to give money. Mid-west and Eastern U.S. are prime candidates for more rails as well. Hell, even if somebody put a high speed train between Silicon Valley and some place in low Sierra I would love to commute on that every day. If I can spend one hour on a train and live 250 miles away from my place of work, that would be awesome. We don't have to focus on extremely long distances. Why not build trains to connect places that can be connected? Fewer cars on the road, shorter lines in airports. It is not about building socialism or taking away your car. It is all about leverage. If we ground our aircraft for some reason or if there is a problem with a major highway it will only make sense to take a train. Currently we put all our eggs in one basket and when oil shoots past $140pbl everybody goes ape shit because we are simply forced to pay the price. We can't avoid it. We can't say "Gee dear, I will be taking a train today since there is no need to stop by for groceries after work."
But yeah, leave it to Japan and other socialist countries to leave the world. Let's focus on 9/11, terrorism and THAT ONE with his ties to Arabs and Muslims.
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.