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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!
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...?
Meh just buy it now on credit. I'm sure the japanese will lend us the money. It's foolproof!!
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.
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.
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
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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.
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.