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Japanese Researchers Test Flying Trains
An anonymous reader writes "As an alternative to maglev trains, Japanese researchers are working on ground-effect vehicles. A ground-effect vehicle takes advantage of fast-moving air and uses some stubby little wings to fly just above the ground, like a maglev without the mag. This is a tricky thing to do, since you have to control the vehicle more like an airplane than a train: you have to deal with pitch, roll, and yaw and not just the throttle. A Japanese research group has built a robotic prototype of a free flying ground-effect vehicle that they're using to test an autonomous three axis stabilization system."
1. Very low energy consumption because of metal to metal rolling friction. Car tyres bend to become a plane of rubber in contact with sticky tar causing very high friction. Yes, the packet switching analogy is nice and best for computers but not for people. Because people will use the car more and more. See the bad points below.
2. A thousand cars driven by thousand individuals has a far bigger probability of accident simply because 1000 minds are involved without any central oversight. Who knows what these minds are doing on the road. A train is centrally controlled with professional crew.
3. When you have a car and the road is free and there is parking space, you will use it to go the next street to buy milk. In effect we will use a hammer all the time for all the jobs because the hammer is easy to hold and use. The moment public transport has to be used, you will make a trade-off analysis and use it only when required. Saves the planet, saves your limbs from degeneration.
4. Trains uses far lesser space. Compare a 8 lane highway with a two-lane railway track. Not only do cars need lot of space while moving, they lot of space at both origin and destination. Since destination can be anywhere, you need lot of space everywhere. What a sheer waste of resources.
5. You can be a zombie in a car or enjoy relaxing and eating and sleeping and reading and listening in a train.
Its not too often you see researchers combine technologies and come up with less than the sum of their equal parts. Imagine, a transport that can crash AND derail. Woo!
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This might be a good idea, if they can figure out how to supply electricity to power the flying train. Tricky, because there is no ground contact, unlike a regular train, and the track itself does not propel it forward, like a maglev track does. Otherwise it has to carry its fuel, which might negate the advantages of the idea.
First of all, no one should shop at Walmart period. It is a soulless evil company at all respects that hurts all of us on a daily basis. Second of all, thanks to their tax cheating ways, no one lives down the street from a Walmart anyway. There are plenty of grocery stores in reasonably built areas that are walking distance. Many of them even deliver.
Second of all, you absolutely can buy groceries on foot -- ever heard of a cart?
Third, sunk money? All of the road maintenance and fuel and costs to the environment are on-going. Slowly moving to a model that makes economic and efficient use of space will save money in the long run.
Really, all of your problems have been solved already: people not living in places that are less dense than streetcar suburbs. Raise the price of gas over time, people will move, and we don't have to deal with all off this robot cockery.
Let's suppose I want to go from Houston to Austin.
I've not been to Houston, but just 18,000 people used Houston's Amtrak station last year. For comparison, 16,000 people used the station in a village of 1,200 people in the English countryside. The nearest big city to that village, Birmingham (pop. 1M, 2M in the conurbation), has several large stations. The largest had 25.3 million passengers last year. Less people used a train in all of Texas combined than my local suburban station, which isn't even open at weekends.
I think you'll find there is demand for trains (of all kinds) in many settlements all around the world. Fortunately, most people don't reject solutions that don't satisfy 100% of the population.
I just get in my car, and from my driveway to my destination takes ~3 hours. (assuming I don't try to travel during rush hours, or I start at the outskirts of Houston)
This 160 mile journey consumes about $21 of fuel each way ...
My parents live 100 miles away. The journey by public transport takes two hours (I allow 40 minutes to get from my house halfway out of London to the appropriate main station, the inter-city journey takes 1h10, and I like to arrive 10 minutes before the train departs) and a little walking (10 minutes). Driving, according to Google, takes 2h5. That's correct -- off-peak on a Sunday. Usually it's nearer to 2½ hours on a Sunday, or 3 hours + any other day. (The train is "normal" speed, about 110mph.)
I've no idea how much the fuel costs -- I don't own a car. My parents will take the train to visit me if it's one or two of them, but if they bring my younger brother they'll drive. I always take the train, owning a car would be a huge expense for the tiny number of journeys I'd make with it.
(Commenting on the rest of your post: if Houston built high speed rail, there'd probably be intermediate stops a few miles out (e.g. 5, 10, 20 miles) which you could travel to instead of going all the way to the centre. Even if you live on the wrong side of town [like I do for visiting my parents], the railway going in the other direction should connect to the high-speed station.
30mph average for a bus is way too high, assuming you're including stops. That's a decent speed for light rail. 10mph is more like it. For a huge city like Houston, buses only every 15 minutes would be pretty crap. Buses near my house are more frequent than that all night.
If transport is reliable, you wouldn't have to wait more than a few minutes for your train. You plan to leave at the appropriate time to make the connection. How much spare time you allow depends on the cost of taking a later train [here, booking for a specific train saves money] and the time you have to wait if you miss it.
Many destinations would be within a short walk of the station.)
They will run into problems with noise. In Japan noise concerns have limited train speeds since the first days of high speed rail in the early 60s, particularly around tunnels where there is a boom every time a train exits. One advantage of maglev is that due to there being no contact with the ground noise is reduced significantly, but adding prop or jet engines would seem to make this train louder than a normal electric one.
France runs 500kph trains and the only reason Japan doesn't is noise. The latest generation bullet trains that do 300kph have a very unusual shaped nose designed to reduce noise.
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