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Japanese Maglev Train Hits 500kph
An anonymous reader writes Japan has now put 100 passengers on a Maglev train doing over 500kph. That's well over twice as fast as the fastest U.S. train can manage, and that only manages 240kph on small sections of its route. The Japanese Shinkansen is now running over 7 times times as fast as the average U.S. express passenger train. 500kph is moving towards the average speed of an airliner. Add the convenience of no boarding issues, and city-centre to city-centre travel, and the case for trains as mass-transport begins to look stronger.
Thanks for pointing that out. However, considering the amount of time it takes to board/de-board a plane, the exact speed isn't as important as the total time spent between leaving your door, and arriving at your destination.
Add the convenience of no boarding issues, and city-centre to city-centre travel, and the case for trains as mass-transport begins to look stronger.
This one seems REALLY easy to fix. Abolish the TSA, save billions in government expenditure and more billions in lost time and goodwill.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
Indeed they probably take a train to go to the train station :-)
> But, I ask, what is the point of a slow passenger train for commuting?
Two points--
(1) it reduces traffic congestion
(2) it still may be faster than driving.
If everyone who tooks trains into NY drove, we wouldn't have needed a large hadron collider. The Cross Bronx would have collapsed into a black hole.
The problem at this point is building trains, not that trains don't make sense. It's politically sensitive to expropriate property.
What could possess someone to think it's ever valid to compare a maximum to an average?
Compare a maximum to a maximum (500 kph for this Shinkansen vs 241 kph for Acela). Or an average to an average (261 kph for newer Shinkansen vs. 129 kph for Acela). So the difference is only 2:1, and mostly has to do with (1) established rail routes in the U.S. being much, much older so as not conducive to high speed, and (2) travel distances being much greater in the U.S. resulting in air travel being more economical/time-efficient.
Just at the federal level alone (think just the interstate highways), along with any taxes you're paying, we're incurring $10,000 per person of debt each year.
Well, you may think about the interstate highways, and yeah I do that occasionally too, but I more commonly think about bank bailouts or dropping bombs on brown people as places where the money goes.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Can any other country boast a top political leader who has a STEM leader . . . ?
Sure: China. Practically everyone on the top for the last 5 decades was a STEM person.
yeah, it's called "public investment", each person pays a little bit so that everyone can use the thing, think "public roads"
Unfortunately, a real and serious difficulty with high-speed rail is that each person doesn't pay a little bit, they pay a small fortune, while in practice only a relatively small number of people will ever benefit directly from the faster travel times.
It's not a simple thing to consider, because of course others might benefit indirectly.
On the other hand, other others will be worse off. Again, some of this is direct: building the new HS2 high speed line from London up to major cities in the north of England via Birmingham is going to cause a lot of disruption to some people. In some cases, it will wipe out entire small communities, because going around them was deemed too expensive. It's all fun and games until it's your family home or established place of business that gets a Compulsory Purchase Order.
And again, there will be indirect negative consequences as well. For example, building HS2 might actually harm our local economy here in Cambridge, because to some extent there is only finite investment capital to go around, and by not being near the new line, our area becomes a less attractive place to make some of those investments.
But the biggest elephant in the room is the opportunity cost. These kinds of projects commit almost unimaginable amounts of public money -- money collected from a whole generation of taxpayers over several years -- to one single project with limited benefits. You can't just consider high speed rail in isolation. You have to also consider the benefits you don't now receive from, say, upgrading existing rail infrastructure or expanding the road network, both of which potentially reduce journey times significantly for a lot more people and increase freight capacity. And of course taxpayers' money also gets spent in areas outside of transport, like running hospitals and educating kids, where there are always considerable pressures and plenty of ways more money could help. You could even do something crazy like not taking that hard-earned money from taxpayers in the first place and instead letting them spend it on things they valued, thus boosting the economy in whatever areas those happen to be.
Basically, high speed rail sounds great until you check the details, but it is far from being a clear win economically, environmentally or politically when you actually look at the details. Time will tell whether the HS2 project in the UK lives up to the hype, but "it's public investment" is a long way from a robust argument in this particular case. And just about everything here goes double for the very high speed technologies we're talking about in this article.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.