Slashdot Mirror
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.
will the stupid germans pick up their transrapid stuff where they left it now ?
Japan has now put 100 passengers on a Maglev train doing over 500kph.
Were they volunteers?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
how much does that cost to build?
U.S. express passenger train run over old rails / rail lines.
Damn that would be quite the train wreck!
Not to be "that guy" but I thought airliners cruised about 600ish mph... which is about 1000kph.
It is nice to pick international system units, however it would be better to do it right. This should be km/h, not kph.
...in places of high density
Sure 500kph is a great achievement, but put it in perspective of what places that are interested in rail travel do, don't compare the speeds to the rail backwater that is North America. Normal trains in Europe do 300kph routinely.
The problem with North American rail travel has never been a technology barrier, it's always been about having any interest in doing better.
Kamikazes Per Hour?
I was excited till I saw the units of measurement. 500 mph, WOOOHOO! 500 kph, not so cool.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
There is no "high speed train" extant that is not subsidized, sometimes heavily. Why do we continue to pursue these elitist wet dreams that will likely never be viable? If a given scheme cannot, at least, sustain itself, reject it.
It's not clear that there's a significant advantage in going, say, 500 km/hr rather than 450km/hr. You burn a LOT more energy (goes as square of speed) for going the same distance. And unless you're going very long distances, the travel time will be dominated by those segments where you're going 100km/hr.
Obviously, "the fastest train in the world" has PR value, but, for instance, the Chinese trains (knockoffs of the Japanese design) are capable of 350 and they run them at 300, saving energy and wear and tear (which also goes as O(V^2) or worse) without significantly increasing travel time on, say, a 1000km trip with one stop in the middle.
The big travel time advantage of trains also depends on supporting infrastructure. If it takes you 2 hours to get to the airport an hour ahead of time for a 1 hour flight, if the flight took 1.5 hrs, you'd not even notice. Ditto for trains. The typical advantage is that trains are ALREADY terminating in a place with decent mass transit connectivity. How much of the "door to door" time advantage of trains over planes is due to those factors.
And what happens when a Madrid type incident triggers security measures for high visibility, high dollar trains. Nobody is going to call for radar and xray scans to get on a municipal bus, but for a multi-billion dollar showpiece?
In the US, there's also a geography problem. A lot of places you'd like to connect with a train are a bit too far apart: LA to Chicago is going to be a long ride (airplanes do it at around 900-1000 km/hr.. a 300 km/hr bullet train is going to take all day). Maybe Dallas to Chicago or similar. Or Dallas to Austin/Houston/San Antonio.. A train in 1 hr vs a several hour drive.
But then you have a "right of way" acquisition problem. There's an entrenched private train industry that is perfectly happy running multi-mile long freight trains at 100-120 km/hr (partly because they got their land and construction funding in the late 1800s after the Civil War)... They're not interested in upgrading tracks for a small volume high speed train.
Unlike China, where the central government can just say "we're putting the track HERE, and if you don't like it, tough", in the US, you have to buy the land, often with eminent domain processes.
How are you supposed to understand and at some point switch to SI units like the rest of the world if you keep inventing these nonstandard notations for standard units as well? kph is clearly derived from mph. However, k indicates scale, not any particular unit (like distance, speed, mass, pressure, whatever). Kilos per second does not mean anything as it doesn't tell you what you are actually measuring.
Please try to use km/h (kilometers per hour) or m/s (meters per second) from now on.
Thanks.
I once heard a Japanese, I think it was a musician, say something like "machines should be efficient, people shouldn't." Instead of being efficient, people should be creative. These ever faster trains reflect the principle nicely.
Look, these high-speeds are not used for cargo, but for ppl. Worse, the real issue is not the rail, but the aerodynamic drag.
As such, the real answer is hyperloop.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
When you factor in the amount of time it takes to get from where you are, or where you live, into the city centre to catch this centre-to-centre train - and then out at the other end to your actual destination, is this really any faster than driving if you have a decent road network?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
A train ride from Chicago to Atlanta takes 3 days and goes from Chicago to washington DC and then to atlanta to and costs as much as flying directly there in 2 hours.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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".
What makes you believe that trains require any less security checks than a plane? Sure, today that might be the case but when you think about it both are equally vulnerable to terrorist attacks (trains even more so because less stringent security checks and the fact that their exact route is known well in advance).
In short: trains are great mostly because of the extra leg room. Everything else will get worse over time.
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.
No one is arguing against trains as transportation because they are too slow. The main argument against high-speed rail is cost. In fact, if it were cheaper, we'd have high-speed rail here in California already. Most people don't oppose having it, they oppose paying for it (especially once they find out the ticket price).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Normal cruise speed for, say, a 757 seems to be about 530 mph. But that's airspeed. Ground speed could be up to 100mph faster (or slower, though if the plane was in a 100mph headwind it would probably look for a different altitude!). Then of course you have to count in climb and descend - in both of those modes you are travelling slower.
It would be good to have a professional pilot comment on this, but I would not be surprised to find the average point-to-point speed on an internal flight (trains don't compete with international flights in the US, of course) being slower than 500 mph. And the Jap train is pushing 330 mph.
So, 'moving towards the average speed' seems a reasonable comment. And this is not a specialist one-off experiment - they are trying out their next-generation trains in real conditions...
but maglevs are generally useless. Old school high speed trains can run so many more routes being compatible with plain old rail lines. That gives you oddities like spending most of the time on the shorter, slower portion of a trip but it works and you don't have to change trains. A decade or two later, the trip's duration gets shaved by another hour or two if more high speed track could be funded and built. Even then, there may be some controversy about the high speed tracks (another project that eats physical space, cuts fields and habitats in half and concern about the funding, maintenance and decreasing operation of low speed tracks). In France some are peeved about the extension of the high speed network. The fares are too damn expensive and we don't need to have fewer local trains running.
Japan has now put 100 passengers on a Maglev train doing over 500kph.
Wow! They must be able to run pretty fast to catch it! Look out 2016 Olympics, here comes the Japanese train riders!
That is all.
Hey, the unit is km/h!
hfoo
> it's called "public investment", each person pays a little bit so that everyone can use the thing, think "public roads"
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. If there are 3 people in your family, that's $30,000 per year your family will have to pay back sooner or later. Right now, we owe $62,000 each ($156,000 per family) .
Is that "each person pays a little" or "each person pays a lot"?
From 'Wired'
"...A prototype of the train was unveiled last November, with the final version unveiled on 3 June. Tests are now underway with the train on an 18km stretch of track at Yamanashi, which will be incorporated into the final rail line's route, and during testing members of the public will be allowed to buy tickets to ride the train on its short shuttle back and forth...."
So they don't appear to be specialy chosen. You just turn up to your local station and if the next run is an L0 Series train being test-run, that's what you'll ride.
It's a little bit misleading to be comparing the vehicle's speed: what people really care about is how fast *they* travel, and how comfortable it is.
For short haul distances, once you take into account all the constraints that trains don't have: check-in and dealing with luggage (at both ends), boarding through a single door (or two), limited cabin space, refuelling, taxiing and waiting for a slot (for both take off and landing), take off and approach vectors at reduced speed, and as was pointed out in the article: the fact that the train station will be in the city centre, whereas you'll often still need to find your way to the city from the airport. Fast trains rule.
TODO: 753) write sig.
no, at least my experience in Germany, autobahn, ice or air travel. I've used all modes dozens of times. I'd take ICE every time (if it was my choice exclusively). Closer routes are faster by car, but I can do anything on ICE. Sleep. Work. Play. Arrive at the station 5 minutes before departure. Order a Coffee and snack. Grab a seat nicer than my house 2 minutes before departure. the 2-3 hour trips are the sweet spot. Faster than cars and planes. City Center cordinated perfectly with local transit hubs, I get on my way to final destination effortlessly. Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Munich, Nuremberg, Mannheim. Also to get between these places you pass mostly through shit that is at least as rural as bum fuck Midwest USA. ICE isn't even that fast.
The OP said this:
Airliners routinely cruise at 550 mph, which is nearly 900 kph. So I guess trains are moving towards the speed of an airliner in a strictly technical sense, but in reality, even this one, which is not representative of the norm, is still only just passing 50%, so not even close yet.
The OP also said this:
It should be noted that there are almost no US express passenger trains anywhere in the country, except within a few large east cost cities. In the rest of the country, there are none city to city or coast to coast, except for one, maybe two Amtrak routes that appear to exist only for nostalgia reasons, not for routine travel.
Nope, not really. It only looks stronger if your cities are very densely populated AND very close together. Neither of those are true of the average US city. If I'm going from the city center of Minneapolis to the city center of Atlanta, that's 1815 km, and I'm not going to sit around for a whole day on a train getting there. And since the majority of the US population lives on the East and West coasts, what about going from the city center of New York to Los Angeles, a common route? That is about 4,500 km. So yeah, rail travel in the US continues to be a pipe dream that makes no sense. I don't understand why people are so hot on bringing the premier travel method of the 19th century back into the 21st century in the US, when we now have airliners for city to city travel and cars and buses for intra-city travel, both of which make far more sense and are far faster than rail. Rail in the US continues to be an expensive, money losing boondoggle almost everywhere.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
> 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.
Apparently, this has been done before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQyj-3C99bA
Then why do they have these?
Posting anonymously because some asshat will tell me it doesn't apply to maglev. Sure it doesn't, until you roll it out on a scale that approach airline density...
One terrorist attack (Madrid) and lines will be long
I live in Boston, and every few years take AMTRACK (and it isn't just that it is slow; the litany of problems goes way beyond speed) to NYC, and the level of security post 9/11 is much higher
I extrapolate that one good train terror event, and security will go thru the roof
"..I'm going from the city center of Minneapolis to the city center of Atlanta, that's 1815 km, and I'm not going to sit around for a whole day on a train getting there. And since the majority of the US population lives on the East and West coasts, what about going from the city center of New York to Los Angeles, a common route? That is about 4,500 km..."
Your first trip on a 500 kpm Maglev train would take 3 hrs 37 mins. Hardly a day. The airlines schedule anywhere between 2hrs 30 mins and 3hrs 30mins. And a coast-to-coast would take 9 hours on your figures, while the average air trip is scheduled at around 6 hours.
Looks to me that the train journey times ARE indeed 'moving towards the speed of an airliner'...
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.
Japan is an advanced technological society with a high education index and strong cultural identity.
The USA is the antithesis of those things with 3rd World Internet speeds, lagging behind (and dropping) other countries in education and overrun with illegal immigrants that have no desire to assimilate.
Our trains routinely derail...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
that's 81.6 smoots per second. Not that a piece of track anywhere near Boston could support that.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
500 km/h high speed rail at sea level is an energy guzzler compared to 'normal' 300 km/h high speed rail, aerodynamic drag, and thus energy consumption, goes up at the square of velocity. 300 km/h rail uses, double? the energy of more common intercity rail ~130 km/h. Jet airplanes have the advantage of flying up high in 1/3 atmospheric density, and are optimized extensively for low weight. Maglev will be more expensive too.
Those cultures that "have it together" divide the year into 10 "months", the month into 10-day "decades", and measure time with 10-hour days.
Metric makes perfect sense, and it is a mystery as to the holdouts against metric time.
Though I am too lazy and have better fish to fry in my spare time than running after questionable /.-eds: I do quite well remember having watched a clip of a French TGV running just above 500 km/h some three to four years ago. /., and 'bloody repeats!' are our staple diet here. alas.
So what's the heck here? I dunno. But we are on
We pay less taxes, so nyah! That trumps everything!
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.
It really is a matter of infrastructure. When I was living in france, I never drove a car. It was not useful. Driving was typically not much faster than taking the train. I could go to my university in 45 minutes while driving took about 35 minutes. But that gave me the opportunity to read in the train and to take a daily walk.
Later I was studying in Grenoble and my parents were living in Paris. To go and see my parents, public transportation (bus+train_tgv+train_city+bus) was taking about 4 hours and a half, 3 of them were in the "main train" which gave me time to do homework, read a book, whatever. The total cost was under 100 euros round trip. The same trip driving would have taken me 6 hours of actual driving (plus pauses) and cost at least 60 euros of gas.
Now, in the US, it is much more difficult becasue even if you had a good train, there would still be no public infrastructure one you arrive. But I guess you could rent a car.
... an emergency automatic stop system in case of earthquakes? Or any other safety measure in case of sudden derailment?
Germany developed similar technology, but was unable to sell it to the public for two reasons. First, it is expensive compared to normal tracks. This includes maintenance and construction. Second, it must run on a bridge like thing. A ground based solution is still 2 m above the ground.
The Chinese tried out that German solution. They built a small line but skipped the extension.
The French TGV can go 500 km/h but normally runs 300 or 350 km/h.
In Germany the next generation of trains will be even slower which makes perfect sense, as Germany is densly populated and there are many stops. So hhigh speed would not result in a big time savings
.
Washintgton to Boston
Metro 30 minutes
Wait in lines for baggage check & security 60 minutes
Flight 90 minutes
Baggage 30 minutes
Silver line 30 minutes
Total 4 hours
Tokyo to Kyoto
Total 2 hours 12 minutes
I am moving toward the Sun. It doesn't say anything about having a long way to go.
Airliners run about 500ktas, and up to 650kt over ground with good wind, which is about 1200km/h. Trains have a long way to go.
It's all fun and games until it's your family home or established place of business that gets a Compulsory Purchase Order.
- What do you mean, why's it got to be built? It's a bypass. You've got to build bypasses.
It doesn't matter how fast how fast your maglev trains go . . . until this tunnel in Baltimore is replaced, it's impossible for trains in the NE Corridor to run that quickly.
Sure, it looks great if you're part of the elite who lives in "city-centres" and travels to other "city-centres" for your corporate, intellectual, and social functions.
It's not so great for the rest of us whose taxes pay for this, and these things are hellishly expensive.
Government borrowed lots of money to save fucked up financial system, but what does that have to do with public investment? Public investment does NOT have to be a new debt, mind you.
if you have a decent road network?
Well, that's the thing isn't it. I live 15 minutes from the "middle" of london (i.e. a mainline terminius) by rail. London is a compact city with nearly 10e6 people in the general area. It's hard to envisage a road network able to shift that many people efficintly through such a small area without taking up most of that area.
Seriously, mass transit works.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
China, Korea and many European countries already have large high-speed rail systems and are building more. China's fastest is 400+ km/h from an airport to central Shanghai, but they have lot of 350 km/h trains on longer routes. Compared to other highly industrialised countries, US passenger rail is downright primitive & Canada is even worse. An article on the Chinese system: https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki...
I think it is quite amazing that a classic railway train still has the top speed record of all times of 574km/h - made by the french TGV.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOdATLzRGHc
Normally this train only does 320km/h ;) But it is still amazing to go from Paris to Marseilles which is 1000km in 3h!
And for all you US-dudes, the acela express around New York is based on TGV, and so is all Spanish, Italian and the English channel-trains too.
I can't understand though why America (USA/Canada) still doesn't want to invest more in railways. It's so much more convenient and faster than cars!
Better in every way.
Seriously, that is my point. Feet, yards, pints, pounds (yeah, pound mass or pound weight, and what value and units are you using for G?) are human scale units. Meters (metres?), litres, grams, what are those? Those are made-up by some wild dudes in France in the late 18th century, and if you really wanted to scold USians about not "going metric", whatever happened to that fancy decimal calendar?
24 hr clock, tell me about it. If you really wanted to go G.I., you would schedule all your appointments in "Zulu time", which is pretty much local time for England and parts of Europe but completely artificial for the Continental U.S..
I've lived in Stockholm for 7+ years, and it's never seriously occurred to me to buy a car. I've rented a car or van a couple of times when I've needed to haul something across town or between cities, but that's been it.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
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.
And you can say that about road and motorway building too. Living in rural Wales I don't get any direct benefit from new motorways or road widenings in, say the Midlands; nor do most people living in Newcastle or Scotland for that matter. I could even do a reductio ad absurdum of your argument by extending it to say that even if I do use a 3-lane motorway, I get no benefit from the two lanes I am not using. Building HS2 is like having more lanes of motorway.
Whether there is really any benefit in building either motorways or high speed railways is another matter. I have always doubted it. When I see a motorway I am always left wondering how it is that so many people can be in the wrong place and needing to get somewhere else. Usually, when these things are built, people just start travelling longer distances, like my company centralised (closing its regional offices) in the 1980's when a lot of new motorways were completed (the M25 in particular) - explicitly because "travel times were reduced". In fact it took longer to reach most destinations from the central office than it had done from the nearest regional office before they were closed. Staff numbers were not reduced anyway.
The UK roads are becoming increasingly congested, and that can't be cured by building more roads. The CPO and quality of life issues you've raised for rail also apply to roads. But there's also the issue that building more roads means more junctions. And junctions cause yet more congestion. It's not feasible to avoid more than a tiny number of junctions by making flyovers.
That's why it makes sense to invest in rail. Because every 1.x passenger means one fewer car on the road. It's very debatable whether HS2 is the best investment to make in rail. But the principle of investing in rail is not wrong.
while in practice only a relatively small number of people will ever benefit directly from the faster travel times.
But how many will benefit indirectly? Even if you never travel on the train, having people travel on the train to meet with you, or do business with you, does benefit you.
Living in rural Wales I don't get any direct benefit from new motorways or road widenings in, say the Midlands; nor do most people living in Newcastle or Scotland for that matter.
That is true, but there is a much higher chance that you will benefit indirectly from improved transport infrastructure that helps anything you buy get moved to your local area so you can buy it. HS2 isn't, as far as I know, currently expected to carry much if any freight itself, and arguments that it will free up significant room on the existing railway network for freight by shifting long-distance services have been criticised for various reasons.
Usually, when these things are built, people just start travelling longer distances
That is certainly true as a local effect and up to a certain level, and it is therefore something that should be taken into consideration when planning whether and where to improve the road network.
In that case there really is a reductio ad absurdum case, though. Suppose you can open up an often overcrowded route such as the M25 enough that all traffic can move twice as fast at busy times. You save a lot of time for a lot of people, and of course you also improve the environmental situation (at least, if you ignore the costs of the development itself and look only at ongoing fuel consumption and emissions by vehicles using the road). Would this mean some people would commute further to work or relocate? Sure. Would it mean everyone using the road would extend their commute or relocate their business to cheaper areas outside London and therefore just shift the burden elsewhere? Of course not. People drive to places for specific reasons, and they choose those places for other specific reasons, and neither those reasons nor economic drivers would completely or even mostly negate the benefits if we could move to some hypothetical road transport network that ran with 100% efficiency tomorrow.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
You understand that "no boarding issues" is a choice, right? All the security theater surrounding air travel is just that - theater. There's no real reason why an airplane shouldn't function as a bus with wings, and no real reason to expect that high-speed rail wouldn't acquire some of the burdensome features of air travel.
The UK roads are becoming increasingly congested, and that can't be cured by building more roads.
Of course it can. You might not like the financial or environmental implications of taking that policy to its logical conclusion. (Neither would I, for the record.) However, there are only so many people in this country, only so many cars for those who drive to use, and only so many hours in the day for them to spend behind the wheel. That creates a hard upper bound for the capacity required, even before you apply common sense and make more realistic assumptions about how long people will actually be willing to spend driving even on a perfectly efficient road network.
I know it's a popular sound-bite, particularly for the green movement, to claim that you can't build your way out of congestion, but such a general and unqualified proposition doesn't stand up to even elementary scrutiny. There is no question that we could do exactly that, but the interesting questions are all about whether or when we would want to.
That's why it makes sense to invest in rail. Because every 1.x passenger means one fewer car on the road. It's very debatable whether HS2 is the best investment to make in rail. But the principle of investing in rail is not wrong.
I'm certainly not against investment in rail in general. I believe the most effective and efficient transport system must be a combination of mass and personal transit, playing to the strengths of each where you can/must.
All I'm saying in this thread is that there are genuine concerns about whether high-speed rail of the kind we're talking about in Japan or less extreme versions like HS2 are justifiable given how much they cost in various ways and how few people they directly benefit.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Right, but there are only going to be relatively small numbers of them as well. Once again, we're talking about enough money to instead make dramatic improvements to the existing rail network, or to upgrade national communications infrastructure to make teleconferences (and remote working more generally) much more practical, or numerous other things that would also benefit exactly the same kinds of people who might benefit from the existence of HS2.
It's also important to realise -- which many people don't -- that when these new high-speed lines are introduced, they often have a negative effect on some travellers. In a nutshell, prices are typically far higher to travel on the high speed trains, and there is a significant emphasis on booking as far in advance as possible because of limited capacity. However, once those services are available, the existing long-distance routes on existing network infrastructure tend to be scaled back, actually reducing the quantity and quality of the available alternatives. It remains to be seen whether saving an hour or two travelling between two big cities on a journey that is still going to take several hours is really that helpful when it happens at the expense of much higher ticket prices and a general reduction in flexibility in rail travel as a whole; evidence from what has happened so far in places like Europe and Asia is not exactly a glowing endorsement of this strategy.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Trains built the west, and it will take more trains to bring them back. Mabey Indiana, or perhaps the dakodas can stop being "flyover states" once again
Is it 1968 again? Because a high speed rail project from back then has paid for itself many times over. In the years since then it's been worked out in what sort of situations it is likely to work and where not.
Sprawling suburbia? Bad idea.
From dense city to dense city? Seems to be working.
Infrastructure costs are huge but running costs not, so there's a crossover with planes where infrastructure costs are not as huge (but still not trivial) but running costs are staggering. Nearly every major airport on the planet has an oil refinery next to it for a start.
There's a recent anime called "Rail Wars" (misleading title but trainspotting, guns and girls probably has less punch) which in a couple of episodes depicts a bicycle driven electrically assisted rail motor with regenerative braking - and it's a thing that does exist in reality. That's an extreme example of how little extra equipment is needed.
Awesome! That's like 80 mph! I think. Converting from metric to normal is a pain.
not in the US or Canada. TOO far between stations for piddling little trains to be of much use. Especially at the prices AMTRAK charges.
> 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.
(3) you can work on a train, or read a book, or watch a movie, or in general do something other than watch the road.
I commute by rail in the NY area. It is not fast, but for me, spending 3 productive hours a day on a train is definitely preferable to losing 2 hours a day to driving.
In the US, the debate is always over whether the unknown potential of passenger service is worth the cost of a rail project.
But since freight pays the bills on today's slow railroads (which run at a good profit!) why not design and build for high-speed freight instead? Fast transcontinental freight service could reduce the need for containerships and take some long-distance truck congestion off the Interstates. Once this is done, let markets for passenger service in crowded corridors develop naturally. We might be surprised.
And that's why republican's want to pass a flat tax. So everyone pays that back. So the rich don't pay "more than their share." Under current rules, most people will pay much much less than that back.
Which, for the record, is how I think it should be. But saying each person owes $62000 is alarmist BS. Many people don't earn enough to pay income taxes, so they're not going to be paying much of that back at all.
Given the income inequality in the US, the right thing to do is for the rich to pay most of that back, since they are the ones who have both benefitted the most from society's investments and they are also the most able to afford to pay it back.
I don't know enough about US infrastructure to know how much potential there might be in that idea, but sure, reasonable alternative strategies should always be properly considered.
For the kind of very high speed, maglev-based trains we were originally talking about, I wonder how much any advantage in somewhat faster movement would really be worth. Presumably the implications for increasing the spec on the infrastructure to cope with shifting much heavier trains would be significant, and you would need a lot of trains to shift the kind of volumes that modern container ships routinely carry, so I suspect when you looked at the facts and did the math the idea of fast transcontinental rail freight might be a non-starter.
Even so, the modern container-centric shipping industry is one of the most remarkable yet unspoken success stories of the technological world, so it surely makes sense to integrate general developments in rail infrastructure with shipping where there is an advantage to be had.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
These trains only make sense for super dense cities that have heavy commutes from suburbs.
For any other application they're either impractical or too expensive.
Over a few hundred miles, airplanes win out if only because they're more flexible and require less infrastructure per mile.
And under 20 miles conventional mass transit is sufficient.
And between 20 and 200~300 miles the expense of magnetic levitation trains is only justified if the traffic is heavy enough that conventional mass transit is overwhelmed.
Systems like this make sense for Tokyo and perhaps New York City. But with the exception of those sorts of cities and in that application it has no utility given current technology.
What is more, from an urban planning perspective, building such a train to accommodate this application would be counter productive. Such population densities are not desirable unless they are literally unavoidable. Since they are avoidable they should be avoided. No nation needs to pack people in that tightly. Not even the japanese.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Just blow up one of high-speed train and suddenly we'll see the same checks and delays as in airports. Fast train network is not an answer to the problem of long security checks, TSA will happily expand to "protect" trains, sooner or later.
(1) established rail routes in the U.S. being much, much older so as not conducive to high speed, and
There are train routes in and out of Tokyo, which now have Shinkansen (New Trunk Line) on them that have been in continuous use since the late 1800s. 18, not 19.
(2) travel distances being much greater in the U.S. resulting in air travel being more economical/time-efficient.
So.... The trains can run for larger distances at full speed. Great!
Tokyo to Kyoto is a day trip, requiring me to just take a local train 15 minutes to tokyo station, pay at a machine and walk straight on any train leaving many times an hour. I can come back at night. This is like New York to Chicago. Or Taipei to Hsinchu or even Tainan... oh wait, that's Taiwan. Or Frankfurt to Munich... or wait, that's Germany. Oh well, none of those matter so I guess I didn't take (all of) those trains (just in the last few months alone, just in the normal course of going to meetings and whatnot).
In most cities expanding the road network would cost more and provide fewer economic benefits than improving or building rail services (assuming you have a rail corridor) This is because we have been making collosal investments for decades in the road network so there generally isn't much low-hanging fruit. When Saint Louis was building light rail they basically said, in their situation, that a train line replaces four new traffic lanes and didn't have the disadvantage of dumping way more cars into already overcrowded roads in town where they don't have any more options for expanding roads.
Most countries spend far more on roads than they do rail and it has very little to do with any kind of cost-benefit analysis. It is simply that there are a lot of people with a vested interest in keeping things the same as they are now because anything else would cause change and uncertainty.
You know, it really pays to do some very basic fact checking before writing a novel. The Shinkansen line is being operated and developed by JR Tokai, a private company, who shoulder the full cost (80-100 billion US$) for developing the Tokyo-Nagoya line. This whole discussion is entirely moot and based on a false premise posted by some angsty uninformed conservative.
I'm not sure you understand the practical relationships between government and big business in Japan.
Also, speaking of basic fact checking, you might like to consider the origins of the commercial operation behind today's Shinkansen. Hint: The original developments were a financial disaster, and got snapped up for the equivalent of cents-on-a-dollar money at privatization after the government had invested a fortune in the early days.
But it is true that the situation in Japan is not directly comparable to other high speed rail such as European or US networks and their potential developments. The economics, demographics and geography are different, and do make very high speed rail a more attractive proposition in Japan.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I thought the only thing riding American rails are containers full of Chinese goods (going east and empty ones going west).
Personally, I'm a fan of trains but there are a few things that stand in the way of the pipe dream that is high-speed rail. For instance, have you noticed how many people cheer every rails-to-trails project that comes along? Guess what? You've now borked the land/right-of-way that would/should have been used for modern rail projects. Then, of course, there are the practical problems of trains rarely going where you need to get to and on a schedule you'd like. But the one that makes me chuckle is the battle between the California high-speed rail proponents and the environmentalists. Classic NIMBYs.
This is what happens when yanks try to pretend they belong to the civilised word.
It's written km/h.
http://www.pbs.org/independent...
The problem in the US and this goes back to Jesse James or further is how much private land must be seized in order to build the corridor. Elon Musk, genius that he is has the right idea, underground. Its the only way. Its almost, if not silly that our corrupt right wing courts have allowed corporations to use eminent domain to take peoples homes to build what is now a vacant failed shopping mall but we can't take land for public transpo.
U.S. express passenger train run over old rails / rail lines.
I doubt they run over old rails at 200 km/h but rather new, welded rails with concrete sleepers. However with modern rails you can certainly reach beyond 500km/h: the French have the record back in 2007 with a 574km/h TGV train. So 500km/h is not really that fast for a special run. What will be interesting is whether they can achieve this for a regular service but it sounds like they cannot due to noise pollution concerns.
To beat airline speeds you need maglev in a vacuum tunnel. Aeroplanes can only achieve the speeds they do at high altitude where the air pressure is low enough to greatly reduce air resistance. A maglev in an evacuated tunnel could easily reach several thousand km/h in silence. Such systems have been proposed but the cost is prohibitive....still reducing transatlantic travel times to an hour or two would be incredible.
Japan is a very small country. Let's see them build a line 5000Km long. Then it will be useful.
You acknowledge indirect benefits exist, then ignore them entirely when attempting to gauge the situation (no pun intended)... That's not particularly helpful.
Environmentally it is usually a great big win as that's about as efficient as mass transportation gets - if you would actually explain your logic instead of trailing off about Cambridge or some problem with a specific implementation of HSR not shared by other examples, you'd make a much more interesting argument.
There might be relatively small numbers of those, but then they interact with others who benefit, and then others interact with those who also benefit, etc. etc. Pretending there's some arbitrary number of separations before it ceases to matter, it's not really helping the discussion. That's not how benefits such as these work.
You can keep your sooth-saying, too, as that's also entirely not helpful to the discussion. Living in continental Europe, your comments about "general reduction in flexibility" and "much higher ticket prices" are laughably nonsensical to me. When prices are higher (which is not always the case when compared to the UK), the service is far better. Flexibility is also insanely present - the system of running inter-town/city trams on surface streets, coupled with high-speed long-distance trains means travel is a breeze, and about as flexible as you can get. No car needed for any part of the journey.
If you need to go to a city centre, ICEs are great. If you need to go anywhere else, driving is a lot more convenient.
*km/h*
It's not as though people are suddenly going to start commuting from Greater Manchester to Central London every day.
England is really quite a small country, you don't need particularly fast trains, you just want them to be reliable.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Of course it can.
I said why you can't, and you've done nothing to address those reasons why not. You just have an empty and unjustified belief that you can. A belief contradicted not only by logic, but by history.
For so many reasons, MagLev does NOT appear to be the answer.
MagLev is much more expensive to construct, maintain and operate than duo-rail (conventional rail).
MagLev is not near as energy-efficient as duo-rail.
MagLev introduces significant environmental problems that duo-rail does not impose.
MagLev is NOT readily compatible with other forms of transportation (the structures are much more difficult to integrate with other forms of transportation).
The incremental benefits of very high speed are greatly diminished, while the costs raise exponentially. At the same time very high speeds are reached, what impacts energy consumption the most relates much more to air resistance than to resistance to rolling (so what's the point of eliminating rolling friction if air resistance is the dominant factor).
As we move forward with high speed rail, it is very important to consider cost-benefit. While "Buck Rogers" type thinking may excite science FICTION fans, those who advocate MagLev do NOT appear to have their feet on the ground. Let's stick to REAL science.
The author of this article is obviously trying to mislead readers about the relative advantages of MagLev when he compares Japanese MagLev with American HSR. That is a joke. A much more appropriate comparison would be to compare MagLev with Japan's Shinkansen or French TGV (HSR). Comparing it with our slowly EVOLVING "HSR" is almost like comparing it with Roman chariots.
If you agree we need a railway, then making it high speed shouldn't cost much more than not. (At least, that's the theory. I'm not interested enough to get past all the biased websites and find some facts.)
I wouldn't be surprised if some people do start commuting from Manchester to London, or working for part of the week in both cities. A few people already commute from Leicester, which is 70 minutes from London. You're sure to get a seat, so it isn't necessarily wasted time. Last time I passed through St Pancras there were adverts for commuter houses in Northamtonshire. Weekly commuting is probably more common. Two colleagues spend the weekends in York and Truro, respectively.
It is self-evident that if you build enough road then there will be enough space for a finite population of drivers and vehicles. It is also obvious that we physically have enough resources to do so. The road-building question is a cost/benefit trade-off, a matter of what is practical to build given realistic time and money constraints, opposition on environmental grounds, opposition from those who would be disrupted by the work, and so on.
I didn't respond to the point you made relating to junctions, because you claim without evidence that it's not possible to avoid them in most cases, yet the reality at least here in the UK is that many of the major road-building projects in recent years have been carried out precisely to simplify junctions or eliminate the need for some of them altogether, while others have been widening trunk roads that have insufficient capacity, which doesn't necessarily create any new junctions at all.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I hardly think Cambridge has anything to worry about. There are plenty of politicians and landowners willing to protect that patch of turf at the expense of everyone else.
Pretending there's some arbitrary number of separations before it ceases to matter, it's not really helping the discussion. That's not how benefits such as these work
Which, with due respect, is an awfully convenient method of hand-waving away the staggering costs and significant disruption of such a project while demonstrating neither any verifiable level of benefit nor any objective advantage relative to other work that could have been done instead.
To put this in perspective, the official estimates for HS2 costs are currently £42.6B for the line plus £7.5B for rolling stock, which is in the general region of £1,000 for each person in the working population. For comparison, the same amount of funding could build about 90 large hospitals like this one, or fund the government's entire national road network enhancements programme almost twice over, or fully fund a major government department like Education or Defence for a year, or pay the interest on the entire national debt for a year.
You need a lot of indirect benefit from a high speed rail project like HS2 to outweigh those kinds of things. I'm not saying it's completely impossible that such benefits will eventually result, but a bit of optimistic commentary doesn't go very far in making the case.
Living in continental Europe, your comments about "general reduction in flexibility" and "much higher ticket prices" are laughably nonsensical to me.
That must be a different continental Europe to the one I visit, then, because every time I go the old school trains seem to cost single figures of Euros for a whole day of travel, while taking a single Eurostar journey between major cities is typically two orders of magnitude more expensive. In some cases the latter also require booking in advance, unlike the older long-distance routes that have often been shut down once a Eurostar-style high speed replacement is available.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
This is because we have been making collosal investments for decades in the road network so there generally isn't much low-hanging fruit.
We must be talking about different countries. Here in the UK, road infrastructure funding has fallen about 80% in real terms since its peak. Across the Channel, the French have built as much new road over the past couple of decades as we have in our entire road network.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I don't think it's a question of ignoring the indirect benefits. As I see it, since we can't know what true benefits will be derived without doing the entire project anyway, it is probably more fruitful to consider the likely benefits relative to other options. In particular, one other option is improving existing transport infrastructure instead of building a completely new long distance, high speed railway line.
We do know that HS2 could only transport a modest number of people compared to the overall railway network, even at its full long-term capacity. We also know that it will offer only a modest reduction in journey time, so almost certainly a quantitative but not qualitative improvement for most passengers. (This is one area where the high speed rail in the UK may differ from the high speed rail in Japan that started this whole discussion.) So whatever indirect benefits may result from creating HS2 are likely to be more incremental, evolutionary improvements in the affected local economies and communities, rather than dramatic shifts in productivity or quality of life. The flip side is that you could do a lot of that with the kind of money we're talking about if you invested it elsewhere in transport infrastructure, and a lot of those projects have much more predictable and reliable long term benefits than the relative unknown of high speed long distance rail.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
yet the reality at least here in the UK is that many of the major road-building projects in recent years have been carried out precisely to simplify junctions or eliminate the need for some of them altogether
The ONLY way they can be avoided altogether is with flyovers/unders. And other than motorways, they are as rare as hens teeth. A miniscule fraction of a percent of junctions. And that's not changing.
Widening motorways doesn't create junctions, but it does pour ever more traffic onto the existing roundabouts that most motorway sliproads feed onto. With ever lengthening queues to get on and get off the motorways as a result.
You talk of projects to simplify junctions. And that's true. But equally more and more junctions with traffic lights or roundabouts are created. Every time theres a new housing estate, business park or supermarket built for starters. Plus wider busier roads mean more pelican crossings are created.
It is self-evident that if you build enough road then there will be enough space for a finite population of drivers and vehicles.
Common sense is commonly wrong. There is no finite population. The number of cars increases every year.
http://racfoundation.wordpress...
Nor is there an eventual limitation of the population figure, as the population rises every year too.
And you are thinking about it in the wrong way completely when you talk of "road space". The only thing space gives predictably you is car parks. The road system is a mostly 2D network. And as such it's limited by it's nodes. The bottlenecks are the junctions.
A lot of this is getting quite off-topic now, but I feel I have to respond to some of these points.
The ONLY way they can be avoided altogether is with flyovers/unders. And other than motorways, they are as rare as hens teeth. A miniscule fraction of a percent of junctions. And that's not changing.
Yes, it is. The current plans place a lot of emphasis on upgrading trunk roads managed by the Highways Agency to dual carriageway and grade separated junctions. If you're interested, there's a list of these projects on the Highways Agency web site.
Widening motorways doesn't create junctions, but it does pour ever more traffic onto the existing roundabouts that most motorway sliproads feed onto. With ever lengthening queues to get on and get off the motorways as a result.
And likewise that is why significant junction remodelling works are going on at some of the major black spots for this, such as the bottom of the M6.
You talk of projects to simplify junctions. And that's true. But equally more and more junctions with traffic lights or roundabouts are created. Every time theres a new housing estate, business park or supermarket built for starters.
But those are rarely heavily congested, nor likely to become so because as you say they are typically there to serve specific local requirements. It's really the main trunk roads that we need to consider if we're comparing the efficiency of road transport with the rail network and potential high speed rail infrastructure.
There is no finite population. The number of cars increases every year.
Perhaps, but any given driver is still driving no more than one of them at once. We're seeing more two-driver households that have two (or more) cars and as a general demographic trend more people are staying single for longer and many of them have their own cars. However, neither of these factors (but particularly the first one) necessarily means all of those extra cars are being driven all the time.
It's also worth noting that with the general hostility toward new/young drivers these days, particularly within the insurance industry, more people are waiting until well into their 20s to take their driving tests, which will reduce the number of (legal) drivers if the trend continues. At least for the next few years, it looks as though this effect is going to more than cancel out the increase in the general adult population that you mentioned. (This is actually one of the stronger arguments for improving public transport provision at the expense of funding improvements to the road network.)
And you are thinking about it in the wrong way completely when you talk of "road space". The only thing space gives predictably you is car parks. The road system is a mostly 2D network. And as such it's limited by it's nodes. The bottlenecks are the junctions.
That is true up to a point, but you are oversimplifying. Traffic engineering can be a surprisingly interesting field, because you get all kinds of perverse-seeming behaviours that actually make complete sense when you consider the actors with their local knowledge making decisions in isolation, but which result in tragedy of the commons kind of outcomes. We see this every time a motorway is congested, when the most efficient way to use the space is to have the traffic slowing down and moving uniformly, but there is always Lane Changing Guy who has to jump around cutting everyone up so he can get there five seconds sooner.
There are also all kinds of circumstances when the modelling these guys use still makes daft assumptions which predictably result in unintended outcomes when implemented. They just spent about half a million pounds "improving" a roundabout on the Cambridge ring road to make it more cycle-friendly, but because they apparently didn't understand the ideas they were borrowing from abroad and didn't implement the whole system, the
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Most Americans drive a lot more miles driving from place to place within a city than driving from city to city or flying from city to city. So, why the emphasis on city to city high speed rail travel?
When I was a 12 year old boy in the 1950s, I could travel from one end of Vienna to the other by myself. I traveled on slow speed rail, the G2 Strassenbahn (streetcar) to the nearest Stadtbahn (intra-city train) station, then took moderately high speed rail crossing to any part of this major world city, then took the streetcar to my destination. That system gave this young teenage boy FREEDOM that few Americans know. It also freed my parents from the SLAVERY of driving their children all over town. Plus, my school had a bus that picked up every child within a block of their apartment and delivered us home after school. And, on the day that our whole class played hookie, we could travel to the Prater (amusement park), enjoy the day there, and then take cheap public transportation home in time for supper.
Let's hear it for slow speed streetcar and moderately high speed intra-city rail.
Yes, it is. The current plans place a lot of emphasis on upgrading trunk roads managed by the Highways Agency to dual carriageway and grade separated junctions. If you're interested, there's a list of these projects on the Highways Agency web site.
There are hundreds of thousands of junctions in the UK. 10s of projects does not make any significant difference.
It's really the main trunk roads that we need to consider if we're comparing the efficiency of road transport with the rail network and potential high speed rail infrastructure.
I figured that's what you were doing. Yet local roads are significant. Few journeys start and end by a motorway or dual-carriageway. And people experience most of their hours sitting in congested traffic whilst commuting, most of which is on local roads.
We see this every time a motorway is congested, when the most efficient way to use the space is to have the traffic slowing down and moving uniformly, but there is always Lane Changing Guy who has to jump around cutting everyone up so he can get there five seconds sooner.
And what of the M4 bus lane scheme, where it was deemed that using fewer lanes for cars actually speeded up the cars journeys? Having a short 3 lane motorway section between a two lane motorway section and one end and and a major off-ramp at the other was inefficient, and slowed traffic. - The bus lane effectively just became a way of using the tarmac that had been set aside for car efficiency sake.
Jeremy Clarkson does one of his ill-educated rants on Top Gear, and the politicians become fearful of white-van man, and overturn the traffic experts scheme. Resulting in worse traffic congestion for all.
There are hundreds of thousands of junctions in the UK. 10s of projects does not make any significant difference.
Sure they do. Some junctions carry several orders of magnitude more than others.
And for the kind of money we're talking about for HS2, you could do a lot more than 10s of these projects. The entire A14 upgrade through Cambridgeshire -- a single project spanning many miles of a major trunk route -- only has an estimated budget in the region of £1B, about 2% of HS2, and this is work that has been delayed for years because of the cost despite a crazy number of accidents, many of them fatal, happening on the existing A14 corridor every year.
I figured that's what you were doing. Yet local roads are significant. Few journeys start and end by a motorway or dual-carriageway.
No they don't. But again different roads carry vastly different volumes of traffic. When the M25 was effectively closed a few days ago because an overnight repair didn't set properly, there were 16 miles of tailbacks, across 3-4 lanes, for several hours. That is roughly equivalent to gridlocking an entire small city for an entire working day.
And what of the M4 bus lane scheme, where it was deemed that using fewer lanes for cars actually speeded up the cars journeys?
You go with the evidence, of course. I'm not saying building more roads is always the answer to congestion or inefficiency in the road network. On the contrary, as I wrote before, traffic engineering is sometimes a surprising field with counter-intuitive results.
My point throughout this discussion is simply that high speed rail is in many senses a very expensive type of infrastructure to build, and there are certainly alternative uses for those resources that might plausibly give much better returns. Improving the road network is merely one possibility, and as you just demonstrated, there are useful improvements that can be made that don't necessarily involve building new roads.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fo1kJ5HxzFs