This is a fantasy out of a science fiction film, and the reduced weight of smaller individual ‘cars’ would do little to reduce the “complex infrastructure” while creating a challenging control problem, notwithstanding that the cost of developing, maintaining, and operating a magnetic levitation system of that scale without room temperature superconducting magnets would be formidable at best.
Because high speed rail cannot use existing rail, and the route for a high speed rail system that would connect Los Angeles-Bakersfield-Fresno-Stockton-Sacramento-Oakland-San Francisco doesn’t currently exist, anyway. That there were obvious problems with the California HSR system as proposed was obvious from the outset but while it might be fair to criticize the overall effort as benefiting some particular special interests with ‘pork barrel’ spending, the complaint that ”a completely new right of way built their high speed train” is some evidence of perfidy is just not well informed, as any high speed rail project is going to require a substantial amount of new right-of-way clearance distinct from existing (mostly freight) routes just because it has a different function.
California is also a geographically pretty challenging place for high speed rail; the Coastal, Diablo and Sierra Mountain ranges restrict where train routes can go without tunneling or massive excavation, and while the San Joaquin and and Sacramento valleys offer a lot of flat open space there are also flood-prone areas that have to be avoided, all while keeping a track straight enough that riders aren’t jerked sideways by constant turns. This is far more challenging that you seem to believe it to be, notwithstanding the questions of whether this is ever going to be cost effective or will see the use rates to justify its existence.
Maybe there’s a flaw in Google Earth, but I5 and Hwy 99 (if they wanted Bakersfield and Modesto stops) seem to go pretty straight. The twin tracks beside 99 are about 36 feet wide, which indicates how much width is needed if space is a problem. I find it difficult to believe for the massive amount being spent they could not have used either right of way for much of the distance.
As for construction, America seems to have a problem. The cost of the Second Avenue subway in NYC is a prime example - per mile, using the right of way of the street above and tunnel boring for much of the way without tearing up the street, it still cost 2 to 3 times as much as equivalent work in Europe or elsewhere.
But yes, smaller, computer-controlled individual transport is a concept that needs a better proof-of-concept construction on a smaller scale before it becomes the basket to put all the eggs into. My thought is that something like small people-movers in tunnels with side stations, as being tested right now in Las Vegas, is more likely the future of urban transit. Whether it can become the future of longer distance transport is still an open question. For near-transcontinental distances, nothing will replace air travel for the foreseeable future.
This is exactly what I mean by California being a geographically challenging. It may seem from a map that the route should just follow I-5, but from Sylmar the I-5 goes up through Castaic and then down into the San Joaquin Valley by a section known as “The Grapevine”, which is challenging even for motor vehicles and far too steep for trains, and is also subjected to highly transient wind and weather conditions that can make it impassible. In fact, the HSR route appears to be following the old SP route through the Tehachapi loop. Of course, the HSR can’t make a relatively short radius loop so it diverges, but once it gets to Bakersfield it does follow the Amtrak route relatively closely.
HSR doesn’t share the right-of-way with the SP/SF lines because those are privately owned by BNSF. In fact, virtually all regional railroads and associated throughways are privately owned by one of the four US-flag Class I freight railway carriers, and the State of California has no authority to require any Class I carrier to share right-of-way with its own venture even if it were physically possible to do so.
If you are referring to the Vegas Loop built and run by The Boring Company, that is just Tesla Model 3 sedans being driven by human drivers in underground tunnels. There is a plan to expand the tunnels to more destinations and to automate the operation of the vehicles (although with the recall of ‘Autopilot’ Teslas and the various problems that have been experienced it isn’t clear that they will be able to dispense with drivers) but isn’t a proof of concept for any kind of longer range system, much less a regional ‘maglev superhighway’, and it certainly can’t handle a commuter scale volume of daily traffic.
Automation is the goal; plus there was a teaser picture of a “people mover” vehicle under development, much like a tiny bus or van, to replace the Model 3’s. Human drivers are required for now to ensure safety until the concept proves acceptable. Obviously any vehicle that fits into the mix physically and computer-ly can be used. Model 3’s were just relatively cheap and readily available.
Yes, I wasn’t suggesting boring co. would replace a high-speed train; just pointing out it’s a step on the way to a transit system that relies more on private small carrier units, rather than a giant train that has to stop at every location. It’s basically taxis on a private right of way, and will incorporate computer control to ensure optimum (dense) traffic flow. The proposed map for the system - going from the airport, to most major hotels and even the old downtown, is ambitious and will be a good proof of concept as to whether this is a viable option.
Whether the same idea - “point to point taxi” vs “10-car train stopping everywhere” is a viable option for high speed between cities, remains to be seen. Considering the cost of infrastructure, I think whoever ends up paying for it will want to be sure it works.
Ah, private enterprise. I suspect they obtained that property originally courtesy of a certain level of intervention by the governments of the day - but why should they share now?
Serious question in this nearly-10-year-old thread: does there exist a definition of failure for this project, where we could definitively say “this just isn’t going to work”?
I think it’s very telling that in the time it might have taken to complete multiple train lines, the actual measurable result is some dudes languidly driving cars through tunnels in volumes comparable to a briskly used bike lane.
Well 10 years is not really a long time from discovery to wide implementation of an invention: electricity was discovered hundreds of years ago–but some rural farms in the U.S. only got it in the 1950s (this happened to an elderly relative of mine).
It would require a number of major breakthroughs, for example low cost technology for boring tunnels.
So it is a network of roads, with fewer lanes, in underground tubes where it is more difficult to maintain or clear inoperable vehicles. And how is this more efficient than just…roads?
Well, it doesn’t “remains to be seen”; what makes high speed trains efficient is that they have one engine pulling a ‘train’ of cars in their slipstream, accelerating and maintaining momentum between stops where they arrive and depart at scheduled intervals. Having a bunch of individual engines, constantly speeding up and slowing down, and arriving at random times essentially negates what makes trains advantageous. And making this a ‘maglev’ at expanded scale is still predicated on room temperature superconductors and frankly some dirt cheap way to lay down a magnetically repulsive track which doesn’t exist. A cursory review of this notion highlights a multitude of feasibility issues unless you posit technomagical fairy dust solutions.
Well, yes, private enterprise; the system that built and runs the rail freight system. Of course, various perfidious means were used to secure railway right-of-way and ensure access in perpetuity; and trying to reverse that or force rail carriers to share access will make the right-of-way battles over HSR seem like a trivial legal dispute in comparison, in no small part because what I casually encompassed in “ownership” includes fee simple (direct) ownership of land, lease in perpetuity, grant-for-access, mandatory easement, and a vast array of other mechanisms by which railroads negotiated, manipulated, or outright extorted from various public and private landholders for their current right-of-way. And it isn’t as if these are huge plots of land with plenty of extra space to be shared; outside of railyards and sidings, they are largely narrow corridors just wide enough for the railway and a maintenance road (if that), leaving no extra space to build up and maintain an entirely new double rail line, and notwithstanding that many extant rail right-of-way pass through the center of towns and have many level crossings making them completely unsuited to high speed rail usage.
The hyperloop in Vegas is basically a tourist attraction. It doesn’t have to be efficient or make sense as transportation, it just has to be another ‘experience’ to attract people to a specific hotel.
In the case of the first ‘hyperloop’ run between Resorts World and the convention center, it almost makes sense. It’s a use case tailor-made for the system - people need to get to the convention center from their hotel in small numbers throughout the day, and Resorts World is oin the wrong place to easily build surface transportation.
But let’s be clear that this isn’t a ‘hyperloop’ as originally envisioned. The key feature of a ‘hyperloop’ is an evacuated tunnel so that the train can run without air resistence. This is not that, it’s just a standard tunnel underground.
After all these years of supposed hyperloop development, I have yet to see a feasible solution for metal expansion or buckling. I’ve seen no safety/inspection designs. I haven’t even seen someone try to solve it. But my, there have been some pretty fiberglass mockups and futuristic models of hyperloop stations.
That should tell you what you need to know about the true purpose of those ‘hyperloop’ companies - to extract money from suckers and taxpayers.
Computer control. Remove erratic humans from the equation. Remove random unmaintained vehcles from the equation. Remove weather issues from the equation. Quick re-routing around problems. How often does a subway train simply “break down in the tunnel”? (Yes, it has happened. No fun when it does). A network where multiple subway trains with different destinations share the same lines thanks to automated switching, as NYC demonstrates, is a baby step. (Heck, they even have express lanes in their subway - and during maintenance, the express uses locall track for a stretch or vice versa)
I seriously doubt that the energy efficiency of trains comes from less wind resistance. Also, the start and stop at every point has to be less efficient the bigger the train. As for scheduled departures - I bet most travellers would prefer a depart-on-demand schedule.
Yes, you’ve nailed the one aspect that is still the main show-stopper. I’m not holding my breath either. But then, who would have predicted 150 years ago that America would be covered with roads made of asphalt or concrete 4 lanes or more wide from sea to sea and north to south? When covered wagons were pushing west, who would have predcted that level of construction was practical or financially possible?
Less wind resistance is certainly part of it. Metal wheels on a metal track means less rolling resistance, especially with heavy loads. And trains generally start and stop less.
Wind resistance isn’t a big factor in the overall efficiency of a traain, but it IS a big factor in the efficiency of alternatives. That’s the point.
High speed (‘bullet’ or ‘turbo’) trains absolutely get efficiency from how streamlined they are, hence why they have power cars with smoothly profiled power cars and passenger/freight cars with tight connections between them. The momentum they acquire helps them slice through the air with little loss to drag compared to a single car vehicle, and they recover much of the energy used to accelerate them through regenerative braking. While I’m sure you are correct that “most travellers would prefer a depart-on-demand schedule”, the bottleneck that would create essentially negates the entire point of a high speed rail system capable of maintaining a large throughput of passengers unless every stop is an incomprehensibly massive number of sidings and platforms.
The Romans had a vast network of roads that spanned southern and much of central Europe from Hispania and Britannia to Dacia and Galatia, many of them paved and curbed nearly two millennia ago. The idea of vast, maintained road networks is not novel or unimaginable. The technological innovations needed to make some kind of workable ‘maglev highway’ system usable by individual operators not only feasible but fiscally practicable, on the other hand, are well into the realm of science fiction.
All computer controlled traffic I am familar with (mainly in warehouses) are prone to “stupid” traffic jams.
Creating efficient rules to eliminate dumb is suprisingly difficult.
That is not a problem when the “passengers” are a dozen pallets of babyfood. But it IS a problem when 100’s of people are getting increasingly irate when they are stuck in an apparently pointless traffic jam waiting for a certified operator to arrive at work.
Yeah, the tech has a long way to go, I’m not holding my breath. Vegas will either dwindle to nothing or be proof of concept. MagLev tech - I rode the one in Shanghai - if they can make that work economically, it would be great but even the Chinese have given up on building an extension of that. It exists as proof of concept between two points, and that’s it.
I was discussing what could be, not what’s around the corner. I’ve worked with computers all my life, I still am astounded that a car can drive itself 90% of the time on ordinary roads. (It’s that 10% that demonstrates computers still have a way to go before they’re passable). However, on closed tracks without random competion, they do pretty good.
I think the biggest obstacle to high speed transport is going to remain the simplicity of air travel. However, we’re seeing the same pipe dreams with that - quad-copter (or hex-copter) point to point travel to simplify the shoter distances, expecially intra-urban. Computer piloting for (a) safety and (b) weight.
(And as a side note, in Toronto they had to put a gate on the spot on northbound Spadina where the streetcars go into a tunnel, because human idiots or drunks got stuck in the tunnel for the umpteenth time. Something - we hope - computers don’t do.)