The world’s first commercial MagLev high speed train is now operating, linking the downtown of Shanghai to its new airport.
With a top speed of 430km/h, whoa dats fast, eh?
My question: will this / when will this technology catch on in NA? (Japan and Germany have pilot programs running.) Or will the petrochem interests crush this like they did to urban mass transit in the 70s?
Unfortunately, probably not for a couple more decades, due to ingrained bias against spending large amounts of public funds on anything other than cars and airports, large cost/mile of the fixed plant and the perception that maglev is primarily a medium for the transport of passengers. Taken together, these consideration make it unlikely that a) a private passenger maglev project could cover its costs b) that federal funding for short, intracity operations (the most likely initial proposals) would be made available.
IIRC, in the past decade, medium-distance high-speed rail projects (which can approach maglev speeds in some cases) have been rejected by voters and/or legislators in Pennsylvania, Florida, and Texas. It seems unless riders could somehow bring their cars along, they’ll never accept high-speed public ground transport.
Hey, let’s start a maglev think tank. Since everything must make money here in the USA, why not establish a for-profit maglev freight line hauling standard containers between two city pairs about 500 miles apart? This could be established by one of the major railroads (who are forever bleating about how they can’t compete with trucks on high-priority shipments), or better yet, one of the major shipping outfits such as UPS or FedEx, and would be much more likely to recover its costs than by carrying finicky, space-hogging passengers.
It’s being budgeted as we speak. My company is quoting the automation needed to build it. here is a link to an article about the project. Maglev for the pennsylvania project is in the final stages of design
b.
Ah, I stand corrected, then. Thanks.
I live in Austin, Texas, and the very people who asked for light rail have voted it down for several elections now, even as my commute time from home to school has doubled because of traffic. While this may not apply everywhere, the biggest obstacle to establishing any sort of mass transit is the state itself, and its blind adherence to utterly obsolete business philosophies and operating principles. The way that they want to set it up is so outrageously and unnecessarily expensive that most people are (somewhat rightfully) reluctant to let it happen.
The problem is, it has been proved that as roads are built linearly, traffic will grow geometrically; more roads only lead to more traffic. The only solution is to give up cars, at least partially, in favor of more efficient (and MUCH faster) systems such as Mag-Lev.
Anyway, that’s my take on the problem.
I live 3 miles from work and ride my bicycle to work most days. Why doesn’t everyone do that before I am taxed to the end of my resources to pay for a MagLev train, city bus that runs virtually empty all day, or other dead end?
The real problem is that people refuse to live near where they work. Companies refuse to locate companies in towns without traffic problems (such as our 80,000 population rust-belt city with 10% unemployment.) People won’t ride bicycles to the store or library. They won’t take a bus or train 500 miles when a plane is 10 minutes faster.
The problem is people and their refusal to cut away from the crowd.
Death of passenger train travel in America is a sad story. :-/
El-Kabong wrote:
Implicit in your assertion is that there are places where things don’t need to make money. But the principle that money doesn’t grow on trees applies just the same in China as it does here. If they don’t generate some cash, they can’t make maglev trains.
Boxer said:
Uh, because it’s tough to ride a bike in snow and ice? Because some people have bad knees, asthma, and other medical conditions that don’t allow it? Because some people work in bad neighborhoods that they wouldn’t even want to walk through let alone live in? Because there isn’t enough room in major cities for everybody who works there to also live there? Because it’s too expensive?
Do I need to go on?
Yes, you do. You still haven’t explained why he should be obligated to pay for the conditions, situations, complexities, and circumstances of people besides himself.
Actuallyl, it’s usually on the order of several hours faster. (In one nightmarish personal experience, ten of them.)
Now, the plural of anecdote is not data, granted. But anecdotes add up to (or into) public impression, and at least part of the resistance to long-distance mass transit in America is that, for many people, the current state of Amtrak and Greyhound and such consists of incredibly inconvenient delays and poor service far more often than not. Unfortunate, but that’s the way it goes.
It’s not merely refusal, it’s economics.
I live about 30 miles from where I work. I would much rather live closer. However, houses near where I work cost about 1.5 times as much as equivalent houses in the area where I live.
Furthermore, none of the jobs I’ve had over the last decade has lasted longer than a year. I can’t afford to move every time I change jobs. Even if every new employer agreed to pay my moving expenses, there’s a huge “hidden cost” involved in packing everything up and moving to a new rented domicile (let alone selling an existing home and buying a new one). I’d hate to think how much more difficult and traumatic it would be if I had kids in school.
Have you ever tried to carry 5 bags of groceries on your bicycle?
The biggest disadvantage to maglev is that it has a high initial cost. It needs it’s own special kind of track.
Apparently though it has a very low operational cost. IF the initial costs could be distributed over long length of time with very low interest, I think it could easily be a better way to travel between cities or from suburban areas into the cities.
It obviously requires less energy than a plane and has fewer parts to break, as well as not having the safety considerations of being miles up in the atmosphere.
In population dense areas like the east coast I think it could easily become a better way to travel. When you fly there’s so much that happens in the takeoff and landing that slows you down. For distances of up to 200 miles I think a 430km/h train would actually be faster than a plane in many cases and probably cheaper too.
The trick is getting people to buy into it and invest billions into laying down tracks across the country. Also it has to be done well too, it could be a great waste of money if it wasn’t well planned.
I agree that maglevs could very well be a cheaper and quicker alternative to air travel during short trips in more populated areas. A new mass transit system would give us an opportunity to start fresh. Airports are antiquated and inefficient. The vehicles may not be faster, but the transportation system as a whole wouldn’t have to work hard to make up for that by providing far quicker boarding times.
In this way maglev’s might work in certain area’s, but after read this government report, I would have to agree with those who say that it is simply not an economically viable alternative right now-due to the high initial cap costs.
The entire point of Maglev (at least the pennsylvania project) is a practical, fast way to get people from remote areas to a central air facility and back. The transport would be cheaper and faster than driving, for an average commuter.
As to freight: it’s not meant to carry freight, and would be largely inneficient at doing so.
I can’t say too much about it because my company has a non disclosure agreement, however the technology that can build those rails also has other uses, which other industries are willing to help finance for many other reasons. It’s moving along slowly, but it’s moving. It’s moving slowly, in part, due to the carefullness of the planning, Perspective. And you’re right, the operational costs are very small.
And Lib, if this comes to fruition as planned, it will be very much self sustaining. The systems required to build the rails etc. will also be a cash cow for the company as they can be used again and again to build Maglev systems across the country as they become more accepted.
A country that lost all air travel for a damned long period of time has to think about what it’s options are if it can’t afford to be without high speed transport. Capisco?
b.
I’d be hard-pressed to find a passenger rail system anywhere in the world that covers its own operating costs. AFAIK, the only one that does is the French TGV system, and that’s only if one doesn’t include the constructions costs of the special high-speed lines.
What I was trying to say was that there seems to be a perception in the US that mass transit must somehow be a for-profit venture rather than a public utility. IMHO, this is part of the reason we have such irrelevancies as Amtrak, and why there is so little co-ordination among modes of transit compared to Europe.
Re: Billy Rubin’s comment about how it “would be innefficient” to carry freight via maglev, it’s not clear to me why this should be so. How would carrying standard (ground or aircraft-type) containers be more inefficient than carrying the same on railed trains or aircraft?
Freight on a railcar is loaded on a heavy frame supported by two heavy trucks. Maglev trains are extremely lightweight and made to carry passengers only. The rails as well. Freight would be limited to the weight density of the number of passengers per car, so a boxcar of lumber, for instance, would have to be distributed along the entire train. Now the couple hundred bucks required to ship that paneling becomes many thousands of dollars. You have a lumberyard, what do you chose? $500 freight to ship something in a week, or $14,000 freight to get it here today? Not that it won’t happen, I’ve air-freighted machines that the airfreight was more expensive than the machine itself; when you need it now, often money is no object.
The Maglev system was not designed to carry freight. Adapting it to do so would cost dramatically more money(orders of magnitude), and the product would be compromised. The entire point is to make it fast, light, reliable, inexpensive. Allowing freight and passenger service on the same rails is what makes the passenger rail dicey in the first place.
b.
I think the whole maglev idea is really neat.
Then again, where’s that air-cushion car we were all supposed to be driving in the 21st Century? Where’s my personal rocket belt?
Stuff that’s new and different and really neat doesn’t always make longterm practical sense.
Some questions and comments:
Is the particular value of a maglev system the relative lack of friction? (You still have air friction, of course.) Or is it the use of magnetism to produce forward motion? If primarily the latter, why couldn’t a mag-PULL system be designed that would use wheel-mounted vehicles, perhaps for much less total expense?
Why not have a wheel-mounted vehicle with a frictionless maglev-type axel?
Is the cost of land acquisition a primary factor in these projects? (There was once a proposal in the Los Angeles area to use various already-owned public right-of-way zones–where power lines are run, flood control channels, etc.–for monorails. Makes perfect sense to me.)
Instead of trying to cure all the ills of man in one swell foop, howsabout we just accept that a great many people like to have their cars with them when they arrive at their destinations, and let’s go from there. That is: why not a maglev or mag-prop system that either directly moves your car along, or some sort of maglev-style “Car-ferry” that conveys your car, with you in it, to where you want to go?
The best place in the United States to implement a Maglev would be in the North East Corridor that runs from Boston, New York, to DC. The problem with this is that Amtrak just build a bullet train system between those cities, called the Acela. However Acela is hideously expensive, it’s cheaper to fly.
As for taking trains rather than flying, there is pretty much no destination that you can fly from one point to another where a train is cheaper than a plane in the US.
Here’s something that will get people behind a Mag Lev. You can’t crash a Maglev isn’t skyscrapers.
Erek
Germany paid for a huge chunk of this project. The Shanghai mayor who approved the project without going through the central government got “promoted” to being the chancellor of a university or in other words got sent out to pasteur for this stunt.
This maglev is the most rediculous waste of money I’ve ever seen. It is inconvenient, goes only a tiny distance and will be prohibitively expensive even if it were not inconvenient. It goes from the Pudong airport to the next to the last stop on the existing number 2 subway line, where you have to change and then take the subway the rest of the way into shanghai.
Could have taken a fraction of the money, extended the current #2 subway out to the airport and the travel time for that section would have been less than 20 minutes instead of 8 for the maglev.