Virginia MagLev Project Back on Track 329
Raven42rac writes "After much delay, the $14 million Maglev train project is back on track at Old Dominion University in Virginia. All the petty lawsuits have been settled, and a much needed $2 million grant has been approved. Let us hope that this sets a precedent to Americans to not litigate ourselves out of the science and technology markets due to petty disagreements and greed. We do not need to be our own worst enemy. I, for one, would much rather ride a Maglev monorail with others, than drive a gas-guzzling car by myself. (And I apologise for the pun in the headline.)"
Trains vs cars (Score:3, Insightful)
Why would you want to be stuck on a train that goes from somewhere you're not (requiring you to get from where you are to the initial station) to somewhere you don't want to be (requiring you to get from the final station to where you want to go) via places where you don't want to go at times you can't choose, sitting across from a drunk and alongside someone who's coughing and sneezing all over you, rather than drive in your own car by yourself from where you are to where you want to go at whatever time you feel like?
Certainly there are places where the roads are so bad that trains are preferable (e.g. London), but in the vast majority of cases, trains really, really suck.
Car vs. Maglev? (Score:5, Insightful)
If maglev is what it takes to move people off the roads, I pity our civilization.
What about ordinary (cheap) trains, faster conventional trains (like Europe's TGVs) or living closer to work, or working more via Internet, or carpooling?
The best way to avoid commuting is for people to move back into the cities, to walk to work, to downsize the huge companies into smaller human-sized organizations, to live on a human scale. The best way to connect large countries is through high-speed trains that use conventional rail technology. It does not happen today for one simple reason: the artificially low cost of travelling by car and by air (thanks to subsidies on roads and on fuel).
Isn't this a bit much for a university? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Car vs. Maglev? (Score:3, Insightful)
If our society has sunk to the point where people think they have the right to force people off the roads, civilisation has long gone.
"The best way to avoid commuting is for people to move back into the cities,"
If people wanted to live in cities, they'd live in cities. Increasingly, people are desperate to get out of cities due to high taxes, poor services and high crime. That's almost entirely the fault of train-loving liberals, and it's not going to change any time soon.
Too late! (Score:3, Insightful)
For example, yet another lawsuit [indymedia.org] against the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant (what is this the tenth, twentieth, thirtieth?). The truth of the matter is that this is exactly the reason that the nuclear industry has shut down. Insurance costs are too high because people are sucessful at suing a plant so that it will never make any profits (Diablo Canyon) or voting it closed (Racho Seco Nuclear Power Plant).
Uh Oh (Score:2, Insightful)
"Morris has insisted that breakthrough will happen once the $2 million federal grant money flows."
That's a pretty big assumption.
Re:Trains vs cars (Score:5, Insightful)
Try driving into Central London. Cars really suck for mass transport. Around 10% of traffic comes into Central London by car in a typical week. Replace the residual (mainly taken up by over or underground trains) with cars and prepare for chaos. Convenient, huh?
Re:Car vs. Maglev? (Score:3, Insightful)
That was exactly what I was thinking. To continue: socialism is the reason cities suck. Having to deal with the zero-self-responsibility scum who would rather steal from you than work for a living are the reasons why no one with any self-worth wants to live in cities. If socialism didn't drive the people, who would have to work, to be lazy and steal money from those that do work, crime rates in cities would be much lower.
Re:Car vs. Maglev? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maglevs are extraordinarily expensive to build and run, yes, but probably less so than (or on par with) conventional high-speed trains, otherwise nobody would fund such ventures.
But they are definitely not noisy compared to a conventional train. Have you ever lived near a TGV line? no, I didn't think so.
What about ordinary (cheap) trains, faster conventional trains (like Europe's TGVs)
TGVs aren't that much cheaper. About half the price in fact, mainly due to the reuse of existing technologies and French government subsidies. What they really have for them is the ability to roll on the pre-existing infrastructure, which Maglevs can't do.
or living closer to work, or working more via Internet
Yes, let's produce cars, baked bean cans, houses and pencil cases on the great Internet.
Fact: people who can work remotely are a minority.
or carpooling?
But you say below that road travel is an artificially low-cost mode of transportation? surely you don't mean to cram more people on the road...
The best way to avoid commuting is for people to move back into the cities
But you say below that you want to scale back the size of organizations and live on a human scale. Surely you don't mean to cram more people in the same tiny spot of land...
to walk to work
Make the cities big enough and people won't be able to walk to work. You contradict your arguments over and over.
to downsize the huge companies into smaller human-sized organizations, to live on a human scale. The best way to connect large countries is through high-speed trains that use conventional rail technology.
Yes that's true For now. I suspect if nobody looks for better solutions though, we'll still be stuck with conventional trains a hundred years from now though.
It does not happen today for one simple reason: the artificially low cost of travelling by car and by air (thanks to subsidies on roads and on fuel).
This is changing fast. Do you know how much gas costs in Europe these days? and it's still rising.
NOTE: before you take me for an overweight Californian who can't walk across the street without his car, or an oil-producing Texan, let me precise that I don't own a car and go around by bike and public transportation, including trains.
Re:Car vs. Maglev? (Score:4, Insightful)
Interesting argument. Not sure if this would mean more cities, those cities smaller in population but higher in density (using simple von Thuman or Henderson medols), but it would be a really interesting (and positive IMHO) thing to see.
But I completely agree about the subsidy on fuel. People who complain about fuel tax simply don't seem to understand the cost of their using fuel is born on others (both in the present and the future). Increasing the cost of fuel makes the true cost apparant to the comsumer. Pity the government don't realise the other part of the equation that this revenue fuel should be addressed to the cost of it (improving 'green' technologies, actual quantification, perhaps international repatriation).
Re:Trains vs cars (Score:3, Insightful)
Most of the lines going to London are electrified now, and the underground has been for a centruy or so. Of course, even for diesels, per-passenger pollution is a lot lower than a car with a single person in it. And the trains are about as smooth as other alternatives. Occasionally there's a shake and a rattle, but I seem to be able to stand perfectly well unaided.
Those aren't issues for maglev, though for a train to be anywhere near as convenient for a car it will need to run every five minutes, twenty-four hours a day, which will mean most of them running mostly empty. That hardly seems likely to be "enviromentally friendly" to me.
Maglev only makes sense for long distances. The sort of distances that will take at least several hours by car. You don't need a service running that regularly.
Re:Trains vs cars (Score:1, Insightful)
DOH! Imagine every passenger driving a car which belches out clouds of diesel smoke into the air.
Re:Car vs. Maglev? (Score:2, Insightful)
Are there cheaper mass transit alternatives? Of Course.
Do many areas of the United States need better mass transit systems? Yes.
Do Americans need better, less costly and less stressfull commute options? Absolutely.
Should Americans be forced to cram themselves into crowded, polluted, crime-ridden (tho less so now) major cities just to satisfy urbanite arrogance towards the automobile? Bite me.
Re:Efficient? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Yay! (Score:1, Insightful)
Maybe slashdot should auto-ban people who post "I for one welcome our [topic] overlords." and "In Soviet Russia, [topic] [verb]'s you."
Or at least punish the people who mod them up.
Joke Science (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Petty Lawsuits? (Score:3, Insightful)
Just why is it greed when I'm looking out for myself?
I, for one, would much rather ride a Maglev monorail with others, than drive a gas-guzzling car by myself.
And I, for one, would much rather ride in a comfortable gas-guzzling, XM radio playing SUV than an a 14 million dollar mass transit Maglev that smells like a wet band-aid. Just another petty opinion, I guess.
Seth
Re:Trains vs cars (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Cars and the US (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Car vs. Maglev? (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, I always find it entertaining when it is suggested that trains are so expensive and such a problem. In Japan, they have trains that are 50 years ahead of our best technology, and they don't seem to have much of a problem with them.
Of course, they also built the longest suspension bridge on the planet and put an airport on water. Maybe they have fewer people saying "it'll never work." Who knows?
If maglev is what it takes to move people off the roads, I pity our civilization.
What it takes to move people off the roads is to move past the 19th century workplace where managers insist on five million lunchpail-carrying peons crawling through the door on their knees to punch a timeclock at the exact same moment. That is the cause of traffic, pollution and waste from automobiles. Period.
t does not happen today for one simple reason: the artificially low cost of travelling by car and by air (thanks to subsidies on roads and on fuel).
Agreed.
Re:Trains vs cars (Score:2, Insightful)
But for many people, a train starts from where they are, and it goes to where they want to go.
And in that case, it beats paying $500 a year for insurance and $150 a month in car payments. And that doesn't even count on gas prices.
For the week or so that I need a car, I'll rent one for $40/day. I save a lot of money that way. And yes, the train will take me to the rental car place
But in the end, I agree... if Springfield is going to build train service, it should go somewhere!
Re:Petty Lawsuits? (Score:3, Insightful)
That pretty much defines greed. A better way to put it would be: why is it greed when I'm only asking for what you agreed to pay me?
Re:Cars and the US (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Cars and the US (Score:1, Insightful)
A lot of this happened due to a real lack of urban planning, in the American spirit. "Oh, let's build the factory right HERE, in the middle of nowhere". "Oh, let's put a residential neighborhood right here, in the middle of this farmland".
This is often because planners are unduly influenced by those who own large tracts of land - they're not trying to build cities that make sense - instead, they plan to build cities that make a lot of money for a few land owners.
Re:Petty Lawsuits? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just looking out for yourself is neither selfish [reference.com] nor being greedy [reference.com]. It becomes selfish when you lose all regard for other people's interests in the process. It becomes greed when it turns into an obsessive lust for wealth.
This project (Score:3, Insightful)
$14,000,000 is peanuts for any kind of real transit system. raven42rac says
I strongly suspect that this particular project is not a substitute for driving a gas-guzzling car. On any campus I have ever been on almost no-one drives a car to get from one spot on campus to another. I strongly suspect this monorail system is substitute for riding one's bike, or going by foot.
Re:Petty Lawsuits? (Score:1, Insightful)
The Tragedy of the Commons [dieoff.com]
Re:Car vs. Maglev? (Score:5, Insightful)
The best way to avoid commuting has nothing to do with moving back to cities. There is a reason why urban sprawl exists: people have discovered that giant cities are not the best places to live and work. Cities only exist because, in the eras predating modern transportation systems they were the only way to effectively concentrate and use resources and manpower. That's just not the case any longer: cities are conceptually obsolete, and are just running on inertia. Urban sprawl is just the first symptom of the end of the road for cities. Besides, the best way to avoid commuting is to decentralize businesses: encourage them to spread out more so people won't have to drive forty miles each way to work.
Fuel costs aren't "artificially low", exactly
As a matter of fact, because of that investment energy costs in the U.S. haven't even remotely paced inflation, and they'd be lower still if state Environmental Protection Agencies hadn't been allowed to mandate specific fuel mixes for different regions. The overhead involved for that is incredible for little real benefit.
Re:Cars and the US (Score:5, Insightful)
Here in Austria many people own cars, but many people ride bicycles. I think it is toss up between time & pride. It takes me two times longer to to drive into the city center (and park) than bike (and park for free). It takes me about the same time to ride to work as it does to drive. So I ride in the summer; the younger more virile guys ride all year rain, shine or snow. But here in Graz it's a reasonable thing, all the stores I want to shop at have a small branch nearby (5~10 min ride) the video store is a 3 minute walk and the Kino is 20 minute away.
I lived in the US for a time and didn't think it was so reasonable. The cities are designed to be car friendly to the expense of all other forms of traffic. The roads and parking are designed to accommodate huge vehicles (A fact many of my co-workers attribute to the poor driving the Americans exhibit, I wonder which came first). The city layout (zoning) is segmented; most people that work in town live in the suburbs, so every morning & afternoon a horrible mass migration occurs. It's outright dangerous to be in this without some sort of armored vehicle!
Whatever the US fascination is about it is NOT about freedom! I think it's more about using the cars they have! Or maybe it's a vicious cycle they can not escape from.
I wonder what will happen when the true price of energy comes to the US? I picture roving bands of Chicanos car jacking Ford gargantuan in order to pump the fuel tank out leaving their hapless owners on the side of the road calling the US version of a motoring club.
Why a maglev? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why? For speed?
Conventional trains routinely hit 320 km/h FOR LONG STRETCHES AND DURATIONS [bbc.co.uk] (not just for 10km portion [trainweb.org] out of a 700 km journey), and have gone as fast as 515 km/h in tests [unipi.it].
The sheer complexity of the switches [slashdot.org] (* [maglev2000.com]) guarantees that the resulting network will be much less flexible than an ordinary conventional high-speed rail whose switches [wanadoo.fr] are of the ultra-simple time-tested conventional design.
What does speed gives you? Since the energy expenditure squares each time the speed is doubled, you soon hit a wall where the energy efficiency drops well below an aircraft.
For example, a 1200 km trip (New-York_Chicago) Speed time saved* Energy How much more than
100 12 10000 at 100 km/h
200 6 6 40000 4 times
300 4 2 90000 9 times
400 3 1 160000 16 times
500 2.4 0.6 250000 25 times
600 2 0.4 360000 36 times
700 1.71 0.29 490000 49 times
* from previous time Fucking slashcode that won't let PRE pass. Fuck it (and cowboy neal too, at the same time).
So, each time you increase speed by 100 km/h, your energy use soars so much that for saving a paltry quarter-hour, you spend 13 times more energy than needed to go at 100 km/h!!!
This is the reason french TGVs only run at 300 km/h. They are designed for 400 km/h and routinely hit 450 km/h for demos but running them at 400 km/h would be too expensive for the tiny amount if time gained.
A high-speed maglev runs at the surface, where the air resistance is waaaaay much higher than for an aircraft at 35,000 feet. So the energy expenditure per seat IS GOING TO BE HIGHER than an airplane!
Even though the speed of sound is much higher on the ground than at 60,000 feet (where Concorde used to fly), 1000 km/h maglev trains will need very long viaducts and tunnels to avoid becoming high-speed stomach wrenching roller-coaster rides.
The only way a maglev could be useful is running within an evacuated tunnel in a long journey.
In theory, the trains could run at the orbital speed of the altitude they are; energy expenditure would then be zero (all you'd need is to accelerate the train to speed, and you'd recover most of that energy by decellerating it at destination). But the costs of digging tunnels that would be so perfectly aligned, immune to geological havoc (crossing from one tectonic plate to another isn't really a walk in the park) and to keep the thing perfectly evacuated would likely be prohibitive (and maintenance guys would need to work in spacesuits...). Such money should be spent instead for a space elevator.
Re:Car vs. Maglev? (Score:1, Insightful)
"Are salaries higher to compensate for higher taxes" no... and if you think about it, that wouldn't make sense.
If everyone in a country gets paid in DINGOS.. and the government decides to tax them at 50%, but salaraies are also magically going to be doubled to compensate.... what's the net effect? Sure, you take home the same number of DINGOS.. but now they only represent half the wealth of the country... so they are effectively worth half as much.
Cost of living in these countries tends to be lower, and reflects the local economy, as with everywhere in the world.
While people in Sillicon Valley were making $100,000 US a year at tech jobs, I was making about $40,000 CAD a year in Calgary,( Which was about $28,000 US at the time IIRC) and living quite comfortably.. I had a car, a nice apartment, I ate out whenever I pleased, had a few computers, cable internet, etc... all the makings of a normal young urban yuppie life. Looking at jobs in the US... I had to think about what the real difference in living was. I really couldn't find anything that made the lifestyle of a guy my age making $100,000 in the valley any different than my own... the only exceptionw as perhaps people tended to have more expensive cars (which they rarely owned completely)
- Americans seem to pay more in monthly expenses for things I'd never even considered.personal liability insurance, health insurance, etc.
- Rent was way higher in the valley.
- Restaurants, etc were much more expensive.
- Cellular phones and things were more expensive.
- Basic food was more exensive at the grocery store.
If you look at the taxes most Americans pay, and then add up some of the fixed monthly costs that don't really exist in other countries... you might find you end up spending just as much of your salary as these socialized countries take in taxes.
Re:Cars and the US (Score:4, Insightful)
Or maybe it's a vicious cycle they can not escape from.
Public transportation sucks. Getting a car is easy. I like to walk to work, and take public transportation when I can, but GOOD LORD the BUS is TERRIBLE! It's filled with low-lifes (especially dependent upon the time of day) that sometimes make me feel like my life is in danger. It's never on time, it stops running at 7pm, and worse of all it's perpetually overcrowded at the times I really need to ride it.
So I frequently don't take the bus. But then, how will they ever improve the situation if not enough people ride?
Catch-22 indeed.
Bryan
Re:Car vs. Maglev? (Score:3, Insightful)
What crap. The advocates of socialism are no different than the advocates of 'hypercapitalism', as you call it. They're the same animal, with a trivial difference in stripes. Both want to tell everyone else how to live their lives, and distribute their resources, at the point of a gun if necessary - no doubt 'for the greater good'.
Socialism is just another form of dictatorship. The fact that the majority might support this dictatorship makes it no different than any other.
Max
Re:Car vs. Maglev? (Score:3, Insightful)
Take a longer look at the human environment in which those trains operate. Japan has incredibly high population densities compared to the overwhelming majority of the United States. Without those incredibly high densities, mass transit, of any kind, doesn't work. (About the only exception is Manhattan Island. No, thanks.)
Japan put that airport on the water because there wasn't ANY land available for a new airport. This is part of their population density problem.
Maglev Makes No Economic Sense (Score:2, Insightful)
Maglev has no discernible future as a commercial proposition if conventional rail can go as fast. No one seems to know how to interline freight on to or off of maglev from conventional rail. Changing from another mode and then back again eats up the profit earned from speed (if any, this is freight we are talking about, after all.) Further, if a railroad train loses power, the train stops, almost always upright on its rails. If a maglev train loses power, the train will not "Coast" to a stop! The heirs and assigns of the purple jelly that used to be its passengers will sue that line out of business and no insuror will want to take the risk of insuring maglev. It seems they have come to this conclusion already. Private maglev companies won't exist or if they do they won't survive the first failure of a train or a track segment.
Bottom line: everyone likes tech and wants a chance to play with the toys. Many want to see this technology pursued, but no one seems to want to invest substantial private money in it. Suggest the maglev enthusiasts turn their energies to finding out what free-market forces are at work and why, and address the issues that that investigation turns up. I suggest that that is the best way to save maglev. It may be the only way.
Maybe just higher population density? (Score:3, Insightful)
In Japan, trains make sense. They run in areas that can support them. In the US, they mostly do not. Most of us do not live in areas that can support them.
Trains are subsidized too. The government often pays for the track (particularly for commuter trains).
Re:Fuck public transportation (Score:3, Insightful)
Say goodbye to reading the newspaper on the way to work. Goodbye to the half-hour nap you took on the train each morning. Goodbye to your stress-free commute.
Re:Car vs. Maglev? (Score:3, Insightful)
The best way to avoid commuting is for people to move back into the cities
Hell yeah. People are going out of their way to live 50+ miles from work, so they can live the American dream and have their own little piece of urban sprawl. Then we build 8-lane superhighways so these lemmings can migrate to and from the city every day.
I suppose the desire to have more personal space is a natural instinct, and it's fueled by the relativly large amount of open space and the relativly inexpensive personal vehicles in this country. But, I wonder how long this trend can continue until we /run out of space/run out of oil/cars get too expensive/ and the benefits of living near work become greater than the benefits of commuting. Perhaps it has begun already..
Re:Car vs. Maglev? (Score:3, Insightful)
What tripe. Capitalism isn't at all evil; it's about being able to distribute your own resources *as you please*. Capitalism is synonymous with economic freedom.
The point where capitalism becomes corrupt is when government gets involved. Government despises a free market; free markets lead to change and fluctuations in power. Government, more than anything else, is interested in maintaining it's power base, and to do that it needs a consistency which you can't get in a truly free market. Government doesn't exist to protect us from the 'evils' of capitalism, but rather to perpetuate whatever power structure exists in the current economic system. This is entirely antithetical to free market capitalism.
You can have both capitalism and social welfare programs. Despite the ravings of left wing loonies the two are not opposed. Charities operate perfectly well alongside capitalism; a government charity could do the same, and without interference in the market. This is a truth which would-be tin-point wannabe socialist dictators refuse to acknowledge because it doesn't allow them to force others to bend to their will, which is the point of their 'greater good' bullshit no matter what they claim to the contrary.
Max
Re:Multiple choice quiz (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Trains vs cars (Score:3, Insightful)
Road subsidies matter, not fuel subsidies (Score:3, Insightful)
The real subsidies that affect the US preference for cars as opposed to trains are socialized roadbuilding. The public wants its roads, and any time you build more roads, making commuting easier, you make more housing development possible because more people can now live where you built the roads, and once a new area is opened up for housing, it tends to build more houses than the roads can really support, so there's more pressure to make the roads bigger. Residential streets in suburban land developments are essentially funded as part of the costs of building the houses, either explicitly or indirectly, but the regional connector roads get heavily subsidized. And especially as most of the US economy moves to a white-collar services model and stops being manufacturing-oriented, this also makes it easier for offices to move out of the core cities, decreasing the reasons for people to live downtown. Sometimes they go to edge cities, sometimes to quasi-residential areas.