What would it take to reduce the cost of maglev trains?
Perhaps 300 mph trains would be enough to convince Americans to take a train.
UPDATE
Just answer my question instead of trying to explain that people won’t take trains.
Perhaps 300 mph trains would be enough to convince Americans to take a train.
UPDATE
Just answer my question instead of trying to explain that people won’t take trains.
You don’t have to come up with some crazy new innovation for Mag-Lev, just make the trains reliable, affordable, and near major population centers.
One of the advantages of trains is that there can be train stations convenient to where people go within the city whereas airports are often hell and gone. There are more light rails etc. than there used to be but Manhattan, for example, is terrible for getting into the city from any of the airports. Both Logan in Boston and National in DC are pretty good.
LA is sort of a , sorry, train wreck (or at least very variable) for getting around without a car. SF is better the airport is actually at least as good (via BART) getting into the city as the Amtrak station in Emeryville is.
People use commuter rail in Boston, NYC, etc. too but it's generally less useful (or not useful at all) outside of commuting.
It’s fine for the airport to be a bit out there if there is a good rail line going to it.
Here are a few other commutable routes with maglev
NYC - Philly 92 miles
NYC - DC 225 miles
NYC - Boston 215 miles
NYC - Portland, ME 325 miles
NYC - Pittsburgh 380 miles
NYC - Cleveland 470 miles
Cleveland - Chicago 350 miles
St. Louis - Chicago 320 miles
Houston - Dallas 240 miles
Houston - Austin 170 miles
Dallas - Austin 200 miles
Seattle - Portland 175 miles
Las Vegas - Los Angeles 280 miles
But it would be great if all of those were connected by regular 200mph rails, 300mph maglev would be even better. I don't think there's the appetite for the level of investment either one would take.
Yes, I understand that it’ll never work in America. Now, can you just answer my question: what would it take to reduce the cost of maglevs trains?
The use case is for China to build its next 25,000 miles of HSR with maglevs
And note that despite operating the most successful maglev in the world since 2004, they decided not to build any more. While building more maglevs would probably bring the cost down some, it's fundamentally expensive technology that delivers very marginal benefit compared to "conventional" wheel-on-rail HSR, which can achieve almost the same speed with much less infrastructure.
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-12/15/c_139591288.htm
Japan is proceeding and will open something by the end of the decade
https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2023/04/japanese-m...
But you're begging the question. What if they simply are that expensive and can't be made cheaper?
> China is pursuing low-speed maglevs that run about 100 mph
Why? What benefit do they offer over conventional rail?
> Japan is proceeding and will open something by the end of the decade
Allegedly. That line's been "about to open" for years but they still haven't even started construction through Shizuoka and still don't have any real path towards doing so. In any case, AIUI they're simply accepting that construction costs are high because on the Osaka-Tokyo route (the most profitable high-speed rail line in the world as well as being one of the busiest air routes) the benefits will justify it.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321479456_Ghost_cit...
Please let them know.
So now we're talking about wealthier people and (somewhat overlapping) business travelers who tend to value comfort, convenience, and schedule to at least some degree over cost. Never say never but it seems a tough sell for most city pairings/routes given that just acquiring land would be a huge cost even if everything else were free.
China has tried, but they are expensive. Japan is building an expensive maglev over the next couple decades.
Building the actual structures has cost but it's probably not where the bulk of the costs are.
I guess you wanna talk about property rights?
The short answer is "everything".
Let's start either public desire. Nobody wants a 300mph train to go through their neighborhood. Especially a train they'll likely never ride. One that doesn't stop locally.
Since public interactions are an important part of any major project in the US this has a real cost implication.
Equally public perception en masse leads to the project becoming political, so it can't fly under the radar. (It benefits at least some politicians to be anti so they're anti regardless of merit.)
Get past the people, and you get into the environment. Long distance trains cover a Lot of land so lots and lots on environmental impact studies to do.
So you're spending mountains of cash before you can even be assured the project will happen. Because its such high risk, that cash comes very expensive. (Politically expensive if its public funds, commercially expensive if its loans or investments. )
If you got this far, construction is expensive because you're not just "laying track". Everything you touch will be subject to a million local regulations, which will differ from one county to the next. You will need an army of lawyers, inspectors, endless tweaks here and there, and so on.
The trains will be expensive. Any craft travelling at 300mph will necessarily be expensive. You'll want it to be safe, which means (quite reasonably) this is not an area to be cheap.
You specified maglev, but that is almost the least interesting part. All the above applies to any rail project. Maglev adds to the cost primarily in terms of tech, and the results of tech failing. (The train would need to safely transition between maglev and not maglev, at 300mph).
So, to answer your question, you need to ignore the public, ignore the environment, ignore the effect of public opinion on politicians, ignore local regulations, be able to aquire land (in a straight line) without hindrance, and of course source a cheap train.
And at the end of it? Maybe you'll have a train people will ride. Maybe you won't. (For reasons mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I'm guessing won't).
And yet somehow, that's what the rest of the world is trying to build, through neighborhoods.
Le me guess, American Exceptionalism once more, eh?
> The trains will be expensive. Any craft travelling at 300mph will necessarily be expensive.
Checked out the cost of Airbus and Boeing's most recent offerings?
However, it’s not necessary that there actually are significant economies of scale to be achieved with Maglev.
But the bigger issue is that it’s not clear why anyone outside of Japan would even build Maglev at the moment.
For obvious reasons, faster speed only becomes advantageous beyond a certain distance. But pretty much every country in the world has city pairs where HSR isn’t built out and the distances are too short for Maglev to be built. Any country trying to go in for a high speed transit option is likely to connect these city pairs first before they try city pairs at greater distances where Maglev may actually make sense even ignoring cost.
So you’re unlikely to see a mass rollout of Maglev for decades, so the actual correct answer is that what you need to make Maglev more cost efficient is a few decades and economies of scale.
The problem is that there is no capability to build such infrastructure anymore. Neither in the US, nor in Europe. It requires both political will and construction companies that build public infrastructure without being political party operatives.
EDIT: sorry I meant to write km/h, that's why the calculation is correct at 15 hours => 4668/300.
Maybe new train tech can deliver higher speeds but, as part one of the article noted, you can't just eliminate stops and they can slow down the average speed a lot.
The fact that I literally do not have to think about the train and just go, with basically the same convenience as say driving a car and I get free fast wifi, cell signal, plenty of space to do work, comfortable seats even at the basic price ... even slow high speed rail between SF and LA I'd take every time, hands down. No question. If it was actually decent modern high speed (300mph+) I'm never looking back.
Although knowing the US, it'll probably be some kind of perverse inconvenient complicated time consuming hellish nightmare
>There's no large list of luggage size and weight rules
I get one or two checked bags free with my usual airline and schlepping around a big bag actually tends to be harder with train than checking a bag on a plane.
I like taking trains and will in Europe even if it takes a bit longer but it's not universally a frictionless experience and can take a lot longer and cost more--certainly relative to budget airlines (which I admittedly don't take).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkansen
they are however, building a new maglev train that will run at 300 mph. The first part will be opening later this decade. https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2023/04/japanese-m...
I think speed is important, it does get tiring to sit on a train for 8 or 10 hours compared to a 1.75 hour flight. However, it is certainly one factor and how it compares to other modes of transport will depend on the person and situation.
Trains do compete with planes.
Consider San Francisco to Los Angeles, for example. That’s about 9 million people a year who fly? It’s only 400 miles.
New York to Boston. Washington DC to New York.
When you’re traveling 300 miles an hour, you can get pretty far in two to three hours.
California has already done a lot of the engineering analysis for this one. They need to build like a hundered tunnels through mountain ranges, seismic rifts, and mansion districts. It's great planning businesses for the consultants, but it is way too expensive to ever be constructed. Much cheaper to fly over all of that, rather than go under it.
Milan to Rome is about ~350 miles (580 km) and the train takes about 3 hours, compared to a ~6 hour drive. I believe this is about the same distance from LA to SF.
Have they consulted Japan, which has successfully built HSR through precisely the same sort of terrain, geophysical, and human limitations that California appears to have, including being on some of the most seismically active places on the planet?
I swear, Americans have some sort of bipolar disorder when it comes to high speed rail. They love the concept of it, but when it comes to actually implementing it, nothing actually gets done, or people complain that 'it's going to be too expensive' or 'America is too big' or 'we have seismic zones'.
It's very hilarious and a bit sad, looking in from the outside.
For the record, urban rapid transit is no better. New York City (and maybe San Francisco) being the exception, essentially every other large American city has nearly non-existent public transport. European cities are significantly better, and East/Southeast Asian ones (HK, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore) are in a completely different league altogether.
Are you sincerely telling me you'd honestly rather prepare to leave 5+ hours before your departure, drive 30+ km to the middle of nowhere, arrive at the airport 3+ hours before your departure, only to wait in multiple queues and be violated by the TSA, and then stuff yourself along with hundreds of others in a metal tube 10 km in the air and suffer possible ear ache, lousy service, irritating passengers, etc etc?
> choo-choos
European, Japanese, and Chinese high speed railways are far from 'choo-choos'. You can get first-class service on the ground for the price you pay for a cramped economy seat on almost all carriers.
However, if you do the math, Acela averages about 85 mph.
The tl;dr is that according to physics, making stuff float is hard.