Japan maglev train breaks world speed record again
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Back in the 70s, you could rock up at the airport twenty minutes before your flight left, jump on with minimal hassle, and cruise along at 600mph to your destination. Now, you need to endure two hours of having your fingernail clippers confiscated so that you can fly at 500mph to save on fuel costs.
That seems to be the true advantage of rail travel. As it said on the loudspeaker in Berlin HBF last time I was there: "Please try to arrive on the platform at least five minutes before your train is scheduled to depart."
Sadly, I bet the way we'll end up equalizing this will be that somebody will eventually bomb a TGV and we'll have to start doing the two hour confiscate-your-kids'-apple-juice routine at the train station too.
But it wasn't a big problem, I simply went through the metal detector/xrays for hand luggage and arrived at the gate with time to spare. Someone before me in the line even asked if they had to take their shoes off, the security guy said "haha, no, this isn't america".
Sometimes they also ask you to take off a hoodie or such clothing, of course your belt, put your laptop separately from the rest, get an occasional pat down, and the liquid restrictions ("don't take that mysterious bottle in here, but your totally oscure laptop battery and the liquor we sell inside is ok"). Also, check in usually closes 45 minutes before departure so you _can_ do online checkin with most companies, but if you have luggage you still need to e at the airport one hour early.
Still, the american process is heavier, but nowhere I've been in europe and asia there is a process as simple as getting on a train (get there, jump on, leave).
EDIT: possibly it's a function of the airport traffic?
It's just a pity that Narita is almost two hours and 30$ far from most parts of Tokyo...
Of course, it's also baffling that they built the airport so far away in the first place, but that's another story.
The Kanto plain suffers from a dearth of available flat land, even more so enough available flat land to build a major international airport (this being worsened by Japan's weak eminent domain and history of resistance to relocation, half a century later there are still families living on the site and farming in the middle of the runways: http://www.japansubculture.com/the-phantoms-of-narita-airpor...)
Total time to pass security: 2 minutes.
Total time to pass immigration: 15 minutes. (depends on traffic).
I remember a friend who caught her flight just 10 minutes before gates closed. She made it.
Edit: HaHa. Forgot my local airport. I can get from the entry door, to the Airplane bus in 2 minutes (security + immigration + walking). It usually only have 1 or 2 flights per day and feels very friendly.
So it's maybe not "outside the US" just "in some places."
I fly out of London Gatwick and Oslo Airport a lot, and have been seething at security staff there who keeps insisting on extra screening for my now 6 year old son. Last time he was crying and screaming his head off because he didn't understand why the lady insisted on patting him down.
A few years ago, one of the screeners looked almost panicked when he noticed that my sons shoes did not have solid heels (they were the kind that light up when you walk) - you could see him looking around frantically for someone before one of the other screeners noticed and explained to him what it was.
(on the other hand, I've repeatedly by accident taken bottles of liquids through in my carry on after failing to realise his mom has "helpfully" put in water or juice for him to have on the way to the airport, and they've not noticed even once - the liquid "ban" is a total joke)
Other places they'll wave you through without paying attention at all.
>Under Title 49 of the U.S. Code, Section 44907, the Department of Homeland Security is required to assess security at foreign airports with direct service to the United States to determine compliance with standards established by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).
Also aircraft security was too much even pre-9/11.
You can overrun the buffer stop (happened last year at O'Hare, a blue line train overran its buffer stop and climbed up an elevator) but you're just going to go a bit past the buffer stop (relatively, most likely a fraction of the train length), at best you'll get just outside the station Montparnasse-style (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montparnasse_derailment). That's hardly a guided missile with complete freedom of movement in the same way a plane is.
You can't drive a train into the white house no matter how often you try, because there's no rail leading to it, or even ending in its general direction, which is anywhere near enough the white house for that to be a concern.
There generally isn't the room to plop down hills instead of buffer stops. Instead it's possible to use energy-absorbing buffer stops (rather than the traditional "hard" buffer stops), possibly with e.g. dowty retarders on the track beforehand to force specific speed ranges on incoming trains.
Into the platform at Grand Central, maybe. Into the WTC and Pentagon, not so much.
Some kind of automatically enforced speed limiter when the train detects that it's near the end of the line would probably not be hard to implement, or maybe has been already. IIRC many trains automatically slow for curvy areas of track.
In 1998 I was able to walk onto a plane in Sydney and fly to Zurich and walk off while barely breaking stride (I only had carry-on luggage, and Swiss customs waved me through based on my passport being US).
This still exists, for example Tegel airport in Berlin. Also, in the 70s there was waaaaaay less traffic in airports so it is simply not a fair comparison.
>Sadly, I bet the way we'll end up equalizing this will be that somebody will eventually bomb a TGV and we'll have to start doing the two hour confiscate-your-kids'-apple-juice routine at the train station too.
It breaks my heart we don't have fast rail in the US. Even if it was just the North Eastern corridor (extended maybe to Chicago and Atlanta) it would have a huge impact on air travel. Of course the cost and final date to roll this out means it's probably not worth buying into.
http://www.houstonchronicle.com/local/gray-matters/article/T...
It's a privately own project, supposedly ready in 2021.
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green_light()To be told I cannot go through security until a few moments before the flight departs (because it is not even open, or the gate not even assigned) means that anything that does go wrong will cause me to miss my flight.
Not to mention the expense of having screening apparatus at every gate seems a little inefficient. It means everyone on the flight tries to cram through the one line at the same time, whereas if it were in advance, it could be spread out in time and over more lines.
Driverless cars will be an interesting phenomenon (and possibly a net increase in our energy use). People will start living in them, doing ridiculously long commutes, etc.
I hope at least, I don't want to be proven wrong on that one. Boarding the Eurostar for example, is definitively not a 5 min job, more like 1 hour the bad days, but at least you can still carry most of your stuff and considering you do not have 1 hour transit to the airport, it still beats the plane by a good 2 hours.
There's a passport check, and a 30km undersea tunnel, which is probably considered a terrorist target. Knives, alcohol etc are permitted, but not compressed gas or liquid fuel. (I tried this once, on a camping trip.)
You can take an almost identical train from King's Cross to Glasgow, arriving 5 minutes before departure (or less, 2 is the minimum recommended time).
In fact, the last several times I've flown security has generally been under 10 mins. SFO is typically the slowest and most highly variable for me, but at its worst I don't think has taken more than 20 mins. Some of the airports this is based on: RDU, MIA, LGA.
Commuting tends to be worse than the occaisional train journey. The baffling fare structure drastically needs reform -- the same journey can either cost £27 or £72 -- these will be the same class on the same day, just different times. It's frustrating. I like the Virgin trains - I've only ever had an unfun experience on one when the aircon broke. I really hate GWS and I will try to avoid using them where possible, even using a coach would be better. (Virgin trains have power sockets; GWS don't; even a National Express coach has power sockets and free wifi)
Or just bought at different times. I recently saw a return train ticket for £50, the next day it was £90, the next back to £50. I bought it then so not sure what happened after that. Admittedly that example was travelling over easter but it's a consistent annoyance.
So 3 to 6 hours we take the train. More than that we tend to fly.
I can get a lot more work done on the train than flying.
Yep. I could tolerate the longer travel times, but long distance train travel gets really expensive really quickly. For the price of a round-trip train ticket across Germany (Berlin to Cologne, around €100), I could also fly to London, Paris, Amsterdam, etc.
But I think most people see domestic flights as a bother more than anything. The love for trains shows in the stats (second biggest per capita usage of trains after Japan), train stations are usually in the dead-center of town, and you don't have to deal with luggage limits.
For modern non-maglev high-speed train (>300km/h top speed), 1500~2000km is the limit assuming "severe" airport security. HST is very competitive up to ~1000km, then it tapers off as the faster plane speed compensates for the security measures and lack of comfort.
Of course price is also a big factor, and barebones budget airlines can provide stupid low prices.
Of course that depends on your distance to the airport, but there train stations very often have a solid advantage. E.g. going from where I live in London to anywhere I'd like to actually go to in Paris via the Eurostar is faster because the train terminals on both ends are more conveniently located.
So the answer is "it depends" but unless you live much closer to the airport than the relevant train terminal it generally takes a quite long flight before air travel is faster. Even then, I will often prefer train if it is "only" a bit slower, because of perceived convenience and comfort (e.g. I'd easily pick one hour more on a train vs. 30 minutes shorter journey if the latter involves additional legs, such as getting off a plane and lugging my bags to a train or bus station to get in to town).
As for me personally, I prefer to go by train even if it takes a little longer. Flying means most of the time spent is lost in queues and transit, whereas a train trip means a single long stretch of uninterrupted time, which is much more relaxing and/or productive.
In terms of price, it's usually pretty much the same. If you book ahead and get a good deal, a flight might actually be cheaper. On the other hand, if you need to travel a popular route on short notice, a flight will be outrageously expensive, whereas a train ticket costs the same even if booked 5 minutes before departure.
It would be easier to economically restructure passenger rail cars so that you had independent bomb resistant compartments. Trains have the disadvantage, in contrast with planes, that you can bomb the rails to wreck a train. However, they have the advantage of adding mass more economically. I suspect that we can eventually come up with good (though imperfect) countermeasures to rail sabotage as well. In any case, safeguarding the rails wouldn't impact boarding passengers as much.
Internal flights in Africa and Asia are pretty good in terms of time too . Some actually feel like train stations.
Already happened, back in '82 Carlos the Jackal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_the_Jackal) bombed a TGV killing 5 and injuring 50.
Nothing since, it's not really worth it, you can bomb fixed locations and get more bang for your terror bucks.
Pretty sure it's marketing though, the TGV can be veeery long sometimes, so it takes a while to walk to your assigned car.
EDIT: source: http://tgv.lu.voyages-sncf.com/fr/avant-depart
Each trainset is a single unit though, so you can just step in at the first car and walk through the train to your seat. The only "danger" is paired trainsets (16 cars), if you're in the further one you have to walk a whole trainset to reach your own train (and even then it's only 200m/660ft), if you're cutting it really close you can probably forego your assigned seat and use the first trainset (you may not get a seat at all though).
Air traffic increases greenhouse effect. Scientists measured noticeable temp drop over sky of US during the days after 9/11 attack with all jets grounded.
I'm assuming you're talking about the scheduled boarding time, not departure time? Most airlines' contracts of carriage say that if you're not at the gate 15 minutes before departure, you'll be denied boarding.
EDIT: I guess it's not clear whether you meant "show up [at the airport]" or "show up [at the gate]".
I basically did this from Tampa FL. I think I arrived at security for a domestic flight like 30 minutes prior to takeoff.
.... till some nut does something stupid, and then the whole security theater moves to railway stations.
Was it on top or bottom level?
As much as I'm a public transportation advocate (I don't own a car, and refuse car rides if a public transportation option is available for the place I need to get to), it's becoming increasingly more difficult to promote this kind of lifestyle with the advent of Uber and other things that have made private gas-guzzling cars even more convenient than ever before. People also just don't like being told what to do and what not to do, even if what they are doing is going to kill their children.
Given the short-sighted nature of people, in general, the only way this is going to change is if we make public transportation more convenient than an Uber. What we need, very seriously, is to make self-driving cars/minibuses running on renewable energy happen as soon as possible. They can then be rigged up to become a "Public Transportation 2.0" system that gets anyone from A to B while dynamically routing and picking up others in-between and avoiding traffic jams from happening in the first place. It would also put the US back on the world map with a brand new, innovative system that's both environmentally efficient, cheaper to ride, and ultra-convenient at the same time.
Many people in my city (Washington, DC) that own cars don't actually need them most days, but they do have occasional needs that aren't easily doable by transit (Costco trips, driving out to see friends in the less-transit-friendly suburbs, hiking in Shenandoah, etc.) so they keep a car for that purpose. But the problem there is the incentives; the fixed costs of car ownership (a car payment, insurance, scheduled maintenance, etc.) are high, and once you've paid them, the incremental cost per mile of travel is really low (certainly way lower than the per-mile cost of transit), so if you have a car, you have a strong incentive to use it more than you need to. Uber and Zipcar are alternatives that make cars available in the circumstances where you need them and thus could allow these people to ditch their personal cars, and they also flip the cost incentives around: low-to-no fixed costs, and comparatively higher per-mile costs, which means you only use it if you really need it, and use transit most of the time.
However, this isn't the way a lot of people use Uber; at least where I live a lot of people use Uber because it's faster and more comfortable than public transportation, not because public transportation doesn't get them where they need to. I've seen business school students (i.e. students who have cash to burn) frequently take Uber between MIT and Harvard for god's sake. There's direct bus and subway service, but it involves a 5 minute walk on both ends, they're too lazy to look it up, and don't want to wait outside.
They are usually subsidized (the county spends more than the service makes, so taxpayers are paying for the service) but still don't see the ridership it would take to justify higher service levels (these places generally don't have traffic jams, just short periods where you might have to wait for the second green to pass through a busy light).
These counties already tend to be depopulating, which is the main way to reduce car traffic levels in such situations. Broader economic change has left them geographically uncompetitive, or automation has destroyed jobs in whatever extraction industry pulled in the population in the past.
I think one of the best ways to improve the availability of public transport would be to treat rising housing prices as a government failure (it's currently considered a success when the value of someones home increases).
Parking takes up a huge proportion of urban land and street space that could be used for exclusive bus lanes. Parking requirements makes the building blocks of classic urban neighborhoods, like townhouses, small apartment buildings, and storefronts with apartments above, illegal to build. Using land for parking vastly increases the distance between destinations, making walking impractical. When walking is impractical, transit systems become ineffective because there are too few homes or destinations near them for them to have customers.
Berlin - 4 - 5 minute trains DC - 6 minute trains
Berlin - 9 lines, 170 stations DC - 6 lines, 91 stations
and thats not even the biggest metro system in the US. So really the problem isn't going back to the US, its going back to whatever place you're going to in the US. I am sure if you moved out to Zwiesel you would be in the same situation
Where you immediately notice is longer distance commuter and cross-country lines. I often take the train from Chicago to Detroit, and every time we stop partway for ~15-30 mins because the company can't run trains in both directions on the tracks. Even when we are moving, most of the time we can't come close to our top speed of 130 mph because we aren't on high speed track. Compare this to EU trains which run across the country non-stop at top speeds of 180 mph. Granted, not everywhere has high quality service, but most major cities do, which definitely can't be said about the US.
The <200km/h category in Germany, at least, is all 180km/h or higher.
Here's the stats for Berlin vs Washington, as you wanted to make the comparison.
Berlin subway (U-Bahn) has 10 lines, 94km (route length). Berlin trams have 22 lines, 190km.
Washington Metro has 6 lines, 118km. No trams (under construction?).
I'm excluding the S-Bahn, as Washington doesn't have anything comparable.
Berlin's subway alone carries about 500 million passengers a year, versus 200 million on the Washington metro.
The difference in this case is quite easily explained by density of population - Washington is much smaller than Berlin, with 700k vs 3.5 million. However, this doesn't explain why other US cities have such poor public transit.
If you look at the numbers transported by American metro (subway) systems, there are 18 subway systems in Europe that carry more passengers than Chicago, the USA's second busiest.
DC is building a streetcar system. The H Street line is basically done and the streetcars are running, but there are issues to work out before it can officially open. Poor project management made it take forever and ended up having neighboring jurisdictions (Arlington) cancel their streetcar plans.
>The difference in this case is quite easily explained by density of population - Washington is much smaller than Berlin, with 700k vs 3.5 million. DC is not less dense than Berlin is. DC is about the same density, actually. What DC is is small: DC is ~69 square miles vs 344 square miles for Berlin. The Metro actually travels relatively far into the suburbs covering far more than just DC itself (DC again being really tiny).
What is much less dense is the surrounding area. Arlington and Alexandria (both part of DC at one point, but now part of VA) are also relatively dense by US standards (especially where the Metro goes; many people do not own cars or own one car per family) but outside of those and a few other pockets of density most of the region is significantly less dense and thus the number of trips is lower.
Also, the DC area does have two commuter rails systems: MARC and VRE, run by Maryland and Virginia respectively. MARC reaches all the way to West Virginia. Based on a cursory browsing of Wikipedia (so it must be true) this seems to be what the S-Bahn is. Not sure how comparable they are though.
> However, this doesn't explain why other US cities have such poor public transit.
Many parts of the US experienced growth after cars came on the scene, and the infrastructure was designed with them in mind. This has since been shown to be a bad thing, but at the time it seemed like the way cities of the future should be built.
From then on, local governments basically mandated suburban living. Places like New York, DC, San Francisco, Chicago, etc. grew up before the car and so weren't ruined. Their suburbs may have been, but the cities themselves weren't. We are now trying to undo the damage.
a) the financial viability of public transportation increases with population density and
b) more densely populated means less parking space.
The DC metro area actually has more population than the Berlin metro area. Most of it is just built in sprawling postwar American style, though it's urbanizing more than many equivalent American cities.
1. cleanliness 2. how much stinky the seats are 3. how much greasy/sticky the platforms are etc.
and yes, I am talking about WMATA
1) Severely limited track speeds through the entire NE corridor.
2) A boarding experience that seems to be modeled on air travel, with security gates, ID checks and waiting rooms.
3) Very infrequent service compared to main intercity routes in Europe.
Calling it primitive is provocative but pretty accurate.
2) That's not my Acela experience at all; last time I took it (a few years ago) it was no more involved than boarding a Metra train in Chicago.
3) Totally fair.
I guess this is just knee-jerkism on my part. The topic comes up on HN every once in awhile about how backwards the US is w/r/t/ rail transport, and while you could still make a lot of strides on DC-BOS, there are good reasons why most of the country doesn't have rail connectivity. But that wasn't what was being argued here.
1) Because we all have cars. Aside from a few outliers (NYC, parts of Chicago, DC, Bay Area), US cities are designed with high car ownership in mind. Less than 10% of US households don't have a car.
Short train rides are less convenient than car trips. Especially since you'll most likely need a car at the destination.
Trains also only take you to limited stops. Cars can take you anywhere.
2) Flights are faster for longer range trips and America is a fairly spread out country. Chicago to Denver would still be a long highspeed rail trip.
3)Trains only make sense for intermediate range trips that begin and end in cities that people will stay close to the train station. Washington to New York, train is the best option.
But that sort of utility wouldn't support a robust nationwide network of passenger rail.
You don't need nationwide, you need regional. The East Coast and parts of the Midwest would do well with a decent train network. Sure, Chicago to Denver is never going to be reasonable, but Chicago to Indianapolis or St. Louis? That could be a train trip.
As American re-urbanizes, these sorts of trips become more and more reasonable to make by train as cars become less necessary.
I mean closing down the most important train line (north-south) for more than 4 months? And now also splitting the east-west metro line in two (again for a few months).
Aside from planned stuff tomorrow and Thursday the trains are off due to strikes. It happens multiple time a year as well.
This usually leaves you with highly unreliable buses and trams.
Maybe Berlin and Germany stand out amongst Europe, but with regards to passenger miles trains are less that seven percent of all travel within the EU [1]. High speed rail does two things, eats up a lot of money and takes riders of slower rail. Even Japan has seen this as when the amount of high speed rail made available increased overall ridership decreased.
there is a lot of romance about trains but in the end they cost more per mile to build, use, and maintain, that even flying, in many areas. Slower than flying except over short distances and less convenient and timely over that short distance compared to cars. Public light rail is a boon doggle in many US cities, the costs to implement are beyond any reasonable time table of recovery.
Freight is king of the rail in the US, even Europe envies its status here and that makes a far greater impact on the environment than moving people
[1] http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/3217494/5711595/KS-DA...
And yeah, long-range train passenger transport generally sucks but it's not really relevant, as it's not inner-city.
Besides, train travel doesn't need to suck - Maglev may just go fast enough and be cheap enough to maintain to fix most of the problems. The train in the article will go for 40 minutes - that's far less than you need just to check in at the airport. And it will cover 330km - that's 4 hours by car. it would be foolish to pick any other means of transport between the two cities. It could go from SF to LA in 1h15m. Depending on how bad the airports are, it could even be competitive with air between NY and LA. But it won't become truly interesting until these trains go faster than planes (and I believe they will do so, eventually)
Not really if you count door to door. 1h15 Paris to Brussels, city-center to city-center and less time wasted.
Same thing with London-Paris, even if you fly to LCY, you're still going at least to Orly.
> and less convenient and timely over that short distance compared to cars
But not everybody can have a car or can drive or even want to bother with that.
"Less convenient", sure, let me worry about where to park my rented car, how to drive in an unknown city (even with GPS), etc. In Europe this is really not worth it in some cities (even in cities like Toronto, you shouldn't bother if you're going to the city center, trains beat flying for nearby cities (Ottawa/Montreal)
Makes you wonder whether the overhead of maglev is really worth it.
The big difference is that the TGV record set pretty much an upper limit on steel-wheel speed -- horrible vibration, and the wheel rims were close to supersonic, which would have led to more shock waves if they'd pushed it faster. Similarly, Formula One cars go a lot faster than regular road vehicles, but you wouldn't want to commute to the office in one! Whereas this maglev test demonstrated a technology that would be comfortably usable at this speed.
The TGV record is about half the speed of sound, which means the wheel rims are bordering on supersonic, so it's not a simple thing to talk about exceeding it.
The middle a the wheel moves at the same speed as the vehicle relative to the ground. (X + 0)
The top of the wheel moves at twice the speed of the vechile relative to the ground. (X + X)
Put another way, the top of the wheel must go faster than the vehicle or it does not rotate.
It's an odd diagram to draw out, as that result is pretty counter-intuitive.
[0] http://www.mobility.siemens.com/mobility/global/en/interurba...
This doesn't make any sense. The record is around 575 km/h. The speed of sound is 1225km/h. How would the wheel rim be travelling faster than the train? The while rim rotates 1m for every 1m the train travels, surely?
Can you explain what you mean?
To maintain that condition, the top of the wheel has to travel at twice the speed of the train. Imagine a point on the wheel. Each time the train moves ones circumference forward, that point also makes a circular trip of 1 circumference.
So at the top, when the motion of the point relative to the train is full forward, the net velocity is twice the train. At the bottom, when the motion of the point relative to the train is full backward, the net velocity is 0.
There are diagrams and further explanation here: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/48234/why-is-the-...
http://www.animations.physics.unsw.edu.au//jw/rolling.htm
Good stuff, and even has an interesting note about how train wheel rims acually go backwards as the wheel turns!
Then consider the amount of research that's been put into this, and the complex problems that needed to be solved -- it would probably cheaper to invest research into track that allows higher speeds with less maintenance (again incremental improvements possible).
Then consider that most of the speed from this maglev comes from the geometry of the track. It's all tunnels and bridges. That's a giant investment needed to get to those speeds; and conventional rail with that track geometry could be similarly fast.
It was discussed a little bit for the new high speed train line in Britain, but rejected for the reasons you state in your first paragraph. But Japan seems much less worried about reusing trains (different lines are usually operated by different companies with different rolling stock). And somehow they were able to get this project funded even though it will be many years until first service---maybe they just are more competent than the west when it comes long-term investments? :) So maybe the trade-off came out differently there...
Commercial aircraft travel in ground-speed terms, around 350-500 MpH on average [0] (sometimes faster with wind behind them). This travels on a "normal" day up to 313 MpH which is nothing to sniff at.
You should also take into account how long you'll spend at the airport (e.g. security, checking/unchecking bags, etc) and taxiing/queuing on/off of the runway, and how long it takes it get up to altitude (aircraft travel slower while ascending).
Even still an aircraft likely is faster than this. But this could theoretically be cheaper than an aircraft, in particular as fuel costs continue to rise (and after the high building costs have been repaid).
These might be wider deployed if land wasn't already "owned" and using Eminent domain to seize it wasn't so politically unpopular. Plus every road you cross either requires a bridge (expensive), tunnel (more expensive), or crossing (dangerous).
The long term trend is for a megaWatt (in any form) to get cheaper (in real terms) and less carbon intensive. There is every reason to believe that energy will be cheaper 5, 10, 50, 100 years from now.
http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/steo/realprices/
(check out residential electricity)
The trip time is going to be around 40 minutes by train.
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-21/world-s-fa...
Unfortunately this kind of decisions are not made by innovative people.
I imagine it's much cheaper to build and operate?
Japan already has a high-speed connection between almost all major cities, so this is just to speed up the link even more.
What would a low-speed maglev accomplish?
Current high speed trains can go over 570km/h but are only operating an 320km/h.
With the roll-out of more sophisticated air traffic control systems that will allow denser traffic, higher frequency landing / take-offs, I don't see the sense in fixed systems like rail.
It obviously makes a lot more sense in places like Japan or even parts of Europe, but in the USA, where you need to traverse huge swaths of uninhabitable and even inhospitable and unpredictable land, it simply makes no sense.
Take Texas for example. All the idiots that have been moving to Texas from self-absorbed and myopic cesspools of self-importance keep crying about public transportation and high speed rail to connect the San Antonio, Dallas, Houston triangle; but no one wants to address the question as to why. You could and already can travel those paths by air and it will only get faster and cheaper with the improved air traffic control system when fully rolled out.
Do we think that high speed rail will enjoy the freedom that current AMTRAK does where you just drive up, hop on the train and off you go? No! You will have to also go through the TSA security bullshit and you will still have to go to specific locations to get on. It just makes no sense.
I would much rather see some sort of automated flight between regular airports on regional hops like the Texas triangle.
Edit: ... If at all. Something somewhat related that has baffled me for years now. Is why do people, especially in the tech industry need to travel so much? Of all people, why has the tech industry not solved the remote working issue? It's like we are using steam power to make electricity. Again, it makes no sense.
Planes have higher max speeds, but they're subject to weather delays and other issues that bring their average speeds down well into maglev territory.
> With the roll-out of more sophisticated air traffic control systems that will allow denser traffic, higher frequency landing / take-offs, I don't see the sense in fixed systems like rail.
Significant limits remain - planes simply can't takeoff/land too close together due to things like wake turbulence, unloading a plane through a couple doors and jetways takes much longer than a train, etc. The weather issue is a big factor here, as well - a thunderstorm in Chicago can disrupt the entire nation due to connecting flights.
> Do we think that high speed rail will enjoy the freedom that current AMTRAK does where you just drive up, hop on the train and off you go?
It does in Europe and Japan.
And if you think that a few storms disrupting the air transportation network is a problem because some idiots thought it was a good idea to make Chicago a hub then you are not thinking about the problem correctly. What you are describing is a process and business problem. Maybe north and north east airports should not be hub airports like any even half witted person would realize, and no matter what, I don't think you could even pay for all the rail lines that would need to be built in order to serve the same number of passengers between the same number of destinations as you can flexibly adapt to with air travel.
For example, Southwest started direct flights from DC to Austin two years ago because the demand was so large. You couldn't even get the plans together in the same amount of time it took to plan, permit, coordinate, and implement DC-AUS flights, which are also a connection from some other airport on top of it.
Planes are frequently grounded/delayed by weather systems trains would have no trouble transiting, particularly thunderstorms.
> I don't think you could even pay for all the rail lines that would need to be built in order to serve the same number of passengers between the same number of destinations as you can flexibly adapt to with air travel.
Once again, you pretend like this doesn't already exist throughout Europe and Japan already.
So clearly an American. I walk up to train stations, not drive.