Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

China laying tracks for 1,000km/h maglev trains

asiatimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 503 posts

Re: China laying tracks for 1,000km/h maglev trains

#331

Post by chillacy »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #164
saberience wrote: post #28

So, as someone that lived in New York for 6 years and California for 6 years, stories like this are incredibly depressing. The US is the world's largest economy and should be the shining example of amazing infrastructure, high-tech, green cities, and forward thinking policies. California is an especially egregious example in terms of infrastructure investment: If California was a country it would be the world's fifth…

I think there are two factors at play here. 1) We have the curse of being first. Our cities are old so our infrastructure is old. 2) We can't just say, "Your land is ours, get the fuck out, construction begins in one week" They can also cut corners on safety and pollution. The ends always justify the means.

> Your land is ours, get the fuck out, construction begins in one week

My understanding is in China the government owns all the land to begin with, you lease it from them. But I guess in this case it would be "your lease is terminated, thanks"

Re: China laying tracks for 1,000km/h maglev trains

#332

Post by remarkEon »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #298
factsaresacred wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> high speed rail is romanticism from bygone days when rail was the only alternative to long distance travel Yes, the 'bygone days' of maglev trains. I don't know if you've ever travelled in Japan or China but the convenience and comfort of high speed rail easily surpasses flying. And in many cases, so does the speed. In most normal countries, rail is critical transport infrastructure. It's not a conspiracy.

Rail is critical infrastructure in the US, extremely critical. It's just not critical for passenger travel.

It is on the east coast. It doesn't always work, and it's a pretty crappy experience, but there isn't an alternative for moving that many people around the Northeast corridor.

Re: China laying tracks for 1,000km/h maglev trains

#333

Post by nine_k »

Shivetya wrote: post #215
saberience wrote: post #28

So, as someone that lived in New York for 6 years and California for 6 years, stories like this are incredibly depressing. The US is the world's largest economy and should be the shining example of amazing infrastructure, high-tech, green cities, and forward thinking policies. California is an especially egregious example in terms of infrastructure investment: If California was a country it would be the world's fifth…

The simple truth is, transportation projects are not created to solve problems but instead of pay off political affiliates, be they donors, family members, political parties, or the unions. Democrats have no more interest in high speed rail or energy independence than Republicans and for the same reason. Oh they will pay lip service saying otherwise but you can see the results of all those years they have made their…

What makes (high-speed or normal-speed) rail a success is a population density. A train moves a lot of people, that's its point. For it to work, these people need to work close to it, and move along it often.

Passenger railways make sense in places where one metropolis is close to another, and to yet another, etc, with suburbs commuting to these cities, too. This is what you see in Europe like Germany / Netherlands / France, this is what you see in central Japan, this is what you see in coastal China; all these places have very high population density, It works to an extent in US Northeast. All these places have dense and working passenger railways.

But they are a major investment that needs to be repaid, so they need a lot of use. I don't think I'd pay twice as much to get from NYC to Philadelphia twice as fast (say, 45 minutes instead of 90-100), and even 4 times as fast (say, 20 minutes). It would cost comparable to hiring an small airplane already, because there's no such a mass daily ridership. And most places in the US are much lower density. Airplanes are more economical over large sparse spaces.

Re: China laying tracks for 1,000km/h maglev trains

#335

Post by rangibaby »

MrFlynn wrote: post #260
jbay808 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mountain ranges didn't seem to be a problem for Japan's high speed rail network.

That's because they mostly avoided mountains on their high speed routes. The Tokaido and Sanyo Shinkansen mostly follow the coastline and the Tohoku Shinkansen mostly goes through a valley. There are lines that do bore through mountain ranges, but nothing to the extent of several hundred miles as would be required for a line through the California coastal range.

The maglev Shinkansen is literally a tunnel bored from Tokyo to Nagoya

Re: China laying tracks for 1,000km/h maglev trains

#336

Post by nine_k »

sandworm101 wrote: post #294
yourbandsucks wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

6h vs 18h for a trip are two different universes. Sleeper trains are cool and all but a shorter ride is better.

It is time but also energy. At 1000kph a train (at sea level) has massively more drag than an a380 at altitude. Even on electric, these things may have a greater carbon and financial cost than proponants want to admit.

An electric train can have near-zero carbon footprint, because electricity can be generated from nuclear fuel, sunlight, wind.

An electric airliner is still unattainable. Synthesizing jet fuel using electricity is of course possible, but must be massively less efficient than using that electricity directly in electric motors with efficiency > 0.95 and recuperative braking.

The carbon footprint of building the railway, likely with massive amounts of concrete to use to support the rails, and the steel for the rails (to say nothing of maglev infrastructure) — that's going to be huge. Building a pair of airports should be much less expensive.

Re: China laying tracks for 1,000km/h maglev trains

#337

Post by gerdesj »

saberience wrote: post #28

So, as someone that lived in New York for 6 years and California for 6 years, stories like this are incredibly depressing. The US is the world's largest economy and should be the shining example of amazing infrastructure, high-tech, green cities, and forward thinking policies. California is an especially egregious example in terms of infrastructure investment: If California was a country it would be the world's fifth…

"So, as someone that lived in New York for 6 years and California for 6 years, stories like this are incredibly depressing."

"If California was a country"

You (US) are now segueing into the introspective phase of Empire - that's when you learn a few lessons. When you realise that deploying more (aircraft)carriers than everyone else combined is simply a thing or spending way more on cough defence than anyone else is a thing as well, and it isn't as important as some other things.

Anyway, I hope your journey from Irvine to Los Angeles was at least comfortable.

The world turns ...

Re: China laying tracks for 1,000km/h maglev trains

#338

Post by nine_k »

dwags wrote: post #287
gok wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you imagine the impact of being able to train from San Diego to LA in 30mins? Yeah I can: approximately nothing. What exactly would you do with such a train? Neither LA nor San Diego have meaningful downtowns or local transit, so you'd still need a 45 minute drive on each end to get from/to where ever you're actually going. It's a 2.5 hour drive door-to-door today, so now you've just got a three-seat journey wh…

What is a meaningful downtown?

Something like Tokyo, NYC, London :) That is, you get off the high-speed train there, and immediately take a local subway train that takes you where you need in 10-20 minutes, or a taxi takes you where subway won't. Looking for parking is never your problem.

Re: China laying tracks for 1,000km/h maglev trains

#339

Post by lhopki01 »

NamTaf wrote: post #82

I’m not sure if it’s just lost in translation, but Wuhan to Guangzhou isn’t even 1000 km so I don’t know where they get the 2200 km they’re quoting. That’s likely a figure for GZ to Beijing. I have used the high speed line between Wuhan and GZ (and through to HK) several times. It’s currently a 4.5 hour direct journey (once per day) or a 5 hour journey if you change at GZ or Shenzhen. The HSR is 300ish km/h at the mo…

The article says that for 1000 km/h they would be using vacumn tubes. With vacumn tubes there's no air resistance and theoretically no need to continue adding power once you're at speed.

Re: China laying tracks for 1,000km/h maglev trains

#340

Post by thawaway1837 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #245
polemic wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> high speed rail is romanticism from bygone days when rail was the only alternative to long distance travel. air travel pretty much superseded it and is doing so all over the world. This isn't true. High speed rail is alive and well in Europe. Geography, politics and history are all significant factors that you can't explain so easily. > the advent of self driving and electric cars will doom them regardless Highly s…

But there are plenty of chinese infrastructure projects that have languished for lack of use. Look at the olympic venues. Once the novelty of ribbon cutting is over, once the recuring costs start piling up, this project too may slow down.

Nearly every country’s Olympic venues fall into disuse. That’s one reason why the Olympics are probably best held in the US or UK or France, etc. where countries already have the resources. When countries like Greece or China built these resources they basically went into disuse immediately after. Even the Olympic village built in Atlanta cost more to refurbish than it would hlikely have taken to build from scratch, because these things are built in tight deadlines, and only really need to last about 2 weeks, so all sorts of shortcuts which make them unviable for non olympics use end up being taken to get them done by the deadline.
Post reply on HN