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

asiatimes.com

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

#471

Post by mac01021 »

jdnenej wrote: post #469
mac01021 wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ammortize the environmental impact of building the rail network over all the rail trips, it might swing the other way. Especially if someone figures out carbon neutral air travel in the next decade.

If we are factoring in imaginary future tech then someone could invent carbon neutral trains

That's theoretically true, but more far-fetched considering the amount of steel involved.

Synthesizing jet fuel from atmospheric carbon, directly or indirectly, is an active area of research and will likely happen at some point.

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

#472

Post by kalleboo »

hinkley wrote: post #329
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…

infrastructure literally and figuratively underlays parts of society. Boston has infrastructure problems to a degree Seattle doesn't experience because when the Seattle core burned to the ground, it was rebuilt in some critical areas with newer infrastructure and thinking. If you were a Bostonian or Chicagoan in that era, you were patting yourself on the back because your town hadn't burned in 20 years, and would not…

> Similarly, residents of Tokyo were 'forced' into cellphones because even the 'burbs were so dense that installing new data lines was hugely expensive

And yet now Japan has a nationwide FTTH grid to the point where the telco has discontinued new ADSL signups.

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

#473

Post by RugnirViking »

adventured wrote: post #226
noodlesUK wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If either of these things were actually the factors blocking high speed rail in the US, Europe wouldn’t have trains either. Eminent domain exists, and US infrastructure only feels old because we never spend money on it.

That's not exactly accurate. Western Europe installed its high-speed rail decades ago. They could not do it today. The US also could have done it in the 1960s or 1970s and made a disastrous decision not to. You can see proof of that in the fact that Western Europe is barely maintaining its infrastructure properly today. Their spending on such has frequently fallen below US spending levels as a share of GDP. That's ev…

Why can't/don't they (the government) simply invest? what exactly has changed that prevents it? Where else is spending up/revenue down?

It seems like just about every government function has had it's budget effectively reduced over the years - where is it going?

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

#474

Post by weberc2 »

microcolonel wrote: post #392
weberc2 wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that, but it seems strictly better than, for example, blowing up a trail full of oil cars.

If the goalposts move as fast as these trains are marketed to move, I'm sure we could find all sorts of things worse than the already terrible tragedy of a deliberate derailment, explosion, or sabotage of a high speed train.

The goalposts didn't move, you were just reminded that conventional trains frequently carry explosive freight.

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

#475

Post by saalweachter »

adinobro wrote: post #420
saalweachter wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would note that not only do you need to acquire a lot of property on straight lines, you need to do so while resolving to not benefit anywhere between your start and end points . Non-stop is an important element of a truly fast train. Firstly because you don't want to be constantly stopping and starting, but also because you don't want to detour your route through a dozen cities which aren't conveniently on a strai…

That isn't true. You have multiple tracks for a reason. Generally, you have three separate trains on the same tracks and a sidetrack that goes into the cities or two tracks that split before the city and merge after the city. 1. Direct - They have the least stops and are the fastest. They don't go into towns. They go around them. 2. Express - They only stop at the largest towns. 3. Regular - They are the slowest and…

This is about routes, not lines or spacing.

If you have three cities on a perfectly straight line, you can run your high-speed trains as above.

If the city in the middle is not on a straight line path between the two end cities, now your train tracks need to curve to connect the three. If you make the curve a large enough, smooth enough curve, it won't hurt your maximum speed much, but when you're talking "1000 km/hr" ... and in any case, you're also adding miles to your route, and if you make your route 20% longer to weave from city to city along the way, you are also make it 20% slower.

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

#476

Post by rhino369 »

mac01021 wrote: post #465
barry-cotter wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this is an excuse i have repeated myself, but it is just that, an excuse. have you actually been to china? i have never seen such sprawl. shanghai is massive and sprawling. but yet, they (china) have extremely efficient and unbelievably cheap trains and subways. also, i have never seen a cleaner subway than what i saw in shanghai. Shanghai’s massive but I don’t think sprawling is really the right word. Where people…

Does sprawling imply not dense? As densely constructed as the city of Shanghai may be, 2-hour commutes are not uncommon because millions of people live that far from the city center.

>Does sprawling imply not dense?

In this context, yes.

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

#477

Post by danans »

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…

> air travel pretty much superseded it and is doing so all over the world

And it has the problem of a massive carbon footprint to go along with it. If we are serious about combatting climate change, we need to find ways to move as people with as much throughput and convenience as airplanes today without burning as much fossil fuel.

Given that electric commercial flight is a way off, high speed electric trains are an existing technology to achieve that.

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

#478

Post by zaroth »

chii wrote: post #425
zaroth wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need to get glossy eyed over China. Yes, there are advantages to a totalitarian regime where the population isn’t allowed to own land. There are also modern day concentration camps and mass organ harvesting. Unfortunately you don’t really get one without tending to get the other.

that's a false dichotomy. The USA's rail system is shit because of lack of investment, and misaligned incentives. It's cheaper to fly, or drive, than to invest in rail, even though rail is very efficient (and i suspect, more environmentally friendly than either of the above).

Rail, at the utilization rate that is observed in the real world in the US, is actually less efficient than a 2-passenger automobile, per passenger-mile.

Note that average real-world occupancy rates of vehicles is 1.5, so that is not to say that rail is more efficient than automobiles. But merely 33% more efficient per passenger-mile than automobiles at the current fleet mpg of 25mpg, which to me was very surprising.

At 60mpg and above (EVs in particular) the automobile at existing occupancy rates is more efficient than rail per passenger-mile.

Part of the challenge with rail efficiency is that it's a fixed point-to-point transit and not a dynamic door-to-door transit. So getting from Point A to Point B has significant wasted overhead distance traveled.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/features/carbon-fo...

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

#479

Post by danans »

exien wrote: post #433
puranjay wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Olympics are, and always have been, PR projects. I can't think of any country that actually uses its Olympic infrastructure adequately.

All of the venues used for the 2010 Vancouver Olympic games are used extensively, the only two I don't personally know if they are used extensively are the Whistler Sliding Centre, and the Whistler Olympic Park. Canada Hockey Place (aka Rogers Arena): Vancouver Canucks NHL team home stadium and concerts. Cypress Mountain: Very popular local mountain for ski/board and snowshoeing. Pacific Coliseum: Used for PNE, conce…

> All of the venues used for the 2010 Vancouver Olympic games are used extensively

Vancouver seems like an exception though. Canada is a wealthy country where the average person is likely to participate in sports (skating, hockey, skiing) that facilities were built for.

Also they didn't have to build new ski resorts, since the area already had some of the best ski resorts in the world.

It's a very different scenario in a country where people have far less discretionary income to spend on sporting venues.

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

#480

Post by zachguo »

bpicolo wrote: post #276
toephu2 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite true, in China the government usually tries to compensate you fairly for your house and cannot "force" you to leave (although I'm sure it happens). https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/dec/01/chinese-highwa...

> All land in China is state-owned, and residents are typically offered a fraction of their home's original value in compensation.

This is utterly false. They are usually compensated 3 times the market value. Simply ask common people in China, everybody wants their houses to be torn down by the government. Sometimes the government cannot afford it, that's why you may see a block of hutong or city-village in a fancy CBD.
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