Could America’s fastest train whisk us away from $4-a-gallon gas guzzlers?
Thanks to a $45 million infusion from a transportation bill signed by President Bush in early June, there could someday be a magnetic levitating train, or “maglev,†soaring from Disneyland to Las Vegas at a maximum speed of 310 mph — 180 mph on average.
After the research phase is complete in about three years, the private partnership behind the effort, American Magline Group, comes to its biggest crossroads: obtaining $12 billion in funding for construction.
Like a lot of other futuristic things out of Epcot Center, it doesn’t have the economics to make it work.
Your driveway leads to the road out front. The road leads to a bigger road. That bigger road leads to a local turnpike. That local turnpike leads to a local highway. That local highway leads to an interstate highway.
The maglev like today’s Amtrak trains is the interstate highway. Okay, now what about getting you from home?
Any system, to be successful and ultimately not a tool of oppression and control of the citizenry, which they’d sense and not like as they have so many forced initiatives towards mass transit, would need to allow ownership of their own vehicles of their choosing, drive them whenever they want, and go wherever they like, just as they can now.
So, if we long distance rail, the ideal thing will likely be a standards system for mating road cars to rail probably via some sort of carrier flatbed. Whether gas, electric, hybrid, whatever, the undercarriage of every car could have fixture points that mated to said carriers when they got to the station. Drive up, slowly get into place, stop the engine, clamp goes the system, you get out and it takes the car onto the train and you simply choose your disembarkation point.
We’ll need local rail loops, underground segments, etc. and they will need to be in interacting hierarchies as existing roadways are now.
The biggest problem will be that people already live where most of these would need to be, and the only other places left are raised systems above existing roads, and people aren’t going to want to lose their second floor window view to a raised track.
Which brings us to the second failure point of these futuristic systems: the human element. We want to be free, and when we try to limit that, the populace will inevitably revolt subversively and individually, and if it continues long enough collectively and the first place that happens in the USA is at the voting booth and every politician knows it.
This set of problems with the current transportation infrastructure is not going away any time soon and big ideas and grand schemes are not going to fix it. It will be slow, it will be torturous and it will be human.
If I had to say a way to go, it would be towards research on electric and related vehicles, it would be to start overriding the reflex nimbyism of the nation when it comes to our aging and creaky electric infrastructure so we can beef that up, and expansion of the electric infrastructure to allow charge up as quick and convenient as gas stations and comparable in cost to what we paid a few years ago. Above all else, a move to nuclear reactors as coal and oil are running down, solar and wind require absurd real estate (and on that mark alone guaranteed to do environmental damage versus the theoretical damage of a nuclear plant IF it fails) and are utterly inefficient for a modern technological society, and fusion is still a ways off.
Failing that, solid state fusion ala cold fusion where batteries charge themselves overnight and need only hydrogen which can be gotten from water slowly by using excess electricity for electrolysis or we can use the boron-water reaction to get it and then send the boron oxide back for recycling at centralized plants. That would at least come close to not butting up against the people and their desires and tendencies.
But the $12B? 1 month in Iraq. Piece of cake, eh?