Not fundamentally more efficient, UNLESS in a Hyperloop-like vacuum tube (as this one is). Let’s consider at near sea level.
At near sea level, the drag at those speeds is absolutely brutal. Airplanes win, although they’re harder to electrify.
If you extrapolate current Maglev designs to 1000km/h, for energy consumption per passenger mile is about 0.5kWh/(passenger-mile).
Airplanes are on the order of 100mpg/passenger, or 0.33kWh/(passenger-mile) even with the relatively low conversion of chemical energy to mechanical in a jet engine. An electric aircraft could get about 0.1-0.2kWh/(passenger-mile) with the same airframe if the battery chemistry is appropriate for that flight length. Improve the airframe, and <0.05kWh/(passenger-mile) is possible.
Length of electric flight is limited, but 1000km is possible with current chemistries. America’s near-term HSR routes are on the order of 500km, so electric flight is feasible.
This is why “Hyperloop” (or vacuum trains generally) are and were a good idea at the high end for high speed rail, in spite of all the mocking that Elon Musk incurred for the idea (which he/SpaceX popularized and funded student competitions for, although the idea is an old one). Otherwise airplanes win on efficiency.
The problem with planes is that they have to carry all their fuel/energy and to carry it costs more fuel/energy.
Most high-speed trains don't carry all their fuel with them. They get it from the network.
This will all change as battery technology improves but at the moment I cannot see it getting better trains.
That being said I expect that the 1000km/h speed will be like the Shanghai to Beijing track that got up to maximum speed a few times for the record and has since been reduced to make it more economical.
Even if this does happen and the train reaches 1,000 for a single trip and then drops back to a safer and more profitable speed of 600km/h or 800km/h it is still faster than what we have now and is a massive improvement.
American here. Public transportation is seen as inconvenient and for lower class people, so large transit projects like this get no traction. You will never see executives or politicians taking trains to work like you do in European countries. Except in NYC.
A lot of executives and politicians take the train between DC and NYC/Boston. The reason they do it is because the trains in the NE Corridor don't suck. This whole thing is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy: build crappy trains, people hate them. Build nice ones, people like them.
This is a common misconception. Overall US transit riders earn about the same as drivers. In metro areas like Chicago, SFBA, or Washington DC, the median income of transit users is significantly higher than drivers.
>Public transportation is seen as inconvenient and for lower class people, so large transit projects like this get no traction. You will never see executives or politicians taking trains to work like you do in European countries. Except in NYC.
I disagree. This is a chicken-or-egg problem. Nobody is inherently against public transit. Having commuted in a few cities in North America, it's far more comfortable than sitting in traffic. If you have a good system, i think people would use it. The GO Train in the Greater Toronto Area is a good example; it's filled to the brim with white-collar city workers.
I knew plenty of people in the suburbs of Dallas who were against public transportation and any expansion of DART out to their towns. It was usually accompanied by talk of "that element" coming up from the city to rob their houses. It was fucking ridiculous, but unfortunately these people exist and need to be dealt with in order to get transit projects through.
The problem is DART needs the outlying towns to join it in order to run anything there. The NIMBYs simply pressured the town into not agreeing to join, so there was no way to do this.
Speak for yourself. In Chicago, we've got the metra [0] which goes to the far out suburbs (L goes to close ones [1]) and there are plenty of upper class people that ride it for their daily commute.
Other, and actually main, reason is that good public transport decreases cost of land, it is basically designed to do so: it makes more places liveable/jobs reachable, so there is effectively more land for the same amount of people. So everyone will vote against or they lose their pensions.
Want to fix this? Sure, easy, just scrap the democracy and just don't ask people, send those who object, to "re-education" camps. Or scrap market economy: if all land is government-owned, it won't be an issue at all.
More and better public transport in EU? For same reasons: less democracy and less market economy. More government-owner land, larger fraction of renters who just want cheaper rents (and public transport gives it to them), and they vote in the right direction, less legal opportunities for NIMBYsm.
I'm not convinced that, as you say, decreasing cost of land is the main reason. A simple counterexample would be London which has great public transport and ridiculous prices of land. On the contrary, public transport projects like Crossrail actually increase prices of land and property in affected areas.
Now try to force Americans survive in the abysmal living conditions of the average Londoner. That city is absurdly overregulated, and expensive as hell.
> Now try to force Americans survive in the abysmal living conditions of the average Londoner. That city is absurdly overregulated, and expensive as hell.
“Want to fix this? Sure, easy, just scrap the democracy and just don't ask people, send those who object, to "re-education" camps. Or scrap market economy: if all land is government-owned, it won't be an issue at all.“
> Want to fix this? Sure, easy, just scrap the democracy and just don't ask people, send those who object, to "re-education" camps. Or scrap market economy: if all land is government-owned, it won't be an issue at all.
I'm just going to assume that you've never been to major Asian cities.
Very interesting conclusion there, "all countries with good infrastructure are not democratic" , it also contradicts the fact that you have public roads, you logic applies perfectly for that too.
I strongly disagreed with them on this particular thread, but I don't get why having pro-China views should be automatically considered "extremely suspicious"?
Obviously i am not "pro-China" lol. And i don't advocate actually destroying market economy and (less confidently), democracy.
All i am trying to show is that public transport in the U.S. is such failure only as an undesirable externality of strong market and democratic institutions. We should probably bear with it because trying to fix risks, or directly requires, breaking too many other, important things.
I would much rather live in the U.S. than God forbid, China. I still prefer EU where i do live which seems to be good middle ground. And yeah, in my place (Cyprus), public transport sucks, and mainly because of democracy/good institutions (taxi drivers union won't let improve buses) and high living standards (low density - most can afford a detached house with a big plot - but it makes buses routes long and not dense, and their ridership low).
For the same reason pro-rape views should be automatically suspicous. An important difference between the moral and intellectual domains is that there's such a thing as an 'innocent intellectual mistake' but there's no such thing as an 'innocent moral mistake'
You can gauge the insincerity of the project by the mendacity of the title. There is an area of Texas known universally as "Central Texas". The "Texas Central" project goes nowhere near it.
It's a rail line from Houston to Dallas. It's not going to happen, unless the legislature goes full bore socialize-the-losses and subsidizes it.
>> You can gauge the insincerity of the project by the mendacity of the title. There is an area of Texas known universally as "Central Texas". The "Texas Central" project goes nowhere near it.
This is an incredibly bizarre criticism. Perhaps you are bitter that the project will not benefit you immediately? I live in Austin, and I am a bit disappointed about that myself, so I sympathize.
One of the many state/public attempts to bring HSR to Texas was built on a "Texas T" route (or "Texas T-Bone", some branding like that) that would have lines from San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas all meet at Austin, so that if you wanted to go from Houston to Dallas, or Houston to San Antonio, it would go through Austin. Unfortunately as I recall (memory fuzzy, very open to correction) this was most recently attempted in the era of Republican Governors saying "F U" to any Obama administration money, even if it would help their state...
It is understandably harder for a private group to start off with a three-line rail network than a one-line rail network, than it would be for a group working with the federal government. Hence when Texas Central Railways that took up the banner, they settled on Houston to Dallas as the most profitable pairing of cities. This is evidenced partly by, at least in the past, that city pairing being the most profitable airline route operated by Southwest.
I followed some of the original proposals for routes, and some of them went through College Station directly, versus the chosen route, which goes through Grimes County stop with a rapid bus to College Station. I would have loved to see those happen, but it turns out they would have had many multiples more eminent domain issues. The current route minimizes private land issues by hugging an existing utility corridor as much as it can, while also balancing land that is easy to build on, and having lower environmental impact.
It may seem a bizarre take to you, however after decades of reading titles of legislative bills and "projects" it's a simple test whose results stand up over time. I use it all the time.
You can never say never, the Texas Leg. is notoriously susceptible to political influence by monied or powerful individual. But I doubt it.
It will also take support of several powerful people within the leg (the speaker, and Lt. Governor), as well as the Governor to get the eminent domain condemnations done without interference.
But land developers get local governments (most often), and sometimes the Texas government to use public funds to build roads to increase the value of land to be "developed" all the time. It's the main way that new roads get built around here. Then they use a "private utility district" (authorized by the friendly leg.) with taxing authority to fund the installation of streets and sewer, etc. and voila, now they can make billions selling houses. All without risking a dime. It's a nice gig using tax dollars to funnel money to millionaires, if you've got the right friends.
NIMBYs would block any of the eminent domain needed to build it. Not to mention infrastructure construction in this country is rife with corruption and incompetence. This results in HSR having massive price tags and taxpayers not wanting to foot the bill.
I assume there are already tracks between the major cities, probably used today mostly for materials and not people, so can't you put a new track near the existing one, this land would already have low value since trains are already passing there.
Those tracks you reference are owned by the freight companies, not the gov. Even a good chunk of the rail lines that Amtrak uses are merely being rented from the freight companies. The Northeast regional line that connects Boston -> NYC -> DC is one of the few lines in which Amtrak themselves own it.
Thanks, I did not know this fact. So the only hope would be then that the private companies would invest into improving the tracks or the government nationalize the tracks(buy them most probably).
The problem is that the freight operators habitually defer maintenance. Most trackage and crossings are in a poor state of repair. Updates would require fixing the backlog.
About 25 years ago in Jr High school we watched a brief propaganda video about maglev trains touting The Future. Corny music coupled with bold narration. It was as comical and sad then as America's progress on high speed rail since then.
Yeah - this is why I find that argument very specious. Florida has a higher population density than France but there's no TGV equivalent running from Jacksonville to Miami
It's only one of the arguments. Florida has neither the political incentive nor the restrictions on air traffic to put pressure on government to build these things.
But the excuse is wrongly used, nobody is expecting bullet trains in Alaska or low populated places. So mostly people/politics are to blame and not terrain or density.
Where is America on HSR?