Asymmetrical Information

Monorail!

What's that?

Monorail!

(apologies to the Simpsons)

Actually, for those of us who are married to train-geeks...uh, I mean "rail enthusiasts", we've known about this for quite some time. These things are energy efficient, very fast and environmentally safer (especially because of the low energy). Unfortunately, the demand for this kind of transprotation is not to get to the airport faster, but city to city travel, in less time than it takes you to go to the airport.(Boston to New York in less than 90 minutes, New York to Philly in less than 30 minutes, Washington DC another hour after that?).

It'll never happen here, but it's a lovely idea. As a non-libertarian I like the occational government boondoggle. And I certainly like this one.

Any rail that does not also carry freight is a waste of good right-of-way. The government does not subsidize elevators for vertically deployed business, why pay for the equivalent for horizontally deployed?

But the government heavily subsidizes passenger airlines. What's the dif?

Kate: But the government heavily subsidizes passenger airlines.

. . . and highways.

Highways pay their own way and then some via the gas tax. California's highway system went to hell when Jerry Brown started diverting gas tax money to Tunerville Trolly schemes.
In a larger sense, it is only because of highways that the United States succeeds. Highways are freedom ways.

I don't dispute that Walter. Although you are wrong if you think Gas taxes really subsidize the roads that much. I don't really have time to look for the numbers, but that's just goofy.

An argument that could reasonablly be made for highways is that it is, in fact, part of the freight system and, therefore, is not entirely passenger driven.

I do, however, think it is a VERY good idea (especially in this day and age) to have a strong rail system just in case the planes and cars don't work for some reason.

Always good to have a back-up, as a good friend of mine who took the train back from New Orleans on 9/11 can tell you.

Kate,

It is true that the gas taxes collected are used more for other things (than highways and roads) than the people pay into them.

Also. The DMV in CA puts out a nice little chart letting people know where their license fees and other charges go. DMV administrative costs if I remember is about 12%. Roads and Transportation is less than 30% if I remember. The fees go to alot of other things than roads.

While it is true that railroads are a necessity- Trains can carry 1,000 times more weight than a cargo plane- it is due to that necessity and demand that keeps the valid routes alive.

What we should steer clear of is making additional (non demanded) not needed routes subsidized by the government. What that would be is the opposite of productivity and bad for the environment. We shoudn't have engines running empty trains with no demand.

While the federal government has subsidized the airline industry heavily in 2001. It is not general practice for the government to give the airlines subsidies. Airline companies routinely go belly up. There used to be 12 then 6 now more under different names like Southwest and Jet Blue etc. I'd be interested to see what percentage of revenue the government is responsible for subsizing airlines. It is probably (even with the 2001 figures less than 1% over the last 20 years.

By the way, it is not a subsidy if the government purchases contracts for airplane manufacturers to make planes for them for the Department of Defense. There are a couple manufacturers who are pitted against each other (they compete) and the plane that best suits the needs in the design phase and comes in at a good price will win the bid.

Maybe the bid process isn't perfect but it isn't a subsidy.

Not trying to stir the pot. Just thought I'd post all of these train accidents that's at FoxNews...

Train Accidents

Wish the article had said how far the train travels in that 8 minute ride. If the acceleration and deceleration are equal and constant, and it just reaches 432Kph before it starts to decelerate, the train could cover only 28.8 kilometers = 18 miles. That's faster than a taxi ride, but not as convenient as a taxi that picks you up at your building and drops you as near as possible to the ticketing desk. If you've got to walk a few blocks to the train station, wait for a train, then walk around the terminal to the right airline, the taxi ride might be faster. At American taxi fares, trains tend to be cheaper when they do go the right direction (because there isn't a railroad employee riding along for every 1 to 3 passengers), but I suspect that $6 is more than a Chinese taxi ride costs.

In the above distance calculation, the acceleration was 0.5m/s or about 1/20 g - not a lot, but more than enough to notice that the train seems to be tilted to the rear for half the trip and to the front the other half. Other assumptions give longer distances. If the train was able to cruise at over 400Kph for longer than it spent accelerating and decelerating, then it would really be worthwhile, but you'd be going to another city on it rather than out to the airport. However, it would take a whole lot of people traveling between two cities to make it financially sound.

I guess that's the whole point. Whether or not enough people would pay to get from one city to another via a train that is 1/2 the speed of an airplane ...in mass quantities.

The airline industry has an advantage because they are already 99% of the speedy travel from city to city marketplace (not counting individuals in cars). It would be a big risk for anyone to make the astronomical investment to get the "Separate" fast rail system in place between any city.

There might be enough demand between Sacramento and LA or San Franciso. But I doubt it. There is an Amtrak that covers that distance between Sacramento and SanFrancisco that a friend of mine rode on for a year. He saw the same set of people every day doing that trip. Will that same set of people be willing to change to a faster train for more money? Or is there enough people who fly the puddle jumper commuter planes that might be interested in changing what they spend to a fast train.
None of us know.

My point is that I don't think it the government should invest heavily into keeping a rail system that isn't in demand.

The routes that are in demand keep the rail system alive sufficiently already.

It would be interesting to see an analysis of the relative energy consumption of air and maglev transporation. The maglev trains are going fast enough for air resistance to be very significant, whereas (jet) planes spend most of their time up where there's a lot less air. On the other hand, there's enery used for the climb, not all of which is recovered in the descent, and jet engines are probably less efficient than the electrical propulsion of the maglev. Also need to consider the energy cost of the rail and structure on which the maglev runs..

> It would be interesting to see an analysis of the relative energy consumption of air and maglev transporation.

It might be interesting, but it is unlikely to be decisive.

If energy costs were decisive, we'd go everywhere by barge or bicycle.

We don't because time matters as do other costs.

Most recent passenger rail proposals have had an interesting property. The product of the proposed ridership and the proposed fare usually is less than the interest on the construction costs. Yes, they usually end up charging more, but the actual ridership is almost always less, so it's unclear that these projects can recover their startup costs. And, many/most end up needing an operating subsidy as well.

Speaking of government boondoggles related to maglevs...

The Transrapid maglev system itself (which is what the Chinese are using) has been more or less usable since 1983, at which time a test track was built in Northern Germany. That track was finished in 1987, and the trains have been (literally) running in circles here in Germany ever since, despite the fact that since 1991 (!) the trains have been certified as a secure transportation vehicle.

Of course there have been various plans to put the trains into use during the last 13 years, most notably a Hamburg-Berlin connection (at one point even suggested as Hamburg-Berlin-Prague) that was in the planning stages around 1993-2000, and several city center-airport connections much like the one built in Shanghai now, but all of them so far have failed to materialize either due to federal/state governments or industry reneging on their pledges to finance building maglev tracks, and/or due to various special interest groups (mostly eco groups and farmers' organizations) delaying the process through the courts until the plans fell apart.

The governments usually pulled the money because, well, Germany's economy has been stagnating for most of the last decade and the money just isn't there in their budgets. Industry usually killed the projects because demand estimates showed most planned tracks to be huge money-losers. I'm a train afficionado and I'd love to see the Transrapid succeed (at this point I don't even care if it's just elsewhere or also in Germany one day), but as the Chinese are finding out, customer demand for it just doesn't seem to be there right now to make it economically worthwhile.

Wish the article had said how far the train travels in that 8 minute ride.

The official Transrapid website mentions that the maglevs take about 5 km to accelerate to 300 km/h. If I understand the technology correctly, it provides for an almost constant rate of acceleration which (assuming I didn't screw up my math) means it would take a little over a minute to get to 300 km/h, and a little under two minutes for 432 km/h.

Nevertheless, I'm guessing that's under ideal circumstances because the actual Shanghai track length is pretty close to your estimate and therefore the train probably doesn't accelerate quite so quickly and/or consistently. I've found it given as between 30 and 33 km in various sources; the official site linked above says 30 km.

In Japan, which has (relatively) good conditions for this kind of train, they estimate a maglev track would cost three times as much per mile as bullet train tracks, and I've heard of unresolved problems like vacuums created by trains rushing past each other in tunnels causing train windows to pop out.
For all this, you reduce travel time between two major cities (Tokyo and Osaka) from 2 hours (bullet train) to 1 hour (maglev). Considering the differences in cost, I'd say maglev right now is a prestige project more than anything else.

I love trains. My dad and maternal grandpa were locomotive engineers, and I love the ride through Feather River Canyon and down the California Ccoast. Like most railfans I have put up with a lot of crap from railroad workers secure in their seniority protected positions.
Passenger only systems continue to eat enormous amounts of money with comparatively little return. Most public transit systems resort to punishing drivers as a means of increasing ridership. Few communities are willing to accept the population desity to even approach making passenger rail pay off. Freight would help.

Incidently, for those who do not believe that highways pay their way, check the cost of off road property.

At six dollars a ride in Shanghai, I would seriously sit there all day peeling off tens and saying "once more around the block, my good man."

Why were the eco groups holding this up? The eco nuts I know can't stop talking about how trains will save us all.

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