Bozo is right. They might still do a stopwatch from the air with this type of thing. I haven't seen it in a very long time around here, but we live on different coasts.
Yep, that's exactly how I feel. When I'm in a car with someone driving 75 mph on a long trip I feel bored just watching them drive. I couldn't imagine trying to hold that speed for the whole trip if I were the one driving. And it annoys the engineer in me that the law should require that I do so. If the car, the road, and the driver can safely deal with much higher speeds, so be it. Let the driver be the judge of the proper speed to drive at, not some politicians in an ivory tower who impose these limits. The limits used to be set at the 95th percentile. In effect, the drivers decided their own speed limit by driving faster or slower. We really need to go back to that. We need even more to get the marginal drivers (the few who can't even handle 65mph) off the roads for good since they cause the most accidents. The old 95th percentile system worked just fine up until the 1970s. It's pathetic to think that the infinitely less safe, less stable cars of the 1950s and 1960s more or less had the same speed limits on Interstate highways as exist today. In fact, 70 mph in a lot of those cars actually felt borderline unsafe, yet they were allowed that in many places. Now my mom's 300C and my brother's Mark VIII feel half asleep at 100 mph. Try to hold 70 mph behind the wheel of one of those on a trip of any length without falling asleep behind the wheel. Automotive technology and road technology have advanced but nowhere is this reflected in traffic laws. Although a lot of people here pick on me for my love of trains, at least the trains today are legally run at twice the speed of those in the 1960s, and are still much safer than their predecessors despite this. It could be the same for autos.
It may be old news to me as it happened in April but I'm still blown away by the videos. I thought it was kind of funny that they had to use a jet for the aerial shots. Remember that this is not a maglev. It's regular steel wheels on steel rails just like any subway. Same track guage in fact. Even though this was a test at nearly twice normal running speed it was still deemed safe enough to have reporters along the ride and spectators on the bridges. That says a lot for the built-in margin of safety in the system. It's a pity this hasn't lit a fire under the behinds of us Americans to build a similar system, and break France's record. I personally feel 400 mph on steel wheels/steel rail is just on the edge of possible.
Merc'll have to get her to divorce her husband, Rob Reid (founder of listen.com), first.
$20 million and up but that's not much more building a road (and maintenence is less). Speaking of roads, I remember the cost for Boston's big dig was obscene. And the DOT spent something like half a billion on a highway interchange in Texas IIRC.
around $20 million
512 per set but two sets can be coupled doubling capacity to 1024. At up to 15 trains per hour that's over 15,000 people per hour compared to 2,000 per hour per lane of highway at typical auto occupancy rates.
See here:
Basically any place there is a heavily traveled air route and/or interstate highways you can replace it with a viable high-speed rail route. Don't forget to look at the enormous indirect subsidies air and auto get. Put those on a level playing field with trains, and I'd guess that 75% of the travel in the US would be via rail of some type. Rail wins hands down in terms of efficiency, cost, and speed compared to auto and air. Well, air sometimes has a slight edge in speed over 1000 miles but that's more than cancelled once the negative effects are taken into account.
I don't know where you came up with these numbers, but they're flat out wrong. A "light" rail system costs nearly 10x as much per mile as a lane of freeway, and carries only 1/10th the number of people on it. So, they puts the light rail at a 100:1 disadvantage to a freeway in terms of cost per person.
Wikipedia has costs for light rail systems. Google turns up lots of links for the cost of a highway per lane. JTR just lives in his own world when it comes to trains and cars.
The total output of the locomotives was 25,000 HP, (about double normal) and they were running a much shorter trainset (3 cars instead of 8 or 10). Both things were necessary to reach the speed record. In regular service the locomotives develop 12,000 but only about 8,000 HP of that is needed to maintain 300 kph on level train. At 512 seats, that comes to about 16 HP per seat to cruise. As for being worth it, this compares more than favorably to any type of road vehicle. Find me a passenger car which requires only 16 HP per passenger to maintain 300 kph. It doesn't exist and likely never will.
The track has much wider turns than standard railways (4000 meters radius minimum), is heavier rail, and is maintained to a higher standard. Other than that, it's regular track. The turns are banked of course, but at the speeds in question you must have much wider turns than conventional railways.
Look, we can go back and forth with anecdotal evidence all day long. Mismanagement or poor management and cronyism driving up the cost of a particular project doesn't mean all freeways are that expensive.
This isn't a light rail system. And light rail systems often don't make money because it seems politicians purposely put them in places where they're doomed to failure just to say "we tried and it won't work so let's just keep everyone in their cars."
Thank you, Tim. The numbers for the big dig in Boston are even more obscene. $14.6 billion for 7.5 miles of underground roads. Literally a money pit.
And that's pretty much how we arrived where we are. GM et al would buy up trolley (nowadays termed light rail) lines, not maintain them, cut service, etc. Eventually they would shut the line down due to the "poor ridership" which occurred on account of their neglect. They would replace it with bus service, for a while anyway. In time they even discontinued the bus service. That's how GM and the others got people to buy into cars-by literally removing all the other choices. Even Microsoft wouldn't sink to that level.
Article about the system.
The things you mentioned drive up the cost of roads also. It's an across the board problem with public works projects which needs to be fixed.
There's way too much tinfoil hat / conspiracy thinking going on in this thread. If all these light rail lines / public transportation schemes were so profitable and useful in the past and some evil corporation shut them down to help their own selfish goals then the free market would worked (as it always does) and another company would have stepped in to fill the void left by it to satisfy customer demand and would have made money.
