12.06.07
Maglev and High Speed Rail: An Investment For Our Future
At first, high speed rail (HSR) was just an idea promoted by dreamers and idealists. Then the Japanese actually built high speed passenger rail lines. Magnetic levitation (maglev) passenger rail was a techno-fantasy, until the Europeans and Chinese developed reliable, high speed maglev systems. The question is, why haven’t we done anything like this in this country?
Popular Mechanics has a vision piece that can help us see where we should be heading. Their maglev article is light on the technical and economic details, and completely ignores the social and political transformation that will be required in order to establish maglev and high speed rail as important components of our national transportation infrastructure. Even so, I recommend that we read the article and that we seriously consider its points.
Living where I live, I fairly often see traffic backups on the main Los Angeles to Las Vegas route, I-15. On some Fridays, traffic heading Northeast backs up all the way to the junction of the 210 and 605 freeways. On some Sundays, traffic heading back toward the Los Angeles area will be backed up all the way into Victorville. Why? Because the leaders of California and Nevada have not yet decided that it is worthwhile to invest taxpayer funding in eliminating that traffic congestion.
Driving around Southern California, I get to see traffic tie-ups along the 15, the 215, the 210, the 605, the 10, the 5, and the 805 (all of which are Interstates, so should be I-15 and so on), along with the 91, the 57, and the 60 (all of which are state highways, so should be CA-91 and so on), the 395 (which is or was a US highway, so should be US-395), and (to a lesser degree) a host of surface streets and highways. For the local traffic, neither HSR nor maglev offer the convenience and flexibility that commuters require. But for longer-range commuting, such as traveling from Southern California to Las Vegas for a weekend, or traveling from Rancho Cucamonga to Anaheim as a daily trek, a well-run rail system is the future.
All we are waiting for now is for our political leaders to have the nerve to declare that this is a priority, including a funding priority. We’ll grumble for five years or so of taxes, but once we get to cut our daily commuting time by half, and the occasional fun trip’s commute time by two-thirds or more, suddenly those very politicians will be heroes.
Infrastructure investments that Southern California Must Make Now.
This is part of a series of articles meant to highlight the fact that our present course is unsustainable. The primary issue in this article is commuting time, which is unbearably long. In a recent workplace, I was staying just twenty miles away, but it took over an hour to get to work. Fifteen to twenty miles, by the way, is about how fast a reasonably fit person can travel on a bicycle in one hour. My present workplace is about six miles away from where I’m staying, and it took me about fifteen minutes from driveway to driveway this morning.
For those who maintain that maglev and HSR are not practical, we can see that they certainly are practical just by looking at the examples of Europe and Japan. Yahoo recently linked both of these articles and this search from their front page, part of a special focus on maglev trains and HSR.
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Tags: infrastructure, transportation, mass transit, political
