All trains should go 431 km/h
Just returned to Beijing after a little mini-visit to Chongqing and Shanghai. The trip was good; Chongqing is probably the #1 up-and-coming city in China, and Shanghai, it turns out, is much better when you have friends there. (Go figure.)
This being my second visit to Shanghai, I wasn’t as concerned with traipsing around gawking at touristy schlock as I was with things like drinking beer and eating food and pontificating with other beer-drinking food-eaters about the state of life in China, but I did reserve one touristy thing for my last day.
Upon arrival, I had a ride into town, so the opportunity wasn’t there, but I made my way back to Pudong Airport all by my lonesome, which meant I could feel free to go and do one of those nerdy things that often seems to entertain me more than the poor people who get stuck with me: I rode the Shanghai maglev train.
At risk of being wrong, I think this is the only, or at least the first, high speed maglev train available for public use anywhere in the world. It’s not a spectacularly long ride (it takes all of 7 or 8 minutes), but in that brief time it shows you what train riding ought to be like. “Maglev”, for those of you who don’t care to waste all of your time reading about new technology, stands for “magnetic levitation”, and basically it means that the train is suspended above its track by magnets embedded in the track surface. This means the train doesn’t touch the track, which means less friction, which in turn allows for theoretically greater speeds than trains which are in contact with the track. Wikipedia can explain it better than that.
So, though this ride to the airport was brief, and even though you have to trek out to god knows where on the outskirts of Shanghai to catch the damned thing (apparently they have plans to run it into Shanghai’s central station, but this hasn’t happened yet), it does show you in those few minutes what riding a train could be. It reaches a top speed in those 7 minutes of 431 km/h (267 MPH).
But more importantly, it got me thinking about priorities. Priorities of, for example, my home country, from which I am currently estranged, living on the other side of the earth. The war in Iraq, which is not actually being paid for by taxpayers but actually by loans granted to the United States from other countries (such as China, ironically), costs somewhere on the order of 1 or 2 billion dollars a day, depending on who’s completely bogus assessment you choose to believe on any given day. Of course, one could certainly argue that we have achieved our goal, which is to place our troops on top of the oil we need to keep the country going, so I suppose from a purely strategic standpoint, the war is worth whatever the U.S. puts into it to continue getting the lifeblood it so desperately needs.
But it does bring to mind what else you could do with a billion dollars a day, and how you could reconfigure that equation so that the oil in question wasn’t quite so desperately needed. Me, I imagine the United States actually improving its infrastructure internally, to enable more efficient state-to-state commerce and trade, and in such a way that some of the energy needs could be converted from oil only to oil and a number of other alternatives.
The United States was built on highways. Cars are a part of our culture. I did my own cross-country journey in 1997, and it was fantastic. I love that incredible feeling of the open road laying out in front of you waiting for you to explore; driving’s certainly as much a part of my DNA as it is any other American’s. But times change, and the highway system has one major problem: it relies on one, and only one, fuel source. Sure, you can try to make it with corn (incredibly inefficient and a great way to destroy farmland) or sorghum, or hemp, but it’s just a different configuration of the same thing.
So, close your eyes and imagine a maglev train running on the eastern corridor…from Boston to New York, and on to Philadelphia and Washinton. Not replacing the current Amtrak system, but in addition to Amtrak. The maglev would operate only at big hubs: Boston, Providence, Bridgeport, New York, Newark, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington. When you get there, you take Amtrak or light rail to smaller cities and towns. Entire time of the journey from Boston to Washington: maybe 3.5 hours? New York to Boston? Take the A train up to Penn Station (or wherever it’s convenient to place the station in NY…maybe even out in Jersey City) and hop on the maglev around 5 PM and be in Boston, comfortably eating a hot dog in Fenway Park for the Red Sox/Yankees game by 7 PM. And then it’s easy to think of LA to San Fran, or New York to Chicago through the mid-west, or Jacksonville down to Miami, and eventually linking them together, just like the cross-country railroad that was built in the 1800s.
Would that relieve some of the stress of the aging highway system? Of course it would. And, powered by electricity, its fuel could be nuclear, coal, oil, wind, solar…whatever combinations of those things worked.
Trains in the U.S. are a fucking joke; the auto companies and oil companies have made sure of it. France and Japan and Korea have nice systems with their bullet trains, but why not just leapfrog them and go all maglev? The United States could do it.
If it had the will.