Finally everyone sees the hyperloop as a massive Elmo grift.
Brightline is also building what it calls “the nation’s first true high-speed rail network” between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. That project received $3 billion of the funding recently announced by the Biden administration, and is expected to break ground in early 2024.
Oh for FUCKS sake
I don’t see the issue?
I think it might be my poor reading comprehension, but it sounded like brightline was some hyperloop nonsense that was getting federal funding
Nope, they’re for real!
for rail!*
They just opened the Brightline connection between Orlando and Miami. It’s cool that we have a rail connection now but for my girlfriend and I to go down it would be $300 round trip. And it would take just as long to drive. It’s really not very “high speed” at all. Maybe compared to Amtrak.
I really, really think high-speed rail is the wrong direction to take. I’m very much in the “maglev” camp
Maglevs are economically unviable in the absence of room temperature superconductors. So being in the “sci-fi” camp isn’t really the flex you think it is.
The Shanghai Maglev train has a top speed of 190 mph and is in active daily use. Please tell me more from your “research” how it is unviable despite already existing in one of the densest metro regions in the world
Read this, maybe you’ll learn something:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MaglevDude, I live in China. I’ve taken the Shanghai maglev a few times. It’s a white elephant. It only exists because it’s “face” for them to have it. It’s heavily subsidized and is still ridiculously expensive (40RMB cheapest one-way ticket, with peak price of 100 one-way).
Perhaps you should have read a bit further along in your little article here:
Despite over a century of research and development, there are only six operational maglev trains today — three in China, two in South Korea, and one in Japan.
Of these:
- The Shanghai one operates at 300km/h most of the time. It’s about 30km long.
- The Changsha one runs at 140km/h over a length of about 19km.
- The Beijing one runs at 100km/h over a distance of about 10km.
- The Linimo one runs at 100km/h over about 9km.
- The Incheon one runs at 80km/h over about 6km.
(I can’t find a reference to a second commercial maglev in South Korea, so if you find it, you can place it in that list.)
For reference, the Jinghu high-speed railway between Beijing and Shanghai operates at 350km/h cruising speed over a length of more than 1300km. And 250km/h rail lines are now common like borscht here in China.
So, yes maglev trains exist, but this does not make them economically viable. The evidence shows that most of them are slow (even by traditional rail standards, not to mention HSR), expensive, only run short distances, and in the case of the single high speed one runs only because it is heavily subsidized (despite the ludicrously overpriced tickets).
So read¹ these² and maybe³ you’ll⁴ learn⁵ something⁶.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_maglev_train
³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incheon_Airport_Maglev
⁴ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linimo
It’s far more expensive than traditional rail. You can get pretty high speeds with traditional rail too, in western Europe there are trains reaching 300-350 km/h.
