Quote:
Originally Posted by finnbow
To whom? Roads are already paid for by excise taxes on motor fuels. Trains, OTOH, are just a money pit for public subsidies.
One of the big problems with passenger rail in the US is the sprawling nature of our cities. If you live in a typical suburb of a big American city, you may well be an hour or more from the rail station and the rail station where you're headed may be an hour from your ultimate destination - and there may not be good public transport connecting the rail stations to anything else.
High speed rail in the US is a big, costly solution looking for a problem. If we want to spend money on rail, why not build world-class light rail/subways in our major cities? There are only a handful of big cities in this country that have light rail/subways that compete in terms of quality and coverage with major cities in other parts of the industrialized world. Even DC, with its Metro, doesn't yet have train service to its major gateway airport (Dulles). This is true of most major airports in the country.
We need to learn to walk before we run.
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Fair points all. Even though you guys are unhappy about rising fuel prices, they are still about half the UK price. Railways will never be as local as they once were; flexibility of personal transport has seen to that but remember, a car is just a mobile power station that carries people. However much fuel costs rise, unit for unit large static power stations are much more efficient. High speed comfortable transport city to city makes sense but 300+ mph? That's what the Japanese are aiming for. Imagine looking through the window and seeing the country flash by that quickly. Scary..............
On another note, no matter how good the wheel breaks are, steel wheels on steel rails can't slow things down as fast as rubber on tarmac. Reversing polarity on a MagLev train could stop it very quickly, but the fear for me is if it's lifted by magnetic repulsion, what happens if the power fails? The theory is the train would drop down to flanged wheels, but at 300 MPH?
OOOPS. I should have done my research. Apparently the idea is that in a full emergency stop, the train would drop down on skids, the train weight would do the rest.