The article doesn't link to the company's website, which is here: http://american-maglev.com/index.php. Sadly, neither the article or the company website indicate how fast the train will go, or any details about where they get the $20 million/mile figure. Those were my questions anyway.
Crikey, numbers like that bring perspective to the old "Why doesn't the US have Japan's mass transit system, yet?" Because just building Japan's total of tracks would cost $3.4 trillion... and we'd have built barely enough track to cover California or New England to service levels comparable with Japan.
I wondered roughly how that compared to highway costs, and I found that it's about four times as much. One thing I found was that while this article claims $700million/mile for the LA Red Line, the MTA reports that $4.5billion was spent for the 17.4 miles, giving a cost of $259million/mile.
project $million/mile persons/day
LA Red Line 259 [1] 140943 [1]
MARTA heavy rail (estimate) 200
I-64 highway 53.5 [2] 140000 [3]
American Maglev (estimate) 20
I wondered roughly how that compared to highway costs, and I found that it's about four times as much
That would imply that the US has several trillion dollars invested in its highway system, correct? Does that number pass the smell test to you?
Wiki reports that our ~45,000 mile interstate highway system cost about 425 billion, or a hair under $10 million a mile, in 2006 dollars. That's under a twentieth of what the LA transit folks are quoting. (I think they're doing creative accounting by reclassifying part of construction as operating expenses, which is a frequent trick in this field, but I've got nothing to back that up.)
What are the continued operating costs, though, from both the government and users? When I lived in Toronto I could have an all-access unlimited subway pass for $100 a month, that's $1200 a year.
If I commuted by car I would've personally paid a hell of a lot more for the privilege. The up-front cost of the infrastructure is not the only consideration...
Last time I ran the numbers the US highway system costs around 3$/gallon of gas used on the highway system. So, double your gas costs, then add all the other costs and you can approximate the "net" cost of your commute.
Wikipedia's "Light rail" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_rail) article has some interesting numbers on the cost of light-rail construction: Over the U.S. as a whole, excluding Seattle, new light rail construction costs average about $35 million per mile. By comparison, a freeway lane expansion typically costs $20 million per lane mile for two directions.
Why couldn't you use the elevated track strategy these guys developed with modified light rail cars? The light rail cars would also benefit from lighter construction.
Doubtful... You'd need a lot of time to accelerate to those speeds, and odds are you'd have to slow down to make a turn well before you reached anything appreciable.
IMO there's no point in building a vac-tunnel for a modern train car, because firstly it needs to be an airtight vehicle.
When traveling at 4,000 mph you don't necessarily have to slow down, you just need to levitate from the sides of the tunnel. Essentially you could make the train act similar to a swinging cart on a roller coaster where the center of gravity will always try to sit under the user. People can easily tolerate positive vertical gee forces with little to no side effect, yet exposure to less than one vertical gee force (like the chair-drop rides at theme parks) can make someone puke their guts out. Equally horizontal gee forces aren't tolerated very well either, but in the linear axis (the one we accelerate through) we're extremely tolerant and are in fact more tolerant if we're facing backwards. Although I don't think facing backwards would necessarily work on a train, you don't really want to hit 2 gees of acceleration and have your coke fly in a straight line to the back wall.
Also acceleration wouldn't need to take too long, however in this systems design it probably would. In the dumb car, smart track systems all the force is applied from the outside, which is where acceleration could potentially reach incredible speeds due to the sheer amount of power that could be expended to do so.
We're a long, long way from any vac-tube form of rapid transit, but if we ever get to it I think tolerating the corners will likely be a small problem. I think the big problem will be keeping the train pressurized under potentially huge pressure differentials due to the acceleration.
KISS. Smooth steel wheels on smooth steel tracks has extremely low rolling resistance, is inexpensive, and works great. Bonus: if the power goes out you gently coast for a while. :)
