3 ms·

It's frustrating to me that this train only goes 79 miles an hour. It seems really hard for it to be a competitive option with driving when the maximum speed is

• reaperducer 6y ago
  The problem isn't so much the speed, it's that it has to slow down frequently, gets blocked by freight trains too often, and stops in far too many towns. There should be an express option.
  • yourapostasy 6y ago
    > There should be an express option. We have the technology now to sling the last car (could be a sub-standard-size car) to a shunt track at a station to offload passengers at the station, which redirects much of the kinetic energy braking it to speed up an already-moving outgoing car off the shunt track to connect to the train to onboard passengers from the station, without the train slowing down at all. Some folks were working on it in France and separate group was working on it in China if I recall correctly from a handful of years ago, but it never got traction. I figure the amount of space the shunt track requires (more length the faster the train travels through the station) and the costs killed it, but it would be skookum tech. The sheer scale of physically moving around humanity might be a problem uniquely facing our civilization that previous civilizations didn't have to contend with. Maybe on an available watts/person measure we have more than previous civilizations, but it is a fascinating megascale engineering problem to me to wonder about the efficiency optimization possibilities. Not just moving people around the planet, but how to get people off the planet.