7 ms·
I'm sorry but this sounds stupid energy wasteful and expensive for something that should be a maglev bullet train, which would also have a much higher throughpu
by ravetcofx 3y ago
I'm sorry but this sounds stupid energy wasteful and expensive for something that should be a maglev bullet train, which would also have a much higher throughput of passengers per hour. Inductive charging will always have a huge amount of energy waste overhead.
- ketzo 3y agoWell, devil’s advocate — if this does work, it would be extremely useful in a lot of places that monorails are not.
- oceanplexian 3y agoFlorida recently completed a high speed rail project (The same cannot he said for CA HSR). It’s no bullet train but pretty comparable to Acela. Everyone throwing shade on FL might be surprised that they are actually ahead of the game on a lot of infrastructure.
- chrisco255 3y agoStill doesn't change the fact that highway driving and automobile based transportation is not going anywhere. High speed rail won't ever replace cars. It's a nice supplemental form of transport, and works fine for point to point transport between major hubs, but it doesn't work at a distributed scale.
- justrealist 3y agoI think that's kind of the point. * CA talks a lot about replacing cars, and accomplishes nothing. * FL makes no pretense about being primarily a based car-culture, but successfully implements mass transit where it makes sense
- outside1234 3y agoCA has moved on and is just going to electrify all of the cars
- Gigachad 3y agoElectric cars solve almost none of the problems associated with cars.
- amanaplanacanal 3y agoAdding fossil carbon to the atmosphere seems like a pretty important one though.
- remote_phone 3y agoThe pandemic proved that pollution is primarily caused by trucks and not cars. Most of the highest polluted cities in the world that were clear during the global lockdown regained their pollution once trucks went back on the road.
- MikeTheGreat 3y agoGenuine question: How do you know this? (Maybe a source or something)? I know the supply chain got messed up, but given that trucks are so crucial to transporting goods (at least here in the US) I would think that trucks remained on the road during the pandemic while individuals driving cars all stayed home during quarantine. I'm really curious how this conclusion ('trucks are the primary cause of pollution') was reached
- panic 3y agoCA HSR is now actively being built. You can track its progress at https://buildhsr.com/ https://buildhsr.com/.
- WillPostForFood 3y agoIt has been actively being built for 8 years, in the wrong part of the state, with nothing functional yet. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jan/07/california-breaks-ground-high-speed-rail-project https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jan/07/california-b...
- helloooooooo 3y agoRome wasn’t built in a day. Cali has very difficult construction challenges wrt earthquakes and land acquisition
- sclarisse 3y agoCalifornia’s bullet train delays have basically nothing to do with fundamental challenges like seismic engineering, and everything to do with planning permission issues / NIMBYs and California specific regulations on one hand, and with bad management on the other. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/california-high-speed-rail-politics.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/california-high-speed-... https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-09/california-bullet-train-officials-say-they-were-told-to-suppress-bad-news-and-shut-up https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-09/californ... https://ktla.com/news/local-news/poor-decision-making-management-blamed-for-ballooning-costs-and-delays-in-california-bullet-train-project-in-new-state-audit/amp/ https://ktla.com/news/local-news/poor-decision-making-manage...
- maxcan 3y agoEarthquakes have little to do with it. They are simply an excuse for horrible policy. Go explain to Japan why earthquakes should prevent them from building effective infrastructure.
- sclarisse 3y ago
- itisit 3y agoThe Brightline vision is finally arriving, partially, after three decades of failures in funding and planning. To call that “ahead of the game” is disingenuous.
- rippercushions 3y agoBrightline is operational and wildly successful between Miami and Palm Beach, expanding soon to Orlando, and it's literally the only higher-speed passenger railway actually built in the US since the Acela. So, yes, it is very much ahead of the game.
- Kon-Peki 3y agoThe Amtrak Wolverine service (Chicago to Detroit) begs to differ. And just last week the Lincoln service (Chicago to St. Louis) and the Texas Eagle service (Chicago to Dallas/San Antonio) got approval for higher-speed operation. Brightline is very successful, part of which is due to having so few stops, something that a public railroad could never get away with politically. The Amtrak trains stop so often that they spend very little time at their top speed.
- cool_dude85 3y agoI don't have access to stats, but is it really particularly successful? I just checked and the Boca - Downtown Miami route takes 51 minutes, compared to (not quite comparable) Boca - MIA on the Trirail in 61 minutes. This, with way fewer stops in between. I can't believe too many commuters are paying a premium price unless they're specifically wanting to go downtown for work.
- bombcar 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightline#Ridership_by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightline#Ridership_by_year They had 1.2 million rides in 2022, that's good by any measurement. Pacific Surfliner in Southern California is a wildly successful intercity rail and only had 1.6m rides in 2022. Some people may use them to commute but it's not primarily commuter rail, would be my guess.
- AshleyGrant 3y agoThe Brightline train travels at 75 mph for a significant portion of its distance. It has to slow down due to dozens and dozens of road crossings. It's half-assed compared to what California is building.
- bombcar 3y agoBut to be fair to the Brightline, the half of the ass that they do have is actually moving passengers today. Track upgrades and locomotive upgrades are also being done to the Pacific Surfliner which in theory could get it above 120 MPH at some points, putting it semi-officially in "high speed rail" territory.
- runarberg 3y agoBut to be completely fair Brightline is only running passengers on a portion of this route (yet) between Miami and West Palm Beach, but so is the state of California, which is actually moving passengers today on both the Caltrain corridor between SF and Gilroy and the LOSSAN corridor between LA union station and Anaheim.
- stickyricky 3y agoOkay class... Everyone's trains are great. We don't need to compare. Trains are cool. Lets just encourage and build more of them.
- coev 3y agoBrightline runs on tracks that give priority to freight traffic (Florida East Coast Railway) and not passenger traffic, it's a 2nd class citizen.
- p_j_w 3y agoThe Pacific Surfliner can go faster than Brightline currently. It's also longer and has been in service for ages now. Florida isn't ahead of the game, they're playing catch up.
- sacred_numbers 3y agoThere will always be overhead, but that doesn't mean it will always be a huge amount of overhead. I believe the state of the art is 97% efficiency (https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1495980 https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1495980) which is better than a lot of wired chargers. Real world systems will be less efficient, and it may be too expensive, but a maglev system would be even more expensive.
- GravitasFailure 3y ago"This is within the expected range of the thermal limits of the envisaged mechanical design of the coils and also indicates a minimum of 98% coil-to-coil power transfer efficiency." Key here is coil-to-coil, NOT total charging efficiency, let alone "better than wired." Worse, it was a stationary setup with a distance of 5 inches between coils, so adding asphalt, protection for the car's coil, etc. is just going to make it worse.
- asdfman123 3y agoThere is absolutely zero chance a maglev bullet train is cost effective in any part of Florida. I want it to happen too, but that’s not going to change the economics.
- ElevenLathe 3y agoI tend to agree, but this still seems less bad than lugging around all energy in individual batteries or burning carbon fuels.
- AlexandrB 3y agoIt seems like the US will do anything to avoid building public transit infrastructure. I can't imagine how expensive just the copper for an inductive charging road will be.
- whalesalad 3y agoFlorida's greatest fight will be keeping the meth heads away from the copper before it gets put into the ground.
- klyrs 3y agoStep 1: steal an excavator (this is surprisingly easy) Step 2: dig up the road at midnight Just 'cause it's in the ground doesn't mean it's not worth stealing...
- whalesalad 3y agoyeah i've heard that just about every piece of heavy machinery uses an identical key
- Arrath 3y agoMore or less, yeah. Maybe split by manufacturer. At best the cab door will have a normally keyed lock, but there's plenty of glass to break out so that won't stop a determined mischief maker.
- Scoundreller 3y agoIs heavy equipment glass really that fragile? I kinda hoped it was like a car’s windshield.
- Arrath 3y agoNo, it is pretty much like a windshield. Just laminated safety glass. Some operators retrofit in plexiglass or in rare cases bulletproof material, but that is for special applications.
- nashashmi 3y agoIf you're carrying a lighter battery, then maybe it is not so bad. Either the inefficiency is eaten up moving the battery around or by wireless waste.
- gnicholas 3y agoTrains provide a different service, which is to move people from one hub to another. Cars take you from a precise location to another precise location. Some people who use cars can easily switch to trains (if their travel locations are close enough to train stops, and they are able-bodied enough to be able to get themselves the last mile). But for many people, especially in spread out areas, trains are not an especially good substitute for cars in the short or medium run.
- Mountain_Skies 3y agoMaybe the point that isn't stated is the desire for you and everyone else to be relocated into hubs in order to support this transportation paradigm. Anything outside of the hubs is reversed for our betters, who of course will have access to other means of transportation.
- DropPanda 3y agoI used to share your gut feeling that this is stupid, but I’ve done a lot of calculations on this now and it (dynamic charging, not necessarily inductive) starts making a lot of economic sense on major roads when most traffic is electric. The technology has very high base cost and very low marginal cost per additional user. The cost of stationary charging scales fairly linearly with the number of users, with surprisingly minimal scale benefits. Pros of dynamic charging: - Substantially reduced need for large batteries, which reduces vehicle cost and contributes to overall lower cost of electric road transportation; - Easier logistics planning, no queuing for charging, and reduced downtime for commercial vehicles; - Cost of public daytime charging on par with private night-time stationary charging; - Same access to charging for all, at the same time, at the same cost; - Well adapted to high vehicle utilization (e.g., 24h operation, autonomous trucks and car sharing services); - Greatly reduced need for high power fast charging, which wears out batteries; - Greatly reduced need to build out infrastructure for stationary charging, which is not easy to do quickly and at scale; - Potentially easier to connect to the power grid than static charging of equivalent capacity. Challenges to overcome include: - The transition phase from zero to many users; - The transition phase from zero miles to coverage of most major highways; - Electromagnetic emissions; - Not in line with how the public and industry perceives that electric cars and trucks should work; - Initial funding (requires public sector support, but not subsidies); - Primarily benefits vehicle owners and transport buyers, not vehicle manufacturers and energy companies. - Unclear if dynamic charging is cheaper beyond ~2045, due to declining levelized battery costs. As for the argument that it is better to electrify rail - both should be electrified. Europe and Asia wonder why North America hasn’t electrified its rail network already.
- pcdoodle 3y agoI agree, let them try this and see what happens. Can't be worse than Solar Freaking Roadways.