The always insightful Megan McArdle has a short blogpost titled “Bullet trains aren’t magic.” She focuses initially on maglev technology — the magnetic levitation trains that ride not on rails but on air because of magnetic repulsion, and which can accordingly travel at far greater speeds than even the world’s fastest rail-based bullet trains. She notes that we haven’t achieved “the really important goal, which is letting [her] ride a Maglev.”
As it happens, I have achieved that goal, on the short train ride from Shanghai’s Pudong airport to a subway station near (but not in) its central downtowns (the old downtown west of the river and the new one to the east). The train has speed indicators showing that it is traveling at something like 430 kilometers per hour (that’s 270 miles per hour); the 19-mile trip takes about seven minutes. The ride is smooth, but not quite so smooth as Japan’s Shinkansen or France’s TGV; the train seems to wobble just a bit, but not at all alarmingly.
Pat Moynihan was a big booster of maglev technology — one reason, in my mind at least, to take it seriously. But McArdle is skeptical about whether it can serve what she considers the necessary function of providing more rapid transit in the Northeast Corridor between Washington and Boston. She points out that a private company is trying to build a maglev line between Washington and Baltimore, and that a maglev train requires a dedicated line.
So does any genuine high-speed rail line, which is why one is unlikely to be built in the Northeast Corridor. McArdle favors having Northeast high-speed rail, unlike the Shinkanshen and TGV, share rails with commuter lines. But then it won’t really be high-speed. McArdle is correct that the Northeast, with its high-density downtowns, is much better suited for high-speed rail than California, where Gov. Jerry Brown seems determined to build a white elephant.
She explains why: In metro Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area, it would take most potential riders so long to get to the central rail station that they would be better off traveling to a more near-by airport (San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose in the Bay Area; LAX, Burbank, Long Beach, Orange County, Ontario in metro L.A.).
Unfortunately Amtrak, with its government subsidies for far less than high-speed rail, isn’t interested in the huge expense of commandeering land for a dedicated high-speed rail line. There seems little chance that the state and local governments in the area could ever cooperate in doing this, and it doesn’t seem likely that any private investor would be interested.
