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Monthly
Discussion
Magnetic Levitation Trains (Maglevs)
The
world's first magnetic levitation train for commercial use, the Maglev, started
its regular service Thursday, Jan. 1, 2004 between Longyang Road Station and
Pudong International Airport in Shanghai, China (see article in
http://de.news.yahoo.com/040101/12/3tl9m.html).
The prediction that had been made in PREDICTIONS twelve years ago
concerning Maglevs was that around the end of the 20th century a new
“species” would enter the world transportation market and begin competing for
passengers with the other means of transportation. The specific prediction was
that Maglevs would “enter the market significantly around 2025, by claiming a 1
percent share of the total length in all transport infrastructures, and reach
its maximum rate of growth close to 2058”, see Exhibit 3.
An
Orderly Precession of U.S. Transport Infrastructures
Exhibit
3. The growth in length of each infrastructure is expressed
as a percentage of its final ceiling. The absolute levels of these ceilings in
miles are quite different, for airways the ceiling has been estimated.
Interestingly the 50 percent levels of these growth processes are rather
regularly spaced 55 to 56 years apart. The Maglev infrastructure therefore may
start sometime around the beginning of the twenty-first century, but its
halfway point should be close to 2060.*
Today, besides the Chinese Shanghai
section, Maglevs are planned in at least seven states of the US. In Virginia
the Baltimore-Washington project plans a Maglev connection that would link
these two cities in less than 20 minutes. In California, the planned Maglev
will connect the Los Angeles International Airport to March Field in Riverside
County, a 92-mile distance in 78 minutes, and in Pennsylvania the
Pittsburgh-Greensburg connection (54 miles) in less than 35 minutes. All three
of the American Maglevs mentioned here are planned to come into operation
around 2010-2011.
These developments reinforce confidence in my old
prediction that Maglevs will claim a 1 percent share of the total length in all
transport infrastructures by 2025. From then on Maglevs will begin taking away
market share from the dominant air travel, see Exhibit 4.
Exhibit 4. The sum total in mileage among all transport infrastructures is
split here among the major types. A declining percentage does not mean that the
length of the infrastructure is shrinking but rather that the total length is
increasing. Between 1860 and 1900 the amount of railway track increased, but
its share of the total decreased because of the dramatic rise in road mileage.
The thin model lines are projected forward and backward in time. The share of
airways is expected to keep growing well into the second half of the
twenty-first century and begin declining only when Maglevs enter the scene in a
serious way (dotted lines). The small circles show some deviation between the
trajectories predicted fifteen years ago and what happened since then.*
Let me explain again here why Maglev constitutes a
new bona fide transportation species. The major inter-city
transportation systems so far have been successively: waterways (channels),
railways, highways (motor vehicles), and airways. Each time the new system
progressively replaced the old one as the dominant means of transportation
despite large overlap between different systems. But the competitive
requirement for a new transport system has always been that it must provided a
factor-of-ten improvement in speed or, more precisely, in productivity
(load times speed.) Supersonic travel as introduced by the Concord did not go
in that direction because while it did increase the speed it decreased the
payload, and even the speed increase was far less than a factor of ten. Future
supersonic planes based on new technology—possibly using liquid hydrogen as
fuel—may provide Mach 8 in speed but will be useful only for long distances.
Supersonic flight is obviously not the answer for linking cities within a continent.
Since speed of existing airplanes is sufficient to serve shuttle links such as
New York to Boston, the future vehicle must increase the number of passengers
by a factor of ten, the equivalent of the Boeing 757 or the European Airbus,
but with a carrying capacity of close to twenty-five hundred passengers! The
problems arising from handling that many passengers in one flying vessel would
be formidable.
The alternative is Maglevs. These
trains move at a mean speed of up to six hundred miles per hour, and from the
point of view of speed and running cost they are like airplanes. But they can
carry a much heavier payload. Maglevs should only connect core cities in order
to justify their high capacity and investment costs.
But at this point, a word about fuel
is in order. Transport is coupled to energy. The dominant means of
transportation at any given time is linked to the dominant primary energy
source of the time. The succession we see in Exhibit 4, waterways to railways
to highways to airways is coupled to a succession of primary energy sources
(animal feed to coal to oil to natural gas) also discussed in PREDICTIONS. Animals used to
draw the barges along the channels during the 18th century, coal was
the primary fuel of railways, oil the primary fuel of automobiles, and natural
gas the primary fuel of airplanes (aviation is young and still uses oil as
early railways used wood!)
This one-to-one correspondence between transport and
energy suggests that Maglevs should use the next primary energy source, which
is nothing else than nuclear energy. Today’s Maglev, and those in the planning
stage, are all powered by electricity. But electricity is not a primary energy
source. It can be produced in a variety of different ways. Today it is largely
produced by burning oil and in the future it will be produced by burning
natural gas. In late 21st century it will be mostly provided by
nuclear reactors. By that time nuclear energy will be the dominant
primary-energy source. It will probably
also be providing in a direct way the hydrogen needed for advanced-aircraft
supersonic travel.
Substitution of Primary Energy Sources Worldwide
Exhibit
5. This
modeled substitution of energies is obtained from PREDICTIONS. The intermittent
line represents animal feed only for the US. “Solfus” is a futuristic energy
source combining solar and fusion.