Aw, it's not for you. It's more a Shelbyville idea.
November 20, 2018 4:17 PM   Subscribe

The Baltimore-Washington Superconducting Maglev Project is a 40-mile, $10-12 billion superconducting magnetic levitation (SCMaglev) line that promises a 15-minute trip from Washington, DC, to Baltimore, MD. The project is the first phase of a SCMaglev line between Washington, DC, and New York, City that would reduce travel time from about 3 hours on Amtrak's Acela Express Train to approximately 1 hour. posted by wintermind (30 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
I have family in Greenbelt, and there’s a lot of opposition to this. Not surprisingly, the proposed line cuts through the lower-income, predominantly black part of Greenbelt. Same as it ever was.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 4:24 PM on November 20, 2018 [11 favorites]


Also, A+ title.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 4:27 PM on November 20, 2018 [12 favorites]


Maglev trains are sexy as hell, and I love the concept.

Then I think about how far that money would go if we ramped up bus transit, with appropriate infrastructural support, and I think it’s maybe not the best investment to spend $10 billion to make a 40-mile stretch of road more quickly traveled.

Especially when a big part of the need is driven by many people who maybe just don’t want to live in D.C.? (Which raises a lot of other issues, natch.)
posted by darkstar at 4:29 PM on November 20, 2018 [8 favorites]


SCMaglev? Ugh.

Just use Bullet Train! "I gotta catch the Washington Bullet." "When does the Baltimore Bullet arrive?"

Just don't call it the Wizard.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 5:17 PM on November 20, 2018 [5 favorites]


Sounds very noir. I like it!
posted by wintermind at 5:18 PM on November 20, 2018


The MARC DC-Baltimore express train takes 36 minutes and costs $8 per ticket.
Amtrak NE Regional/Vermonter takes about 40 minutes (plus all the waiting time when it's inevitably late) and costs $14.
Acela takes about 30 minutes and costs $35.
This maglev is projected to take 15 minutes and cost $46.

I'd add MARC express runs.
posted by cichlid ceilidh at 5:40 PM on November 20, 2018 [12 favorites]


If trains had not been invented, and both maglev and regular old railroads were both invented today, then putting maglev (or any other gadgetbahn technology) may well make sense on this corridor*.

But trains exist, and this corridor grew up around trains.

If you spent the money instead on improving the regular boring steel rail Amtrak lines between Baltimore and Washington (which is actually one of the sections in better shape in general), then it not only helps people get from downtown Baltimore to downtown DC. It helps people coming to DC from Boston, or New York, or Philly. It helps people going from Baltimore (and points north) to Richmond, or Norfolk. It helps people taking MARC commuter trains to all of the stops between Baltimore and DC.

And because it's not nearly as expensive in general to improve the existing rail, for the same kind of money, you could do a hell of a lot more improvements along the corridor, not just in Maryland. And that would help commuters and travellers throughout the Northeast.

The Northeast Corridor could meet substantially increased demand. It only runs four trains per hour in the peak; there are railroads running close to 30 trains per hour. It needs capacity increases, sure. It could benefit substantially from speed and reliability increases along most of the corridor.

I recommend reading Alon Levy on the subject; this has an overview of his various NEC posts, and this in particular is a look at what a ~$20 billion investment could do on the corridor -- drop times down to 4 hours Boston to Washington -- if the focus was on the cheapest possible improvements, rather than the most politically appealing ones.

* Spoiler: even if the was no rail, maglev doesn't make sense especially on a corridor as short as Baltimore-Washington. How fast does the Shanghai maglev go? Everybody who talks about it says 268 miles an hour -- the actual fact is that it peaks at 268 but actually travels end-to-end at an effective speed of 152 mph because it spends most of its time accelerating and decelerating.
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 5:57 PM on November 20, 2018 [22 favorites]


I'd be happy if Los Angeles could simply give surface light rail the right-of-way through intersections, but there's a law on the books from a very long time ago that says you must give priority to cars so they won't idle and pollute while the train passes. Makes me wonder how many other small, legislative optimizations could be made that would significantly increase the effectiveness of our existing infrastructure without giant plays like this one.
posted by davejay at 6:01 PM on November 20, 2018 [4 favorites]


an article about the law
posted by davejay at 6:02 PM on November 20, 2018 [2 favorites]


The mere fact that Larry Hogan supports this plan makes me suspicious of it, tbh. This feels like money that would be better spent of beefing up MARC and our share of WMATA. Maybe if there's some left over we could get really crazy and work on the watershed and runoff problems that drowned Ellicott City.

(I hold Larry Hogan personally responsible for what happened to Ellicott City and I always will.)
posted by nonasuch at 7:32 PM on November 20, 2018 [12 favorites]


We had a maglev train promised for a long time here in Pittsburgh during the early 2000s and exactly zero ever came of it except a lot of hype and newspaper articles.
posted by octothorpe at 7:39 PM on November 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


The thing that first blew my mind about maglev is they are essentially "solid state". No moving parts.
posted by pashdown at 7:49 PM on November 20, 2018


There's no reason there shouldn't be high speed trains ala Japan's bullet trains in America. There just doesn't exist the political will to make t hem happen.
posted by runcibleshaw at 7:50 PM on November 20, 2018


How about actually building the Red Line instead? And nonasuch, at the risk of derailing I'm curious why you hold Gov. Hogan personally responsible for the flooding. Is he one of the developers building upstream? Or is it his elimination of the stormwater runoff fee?
posted by postel's law at 7:57 PM on November 20, 2018 [3 favorites]


If this was China, this would be built in two years; in France, four years. Here, fifteen years from now we're still going to be arguing over better, cheaper alternatives, while the project lies fallow and the road and railroads continue to decay.

Welcome to the 1970s again.
posted by happyroach at 9:58 PM on November 20, 2018 [9 favorites]


What’s the famous Churchill quote? “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else.”

One day we will have a real public transit system in this country. But probably not in my lifetime. :(
posted by darkstar at 11:49 PM on November 20, 2018 [5 favorites]


If this was China, this would be built in two years; in France, four years.

Would it also be a public-private enterprise? Would we be unconcerned about how this harms, but does not help, the towns and cities it sliced through using eminent domain?

This is not a simple proposition. It’s frustrating when people see opposition as “oh, I guess some folks don’t want the future.”
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 11:59 PM on November 20, 2018 [2 favorites]


> "more than 2,100 passenger ... a day"

That's ... it?

That's it, and they're operating at capacity?

Yeesh. Five times that many people get on or off a train every day at a single station in Paisley. Waterloo Station in London gets 419,000 a day by rail, and London as a whole over two million.
posted by kyrademon at 4:01 AM on November 21, 2018 [1 favorite]


2100 passenger trains. Amtrak carries around 750,000 passengers on the Northeast corridor daily. Plus there are a couple of commuter rail systems that share the track, such as Maryland's MARC trains, which carries another 40,000 passengers daily (most though not all on the same track as Amtrak).
posted by postel's law at 4:10 AM on November 21, 2018 [2 favorites]


Not sure what that 2,100 passengers/day refers to but the Northeast Corridor had almost 33,000 riders/day in 2016 (Amtrak pdf), with the ridership between NYC and DC being higher than all air travel between the two cities.
posted by plastic_animals at 4:11 AM on November 21, 2018


Ah, the higher number I saw was all trips, most of which are the commuter rail lines. Dont add MARC to that. http://nec-commission.com/corridor/
posted by postel's law at 4:15 AM on November 21, 2018


> "2100 passenger trains"

Ooooh, that makes more sense. Sorry for misunderstanding.
posted by kyrademon at 5:18 AM on November 21, 2018


I got to the Atlanta Amtrak station at 8 last night for my 8 pm departure because I knew the Crescent was already late. We were actually >2 hours late leave Atlanta. I got to Greensboro at 6 this morning, > 3 hours late, which is fine because the first morning train east to Raleigh doesn’t leave until 8:30. It’s 9:20 and that train still hasn’t left. Both the Crescent and the Carolinian are completely packed this holiday travel day. I’m glad “the Northeast Corridor” is doing so well on trains. I wish the rest of us were.
posted by hydropsyche at 6:21 AM on November 21, 2018 [2 favorites]


In college I wrote a paper about light rails systems and one of the most impactful statistics that I had gathered is that a single light rail line running at max capacity could move the same number of people as 18 lanes of traffic. It's great because it seems pretty obvious that it makes way more sense to build a new light rail line than to try and add 18 new lanes of traffic in even a one direction to an existing highway.

A single lane of highway theoretically maxes out at 1,900 vehicles per hour but I haven't been able to figure out a similar figure for any of the existing trains or this SCmaglev project. But even if we assume that the average car on the highway carries a little over two people that and use the average hourly usage of the trains of 750,000 passengers daily we're still talking about moving 31,250 people/hr vs. 4,000 people/hr on the roads or just shy of 8 lanes of highway.

I have a hunch that the even the projected capacity for this SCmaglev train falls short compared to the capacity of existing trains.
posted by VTX at 6:45 AM on November 21, 2018 [2 favorites]


I've lived a few places in the region and commuted by a variety of modes. We need more, more frequent, and more reliable versions of existing mass transit technology. We don't need to get a few thousand people a few hundred miles one or two hours faster; we need to get millions of people between their homes and their jobs and their schools without them having to choose between 90 minute public transit commutes and 65 minute car commutes. The DC/MD/VA region is growing so fast but had so much of the existing infrastructure built out in low-density style during the automotive era - and we are stuck with it and we are not doing enough to transition to the true urban transit and housing density that we need to invest in to make this area livable for all of us.

I think maglev in general is really cool! And I think it's a solution to some transportation problem...but not the main transportation problem the bulk of us are dealing with.
posted by everythings_interrelated at 7:39 AM on November 21, 2018 [4 favorites]


And I think it's a solution to some transportation problem...

Most directly, the massive airspace, airport, and highway congestion that is omnipresent in that part of the country. A maglev will not, being inappropriate for that use, help with congestion along local commutes.

And yes, Amtrak needs some serious changes outside the NEC to be much more than a novelty. Not the least of which are better priority rules vs. freight. The track owners are getting a huge subsidy in the form of relief from their passenger service obligations, so the least they can do is not exacerbate passenger delays. Sad that we actually have to force companies to not be ungrateful flaming assholes, but we do.
posted by wierdo at 8:04 AM on November 21, 2018 [2 favorites]


I got to the Atlanta Amtrak station at 8 last night for my 8 pm departure because I knew the Crescent was already late. We were actually >2 hours late leave Atlanta. I got to Greensboro at 6 this morning, > 3 hours late, which is fine because the first morning train east to Raleigh doesn’t leave until 8:30. It’s 9:20 and that train still hasn’t left. Both the Crescent and the Carolinian are completely packed this holiday travel day. I’m glad “the Northeast Corridor” is doing so well on trains. I wish the rest of us were.

So, we start with making the trains run on time. Seems simple enough *

* Historically, it's not that simple, but it is the obvious goal
posted by mikelieman at 8:23 AM on November 21, 2018


Maybe this is more of a Hawthorne idea...
posted by littlejohnnyjewel at 10:47 AM on November 21, 2018 [1 favorite]


Apologies for poor writing, the material I read said that the NEC carries 2,100 passenger trains each day, not 2,100 passengers.
posted by wintermind at 1:34 PM on November 21, 2018


If this was China, this would be built in two years

Totalitarianism is remarkably efficient for getting things approved.
posted by acb at 2:07 AM on November 22, 2018 [1 favorite]


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