Trouble flying

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

This is what Japan is already dealing with.  Imagine if everyone who was flying had to take a train instead:

Come on, that is daily city transport of people going to work and not passengers on longer routes.

But I do admit problem seems to be more complicated than I anticipated.

Nevertheless, monorail magnetic trains shouldn't be so problematic in carrying many wagons since they levitate and therefore don't lose on friction, so SCMaglev can carry 16 wagons (but how much passengers is that, I don't know)

And here's an uplifting video




But it does seem like it is still on experimental level and it is probably very expensive to have that kind of magnetic rail.

I just don't think it's going to be feasible without a MASSIVE investment, which I don't see happening.

Boru

But this is Trump's era where "economy is doing better than ever" so there certainly has to be money in the best economy ever for something that important.

Some 15 years ago, the Shanghai MagLev Project was built at a cost of US$1,2 billion (5 cars, track, 2 stations). The track is just under 20 miles long. The train you mention with 16 cars is projected to carry 1000 passengers.

While extrapolations of this sort are clearly a mug’s game, I’m going to do one anyway.

Let’s assume that, due to refinement in technology and possible breakthroughs in material and theory, the cost of building these trains drops by 50%. This means a train three times as long as the Shanghai would cost $1.8 billion.  

At any given moment, there about 6 million people in the air. This means - not counting overseas flights - that the cost of building enough maglev trains to take up the load would be on the close order of 11 TRILLION US dollars, not including upkeep and operation. This is almost half the US GDP and about 70 times the cost of the entire Apollo programme.

But being so prohibitively expensive does’t alter the fact that, in most respects, it’s a cracking good idea. Your grandchildren might live to see it, we never will.

Boru