Reply To: The plasma torch?

[Duke Leto]

Alright, here’s a set of IFs for you:

IF FF reduces the cost of energy by an order of magnitude or so, then MagLev trains become noticibly cheaper to build and run. Even without the air evacuated tubes proposed elsewhere on the site, commuter rail lines for intra city travel could see a big increase in transit speed to up to 250 mph with pretty high acceleration and deceleration rates.

Now I live in the NW Philly Supurbs in a house I share with my brother, whose main office is in Cherry Hill NJ. He has to spend 90 minutes or more of every working day when he is not traveling to other company sites going between these two locations. There is no rail service from our local SEPTA station to Cherry Hill. Now if FF MagLevs were in place and there were a large regional rail network on a Japanese or European model, I suspect that my brother would be able to commute from our house to Cherry Hill in less than 25 minutes per day.

This is assuming you lay out a kind of “Spiderweb Grid” over the Philly area, with radial lines going out from the city center in all directions and encircling loops at about every 5 miles or so. If you added radial spokes at every circle, I think it would be feasible to have a grid that covers the whole of Southeastern PA, Northern DE and Southern Jersey with no point more than half a mile from a train stop. Employers or commercial real estate holders might find it economical to sponsor shuttle buses for the small gaps remaining. You could speed up line operation by having each train stop at only one in every 4 or 5 non-hub statios on its line, like this:

A-B-C-D-E-Hub-A-B-C-D-E-Hub-A-B-C-D-E

Where train A goes by at 8:05 and stops only at stations marked A and Hubs, train B goes by at 8:10 and stops at Bs and Hubs, and so on. The assumption being that nobody is going to want to go from Point A1 to point B1 by train, and if they want to go from A1 to B3 it is easier for them to change trains at Hub1 or Hub2 then for them to wait while the train stops at all points on the line.

At any rate, the point is my brother, and many many more employees in Philly, would probably pay to ride the rail lines in that circumstance since it is giving them a free hour of business or personal time every day, a $30 value in my brother’s case. Paying $5 a day for train fare is the economicly sensible option in that scenario, since the speed of travel is so much improved. That’s not all, because if you can get local freight onto these lines too, you have another revenue stream and the multiplier effect for clearing up traffic congestion gets even higher, since you can get more freight around the city faster with fewer operators. Plus there’s the postal and express package delivery business. You might even be able to make a buck by carrying cars with people in them.

Speed kills in business, EVEN with Bulk freight. If I can haul 500 containers from point A to point B at 150 mph rather than 25 then it means that I can do it in 6 trips with one engine and one engineer, reusing the same rolling stock 6 times. (Floating stock technically.)

I’ve done some napkin calculations, and I’m pretty sure that if you have can build a two story sealed tunnel with 4 freight lanes below and 5 express lanes above for less than $20 million a suburban mile, (the middle line is for emergency transit vehicles, police ambulances, repair crews and so on) then you have a self-supporting business in the post FF world.

It might cost $30 Billion to build that Super SEPTA network I described above, but if you have 3 million customers doing as little as $1000 of gross profitable business every year, and remember they are all buying groceries that Super SEPTA is delivering almost to the doorsteps of their supermarkets in addition to $5 fares every business day (260 per year), then you make your investment back in 10 years.

As an aside to our Libertarian friends, how come you never EVER bitch about government subsidies to drivers, ie. Roads?