$28 million of our tax dollars are being ladled out for Maryland to study the extent to which American government workers can import and operate the latest Japanese maglev train (Washington Post). Of course it would be nice for lobbyists to zip from New York to Washington in one hour, but I’m wondering if what works in Japan can work in the U.S.
During my last visit to Japan, a couple of years after 9/11, there was still hardly any security screening for passengers on domestic flights, not any care taken to keep car or truck bombs away from regional airports. The security risks within that society simply didn’t merit the expenditures of time and money that we spend.
Let’s look at our current technology for 300 mph travel: the Airbus, Boeing, or Embraer. We have airports that are fairly easy to secure with a fence and then vehicles that protect themselves by climbing thousands of feet above potential attackers. A high-speed rail system, on the other hand, would seem to be as challenging to protect as a border. As a practical matter what could be done to keep explosives, projectiles, and other threats away from hundreds of mile of track on which a 300 mph vehicle rides? And are we up to the challenge? If not, should we be spending a lot of money on a technology that is not practical to implement in the society that we actually have?
Terrorist attacks on trains in the US is not a common problem.
US Trains killing people at railroad crossings is a huge problem. Here in Silicon Valley, the SF to SJ train kills somebody about every three weeks. Year after year. Unfortunately, the train deaths happen so routinely, they no longer make significant news. Yet the cumulative body count by now surpasses many terrorist attacks.
Worrying about keeping explosives etc. from the trains is an imaginary problem. Worrying about how to keep the trains from killing people outside of them is a very real problem.
Terrorist attacks don’t need to be reserved for the latest maglev systems that are years away from being in operation. Today’s Amtrak system serves more than 500 destinations in 46 states and three Canadian provinces on 21,300 miles of tracks, representing plenty of opportunities for mischief. And yet actual security incidents are extremely rare, at least so far.
And, for the record, U.S. railroad-crossing deaths have averaged 299 per year for the past 10 years, or 25 deaths per month nationwide. In a similar 10-year period, we’ve averaged 38,350 highway fatalities, or 3,196 deaths per month nationwide. I’d suggest keeping cars from killing people is the more pressing problem.
The existing rail infrastructure is equally vulnerable – most rail lines are completely accessible, not to mention all our road, bridges, etc. If the only thing you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Once you start looking at our society as one big fat terrorist target, everything is vulnerable – theaters, cafes, anywhere where more than 2 people gather. The cure for terrorism is not to remake ourselves into a security state with airport type security everywhere but to get rid of terrorists. As Stalin said, “no person, no problem”.
High speed rail is less vulnerable than most because usually their right of way is fenced off or elevated. You can’t have cows/deer/people/cars wandering onto the tracks when the train goes by at 200mph.
I think high speed rail is silly because on the routes where it’s viable normal speed rail would be better than fine if they just got the experience really nice. Clean, comfortable, quiet cars. Fast internet. Rock solid schedule reliability. Easy, low stress boarding and ticketing (no waiting in long lines, no jockeying for seats).
Tick all these boxes and nobody would care about an extra 50 minutes on the trip.
Joe, sorry but you are wrong. Historically, a US metropolitan area is generally a ring that has a radius of around 30 miles from the center (e.g. the 495 ring in Boston). Any further is too far to commute. China now has 200+ mph trains and they conceive of their ring as being as far as 100 miles out. If we had 200 mph rail, Philadelphia could be a commuter suburb of NY, Hartford could be a suburb of Boston, etc. This would totally revolutionize living patterns. Fixing our existing system to be merely decent instead of atrocious would not have any such effect.
Phil,
According to earlier poster LongLeaf, we have nothing to fear but fear itself!
Stop being a worry-wart! Live it up.
J. Peterson wrote:
“US Trains killing people at railroad crossings is a huge problem. Here in Silicon Valley, the SF to SJ train kills somebody about every three weeks. Year after year. Unfortunately, the train deaths happen so routinely, they no longer make significant news. Yet the cumulative body count by now surpasses many terrorist attacks.”
What a shady comparison. Almost all of Caltrain’s “body count” are suicides. That isn’t the same thing at all, which I’m sure you know or else you wouldn’t have deliberately not mentioned it.
Folks who say that terrorism isn’t a big statistical risk: This could be true and yet still the cost of security might make maglev trains vastly more expensive here than in Japan or China. The budget of TSA would be the same even if all potential terrorists had, ten years ago, retired from terrorism. Since we don’t know how many people there are in the U.S. who might want to attack a maglev train presumably our government will assume that there are at least some and try to secure the entire line.