It seems like every article about a ridiculous high-speed rail proposal starts out with something like, “Imagine stepping on a train in Portland at noon and stepping off about two hours later in Vancouver, British Columbia.” What a great imagination you have, Andrew Theen of the Oregonian!
How about this: imagine stepping aboard a plane at Portland International Airport at 10 am and landing in Vancouver a little more than an hour later. You don’t have to imagine it because you can do it! One-way fares are under $150, which is a lot less than it would cost to build a high-speed rail line between the two cities.
Of course, someone is going to say that the downtown-to-downtown time of the train will be competitive with flying. But most people don’t live downtown anymore, so that is really irrelevant. Those who do can take light rail to the Portland Airport and the Skytrain to downtown Vancouver. Driving would be quicker, but no one who lives in Portland ever drives anywhere, do they?
Most of the female viagra uk people of all over the world are too embarrased to talk about their sexual troubles. How well do blue pills perform? ED pills from a reputed web chemist. on line levitra http://deeprootsmag.org/2015/07/14/herb-herby-herbert-daddy/ In the old days there was buy generic levitra no solution existed to deal with this dysfunction and once got infected man had to accept the inability as his fate. Feeling thirsty all the time is levitra prescription deeprootsmag.org considered to be one of the most popular producers of PC game accessories. The problem with high-speed rail is that it requires an enormous amount of precisely built and precisely maintained infrastructure. Airplanes don’t, and the little infrastructure they do require is almost entirely paid for by ticket fees. Portland can’t even afford to maintain its streets, so who is going to pay to build and maintain high-speed rail?
The Oregonian says that state and provincial “governments hope to work with private companies” to make the high-speed rail happen. Have they heard about a state to the south called California? The high-speed rail authority there promised to build a line for $40 billion and that private companies will help pay for it. The costs have more than doubled and no private company was gullible enough to put in a single cent, much less the multiple billions of dollars the state was hoping for.
As usual, what is really going on is that Oregon and Washington want to be “shovel-ready” for when Democrats take over Congress and start spending money like crazy on crazy projects like this one. So taxpayers are going to spend millions of dollars on planning documents that, if we are lucky, will sit on the shelves and collect dust.
Regardless of whether you think of climate, air travel is the most fuel thirsty way to travel. Airlines all over the world are struggling to lower the energy consumption of their machines – by designing lighter planes and more efficient engines, by getting rid of needless weight inside the cabin, or by flying at lower speeds. At the same time, they started investigating alternative fuels like algae, coconut oil, hydrogen and solar power. None of these things will save cheap airline travel when kerosene prices keep going up, though. Replacing jet fuel kerosene with natural gas may seem more efficient and cleaner but given it’s explosive nature, it’s laughed out of discussions.
But there is an alternative, if we’re willing to sacrifice speed. The 1930’s saw the end of the airship era. Blimps and Airships however may make a comeback. An Ohio company Ohio Airships, combines the advantages of air cargo while significantly reducing ecological problems. They achieve this by designing slow cargo airships, called “Dynalifters”. These air vessels mix the travel concepts of planes and Zeppelins. The company completed 4 conceptual designs for four different sizes. All designs are equipped with detachable cargo pods for rapid loading and off-loading, and a prototype with a length of 37 metres has already been built and tested. They’re not blimps, they do not float away without a tether. The Dynalift is a airship/plane hybrid, it uses the helium/air mixed bag buoyancy to reduce most of the aircrafts weight penalty but it’s not light enough to float. The airship has wings and engines and wheels and takes off and lands as passenger aircrafts do albeit at a slower pace. The aircraft do not fly at stratospheric altitudes and can navigate safely in as little as 2,000 feet or less. It’s top speed is 200 km/h or 124 miles an hour, while four times slower than a jet it uses a fraction of the fuel to travel the same distances. The passenger gondola offers wider floor plans than jet’s, a 747 is 240 inches wide (20+ feet) a passenger gondola can be over 25 feet wide and windows the size of house windows because cabins don’t require pressurization and open floor plans means no coach style seating.
http://nebula.wsimg.com/4072baa05789456f78fa98a9daafffa3?AccessKeyId=8ADDB62CE271F95970F8&disposition=0&alloworigin=1
We’re not willing to sacrifice speed. And air travel is far from the most fuel-thirsty method of travel. Because the airlines are good about filling almost every seat, they use about 2,500 BTUs per passenger mile, compared with 2,200 on Amtrak. Moreover, Amtrak’s energy efficiency is improving at 2.3 percent per year while the airlines are improving at 3.3 percent per year, so the airlines are catching up.
Meanwhile, cars use about 3,000 BTUs per passenger mile and mass transit uses 3,300. The only really energy efficient form of travel is intercity buses that probably use about 1,000 BTUs per passenger mile — one study says under 700, but I suspect that’s a bit optimistic.
Dated, from 2012, but still relevant:
Boeing 737 vs. Toyota Prius
This exercise also points out a paradox in aircraft design – a single aisle Boeing 737-800 is nearly twice as efficient as the larger, double-aisle Boeing 777-200ER. The design requirements for long-haul international flying require more lavatories, large galleys, more storage space, life rafts and a host of other overhead not needed for shorter hops. This paradox creates an opportunity for shorter stage long-haul flying as fuel costs continue to rise. I’ve already shown that absolute fuel burn does not correlate to efficiency the way seating capacity does. Commercial aircraft can move many people very rapidly, and they do it at least as efficiently as cars, and advanced aircraft designs like the 787 Dreamliner, and A350-900 are closing the gap with their single-aisle peers. Motorcycles and minivans are great for moving one or a few people, but it’s very clear that technology scaled for personal transportation doesn’t beat mass transit today. Buses and mini-buses continue to shine in a world where liquid fuels are scarce and expensive and it will be interesting to watch how efficiency demands will shape international and domestic travel in the coming decades.
Portland and Vancouver, BC are about 300 miles apart. For the line-haul portion of the trip — forget about the access/egress issues Randal mentions and any association delays related to international travel — to be completed in two hours, this train would have to average 150 miles per hour. Not max speed, average.
Not sure where such a train would be routed, considering that the entire Seattle area and much of the eastern Puget Sound region are almost completely developed. The design would require complete grade separation and would need to be placed in a corridor with a linear right-of-way. Given that the Seattle area is boxed in by the Sound and the Cascades, this more or less restricts options to existing intercity rail corridors, which would need to be upgraded to provide the requisite grade separation. That’s not just a challenging design consideration. It’s also extremely expensive.
But then again, both Oregon and Washington have shown before that money is no object when it comes to train romanticism. No wonder these pitches always begin with “Imagine stepping on a train in [inset your city here].”
Increases in speed have taken away any fuel advantage from jet engines, and it has taken 50 years to get back down to the same Megajoules per passenger-mile as before the jets. Given the advances in engines, materials and aerodynamics, one can only imagine what a modern version of the turboprop Constellation, flying at the same speed, would be like in terms of efficiency. Breaking speed records was an almost daily occurence throughout the 20th century. Cars, ships, planes and trains became faster and faster, year after year. Because the power needed to push an object through air increases with the cube of velocity, this race to ever higher speeds raises energy consumption exponentially.
A dynalift uses 6-8 times less fuel per trip.
Imagine if airships were the dominant mode of travel in the 30’s and didn’t die out, improving energy efficiency every decade. Then in the sixties an engineer comes along and says check out this new invention.
The Jet liner!!!! it’s 4 times faster than the airship
“AMAZING”
Heres the kicker it uses several times the fuel…….
“Get the hell out of here”
LR, do you consider the value of passengers’ time in your advocacy of passenger blimps? That is, JFK—LHR is seven hours by turbofan airplane and you say that blimps would quadruple that time to, what, 28 hours? If a 777 carries 200 pax and each make the average hourly wage of $23/hour, then multiply that times the 21 hours means that the blimp costs almost $100,000 more to use than the 777, in terms of passenger time.
Or am I getting something wrong? Wouldn’t crew time have to be included in the calc too? And if blimps’ cabin don’t require pressurization, wouldn’t that mean they would be flying in some pretty awful weather? Even up at 35,000 feet, the turbulence over the middle of the Pacific can be awful in winter. I can’t imagine doing the same flight but four times as long at 7500 feet.
I can see blimps being used for cargo, however, if the fuel savings are that great.
Then by that logic I-5 isn’t viable :$