Michigan state representatives Bill Rogers and Wayne Schmidt have set up a task force studying the possibility of a solar-powered, magnetically levitated, high-speed rail line between Detroit and Lansing. A group calling itself the Interstate Traveler Company claims that it can privately finance the entire $1.3-billion cost of the line, and it expects to earn enough profits to be able to give half its gross revenues to the state in exchange for letting them build the lines along interstate highway rights of way.
Interstate Traveler estimates that this 60-mile system connecting Ypsilanti, Willow Run, and Detroit Airport will cost $920 million to build but earn $1.3 billion in annual revenues. But how will the tracks fit into the tunnels that go under the Detroit Airport taxiways? Click image for a larger view.
Interstate Traveler claims it has enough financial backing already to buy an old General Motors factory to use in building the components that will eventually become mag-lev tracks and vehicles. Interstate Traveler’s founder, someone named Justin Sutton, casually talks about spending billions of dollars building additional lines connecting Detroit to Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor, and officials in Ypsilanti seem to take him seriously.
This proposal could not be more unrealistic if the horse in the company’s picture of its equestrian traveler had a unicorn horn. To start with, mag-lev requires a lot of power, and the tiny, partly shaded, and sub-optimally angled solar cells that will supposedly be built into the mag-lev tracks are not going to generate enough power to move one vehicle, much less the hundreds that the company promises will relieve highway congestion and earn billions of dollars in revenues each year.
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Second, an image provided by the company of a spreadsheet for the proposed Ypsilante-Detroit line projects wildly unrealistically high revenues. Supposedly, farebox revenues, advertising, and station-area rents from a 60-mile system will return more than $1.3 billion a year. That’s more than is collected by all of the transit systems (including nearly 700 miles of rail transit lines) in the Philadelphia and Washington DC regions combined. Just how much travel takes place in and around Ypsilanti, Michigan, anyway?
Claims of significant financial backing are belied by the fact that the company’s web site hasn’t been updated in more than three years. It doesn’t help that the company claims to have a Northwest office whose web site is identical, other than the different web address, to the main one. Or that the company’s headquarters looks on Google maps like someone’s lakefront home. Or that the address that the company claims for its Detroit office also happens to be (according to numerous on-line directories) the address for UAW local 7777, though admittedly that could be old. Or that the company’s supposed management team includes a lot of presumably unpaid foreign “directors” but marketing, media, safety, and public relations officers are all “pending appointment.”
A decade ago, Interstate Traveler persuaded the Michigan legislature to ask Congress for funds “to support research, development, and construction of the Interstate Traveler Project.” Ironically, while denying it needs public money, it passes out certificates affirming this request when asked whether the project will be privately or publicly funded.
This smells like a scam. Even if Sutton has the best of intentions, he is obviously hoping for a giant windfall of some kind or other. Even if he could con Ypsilanti or the state of Michigan into giving him rights of way, he doesn’t appear likely to be able to raise the billion dollars or so he claims the project will need. Even if he could there is no way the lines they want to build could generate the revenue he claims even if they were technologically feasible, which is dubious.
Despite all the flaws and weaknesses in the proposal, Michigan legislators are actually holding hearings on the plan. I knew Michigan was desperate, but I didn’t realize it was so bad that elected officials in that state would take a crazy idea like this seriously.
It’s no surprise. Similar ventures have been thought up elsewhere. General Atomics has a 120-meter test facility in San Diego, which is being used as the basis of Union Pacific’s 8 km (5.0 mi) freight shuttle in Los Angeles; a freight maglev. General Atomics has received US$90 million in research funding from the federal government. The commercial automated “Urban Maglev” system commenced operation in March 2005 in Aichi, Japan. This is the nine-station 9 km (5.6 mi) long Tobu-kyuryo Line, otherwise known as the Linimo. In January 2001, the Chinese signed an agreement with the German maglev consortium Transrapid. Shanghai Maglev Train demonstration line is the first leg of operation. There was a proposal to build lines for Sydney, Australia and Melbourne. Long-proposed but not on any official drawing boards would be a Maglev line along the Interstate 5 corridor, its core component from Portland, Oregon to Vancouver, British Columbia, connecting Eugene, Oregon and Seattle. High-speed maglev lines between major cities of southern California and Las Vegas are also being studied via the California-Nevada Interstate Maglev Project. This program has ben heavily criticized mainly in California under the belief it would simply serve as a means to swing millions of Californians to Nevada to spend in casinos. UK Ultraspeed, a proposal to connect London with Glasgow an Edinburgh. A 39 Mile (64 km) project has been proposed linking Camden Yards in Baltimore and Baltimore-Washington International (BWI) Airport to Union Station in Washington, D.C., but like it’s old website doesn’t appear to have been updated. I don’t think any of these are viable, a shame, I’ve always been fascinated by maglevs and monorails, but the only place I can think of it being remotely useful would be the Northeast Corridor. If they can drastically lower the cost of magnetic suspension and the cost of building the elevated guide ways and track.
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The Antiplanner asked:
Just how much travel takes place in and around Ypsilanti, Michigan, anyway?
I have some familiarity with that area, in particular around Ford Lake (south of I-94 in Ypsilanti).
The land use is not in any way supportive in rail transit. Low-density suburban or even rural land use.
I find it especially curious that the proposal does not reach the “downtown” area of Ann Arbor (the middle of the University of Michigan campus, north of I-94), which might have some people that might want to ride rail transit.