Illustration by Russ Ando
Where will you be on Friday at 5:30? Chances are you’ll be fighting rush-hour traffic on the Bay Bridge or Highway 880, trying to get home. You’ll spend two-and-a-half days of your life stuck in traffic this year, and soon it will be more, as each year that passes adds another half-a-million cars to California roads and highways. Yet while gridlock is growing w–orse now, the real challenge is just ahead: with supplies dwindling and demand on the rise, the price of oil is soaring fast. In future decades, you might not even be able to afford to drive.
In the search for solutions in the Bay Area and statewide, a quiet movement has been growing to turn to technology beyond the automobile. In a modern twist on our oldest form of mass transit, a unique coalition of not-for-profits, government and industry is pressing for an American revolution in railroads. Europe and Japan have been running high-speed trains for decades; the same technology, many believe, could set California back on track to a cleaner, greener and more efficient future.
Imagine a high-speed network stretching 700 miles and linking every major city in the state, where bullet trains roar down the rails at speeds of up to 220 miles per hour; trip time from Oakland to Los Angeles, two-and-a-half hours; from Oakland to San Jose, just 22 minutes. This is the dream behind California high-speed rail. It’s a long-term vision that wouldn’t be completed until 2020 even if begun immediately, but if voters approve a $9.9 billion bond measure in November, it will be well on the way to becoming a reality. And if it sounds impressive, there are others who believe it’s just the beginning; planners in some cities are working on designs for maglev trains—short for magnetic levitation trains—that glide down guideways at more than 300 miles per hour, without ever touching the track. Could high-tech trains be the right investment for California?
Mighty maglev: This magnetic levitation train leaving China’s Pudong International Airport travels at 269 miles per hour. Photo by Alex Needham.
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When California high-speed rail someday gets a mention in the history books, it may well be in connection with Mehdi Morshed, the Iranian-born executive director of the California High Speed Rail Authority, former consultant to the state senate transportation committee and civil engineer. For more than 10 years, Morshed and his fellow board members on the rail authority have fought for funding and attention. That means a decade spent planning without laying a single mile of track. But Morshed isn’t surprised at the delay, given what proponents want to achieve.
“When you start talking about a project that will transform the state, it’s not that easy to get people to accept it,” Morshed says. “What we’re looking at here is very much like the interstate building program. It took 20 to 25 years to build the highways and to get the initiative to complete it.” The problem all along has been funding. The $9.9 billion bond initiative originally scheduled for the 2004 election was twice postponed, first to 2006 and now, likely, to the November 2008 ballot.
It’s a bird, it’s a plane: It’s a JR 700 shinkansen bullet train racing past Fujisan, Japan. Photo by Imre Cikajlo.
These struggles may soon be over. In 2007, the California legislature (after nearly condemning fast trains to death by underfunding) appropriated $20.7 million to the high-speed rail authority, not as much as the authority wanted but enough to complete the planning stage of the work. And now the ballot initiative is scheduled to go to the voters this November.
High-speed rail already boasts an impressive list of endorsements, ranging from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to the Sierra Club and the governor himself, while a 2004 poll from the Public Policy Institute showed support from 57 percent of likely voters. “High-speed rail protects our air, reduces greenhouse gases and eases congestion on our freeways,” says Sabrina Lockhart, a spokesperson for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Many long-distance Bay Area commuters are already on board. Gary Marshall spends an hour each morning driving from Hayward to San Jose; the high-speed line would run through both cities and possibly help to ease traffic along his route. But Marshall believes high speed is the right way to go for a different reason. “I think it’s going to be more fuel-efficient, it’s more environmentally friendly, and it’s where we need to be going in a future without cars,” he says.
The planned network, if built, would link all the major cities in the state. Locally, the line will split in the Bay Area, one branch running through Union City and Oakland Airport to Oakland, and the other through Palo Alto to San Francisco. The Oakland to San Jose commute would take 22 minutes on high-speed rail compared to the hour and 12 minutes it takes on Amtrak now; the drive can take anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and a half, depending on traffic. Ironically, the line might also create competition for BART’s airport connection, since it would stop in both San Francisco and at SFO and travel faster than BART trains. It might be possible for Caltrain and the high-speed rail to implement a shared-use or single-fare arrangement for travel locally in the Bay Area, according to Doug Kimsey with the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, although there are no definite plans yet. The transportation commission, he says, would ultimately like to see some of the funds planned for high-speed rail improvements used to make local improvements. And the ballot initiative does in fact contain some $700 million that will go to enhancing local systems; since the high-speed trains will very likely share track with Caltrain, its existing network could get a major upgrade.
Bite the bullet: On a bullet train like this German one, the trip from Oakland to Los Angeles would take only two-and-a-half hours. Photo by Loic Bernard.
According to its supporters, high speed offers a number of dazzling advantages that make a project of this magnitude well worth the cost. Stuart Cohen is the director of the Transportation and Land Use Coalition, a coalition of more than 60 environmental, social justice and community groups. The proposed system, he believes, has incredible potential: “If all 700 miles are built, it will reduce our carbon footprint by about eight million tons per year.” This is, as Cohen points out, a major step toward California’s goals under the Global Warming Solutions Act (commonly known as the groundbreaking AB32 legislation), the California law that sets targets for greenhouse gas emissions. And this is only the beginning. Cohen believes it could help relieve the swelling tide of traffic on our roadways, draw people to live and work in city centers and ultimately stem sprawl. “If we can get this project developed, it will definitely provide access for growth,” says Cohen. “High-speed rail won’t mean that we never need another highway. It really is about creating a choice other than highly polluting airports and adding more lanes creating more congestion. If you have someone who wants to drive, they can. If you have someone who doesn’t want to sit in traffic and wants to get their work done and get there faster, they’ll be able to.”
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The single greatest advantage of high-speed rail, however, may be its ability to compete with short-haul air travel. For distances under 400 miles, high-speed rail is highly competitive with air travel, according to a Federal Railroad Administration study. It’s faster door-to-door, because there are no check-in times or other delays; it’s more comfortable because there is no takeoff, no landing and no turbulence. It’s cheaper as well; the authority will set fares from San Francisco to Los Angeles at 70 to 75 percent of the price of a budget airline ticket, according to Morshed, meaning you could save as much as 30 percent by going by rail. You can move freely around the train during the journey, buy drinks at the bar or plug in your laptop. And you don’t have to take off your shoes or hand over your toothpaste to pass security on this ride. “It would do a lot to relieve the short-haul plane traffic that takes up a lot of space at airports,” Cohen says. “SFO will be reaching capacity again over the next decade or so, and high-speed rail will help to avoid the need for further expansion.”
Historically the advantage of high-speed rail over air travel holds true as well. When the Spanish high-speed line opened between Seville and Madrid in 1991, it cut the number of purchased airfares on the route in half. Thirty-two million or more Californians will ride the high-speed trains every year—slightly more than half of them passengers who would otherwise have flown to their destinations, according to a ridership analysis (one of several) prepared by an independent consulting firm.
Based on these estimates, the California system will run at a $340 million annual surplus, giving the state an advantage no freeway can offer: income.
And if high-speed rail seems like a new concept for California, it’s actually closer to a modern version of a past success. The California of the late 19th century was built on railways; many of those who trekked west came by the Transcontinental Railroad. The terminal where weary passengers from the other side of the continent would end their long journey is today the Port of Oakland. And the railway magnates of those bygone days were a mighty force in state politics; one of them, Leland Stanford, became governor of California and founded what is today Stanford University. It wasn’t until the 1950s, when the federal government spent what would be hundreds of billions in today’s money on the creation of the interstate system, that railways began to meet serious competition, and many of the streetcar lines that had once been the backbone of growing towns across California were torn up, paved over or left to rust as cheap oil and government-funded highway construction fueled the automobile craze. In that sense, at least, today’s high-tech trains are less a first than a comeback for a form of transportation that was once all-important in California.
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The benefits of high-speed rail stem from the nature of its design. The technology is familiar abroad; high-speed rail has been in operation for two decades in Europe and more than 40 years in Japan, where rail fares outnumber airline tickets on some routes by as much as eight to one. Using special track construction and overhead electric power supply, “bullet trains” on steel wheels glide down the rails at speeds from 150 to 220 miles an hour, powered by muscular air-cooled electric motors that pack much more horsepower than the diesel engines in Amtrak trains. The line is kept isolated from local roads in much the same way as a freeway, using over- and underpasses so that no rail crossings are necessary, permitting the train to go at high speeds while ruling out the possibility of accidents.
Some of the most modern designs, like France’s TGV and Korea’s KTX, use regenerative braking, or brakes that collect some of the heat energy created by braking and feed it back into the system. Many high-speed systems have “tilting trains” that use hydraulics to keep the train level around curves for extra comfort and still greater speed. The time difference for high speed compared to other means of travel is striking. From Oakland to Los Angeles via high speed will take just two-and-a-half hours, as compared to 10 hours or more on Amtrak or six hours or more by car.
The system’s extraordinary promise comes with one major short-term drawback: an estimated $40 billion price tag, about two-and-a-half times the size of Caltrans’ budget this year. Critics argue that highway construction is a higher priority, and in a cash-strapped state plagued for years by budget crises, state government has seldom been able to spare the funds for this massive infrastructure project, no matter how beneficial. In response to these concerns, the governor has often suggested that the authority seek private funding from investors through a public-private partnership, to try to take as much of the load off of the state as possible. Morshed says this is definitely part of the plan, but he expects that private investors will only start to chip in once the state has made the initial commitment. He projects the cost will ultimately be split three ways, between state, federal and private.
Many supporters of the project also point out if high-speed rail is expensive, building new freeways isn’t any cheaper—in fact, it might even cost more. “One of the things we have been stressing when people say it’s expensive is that transportation capacity is expensive in this state,” says Cohen, with the Transportation and Land Use Coalition. “So you have to compare it with the price of expanding the existing infrastructure.”
Improving just one regional highway can cost over half as much as a statewide rail system, supporters argue, which easily justifies the price of high-speed rail. Cohen gives his favorite example: Highway 99 in the Central Valley received $1 billion from Proposition 1B as a down payment on a $6 billion construction project to add one lane in each direction; now Central Valley lawmakers are advocating to add yet another lane in each direction to bring Highway 99 up to interstate highway standards—a $20 billion project.
If the ballot initiative for high-speed rail passes in November it will provide the rail authority with the first quarter of the funds; Morshed believes that investment from federal and private sources will follow once construction is underway. Given voter approval, then, the project will start as planned. But high speed still needs all the support it can muster, Morshed says. “It needs to have strong public support. If you support it, let people know—your legislators, representatives, neighbors—this is a good idea,” he says. “It’s a grassroots effort. The more support we have, the faster we can make progress.”
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If there are some who believe that the California high-speed rail project is too ambitious, there are others who think it’s too tame, and have placed their faith instead in the fastest mode of rail transport known to man—the maglev or magnetic levitation train. The answer to our transportation problems, they say, is a kind of train technology already in use for three years in China and two years in Japan.
“We need to start thinking in terms of how to build the 21st-century infrastructure. We’re still thinking in terms of the present reality of automobile travel. I would venture to say that the I-405 [in Los Angeles] will not be as heavily traveled 50 years from now as it is now because the price of oil will be through the roof,” says Kevin Coates, a Maryland transportation and energy policy consultant and a former executive in the electric power industry who helped make a recent National Geographic documentary on maglev. “Maglev is the technology that promises to deliver us to a clean, renewable-energy future . . . . the system is not only cost-effective, it’s much more efficient travel, and it’s quiet and it’s clean and it’s environmentally friendly.”
There are currently three different maglev designs: Inductrack, invented in the Bay Area at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory; EDS, developed in Japan; and EMS from German consortium Transrapid. But the basic idea is the same. Powerful magnets keep the train floating on an invisible cushion of magnetic fields a few inches off the track. The magnets on the train and the track become like two halves of a motor; attraction and repulsion drive the train forward in much the same way they turn the motor in an electric car. Since there is no friction with the rail, maglev trains can reach unbelievable speeds. In Japan, where maglev trains have been in operation since 2005 and carried over 10 million people, the fastest trial run reached 361 miles per hour. The maglev line in Shanghai, China, running since 2004, is a close second. Carrying passengers to and from the airport, it cruises there and back at 269 miles per hour, although its top speed is 311 miles per hour. It may come as a surprise that the Shanghai train has no seatbelts.
But more important than speed, Coates says, is the cost-saving potential. Because there are no moving parts and no engine, there is no wear and tear, meaning that maglev is potentially cheaper to run and maintain than freeways, airports or high-speed steel-wheel rail.
“The high-speed rail system is steel wheels on steel track. And all that weight from the vehicles and the engines is being passed through to the several square centimeters of steel wheel that come in contact with the rail; and that weight, that mass, pounds the rails when [it’s] traveling at 200 miles per hour. So your operating and maintenance costs end up being double that of a maglev,” says Coates. Another side benefit of frictionless travel is that these trains running up to half the speed of sound are nearly silent. “I’ve stood right under the track and you hear the track power up as the electric current passes through it and the vehicle goes by,” says Coates. “If you’re a hundred yards away, you don’t even hear it.”
And, these trains run on time. “The maglev system is computer-controlled, so the on-time performance of the Shanghai system is better than 99.9 percent of the time,” says Coates. “This is truly the first digital means of transportation.” And in the event of a power failure, the Shanghai Transrapid can levitate for up to an hour on reserve battery power.
What’s the catch? If maglev systems are cheaper to maintain, they are far more expensive to build. There are so many unknowns that cost estimates can vary widely. A study on a possible maglev system in Southern California concluded that, depending on the location and type of construction, it could cost anywhere from $37 million per mile to $300 million per mile to build, partly because maglevs can’t share track with other systems. The Shanghai maglev cost roughly $70 million a mile. For comparison, the same study notes that a freeway costs from $5 million to $20 million dollars to build per lane per mile and high-speed steel-wheel costs roughly $18 million per track per mile. Coates believes discounting maglev because of construction costs is short-sighted.
“It is a substantial investment. But what’s the life cycle of something that runs like this? You’re looking at 50, 60, 90 years. When we build this system, we’re not just building for today’s generation, we’re building for the end of today’s generation and the next two, three, four generations. And we can’t continue to give them highways, because it just doesn’t work,” Coates says.
Some politicians and officials share this view, and an increasing number want to give maglev a chance. The Federal Railroad Administration has been holding a contest to pick a site for a maglev line. Los Angeles to Las Vegas was in the running and is still on the table, but the finalists were the Baltimore-D.C. connection and an airport connector for Pittsburgh. By building a demonstration line, the federal railroad administration believes they will be better able to judge the benefits of maglev. The new maglev system—wherever it ends up—could begin construction by 2011, if Congress enacts the necessary legislation and appropriations.
Closer to home, Marin County Supervisor Judy Arnold suggested last September the possibility of running a maglev commuter line from Marin to Sonoma in place of the proposed SMART commuter line. The Marin County board listened to a presentation on maglev but recoiled at the cost and dropped the idea before October 1, the deadline to apply for federal funds. And in Los Angeles, the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) wants to build maglev from Los Angeles Union Station and LAX to the suburbs in the hopes of providing an alternative to gridlock. These projects are some of the most ambitious transportation projects now under consideration in the United States; but again, the major hurdle is the price tag. SCAG believes they will need to seek private funding for their project because federal funding probably won’t be forthcoming.
But if the cost of construction is the main drawback for maglev, there are some Bay Area scientists who may have found a cheaper way to levitate.
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Invented in Livermore, Inductrack is a simpler variation of the high-speed maglev trains in China and Japan which use computer-controlled electromagnets. First invented by physicist Richard Post and his team at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory; Inductrack was so successful it won them a contract from NASA shortly thereafter to study the idea as a means for launching satellites into space. General Atomics, a company based in San Diego, is now working together with the Livermore team to further develop Inductrack for commercial use. Inductrack uses permanent bar magnets—like the magnets in children’s toys—only these neodymium iron boron magnets are many times more powerful than your average fridge magnet.
“It uses permanent magnets that when they’re moved across a conductive surface create currents, electrical currents in the conductive surface, and those currents interact with the magnets such that it’s almost like if you had a north pole magnet and another north pole magnet and you push those together you’d feel the repulsive force,” explains Bob Baldi, senior program manager for the Inductrack project. “Now there’s no free lunch. It takes energy to push the vehicle to create those currents.”
In other words, as long as the train is moving, the bar magnets in the train keep it hovering over the tracks. When stationary, the train settles back down onto wheels. When it starts to move again, the wheels retract as the train levitates. The levitation in and of itself consumes no power. “It merely requires forward motion of the vehicle in order to levitate,” says Baldi. The magnets in an Inductrack or “urban maglev” train can levitate more than 50 times their own weight even at low speeds.
Why might Inductrack be a better way to go? Since this model uses fewer sophisticated electronics than other systems, it not only has the same advantages as other designs—quieter, cleaner, more efficient—but it’s cheaper to construct as well. The cost of Inductrack maglev is comparable to light rail, such as streetcars or trolley, says Baldi.
After seven years in the works, Inductrack is almost ready for commercial use. Given all its combined advantages, it’s likely to be on the table as urban planners plot the future of transportation in California.
Whatever the fate of any individual project, the trend is clear: high-tech trains are gaining ground as new technology becomes available. Whether maglev and high-speed can popularize mass transit and help solve our coming energy crisis remains to be seen. For right now at least, our oldest form of mass transit is making a comeback here—made faster, more efficient and built to beat the competition.
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Jonathan Parkinson is a freelance writer who reports on environmental and technological issues concerning Californians. Mighty maglev: This magnetic levitation train leaving China’s Pudong International Airport travels at 269 miles per hour.
