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Why are maglev trains still rare?
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Because it's not currently profitable in most cases. Capitalism ensures that the merit of an idea comes secondary to it's profitability. We don't get the best things, we get the profitable things.
Not to defend capitalism in general, but it’s really good at answering these sort of “is it worth the cost?” aquestions. The whole point is to allocate scarce resources efficiently; the problem is that it assumes nobody is a scumbag and all the costs are accounted for.
You can't.
The current, dominant form of capitalism isn't and doesn't, though. It maximizes short-term profits and ignores all other medium and long-term costs. The efficient allocation of scarce resources doesn't happen when inefficient allocation yields greater short-term profit. The stock market ensures that high short-term yields with lower total returns will be favored over the inverse. In particular, it emphasizes competition over cooperation, which is more resource wasteful for the gestalt.
It's also really good at "externalizing" costs one does not want to factor in -- making it worthless for the stated purpose.
It isn't. Most decision makers of capitalism are very unaware of science. You'd know this if you work in research. The ideas that see light of day do so not because they're good in any quantifiable sense. It is because they convince the capitalists. This can be affected by so many things that aren't merit or even cost based.
Some things make sense from a cost perspective, but not a profitability perspective. Profit isn't just about cost. There's margins, competition, longevity, etc. Something can be of moderate costs, but if the margins are too low or it is too long term or a project, it is of low value to capitalists.
I'm really struggling to understand what you're getting at here.
Whether or not a decision maker is aware of science, their products will still be subject to the laws of physics.
For example?
To simplify it, when capitalism answers "is it worth the cost?", it is not answering "is the benefit of this thing to society worth the cost?". They're answering "are the profits I would get out of this and the risk worth the cost?". And profits do not always agree with what's good for society.
One example of moderate-to-low cost investments that are of demand in society but not very profitable and hence does not see focus is low-income housing (at least in the US). Housing developments disproportionally target high income or even luxury housing, as the margins on those are far better (but the costs are also much higher). Even nowadays, that this trend has been going on for a while, and luxury housing has really fallen out of demand (which greatly increases the risk), it continues. Luxury housing still looks a better investment to investors, when society does not need more luxury housing. It needs more moderate and low income housing.
Perfect
I think OP is just thinking of “cost” to mean capex. Whereas most real-world cost evaluations consider capex, opex, and opportunity cost, among others. Something having low cost but low margins will usually have a large opportunity cost, which increases the total real cost.
What kind of benefits are there to maglev trains that are not cost related?
They're faster and more comfortable than traditional rail. They could help to reduce air and vehicle travel
They're not that faster. Conventional train speed record is 574.8 km/h, Maglev record is 603 km/h. Maglev price doesn't justify diminishing returns.
And how about the actual speeds they are used with? Another poster suggested the maintenance costs of traditional speeds skyrocket as speed increases, while maglev doesn't really have a lot of stuff that wears down in the first place.
All but one operational Maglev lines run at speeds below 160kph. Which is way lower than conventional high speed railways which usually run at speeds over 300kph. Also "non high speed" conventional railways in the UK have a top speed of 200kph, which is also faster than existing maglev lines, lol.
The only exception is Shanghai Maglev, which tops out at 430kph. But that line only exists as a Chinese propaganda tool.
I doubt conventional trains are regularly traveling at the speed record. Thats a poor way to compare the speeds of things.
Regular conventional service is much much faster than regular maglev service. It's not even a comparison at this point.
I would expect a century+ old established wide-spread technology to be able to beat a newer less tested technology in many cases. This doesn't mean conventional rail is inherently superior and especially doesn't mean we should discard the concept. Maglev faces much resistance (such as the cultural resistance evident in this thread), it's time may only be starting now as the automobile age looks to have peaked.
Then it's good that we don't have them, isn't it? Kool_Newt's post implies that it's due to a failing of capitalism, but this sounds like a win to me. I'd rather my money go towards food and housing than a faster or more comfortable experience doing something I rarely need.
Sure, but if it lessens the impact on the climate from air travel and vehicles, then it's a good thing. Especially if they can become reliable and convenient enough that people don't need to have their own vehicles to drive everywhere.
One of the most common flights is US west coast to east coast. Normal high speed rail can't do this in a reasonable time frame. We need something faster if we want to get reduce those flights.
One of the features of capitalism is externalizing the costs, especially of pollution.
Ah, that makes sense. So maglev is overall cheaper but still less profitable because the costs are paid where they're incurred.
Cheaper than flights? You'd have to do the math on it. We may have to accept that some things like travel will be expensive. But right now it's not feasible Wrt to time to take a train or even HSR coast to coast.
That's the dumbest take ever.
Care to explain why?
It is scientifically proven that high quality public transport, and especially train services, improves the lives of people and improves the economy.
Money spent on food is a total waste. No matter how much food you buy for people, they will eat all of it and will ask for more. Simply because you need to eat every day of your life.
This is also true for housing to some extent, as populations generally tend to grow over time, thus more and more houses will always be needed no matter how much you have built already. But houses take a lot more time to run out of as you don't need a new house every day, only once every few years when the population increases.
But you can build a good railway system in the area once and then people will use it to earn their own money, to pay for their food themselves and to buy their own homes themselves. And they will also pay for railway maintenance and bring profit to the budget as well. It's a one time investment which lasts virtually forever.
The government should invest in long term solutions: infrastructure, education, etc. There's really no point investing anything into short term solutions. Housing can be a long term investment if done properly though. But that's an off topic.
Thanks. So it basically comes down to externalizing costs again. Those who build the trains don't see most of the profits or the costs that come with it, so they optimize for the parts that they do see.
Regarding food, I as an individual need to eat every day, and I need to pay for that food. I'm not going to just not buy food because I'll need it again tomorrow. It doesn't matter if the government provides the food or I buy it myself, it's still money that needs to be spent on it. One could argue that food security also leads to similar second/third order effects by freeing up that mental real estate dedicated to survival and allowing it to be used for positive contributions to the community, though I don't have data to back this up so it's just speculation. Similarly, if the rails are public and built using my tax money while providing me with no value, I would consider it to be wasteful as survival takes precedence over comfort. If it's private and not profitable, then it means no one wants this for the price it takes to build and maintain, so it was a bad idea to have it in the first place. But either way, this is all moot because it's a conclusion reached from incomplete information. I'm down for public spending on this if there are higher order effects that everyone benefits from.
Better acceleration, steeper inclines, tighter curves at same speed, better ride quality and less wear. As someone has mentioned below, normal trains could go a lot faster than they do in practice, because the ride quality, wear and wind resistance get atrocious, and the tracks need to be exceptionally straight. Making a maglev go fast is more feasible, though you still have the wind resistance issue obviously.
Where are all the maglev trains in non-capitalist countries? Sooner or later, in any system, someone has to do a cost benefit analysis and decide whether it's worth it. It's not just about profitability. There are plenty of situations in the US where something is unprofitable but still funded because the benefit is worth it.
Dude, without capitalism we’d be living in flying maglev RVs on mars with free robot labour bro
Three of the six currently operating maglevs are in communist china
China is very much capitalist and has been for at least three decades now.
"MVP" stands for "minimum viable product".
It's basically evolution. It's not that we don't get the best things, it's that when something evolves traits that require more energy than they are worth, they inevitably die out. I'm reminded of the film The Man in the White Suit.
It'd be nice to always have the "best" things, but the "energy" to support them has to come from somewhere.
But unfortunately the mechanism that is dictating which traits are carried through and which are left to die out, is capitalism. Not just that, but short sighted capitalism.
I'm not saying maglev is the be all and end all, I'm just saying that this "evolution" is sort of (extremely) fucked.
True. Similarly, unfortunately the mechanism that is dictating which traits are carried through is natural selection. Maybe this metaverse thing has some benefits after all 😆.
The way I see it is, if you have a set of entities all acting in their own best interest, the way they engage with each other is called "capitalism". If a subset of those entities band together to act in the interest of their communal group, the mechanism within the group might be "communism", but how that group interacts with other entities/groups is still capitalism.
It's no coincidence that China, a communist state, is one of the strongest players in the wider capitalist economy. And even if the CCP was 100% benevolent toward everyone, they would still only be able to justify spending that makes sense at the global level. This is why they've opted to no longer buy our "recyclables" as raw materials. Sure it would be nice to always recycle stuff, but it was polluting their rivers, costing them more in healthcare.
At the end of the day, capitalism IS economic natural selection. So I view a government that embraces unchecked capitalism as a government that does nothing.
I think our best chance is if people to view a maglev train (and the benefits it offers) more like going to the moon: it's inspirational. It gives people something to look at and say "look how far we've come" both figuratively and literally. It's not impossible to fund, we just need to all value it so much that we're all willing to divert funds from other places where they probably make more sense, i.e. act in a common interest. But we can't even do that for healthcare so...
While I agree and disagree with several parts of your sentiment, asserting that a mechanism fuelled mostly by the 0.1% or 0.01% of its constituents is "natural selection" feels a bit disingenuous. It's selection, but it doesn't happen by nature. The driving forces behind a lot of the changes that happen are backed by intent (of the players with the most power), not environmental fitness.
And calling China a communist state is a disservice to communism, they call themselves communist but its about as apt as trump calling himself a feminist.
It's interesting to hear you say it doesn't happen in nature as though we are outside of nature. It seems pretty clear that the phenomenon that is currently happening does happen naturally. Natural Selection isn't without local minima/maxima. Rapid environmental changes cause them all the time, and we've seen a lot of change in the last 100 years.
It sounds like you're conflating wealth inequality with capitalism. Those are two different concepts entirely. Capitalism with appropriate limits can lead to healthy competition, and a self-correcting economy without risk of a misguided government accidentally creating a bubble that then pops and hurts everyone. The government should specifically be there to pop bubbles before they become too big, and if they do get too big, ease the impact to its citizens as it deflates. Without the appropriate limitations in place, often times the best "capitalist" option is to buy government influence and cause exactly these kinds of bubbles to happen, benefit from it, and then step out of the way when it pops. Which is where we regularly find ourselves today. The issue is compounded by people using phrases like "just pick yourself up by your bootstraps" to justify a do-nothing government.
I agree with you about calling China "communist", but I was deliberate in my argument. It's not relevant that China is a totalitarian dictatorship, I was using them as an example of an entity that is decidedly not capitalist internally, but inevitably has to be externally.