continued from page 76 generated in this country by water, by coal, by wind,
and by sun.” He doesn’t mention nuclear power, which, given that General
Atomics is part of his team, is a curious omission.
I run the maglev question by Andy Kunz, a high-speed-rail advocate and
urban designer who runs the Web site NewTrains.org. Early in our conversation, he’s upbeat: “I’m all for any train that can move a lot of people in
a hurry.” Gradually, as we talk, Kunz turns suspicious. “We’ve had high-speed trains since 1964. Why aren’t there a bunch of maglevs? That’s the
question someone needs to answer.”
“It’s promotion, it’s all blue sky, it’s
speculation,” Quentin Kopp says of the
maglev. “Let them build it in Germany.”
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There are the maglev test tracks in Germany and Japan. Shanghai now has
a maglev line in passenger service, linking the airport to the city. But that’s
it, so far. Citing the example of a consortium of automotive industries in the
1930s that bought up and shut down urban streetcar lines, Kunz voices his
fear that the whole maglev craze is a decoy, something that will actually prevent high-speed rail from ever being built in this country. Later, I talk to
Quentin L. Kopp, a retired superior-court judge and former state senator who
runs the California High-Speed Rail Authority board. He opens the conversation by calling the maglev line “irrelevant.” Judge Kopp resists Kunz’s theory
that the maglev project is some sort of scam but calls it everything but. “It’s
promotion, it’s all blue sky, it’s speculation,” he roars, and then asserts that
the Germans have been trying for more than 20 years to unload their technological white elephant on us. “The proof is in the pudding,” he continues.
“The Berlin-to-Hamburg line never happened. Let them build it in Germany
or Japan. Let them spend their money on it.”
In theory, at least, the rail lines built by the California High-Speed Rail
Authority and the AMG’s maglev service could actually complement each
other. They might share stations in Anaheim and Ontario. But they will
inevitably be competitors when it comes to federal funding. California plans
to look to Washington for a quarter to a third of the money it needs. Cummings
says his maglev team only wants the same deal the Lincoln Administration
provided to the transcontinental railroad back in the 1860s: “The railroad
barons, they borrowed the money from the federal government to build it, and
they paid it back eventually.”
My real problem with maglev, though, is that it’s a technology that made
more sense 20 years ago, when it promised unheard-of land speeds. Now that
gravity-bound trains can hit 357 miles an hour, it’s a little passé. And what’s
been proposed is merely a series of discrete projects to demonstrate the viability of maglev technology: one from Anaheim to Las Vegas, another from
the Pittsburgh airport to downtown, and maybe a route from Baltimore to
Washington, D.C. By contrast, the State of California is promising to build an
integrated system using technology that is already proven and in widespread
use in the rest of the world. It’s a system that could inspire other states to do
the same, and act as a catalyst for a new national railroad.
I wish I could envision an America with our major cities connected by maglev lines, but all I can picture is Disneyland’s Monorail. You can ride it from
Downtown Disney to Tomorrowland and back. But, when you’re tired of
Tomorrowland and want to go home, you go out to the parking lot and get in
your car. Like the Monorail, maglev seems to be a symbol of someone else’s
future, and a distr°action from the business of building the real future we so desperately need. #
