NOTE: This article was revised in the following areas in July 1998: The name of the system has been changed from "HiLo" to "HiLoMag", because it was discovered that the name HiLo, (even written with a capital L) has been used by other businesses (unrelated to transportation). HiLoMag, pronounced high-low mag, is an acronym for the national High and Low speed Maglev transportation system. The HiLoMag system speed has been changed from a constant 100mph to 60mph in and around cities and 200mph between cities and across the nation. The configuration of the guidance and switching system has been changed to permit wide vehicles on the guideways. Pallets will be included to permit existing automobiles to be used on the guideways. And, the concept of intermittent-flow vs. continuous-flow systems has been introduced, which makes the huge capacity of the HiLoMag system easier to understand.
This supplement should be read only after reading the basic article .
This longer supplement, which was written to prove the feasibility and the practicability of the HiLoMag system, contains some moderately-technical material, but most of it will be understandable to lay users of our highways. Some seemingly obvious material is included here as an aid to a rapid understanding of the system. What is obvious to one may not be to another. A more definitive description of this concept has been developed in a book (awaiting publication) by Francis D. Reynolds. See the Table of Contents of this book length treatment of this concept.
The objectives of the writer, a retired engineering manager and inventor, are to spur interest in HiLoMag, or a comparable dual-mode transportation system, and to promote its study, development, and implementation nationally. Except for consultation, lecturing, and further writing on HiLoMag, he will not be personally involved in its development. His contributions to HiLoMag will be limited to suggesting the system, to providing these preliminary thoughts and considerations, and to publicizing and promoting it. He is waiving his patent rights and placing the invention in the public domain. He will not profit financially from the development or implementation of HiLoMag. Others, however, are encouraged to patent details of the system, and to engage in commercial HiLoMag enterprises. This is an open invitation to all individuals, universities, research organizations, manufacturing companies, financial institutions, and government entities to freely study, develop, and implement HiLoMag.
The system, at this time, is a well-thought-out concept, but it has not been designed yet. In an effort to promote HiLoMag the writer proposes here specific workable answers to the technical questions which are most apt to be asked about it, but little real engineering has been done on HiLoMag to date. None of the approaches suggested here are sacred, and surely the actual HiLoMag designers will, in many cases, find or develop better solutions than these.
Because of the futuristic nature of the HiLoMag transportation system, its huge size, and the major effects it will have on several aspects of society, some people won't take it seriously at first. Many areas and details requiring further research, analysis, and testing will be discussed here; but the possible existence of as-yet-unaddressed questions should not be allowed to kill the proposed system at the outset. As Charles Kettering of General Motors once wrote, "We see what is wrong with a new idea, not what is right." Other quotes also fit: "We must not dismiss any novel idea with the cocksure statement that it can't be done. We have already proved that science and hard work can lick what appear to be insurmountable difficulties." --William E. Boeing.
After reading the basic HiLoMag article a young friend asked, "This is just a story, isn't it?" No, Steve, it is not just a story; it is a proposal and a forecast. I am serious, very serious. "Nothing is too wonderful to be true." --Michael Faraday.
Most of the HiLoMag guideway traffic will consist of passenger cars of various sizes. Very small cars have had limited popularity in the United States, partly because they are less safe than larger heavier cars. But on the guideways very small (even single-or two-passenger) HiLoMag electric cars will be equally safe, will cost less to buy and use, and will have a number of environmental advantages.
At least in the early years of HiLoMag, we will be able to drive our conventional automobiles onto special maglev pallets that in turn will run on the guideways. The guideways will be made wide enough to accommodate pallets for most private vehicles, including light trucks and recreational vehicles. An empty pallet will travel underground automatically from the exit stop where it has just delivered a car, to storage, or to an entry stop where it will pick up a car wishing to enter the guideways.
Even if internal combustion engines continue to be used in a high percentage of our vehicles in the HiLoMag age, the rate of our fossil fuel depletion will be reduced and we would pollute the atmosphere less, since these automobiles will be traveling on the guideways with their engines shut off a high percentage of the time. The HiLoMag system can be used with either polluting and fossil-fuel consuming vehicles, or with much more environment-friendly vehicles which are electric powered in both their street and guideway modes. The choices are left to we the people and our lawmakers. In either case, with HiLoMag most of our traffic jams and accidents will go away, transportation of all types will take much less time, and our productivity will therefore increase. HiLoMag does not make us give up our private cars in an effort to solve our transportation and environmental problems.
Guideway school buses will be available, and guideway taxis. Surely Greyhound and Trailways will have guideway buses, but these will operate more like maglev trains. They will need no electric motors, batteries, wheels, or even drivers, because HiLoMag buses will never travel on the streets or highways. (HiLoMag bus stations will be adjacent to HiLoMag guideways, the same as train stations are adjacent to train tracks.) Most HiLoMag buses will be small, because each bus will be loaded with passengers for a single destination only, and will travel nonstop to that destination. The lack of intermediate stops combined with the constant 60 or 200-mph HiLoMag speeds will reduce average travel times to far below those for conventional trains or buses.
Lots of light HiLoMag express trucks are expected, but the few heavy tractor-trailer rigs that are left after HiLoMag trucks and containers take over, will continue to use the existing freeways. The Harleys, big mobile homes, and large trailered boats will also stick to the freeways.
HiLoMag taxis, HiLoMag buses, and HiLoMag freight containers will be driverless while they are on the guideways. Drivers on the guideways would contribute nothing except to take up space and increase the cost of the service. In the HiLoMag age drivers will be used only where they are needed. For instance, a taxi driver could pick up a passenger with a company-owned HiLoMag taxi in street mode, deliver the taxi and his/her "fare" to a HiLoMag entry stop, and then get out and wait (in a little shelter) for a new fare to arrive in a driverless taxi at the adjacent HiLoMag exit stops. A couple could take a single taxi all the way from San Diego to Boston, have privacy and an extra seat to relax in almost all of the way, and pay two drivers only a little at each end. While on the guideway the status of HiLoMag taxis and buses without drivers will be similar to that of driverless airport shuttle trains such as the underground one at SeaTac, the People Mover at Morgantown, West Virginia, and similar existing driverless transportation systems. The larger driverless transcontinental HiLoMag buses could have onboard attendants if needed, however.
A friend wrote, "I believe there will be a major subsidiary business of HiLoMag vehicle rentals." He pointed out that business people could rent small two-passenger HiLoMag cars. If only one person was traveling, a fold-down worktable could take the place of the other passenger. When the table was folded up, there would be room to sleep en route. Many chores of the past have disappeared, or are disappearing. Few of us cut firewood anymore, we seldom raise our own food now, home sewing is almost gone, even home cooking has declined in a major way. With HiLoMag the task of driving will also be gone when we are on the guideways. Workaholics can work on their laptop computers instead of drive, and the rest of us former drivers can rest, read, telephone, e-mail, or watch TV.
Much long-run highway trucking is now nonstop, but at considerable cost in relief drivers, on-board sleeping facilities, and provisions for eating and other necessities to accommodate human beings. Driverless HiLoMag freight containers will cross the country nonstop. They will be much cheaper, and their cargo-capacity-to-total-weight ratio will be much more favorable than trucks, since they will have no driver's compartment, windshield, seats, dashboard, steering wheel, road wheels, brakes, engine, transmission system, nor fuel.
HiLoMag freight companies and others with things to move, will always have loading and unloading facilities adjacent to HiLoMag guideways. HiLoMag containers full of freight will be transferred from manually driven container trucks directly to the guideways. The relatively inexpensive magnets required in guideway vehicles will be built into all HiLoMag-containers. Each one will therefore be a guideway vehicle within itself. These HiLoMag containers will be much cheaper to buy and operate than trucks: They will be self-propelled, driverless, and will be routed automatically.
Like HiLoMag buses, each HiLoMag container will be loaded with cargo for a single destination; there will never be intermediate stops. HiLoMag container entry stops and exit stops will be located immediately above stops for the container trucks, so the trucks can back under the guideway stops to transfer containers onto and off of the guideways like a forklift transfers pallets. No cranes or other handling equipment will be required. Many factories and businesses will be located adjacent to HiLoMag guideways, the same as factories are located next to railroad tracks. These factories will need no trucks, since all of their incoming material will arrive at the factory guideway stop in HiLoMag containers, and outgoing products will leave the factory on the guideway in HiLoMag containers.
There will be no degradation of HiLoMag safety resulting from the presence of these container vehicles on the guideways, since vehicles of all types will run at identical speeds and be controlled by the same automatic system. But highway safety will greatly improve since most of the freight as well as the passenger vehicles will travel by HiLoMag--getting most of the big rigs off of the freeways. That will save lots of lives. Have you ever tried to pass a large truck at night in a heavy rain? A September 1997 news release stated, "Nationwide, trucks collide with cars about 250,000 times a year. In four out of five of the fatal truck-car encounters, it's the driver of the car who dies."
Since the spacing between HiLoMag cars at maximum capacity is independent of speed (a constant number of cars per mile) the maximum number of HiLoMag vehicles per hour is directly proportional to the speed of the guideway. With private automobiles on our present highways the reverse tends to be true. If the speed on a highway increases, the distance between cars must not only increase, but also increase at a greater rate than the increase in speed, in order to maintain the same safety margin (since human reaction time is a constant but the braking time increases). Therefore, unlike HiLoMag or similar systems, at the higher velocities the maximum capacity of a highway, in number of vehicles per hour, tends to decrease with increasing speed. The corollary of this is demonstrated when the traffic gets too heavy: It slows down, thereby automatically increasing the capacity of the highway in an attempt to accommodate the load--which it is frequently unable to do, and traffic jams are the result.
The capacities of commercial bus, train, and airplane transportation systems are independent of speed. Their capacities depend only upon the number of passengers per vehicle and the number of vehicles dispatched per day or per hour. It was shown in the Introductory HiLoMag article that the number of buses, trains, or airplanes that would be needed to carry any significant percentage of our present freeway traffic would be completely out of reason. Let us assume that the planners succeed in getting us twice as much capacity in buses and/or trains as we now have. And let's further assume the a sufficient number of car drivers are brow beaten into leaving their cars at home so as to fill this doubled public transit capacity. "Wonderful! Twice as many people are now using public transit." But let's further assume that one percent of the travelers were transit riders before (and I think this number is high in most cases)--now there are two percent leaving their cars off the freeways. That means the percentage of people driving their cars went from 99% all the way down to 98%. That is hardly wonderful; it would do next to nothing toward solving our transportation problems. Do the planners ever look at the arithmetic?
Buses, trains, and planes are intermittent-flow systems, while automobiles and HiLoMag cars are continuous flow systems. A hundred years ago thousands of people got water into their houses by carrying it in buckets from a well in the yard. This old intermittent-flow system delivered very little water compared to our modern system where continuous-flow pipes deliver our water. The same observation applies to transportation: Intermittent-flow buses and planes are obsolete, and airplanes will have the advantage over HiLoMag only on long trips--perhaps those of over a thousand miles.
Transportation system capacity proportional to system speed is unique to HiLoMag and similar continuous-flow systems. That fact, HiLoMag's potential for extremely high speeds, and the very close spacing which is possible between HiLoMag cars, makes the maximum capacity of HiLoMag in cars/hour and passengers/hour, remarkably high compared to other modes of transportation. Repeating figures derived in the basic article: At 200 miles per hour and one foot spacing between cars, one HiLoMag guideway will have a capacity of 66,000 cars/hour. That is approximately equal to the capacity of forty freeway lanes traveling at 60 mph! Because of that huge capacity, most of the 200-mph guideways will not be crowded for many decades. The 60-mph guideways in and around our cities will have a capacity equivalent of 12 freeway lanes. That again is far more than we will need in most places for a long time. When we do eventually saturate a 60-mph guideway we will need to build another one parallel with it, or reroute some traffic to a less-used guideway.
Comparing a busy HiLoMag guideway to a very long high-speed electric train is informative: Both will have a single-file mixture of cars. Both will have a very large number of cars per mile. In both systems individual cars can be added to or dropped out from the "train." And both systems use clean quiet electrical power.
But there are a number of important differences between HiLoMag and railroad trains: Each HiLoMag car will be independently powered, so the HiLoMag "train" won't require a locomotive as such. The electric coils built into the guideways will act as continuous stationary linear electric "locomotives." These coils will magnetically couple to and propel all cars at a constant high speed, wherever they may be on the guideway. Since the HiLoMag "train" does not need and will not have physical coupling between cars, it will run, and maintain relative car spacing, even if it consists of only a few widely-spaced cars.
The HiLoMag "train" will continue to travel at full speed while cars are shuttled into and out of it in any order. (No cars in the real train could be added on the fly, and only the last car could be dropped off without stopping the train.) Best of all, HiLoMag cars will take their passengers and cargo to final destinations. No intermediate parking, no waiting, and no transferring of passengers and luggage to other vehicles will be required. Therefore, there will be no intrusions upon traveler privacy and safety.
The HiLoMag guideway system is also comparable to a railway track system with sidetracks and switches. Except instead of steel rails the guideways will have electromagnetic "tracks," and the HiLoMag switching system will be far superior to railway switching, as we will see.
Maglev trains have carried two and two-thirds million paying passengers at speeds up to 191 miles per hour and never had an accident. Meanwhile, according to a recent news item, "In the United States, more than half of the country's accidental deaths occur in the transportation sector, and more than 90% of these are on the highways." In 1996 a total of 41,907 people were killed on our highways and streets, including pedestrians and cyclists; and about two million were injured. Most of our highway accidents are due to human driver errors, visibility limitations, carelessness, incapacity, or poor judgement. Since human drivers will not be in control on the HiLoMag guideways, all of these dangers will be eliminated. Computers are near perfect in these areas. Computers can also "drive" safely at very much higher speeds. When Congress abolished the national 65-mph limit in 1995, the traffic death rate started climbing. Matthew Wald of the New York Times, said in an October 1997 article, "In twelve states studied, when the speed limits were raised on the interstate system, the death rate increased by an average of 12 percent, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety."
As to possible danger from magnetic field or electromagnetic radiation to HiLoMag passengers, William W. Dickhart III, with the German Transrapid maglev train development, stated "The magnetic flux density in the cabin of the [maglev] vehicle is about one gauss. The earth's magnetic field is a half to one gauss, depending upon where on the earth we measure it." [Reference to the geomagnetic flux is a different matter than electromagnetic radiation, however, since it is a static or 'dc' field.] "A hand-held hairdryer radiates nearly ten gauss, and some electric blankets radiate 100 gauss." Engineers at the Canadian Institute of Guided Ground Transport found that the radiation from Transrapid maglev vehicles won't bother the passengers, their electric watches, or their pacemakers. If future studies raise concerns in this area, magnetic shielding will be used.
The power for the HiLoMag guideways will not be transmitted on low lines surrounded by trees, so the reliability of HiLoMag guideway power will be far better than that of some residential power. But, even though power failure will be rare, the system will be designed such that the loss of guideway power could never cause accidents or other serious problems. A method for automatically isolating a local portion of HiLoMag guideway will be described.
Since, in the event of a power outage, all the cars would be traveling at the same speed and would all lose their linear-motor thrust simultaneously, they won't crash into each other but will simply settle onto their wheels and coast to a stop together. If tests show that differences in rolling friction between the cars produce some bumping with a power outage, retracted springy front bumpers will be provided which will automatically extend forward to fill the clearance space. Things in contact with each other can't bump each other. Speaking of clearance between cars, I.T.S. suggests as little as seven inches between cars at 150 mph.
If a confused or irresponsible HiLoMag driver should try to use the car's steering or brakes while traveling on the guideway, nothing will happen because the wheels will be off the ground and already stopped. However, to be ready for possible emergencies, the wheels must be free to rotate, and the front wheels must be aligned with the car, therefore interlocks will prevent turning of the steering wheel or engagement of the brakes when the vehicles are on a guideway.
The levitation, guidance, and propulsion magnets mounted on a HiLoMag car will be on the same spring-suspension system as the wheels. The inclusion of the car's springs in the maglev-mode support system will provide a smoother guideway ride and/or permit wider tolerances in the guideways, resulting in lower construction costs.
HiLoMag electric cars will have smaller wheels and tires than those of our present automobiles because the wheels will only be used in the low-speed short-distance street mode. Therefore tire wear will also be greatly reduced. The car will be raised only a few inches or less by maglev, so in the rare event that it drops suddenly from a power outage, the feeling will be like that of running off a low curb.
No forms of human transportation, including horses and canoes, have ever been completely safe, and HiLoMag will be no exception. But the proposed system promises to eliminate automobile accidents due to traffic congestion, weather, mechanical failures, and human errors (including those of drunks and reckless teenagers).
"Road rage" crimes won't occur on the HiLoMag guideways because there will only be one lane and no passing or "cutting in front of." The speeds of all cars will be identical and the computer will be making all the decisions. That electronic brain won't be located where it can be shot at from passing cars. The HiLoMag guideways could be sabotaged, but so can highways, railroads and airlines. A bomb or other mischief could and occasionally does kill a few people and disrupt local service for some time on any of these modes of transportation. The entire HiLoMag system will not be disabled by a single-point failure or sabotage, since the power and control lines will all be protected, the computer system will be isolated and not accessible to hackers, and a failed guideway section will be immediately isolated.
Since it will be entirely automatic, and there will be few mechanical subsystems to wear out, once the HiLoMag system is completed and tested it will need only a few employees. There will be potential for disruption of the HiLoMag system due to labor disputes however, as there now is on our highways, railroads, and airlines. Since HiLoMag is expected to grow into our prime ground transportation system, such disruptions would be intolerable. Therefore, HiLoMag employees must be carefully selected, well paid, and work under firm no-strike contracts.
Several other potential safety concerns are being mentioned in these pages, along with solutions evident to the writer at this time. A high level of safety must and will be a firm requirement in the design, construction, and operation of the HiLoMag system.
As with all new modes of transportation in the past, most of the population will be eager to use HiLoMag, but some cautious souls will resist getting onto the guideway for the first time. They will lack trust in the system, or be afraid of traveling so fast on the ground. HiLoMagphobia is not expected to be a continuing major problem however. Many thousands of people travel daily on trains at over a hundred miles per hour in Europe and Japan, most people are now willing to fly, and almost all people use the freeways (which are far more dangerous than either flying or HiLoMag). HiLoMag will earn the trust of its users.
There will be a special guideway radio system, and an always-on but usually silent receiver in each car will provide information and instructions in case of a power outage or other problem. If the outage is to be brief the drivers will be informed and the cars will be relevitated and uniformly accelerated back up to the normal system speed. If the power outage is to be lengthy the drivers will be invited to start their car motors and drive off the guideway at the nearest exit. Since HiLoMag cars will use electric motors, internal-combustion-engine-starting problems will be avoided. The local news media will advise travelers in advance of scheduled guideway-section maintenance shutdowns. The guideway radio will also specifically advise drivers of any local shutdowns before they enter the guideway.
If power was to fail on one section of guideway, some other local failure or accident was to occur, or if one section is shut down for maintenance, there will be no pileups and there will be no disruption of traffic in the rest of the system.
"Turnarounds" will be provided on all sections of HiLoMag bi-directional guideway, as illustrated in . If the power is shut off or lost in any section for any reason, these turnarounds will be instantly and automatically activated at both ends. The traffic in the resulting long narrow closed loop will coast to a stop. At the same instant concentric turnarounds will turn back the continuing traffic flow toward both ends of the disabled loop. It will be fed onto the parallel but opposite-traveling guideway lanes. Note that these return guideway lanes will be able to accept this turned-around traffic, because their usual traffic (from the disabled section) has likewise been diverted.
Dual turnarounds will be provided at both ends of any guideway section that receives power from a source different than that supplying the guideway ahead or behind. Turnarounds will also be constructed at many additional points. The more turnarounds we have the shorter the detour routes will be, but the greater the cost of the system. In Figure 1 a section of guideway in the middle (as shown by dotted lines) has lost power or is to undergo maintenance and the computer has switched the traffic through the four emergency turnarounds shown. The disabled-loop traffic has circulated and decelerated to a stop. The external traffic is circling back at both ends in what amounts to a huge and complex additional loop consisting of the entire rest of the system.
Traffic near the disabled section will be inconvenienced, but distant sections of the system will be completely unaffected. The computer will analyze the changes of plan required for each car that was turned around as a result of the section outage, and it will automatically order moves to minimize the problems. The HiLoMag computer will have much in common with "Big Blue," the wizard chess-playing computer; but it will have many more "chess pieces" to move, and the HiLoMag guideway traffic rules will be much simpler than those of chess.
HiLoMag travelers within the stopped section will be able to drive off the guideway manually, travel on the regular highways around the failed or shutdown guideway section, and reenter the guideway system beyond. HiLoMag cars that were expecting to enter the system within a section that is now dead can also drive around it and enter the operating guideway beyond. Cars on a disabled section must leave it and reenter the guideway system through entry ramps, since the synchronous guideway motors will not be equipped to accelerate stopped cars when power is returned to that section of guideway.
Cars on a guideway approaching a stopped section will be notified of the problem ahead, and some of them will be given the option of leaving the guideway to drive around the problem area manually. However, because of practical limits on the number of exit ramps provided, many cars will probably be required to stay on the guideway, travel in the wrong direction briefly and then exit, or stay on and let the computer choose a detour route for them.
Until the troubled guideway section is reopened the system computer will deny travelers access to the failed section; but it will accept and reroute them over a detour if they choose.
During normal operation of the guideways the turnarounds will be largely unoccupied: The computer will shunt the traffic into them only in the event of a guideway problem. However, the computer can also use the turnarounds to route some cars back in the direction from which they came in order to solve problems for individual users. A driver may key in a return request because he/she forgot something, because the guideway telephone delivers an emergency personal message to that car, or perhaps the driver wishes to exit the system at the other side of the guideway in order to take a shorter street-route home.
The required guideway power will be the greatest when there are a lot of cars using the system; however, energized guideway magnet coils will consume considerable electricity even when there are no cars on the guideway. To save electricity the power to sections of guideway with no traffic on them will be automatically turned off, but the entire guideway system will be instantly available to HiLoMag cars at all times. This apparent contradiction is explained by the fact that approaching cars will trigger sensors well in advance of a turned-off section of guideway, which will turn on the power ahead. It will be automatically turned off again when the cars have passed--unless there are other cars approaching. The failure mode of this power-saving system will be "power-on."
Offhand, two to five miles may be reasonable compromises (between system cost and energy cost) for the length of the guideway sections to be separately turned off and on. Likewise, these same sections could be provided with turnarounds as we have discussed.
The largest portion of the power consumed by HiLoMag will be used in propelling the cars forward on the guideways. During levitation all of the friction of the engine, bearings, gears, and of the tires on the road will be eliminated; but the bad news is that air resistance (aerodynamic drag) is the big item at high speeds, and it is proportional to the velocity squared.
The good news is that the closer together the cars are travelling on a guideway, the lower the aerodynamic drag per car, and the lower the power requirement. Speed skaters and bicycle racers often make use of this shielding phenomenon by traveling close behind and in the wake of their competitors or their teammates. Migrating birds fly close together in formation to achieve a similar drag reduction. The NAHSC estimated thirty-percent reduction in drag with a comparatively large 13-foot clearance between their cars. The book, FLUID-DYNAMIC DRAG, by Dr. S.F.Hoerner, devotes considerable attention to drag reduction by the interference between closely spaced vehicles. The exact numbers will depend upon the size, spacing, and the amount of vehicle streamlining, but the drag reduction due to our HiLoMag cars travelling close together may be fifty percent or more.
Since aerodynamic parasite drag varies as the square of the velocity, the wind resistance of a HiLoMag car will be over ten times as much at 200mph as it will be on the 60-mph guideways. This applies equally to all types of vehicles; more speed always costs us a lot more fuel or electricity, whether we are traveling by car, train, plane, or ship.
The latest combined-cycle natural-gas turbine electric-power plants have an efficiency of 58%--and 60% is expected soon. This is roughly twice the efficiency of internal-combustion automobiles. This fact, combined with the close-spacing drag-reduction factor discussed and the elimination of mechanical losses by levitation, is expected to more than compensate for magnetic and electrical system losses. The 60-mph HiLoMag system will therefore consume less energy than our present cars on the highways do. It will be shown that maglev vehicles are more efficient than jet airplanes, therefore travel by the 200-mph transcontinental HiLoMag guideways instead of by jet will again save fuel.
Modern fossil-fuel power plants emit much less carbon monoxide and far fewer tons of oxides of nitrogen than automobile engines do. Unfortunately we can't burn fuel-containing carbon without making carbon dioxide. However, the improved efficiencies of HiLoMag will means that much less carbon dioxide will be produced per unit of useful energy generated. For this reason the introduction of HiLoMag will reduce the production of "greenhouse gases."
But attempts to stop global warming by reducing carbon dioxide emissions will be largely lost causes for the near term. Even if meaningful international agreements were reached, the various national promises will never be kept, because the cost to the progress and to the economies of the nations involved would be intolerably high. Reducing the number of internal-combustion-engine vehicles with HiLoMag will be a major step in the right direction, so the sooner we can build the HiLoMag system the better it will be for the environment of the world.
The present capacity of our national power grid will not be sufficient to power the HiLoMag system in addition to our existing electrical loads. However, the billions of gallons of fuel we now burn on our freeways will become available to generate extra power to levitate and propel our HiLoMag cars.
More than 90% of our national fossil fuel reserves is coal, not petroleum, but "Coal supplies only 0.1% of the total national transportation energy requirement." ---Dr. Hal B.H. Cooper, and Richard J. Buck. Automobiles won't run on coal, nor will diesel trucks, buses. But roughly half of our electric power comes from the burning of coal. With HiLoMag we will therefore have plenty of fossil fuel for transportation for many decades to come, without buying it abroad.
In time the world's fossil fuel supplies, including coal, will be largely gone (and the production of man-made carbon dioxide will decline); but surely by then we will have fusion or some other nonpolluting 21st-century power source. The point is that HiLoMag will not be adversely affected by changes in the source of its electricity; but automobiles as we know them will be out of business when our petroleum is gone, and that will be the first fossil fuel to go.
For comparable size and weight, electric motors can be built which will deliver power comparable to that of gasoline automobile engines; but a hundred pounds of gasoline can deliver several times as much energy as a hundred-pound rechargeable battery. Efforts to develop better batteries continue, however the progress is slow and difficult. There are a number of advanced battery types under development; but we won't have production rechargeable batteries, which are significantly superior in all respects to our present lead-acid, nickel-cadmium, and nickel-metal hydride batteries for some years.
In turn, it is unlikely that we will have practical electric cars for highway use until a better rechargeable battery is available. However, the batteries we now have will be quite adequate for HiLoMag cars since they will do most of their traveling using guideway power. Their batteries will be used only for short distances on local streets. When and if better batteries come along, or if we develop some other advanced power source, HiLoMag will become an even better transportation system. Perhaps the most likely advanced power source is fuel cells. Fuel cells have been used in space for decades, and there have been major recent improvements in them.
The HiLoMag-car batteries (if we have them) will probably be charged in home garages, at curbside parking spaces, at commercial parking lots and buildings, and while travelling on the HiLoMag guideways. If desired, plug-in battery-charging cables could be eliminated entirely by parking the cars over fixed transformer-primary coils.
There are two basic magnetic levitation configurations and a dozen or more variations of each. One basic type, sometimes called "electromagnetic suspension" or EMS, uses electromagnets to support the cars by magnetic attraction. The other type uses magnetic repulsion. In attraction-maglev trains the sides of the cars usually wrap down around the edges of the guideway in order to provide support for car magnets below the guideway magnets. This wrap-around attraction-mode configuration is probably unusable in the HiLoMag guideway system since it appears to make the necessary full-speed switching from one guideway to another difficult if not impossible. There are other attraction-maglev configurations, such as those supporting the guideway coils above the cars, which would work on HiLoMag however. At this early stage it appears that the system costs would be less if repulsion maglev were used; therefore a repulsion maglev configuration is assumed throughout this HiLoMag article, and is illustrated in
Lifting the cars off the guideways will require little power. Theoretically it would take less than a half horsepower to lift a one-and-a-half-ton car three inches in three seconds; and that power requirement would last for only the three seconds. It is interesting to note that no further output power will be required to hold the cars at operating height. Similarly, the studs of a house require no power in order to hold the roof up; studs are solid members, which have "100% efficiency" in compression. Permanent magnets and superconducting magnets are likewise 100% efficient and do not require continuing power. If HiLoMag uses regular electromagnets instead of superconductors and/or permanent magnets, continuing electric power will be required in order to maintain levitation.
Some repulsion maglev systems, which use permanent magnets in the cars and passive conductor strips or shorted loops in the guideway, require no direct electrical input for levitation, but provide levitation only when the cars are moving. The car motion in such systems induces electric currents and associated magnetic fields in the guideway conductors. These fields repel the fields of the moving magnets. This magnetic levitation is not free, however: the resistance (inefficiency) of the guideway conductors indirectly produces a magnetic drag force that drains a little mechanical energy from the moving cars. This drag force must therefore be countered by additional vehicle thrust and additional propulsion power from the linear motors.
The type of maglev just described is an indirect equivalent of producing the magnetic levitation directly from electric power. On HiLoMag the main or vehicle-supporting maglev will probably be of the direct type. But HiLoMag's lateral guidance and switching system is apt to use this indirect method of obtaining magnetic repulsion since it is simpler, cheaper, and contact-free guidance would still be provided to moving vehicles during deceleration even if guideway power is shut down.
According to the authors of "Maglev: A Physics Point of View," maglev consumes about one seventh of the energy used by a Boeing 737-300 for a 125-620 mile trip." Another way of looking at lifting efficiency is "lift-to-drag ratio". This ratio in the Bechtel maglev system is said to be 100, while that of the Foster-Miller maglev system is 170. The lift-to-drag-ratio of jet transports averages only 18 to 20. Note that for longer trips the comparison becomes still more favorable to maglev, since at the beginning of a long flight the (induced) drag of an airplane is very high because of the great weight of fuel it must carry. A maglev vehicle is equally efficient at any range since it doesn't carry its energy source.
Another source of vehicle levitating force which is more efficient than airplane wings is "ground effect" or "air-bearing" technology (Ref. US Patent #3,470,827, "High-Speed Land Transportation System," assigned to General Motors). The possibility or levitating HiLoMag cars by air bearings was studied, but it was concluded that use of the concept would create more problems than it would solve. Maglev is the preferred approach. Ram air bearings are an option to be considered in place of wheels for emergency delevitation of nonroadable HiLoMag vehicles such as the freight containers, however.
NOTE TO THE FUTURE: If you want a really efficient transportation system, put your HiLoMag system in sealed tunnels (or tubes on the surface), and evacuate them. (It would then be advisable to also seal and pressurize the passenger vehicles to be used in the tunnels, like pressurized jet airplanes.) Remember that in the atmosphere at high speeds the aerodynamic drag and therefore the power requirement of vehicles is high. High-altitude airplanes, with air-breathing engines and aerodynamic-wing support, still need a significant air pressure and therefore still have a lot of drag. HiLoMag, with its electric propulsion and magnetic levitation could theoretically be operated in tubes with a perfect vacuum, with zero aerodynamic drag (very low power requirements), and no accidents due to the weather, falling out of the sky, hitting mountains, fuel fires, or pilot errors. And the speed possible in a vacuum on maglev could be extremely high. But that would all be in the somewhat distant future. The basic HiLoMag system, which is far better than the transportation-system mix we now have, is achievable and practical now.
The efficiency of maglev systems and linear motor systems is improved by the use of superconducting magnets in the cars in place of ordinary electromagnets. One example of a superconducting installation is the Miyazaki maglev test track in Japan, which recently propelled a vehicle at 268 mph. Gordon Danby and James Powell, of the United States, invented superconducting maglev (Ref: US Patent #3,470,828). These two gentlemen were also members of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Maglev Technology Advisory Committee.
But superconducting maglev also has disadvantages, including high initial costs and developmental problems. With the present state of the art, superconductivity is possible only with special alloys such as NbTi and NbSn, and only at extremely low "cryogenic" temperatures. Where they are used, the superconducting electromagnet systems in maglev trains must be cooled down to a very few degrees above absolute zero, then energized with circulating currents of "several hundred thousand amperes." In order to keep the conductivity "perfect," and this very high circulating current and resulting magnetic field "permanent," the ultra-low temperature must then be maintained indefinitely by on-board liquefied gas. Some maglev systems are proposed with on-board cryorefrigerators. Even with the best of insulation, an unrenewed onboard supply of cryogenic liquid will boil away in a few hours whether the vehicle is in use or not. Any comparisons between the efficiencies of ordinary and superconductive systems must include the energy expended to reliquefy this superconductor-cooling gas, or to maintain it in a "supercritical" condition.
Superconducting maglev is said to be practical in maglev trains, but its requirements limit its appeal as a design choice for personal HiLoMag cars at the present time. The tank of cryogenic liquid in HiLoMag cars would have to be regularly filled, or an onboard cryorefrigerator would have to be operated, even if the cars were not used regularly. When and if progress in superconductive technology reduces or eliminates the worst of these problems, later model personal HiLoMag cars are more likely to be candidates for superconductive magnets. However, HiLoMag taxis, buses, trucks, and containers, which would have regular maintenance and a much higher use factors, might use present-technology superconducting maglev to advantage.
But superconductivity is not essential to any part of HiLoMag. Modern ceramic and rare-earth-containing magnets are extremely powerful compared to earlier permanent magnets such as Alnico. According to Maglev scientist Ernst G. Knolle, "Today [1993] eleven times more powerful magnetic materials are available than just ten years ago. ... ... . On [our] full size prototype [maglev] there is virtually no degradation in the magnets' strength after levitating a vehicle for over seven years." That word "rare" above may have sounded warning bells for some. We do want to build millions of HiLoMag vehicles, and as inexpensively as possible. Actually the "rare earth" elements were given that title long before we knew much about them, and it turns out that the ones we are interested are not at all rare. Neodymium, which is used in one of the best permanent magnets, is over twice as plentiful in the earth's crust as lead.
But if, for any reason, permanent magnets are proven to be a poor choice for HiLoMag, ordinary electromagnets will do the job well. The successful German Transrapid maglev trains use ambient-temperature dc electromagnets. "Trolley buses," "elevateds," "subways," high-speed electric trains, and other electric transit systems using "brushes" to transmit power to the cars, have carried billions of passengers, some at 200 mph and more. And it should be noted that all of the power required for nonmaglev electric vehicles is transmitted through brushes. Fortunately, on HiLoMag cars with electromagnets, only the "field excitation" power, a small percentage of the total, would go through brushes (or be inductively coupled and rectified). Most of the HiLoMag system power would go to the guideway coils.
Linear motors propel maglev trains and will propel the cars on the HiLoMag guideways. These motors do not rotate, they move in a straight line. The rotors of conventional electric motors are replaced by "moving" magnets attached to the suspension systems of the vehicles. The stator electromagnet coils of the linear motors will be built into the guideways, and will be powered by alternating current. A single set of guideway coils and car magnets will serve both the linear motors and the magnetic-levitation system.
The linear propulsion motor system for the HiLoMag guideways will be of a synchronous type so that all vehicles on the guideway are locked into step with each other and will travel at exactly the same velocity. All guideway power throughout the country will be at precisely the same frequency, but that frequency will probably need to be different than our standard 60 cycles per second. Guideway-frequency power could be generated at our main power plants along with 60-cycle power and/or be converted from 60-cycle power by synchronous motor/alternator sets located near the guideways.
The concept of maintaining constant spacing between cars by driving them with linear synchronous motors powered from a common ac power source appears to be unique to HiLoMag. This very simple and fool-proof system, which will require no vehicle proximity sensors or car velocity control circuits, would be a basic claim in the HiLoMag patent if the invention wasn't being placed in the public domain. This inherent synchronization of all the HiLoMag cars will keep their spacing as constant as that of boxes on a conveyer belt. They can no more gain or lose ground with respect to each other than plugged-in ac clocks can gain or lose time with respect to each other.
To maximize the useable capacity of the guideways, the system computer will attempt to position entering cars either at the end of a "solid" string of cars or at the front of a solid string. This will largely eliminate the creation of wasteful gaps too short for a car. Another important reason for having the system form continuous strings of cars in this way is to reduce the aerodynamic drag and the power required, as discussed earlier.
Closely packing strings of HiLoMag cars will also provide more safety in case of emergencies. Objects traveling very close together in the same path are unable to develop the kinetic energy difference required to seriously impact each other. On conventional freeways, where the cars are independently powered, plenty of space between cars provides more safety, but on HiLoMag the reverse will be true. Railroad cars, which are coupled together physically, are considered safe at high speeds. The coupling between HiLoMag cars will be just as real, but it will be through electrical synchronization, not through physical coupling.
When guideway traffic is heavy a human driver could never be trusted to match his/her car's speed and position to that of the traffic on the guideway accurately enough to safely slip into one available vacant spot between tightly packed speeding cars. Therefore automatic maglev entry and exit ramps will be an integral part of the synchronized system. Such accelerating and decelerating ramps are required at all places where cars enter or leave the guideways. Because of the high speed of the guideways, these ramps must have significant length. Several factors will be taken into consideration in choosing the ramp "g" levels (acceleration as compared to the acceleration of gravity). But if that figure turns out to be 0.2g, the acceleration and deceleration portions of the ramps for the 60-mph guideways would need to be 598 feet long, and the 200 mph guideways will require 6639 foot acceleration and deceleration ramps. The total ramp lengths in both cases will need to be longer to provide for merging with and diverging from the guideways. Obviously a merge cannot begin until the merging car is at guideway velocity and adjacent to a gap in the traffic of sufficient length.
The 60-mph HiLoMag ramps will be very comparable in length to 60-mph highway ramps. We have no 200-mph highways, but the long ramps required for 200-mph guideways will be comparable to the long runways on our airports. Two-hundred-mph ramps will be very long because the distance required for constant-rate acceleration to a given velocity varies as the square of that velocity. Relatively low-speed (60-mph) guideways are being proposed for cities and other dense areas, chiefly because the land that would be required for ramps would be excessive if city guideways operated at 200mph.
Exit ramps will usually precede accompanying entry ramps; therefore, if the traffic on a guideway is really heavy, an entering car could immediately take a spot being vacated by an exiting car. On the ramps the car's street-mode motors are not used and the cars are levitated. The acceleration and deceleration forces are provided by linear electric motors in the ramps similar to, but probably not identical to, those used on the guideways.
The cars change from wheel-supported driver-controlled mode to levitated automatic mode in stopping spaces at the beginning or street-end of the entry ramps, and change back to manual mode in stopping spaces at the street-end of the exit ramps. These spaces are comparable to parking spots, except cars are never parked in them. Each car is normally in a stopping space for only a matter of seconds. And the car goes on through; it doesn't back out. "Entry stops" are transfer points from the manual low-speed mode to the automatic high-speed mode, and "exit stops" are transfer points back out of the automatic system.
Multiple entry ramps and multiple exit ramps will be required at high-traffic local areas such as shopping malls, factories, stadiums, and convention centers. Figure 2 shows a typical arrangement. When a regular freeway (or a HiLoMag guideway) is operating at capacity, a symptom is lines of cars waiting at entry ramps. We also see this phenomenon when an airport is operating at capacity: the jets line up awaiting their turn to use the takeoff runway(s), or they stack up in a holding pattern awaiting permission to land.
With our present freeway system if there is insufficient exit-ramp capacity the right lane of the freeway jams up. Unless sufficient exit ramps are provided on HiLoMag, an exit-capacity problem will occur at popular exit locations, but on HiLoMag guideway jamming and slowdowns will be impossible. Instead, if there is a shortage of exit ramps some cars wishing to exit will be forced to go on to the next exit. If this happened often the HiLoMag paying customers affected would demand and rapidly get more exits installed there. As will be discussed later, considerable initial government involvement is necessary, but if we can then get the government largely back out of HiLoMag the forces of supply and demand will provide timely expansion of the HiLoMag guideways as it does with other successful businesses.
A HiLoMag car driver wishing to enter the guideway will drive into an entry stop, shut off the motor, key in the desired guideway exit number, and relax. The computer will record the car's vital statistics via its identification chip, then (if it doesn't refuse the car entry for cause) it will automatically levitate and accelerate the vehicle to exactly guideway speed and merge it into the traffic on the guideway. There will be only one entry stop per entry ramp, but one car may be in the stop getting processed while one or two preceding cars are still accelerating on the ramp or merging with the guideway.
The writer considers it likely that HiLoMag entry ramps will be provided with power at the fixed-frequency of the guideways, and that the linear motors will operate asynchronously (as induction motors) during the acceleration of the vehicles. Pure synchronous motors would not be suitable for the acceleration, since such motors have little or no starting torque (or thrust in this linear case).
In an asynchronous entry-ramp system, vehicle acceleration will be affected by vehicle weight. The size or number of propulsion magnets installed in a HiLoMag vehicle will therefore be proportional to its weight (heavier cars have larger motors), but this correction will be an approximation. The ramps will be made long enough to ensure that the slowest-accelerating vehicles accepted on the guideway will achieve synchronous speed well before they are required to merge. Trucks and cargo containers will be automatically weighed at the entry stops, and denied access to the guideway if they are carrying an overload. Excessive weight could jeopardize their merging, or their stopping in the exit ramps.
The HiLoMag merging system will be capable of temporarily altering the velocity of merging vehicles, to slightly above or slightly below synchronous velocity, so as to exactly position them in selected one-car vacant spots on the receiving guideway. One low-tech method of slightly varying the velocity of the merging vehicles would be to power the merging ramps from an alternator driven by a synchronous motor through a differential gear system. The third shaft of the differential would be rotated as required by a servomotor controlled by a computer. When used with acceleration ramps, the merge positioning will be done after the vehicles have locked into sync with the power. Merge-position control will be used not only on HiLoMag entry ramps, but also at merging guideways and at interchange merges.
If, for any reason, something goes wrong with any in-process merge, there will be no crash; the computer will automatically abort the merge by directing the car(s) straight ahead into deceleration ramps and exit stops. These abort-merge ramps in connection with the entry ramps are shown in (which is diagrammatic only and does not show realistic proportions and radii). All of the entry ramps at one location will feed onto a synchronous-speed "siding" parallel with the guideway, and merge (or an occasional abort) will take place from there.
After an exiting car is demerged from the guideway stream and decelerated it will be stopped and delevitated; then the driver will turn on the car's electric motor and drive onto the streets.
If the HiLoMag exit ramps are designed to decelerate cars individually and uniformly, it is obvious that the spaces between the cars on an exit ramp would decrease as their velocities decrease; therefore each exit ramp could accommodate only a few widely spaced cars at a time. However, if exit strings or "trains" of perhaps ten cars are decelerated as units (keeping the distances between the cars close and constant), the useful capacity of the exit ramps would be much greater.
If the cars that are scheduled to exit at one place on a guideway are randomly mixed with through-traffic cars, gaps will be formed in the through traffic and in the exit strings when these cars exit. But the capacity of an exit ramp would be maximized if just the minimum guideway spacing separated all of the cars entering it. Therefore the computer should be programmed such that it would make an attempt, for a few seconds at a time, to schedule the cars at the entry ramps such that specific exit-ramp strings will be formed on the guideway.
In addition to programming the entry ramps for exit-string marshaling, the guideways between cities could be provided with marshaling yards which would further and automatically bunch cars together which are scheduled to leave the guideway at the same exit area. These would be reminiscent of railway switching yards, but infinitely faster: The HiLoMag marshalling yards would juggle the cars into specific exit strings at full guideway speed. This impossible-sounding achievement is really rather simple: The computer would automatically switch the positions of some cars (or of cars and spaces) by the use of guideway sidings. Assume that two cars are "x" cars apart, and the forward car of the pair is shunted onto a short siding which is x car-spaces longer than the main line segment. The trailing car of the pair is shunted to a siding which is x car-spaces shorter than the main line. When that traffic again merges these two cars will have switched positions, yet they never reduced or gained speed.
By these means gaps in exit strings could be greatly reduced, and longer exit strings formed. In addition to increased safety, increased guideway capacity, and decreased drag, gain in exit-ramp capacity is another reason for bunching the traffic on the guideways into strings or trains.
(This item will be more technical than most of this Supplementary HiLoMag article. Those who have no interest in synchronous electrical systems may skip on to the next item.)
"An alternator may be used to generate electrical power when driven mechanically, or it may be used to develop mechanical power when driven electrically. An alternating-current generator and a synchronous motor may be one and the same machine." --E.A.Loew, in DIRECT AND ALTERNATING CURRENTS, McGraw-Hill.
Professor Loew was thinking in terms of rotating synchronous machines, but his statement also applies completely to linear synchronous machines. The linear magnet coils in the guideways, interacting with the magnets under HiLoMag cars, will act as motors to propel the cars whenever thrust is required to keep them at synchronous speed. But if the cars are going down steep hills these machines will act as AC generators (alternators) and pump electrical energy back into the system. The cars will run at exactly the speed established by the frequency of the applied power in either case; but the phase of the sine-wave of voltage generated by a synchronous machine will lag that of the applied voltage slightly when the machine is acting as a motor, and lead it slightly when the machine is acting as a generator.
The exit-ramp-string concept will require synchronous exit ramps in order to keep the spacing between the cars of an exiting string constant. The linear motors in all of the exiting cars will remain locked into the ramp frequency, which will gradually decrease in order to decelerate the train of cars as a unit. They would all come to a stop at the same time on the final portion of a single exit ramp, then drive off onto the streets one by one, much as cars in line at a traffic light start up when the light turns green.
It is proposed that an exit ramp be provided with the ac guideway power until the last car of an exit train entering it has demerged from the guideway. At that point the guideway power to the ramp will be automatically switched off, but the cars will still be electrically connected to each other through the guideway. If any car in the train then tends to travel faster than the others, its "motor" will start to act as an alternator, and phase shift will produce a regenerative braking effort, which will keep that car from closing the gap in front of it.
Likewise the motor of any car in the train with a tendency to slow down faster than its mates will draw enough generated power from the other cars in the train to hold it to exactly the speed of the other cars at that moment. No cars could ever lead or lag by more than a portion of one cycle of the alternating current frequency being generated at that moment; they will decelerate precisely together; the distances between cars will remain constant. They will act like a railroad train coasting to a stop, but their couplings will be electromagnetic instead of mechanical.
For a while after an exit train has demerged from a HiLoMag guideway it will decelerate naturally, since the aerodynamic drag due to its yet high speed will rapidly absorb kinetic energy from the cars. As the velocity of the train decreases, however, the drag will become insufficient to produce deceleration rates consistent with affordable exit-ramp lengths. Remember that the cars are still levitated and without ground or wheel friction; they would coast and coast; and the brakes in the cars can't be used with the wheels off the ground. Therefore, to supplement the rapidly dissipating aerodynamic drag, we will put a "brake" on the frequency of the alternating current which is being generated in the exit-ramp coils by the cars passing over them.
A nineteen-thirty-era method for accomplishing this would have been to provide each exit ramp with a large synchronous motor with an automatic brake attached to it. This motor would be electrically connected to the ramp linear-motor magnet coils, and it would always see the same frequency as the cars in an exit-ramp train. While the velocity of an exiting train was still high the big motor would be partially decelerated by the decelerating cars. As the drag on the cars decreased, the brake on the motor would be gradually and automatically applied, so that it replaced the aerodynamic drag as the energy-absorption means for further decelerating the train. From 100mph on down all of the cars and the braking motor would remain electrically synchronized with the decreasing frequency, and therefore synchronized with each other. This system would work well, but electronic-age engineering will doubtless give us a less massive method for decelerating exit trains on HiLoMag.
On a conventional railroad, in order to switch a train or car from one track to another, the configuration of the rails must be physically switched before the train arrives at the intersection, and switched back to the through-traffic configuration after that train or car has left.
U.S. Patent #5,517,924, which was assigned to the U.S. Department of Energy, covers a magnetic-repulsion guidance and switching system for maglev trains which electrically switches coils in the guideway to reroute trains in a manner functionally equivalent to steel-rail switching systems. This patented system would meet the needs of maglev trains; but it could not satisfy the requirements of HiLoMag, because we wish to selectively switch closely spaced individual cars in and out while the whole string of cars is traveling at high speed. At 60 mph the time spacing between tightly packed HiLoMag cars will be 0.17 seconds. At 200 mph it will be only 0.05 seconds! This is far too little time to mechanically change the configuration of a track or guideway switch.
So, instead of switching by changing the configuration of the track or guideway, HiLoMag switching will be accomplished by changing a configuration within the cars well before they arrive at a junction. This is more comparable to a highway than a railroad, because the automobile, rather than the roadbed, determines whether a car will turn at a junction or not. But on HiLoMag a computer will order the required action in the cars, not the drivers.
Figure 3 is a diagrammatic cross-sectional view of a proposed HiLoMag repulsion-maglev guideway and car. In the center of the guideways, between the wheel and coil tracks, there will be rigidly mounted guide "rails" as shown. These rails will be submerged along with the guideway coils, so their tops are flush with the surface of the guideways. The guide rails will be mounted from below on spaced structural beams with no "floor." This will permit snow and debris to fall through to the ground several feet below.
The HiLoMag guideways will accept vehicles with either of two lateral-force-producing means for guidance and switching. In the simplest method, rollers mounted on the switching system of the cars or containers will bear directly against the sides of the guide rails. Or magnets can be mounted in the switching system. These will inductively react with the guide rails to produce repulsive magnetic forces for guiding the car laterally and keeping it centered on the guideway without physical contact.
This method of developing a magnetic-repulsion force from the motion of the car, without the need for external electric power, was described above under "MAGLEV CONFIGURATIONS," and has been demonstrated in the writer's laboratory. It is also the system described in the article "Track of the Future" on page 68 of the May 1998 issue of Popular Mechanics. The HiLoMag magnetic guidance system will require that the guide rails be made of a material such as aluminum alloy, with good electrical conductivity as well as good structural properties; but they need to be nonmagnetic.
The small rollers, which will be spun at very high speed by the rails, will have solid but resilient and long-wearing tires of a polymer such as the polyurethane used on skate wheels. Even if the main guidance and switching forces are magnetic, rollers will also be provided. If the guidance magnetic-repulsion forces become inadequate for reasons such as earthquakes or wind storms, the rollers will take over. The backup rollers will assure lateral guidance on the guideways comparable to the vertical-safety backup provided by the car's wheels. Since the guidance and switching magnetic repulsion system requires no direct electrical power, the cars will continue to be guided without the rollers contacting the rails as the cars drop to their wheels in the event of a power outage. As the cars decelerate the guidance-repulsion forces will decrease until eventually the rollers will take over, keeping the cars on the guideway, or even switching them as previously commanded.
The guidance and switching units, provided with rollers and perhaps magnets, are indicated on the car of . These units will be mounted to the cars by retraction mechanisms so they can be raised or lowered differentially. Either the front and rear right units or the front and rear left units will be down, but never both. The center units between the guide rails will always be down when a vehicle is on the guideway, being retracted only for road use of the vehicle.
Figure 3 shows the left units lowered. These in conjunction with the center units straddle the left guide rail. This car would turn left or bear left at the next fork in the guideway. Whether or not a HiLoMag car will switch to a connecting guideway or go straight ahead through a junction will depend upon whether its left or its right guidance units are down.
Figure 4 (which is diagrammatic only) illustrates a guideway with a right and a left exit, and several cars. The heavy dashes indicate car guidance units in the down or active position. Car number 1 is scheduled to continue straight on, so its left guidance units are down. They will sense the straight-through left guide rail while ignoring the exiting rail on the right. Car number 2 is beginning to exit to the right by means of its right units. Car 3 has just gone straight through the right-exit junction by using its left units. Because of the upcoming junction to the left, the system has lowered the right units of car 4 since it is scheduled to continue straight ahead. Car 5 is exiting to the left by means of its left units.
The raising and lowering of the guidance units will be commanded by the computer and accomplished automatically in each car as required to direct it to its destination. If a computer failure should cause the wrong guidance signal to be sent to a car, or to all cars, or if no signals are sent, some cars may be routed to the wrong guideways. But since both left and right guidance units are mechanically prevented from being down together, system errors cannot cause accidents.
The beauty of this system is that it can operate at any speed and with any car spacing, since each car will be programmed for its next move long before a junction is reached. The higher the speed, the earlier the guidance commands will need to be given to the cars. If we assume a maximum of one second is required to raise or lower the guidance units in a car, at 60mph the switching signals would have to come at least 90 feet before the cars reach the junction. At 200mph the signals will be given to all cars at least 300 feet before they reach a junction.
Unlike the screeching and laterally lurching ride on trains during switching, a HiLoMag car will be quiet and smooth riding using magnetic switching, since it will have no physical contact with anything, and its magnetic guiding forces will tend to damp out oscillations. With roller-only guidance and switching, HiLoMag cars will still be much quieter and smoother than railroad cars, since the HiLoMag guide rails will be smoother and straighter than railroad rails, and the guide rails will be vertical instead of angled and radiused like the interfacing wheel flanges and rail edges of railroads.
If the guidance rails are electrically insulated from each other they can serve a secondary function of carrying electric power to the cars for street-mode-battery charging and other on-board uses.
To provide adequate clearance in the street mode the levitation and propulsion magnets, and the guidance units of the cars, will be raised a few inches above the road surface. These magnets and units will be automatically lowered while the cars are in entry stops and automatically raised (retracted) when the cars arrive at exit stops. Accidents similar to those caused by the failure of an airliner landing gear to extend for landing will not happen on HiLoMag, because the extensions and retractions of the magnets will be accomplished and verified while the HiLoMag vehicles are stopped.
To provide ample roll stability in the levitated mode, the left and right rows of guideway coils will be widely separated, and below the car wheels. To provide a rolling surface for the wheels and protection for the guideway coils during occasional delevitations, the parts of the coils that would be contacted by delevitated wheels will be provided with a non-magnetic non-conducting load-supporting and wear-resisting surface. Except for these protected areas, the coils and the guide rails will be left as open as possible so that snow and debris can fall through the somewhat elevated guideways as previously noted.
The "gauge" of the coils and emergency wheel-support surfaces will be wide (considerably wider than standard railroad gauge) so as to accommodate a large range of vehicle widths and heights with good stability. Trucks and recreational vehicles up to a certain size will be accepted on the guideways. Those larger or heavier than generous guideway limits will continue to use the freeways (which will by then have little traffic).
At junctions the guideway coils and the guidance rails will divide into two branches. As shown in the enlarged detail of Figure 4 , some of the propulsion/levitation coils within the junctions will be modified or deleted in order to avoid interference with exiting or entering guide rails. The longitudinal position of coils laterally opposite deleted coils can probably be shifted forward slightly to produce compensating thrust through synchronous phase shift. That is, the coils on the other side of the guideway can be designed to provide extra drive to make up for that lost by omitting certain coils in the junctions.
Thought must also be given to delevitations of cars within junctions, since the tires would cross slots for the guidance and switching magnet and roller units in that area. If the struts supporting these units are made relatively narrow (narrower than the width of the vehicle tires), the slots in the guideway surface through which these struts pass can also be made narrow, with "tunnels" of increased width below to accommodate the guidance units. Note that this narrowing of the slots at the top is only necessary at junctions, since the tires will never cross the slots in other areas of the guideway. Likewise, the top of the slots could not be narrowed where switching of the guidance units may occur, since the slots there must be full width to allow extension of the units into, and retraction from, the slots.
Across the United States there may be one northern and one southern 200-mph east-west guideway, and a large number of north-south and diagonal guideways between cities. All north-south and east-west guideway intersections will have automatic computer-controlled interchanges, which connect the system into a completely accessible grid. When the system is fully implemented there will be guideways paralleling most highways throughout the nation. City streets and country roads will have no accompanying guideways, since HiLoMag cars will be used in their manually-controlled or street mode in those places. HiLoMag users will make most five to twenty-mile trips on the 60-mph guideways, and get onto the 200-mph guideways only for longer trips. The local 60-mph guideways will be the most useful for solving our traffic and environmental problems; so it is likely that these will be developed and used in and around the major cities before the interconnecting 200-mph guideways are built. The guideway grid will expand gradually over the years, just as our street and highway systems have expanded. If we get started, and adopt HiLoMag soon, we could have most of the system be 2020. If we don't, by then we will be stuck in traffic jams we cannot imagine.
All guideways must be "endless." One can picture the cars piling up in a huge continuing 60 or 200-mph crash if a guideway ended. A two-way-traffic guideway which does terminate in a remote place must have a turnaround there so the inbound traffic finds itself outbound again if it doesn't exit the guideway. Opposite-traveling HiLoMag guideways, like freeways, will normally be placed closely parallel to each other to conserve real estate and to facilitate the guideway section-shutdown system.
Since each 60-mph HiLoMag guideway can carry as much traffic as a twelve-lane freeway operating at capacity, one guideway lane should be plenty everywhere for many years; but eventually, in the most dense traffic corridors, a second guideway lane may be needed. The 60-mph guideways would feed into the single 200-mph guideways for the long hauls. It is hard to imagine anyplace where the 40-lane-highway equivalent of a single 200-mph guideway wouldn't be enough. In approaching a large city, the 200-mph traffic will fan out from a single guideway into several parallel 60-mph guideways, much as manually-driven cars fan out and merge as the number of lanes on our freeways change. Sixty-to-two-hundred-mph accelerating ramps and 200 down to 60-mph decelerating ramps will be required, as will merge-positioning velocity control, as previously discussed. Where two guideways cross we will usually provide an interchange. Although a number of interchange configurations are possible, the one illustrated in Figure 5 (which requires only two levels and permits low roll rates in turns) is suggested.
Like train tracks and freeways, most of the guideways will be at roughly ground level, and on bridges and in tunnels. Overpasses or underpasses are required at all guideway interchanges, turnarounds, and at crossings with streets, highways, train tracks, and other guideways. In dense urban areas we will probably put our HiLoMag guideways underground or elevate them. Subways and the elevateds have been used in some major cities for over a century. Elevated HiLoMag guideways will also make sense in many open stretches where they could be placed above the median between opposite traveling freeway lanes, thereby eliminating the need for acquiring more land. Figure 6 illustrates a hypothetical city with surface guideways, an elevated guideway, and an underground guideway. Some guideways will probably be built along abandoned or active rail right-of-ways.
Factories, malls, sport domes, and concert halls require lots of parking area. The many ramps and stops which will be required on HiLoMag at these locations could be integral with the parking lots. The businesses involved should be charged for the HiLoMag ramps that they require. With HiLoMag, park-and-ride lots will probably disappear, but more parking space will be needed at final destinations. Figure 7 shows a typical parking lot adjacent to bi-directional HiLoMag guideways with multiple entry and exit ramps.
HiLoMag guideways will be properly banked on the curves; we will never feel side forces in turns. The minimum turning radius will be limited by the maximum bank angle travelers are willing to accept. The seat-depressing g forces passengers will feel remain small up to moderately high bank angles (only 1.15 total g's at 30 degrees, for instance), but airline experience has shown us that some passengers are frightened by balanced bank angles higher than about 30 degrees.
If the writer's arithmetic is correct, with a 30-degree bank angle and a 1.15g turn, at 60 mph a turn radius of 417 feet will be needed. At 200-mph, and the same bank angle and g level, a 4,628-ft radius will be required. The velocity-squared function in the centrifugal-force formula obviously costs us a lot more real estate for turns at the higher speed. For that reason, study should be given to exceeding 30-degree bank angles. The writer's thought is that we tend to fear what we are not accustomed to. Jet airliners only use their 30-degree banks in setting up for landings. This angle may get the attention of timid infrequent fliers, but frequent fliers never notice it. It seems likely that the HiLoMag guideways could be built with 35 or 40 degree bank angles, and almost all people would soon get used to them, have no objections, and even like the slightly stimulating feel of HiLoMag turns.
While a car is in the act of merging with or demerging from a guideway it must be level: Within junctions the guideway can have no bank angle. Therefore, since passengers would object to high lateral forces and the guide-rail loads must be kept reasonable, the radius of the part of turns within junctions must be much greater than that which is acceptable in banked turns. If one assumes that 0.1g laterally would be acceptable in a flat turn, then for 60 mph a within-the-junctions-only radius of 2405 feet is required. Once a demerging car is clear of the main guideway, its exiting-guideway can begin to assume a bank angle, and the turning radius can be reduced to less than a sixth of the flat-turn figure. These large radii required within junctions will be of little concern, however: They will cost us very little more real estate, since they will be mostly within the width of the guideways.
HiLoMag cars on the guideway will not be able to climb as steeply as autos and trucks occasionally do; but the maximum allowable guideway grades will be greater than those of railroads. Of course HiLoMag cars won't slow down on hills, the traffic will run at full speed at all points in the system except in the entry and exit ramps. Most existing highways have limited grades, and the HiLoMag guideways will be built parallel with our highways in most areas.
On downgrades the linear motors of HiLoMag cars will work as synchronous generators (alternators) and hold the cars to exactly their normal system speed. Automobile brakes waste energy, turning it into heat; but the "regenerative braking" on HiLoMag will save that energy by converting it into guideway electricity which will indirectly help cars which are climbing grades. From an energy-conservation standpoint that will be comparable to the cable-car system in San Francisco: cars descending the hills provide part of the energy required by ascending cars.
Slippery, wet or icy surfaces won't cause HiLoMag cars to slide off the guideways or into each other, because the guidance rails will always be guiding the cars. Tire traction will not be a factor.
As previously mentioned the guideways will usually be elevated several feet and they will be built as "open" as possible so as to let snow and debris such as leaves and cones fall through the "tracks." Railroad trestles remain free of blocking snow and debris. Also, the constant high-speed single-lane traffic on most HiLoMag guideways will blow, brush, and melt the snow off even better than it is removed by heavy traffic on the most-used freeway lanes. However, a coating of ice on the guideway coils would be of no concern, since ice doesn't block magnetism.
The cost of snow and avalanche sheds for guideways in mountainous areas, where required, will be a small percentage of the cost of the guideways themselves. HiLoMag snow sheds will be less expensive than those required for multilane highways, because HiLoMag sheds will be much narrower. Automatic electric heaters in the guideways are also a possibility for the worst snow or freezing spots. Snow and ice will probably be less of a problem with HiLoMag than with other types of transportation.
There will doubtless be some shift of HiLoMag traffic from northern east-west guideways to southern east-west guideways in the winter to avoid the weather and the cold, and some shift to northern guideways in the summer to avoid the heat. Air conditioning will be optional for HiLoMag cars on the guideway.
As the speed goes up, not only does the power required increase roughly as the square of the speed, but the noise also goes up nonlinearly with speed. At low speeds steel-wheeled trains are quite noisy, and maglev trains are very quiet. At high speeds both types are noisy because then aerodynamic or wind-resistance sounds predominate. The aerodynamic noise (aeroacoustic energy) from any type of very high-speed vehicle would be a problem in residential neighborhoods. At 250 mph the maximum measured noise level from the German TR07 maglev train was 92dBA at a distance of 25 meters. The 60-mph HiLoMag guideways in and around cities and residential areas will be quieter than our 60-mph automobile freeways are now; because the car motors won't be running, and the drag reduction due to traveling close together will reduce the noise. In most areas out in the country the average noise pollution will also be less with 200-mph HiLoMag than it is now, because HiLoMag will reduce the amount of domestic airline traffic. Ground- traffic noise tends to be absorbed outside of narrow corridors, while air traffic is heard miles away.
The automobile made possible urban sprawl, and HiLoMag will further encourage this wonderful type of living. With HiLoMag, sprawl becomes still more appealing to the sprawlers and also more acceptable to the environmentalists. But what will happen if the population of the United States should continue to increase indefinitely, the standard of living continues to allow most of this larger population to drive cars (HiLoMag cars), and most people will be on the go? When HiLoMag is completed everything will be rosy for years; the traffic on the guideways will be light, and there will be few delays or frustrations. In a dense area where there are now four parallel freeway lanes in each direction operating at near capacity, the addition of one 60-mph HiLoMag guideway will make it possible to remove two or three of those freeway lanes and allow the traffic to increase by a factor of three before it will again becomes as bad there as it is now.
If the traffic does finally begin to approach guideway capacity, driver frustrations will start again. The traffic on the guideway will never slow down, but getting onto a nearly full guideway would become difficult. The HiLoMag computer system will simply not accept any more cars when the guideway is full. Long before such frustrations become serious, the HiLoMag system should be expanded in that area. If we are on a guideway approaching an interchange, and wish to transfer to a crossing guideway that is operating at capacity, the system will not accept our request. To prevent it from routing us miles out of our way in such a case, exit ramps will be provided at the interchanges. As already discussed, if there are insufficient exit ramps and stops at a particular location, some cars won't be able to get off the guideway there, and will be taken on to the next available exit. We could feed three nearly full 60-mph guideways into one 200-mph guideway but it will take a number of 60-mph guideways to accept all of the traffic from a crowded 200-mph guideway.
Even though the capacity of HiLoMag is very great compared to freeways, buses, trains, and airplanes, its capacity is still finite. When a few areas approach saturation (perhaps fifty years from now) there will be frustrations. If HiLoMag is operated as a moneymaking business instead of a bureaucracy, needed expansions will be accomplished in a much more timely manner than that which is usually seen in government projects.
The HiLoMag guideway system should be directly paid for by its users, like tollways are. But there will be no scrambling for change at entry stops; the HiLoMag car identification-chip data, combined with the exit-number selection, will provide the information required for the HiLoMag computer to automatically add each additional trip to the bill of the user. The details of our monthly HiLoMag bills will be comparable to those of our telephone bills. HiLoMag bills will replace gasoline as a budget item.
Data in the car-identification chips will include the length and weight of the vehicles. These parameters will be factors in the formula for determining guideway charges, since more weight will cause a car to use more electricity, and length is what uses up guideway capacity. During heavy guideway traffic the system will hold each car at its entry stop until the computer has chosen an upcoming empty space on the guideway which is long enough for that car.
Although the fee for putting a big vehicle on the guideway will be more than the fee for a minicar, the more nearly a car is loaded to its capacity the less it should be charged for a particular trip. This will be the twenty-first-century equivalent of HOV lanes to encourage ridepooling. A photoelectric system will record the number of passengers in each car at the entry stops (no dummies allowed).
Does HiLoMag make sense from an economic standpoint? This vital question is extremely difficult to answer at this time, since the system hasn't been designed nor analyzed in depth yet. Both the cost of building HiLoMag and the income from guideway-use fees need to be estimated wisely and honestly. Judging from past large projects, the actual costs will turn out to be much higher than the estimates, but fortunately experience tells us the guideway fees collected will also exceed the estimates.
The best estimates which could be made at this very early date would be extremely broad brush and might be off by an order of magnitude; but any kind of numbers may be better than none, as long as we recognize and remember their intangibility. If we assume that private vehicles will load the guideways to an average of one tenth of their capacity, assume the average guideway trip length is twenty miles, and assume that the average guideway fee charged per trip is $2.00, we would then collect $7,920 in guideway fees per mile per day. This is a $2.89 million return per year from each mile of guideway. But what will HiLoMag cost to build? Can we hold it down to ten million dollars per mile of guideway? And the electricity to operate it? --Perhaps fifty cents for our twenty-mile trip. If these numbers turn out to be in the ballpark, we could pay off the HiLoMag bonds in five or six years of operation. Don't quote me.
After I had worked with these figures I took out and reread a letter of some months earlier from one of my technical consultants, where he was addressing the high cost of HiLoMag. He wrote: "At ten cents a seat mile, HiLoMag starts to make sense." Looking back at my own guesstimates, I see that I independently assumed ten cents per car mile, which is that same ten cents a seat mile in the worst case of one person per car. Will the person who drives ten miles to work every day pay a dollar (instead of buying fifty cents worth of gasoline) to save a lot of travel time and frustration?
So far we have considered income from only private-car travel on HiLoMag; but we will also have a very large HiLoMag income from freight and bus companies. And since HiLoMag freight systems may largely or entirely replace railway freight trains (as well as highway trucks), and HiLoMag bus service should replace passenger trains, the land-grant railroad rights-of-way may become available for HiLoMag guideways, saving billions of dollars in the cost of the National Guideway System.
In thinking about these financial assumptions, remember that one 60-mph HiLoMag lane is equivalent to 12 freeway lanes, and a 200-mph guideway will carry the traffic of 40 freeway lanes. We will therefore be buying a system that will be operating at a small percentage of its capacity in its early years. As the traffic increases with time, the profitability of the system will further increase. With proper management, money will therefore be available for system expansion when it is needed.
HiLoMag will cost more than most of the other systems that have been proposed to solve our ground transportation problems, but it will pay for itself because it will do the job. And it, or some comparable private-vehicle dual-mode system, is the only type of system that would do the job: We must accept the fact that the great majority of people will not give up their private cars. And HiLoMag will gain another customer every time a gridlocked freeway traveler glances at the adjacent guideway and sees its traffic breezing along at 60 or 200mph. Although HiLoMag will be a huge and expensive project, it will be more than worth every megabuck of its cost. And HiLoMag will probably be less costly than the additional freeway lanes that will otherwise soon be required. It is going to take a huge project to solve our huge traffic problems. I wonder how many people earlier argued that we couldn't afford to build the streets and highway system that we now have.
HiLoMag will pay for itself because roughly a hundred million drivers plus many freight and passenger-carrying companies will be willing to pay to use it; therefore HiLoMag bonds will be recognized as good investments. Quoting my systems consultant, Dick Scherer, "The [HiLoMag] system will not only pay for itself but will make big money because of the combined people and freight usage." HiLoMag trucks will be offered lower guideway fees at night when there is little passenger traffic on the guideways. "Off-hour" use will help keep the guideways paying for themselves 24 hours per day, and help avoid saturation of the guideways during rush hours.
HiLoMag building costs should not be part of the national budget and should never be added to the national debt. HiLoMag should be financed by private investors and paid off directly from some portion of the guideway-use fees collected. Those who don't want HiLoMag shouldn't have to pay for it. If they later change their minds and use it, they will be helping to pay for it.
Little has been said about the private HiLoMag passenger cars, because little needs to be said about them. In mass production they may cost a little more than our present automobiles. Each will need several subsystems not used in our current automobiles, but they won't need a gasoline engine fuel tank, exhaust system or transmission system. When a person is ready he/she will buy a HiLoMag car instead of another conventional car. We in the United States have three major car manufacturers who should be delighted to develop and sell us a couple hundred million HiLoMag cars. If they don't want to I'm sure that Japan will. Getting the guideways may be difficult, because that will involve many politicians, government agencies, and large companies--getting the cars will be easy because they will be private deals like they are now.
It will not be cost effective to convert our existing cars into HiLoMag cars. A great number of major changes and additions would be required. Anyway, since the transition to HiLoMag will take many years, our present cars will be worn out before they need to be replaced with HiLoMag cars. HiLoMag electric cars will look pretty much like present automobiles, but under the hood they will be entirely different. But we (as a nation) can if we choose, put conventional gasoline-powered automobiles on the HiLoMag guideways by first driving them onto pallets designed to operate on the guideways, as previously discussed. Conventional automobiles may also continue to be legally used on the highways, but this mode of travel will lose much of its popularity after the introduction of HiLoMag.
Many of the early HiLoMag dual-mode cars should have internal combustion engines instead of electric motors and batteries, because these cars will be used on the first guideways completed as well as on the highways where guideways have not yet been built. A mixture of highway and guideway travel in private cars will be common for some years. For environmental reasons a law might be passed which would prohibit the sale of new internal-combustion-powered HiLoMag cars after completion of the National HiLoMag Guideway Grid. Those already in use could continue to be used until they wear out. Likewise, use of the guideways to carry palleted automobiles could be outlawed in time, but such decisions are left to public debate and our lawmakers. The point which needs to be made is that the HiLoMag system will be able to accommodate any types of cars we choose to call legal. But if gasoline-powered cars continue to be carried on the guideways, they should be complete dual mode cars. Putting all of the requirements for both modes in a vehicle is much preferable, from the standpoint of cost and operational advantages, to the use of pallets for guideway transport of conventional cars. While the use of guideway pallets is quite achievable it will complicate and add cost to the system.
A news release on October 21, 1997, by the Energy Department and the Arthur D. Little Co. concerned a "promising" method of converting petroleum to "hydrogen and carbon dioxide," which would then be used in fuel cells to produce power for electric automobiles, thereby replacing internal combustion engines. This would greatly reduce our smog problems, and is claimed to reduce CO 2 emissions. (It has not been made clear to the writer what happens to the CO2). If fuel-cell-electric car development were successful, these would be still better than battery-electrics for our dual-mode HiLoMag cars. HiLoMag is a broad and flexible concept that will take advantage of the latest technologies as they develop.
Once HiLoMag car/guideway interface decisions have been made, manufacturers can start to produce the vehicles, and guideway construction can get underway locally and nationally. As local 60-mph HiLoMag guideway systems are completed they will be opened for use, in order to reduce local traffic problems. The building of the 200-mph long-distance guideways and the integration of the entire national guideway grid can follow. If, for any reason, a state or city should refuse to join the HiLoMag system, the national guideways could simply bypass it. It isn't likely that a region's rejection of HiLoMag would last for long, except possibly around Lancaster Pennsylvania.
Compared to our development of the atom bomb, and compared to our program to land men on the moon and get them back to earth safely, the development of HiLoMag will be "a walk in the park." The United States successfully achieved both of those former great high-tech goals on schedule, even though there was little related prior technology available upon which to base either one of them. HiLoMag, on the other hand, will require essentially no new technology: we already have automobiles, maglev trains, superconductivity, linear electric motors, advanced computers, sophisticated software, integrated-circuit control systems, power generation systems, highway and railroad construction technology, advanced materials, and all of the other required bits and pieces. Technologically speaking, the development of HiLoMag will be much more of an integration and testing effort than it will be one of new science, invention, and technical innovation.
In addition to the extensive German and Japanese maglev technology, further maglev development is progressing rapidly in the United States. Recent U.S. maglev patents have been assigned to Northrop Grumman Corp., MIT, and the United States Department of Energy, among others. Technical papers on maglev are being written at a rate of around two dozen a year. These are being published by the IEEE, the ASME, the AIAA, the ASCE, and by foreign journals.
A September 1993 U.S.Army Corps of Engineers and Department of Transportation document, "Final report on National Maglev Initiative" (Doc No. PB 94-100237), makes the following statements: "The NMI study concluded that maglev technology has been demonstrated as a technically feasible transportation system. A United States-developed maglev would yield several design improvements that could result in significant performance and economic benefits compared to other high-speed ground alternatives. Most important, by developing an advanced maglev system, the U.S. could compete in both the nontechnical and technical aspects of the global maglev market.
"The NMI study recommends that the Federal Government proceed with a U.S. maglev prototype development program because of the significant public benefits. The recommended program is a three-phase development plan leading to a technical demonstration at a test site.
"The GMSA team found that any maglev system, foreign or U.S. developed, would offer many benefits, including high speed, high capacity, low wear and maintenance, modest land requirements, low energy consumption, low operating costs, alternative fuel choices, and low noise levels. The U.S. concepts, however, offer even better performance potential than foreign maglev systems in the areas of energy efficiency, guideway design, motor design, power transfer, refrigeration demand [for superconducting magnets], and materials and techniques."
And remember that all of these good words were written with only maglev trains in mind. We analyzed the shortcomings of trains along with other existing transportation systems in the "Introducing HiLoMag" article, showing that the capacity of any train system, maglev or otherwise, is very low compared to HiLoMag. Dual-mode HiLoMag will fill the needs of our private-car-using society far better than any single-mode public transportation system could.
Therefore, the writer urges the maglev-promoting people and organizations, the National Automated Highway System Consortium, the Institute of Transportation Engineers, the SAE, the ASCE, the IEEE, and all other groups which are now confining their thinking to either maglev trains or wheeled cars, to start thinking in terms of both--of a combination or dual-mode system. Please consider HiLoMag, or a similar system, which incorporates the best of both of these wonderful fields of technology. The marrying of maglev and cars will give us dozens of advantages that neither maglev trains nor conventional cars can give us as long as they remain separate transportation systems.
The HiLoMag engineering will involve feasibility studies including computer simulations, the systems engineering, preliminary design, and the engineering of the subsystem details. The development will include construction and testing of prototype hardware in laboratories and on short test guideways. Parts of the system will need to be developed heuristically. Integration and testing will start with a partial system: a few miles of guideway and prototype HiLoMag cars. If everything looks practicable at that point we should be ready to build and test the first operational loop of HiLoMag guideway.
Personal to fellow engineers: HiLoMag will require a lot of engineering work in each of your specialized fields. It will be a fascinating project; I wish I were young again so I could participate in one or more aspects of it. I won't live to see HiLoMag fully implemented nationally, but if things start rolling and I hang in there, I would appreciate a ride on one of your HiLoMag test guideways.
As the originator of the HiLoMag concept, I felt an obligation to assure myself, and hopefully you, that there are no requirements of the proposed system which would be impossible or unrealistic to meet. I have examined all of these areas which I could identify and found no obvious barriers. But I leave ninety-nine plus percent of the work to you. I stopped worrying about each requirement after finding one solution that would work. You will doubtless find better ways, so I won't burden you here with all of my detail design thoughts. In many areas I am not qualified to design the system further, but I believe I have found workable paths around all of the pitfalls.
Can HiLoMag, or some other dual-mode system, be operational before travel becomes largely impossible? One certainly hopes so, since there appears to be no other real solution to our burgeoning national transportation problems. Many cities and areas are now frantically trying to promote and develop various conventional local rapid-transit systems; but as shown by analysis as well as by actual results, these cannot significantly reduce traffic nor solve other current transportation problems, and People won't give up their personal cars.
The politics in getting any large national project implemented is always a major stumbling block. Does history offer any reasons for optimism in the case of HiLoMag? Referring again to the bomb and the moon, a little over fifty years ago this country successfully completed the vitally important and extremely difficult Manhattan Project at low cost and in a very short period of time. But that was done under wartime conditions and a few courageous leaders unilaterally made some major decisions in minutes or hours, which we would debate for years today.
Several decades ago the Soviet Union, our cold-war opponent, was ahead of us in "the space race," and our pride was hurt. Jack Kennedy set a national goal of putting an American on the moon by 1970. We did, and we beat The President's nine-year-old timetable by five months! Putting a man on the moon was a far greater technical challenge than HiLoMag will be; yet HiLoMag is far more important to our country. Will our desperate need for a solution to our transportation problems motivate us as much as did competing with the Russians in a race to the moon?
A big and recent transportation project of interest here is the English-Channel Tunnel. From a political standpoint that was a rough one, because it physically coupled two historically antagonistic but isolated nations. However, it was completed successfully in less than ten years. We will have just ourselves to disagree with on HiLoMag.
The fact that the development and installation of HiLoMag will employ hundreds of thousands of people in productive jobs for several decades will not go unnoticed, by the way.
With a minimum of political wrangling and with smooth sailing on the engineering and construction, we might be able to have some of our HiLoMag 21st-century transportation system operating in as little as a decade. Unfortunately our usual course would be to spend billions of dollars and years of time on HiLoMag study contracts before anything is designed or built. But our rapidly expanding traffic isn't going to wait; we must hold the study contracts to a minimum, speed up the process, and spend those billions of dollars to design and build the real thing. "The National HiLoMag Corporation" will obviously need to be closely associated with the government, but must not be hamstrung by politics-as-usual.
TV broadcasts, which include computer-generated scenes of HiLoMag in simulated operation, will help acquaint the public with it. Great interest in the subject of transportation already exists, because of our daily transportation frustrations. HiLoMag will be much easier to sell to the populace than rapid transit because it is for the automobile-driving public. We won't be buying highly subsidized transportation to give to hoped-for bus or train passengers, we will be investing in our own high-speed low-congestion system, and we will be buying new cars for ourselves, not buses and trains which we personally never intend to use.
According to a September 1997 newspaper article, "Since 1969 the vehicle population in the United States has grown six times faster than the human head count. ... ... Between 1969 and 1995, the number of vehicles climbed 144%. ... Drivers formerly outnumbered cars by thirty percent, but the two are even now, according to the Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey [of the Federal Highway Administration]. The number of households without vehicles fell during the same period from 20% to about 8%. The number of households with three or more cars grew from 4.6% to about 19%.
Our present ability to foresee the future of HiLoMag is little better than was our ability to foresee the future of the airplane in 1903, or to foresee the future of the automobile when Henry Ford decided to produce the Model T. But one thing we know: our traffic and environmental problems are only going to get worse. I hope and believe that the seriousness of these burgeoning problems, combined with the great promise of the HiLoMag approach, will be enough to assure its implementation. We won't give up the convenience of personal cars, and the traditional systems can't relieve the traffic jams or the environmental problems. We have a choice between a system of the HiLoMag type or national gridlock. We can continue to complain about the traffic, pollution, highway deaths, global warming, dependence upon other nations for fuel, and all the other problems caused by our present transportation systems, or we can take this one big step and fix most of it.
I am proposing the dual-mode HiLoMag system since I feel it is the right answer--that it best suits our present and future needs. If further study by qualified people proves me wrong, then I will favor the system that does best suit our needs. But we must take some wisely-thought-out unified national action as soon as possible.
I am indebted to a number of people for technical assistance and help of other kinds during the conception of the HiLoMag system and during the writing of this article. Thank you very much: Arnold Anderson, electromechanical engineer; Jerome Baer, transportation engineer, Dr. Andrew Bauer, aerodynamicist; Captain Paul Bowers, United Airlines; Dan Bray, electrical engineer; Ronald Case, Case Financial Services; Dr. Hal B.H. Cooper, Jr. railroad engineering consultant and former Texas A & M professor; Arthur Hoal, railways civil engineer, Cape-Town, South Africa; Robert Jenny, engineer and patent agent; Professor Emeritus Robert Joppa, College of Engineering, University of Washington; Ware Lantz, electrical engineer; Fred Mannering, transportation engineering professor, and Chair, Department of Civil Engineering, University or Washington; Robert Nielsen III, control systems engineer, Los Angeles; Leroy Perkins, electrical engineer and inventor; Sue Plahn, computer-aided designer; Greg Reynolds, robotics engineer (and my son); William Roeseler, aerospace engineer and inventor; Dick Scherer, systems analyst, Sacramento; Dr. J. B. Schneider, transportation-engineering professor emeritus, University of Washington; Robert Style, business consultant and politician; Richard Wallace, aeronautical engineer; Robert Weltzien, school systems administrator; and Paul Weston, vehicle designer and builder. And a special thank you to Marianne Reynolds, my wife, for much help which included the translation of German maglev reports, and for freeing my time for work on HiLoMag.
The writer is especially indebted to Dick Scherer for many of the thoughts leading to the driverless HiLoMag taxi, bus, and freight-transportation concepts. And special thanks go to Ron Case for his insistence that the HiLoMag system provide pallets to accommodate existing vehicle types, and that the guideways be designed wide enough to accommodate a large range of vehicles.
Francis D. Reynolds, who was awarded earlier vehicle-guidance patents, is a retired professional engineer and a lifelong inventor. In the late 1970s he was a Boeing engineering manager on the development of the Morgantown, WV electric-powered automatic " People Mover " system, which uses rubber-tired cars on dedicated guideways. This early system, funded by the U.S. Department of Transportation, assisted by the West Virginia University, and developed by Boeing, is still in full-time successful public operation, but it is a nonmaglev single-mode system; the cars don't go home with the customers.
The recognition of a need for a transportation system that would permit the use of personal cars and yet solve our freeway and environmental problems is far from new. One approach, which has seen considerable effort from individual inventors and designers, is that of the roadable airplane (or flying car). Molton Taylor's "Aerocar" was more successful than most of these attempts, but they were never produced in quantity. These flying-car projects were not always attempts to solve freeway problems, however; they were often efforts by private-airplane buffs to eliminate the need for renting hanger space at the local airports.
Graduating from two-dimensional travel to three-dimensional travel above the surface, and adding the limitless number of ready-built paths the air provides, would seem like a tremendous advantage. In reality, the use of roadable airplanes in a dual-mode transportation system has great disadvantages: The requirements for airplanes are so different from the requirements for cars that hybrids are always poor airplanes, poor cars, or both. To date the only satisfactory power plants for airplanes burn fossil fuels, so roadable airplanes would still be polluting and noisy. Roadable airplanes would have to meet vehicle and operator licensing requirements for both the highways and the skies-- a bureaucratic nightmare.
If a high percentage of the population used roadable airplanes for daily transportation we would have to have a huge number of new airports, the roads to the airports would be jammed with vehicles; and the airspace around the airports would also be jammed and very unsafe, especially under conditions of poor visibility.
Fifty years from now we might possibly have private vehicles reminiscent of those used by "The Jetsons." To meet the requirements of the real world they would have to be automatically navigated and controlled, provide vertical take-off and landings, be nonpolluting, use no fossil fuels, be quiet, be safe, and be affordable. These requirements won't all be met for many decades, if ever. On the other hand, the requirements for HiLoMag can be met with today's technology.
The National Automated Highway System Consortium (NAHSC) was proposing a dual-mode system using personal cars wherein the cars would be driven normally on city streets, but they would be under the control of sensors and computers while on specially-equipped freeways. This system was being developed and tested in San Diego on a $200 million budget. Eighty percent of that came from U.S. Department of Transportation money under the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, which was passed in 1991. USDOT support was withdrawn at the end of 1997.
The NAHSC obviously understood that any successful system must retain private cars, that at high speeds the system must be automated, and that high capacity is obtained by maintaining high speed while squeezing the vehicles close together. But, in the opinion of the writer, NAHSC did not propose to go far enough, and their basic approach had serious disadvantages. Their system would have still depleted our rapidly vanishing oil reserves, still polluted the atmosphere, still consumed millions of pounds of rubber; and it would still have been subject to chain-reaction accidents from electronic-system failures, blowouts, mechanical failures, and engine failures in individual vehicles at high speeds.
The HiLoMag system promises to solve all of the above problems. Further, HiLoMag can be designed for a speed at least a hundred miles per hour faster than could ever be safely achieved on rubber-tired wheels.
HiLoMag cars, with their synchronous linear-motor drives, could also safely travel much closer together than the National Automated Highway Systems Consortium(NAHSC) cars could have with their separate engines and controlling sensors on each automobile. NAHSC estimated thirteen-foot clearance between cars compared with our estimate of one-foot clearance between HiLoMag cars. Running the vehicles closer together not only increases the capacity of the system in vehicles per hour, but it greatly reduces the aerodynamic drag of the vehicles, and thereby reduces the power required in direct proportion.
The "1997 SAE Future Transportation Technology Conference" was held in San Diego on August 6-8, 1997. In addition to the Society of Automotive Engineers, that conference was co-sponsored by NAHSC, the Institute of Transportation Engineers, and five other domestic and foreign organizations. The possibility of magnetic levitation of private cars on guideways was not mentioned.
There have been a number of proposals to use present automobiles or private electric cars on the streets, and to transport them at high speeds and long distances on something like pallets or flat cars in trains, or to run them separately on tracks or guideways. I am indebted to Professor J.B.Schneider and his Innovative Transportation Technologies website for most of the information in the following paragraphs.
A currently-proposed dual-mode system called " SEGway ," (Smart Electric Guideway) would put individual street vehicles on individual steel-wheeled "Smart Carts," which in turn would run on steel rails at 100 mph under computer control. A method was proposed for getting the cars on and off the SEGway smart carts, but it has not been explained how the smart carts would be switched in and out of the "constant speed" 100-mph traffic. On railroads the switching of cars is done only at low speeds. A 30-foot spacing between smart carts was mentioned for SEGway. This "close" spacing (compared to cars on freeways) would appear to preclude the safe switching of carts in and out at 100 mph, yet this "great" spacing (compared to HiLoMag) would reduce the capacity of the SEGway system to roughly half that of HiLoMag.
Other major disadvantages of SEGway are the logistics problems associated with providing, maintaining, and storing smart carts; and with shuttling them around so that one is hopefully available when a car wishes to get on the high-speed rails. Integrated Transportation System ( ITS ), likewise proposes to put the cars on pallets, but the pallets would be suspended below an elevated track.
A dual mode system now being developed in Denmark is "Rapid, Urban, Flexible" or RUF (In English that acronym has unfortunate implications). RUF proposes to put special private cars on an elevated monorail, where they are supported and guided automatically at high speeds. Actually, RUF wouldn't be as rough riding as SEGway, since RUF uses rubber-tired wheels on the monorail. Again, as in the case of SEGway, information on how RUF vehicles would transfer to and from the monorail at high speed is scanty.
Another dual-mode system, the UTI (Unified Transportation Initiative), proposed by BCS Inc. of Tucson AZ, would put special private cars on "Local Loop Automated Guideways" traveling at speeds up to 50 mph, and upon "High-Speed Interconnect Automated Guideways" at speeds up to 140 mph. No technical description or hardware details on this system have been found on the Internet.
Motoyuki Minakami of Japan has broadly proposed the use of private cars on maglev pallets.
The HiLoMag concept was developed independently over the past two years. Only recently has its originator studied the extensive and somewhat parallel efforts that have been disclosed on the Internet. It was interesting to note that many investigators have independently arrived at the following common conclusions: Our future
