Transrapid International Transrapid Test Facility in Emsland, Germany BACK  TO  ARTICLE on Maglev and Infrastructure Developemnt Corridors

If you want to have an industry, you have to move materials to it and from it. Therefore, you require an efficient transportation system which has a low physical cost of transportation per ton of weight. The most efficient, of course, is rail--rail or magnetic levitation--the lowest in the cost, physical cost per ton mile. Roads are very inefficient, and the only time you use roads, is when it is inefficient to build rail. And you try to use them only for very short distances, because they're very costly, per ton mile, relative to rail. Rail is much cheaper. Water is the cheapest, but that's not land. But, water is slow.

To deliver those technologies, we shall not generally do it by sea. If we build development corridors, corridors of approximately 100 km width across Eurasia, especially Central Asia, then we will create a situation, which, with the use of magnetic-levitation transport, we will transport freight from Rotterdam to Tokyo, at speeds of up to 300 km per hour. The result will be that, since we are doing it across land, and since every few kilometers of land area is developing new wealth, the net cost of shipping a ton of goods from Rotterdam to Tokyo will be less than zero. And it will go at speeds of up to 300 km per hour. Why? Because, when you transport across a development corridor, the use of that development corridor increases the production of wealth along the way. Therefore, you are actually generating wealth by transporting it.

Magnetic levitation systems of mass transport are not merely an upgrading from friction-rail systems. Although the speeds achievable do relieve the presently excessive reliance on passenger air transport for medium-distance travel, the revolutionary impact of magnetic levitation shows itself in the transport and classification of freight shipments. Of course, on the horizon, there is the prospect of magnetic-levitation transport within long evacuated tunnels, and well above ordinary supersonic speeds. We would rely on the latter for sub-surface transport among centers in a science-city form of astrophysical research and development, and production colonies on the Moon or Mars, for example.

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