Innovative Transportation Proposals

This is a list of innovative and speculative transportation systems.
This is not for any "shovel-ready" proposals for which the technology has already been developed to the point of practicality.
LeviCar / RoboTrail
LeviCar (for passengers) and RoboTrail (for freight) are technically not trains, in that each unit has an individual pair of starting and destination stations, and it travels non-stop from the one to the other, bypassing intermediate stations. However, units may be temporarily linked together in convoys to reduce air resistance and noise. A LeviCar is a modular electric car. The drive train, power system, and wheels are located in two detachable road chassis that are removed from the car body when using the high-speed MagLev rail.
The RoboTrail system should be developed first, as freight rail has always proved to be more profitable than passenger rail. The profits can be plowed back into building the Maglev-rail network. Safety issues can be resolved during the "RoboTrail" phase, and scheduling algorithms can be refined. Then, the Maglev network can be opened to passenger vehicles, including LeviCars. The flexibility and high speed of RoboTrail and LeviCar should vastly reduce the use of trucks, buses, private cars, and airplanes for overland routes, reducing pollution and enhancing safety.
These proposals do not, however, address the needs of commuters, nor the use of cars for local transportation for shopping and entertainment. However, electric LeviCars would not need to have the 400 mile (~650 km) highway range that current gasoline cars have, because most all long trips would be on the MagLev rail.
Transoceanic Maglevs
Maglev ground speed is capped by aerodynamic drag and noise limitations. The use of vactrains in evacuated tunnels (i.e. a partial vacuum) similar to the external air pressure of air travel at could boost travel speeds to Mach 5 and above. As early as 1973, a RAND study concluded that future high-performance maglev systems built with advanced tunneling and control technologies, could form the backbone of a true global "subway system". Theoretically, these tunnels could be built deep enough to pass under oceans or to use gravity to assist the trains' acceleration. This would likely be prohibitively costly without major advances in tunnelling technology. Alternatives such as elevated concrete tubes with partial vacuums have been proposed to reduce these costs.
In his book 2081: A Hopeful View of the Human Future, Princeton physicist and futurist Gerard O'Neill proposed that what he called "floater" train tunnels could be constructed relatively cheaply once tunnel-boring machinery can be reliably automated, because the tunnels can be pressurized to any necessary pressure for support, even deep underground. He also described methods for loading and unloading the vehicles (which would probably travel independently rather than in conventional long trains; since the drive would probably be external) very quickly by leaving the train car's outer shell in vacuum, but rolling out the passenger compartments into the boarding lounge so that all the passengers could exit and enter at the same time. Tunnels under the ocean could be suspended a few hundred feet below the ocean surface -- just deep enough that storms and waves would not disturb them. With hard vacuum and well-aligned tunnels, trains could move at very high speed while actually using very little energy: energy used to accelerate would mostly be recaptured on deceleration. At the limit, passenger trains could accelerate at a high but not unsafe 2G for 9 minutes to a speed of 7 miles/second, at which they would experience a 1G acceleration upwards from the Earth's curvature (the train would rotate in the tunnel so this would be experienced downwards); then decelerate at 2G for another 9 minutes to the destination, permitting travel between the most distant points on Earth in just 39 minutes. An even more far-out, yet apparently feasible proposal would be to support such floaters near the edge of the atmosphere with huge balloons such as the STARS ("Solar Thermal Aerostat Research Station") proposal, that would accelerate vehicles at 2G until they emerged near the top of the atmosphere at orbital velocity.

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