Hurry the hell up, 'cause I am NOT stopping.
When you get right down to it, transportation is all about A-to-B. The object is to get from one place to another in as little time as possible. It’s why speeding tickets exist.
It’s also why trains, planes and automobiles continue to get faster and more efficient. Simply, people only want to get to point B when they travel. Most people don’t want to dally, and no one falls for that “getting there is half the fun” crap anymore.
Perhaps that is the reason cars are so prominent in the bay area. Time is the most precious resource. Why spend an hour of it on public transit when, in a car, you can spend 20 minutes?
Therefore, we can expect people to pay through the nose for gasoline until transportation ceases to deplete their most valuable resource.
The Bart has the capacity to go 80mph. High-speed bullet trains are capable of going hundreds of miles an hour without batting an eyelash.
Not fast enough.
In an article(Non-stop High-Speed Trains Enabled by Docking Trams) for Mashable, Charlie White stated the obvious:
“No matter how fast a high-speed train travels, it still has to slow down to 0 mph to pick up additional passengers,” White wrote in the article.
The article goes on to explain UK Designer Paul Priestman’s solution for this little problem, which is to set the platform itself into motion.
The idea is that a high-speed train, sailing along at inhuman speeds, would, instead of stopping at a station, bullet on ahead.
If you don’t believe that your sense of time has been warped, dig your old computer, with its 56K dial-up modem, out of its landfill and plug it in.
A second, smaller train, which would depart from the station when the bullet train is in its proximity, would catch up to the larger train, and then they would connect, and then passengers on the small train (which is basically a moving subway platform) would board the larger train, which has just saved minutes by not stopping.
Then, the moving-platform train disconnects, returns to the station, and the process starts again.
This means one thing: James Bond is no longer the only guy who jumps from one moving train to another.
It also means that the human reluctance to wait is being not only directly acknowledged, but catered to.
Perhaps it’s the fault of the Internet. Our one-click lifestyle has led us to believe that it is feasible to get everything instantly.
If you don’t believe that your sense of time has been warped, dig your old computer, with its 56K dial-up modem, out of its landfill and plug it in.
Now connect to the Internet.
Now check your mail.
Remember when it was reasonable to expect AOL to take a minute to load? And remember yesterday, when you started paddling on your computer monitor because Firefox didn’t pop up in fifteen seconds?
The need for speed is not a bad thing, necessarily. Inventions change expectations. If it takes your Ferrari a day to drive into town, you may as well just get a horse, as did your great (number of “greats” varies depending on your generation) grandad.
White’s article mentions the ability to seamless move from country to country, city to city, in record times.
But before you start packing a magazine instead of a novel for your train ride, ask yourself just how rapidly you really need to transit.
After all, the bullet train goes pretty damn fast, if you ask me. Do you really need it to continue on to the other side of the world at 300-mph, without stopping once? Further, you could feasibly doze off, miss six stops, and end up in the land of penguins.
In any event, what we have here is an enhancement of the current human tendency to, at all costs, avoid slowing down to smell the roses. Just how fast do we want this wacky world to revolve?
This is the sort of thing that could put an end to tea time in England.
Tags: bullet train, Charlie White, high-speed, moving platform, Paul Priestman, train, transportation
