It has been in service for 20 years but only on a single short line. it is clear that the technology is more expensive than the HSR in Germany that is at 300 km/h or below, and then DB is an absolute mess nowadays anyway, incapable or incompetent of building the regular rail projects it is even contractually obliged to.
Your definition of public transport is very strange. Rail, including Maglev, can serve different purposes. Inter-city connections are one of those. I know it is a fairly foreign concept to many Americans even though you can find those things at least in some corners of the country. If it is one hour faster, this enables corridors that were not feasible before. It is the question if the costs still make sense but we can’t know until we see an actual line being built. China appears to still believe that the technology makes sense, otherwise they’d have not invested into more R&D based on the Transrapid technology. We’ll see if they will make something out of it. Germany is probably not large enough to actually have any national need for a system as fast as +400 km/h. China being considerably larger might be a different story.
It has been in service for 20 years but only on a single short line. it is clear that the technology is more expensive than the HSR in Germany that is at 300 km/h or below, and then DB is an absolute mess nowadays anyway, incapable or incompetent of building the regular rail projects it is even contractually obliged to.
Your definition of public transport is very strange. Rail, including Maglev, can serve different purposes. Inter-city connections are one of those. I know it is a fairly foreign concept to many Americans even though you can find those things at least in some corners of the country. If it is one hour faster, this enables corridors that were not feasible before. It is the question if the costs still make sense but we can’t know until we see an actual line being built. China appears to still believe that the technology makes sense, otherwise they’d have not invested into more R&D based on the Transrapid technology. We’ll see if they will make something out of it. Germany is probably not large enough to actually have any national need for a system as fast as +400 km/h. China being considerably larger might be a different story.