Environmental groups forced the ironically-named Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) hand by suing them for not adequately regulating pollution. The upshot: 300 cities and counties nationwide are in violation of the new, stricter standards – up from 85 counties based on the old rules. One in ten U.S. counties is over the new limit for ozone levels.
According to the Daily Green excess ozone, generated by factory smokestacks and the tailpipes of our good friend the car “…interacts with heat and sunlight, primarily on hot summer days. It can trigger asthma attacks, permanently scar lung tissue and contribute to respiratory and heart diseases. It can also damage crops, forests and other ecosystems.”
EPA scientists actually believed that more stringent air pollution restrictions were required by law. The Bush administration stepped in to soften the blow to industry and allow one-third more pollution than the EPA’s Science Advisory Board deemed safe and legal.
Photos via flickr by pfala and Simone Ramella.
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{ 66 comments… read them below or add one }
What happens if everyone wants to get off at a particular stop?
then they r all fucked ya smart ass
Why do you clam it’s a Taiwanese Invention and the video is in Taiwanese? It says right at the beginning (upper right corner) that the Name of the Designer is Chen Jianjun of China, and the YT video is in the Chinese language.
well in tw they speak chinese
Ummm because Taiwan is an island province of China?
Taiwan, whose official name is «Republic of China», is one of two nations that claim to be the «real China». The other is of course «mainland China», whose official name is «Peoples republic of China». Both of these countries consist of Chinese citizens, both have the same language and culture, and both consider the other country an illegitimate government that has misled a part of the Chinese people. PRC is a communist state, while ROC is a democracy.
(This is a simplification, the PRC is so big it contains many different cultures and languages, PRC is almost two orders of magnitude larger than ROC, etc.)
Hey!
Please,that’s definitely a Chinese guy from Wuhan,Hubei province,China!
China/Taiwan sparring aside, this seems like a great idea for making train travel faster and more useful as well. Faster is obvious, because it doesn’t have to stop, but more useful because you can have more stops in more places, getting the benefits of a local train (or even more stops) with the speed of an express train. Anyway, it wouldn’t have to be used 100% this way, you could still stop the train at the endpoints and a few major stations in between.
All orientals look the same to me. Don’t they all speak chinese?
How do you get from the carts into the main train? Guess there would be a hatch the cart will park ontop somewhere?
If you cant get in the main train, people getting in the carts are forced to only go one station further.
I am also not sure how practical it is. For one, some trains have electical cables hanging above in the way.
So why not just have a second train travel on the side? No need for clumsy roof hatches, just the same old doors. I still doubt the practicality and safety of this, though. At high speed, you’d need very long parallel tracks for people to have the time to switch train, and if you slow down a lot, you could just as well stop.
And, of course, it all the energy savings are lost here: you need to decelerate/accelerate the second train/loading car. Speeds may be higher as the main train doesn’t have to stop, though. Maybe the simplest solution towards that would be to have the last self-propelling car of the train detach before a station, and a new one attach after it.
While the designer speaks with a thick taiwanese accent, the characters in the video are written in standard simplified chinese as used in the PRC and the train is identified as “Number 168 from Beijing to Guangzhou.”
Taiwan is and will always be a part of China.
so what if i don’t want to get off at the next stop? i would hope they have an access to the bottom of said train so that a large number of passengers can sit and relax for longer trips while those taking a shorter trip (to the next stop perhaps) would be able to stay on top
Learning about all these different asian countries can be quite dis[b]orient[/b]ing.
If slowed the unloading shuttle by having it compress air, you could use that air to accelerate the loading shuttle
Taiwan is not and will never be a part of China.
From the massacre in Tiannamen Square to the brutal suppression in Tibet, the communist bastards prove they are not real Chinese.
It should be said:
China is and always will be part of Taiwan. I look forward to the day when the people of Communist China stage a national uprising and execute every last one of the China leaders. Then, and only then, will we in Taiwan think of allowing them to be part of the real China.
C’mon, people, it’s a simple concept that saves time and energy. Half of the embarking is done at the station. The other half is done underway. The people have to move twice, but the train never stops. So, barring any emergencies, you save 1) the time of stopping the train for passengers and 2) the energy of decelerating and accelerating the train.
“2) the energy of decelerating and accelerating the train.”
As I already mentioned, you have to decelerate and accelerate the embarking car. No energy saved, unless the embarking car is very lightweight. But then, barring science fiction technology, safety issues dictate that speeds must be slow, which means the train must slow down and accelerate again. It’s simple physics. To hurl a human plus extra protective mass/shell to such and such speed from zero, that and that much energy is required.
(Trains could be made much lighter than they’re today, but largely at the expense of safety standards. Since trams don’t travel very fast, they could probably be very light, if they didn’t have to survive a crash with a car.)
Some of you seem to not be paying close attention. The embarkation car is a fraction of the size of the main train, thus making it much lighter, as well as not having any locomotive of its own, another reduction of weight. It takes far more energy accelerate an entire train vs a single mini car. Thus, there is significant energy savings.
Regardless of who the inventor is or where he’s really from, the video is still in Chinese.
Taiwanese is a distinct dialect of Chinese that can range from very different to very similar to regular Mandarin.
I think carterhawk is correct. Since [i]F = m·a[/i], where m is small and a remains the same, F shall be reduced. Regenerative braking, air, hydraulics, you name it, this could be done.
A mini train won’t allow embarking many people. It is only suited to very small stations, where it may not be financially feasible to build such systems. For high-speed embarkation, you’d need very long tracks for the mini train. So in practise the main train has to slow down. Thus after regenerative braking, I doubt the savings are that big. And at bigger stations a lot of people embark and disembark, and you’d need a sizable embarkation train.
The idea is not at all new, but maybe now its time has finally come. I remember a booked named “The Future” (in German) from the 1970th, in which a system was proposed where small local trains would accelerate on a loop of tracks to match the speed of an intercity train, let passengers change trains and then bring them to their destinations in a city.
[img]http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3077/2628649029_7359b6f0cf_m.jpg[/img]
Such a system would finally rid us of the strange situation where an intercity trains speeds at 300km/h on a free track just to crawl for hours through inner-city tracks.
Attaching/detaching EMUs (electrical multiple-unit; trains with the locomotive distributed under the carriages) at speed seems much simpler and cheaper than this scheme, not demanding long parallel tracks, just a short stretch at the station. The embarkation EMU at the end leaving at the station detaches before it and starts slowing down; the one waiting at the station starts accelerating after the main train has passed, and attaches at the rear until the next station. It’s still a dangerous scheme, though.
Yes. I agree with the comment above about attaching/detaching units. That is a great solution. You could walk within the train to the unit which is slated to stop at your departure point.
Dude, it’ll never happen.
JT
http://www.FireMe.To/udi
Alright, I have a question, whats the point of the rest of the large train, if all the passengers are on those cars? I mean to me, it looks like there’s still an entire commuter train underneath where the people would actually be sitting. Wouldn’t it be smarter to use a train engine, and then a very basic train body frame of some sort (to support the cars on top)?
[b]The people get in the big train from the little train.[/b] Think much?
“All orientals look the same to me. Don’t they all speak chinese?”
Chinese isn’t a language. And every Asian country speaks entirely separate languages.
http://multimedia.at.ua Cool Very
@Heh
If you can speak chinese, it’s a language. and I’m 83.4% sure that what you quoted was sarcasm
Oriental is a type of rug – Asians are people. Hmmm, I wonder why the world thinks Americans are arrogant and ignorant.
I could not see the video but I think the main train will be used for acceleration and deceleration. (Guess), the mini-car starts and attaches at the front of the train and slides to the back using the main trains momentum and energy to get to speed. By the time it reaches the back of the train, it is traveling the same speed as the main train. It does the opposite to detach and slow.
I would guess the main train would have to spend a bit more energy to accelerate the mini-train but considerably less that stopping and starting – what doe the physicists think?
I Chinese and this is in Chinese language. My name Ming Lee and I give sucky sucky 5 dollars. Me love you long time.
^^Yeah! White Power! I’m a Redneck! DEY TOOK URRR JOBBBSS!!!!!!!
Case-in-point
There is probably a standard minimum clearance for tunnels and crossings. So either trains will need to be shorter, or that will need to be higher.
when someone says “oriental people” everyone knows who they are talking about. the people (??) trying to correct everyone are the arrogant ones. also saying they speak ching-chong covers chinese, japanese, mandarin and all the other dialects causing all the commotion.
I can think of many terms for a specific demographic that everyone would know who I was talking about. That does not make it correct.
If being informed, educated, and sensitive to other cultures around the world makes me “arrogant” than so be it.
The reason why not to have it on the side is that you would need to add tracks. This is a modification which could be done with less changes to infrastructure.
However, it doesn’t seem simple at all from an engineering standpoint – compared to the operation of a regular train its actually VERY complex and would require some very precise operating tolerances and maintenance.
Chinese is not a language. Chinese people speak Cantonese or Mandarin.
But I guess they don’t teach you that in the backwoods of Alabama.
StationStops – wouldn’t the top car just require some sort of track to slide on and a braking system (see my comments above).
BTW – thanks for getting us back on topic.
how would old people get on, such as people with wheel chairs? i can hardly imagine them going down through a hatch. also people who were slower would hold up everyhting
Nice idea, don’t know how practical and timing wise it would be. You would have to solve the issue with timing for getting on/off the transit/moving stations
Oh come on, an entire separate train to avoid losses while slowing down and speeding up? Give me a break!
How about replacing those two separate trains with an equal weight in supercaps? Same effect, zero complexity.
All the Caucasian look the same to me, but not everyone speak English and not from the same place. Try calling a Russian an American.
Saffsd said:
>What happens if everyone wants to get off at a
>particular stop?
Amtrack already found the solution to this problem: just crash the train.
Alright, please, I’m Malaysian Chinese, but please stop with the political/moral/whatever Taiwan/China debate already. We know your views, it has been going on forever.
On the subject of the train, it’s a pretty cool idea, and will probably offer energy savings, if they use run-off kinetic energy to stop the car on top. Looks really dangerous though, if the computers controlling the accel and decel malfunction, the topcar goes plunging over. There is probably some sort of stairway or hatch into the main train, as you can see windows on it.
The designer states that he’s from Hubei, and province in China, and the announcement clearly says “Wuchang Zhan” (Wuchang Station), Wuchang being part of Wuhan, the seat of Hubei Province. People in Hubei are with southern dialect, similar to some in Taiwan in that regard.
Get the facts straight, folks, before making any funny statement.
Actually this is all a collation of ideas that were thought of in the 19th century. The British Railways, for example, had “Slip Coaches” (Google it!). And in the 1920’s NYC’s Twentieth Century Limited in Albany NY would have a bunch of burly guys manhandle people on an off the train as it ran through the station slowly so it wouldn’t have to stop.
It’s also apparent that commentators lack the basic understanding of duo-rail transportation basics; or failed High School physics; or don’t have even a rudimentary understanding of political science.