GRRR

The Canadian Academy of Sciences did a comparison of TGV and MagLev technologies is a study on the Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal triangle in the late 1980's. They estimated that MagLew would require up to 27 times as much energy to levitate and propel the train, as TGV technology, which is, at high speed, pretty energy intensive. The use of levitation allowed for about a 20-25% higher "maximum" speed on the alignment they studied, but a lesser differential in average travel speed between City pairs.

A certain consulting firm that will remain un-named on this post, was telling Pisano's Board at SCAG that MagLev consumed less energy "per passenger" than a jet airliners. Since this "derivation" requires a pile of interesting assumptions about load factors and ridership, it is a very disengenous comparison. Most of these very poor arguments were used to keep the Emperors' new clothes from falling off and keep the MagLev project moving "forward".

The companies pushing this technology always went mum or dissembled when asked directly about the energy consumption. My favorite answer by one of them, went something like this, "linear induction (for propulsion) is a more efficient technology, which should save a lot, but hasn't been used for transit systems", a questionable and innaccurate answer, indeed. Linear induction has, in fact, been used, and, to my knowledge, shows no particular advantage in that regard, in actual operation.

MagLev energy use is clearly not cheap for direct operations consumption compared to existing rail technologies. So when trapped, the promoters of MagLev fall back on the argument that without friction that there will be no need to maintain the guideway and that this will reduce costs. In theory, you wouldn't need energy to make rails, and do maintenance.

Gravity is a "weak" force in particle physics, but a pretty strong force here on earth, and requires significant energy to overcome.