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O PINION &EDITORIAL
Views expressed in Opinion & Editorial do not reflect the views of the Rancho Santa Fe News
RANCHO SANTA FE NEWS SEPT. 6, 2013
Musk’s hyper-rail: Escape from old technology? By Thomas D. Elias
INSIDE OCEANSIDE BY KEN LEIGHTON
School is back in session
If you are a parent of a Kindergarten through 12th grade student in Oceanside, you know that school started earlier this year than ever before. Last year, the first day of school was Aug. 23. This year it was bumped up to Aug. 20. As I remember attending the now defunct North Oceanside Elementary and then South Oceanside Elementary, it seemed like school started in the middle of September. Times have changed. We also used to get Feb. 12 off for Lincoln’s birthday. It seems cruel to make local kids attend school during August and September, which happens to have the best weather of the year, just so they can be out of school in June, which is arguably the worst month for weather. Also new this year, on Thanksgiving week, Monday and Tuesday will be school days, and vacation starts on Wednesday. Last year they took the whole week off. The reason for starting so early this year is so that the first semester will be wrapped up before Christmas vacation. When students and teachers return in January, it will be the first day of the new semester. But there is a lot of other news out there in our sprawling Oceanside Unified School District. Back in 2008 voters passed
Proposition H, the $195 million bond issue that was to pay for a complete renovation of seven OUSD schools. Mission accomplished. OUSD boasts that the project was completed on time and under budget. All schools were totally rebuilt, with new plumbing, heating, technical infrastructure in the classrooms. Libraries, playgrounds and parking lots were also upgraded. The results are brand new campuses of Lincoln Middle School and six elementary schools (Del Rio, Libby, Santa Margarita, North Terrace, Palmquist and Mission). A grand reopening ribbon cutting is planned for Palmquist, 10 a.m. Sept. 6. Just as we have to adjust to the idea of starting school a month earlier than we used to, we must also divest ourselves of other long held traditions like the traditional K through 6 concept. OUSD operates three elementary schools that are actually on Camp Pendleton. (The federal government pays OUSD for each military dependent it educates.) Those three schools, Stuart Mesa, Santa Margarita and North Terrace, used to be grades K through 5. Last year the three started hosting sixth graders. This year the trio has become K through 7 and next year, all three will host nine different grades: K through 8th grade. The idea is to
keep USMC kids on base as long as possible. But wait, there’s more! Due to neighborhood gentrification (old people stay, young families don’t move in), Ditmar Elementary stopped operating as a full service neighborhood school five years ago. The kids simply weren’t there. For the last few years Ditmar has been hosting bussed-in students from some of those schools while they were getting remodeled. But what to do with this campus now that all seven schools are remodeled? This year, the school will house offices for the administrative staff of the Migrant Education and Adult Education wings of OUSD. No actual teaching will be happening at Ditmar this year. But next year could get interesting. OUSD Superintendent Larry Perondi sees the future of Ditmar as a “specialty” K-8 school, where there would be an emphasis on a specialty like arts, humanities or technology. In other words like the Guajome Park Academy in Vista. But unlike Guajome, Ditmar will not be a charter school operated by a for-profit entity. So while the new Ditmar may walk and talk like a charter school, it TURN TO OCEANSIDE ON A15
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There has long been a suspicion that the $68 billion plan to build a 432-mile high speed rail system between Los Angeles and San Francisco was too little, too late. Essentially, some say, it could be the last hurrah for an outdated technology. “Bullet trains are obsolete, at the end phase of their development,” Rick Canine, an executive of Federal Maglev Inc., claimed in an interview two years ago. His company said it could build a magnetic levitation rail line with a top speed of 300 mph (to the bullet train’s 220 mph), similar to maglev lines already running in Japan and China. Maglev trains run on concrete beds with embedded magnets that repulse other magnets mounted on skis beneath lightweight aluminum passenger cars. Maglev drew no response at all from the California High Speed Rail Authority. Now comes Elon Musk, immigrant from South Africa, co-founder of PayPal (later sold to eBay), chairman of the San Francisco Bay area’s Tesla Motors and boss of SpaceX, the suburban Los Angeles company that has changed the resupply of the International Space Station. Musk agrees that bullet train technology is outmoded and would like to see that project aborted before much money is spent on it. He doesn’t endorse maglev, though he probably wouldn’t object. Rather, he suggests a completely new form of transport, essentially the use of a pneumatic tube to whip passenger capsules from place to place at hyperspeeds of almost 800 mph, right around the speed of sound. Hyperloop, he called his plan, which he insisted in a 57page report (teslamotors.com/blog/hyperloop) would cost just a fraction of the bullet train’s projected expense. Anyone who worked in an old newspaper office should be least somewhat familiar with the technology: editors would stick capsules filled with typed copy into a pressurized tube for virtually instant delivery to a pressroom. Some banks still use similar methods for moving paper. The hyperloop would use far larger tubes for passenger capsules. Because the distance covered would be hundreds of miles, not dozens of yards, delivery would take a little longer: about 40 minutes to move passengers from city to city. Yes, there could be overheating problems, as critics have noted, but Musk is also the fellow whose engineers conquered the problem of short range electric car batteries and gets stuff into space at far lower cost than space shuttles ever did. Then there’s the route he chose: Musk would use 20-foot pylons along Interstate 5 and
Interstate 580 medians, the shortest driving distance between San Francisco and Los Angeles. No intermediate stations for political reasons in cities like Bakersfield, Fresno and Merced, as now planned for high speed rail. Some have previously urged this much cheaper, swifter route, where the state already owns much of the right-of-way, upon the bullet train but officials never so much as acknowledged those suggestions were made. So this plan makes some rudimentary sense, especially if the technology turns out to be more efficient than bullet trains. Musk would have to resolve potential safety problems — what if passenger capsules traveling at ultra-high speeds were to collide? Bullet train authority chairman Dan Richard, in a statement, allowed that, “New technology ideas are always worth consideration.” But he tried to toss cold water on Musk, adding that “If and when Mr. Musk pursues his Hyperloop…we’ll be happy to share our experience about what it really takes to build a project in California, across seismic zones, minimizing impact on farms, businesses and communities and protecting sensitive environmental areas and species.” It’s also true that the Hyperloop would not move quite as many passengers as the bullet train says it will, with a capacity of 840 miles per hour. So this proposal is in its infant phase at best, with many details yet to be worked out and the prospect of going forward only if the bullet train should be derailed by its persistent foes. Which means no one yet knows whether this plan will join other big California ideas that never became reality even though they had some merit, like moving icebergs here from Antarctica during dry years to solve water shortages or using waves outside river mouths to generate electricity.
Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It,” is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, go to californiafocus.net.
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