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Comment by S4M | Hacker News Reader

> High speed rail, such as Eurostar, would be around 10,000 passengers/hour.

How is that remotely true? There is one Eurostar approximately every 30 minutes (looking at the departures from London [0], it seems that there are 32 Eurostar leaving London every day), and I seriously doubt one train can carry 5000 passengers (I would say about 500 passengers), so your approximation is completely off (even taking into account the fact that Eurostar can go from London, Paris and Brussels) and 1500 passengers/hour is comparable to the number of passengers the Eurostar carries in an hour.

[0] http://www.eurostar.com/uk-en/travel-information/service-inf...

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Europe's busiest express train line seems to be LGV Paris-Lyon, with a peak scheduled capacity of 13 TGV trains per hour. Given that a TGV duplex fits 545 passengers, we are above 7000 per hour. Now couple two TGVs together, and you'll be well above.

Weirdly enough, the only source I found was German wikipedia on the train track (LGV Sud-Est[1]). Neither English nor French wikipedia have capacity information, and neither of the respective articles on the train itself have capacity information, even though the TGV duplex was introduced for this very reason.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGV_Sud-Est

In Germany there are some tracks with higher usages, but those are not the same line – they just share part of the line (imagine on the track A -- B -- C -- D, a train going from A to C, and from B to D, both every half hour – between B and C now you have 15min frequencies).

But the point is the same, regardless of if we use Japan, Germany, France, Spain, etc: 10k people per hour, or more, is easily possible.

Hyperloop transports less people than a single lane of highway. And with the cost you could maintain teslas for rental on a dedicated highway for many decades.

>Hyperloop transports less people than a single lane of highway

So what? Airplanes also transport fewer people than a highway. How many people travel by air between LA and SF right now per hour? Probably no more than the capacity of Hyperloop.

>But the point is the same, regardless of if we use Japan, Germany, France, Spain, etc: 10k people per hour, or more, is easily possible.

What makes you think 10k people per hour actually want slow train service between LA and SF, when they can just use their car, get there in about the same time, and then not have to rent a car at their destination?

>And with the cost you could maintain teslas for rental on a dedicated highway for many decades.

You're placing passenger capacity above speed. The whole point of Hyperloop is speed: it's faster than an airplane, without all the downsides of the airplane (terrorism, TSA, crashing, etc.) HSR is not, it's slow (esp. the way they'll build it in this country). Of course, Hyperloop doesn't have the advantage of not having to rent a car like driving yourself does, but it makes up for it with very high speed.

> when they can just use their car, get there in about the same time

> HSR is not, it's slow

Have you ever seen an actual HSR system?

We’re talking about 220mph minimum. That’s quite a bit faster than per car.

And, due to TSA, it’s faster than an airplane, and without the annoying stuff. And cheaper.

Hyperloops only differences over HSR is that it’s 15min faster, is a lot more uncomfortable, a lot more expensive to build, a lot more expensive to use (due to few people per capsule), etc.

>Have you ever seen an actual HSR system? >We’re talking about 220mph minimum. That’s quite a bit faster than per car.

Sorry, that's complete bullshit.

We're not talking about HSR in Japan, China, or Germany here. We're talking about "HSR" in California, USA.

The California system will be very, very lucky if it manages to ever hit 200mph in a short stretch. Realistically, it might be about the speed of the Amtrak Acela Express, which is basically no faster than any regular train, except that it manages to hit 150mph once or twice, briefly.

You seem to be making the ridiculous assumption that HSR in America will resemble HSR in other countries somehow, in both speed and cost. Nothing could be farther from the truth. HSR here is a horribly expensive boondoggle. It'll be worse than the F-35.

I’ve only seen German and French HSR, but the one in the US can’t be that bad.

Worst case, you just let some Germans build it for you.

>I’ve only seen German and French HSR, but the one in the US can’t be that bad.

This is your problem then: you're speaking from ignorance. Yes, it really can be that bad. Acela Express is a total joke compared to foreign HSR, and the one in California isn't even built yet, the cost projections are insane, and the proposed top speed is only 200mph.

>Worst case, you just let some Germans build it for you.

We can't do that. I'm not joking, I mean that literally. We simply cannot do that, and will not do that. Sure, it'd make sense to just let a company that's already an expert do that, but we won't. We'll do it with crappy domestic companies (though perhaps getting the passenger cars made by Bombardier in Canada) at an absolutely astronomical cost, because that's just how things are done in this country now for anything that's government-funded. Just look at the F-35 jet for proof.

From: http://www.eurostar.com/uk-en/about-eurostar/press-office/pr...

"Eurostar, the high-speed passenger rail service between the UK and mainland Europe, today reported the highest ever number of passengers transported on Eurostar in one quarter with over 2.8m customers travelling between the UK and the continent in Q2 2015. This represents a year-on-year increase of 3% in passengers compared with the same period last year (2.8m 2015: 2.7m 2014)."

2.8m in a quarter = 31,000 a day. Given the trains only run for just over 14 hours a day (London departure board for tomorrow) - then that's a mean passengers per hour over the quarter during operating hours over all days in the quarter of 2,214. Note this actual passengers not capacity. If you assumed say an average load ration of perhaps 70% (over all times of day all over the quarter) then the mean capacity per hour would be 3,100. Then at some times there are more trains than others, so the peak capacity per hour is probably at least 4,000.

Perhaps Tōkaidō Shinkansen would be a better example? 331 trains / day, 391 thousand passengers / day according to: http://english.jr-central.co.jp/company/ir/annualreport/_pdf... (pdf)

And Beijing-Shanghai highspeed railway? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing%E2%80%93Shanghai_High-... 100M rides/year in 2014, similar to the number of Shinkansen, far larger than eurostar.

Yes, but you also have loads of Eurotunnel (car and truck carrying trains) and Southeastern High Speed (non-international) trains on those tracks.

Add the capacity of those in.

Say 3x Eurostar, 5x southeastern hsr and 4x eurotunnel.

The new e320 trains have 900 passenger capacity (could be more with less first class, so let's call it 1000). With 12x departures per hour that's 12,000, and there would be more spare capacity left over because there wouldn't be local and express trains mixed together which kills capacity.

I think you could easily do 15k p/h on Eurostar + related infrastructure. Maybe more if you used TGV Duplex double decker trains.

Eurostar capacity is driven by demand though. There's no practical limit that forces trains to be 30 minutes apart.

Simply, because you don’t have to run them every 30 minutes.

In Germany and Japan on select few HSR lines trains are operating with a frequency of 2 minutes, and 800 passengers per train.

That’s 24'000 per hour.

The record is probably the Yamanote Line in Tokyo, with about 165,000 passengers per hour at peak. That's effectively a conveyor belt made out of trains; there's a loop in each direction with trains every 2 minutes in each direction during peak periods. Each train carries up to 1600 people, and there are 50 trains on the loops during peak periods.

Gp is referring to 'max capacity'. As others have noted 10k/hr is conservative.

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