Can a 700 M.P.H. Train in a Tube Be for Real?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It's worth noting that the skepticism involved is not in any way displaced by the recent test. The major problems with Hyperloop boil down to:
1. High-speed switching, necessary to expand more than single-city pairs
2. Ability of the loop to maintain tolerances and structural integrity after weather and seismic considerations (particularly CA!) take their toll
3. Right-of-way feasibility, both in terms of cost-effective land acquisition and in terms of curve radii tolerances (note that even 300 km/h HSR systems in practice often have effective speed limits lower than that on much of the track)
4. The ability to get safety certifications--and the implications that would have on headways and consequently passenger throughput
5. Ability to maintain the necessary pressurization of such a long pneumatic tube
6. The cost/benefit of hyperloop relative to other technologies (like conventional HSR, maglev, even highways and airports).
The way that the company seems to be shrugging off all of these questions is not a good sign.
For some popular long distance routes, I could see the Hyperloop being useful. Between all reasonably large cities? Probably not.
Automated automobiles won't help cutting trip times, which is the main reason why people pay to fly or to ride a high-speed train.
True.
But if the only track record is a string of failures, it would be madness to expect this time to be different, particularly as the main problems that plagued other technologies still persist and are being repeated while being brushed aside.
> particularly when exponential change is involved
Even minor changes have disastrous results. Case in point: BART. It's a conventional railway service in the same fashion that's being done for decades all over the world, and somehow the "exponential change" that has been attempted in that project was more than enough to render it a failure.
The main reason why people keep investing in tried-and-true technologies is because the risk of trying it again and succeeding is far lower than reinventing the wheel, even if it's a fancy, popular wheel that is promised to go very fast.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2016-05/06/c_135339867.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_S1,_BCR
San Francisco/LA is only 400 miles. We need a 700 mph train because there's no affordable direct route.
"The first phase will be within budget, at $4.45 billion. The total cost of the 8.5-mile (13.7 km) line is expected to exceed $17 billion.'
This article says that low-speed maglevs are competitive:
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2016-05/06/c_135339867.htm
"The line costs between 150 million yuan and 250 million yuan per kilometer, making it highly economical compared to subways and light rail, which cost up to 800 million yuan and 300 million yuan per km respectively"
Do you have any facts to back up your "white elephant" claims?
This is an apples and oranges comparison. Big construction projects will always cost a lot more in the United States because of high labor costs, getting a plan that is acceptable to all levels of government and other stakeholders, environmental impact studies/minimization, and all those other pesky things that China doesn't have to worry about. You would have to do a comparison with a Chinese rail project to get useful results.
I also agree that the comparison with a Chinese rail project would be more interesting, but the miserable political climate for large projects in the US would apply to a good Maglev technology just as much as it would apply to a junk Maglev technology.
Putting a viaduct in the middle of nowhere, where eminent domain committed by a totalitarian state lets you get access to very cheap land usage, is not a fair comparison with having to dig holes in a high-density city.
Yes, China can build a 21st century infrastructure more easily than the US. They already have 10,000 miles of high-speed rail, for example, while the US has none.
Or a bed on a truck. $48, no subsidies needed, get there in ~0 waking hours, sold out, mostly 5* reviews http://www.autoblog.com/2016/05/09/sleepbus-la-sf-overnight-...
http://cahsr.blogspot.com/2009/10/la-sf-nations-second-busie...
6.3 million people fly it every year.
http://www.spacex.com/hyperloop
Unless this has changed, Musk just had the idea; he's not doing any of the implementation.
Seriously, if this mentality were pervasive we would not be having this conversation on the internet or driving cars to knowledge work jobs, we would be riding horses to the field.
I love the nerve and ambition it takes to try something that seems impossible, these are the people moving the world forward.
Edit: words
There are far more efficient ways of transporting people at high speeds and lower costs than this.
What are the advantages here? It's more expensive than high-speed rail, for example.
Anyway, it's silly to consider current demand. The demand currently is capped by the time / expense/ inconvenience it takes to get from one place to another. If it really took half an hour, people would start using it to commute, go out for dinner in other city, etc, and one would need to meet demands similar to rapid transit lines. BART can move 25,000 people / hour (and it's full during peak demand). Hyperloop would need similar demand.
It still smells like one of those crazy Sci-Fi ideas that crashes and burns when people do the math and discover that they'll need to charge $10,000 a ticket and be at 100% capacity for decades before they break even.
The cost estimates I have seen for constructing the tubes are hilarious lowballs thus far. It's definitely not going to be cheaper than high speed rail per mile, especially when you're talking about California (land of NIMBY).
But then you have to build transit into dense cities, where a single building that you have to go through might cost $1 billion.
And then you realize why infrastructure is so expensive when you actually figure out the real costs.
If nothing else, if it increases expectations people have about transit then that's good. The currently planned California "high-speed" rail is pretty underwhelming.
What part of CAHSR do you find underwhelming (other that it will take too long to build?). I disagree with some of the routing decisions (I think it should go SJ ->SF -> Oakland -> Central Valley -> LA ), but what would conceivably make it better?
The original whitepaper included absurd assumptions related to cost.
Even if the CA highspeed rail is underwhelming, it's already under construction. Nobody is going to pay for a competitor project because you'd split the market.
Skepticism is fine but doesn't warrant calling off the project at this point.
If Elon Musk seriously cared about the Hyperloop project, his FEA simulations would have looked better than the crap I pulled in an optional class from college. His "proposal" was the most modest of sketches, and should be treated with only the same amount of rigor that Elon put into it.
That's enough to call it off.
Pets.com. South Sea Bubble. Tulip mania. et omnium cetera.
It may work, but that's not the way to bet, right now. (Unless you've done a lot more math on it than I have, or, like the VCs and angels backing it, you're getting really good odds).
In the US the shifting of the populace to the left after the long period of "we need smaller government, get government out of the way" (see Bernie Sanders).
As someone in a small Northeast City that can't seem to extend a trolley based subway line 3 miles, and commuting time here is stupid... I'm a little worried, plus I"m not sure I'd like to ride it..
You might be thinking this is the country that put men on the Moon. That's incorrect. That country is in the past, and no longer exists; most of the people involved in that are dead.
This country couldn't put men on the Moon right now, with far better technology than existed back then, if its survival depended on it. This is a country that doesn't do anything big any more, it just sits back and says "that can't be done", and "that'll never work". This country says these things even while other countries like China actually go out and do them.
These people are probably right: this fancy new ideas never will work, here. Instead, they'll be taken overseas somewhere where people there will make them work. And we'll continue to sit around here, telling ourselves "no way, that'll never work, it's not feasible, etc." while our economy stagnates more and more.
Above ground tube is probably going to make it for flatter countries.
"Mr. BamBrogan’s real first name is Kevin. This is just one of many aspects to this undertaking that makes me feel that it will all be revealed as a breathtaking piece of performance art."
Is entrepreneurship sometimes completely, or partially, performance art?
Especially please don't post comments that do nothing but call names.
Some people LOVE bad ideas.
That immediately reminded - state owned Russian Railways Corp has just recently publicly expressed huge interest in it :)
Paying for it is left as an exercise to the voter.
On HN, the idea is to post civilly and substantively, or not at all. For example, neutrally explaining how an idea is broken would be substantive.
(I'm assuming everyone read the article?)