Elon Musk says he has a green light to build a NY-Philly-Baltimore-DC hyperloop
theverge.com
theverge.com
LA Metro is currently building a subway extension, and Beverly Hills has fought them every step of the way.
If you want this to happen fast, please let your local & federal elected representatives know. Makes a big difference if they hear from you. -@elonmusk [1]
Traveling 1 mile under the hudson would involve deals with at least 6 entities: the states of NY and NJ, the port authority, the federal government via amtrak, and the city government of NYC and whichever municipality on the NJ side.
Maybe best to just go around us.
Inspector: Hi... can I see your permits? I hadn't heard about this.
Foreman: It's OK... we have verbal permission from the zoning board and building commission.
Inspector: Oh, I see, well... carry on!
I think it's fair to say that there is no such thing as "verbal approval" when it comes to any government bureaucracy so empowered to approve/reject any activity. Sure, you might get the verbal commitment of bureaucrats and politicians to oil the wheels and speed things up, or even look the other way... but they can also just be giving you happy talk, too. It don't mean a thing until the right approvals are filed with the right offices, usually on the right forms, with the right seals, and the right signatures.
I am not concerned about the surface substance of Elon's message. What I am concerned about is the Boring company having no experience building tunnels yet, having no test track, and having no experience building vehicle elevators.
So many unknowns. The least of their issues right now is permission to start work.
He also later tweeted:
> Still a lot of work needed to receive formal approval, but am optimistic that will occur rapidly
Musk is trying to drum up momentum for it. It'd be wrong to think he's gotten anything terribly official done, here.
He will reference it when the lawmakers try to back out, delay, or, otherwise impede the progress of Boring Company.
"I've got a pen and a phone." -- Barack Obama
So does Trump.
The ratchet of increasing federal government power only turns one way.
Maybe below ground property rights should not be quite as absolute and people would have to allow tunneling below a depth where disturbance to the near surface is far below the background. They could receive some kind of predetermined fee and/or rent. I hope America is still flexible to implement such a legal change.
I can't help but think of this Simpsons scene whenever I hear Musk talk about Hyperloop and the Boring company.
The guy has no skin in the game, and meanwhile he's building a car company which does not benefit from increased public transit use. It's a sham folks.
What's the nature of the supposed sham? It doesn't look like he's structuring this company in a way that will let him take the money and run, so what's the plan?
Governments could build high speed rail right now and significantly improve transportation options, but with the promise of some better Hyperloop system in the future, they could be encouraged to hold off. Of course Hyperloop may never appear at all.
Similarly with the Boring Company Musk is asserting that increasing road capacity with tunnels will reduce congestion and improve the transportation system, when in reality this issue has been studied at length and has been proven false. Due to induced demand increasing road capacity simply encourages more people to drive, which Musk would of course be in favour of. Yet again by putting forward a zany idea and additionally hand waving about the future promise of autonomous cars, Musk distracts government officials from real transportation solutions that can be implemented today.
EVs and trains are a great match. Self-driving EV takes you to train, train takes you to another city, and another self-driving EV picks you up.
Also, Tesla is a vehicle (heh) for battery research.
I imagine if this news is true it will get very political as Amtrak has recently secured billions from the Federal Government for new trains, along the same corridor:
https://media.amtrak.com/2016/08/1610/?mc_cid=d3b3f1fecc&mc_...
Amtrak is largely a political problem with no will in Washington to fix. It would be interesting to see what would happen if Amtrak had actual competition.
Even if the threat of Hyperloop were the kick in the pants Washington needs to fix Amtrak, Hyperloop would be a success. See:
A great book on topics related to this is "The Great Good Place" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Good_Place_(Oldenbur...
>"Mass transit can be way more efficient and desirable, as well as allow pedestrians to take back city life."
Indeed mass transit "Can be" more efficient and desirable. Unfortunately however there's often a host of real world constraints such as budgetary, political, and logistical that seem to ensure that its never optimally efficient or desirable. See:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/interrogatio...
Yes exactly, and that is the point being made in my Economist link. Amtrak should be broken up. Why should commuters along the NE corridor be subsiding the rest of it? In 1971 when Amtrak was founded this made sense but in 2017 with budget air travel it's to believe it still does.
Let Amtrak continue to operate the NE corridor and be profitable. But why should they be protected from competition? Or stated a different way - why should commuters be denied an alternative?
Amtrak isn't solvent in those other areas because it simply isn't competitive. It's too slow (because we won't invest in bullet trains, and it doesn't help that Amtrak trains use freight tracks and have to yield to the freight trains), and it costs way too much. Air travel in the US sucks, but it's still better than the Amtrak option for those routes. It only works in the NE Corridor because those cities are close enough together for it to work out; air travel is hampered by the crappy TSA security (aggravation but also a lot of time: having to be at the airport 3 hours before your flight makes it uncompetitive if you're just going from DC to Philly for instance) so train travel makes some sense there, though even there you can get there more cheaply by bus, though it isn't as comfortable or quite as fast.
Comparing the Northeast Megalopolis to West Germany is instructive, they are similar in size and population. Germany has had its Intercity-Express since the late 1980s. America on the other hand can't get its ass off the seat. No competition needed, just political will.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/driving...
Not to mention the difference in housing cost would have to support the cost of travel. Who knows what a single Hyperloop ticket will cost but a 3-digit figure wouldn't surprise me, especially during rush hour. You could be looking at $3-$4k/month for a daily commute (which granted, is not too far from the difference in housing costs between parts of NYC and parts of Baltimore).
Living 5min from Baltimore hyperloop station would give you 15mim on the other side for a 40min overall commute each way.
If you are saving 2k/month on rent you could pay up to 50$ each way and break even. Though, I don't know what tickets would actually cost, that not ridiculous.
I have friends that have moved upstate from NYC and spend 80 minutes door to door commuting via Metro North, while only being about 60 miles away. Baltimore is about three times the distance and in this future would take 1/2 the time. The metrics just change with something like the hyperloop.
(I moved from Brooklyn to Baltimore, in part because of the >30% difference in housing prices.)
My point is mainly that we'd start thinking about commuting distance differently if we had a system like the hyperloop (assuming the cost isn't prohibitively high). We could conceivably even build other dense cities somewhere in the radius of 225 miles outside of places like NYC, LA, or SF to offload people if commute times are around 30 min.
It can take me an hour to go see friends in Harlem or The Bronx, so you'd even open up the possibility of going to see friends or family for the evening 200 miles away for the same door to door travel time.
Of course this is all futurist speculation, who knows what the numbers would actually add up to until a pilot program happens.
And I'd bet the cost of Baltimore housing would no longer be cheap when commuting options are expanded.
The other way of dealing with it is to gentrify an area so the inner-city housing prices are so absurd that the poorer people can't afford to live there any more.
In a nutshell, the American way to is establish a lot of space between poorer people and everyone else. Honestly, I'm not sure what else can be done; all kinds of social programs have been tried.
SF Bay area is a leader in this work-from-home/remote revolution, but what external factors will tip the masses to be able to migrate?
That's not actually easier to solve. Only theoretically and only if your theory involves only robots and is specific to a dozen cities.
Study after study keeps proving most people like working physically with other people. The majority would prefer to not telecommute. It also keeps getting proven that most people perform their jobs much better on location rather than telecommuting. Amazing things happen from physical human interaction that do not happen telecommuting. Bell Labs and Xerox PARC would never happen via telecommuting. These things are not true for everyone, they're simply true for most.
Beyond that, it's a small minority in the US that has a housing cost problem. Overwhelmingly the US is the land of inexpensive housing compared to other nations with comparable median incomes.
But I wonder about the longer term. In 30 or 40 years we will have virtual reality systems that can almost perfectly fool our senses into believing a remote colleague is in fact sitting in the same room. Will most people still commute to work?
I'll bet Bell Labs and Xerox PARC didn't have modern open-plan office spaces.
When the choices are telecommuting or open-plan offices, telecommuting is clearly the better option.
Tunnel fires are NO JOKE. Especially with very, very long underground tunnels with particularly narrow diameters and primarily (or exclusively) elevator-based access. A thousand firefighting and evacuation questions there that I haven't heard a single reporter ask.
You mentioned planes. There are tons of regulations and engineering codes and procedures and training and on-board safety personnel that go into making airplanes fire safe. Including emergency landing and evacuation and firefighting procedures which need to be reimagined for deep underground, elevator-accessed tunnels.
Even the existing procedures for subway systems probably need to be reimagined for deeper depths, narrower diameters and elevators which are the hallmark of The Boring Company's approach.
And I should reiterate that the video shows cars using surface elevators and riding on electric sleds, not a more tightly controlled hyperloop system. So that further complicates safety.
All the best, and please make up all the way to Boston.
[0] The wiki article is pretty thin on details but it sounds like they do me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-of-way_(transportation)
Depends. In some states, the costs are shared between the rail owner and the locality (by law). Michigan is one of those.
> Just received verbal govt approval for The Boring Company to build an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop. NY-DC in 29 mins.
Obviously they'll need to be _some_ ground level access. But no where near the type of access an above-ground hyperloop would.
The reason trains are slow on (some of) the Northeast Corridor is because (1) tracks aren't straight (2) population density means you're frequently running through cities and (3) trains stop all over the place, so people can actually get on and off.
The hyperloop sacrifices throughput for speed, but if you ran a conventional-style train fast through straight tracks underground, you could still do DC to NYC in 90 minutes or less, with a much higher throughput. Letting an order of magnitude or two of people make the trip in 2-3 times the time seems way more valuable than letting the smaller number make it faster.
It's doable, I guess, but I think the regulatory obstacles, archeological excavations, etc would slow it all down more than the machines.
Musk claimed[1] existing tunnels are far too big/wide as they're over-engineered for safety + regulatory FUD. Boring plans to reduce tunnel diameter by half (from 28ft to 14), and then build a better machine to tunnel + support the walls simultaneously. Estimates would reduce costs by ~10x.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/ne...
This alone will drive up required funding exponentially. Almost all of the named city centers have onerous space, security and tunneling red tape that will intuitively drives up the marginal per-mile costs the closer to the city centers one tries to bore.
Why not fix the train instead - you know, in some other parts of the world the high speed train is a reality, and works quite well.
Suppose this happens, some cities like Boston become simple "suburbs" to a more connected mega region.
I mean, is it feasible he released the idea of Hyperloop into the wild and let other companies battle it out and spend an enormous amount of money on R&D, only to build a "straightforward" company and sell it's "product" (infrastructure) to Hyperloop and the others?