Hyperloop One reveals strongest potential Hyperloop routes | Hacker News Reader

Hyperloop One reveals strongest potential Hyperloop routes

techcrunch.com

28 pointsthesanerguy54 comments

For the lazy:

U.S. Cheyenne – Denver – Puelbo (360 miles) Chicago – Columbus – Pittsburgh (488 miles) Miami – Orlando (257 miles) Dallas – Houston (640 miles)

U.K. Edinburgh – London (414 miles) Glasgow – Liverpool (339 miles)

Mexico Mexico City – Guadalajara (330 miles)

India Bengaluru – Chennai (208 miles) Mumbai – Chennai (685 miles)

Canada Toronto – Montreal (400 miles)

Glasgow - Liverpool is just wrong, and Edinburgh - London is the distance by car. I'm guessing the other distances aren't accurate either.

Yeah Glasgow Liverpool doesn't make sense. Maybe London - Birmingham/Liverpool would. that's what all the money on HS2 is going to be wasted on.

If you actually look at the routes [1] (as linked by another user [2]) the Glasgow-Liverpool makes some of the most sense. The UK has long term problems with its north-south divide, putting a hyperloop into London and the south will be crazy expensive and meet tons of opposition. Linking the northern cities will be brilliant infrastructure and form a solid backbone for future economic development. Eventual extension to London is also possible with less opposition.

We need to unite Britain, and a northern hyperloop could go a long way to doing that.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/09/hyperloop-one-colorado-... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15250816

The UK distances are based on big curving loops with intermediate stops (Liverpool - Glasgow goes via Edinburgh and Newcastle). I'm not convinced that makes them more practical - if anything the opposite - but it does mean the distances likely work.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/09/hyperloop-one-colorado-...

There is a project for high speed rail between Dallas and Houston being worked on, though it's not guaranteed to proceed.

If it did, I assume that would take the wind out of a hyperloop proposal. The train is supposed to take 90 minutes, so there wouldn't be much pressure to improve that, I would guess.

I think it could. As proposed, it's no different that taking a flight (50m + airport time) and slated to be similarly priced - so what's the point.

Also, Houston<>Dallas = 240 miles not the 640 quoted

Depending on who you ask, though, "airport time" could be 2+ hours. Especially DFW airport. And IAH isn't really in an area of Houston anyone wants to go to...it's far north of most of Houston. A 90 minute train would be a no brainier decision for me.

And going through airport security is a hassle, whereas time spent sitting on a train is time you can use to get work done. A train also is much less cramped than a plane, has better Internet access generally (you can just tether), and is probably less likely to be delayed.

The image in the article says "Dallas-Laredo-Houston" which presumably means some Y-shaped route connecting those three places via Austin and San Antonio.

My understanding is that construction is scheduled to start in 2018 and the first trains will run in 2020.

Correction: the distance between Houston and Dallas is 240 miles, not 640.

The reason it's longer is because they're routing it via Austin and San Antonio. In their vision, San Antonio functions as an intersection for the lines from Dallas and Houston, as well as another from Laredo.

Not sure why they went for this configuration. Leaving Laredo out of it and adding a direct Dallas-Houston branch to complete the triangle would make more sense to me.

There is also this competing high speed rail project, which seems more realistic to me:

http://www.texascentral.com/

How's the proposed Dubai to Abu Dhabi route coming along? Hyperloop One announced that last year. That's the ideal situation - flat undeveloped desert between the endpoints. Few routing problems. Short distance. Enough money to make it work.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pi8o8gB_F24

Why not use the original street-car/suburb model?

Buy cheap land.

Build a highspeed line to a place with very high land values.

Profit.

And of course, start selling the land early to fund the line.

Selling would be a disaster in a 100 years. Leasing would be a better option. 100 year lease on the land near stations could subsidize the transit system during maintenance heavy years.

I think this proves that the Hyperloop will be a complete economic failure.

The most important line is missing from the list.

* Los Angeles to San Francico and San Jose

* Los Angeles to Las Vegas

Who really wants to take a Hyperloop from Houston to Dallas?

And even if you can, then you need to rent a car just to get around, or spend several hundred dollars on Uber/Lyft.

Or, say, be a member of the Tesla auto-fleet. It's not like this thing is going to open next year, so transit issues should be considered for a few years from now at least. Also, people still fly those routes, so why not hyperloop instead?

Yes, I agree. The robotic car fleet might actually be the game changer.

I am thinking you arent a texan. The 35 corridor is already full of people going from Houston to dallas. It would offer huge opportunities.

You're thinking 45 corridor...

right you are. 35 could use a hyperloop to austin also.

This is a very California-centric mindset. The Houston-Dallas commute is the largest growing in the nation [1].

[1] https://wagner.nyu.edu/files/rudincenter/supercommuter_repor...

People really have no idea.

4 Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX Metropolitan Statistical Area 7,233,323 6,426,214 +12.56%

5 Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land, TX Metropolitan Statistical Area 6,772,470 5,920,416 +14.39%

Note, the areas above them top out at 3% growth. They could very easily be bigger than Chicago (3) in 15-20 years.

and:

24 San Antonio-New Braunfels, TX Metropolitan Statistical Area 2,429,609 2,142,508 +13.40%

31 Austin-Round Rock, TX Metropolitan Statistical Area 2,056,405 1,716,289 +19.82%

There is a single area with growth rates above that preceding them in the list.

One day Californians are gonna wake up and wonder how the hell everything moved to Texas. We'll take your industries, too. ;)

Actually, it's a little unnerving. The area is getting busier and busier, you can't drive 10 minutes down the highway without seeing numerous new apartment. I hope our metros can deal with these pops, but we'll see. Austin has gotten the worst of it. Thankfully we've been good about investment in things such as light rail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Metropolitan_Statistic...

I love the folks of Texas!

But the fact remains.. it's pretty hot and humid over there.

As expensive as California is, the weather here is pretty nice.

No hurricanes, tornados, blizzards, or monsoons.

You just have to survive the occasional earthquake once every few decades.

Cali weather definitely sounds like paradise.

The truth is from September to May the weather is pretty nice. The nights get chilly and into the 60s, the highs are hardly ever above 90, and from November to March we get actual seasons and winter, without it getting so cold you want to die.

It's a tradeoff. Plus if you don't merely adopt the humidity but are born into it, it really doesn't bother you much. Well, not sure how people live in Houston, but they do.

> If it's not near me it's going to be a complete economic failure!

> Who really wants to take a Hyperloop from Houston to Dallas?

Presumably people living there, about 12 million of them.

> And even if you can, then you need to rent a car just to get around, or spend several hundred dollars on Uber/Lyft.

Are you joking or describing LA?

> And even if you can, then you need to rent a car just to get around, or spend several hundred dollars on Uber/Lyft.

> Are you joking or describing LA?

Los Angeles and Orange County is spread out over about 60 miles.

Perhaps the average distance between 2 interesting neighborhoods, is about 20 miles, give or take. So you live in one neighborhood, but you have activities in another area.

The cost of taking Uber for 20 miles, is about $30. So the roundtrip will cost $60. Add a few of these trips together, and you'll quickly hit a few hundred dollars. At that point, you might as well just rent a car.

Profits are revenues minus costs. The costs of building a Hyperloop through Silicon Valley, the most expensive land in the United States, with probably tens of thousands of regulatory hurdles, is a lot lower than building through the middle of Texas or the middle of the desert.

That UK routes feature at all on this list makes me feel it's not that grounded in "likely to happen in the near-medium term"

The UK has an existing High speed rail project, HS2(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Speed_2) which isn't as ambitious as what's proposed here, but is slated to cost £56 billion and isn't going to even reach Birmingham from London till 2026.

And instead of a track we've got an evacuated tube. I'm not saying that it it's not technically feasible, I'd just like to see the finance numbers. Surely London-Edinburgh would be well north of £100 billion. That's a _frightening_ amount. I suppose it's possible that hyperloop might replace future maglev systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev#Operational_systems ?

The I-25 corridor is ideal- 20 miles to the east of it is basically BFE so it should be relatively simple to acquire right of way compared to, say California or the Northeast corridor. Also easier to deal with one state gov't instead of multiple.

Of course. Both Hyperloop and Boom are feasible both economically and physically. Not to mention Theranos and uBeam. LOL. OK, I cheated: at least physics is not against Boom. It just fits in this arch.

"Toronto <-> Montreal" would be very interesting. It could help close some of the cultural gap between Québec and Ontario.

Edit: Why the downvotes? Canada is a big place. Being able to move quickly between the two metropolitan areas would be great for both provinces. The nearest city from Montréal is the city of Québec (3h drive) and the next closest is Toronto (5h drive).

Can you imagine if that route was built? Montreal real estate is affordable and Toronto is not. But, if you could travel to Toronto in 30 minutes from Montreal... that might change :)

https://www.livingin-canada.com/house-prices-canada.html

To have an effect on housing prices, the hyperloop would have to move way more people than any numbers I've heard thrown around ("800 passengers per hour", "28 passengers every 30 seconds").

Montreal already has 1.7 million people, a couple thousand highly-paid commuters wouldn't make a dent.

Also I imagine if they built the thing that supply/demand would make it so expensive as to eliminate any savings from cheaper housing. The numbers that have been suggested wouldn't make Hyperloop a replacement for commuter trains, although it could be much better and cheaper than flying.

I assume this takes into consideration costs, because otherwise, I don't see how NYC-DC isn't number 1.

Yeah, NYC/DC would involve either really complicated/expensive on-land right-of-way acquisitions, or development of new underwater tunneling technology to put the tunnels off shore. Plus it's a corridor that's already served by lots of other existing transportation modes: extensive road network, rail, three airports on each end with direct flights from any one on either end to any one on the other, etc. I'm not surprised that there are other options with a higher value proposition.

"infrastructure, technology, regulatory environment and transportation concerns"

I assume the BosWash Acela corridor isn't on there because any potential route would require digging through numerous suburban neighborhoods, each of which has individual property owners that need to be eminent-domained and compensated.

Pretty telling how they left California off the list. The California High Speed Rail project is a testament to the pork, inefficiencies, poor planning, and NIMBYism involved in major infrastructure projects in this state.

It's also a testament to strong property rights.

Can you elaborate on this? I think I have something to learn from you here.

Sure. There's not much to say beyond "It is very expensive to do Eminent Domain takings in the US, especially in areas where market values for property are high."

The US is not a place where the state actually owns all the property, nor a place where the state has an indefeasible right of first refusal to purchase all property for a nominal sum.

What makes California distinct in this regard?

Could just be high property values.

Yeah, it was interesting that SF <-> LA wasn't on the list, given that that was Musk's original example for the Hyperloop concept.

India is on the list. That tells you a lot about the selection criteria: governmental efficiency is simply not a criteria. Nor is passenger wealth a criteria.

My guess is that these routes are chosen based on population of the end points, distance, and geography. California loses based on geography: too many massive mountain ranges you would need to tunnel through.

Can anyone think of a good reason that something involving the Benelux and either Paris or Berlin isn't considered?

These cities are already connected through high-speed rail, so the added value would be lower I guess.

Who's commute is reflected in those destinations? Did they give this thing any thought?

I think there are better perspectives to look at it from than "replacing local commuter rail".

1. What commutes will it suddenly make practical?

2. What air traffic will it replace?

If it replaces COS->DEN then that's 3 hours of a lot of peoples lives back when they travel.

Being able to effectively commute from Columbus to Chicago would open up a lot of job opportunities for myself and many others.

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