It’s a cool idea and I do want to see more prototypes and feasibility studies, but people need to get off the hype train (no pun intended) and be realistic about the cost.
Do we think the Hyperloop costs are more or less than that? 1/8 of a theoretical $100b is $12.5b -- is $12.5billion for Hyperloop unreasonable? I have no opinion on cost personally, and I don't know economics, but this $151 billion from D.C. to Boston was floated by the established US player in rail infrastructure. Anything less than that number is fantastic, right?
Just because I felt like doing some more Google-fu, I found an article in the LA Times[0] that says a California HSR/bullet-train project is going to overshoot it's original budget (and deadline) of $68 billion. There's a lot of info out there about this project, and it's potential overruns, but let's forget all that and just stick to the original planned cost: $68 billion, so, about half of the cost of Amtrak's northeastern bullet. Let's use that number for our comparison.
If we are going to hold Elon to his "we can do it for 1/8th the cost" blurb, then we are giving him like $8.5 billion to use for his SF/LA Hyperloop. Still, that doesn't sound unreasonable, right? He'll get a good deal on tunnel boring with his other company, and fuselage manufacturing can be handled by SpaceX. When it comes to financing, I don't think it's a major issue compared to other infrastructure works out there.
Like I said, though, I'm just going off the top of my head. I don't know finance or economics or vacuums or magnets.
There's a new LIRR train being dug in NYC called East Side Access. This is a commuter rail line, and is going to cost ~$10 billion or so[1]. Logistically these aren't the same, obviously, but if adding to the LIRR is worth ~$10b then surely the Hyperloop experiment is as well, right?
EDIT: Also, just for disclosure, I don't live in California and I'd probably never end up using the Hyperloop myself so I'm neither for nor against it versus any HSR. I just want to entertain the idea that cost shouldn't be the main focus of discussion IMO.
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0. http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-bullet-train-c... 1. http://web.mta.info/capital/esa_alt.html
I think boring company claimed it can bring down costs to 100 million dollars per mile (how? Just reduce tunnel size! SMH. Plus 100 million dollar a mile isn't too far from prices of current tunnels). Sf to la is 380 miles. That's 38 billion dollars just for the tunnel?
I think hyperloop is certainly feasible, if you spend hundreds of billions in it, the problems can be dealt with costly engineering.
If you think hsr will cost 150 billion, a maglev will be costlier, tunnels are extremely costly to build, but building a maglev in a vacuum tunnel will cost only 6 billion? How will cost savings of an order of magnitude happen?
You're starting with the wrong number. The $151B number is Amtrak's estimated cost for it's "shoot for the stars" plan. Its basic NEC stretch plan is effectively 4-track corridor (shared with commuter rail) from DC to Boston, with new stations and new inner city track being laid in Philly and Baltimore, two new Hudson River tubes and a new station annex in NYC, among other less notable improvements. I don't recall if the "abandon current Connecticut track and instead go from NYC along Long Island and tunnel under the sound" plan is in that tier or the next one. The stretch tier is somewhere in the region of $70B.
The reach for the stars tier is "do all that, and then build a parallel 2-track dedicated HSR track from DC to Boston." That's $150B. Which means building dedicated track from DC to Boston is only $80B. The estimated full buildout for CAHSR (including San Diego and Sacremento) is around $80B, as I recall.
I'd argue it's absolutely possible to improve the cost on American public transit infrastructure by one to two orders of magnitude if you can simply get a way around government capture.
My guess would be that the cost of land in the north-east, combined with AFAIK pretty strong ownership rights, makes it that expensive.
The cost of the Gotthard Base Tunnel comes out to around $300-400 million / km. By comparison, the Second Avenue Subway comes out to around $800-1000 million / km (I'm subtracting a bit because the subway has three stops--which tend to be really expensive money pits--and the base tunnel does not).
Again, why not put HSR tracks in the same place you'd put a Hyperloop track? Put the station in the same place. The tubes aren't smaller or lighter.
> The total length of the project, from 96th Street and 2nd Avenue to 125th Street and Lexington, is about 2.7 km. At $2.2 billion per km, this sets a new world record for subway construction costs, breaking that of the first phase of the same line, which only cost $1.7 billion per km.
The article I linked to smacks his arrogance down over costs that he's overlooking, but even that may be addressable. Let's see what he delivers in the next 5 years.
Yeah, and that proposal was for something with much lower throughput, that didn't have stops along the way, and didn't even reach the same areas (they saved money by stopping outside both cities, which the rail line wouldn't do). It also assumed that the tubes could just be placed along the highway meridians (a lot of the money it was supposed to save was from this).
Reminds me of when an actual AI expert pointed out that by making dire predictions about smart AI, that we are nowhere near having, keeps eyes off the autopilot system and the issues with that.
I don't think above ground is economically and technically feasible, there are just too many unanswered issue that almost no one has answer to. Not to mention it will be very very expensive and time consuming.
Cost references: https://tunneltalk.com/TunnelTECH-Apr2015-Arup-large-diamete...
https://www.compassinternational.net/railroad-engineering-co...
I grew up in the 70s and saw production electric vehicles that are not on this list. People have been chuckling for a long time and for good reason. It's not that electric vehicles won't eventually be successful -- they must. It's that the time from, "Hey, an electric vehicle would be a good idea" to "Hey, we've figured out all the engineering challenges to make this viable" is longer than the lifetime of most of the companies that entered the fray.
Look at the list of vehicles from before 1990. That's the "getting to the market first" list. All gone. Then look at the list from 1990 to 2010. How many of those will be major players in the electric vehicle market? My point is that I'm relatively old for someone on HN and there have been production electric vehicles since well before I was born. They only started to be viable in the last few years -- and even then, we probably need a few more breakthroughs in battery technology before the market settles out.
Long distance, super fast trains in tunnels? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen I saw the tunnel the other day. I was surprised that practically the whole damn length of the maglev tracks will be in a tunnel, but it makes total sense. That's been under construction for 10 years. They are optimistically expecting to make a profit in 2026 when "costs stabilise".
Will long distance, high speed trains in low pressure tunnels be successful? I have no doubt. Will Hyperloop One be successful? Umm... frozen balls of ice remaining intact in a very hot place probably have a better chance, but I won't say they will definitely fail. If they can secure something like a trillion dollars and invest it wisely over the next 30-40 years, then their chances will improve significantly.
Consider he did this with rockets, getting them to under 1/10th the cost
Comparisons with non-domestic rockets are complicated by state subsidies and differentials in labor costs. But the Falcon 9 is approaching the 10X mark even before reusability has been priced in. Both the Falcon Heavy (in a few months) and the (eventual) reusable pricing should overshoot the 10X mark substantially.
[1] I went to rocketbuilder.com and both LEO configurations I tried were around $8,000/kg (and I didn't count the 20% deduction for "ULA added value" since the numbers there are debatable)
The GAO cites $164M/launch as the price for the cheapest Delta V[3] (is there some kind of threshold at $165M?), which when the Falcon 9 was introduced could put 8,500kg to LEO[4], or $19,294/kg. (It has since been uprated and gotten slightly cheaper).
Must've screwed up my calculations earlier, because those aren't tallying. Anyhow, as you can see, SpaceX is already around 7x cheaper compared to where ULA was, and should cross the 10x threshold shortly. Nice to see ULA responding to competitive pressure, however!
1: https://web.archive.org/web/20160324172526/http://www.ulalau...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_V
IMHO he'll be well over 1/10 the cost before he finishes the thousands of land deals he would need for this, even if he somehow got permission to build it over the highway.
Hence the boring company.
Tunneling gets cheaper due to <...>? I would be interested.
I guess the Swiss would be interested too.
Salient points:
"If you just do two things you can get to approximately an order of magnitude improvement, and then go beyond that. The first thing to do is cut the tunnel diameter by 2 times or more. A single road tunnel has to be 26 to 28 feet in diameter to allow for crashes and emergency vehicles and sufficient ventilation for combustion engine cars.
But if you shrunk it to 12 feet, what we're attempting, which is plenty for a skate to get through, you drop the diameter by a factor of two and the cross-sectional area by a factor of 4. The tunnel costs scales with the cross-sectional area. That's roughly half an order of magnitude improvement right there.
Then, tunneling machines tunnel half time and then stop and the rest of the time is reinforcements for the tunnel walls. If you design the machine to do continuous tunneling and reinforcing, that will give you a factor of two improvement. Combine that, and it's a factor of 8. Also these machines are far from being at their power or thermal limit. I think you can get a factor of two, maybe even four or five on top of that.
There’s a fairly straightforward series of steps to get somewhere in excess of an order of magnitude improvement in cost per mile. Our target actually is that we have pet snail named Gary from....Sponge Bob Square Pants. Gary is capable of going 14 times faster than a tunnel boring machine. We want to beat Gary."