L.A. Company Wins China Hyperloop Deal
wsj.com
wsj.com
It's a little concerning that this isn't really a sale - it's a joint venture. From the article:
"HyperloopTT will form a joint venture with the Tongren authorities, according to the Guizhou provincial government, though the company’s announcement didn’t say whether it would be expected to transfer technology."
Has to be taken with a bit of caution as we've seen how this worked out in high speed rail:
"China's early high-speed trains were imported or built under technology transfer agreements with foreign train-makers including Alstom, Siemens, Bombardier and Kawasaki Heavy Industries. Since the initial technological support, Chinese engineers have re-designed internal train components and built indigenous trains manufactured by the state-owned CRRC Corporation." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China]
You'll find that China now is battling for dominance in the global high speed rail market and the formerly leading European providers (Seimens, Altrom) and in trouble and may have to merge just to survive.
"European rivals unite as CRRC threatens to corner train market " [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-27/alstom-si...]
[https://www.credit-suisse.com/corporate/en/articles/news-and...]
And how is that working out for California? Rail is by far the single most expensive form of transportation on a per-passenger basis.
While I presume you're taking a dig at the high speed rail project, it's worth remembering that that's not the whole of what "train service" means. It's also worth remembering that as of yet we don't really have a baseline for how the cost of longer-run train service compares to hyperloop service; as fun as it is to blame HSR's travails solely on being a government project, the reality is that there are very, very few private projects that are conducted on such a massive scale that we can point to and say "look, that was so much more efficient." Last but not least, there are good arguments against using "cost per passenger mile" as the be-all-end-all metric for transit, which you can find pretty easily if you're so inclined.
Isn't that kinda a given at this point when dealing with the Chinese state?
the train or the tunnel?
Backpackers should visit this place, it’s like yangshuo/Lijiang before they became saturated.
I see these claims every now and then and never have seen a decent justification. Would be great to have that to have a more informed debate ...
Some good points, but I also think that the train system is overhyped here (comparing a single hyperloop v1.0 with a single terminal with a whole train station isn't as useful as it could be.) [Aside: Also, knowing the knots Palo Alto and other cites tie themselves in to deal with the high speed lane up to San Francisco, I'm not sure that HSR there will ever be successful, no matter how much $$$ and time is spent. Drives me nuts]
I also don't know how to compare highway costs - dunno what it would cost to increase one lane between SF and LA, plus adding a lane doesn't increase capacity linearly AFAIK.
Realistically speaking, it's a lot more cost-effective to bring the slowest sections up to good enough speeds for medium-high speed rail. Each 10MPH increase in max speeds lead to diminishing returns.
Hyperloop does not compete with highways.
To get a better comparison, how many people fly from SF to LA every hour? That's the use case.
1 flight per hour sounds about right as a ball park estimate. A hyper loop beats that in capacity, and would likely be FASTER (due to not having to go through airport security).
That's how most Chinese infrastructure projects start. I saw Ningbo in 1992. I look at it today and, yeah, can you say different?
I thought Three Gorges would be impossible, even for the Chinese. A few key innovations later and there it is. (Subtle innovations which, in my defense, a reasonable engineer would never have seen coming.)
If there's one thing they're good at over there, it's building infrastructure. I'll give them that.
Building a dam isn’t that hard? Definitely not impossible if you are willing to displace a few million citizens. But tunneling under granite for 30+ km? Yes, possible, but it won’t be cheap. I don’t think the Chinese would do that, it will definitely be a vacuum enclosed viaduct to match what they did with HSR.
???
Three Gorges is a mile and a half long almost. (maybe a tad longer.) Almost what? 6 or 7 hundreed feet tall. Ship locks and ship lifts too! For what? 10 thousand tons or so would be my guess? Not to mention entirely new ports to accommodate new heavy shipping inland. New walls and other flood control measures. And all of it designed to concert in such a manner that they never exceed the design specs of the dam.
Displacing citizens is the LEAST of the problems that project faced.
Building ANY dam is definitely not to be characterized as "not that hard". Building Three Gorges falls on the "near impossible even with backing of wealthy nation state" end of the scale.
But I don’t see how it was extra amazing vs. the grand coullee or hoover dams built almost a century ago.
Count the number of locks and lifts integrated with them.
Count the number of deep water ports built to concert with them.
Then you'll START to get an idea of how non-trivial Three Gorges was. It's not just a dam, though a dam even the size of Hoover or Grand Coulee would be non-trivial in themselves for us to do today. (A dam the size of Three Gorges? Not even close to being easy.) Throw in concerting projects, and to call it "not that difficult" is, frankly, laughable.
Shame.
I know it feels that way, but it's not strictly true. Here in Seattle in the last decade we've built a new floating bridge, multiple miles of underground light rail track, and nearly two miles of deep bore road tunnel.
I think there is a real problem that our new infrastructure is way too expensive and takes way too long to build, but we've demonstrated that we can definitely build new stuff.
They could've used that to link up Seattle, Tacoma, Redmond, Kent, Bainbridge Island, Vashon Island, and the entire Seattle area.
And to keep costs of building the infrastructure down, then they should consider outsourcing it, and hiring Chinese labor. (Apparently, the Chinese are very good at building railroads.) That way, you keep development costs down, and afterwards, the local citizens can enjoy first-world infrastructure, at low rates.
But, when infrastructure projects become billion dollar estimates, then that just kills any opportunity of it ever being developed. Simply, because it now becomes a major high-paying jobs program.
Edit: clarified what "it" is.
Edit: Ah, your stealth edit indicates you thought I was talking about Hyperloop! I wasn't. I edited the top to indicate that.
Oh, its in an expensive pointless vacuum tube? Is that the "new/cool" part?
See: BART
What this resulted in was - a wider track gauge than any other used in the US - bespoke rolling stock with different braking, control, coupling systems - untested ATO that had several early failures
The first two have had lasting impacts; servicing BART equipment is very difficult because no one else has ever made traincars like that, and it makes it difficult to extend BART over existing rail tracks. The expensive of all this "cool" factor is at least a factor of two over standard rail projects, which is why eBART was built as a normal diesel rail line instead of as a BART extension.
Other examples of "cool" transit technologies that ended up aging poorly because of their rarity are monorails and maglevs. With economies of scale it's hard to beat trains, and trains already go to 220+ MPH; there are very few markets where you would need to go significantly faster via land, and where doing so would be a big advantage over air travel, as Hyperloop is proposing.
China has 16,000 miles of high-speed rail. We have essentially zero. It makes more sense to build this in China.
They already have high-speed and low-speed maglev trains.
Not unless you nix the tube and just build a reliable high speed rail system.
So, given this, why would any new American company, choose to enter into a 51/49 partnership with China? Where China has the majority share, and where the American company must share with their Chinese partner, all the system processes, techniques, and new technology of their product.
This is just adding fuel to the fire, and the resentment that Americans have of the Chinese people.
Here, the American company is willingly entering into such a business agreement. The Chinese side is not holding a gun to the American company's head.
For the Chinese side, they are investing a lot of money into this research project, to fund this hare-brained idea. So, there is a lot of risk on their part, that nothing will emerge from this.
The alternative, is that the American company can just choose not to do it. Don't accept the money. Go it alone. Don't enter the Chinese market. The rest of the world is a huge playground as it is.
It is their company. They presumably care about making money. And if someone offers them lots of money, why wouldn't they accept it?
Whenever I hit a paywall from an HN link, I immediately go to the comments to see if somebody has linked to the full article. Thought I'd help folks out since nobody had done that for this article yet, but if I'm out of line I won't do it again.
That would explain it though.
In this case: http://archive.is/5n84J
The monorail at Disneyland works great and so does the one in Seattle.
They don't need to be surrounded by a vacuum tube, which is the impractical and expensive part.