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The thing about ultra-high-speed is this: your benefits (travel time) grow linearly with speed, but your problems (energy, capacity, curve radii, etc.) grow quadratically.

Actually, it's worse than it sounds. Travel time has a big impact on demand--but only within a small-ish window, about 2-4 hours. Outside of that window, demand does not respond that much to changes in travel time. That means that higher speeds are ultimately about trying to bring more destinations within the acceptable travel time window, but you also have to give up destinations within that window because the stop time penalties are too high.

Switzerland has the issue that it's just too small. With conventional 300-350km/h max-speed HSR, going from the eastern to the western edge of the country could be done in about 2 hours (recall that average speed is going to be less than max speed, particularly when stops are included), which is around the point where going faster means getting no practical benefit for people. It could serve international routes, but then Switzerland is bearing the costs without reaping the benefits, which the citizenry tends not to favor very highly.

Even the HSR that operates in Switzerland, the TGV, doesn't get up to speed until it is well within France. Switzerland tracks aren't straight enough for HSR, and it would cost a lot to straighten them out.

There also isn't a lot of demand for Geneva to Zurich in an hour.

I think the demand would come after it gets built. Even bigger would be demand for Bern/Zurich and Basel/Zurich in 30min, bringing these cities comfortably into commute distance. People do that today but only if they really must.

There is an aspect of Swiss economy that makes HSR attractive: high degree of decentralization.

Those cities already feel close enough together. More to the point, I don’t think Switzerland probably wants the kind of growth that HSR would enable and encourage.

No they really aren't close enough together. For example, I know someone who moved from Zurich to Olten so that their girlfriend's commute to Bern would be reasonable. Now you have 2 people with 50 minute commutes instead of 1 person with 1h45 and another person with 15min. If there was a 30min connection from Bern to Zurich it would be perfectly reasonable to live in one and commute to the other.

Again, does Switzerland really want to become one big mega city? It is up for the Swiss to decide, but a huge commute draw between Bern and Zurich (or even Bern and Lausanne) would lead to something more like Japan.

Maybe that’s just me but I don’t think of Japan as a bad model in how to have a dense population that is prosperous. If anything their biggest problem currently is depopulation of remote areas.

The question is about density and whether that's something to pursue even if it's prosperous.

It's an incongruous question. Hyperloops between Basel, Bern and Zurich would make them into one virtual Mini-City. The loops would also reduce density in the travel corridors preventing a California catastrophe kind of sprawl inbetween.

On the mountains that the hyperloop would traverse? ok dudes

Basel<>Bern (direct) would need tunnels.. The other 2 routes are pretty flat. Most of the Swiss economy is in the valley between the Jura range and the Alps.

The necessary tunnels for Basel would probably cost less than this:

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

But Bern<>Zurich is the SBB's bottleneck.

There is an eaisier question. Is it better to have more ambulances or faster ambulances. Faster wins every time.

Analogy is a terrible argument. But I kinda think faster transportation beats more transportation every single time.

What do you mean? More ambulances would mean you could be nearer to the patients (imagine an ambulance on every street corner) so the net journey time would be less. You can also administer care from the ambulance (e.g. narcan, cpr, stopping bleeding etc.) which can save lives. A huge number of ambulance journeys aren't time critical either (e.g. a broken leg) but not having an ambulance means getting a taxi or other transport which exacerbates problems.

Probably better to have more ambulances overall, and maybe a few ultra fast ones (e.g. helicopters) for time critical situations.

I think they're trying to talk about latency versus throughout. Latency matters more than throughput for an ambulance if you assume that only a small portion of the population will have a heart attack or needs emergency medical attention at any given time.

It is obvious to me that you're correct though. Overall, the throughput matters. There are only so many people you can pack into a single F train and it won't help much if the train could go 60 mph all the way if the only scheduled trains arrived every two hours.

Regular US railroads generally are 1:100 slopes (0.6°) or less. Grades steeper than 2.2:100 (1.2°) are rare. Clearly there is a way to efficiently connect population centers which is not steep.

I think the issue is vertical curvature rather than slope. Traversing a slope at speed is just going to get you a constant vertical component which you will not feel, and not terribly fast, <20kph, about half as fast as a fast elevator. Changing slope is going to get you a vertical acceleration which could fill your tiny capsule with more vomit than one would like. The question is then, can you blend the slopes to keep that under control? Going maximum up grade to maximum down grade at full speed will be something like a 40kph velocity change, at 1G that takes 1.1 seconds, during which time you will drive 360 meters. So, blending over 360 meters gives you full weightless vomit motion or a 2x weight. The blend from full up to full down will probably need to be over a kilometer to keep things clean¹.

␄

¹ The internet is not being forthcoming about real world elevator accelerations. It is too polluted by imaginary physics problems. So I unilaterally decided 1/3g would be ok.

Why would it be above ground? In Switzerland tunnels are a very common thing and Swissmetro was also planned to be underground. The Gotthard Base Tunnel is a almost level line through a thick mountain.

cost

I don't think Switzerland is going to use this system above ground. It most certainly will be deployed underground - long train tunnels are very common in Switzerland.

There was a project called Swissmetro [0] in 2005 which had a very similar concept to Hyperloop.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swissmetro

I don't think the Swiss are going to use it in their own country.

To me the article sounds like: we think it has potential and are going to see if we can make money out of it.

Edit: it can also be very interesting to see if it is cheaper and more confortable than 'low speed' trains. Maybe in the future we use the hyperloops at 80km/h.

Everyone is talking about transporting humans with Hyperloop, but it doesn't make sense to me.

With internet, I cant think of a case where there is a need to be urgently, physically, transported from A to B anymore. Maybe weekend leisure trip would be more enjoyable with less travel time.

What I can imagine is an Amazon Hyperloop delivering goods and products faster from delivery center to consumers across countries. No problem about human sickness if there is no human transported. Also, maybe fresh foods like vegetables and fishes would benefit from a faster travel time.

EDIT : also, maybe it sounds silly but... what about transporting gold bars very fast?

What’s the point of transporting gold bars very quickly when we have plenty of financial instruments that can reliably represent gold bars that can be transmitted digitally?

I wonder if people would just get used to that sensation if it meant cutting their commute in half.

Or they wouldn't get those jobs.

That sensation is caused by vertical acceleration, ie. curvature, not by vertical speed. Controlling curvature is something that needs to be done anyway in the horizontal, I don't see why the vertical component would be harder to control for.

Because the land has vertical variations that you would have to work with, probably involving a lot of filling, bridging, and tunneling. The horizontal is just about planning the route. (Which of course has some restrictions as well, but not to the same extent.)

I was under the impression that a hyperloop would run mostly on pylons anyway, so just by varying their lengths it is possible to smooth the altitude however you want.

Agreed that pylons would let you filter out small changes, but in a place like Switzerland the land varies in height by a lot more than the average pylon.

> (which is public knowledge) that at high speeds even smallest elevation drops would make the passengers feel the free-fall sensation

I'm happy to hear that legally, physics is still public knowledge.