Elon Musk's D.C. To Baltimore Tunnel Sounds Worse Than Pointless
jalopnik.com
jalopnik.com
Sure the initial demo where a slightly modified Tesla traveled through the tunnel is not practical, why does that matter?
The challenge is digging tunnels quickly and efficiently, even if hyper-loop tech does not come to fruition, efficient tunnel digging can be used with traditional high-speed rail tech. Compare the state of underground transit in the US vs. other countries, there is clearly substantial room for improvement here.
How much money would they save by doing it on/under cheaper land, with fewer lawsuits, easier access to the TBM should there be problems like 'Bertha' had in Seattle, etc.?
Shouldn't the "initial demo" be part of the "technical progress prior to the start of implementation" mentioned in the article?
Good for it, but in the mean time a car tunnel would still have worse throughput than public transportation (less than two train's worth per day), rely on unproven technology (both for tunneling and moving the cars in a human-friendly way), and almost certainly not be financially viable (without massive subsidies).
Yes we need better public transportation, but there are well-established methods for effecting this. We just need to invest in them instead of Musk's poorly-conceived flamethrower company.
This is from the original Hyperloop paper:
> When the California “high speed” rail was approved, I was quite disappointed, as I know many others were too. How could it be that the home of Silicon Valley and JPL – doing incredible things like indexing all the world’s knowledge and putting rovers on Mars – would build a bullet train that is both one of the most expensive per mile and one of the slowest in the world?
We can do better.
Three I can think of are 1) the original hyperloop proposal, 2) the mini-sub to rescue the people stuck in the Thai cave, and 3) car-based mini-tunnels as an better alternative form of transport.
All of those objections, as far as I can tell, are correct.
I would like this clarification because there are a large number of other goals which experts said would be impossible to achieve in the timeframe given.
Consider that in 2014 he said that self-driving cars would be safer than humans in about two years.
Now, at that point there were self-driving cars and in some circumstances they were already safer than humans. More so if you include automated trams on special tracks. Remember, the first nearly hands-free trip across the US was in 1995.
However, at least some experts doubted it would happen in that time frame, and we still don't have such technology. We especially don't have it at the level that we can sleep while the car is driving, which in 2017 he implied we would have by 2019. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/elon-musk-self-dr...
Is that a "complete failure"? No. But were the experts who said it was not achievable in anywhere near the time frame given correct? Yes.
As another example, in 2018 SpaceX said that there would be a crewed flight around the Moon. Didn't happen, and as I recall there were experts who doubted it - though they of course know from history that such flights are possible.
If in 5 years there is a crewed flight around the Moon, does that make that prediction correct?
1) Does "many" equal "the large majority"? That is, 100 people can be "many", but if there are 100,000 with the opposite view then it doesn't make sense.
2) Do you place the same weight on market 'experts' as you do on engineering 'experts'? That is, if a transport engineer says it's not possible to build a hyperloop on the original because of a half-dozen well-understood engineering issues, and a market expert says that a given product is not going to be commercially successful, then are they equally (dis)trusted?
Because the three examples I gave were in the "not possible because of known engineering problems", while the successes you listed were more marketing and commercialization.
Going back to 1), I'm not a car person so I don't know the history. It's not hard to find car experts from 2009 who tried out a Tesla and were enthusiastic about it. For example, from https://www.thecarconnection.com/news/1021105_driven-2009-te...
> I was fully prepared to write something negative about the 2009 Tesla Roadster simply because it is the poster child for "environmental change" and "all things wrong with Detroit." Then I drove it.
> I suppose it's OK to be wrong when you admit it...
> If this is the future of cars, enthusiasts have nothing to worry about.
So I assume the experts you refer to are "car people before 2008 with knowledge based on gasoline engines and a few earlier electric cars, who had strong doubts that a small company would be able to produce a mass-produced electric car."
That seems to me to be substantially different than a transport engineer who points out that the raw numbers - load time, capacity, speed - simply do not justify the cost for a small tunnel given that there are well-known alternatives which can provide much better service for the same cost, and there are no proposals for how the small tunnel can come close to matching those alternatives.