Virgin Hyperloop Has Invented the World's Crappiest High-Speed Rail | Hacker News Reader

Virgin Hyperloop Has Invented the World's Crappiest High-Speed Rail

defector.com

84 pointsOsiris30117 comments

The problem with hyperloop is that is does not solve the main problem of bullet trains: infrastructure costs. Nobody complains about the TGV/Shinkansen/ICE being slow.

Building a new train line cost millions of €/$ per km/mi because you need to expropriate properties, build tunnels and bridges, fine tune the tracks (any small distortion in the tracks will cause significant annoyance for the travelers). Hyperloop will have all these issues, but worse, as the speed is higher, and as the hyperloop trains will not be able to run on existing tracks.

It's actually more like billions of $ per mile. How anyone looks at a figure like '1 billion per single mile of tunnel' and thinks it's feasible to run utopian pie in the sky experiments like hyperloop across hundreds of miles is beyond me.

HS2, under construction in the UK, is 155 miles long, with a total budget of £55bn but currently expected to cost well over £80bn - some estimates have it as north of £100bn. $1bn per mile is in the same ballpark.

In the UK everything costs twice as much as originally estimated and takes twice as much time. I hope I will live to experience the 330km/h (operating speed of UK's HS2)

German here. ICE sucks majorly.

ICE is engineered way over the limitations of the underlying technology. They break down easily and are constantly late.

I'd take a hyperloop over an ICE any time.

We had good tech, that that didn't get held back by the physical constraints of rail travel: Transrapid

A maglev train developed in the 70s which operated flawlessly for 40 years.

Sadly there was no political willpower for it's realisation due to a very strong car lobby.

I see the hyperloop as a modern spin on the Transrapid, and I'd pour all of our subsidies for Deutsche Bahn into it in a heartbeat.

TGV runs very well, except for the weekly labor dispute that's completely orthogonal to the fact that it's not running in a vacuum.

How you people believe the risk of explosive decompression will solve whatever problems a minority of high speed train systems have is beyond me.

1 bar is acutally not that bad.

Hyoerloop pods are smaller, so less lives are at risk.

And most importantly of all. It's not gonna be explosive, unless you rip the thing open with a bomb and you're right next to it.

Even if you rip the tube in half, the air is going to take some time to fill it up. A few miles from the hole there will be a much more harmless pressure gradient already.

Sure it might shake your capsule, but you're not gonna get shredded.

Pressure wave moves at speed of sound. Lightweigh capsule gets destroyed just by derailing at 500mph. Any bad event will put down ALL trains on track. And rescuing people trapped in 100 miles long steel pipe...

Hyperloop is a nightmare!

See my above reply. Speed of sound doesn't mean much if there is a constantly softening gradient.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagen%E2%80%93Poiseuille_equ...

Edit: To give a good analogy: Electricity also travels at the speed of light through a cable, however due to resistance you will get different current reading depending on where you measure.

>And most importantly of all. It's not gonna be explosive, unless you rip the thing open with a bomb and you're right next to it.

And that's precisely what makes it unworkable with regards to safety. Burying the tubes is an option but by that point you would be looking at rail instead.

Ok so somebody attacks it, with explosives. And manages to time them well enough that they go off right next to a cart, or inside one.

They will get 1 passenger car. Which is what? 8 People?

The tube will slowly fill with air, everybody else evacuates safely at a slower speed.

I'm willing to bet on those odds. Compared to the number of car accidents, it'a a no brainer.

> 1 bar is acutally not that bad.

That does not mean anything.

The weight of a 1 cm² column of air is 1 kg. So 1 ton for 1 m². Let's say a square profile hyperloop tunnel 1 m high decompressing will be the equivalent of dropping one tonne for each meter. The shock will propagate at the speed of sound.

You neglect the friction that even laminar flow would experience while flowing into the tube.

If you make small fins at the top of the tube you can even exagerate the effect and introduce turbulence, which further reduces flow rate.

There is a reason why pipelines need pumping stations every couple miles, to keep the fluid at speed.

Sure the wave might propagate at the speed of sound but that doesn't matter much if its pressure gradient is slow enough.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagen–Poiseuille_equation#Po...

Edit: To give a good analogy: Electricity also travels at the speed of light through a cable, however due to resistance you will get different current reading depending on where you measure.

Edit2: I reread your argument, and there is also a flaw in your energy calculation. The energy per time is not proportional to the length of the tunnel, but proportional to the size of the inlet.

Your calculation would be if you remove the entire top of the tunnel at once, over it's entire length.

Turbulence in a near vacuum? I'm more than rusty on my statistical mechanics, but what you describe will only matter long after most of the potential energy has done its damage.

Don't look at the wavefront of the first 100m, the pod there is gone anyways in case of a bomb.

Turbulence on the phase of what comes after the near vacuum.

The plug essentially plugs itself from resticted airflow.

If you want to be extra safe you could even add small tesla valve style fins around the border of the tube, to increase turbulence.

What about what's right outside the damn pipe? Or do you plan on laying said pipes only in the desert?

That's a problem of the ICE not HSR as a whole. I never had issues with the TGV or shinkansen.

DB is a joke in general. Any time I travel through Germany there's been constant delays.

I too have bad experience traveling Basel - Cologne route with DB. At this point, I switched to flying or renting a car. The thought of traveling with DB gives me shudders.

I'd take a hyperloop over an ICE any time.

Since a “hyperloop” doesn’t exist and you have no basis for understanding what the tradeoffs are, this is not very convincing.

The point remains - high-speed rail is a known and deliverable system. Good implementations exist in several countries. In contrast, a new technology comes with associated engineering and economic challenges, and it’s unclear how those can solve the existing problems that high-sped rail deals with.

Ok let me rephrase, and actually make my point stronger.

I'd take a shot at fully funding hyperloop with all the ressources that our current HSR system has, over keeping our ICEs any day.

If it was up to me we'd fund Transrapid. It's also build on pylons, does 500kmh, and is proven tech that has been running for 40 years. So we get the best of both.

But I don't see a future for Transrapid, because it's not cool enough for political backing.

Hyperloop is, so I'm doing a strategic vote here.

Do TGV and Shinkansen have the problems you say ICE has?

Do they run in a literal vacuum?

The Transrapid was simply way too expensive. The planned route between Hamburg and Berlin, which is not even 300km, was shelved because the estimated costs exploded. The DB (German Railway) gets 2.5 billion EUR funding per year for its train network, which is 38.500km, so it's really not that much. The Transrapid wouldn't even have been significantly faster, since there were three stops planned between Hamburg and Berlin. And both the Transrapid and the ICE were/are built by Siemens, so there's not reason to think they would have been more reliable.

To add to that, one of the major problems was that due to the political power structure (state vs federal government etc.), a no-stop trip on the direct route wasn’t viable political. So the DB basically opted for refurbishing the existing track, because that did not need political approval on any level - the track existed and no new permits were required.

All of this would be issues that hyperloop would have to face as well. None of these are in any way related to the underlying technology.

In addition, there’s extremely few routes in germany where 300km/h vs. 500km/h top speed makes a significant difference. The latest generation of ICE trains trades a lower top speed for faster acceleration. We’re a small country with comparatively short distances between population centers.

Transrapid tech has no moving parts apart from switches and trains.

It's a lot easier to get that reliable.

Given that one of the major problems with the ICE is that often times the air conditioning doesn't work, I seriously doubt that. The real problem here is that you're dealing with a monopoly. Siemens simply has no reason to care, so they don't. It doesn't matter if they build an ICE or a Transrapid, it's not like the DB could switch suppliers. The problem in Germany is not to travel between major cities. The real issue is if you have to reach a city which is not big enough to be connected to the ICE network, since missing your connection often times means waiting for an hour.

> It's also build on pylons

High-speed rail can also be built on pylons.[1]

The hyperloop white paper argued that being able to build on pylons would be an advantage of hyperloop over conventional rail:

> The key advantages of a tube vs. a railway track are that it can be built above the ground on pylons and it can be built in prefabricated sections that are dropped in place and joined with an orbital seam welder. By building it on pylons, you can almost entirely avoid the need to buy land by following alongside the mostly very straight California Interstate 5 highway, with only minor deviations when the highway makes a sharp turn.

The author seemed completely unaware that conventional rail can also use pylons, and can (and does) use prefabricated elements.

The whole white paper seemed terribly uninformed about the realities of high-speed rail.

1. http://img2.chinadaily.com.cn/images/201801/02/5a4b62cea3100...

> I'd pour all of our subsidies for Deutsche Bahn into it in a heartbeat.

congratulations, you just got a few high-speed links between half a dozen cities at the cost of rail infrastructure for the rest of the country (a large part of the subsidies goes into boring regional services). The answer to "our rail infrastructure should be better maintained" is not "dump all the money in shiny unproven high-tech".

Instead of hyperloop, why not Japan SCMagLev? That things is actually getting build for commercial operation right now.

German here. ICE rocks. Until like 2 years ago, I used to travel long distance nearly every week, often all the way across germany.

The problem is not the ICE or high speed rail connectivity, the problems arise at the edges, when you need to switch over and travel the last few miles. For example, I used to travel from Berlin to Hamburg for on-site work. The leg from Berlin to Hamburg was faster than the connection from Hamburg Main to the client site.

Certainly, there’s delays, but I’ve done the same trip by car and it constantly took longer than by train, I had very few trips where I didn’t end up caught in a traffic jam somewhere on the autobahn. There’s a bit of a perception problem: nobody notices if you’re late by five minutes if traveling by car because no one has such an exact expectation for car travel.

Delays in train travel also have a problem that is exacerbated by the timetables of the DB: In an attempt to make travel times seem shorter, there’s often insufficient buffer at places where you need to change, so that a few minutes of delay will result in an hour of layover. Combine that with lack of maintenance on the rails and you get unfavorable results.

None of the problems would be solved by hyper loop or any other technology. It’s a result of misaligned incentives.

Still, with all the things wrong in planning, maintenance and political incentives around it, high speed rail still is the best way to travel medium and long distance.

You neglect the timing advantages gained from smaller independent crafts.

Hyperloop has the ability to essentially do driverless packet routing.

You can't do that with high speed rail.

For safety concerns, you'd probably have to divide the route into air-locked sections with a pod per block. This gives you about one packet every 25 miles or so – and rather slow packet routing (more like RFC 1149 – https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149 )

At 1200km/h thats one every 2 minutes per 40km (25miles).

So you get 30 pods per hour.

With 28 passengers each.

Which is 840 passengers per hour.

Compared with the different ICE 4 models, even the Largest ICE transports less passengers per hour.

499 (K1n) 724 (K3s, 10-car) 830 (K3, 12-car)

Sure, you might say that those are only the planned stats for the hyperloop. But even halfed it's still competitive due to speed alone.

Furthermore ICE trains are half empty most of the time, even when it's packed. Why? Because DB insists on having 18th century style 1st and 2nd class tickets. And most people can't afford that.

However hyperloop has no such distinction, because all the pods can be made to "first class standards" due to the direct point A to point B routing nature. Alternstively, the richt people have to wait until their pod is at capacty, which I'd be delighted to see.

So in reality ICE capacity is probably half of what hyperloop could provide.

Edit: I'm using the assumption of 1 ICE per hour, because that's how the entire german train system is sheduled. And we're comparing Hyperloop to the current system.

Seriously, taking per train numbers as hourly limits? And why would hyperloop magically be cheaper?

Even if it was the same price, it's better in every other metric.

It's cheaper because you can prefab parts that are otherwise not prefabbable due to the high weight of trains, and that require less maintenance due to not being exposed to the elements.

The entire german train system is build on crushed stone. With mechanically tensioned electrical lines that are in constant abrasive contact with the train. The main cost here is not the crushed stone, but the workforce required to set everything up.

Having the thing run as a highline with integrated contactless propulsion made from robotically mass produced segments, would be a lot cheaper, and a lot easier to maintain.

In theory you could even build the tune in a factory and just push it out, with each pylon containing a small pusher system. That way you can just produce it at the station and only need a groundgrew for the pylons and for alignment.

If you cover it with PV it'll even be energy net positive.

The price we save on CO2 and climate change alone would be worth it.

50% of ICE electrcity is still coal and will be for the coming decades. (Datteln 4)

Now there could be 10 ICEs passing a given track an hour, with various endpoints…

Yeah there could but that's not how ICE are sheduled most of the time. But there could also be 4 tubes stacked, or your security distance reduced.

Your whole capacity argument is based in the "acceptable amount of lives lost".

If you're ok with the same amount of lives lost in a catastrophic hyperloop accident, as with a catastrophic ICE accident and assuming that everyone perishes in case of a hyperloop accident (unrealistic but let's go with it), then that would be 101 lives. Which gives us 3.6 times as much capacity for the hyperloop, or 3030 passengers per hour per tube.

Say you stack 4 tubes, that's 12120 passengers per hour between two points compared to 8400 passengers for your ICE case.

And that still completely ignores the multi rout load balancing, last mile convenience, small village connection and no waiting time advantages gained from packet routing.

How would any of this be impossible on rail? None of that depends on “pods need to move in a tube”. And if it’s such a major benefit, why hasn’t any of this been done on light rail? There’s no driverless light rail anywhere in germany - and the question you need to answer is “why is that?” You’ll quickly figure out that some of the reasons are technical and some are political, but “must be in a tube and maglev” is not one of them.

Hyperloop appeals to us technical folks because it’s cool. But it suffers from many of the same problems that occur when technical folks propose solution, we tend to propose technical solutions to non-technical problems. And we usually fail because we ignore the non-technical side.

The Shinkansen is an existence proof that high speed rail can be fast, comfortable, and always on time (and while by no means cheap, affordable for many). I often wonder what Japan did uniquely that makes this possible.

But building trains that run in a vacuum doesn't appear to be a necessary attribute of running a successful high speed rail service.

The was a CCC talk about why the Deutsche Bahn has so many delays: [1].

It turns out that East Germany has great on-time performance, probably because all the infrastructure is new. But overall, Germany has to invest more in upkeep of its existing infrastructure.

1. https://youtu.be/AGCmPLWZKd8

I think the point is that if your country can’t make it work, perhaps you should look at how the French and the Japanese do it and copy them.

According to the original hyperloop paper (https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/hyperl...) it is meant to be able to help with infrastructure costs. The main difference is that it is all much lighter than conventional rail. This means that you can build it on pylons over the ground, and continuously extrude carbon fibre to build the tunnel. In theory both land costs and construction costs should be much lower.

That was the original paper though, I don't know how much of that is considered realistic now.

This!

Pylons for the win!

The Shinkansen is built on pylons in many places especially where it goes over low-lying farmland and through cities, so I'm not sure this is a good reason.

But the bulk of the infrastructure cost difference of the original hyperloop paper vs. the CAHSR project it was offered against wasn't due to use of pylons, it was due to the fact that the proposed hyperloop didn't serve communities between the termini at all, and didn't come anywhere near the urban centers at either terminus.

This, of course, also made it useless for literally any purpose.

This article is rather uncharitable. While maglevs have been in operation for a long time, I believe this is the one of the few examples of an inductrack. Iirc The technology hasn't really made it out as much because it has only recently come off patent.

A key advantage of inductrack is that it requires relatively little energy to achieve it's levitation, but the technology is still very new in the engineering sense, so you really wouldn't expect it to go fast. I'm frankly impressed that they were able to get a decently fast human trial up an running so quickly.

This is completely not the point.

The point is: You're not getting working public transport by inventing new technology. You get it by having the political willpower to fund it. If you don't have the latter then no amount of technology will save you.

Also related: It's an obvious case of Bionic Duckweed (see https://medium.com/@stianstian/bionic-duckweed-using-the-fut... )

Exactly. But you also seem to miss it. Politicians have no will to fund old technology (and lets face it, high speed rail is PREindustrial tech).

However they will fund new shiny technology that they think will make them look good and future oriented towards the general public.

Don't underestimate the advertisement value inherent to "new stuff". Politicians play mind games, we just have to play them better.

> high speed rail is PREindustrial tech

No, that's canal barges.

Trains are what helped spark the industrial revolution, thus by definition they are preindustrial.

Arguably, trains came out of the industrial revolution and amplified it. (The early phase ran on canals.)

The real question, however, is: will Hyperloop meet canal barges in terms of mass moved per distance at a given interval of time (and this for an equal share of investments / at comparable costs)?

Edit: Assuming you'd have to divide the track into air-locked sections for safety concerns, with just a single pod in a section at a given time, which drastically limits capacity.

"Train" is decidedly not before the industrial revolution but rather is part of it.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution

> The Industrial Revolution .. the period from about 1760 to sometime between 1820 and 1840.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_locomotive

> Richard Trevithick built the first steam locomotive in 1802.

Further, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rail_transport :

> William Murdoch produced a working model of a self-propelled steam carriage in [1784].

The definition of "train" meaning "locomotive and the cars coupled to it" dates to 1816 or 1820 - https://www.etymonline.com/word/train .

Trains require (at least) steam engines. If there's something that marks the start of the industrial revolution, it's (practical, not toy) steam engines.

We have a new highspeed rail line between Berlin and Munich. It's old tech. It was old tech when the decision to build it was made.

(Not that I'm happy with the highspeed rail network in Germany. It could and should be much better. It could completely replace short distance flights. But it's quite obviously lightyears ahead of the situation in the US.)

Yeah but you have to remember the population density of the us.

It's main population centers are west and east coast, with nothing but farmland in between.

For them any system needs to be a lot cheaper per mile.

Also the only reason why we get some ICE tracks, is because of the 1% and politicians that want to have a convenient way to commute to and from work.

Everything that is not a major business hub just get's left out.

And remember when we tried to get a proper Transrapid track? It was the only thing Sheuble ever did right, and he got ridiculed for it.

> Politicians have no will to fund old technology

Then get a nice Ralph McQuarrie or Syd Mead style artwork to sell it. It's not about the thing itself, but how it's perceived.

The problem is that people excited by stuff like this, aren't excited by public transport.

The idea of sitting on a train with the regular public is horrifying to them.

They are excited by expensive fancy private transport for themselves. How the public transport themselves around, or their wider welfare, is not a concern.

It totally is a concern for them. Too much road congestion, and the fancy private transportation is less enjoyable.

I honestly had the feeling that Munich, home to an unnamed automaker, was treating public transit pretty much like that. Too much congestion? Let's improve public transit! Congestion just right? Stop investing in public transit.

I feel the incentives for the government are super wrong. Every car brings taxes and parking fees. The latter often goes directly into the municipality's pocket. No wonder public transit is as it is.

I'm sympathetic to that viewpoint, but also there is the example of the Great Northern Railway, so it's not impossible to get working public transport without significant public investment.

Dude. As a European who used to take high speed rail regularly before Corona when I saw this video I felt exactly like the author of this article.

France has had high speed rail for over 40 years that is better than this. Do Americans just simply not understand what mass transit is? The goal is to move lots of people quickly between destinations where people want to go.

Three things;

-lots of people

-quickly

-desired destinations

This demo literally hit none of those marks. Give it a rest.

Also this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDOI0cq6GZM

Neither did the first demo of a conventional train. It was a horse drawn cart on rails that could hold 5 or 6.

It really shows what the Hyperloop really is: something to divert interest and money away from working mass transit options.

As long as it gets private funding and does not blow away a crazy amount on research and testing, i do not see an issue. All modes should be researched.

I do not personally see any public entity funding hyperloop for at least a decade. The only ones who are interested now is the UAE govt because they have a perfect test case and $ to back it along with ambition to be a player.

The SNCF, the main French railway company owned by the French state, did invest a bit in Hyperloop.

What do you expect is going to happen, though? Do you think they will magically discover that hyperloop runs even faster than high speed railway and is somehow more safe? More cost effective?

Like, I totally get experimenting, but this is one of those things that you can see is not even worth experimenting on.

Given the idea was championed by a major manufacturer of cars, who has a vested interest in mass transit failing, you might be right.

I wouldn’t take this article too literally. The whole Thing is full of exaggerated emotive rhetoric. It’s really more an opinion piece despite the site tagging it as “science”.

There are no working mass transit options. At least not from the perspective of day-to-day travels in areas that are not extremely densely populated. Hyperloop just shifts the problems around, IMO.

All kinds of trains face the same problem. Their target and destination has to be fixed in advance. Thus their cost raises linearly with every new station served. A workable subway net (say, Berlin) has so many stations that you are often quicker by bike, you often wait 10min for a connecting train, and even then the distance between two stations is often barely walkable for a lot of passengers. Oh, and the trains often run close to Max capacity.

Buses are much better, as they can use roads flexibly. They suffer from high operating wage costs (one driver per dozens of passengers) and very small stations, though.

Compare this to individual traffic, especially (electric) bikes: You can go point-to-point, at any time you want, at your personal speed. The only matter is that bikes need to get safer (ABS, lighting) and cities should invest into weather proof roads (coarse asphalt, managed lanes, lighting, if possible roofs). If you combine that with trains that only have to stop every 5-10km you are pretty close to a perfect mode of operations for even the largest mega city, I think. In less densely populated areas, battery-electric vehicles could substitute trains quite nicely.

edit: To the downvoters. I know it sucks when someone challenges your deeply ingrained ideology. But I do live in a city with exactly the problems I mentioned and no amount of political willpower will ever change physics.

What does "working" mean? And what does "extremely densely populated" mean?

Basel's mass transit system was a lovely fit for my needs as a tourist, for example. (Berlin's big city system confused me and I wasn't there long enough to learn it.)

> you are often quicker by bike .. barely walkable for a lot of passengers

That's two opposite complaints. At least, I assume that those people who can barely walk the distance are also those that can't bike the distance. So, do you want more stations (for those who can't walk) or fewer (making it better for those who bike)?

> you often wait 10min for a connecting train

Umm, 10 minute average wait is a sign of a good mass transit system. That's short enough that most people simply show up and wait, rather than having to make specific plans.

How often do you want it to be?

'Course, I grew up in Miami. Quoting https://www.masstransitmag.com/bus/news/21157358/fl-tired-of... :

> maddening delays and 30-60-minute waits on a network that meanders to all nooks of the sprawling county at snail-like speeds. ... Of the county's 100 routes, only five are scheduled for maximum frequency; passengers can count on buses arriving every 15 minutes or less at all hours every day.

You mentioned a few of the negatives about buses. Another is that they can carry fewer people. If the train is at max capacity, how many buses do you think will be needed to replace it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BVG_Class_HK says the capacity of one of the U-Bahn trains is 296 seated; 1,624 standing and https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/DB-Baureihe_481 for the S-Bahn has seating for 94 standing for 200 (for a 481-482)a and the minimum for a train is twice that (as a 481-482-482-481 configuration). So call that 500 people. But note that that's the minimum length train configuration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_transport_in_Berlin says the biggest buses - double-deckers - carry 110 people. So you'll need at least 5x the number of buses as you currently have trains, and more likely 8x or more.

Another issue with buses is that unless you have dedicated lanes, they end up getting stuck in traffic.

that's your little conspiracy theory. it really is nothing more or less than the new pet project of a billionaire in a world that is approaching technological saturation - so coming up with new meaningful ideas becomes harder and harder which invites "entrepreneurs" to come up with fancy stupid inventions.

I already bought the popcorn and just waiting for the next Thunderfoot video...

This and the "Solar Freakin' Roadways" are the absolute pinnacles of human stupidity and ignorance...

...and let all my wishes be granted so fast: https://youtu.be/VrbstnzbhZA

I'm surprised the vibration shown in the video was not addressed at all. I thought maglev trains, without friction, would ride smoothly even when accelerating.

https://youtu.be/4dn6ZVpJLxs

I like this video too. This guy seems to be an urban planner or civil engineer, and he gives some realistic criticism if you can get past the jokes (which are also good)

Just for the record, Italy is not a "backward-ass doofus country".

They have a claim to it:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-20025626

An American ignorantly complaining about American ignorance. I found the tone of the article rather unpleasant to read.

Yeah the tone of the whole article was really off-putting.

Seems they are trying too hard to convey a 'no-bullshit' style of writing but completely overshoot and distract from whatever point they actually wanted to get across.

Resident here. Yes, it is, and that's what brought me here, and that's why I stay. Sadly, some of that quality has being eroded over time, but the further south you go the more there is. Sadly, current economics keep me northern-bound.

And neither is Spain, nor France, nor any other European country with a substantial high speed rail network. These networks are the product of decades of cross-party strategic investment in rail to combat the need for short-haul domestic air travel or a proliferation of tarmac across empty countryside to link population centres. The very fact that the US has failed to invest in rail in any meaningful way since the westward expansion suggests that it's not the european countries that are backward-ass or doofus. What's the experession - 'Those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones'?

Correct me if I am wrong but I don't think any high speed train can go as fast as Hyperloop is aiming for. If you want high speed trains why not complain to your politicians?

If your problem is wasting money there are probably thousands of projects and companies right now whose only purpose is to waste money. At least Hyperloop has something to show for all that money it "wasted".

> working just fine even in backward-ass doofus countries like freaking Italy

Nice. I don't know why useless rants like this gets upvoted here.

I think that was meant ironically but I agree it was a little strong. as for the speed question - the point is it may go faster in theory at some point whereas the TGV does go really fast now and is (in my limited experience) excellent value for money and a much better way to travel than flying

What has any of the "Hyperloop" projects to show for their investments, other than very expensive pod trains?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/nov/09/first-pas...

Working prototype? True, it is expensive but they are also aiming for much higher speed than any train.

Part of the problem is an american political practice where once someone's "team" (party) wins, then instead of the voters saying "good, now it's time to exercise our power and make them do our bidding" they instead do exactly the opposite and say "good now we can go to sleep and not pay attention".

Combine that with the cheerleading and party loyalty and the idea that pushing the people you voted for to exercise their power is somehow a form of faithless heresy (where you don't "trust" them or you're "against" them) and we get this.

It'd be like working hard to get a pile of money. Someone then places all the cash on a table for you to take and you sigh "finally!" and turn around and exit, leaving it all behind on the table.

"Empower and walk away" is the american way and until that changes good luck trying to get HSR or anything that benefits the well-being of society.

Hyperloop is just another of Elon Musk's dumb "what if" ideas he dreamed up while stuck in gridlock on the 405.

"Wouldn't it be great if we had a magic underground tube that whisked you to your destination without traffic?"

"You mean like a subway?"

"No, no! For rich people, with private pods designed to look like an Apple store."

Note how Musk is not putting any of his money in that shit. That should tell you something.

Musk owns The Boring Company, which is currently building a public transit tunnel in Las Vegas.

... which is not a hyperloop.

A 5 minute Wikipedia search will show you that's not true

Humor me. Show me that 5 min search.

It's ok the Hyperloop Wikipedia page. SpaceX has funded competitions, and SpaceX is majority Musk

Hyperloop solves two problems that challenge the adoption of high speed rail.

1. Infrequent departure times. There are about 100 flights from New York to LA a day. Plenty of departure time options. Are there going to be 100 departure choices with a train? No, it would probably be 15 at most. In Canada, we have relatively fast rail between Toronto and Montreal, two of our major cities. Even with similar travel times all in, they struggle to get people on the trains because of the lack of departure times. There are about 50 departure time options by air.

If you can have 30 people a pod, then you can have tons of departure options or even could be flexible about them.

2. 367 miles per hour is slow for a country the size of the USA. That is 7 hours point to point from New York to LA. Probably 11 hours with stops and not being able to go that speed along the whole way.

Sure, the faster the better, but as long as there is a couchette option 11h doesn't sound half bad.

Beijing-Shanghai trains run three to four times an hour in each direction. Is that not often enough for intercity connections?

Hyperloop solves those problems like I solve those problem with my fleet of magical unicorns.

The difference is no one believes me.

By some accounts/promises the hyperloop should be operating now or in few years.

By the looks of the demo it will be at least decade before they will build anything serious.

But, I can deploy my unicorns in matter of days just need few hundred millions to R&D magical stables to keep them under control. Its future tech invest in me. /s

And the dudes at Google who made a quantum computer invented the world's crappiest computer.

You could realistically see how a quantum computer can be improved. Hyperloop has no realistic end goal.

So when this is done you'll get 20-30 people in a pod, but it will be faster than other railways? Why are they optimising for latency over bandwidth? What actually is the point of this? Just so that a few very rich people can live very far from work?

While there are many good critiques of Hyperloop, comparing its speed on half-kilometer test track to established technologies is not one. The article is joyfully bashing a strawman it has built on its own.

Amazed by the negativity of this article and comments. We haven't invented a new form of transport since the Second World War, don't you think we're overdue? And to Americans who think that getting high speed trains is just a matter of government willpower, might be worth remembering that railways were originally private ventures which only stopped being profitable once they could no longer compete with the newer technologies of cars+highways and air travel.

Highway infrastructure in the US is largely publicly funded. It's no surprise that a mode of transport which doesn't pay for its infrastructure and externalities (long-distance road transport) is more competitive than a mode that does (long-distance rail).

Air travel is a better natural competitor than highways. Ultimately highways are already sunk costs which can be seamlessly upgraded to work with new tech (ie more efficient, and soon electric, cars). Air travel is heavily taxed rather than subsidised, and yet it's still preferable to road travel over long distances, for the simple reason that it's faster.

We haven't invented a new form of transport since the Second World War, don't you think we're overdue?

No. There is no schedule for the delivery of new forms of transport that we can be overdue on; they emerge when technology and economics make them possible.

A new transport technology can emerge if it can demonstrate that it is better in some way relative to existing technologies. It would be great if Hyperloop can do something like that, and R&D should be encouraged. But it’s not at all clear how it could effectively be better than existing solutions.

'overdue' is obviously a rhetorical device in this context. Otherwise I agree. I find however that bashing people trying new things and pushing the envelope very distasteful, especially from Americans whose culture historically supported ventures that would have been mocked in Europe, and especially from people on a website built for technologists and entrepreneurs!

The big private rail empires of old in the us became so because of subsidies in the form of land and cheap access to loans.

The privately built new York subway system was actually built on a complicated contact system with the city, which today would be called a build-design-operate-maintain Public private partnership.

The privately built high speed rail lines in the world... wait a minute, those don’t really exist. Even in Japan the public was involved with the construction of hsr...

...just like the public is involved in the construction of any transport infrastructure.

> We haven't invented a new form of transport since the Second World War

It depends on what you mean why "new." Trains existed before WWII, but high-speed trains only began to be deployed in the 1960s, with the Japanese Shinkansen. Modern high-speed trains are more than twice as fast as the fastest WWII-era trains.

* The American Morning Hiawatha ran at a top speed of 160 km/h in 1939.

* The Japanese Shinkansen ran at a top speed of 210 km/h in 1961.

* The French TGV reached 300 km/h in 1995.

* The Chinese Fuxing trains have been running commercial service at up to 350 km/h since 2018.

"Backward-ass Doofus Country"

Kind of right but also kind of not. The tone of the article is trying too hard to sound edgy and it ruins the underlying message it is trying to convey.

It's a symptom of modern supply-side economics. It's all about job creation. The people who are working on this project are the only ones getting anything out of it. It's CaaS 'Career as a Service'.

The people who work for this company are probably a bunch of kids whose rich daddies wanted them to experience what it feels like to succeed in their careers and so daddy kept injecting millions of dollars into their projects. But their career is about as real as a roller-coaster ride in a Disney theme park.

I've worked for many different companies over the past decade and I've seen this everywhere, over and over.

Nowadays, when I look for a job, the only question I ask myself is: "Do these founders have rich daddies?". I only work for companies whose founders have rich daddies because they're the only ones which can 'succeed'. It doesn't matter what the project is or whether it adds any value anymore.

It doesn't matter how much value I can produce in any other capacity because other people's daddies have access to the money printer and no one can compete with the money printer.

This is by far the most vile comment I have read on HN. I hope it’s just a case of Poe’s law otherwise you should seek professional help.

You're right I'm probably mentally ill by now. I was perfectly healthy 5 years ago though.

I assure you, it's a lot more traumatic to actually experience the effects that I've just described over and over during 5 years than to read a single comment about it on HN. Whatever emotions my comment brings up can only help you. Creating something useful for society is very difficult and almost nobody is doing it these days.

Realizing this fact is a healthy, positive step forward even though it's going to hurt a lot people's feelings.

I kinda agree with your point about CaaS, but the notes about "rich-daddy" types are just mean for no reason. They have no merit in reality.

Not familiar with the technical details, how are they gonna handle stopping a hyperloop at 1200km per hour?

Regardless of the content I really don't appreciate articles written with an explicit effort to shit on other people's work.

Flagged.

By hoarding all the capital for their toy project, they're depriving other more worthy projects of that capital.

This misallocation of capital is WAY, WAY more harmful than "shitting on other people's work" using mere words. Feelings should not enter the discussion. I can assure you that capitalism never gave a shit about my feelings and I never complained about that aspect.

I've experienced the exact reverse of this: Glowing reviews of my work, but 0 funding. I still envy these people. Their situation is way better than mine.

The article is great. I wish more people would write such articles.

one of the things rail can do that an airliner increasingly cant do. is land downtown. maybe this hyperloop thing has a chance if its cheaper to build than rail.

not many places have that many 5m+ cities within 500km of each other like china.

Quick Question: Was that tube under vacuum or not?

I live in Calif. and have been watching the HSR debacle.

- You know, the Central Valley "ezpath" wouldn't be such a bad idea if it included a planned city with HSR to relieve SV congestion, rather than just being a "rail to nowhere."

- I like the idea of finishing the HSR terminals in SF and San Jose for long-term use

- I like the idea of blasting through any mountains on the route from SF to LA over time, for long-term use.

Somehow the state is fixated on a trillion dollars or bust right now, which just isn't going to happen.

And state politicians focus on HSR as a jobs program/scam, rather than a transportation project.

The corona lockdown is a great time to work on the San Jose terminal.

I'm not sure if I've ever found a worst piece on HN. There may be valid criticisms of Hyperloop tech, but they are not in this article. It's just low effort sarcasm and strange arguments based on a very silly strawman.

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