Hyperloop One to shut down
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
So, its purpose is done now and it can retire gracefully.
Or am I being too cynical?
"Musk reportedly told his biographer, Ashlee Vance, that the Hyperloop proposal was motivated by “his hatred for California’s proposed high-speed rail system,” which he felt would be too slow, outdated and expensive. “With any luck, the high-speed rail would be canceled,” Vance wrote."
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/elon-m...
See previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32892396
https://www.travelchinaguide.com/china-trains/high-speed/rai...
US is now cursed by their own success. Eisenhower jump started the highway to connect all of US as the largest transport infrastructure project. We have been riding the success of that for a massive economy. We are on the plateauing side of that S curve.
cursed because we spent a ton of money and got into debt with trillions spent for wars without much to show.
Now we don’t have to money, nor the will to invest in the next S curve infrastructure project.
Meanwhile China is pumping out infrastructure at speed of thought.
That 500K should be enough to build 1/4 of a bathroom: https://slate.com/business/2022/10/san-francisco-toilet-mill...
I different version of hype applies in a different way. With the systems destroying themselves through compounding "compromises" to get political allies. It's a Vox video, so high level but not a bad intro[0]. Tldr: easy to derail (pun intended) any political project, and the bigger the project the easier it is to derail.
"U.S. Debt: Visualizing the $31.4 Trillion Owed in 2023" - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/us-debt-31-4-trillion-ow...
And even before that a huge numbers of highway built made no fucking sense and were a negative for the economy. And state DoT are literally just highway building departments with a fetish for destroying cities.
You are not riding the plate of the S curve, continued investment in that nonsense is an active negative.
> Now we don’t have to money, nor the will to invest in the next S curve infrastructure project.
How about this. Stop spendign such an mind blowing amount of money on highways and other roads, and instead invested in financially smart things like walking, bike, buses and trains.
Also, boarding a train is so much more comfortable and convenient than boarding a plane (no security check, at least in Europe, wide seats, no emergency tutorial, ...). Also the train drops me right in the city center.
I would argue that up to 500 km of distance, high speed train is the best option, then it becomes debatable.
When the tracks don't exist (i.e. in the US) there are billions of dollars of carbon cost (moving earth, concrete, steel) to building new track.
planes are faster, have flexible routing, and cheaper upfront cost sure
the rest is simply not true. how do planes have "flexible capacity"? how do trains not have flexible capacity? wtf?
> how are trains not a proven technology???
The US currently has nothing that would be considered high speed rail by the rest of the world. It could be built here, but it would cost billions and take decades. Hofstadter's law strongly applies to major infrastructure projects in the US. "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law."
> how do planes have "flexible capacity"? how do trains not have flexible capacity?
Planes can be put in service or redistributed to serve a certain route in hours. Extra train engines and train cars cannot be moved nearly as easily.
Dense urban areas are obviously different, but most of the US was purpose-built for cars and roads.
Are they not?
The BART Police Department's reports for 2022 show the following numbers for Part 1 UCR Crimes: Homicide: 3 Rape: 4 Robbery: 156 Aggravated Assault: 81 Burglary (Structural): 17 Larceny & Auto Burglary: 783 Auto Theft: 136 Arson: 10 Property Crime Subtotal: 946 Total: 1,190
The reality is that cars are freedom and still superior from a continence and comfort standpoint. Americans are insanely privileged to have cheap, powerful cars.
For one thing, I think a lot of American suburbs could be way more bike friendly if people just had a safe path to ride in. We are talking a half a lane worth of pavement.
Another thing is that this isn’t all or nothing. Still owning and perhaps needing a car but reducing the number of trips per week is a win.
Look at pictures of European countries that used to use their central squares as parking lots. It can be done.
Change certainly won’t happen via defeatism.
Until we put shops very close to homes, end the huge big-box retailer’s death grip on everyone’s spending habits, and learn to live leaner, European style public transport will never work.
We put shopping centers far away from homes, and we put homes all over the effing place, making public transport effectively impossible to get right for even a small percentage of the population.
I agree with rest of the comment, but I feel that connection between walkability and population density is misunderstood. It's not "we need XXX people/sq. mile in US to have walkability", it's "allowing walkability and building corresponding infrastructure leads to increase in local density in places where people want to live".
Maybe the most offensive thing about public transport to an American is that it cannot really be profitable by itself. Infrastructure rarely is but it is still worth investing in for the downstream effect.
The difficult part was getting a sense of direction because there aren't really any obvious landmarks to look out for when wandering through wide-scale suburban sprawl. It's like the availability of GPS has just allowed this kind of sprawl to become even more labyrinthine because nobody needs to bother with street names or directions any more.
But it still might be worthwhile to find policies that at least help to steer things in the right direction without being failures themselves. Easier said than done, obviously.
The solution to this problem as has been shown by most other civilized countries on this planet is trains, yet in the land of rugged individualism and capitalism, it's somehow not viable.
https://vividmaps.com/railroads-in-america/
You say that every other method of travel is more expensive…but that doesn’t really pass the sniff test, does it?
The Big Dig in Boston adjusted for inflation cost more than New York City’s “world’s most expensive stretch of subway.” The California high speed rail project, also notoriously expensive, is in the same ballpark.
We just assume trains cost more money because we put the blindfolds on for highways. Voters salivate over highway expansions because they loathe being stuck in traffic, while the reality is that this style of building induces demand while more transit options make driving better.
I often think about how thousands of American businesses pay for short-hop commercial flights between destinations like New York and Pittsburgh where a proper high speed train could cover that distance in about 2 hours including stops. How much money are we paying employees to show up at the airport 90 minutes early and put their laptops away for takeoff and landing when they could spend the whole train ride productive?
I know my company will pay for a checked bag as a travel expense. How much money is wasted on putting bags in airplane holds? It must be billions!
Car ownership has huge personal costs (car purchase, operation, depreciation, maintenance), collective costs paid by taxes (maintenance of roads, etc), and societal costs that nobody really pays for (excess deaths from crashes, pollution, opportunity costs).
I’d like to know which method of travel besides cars costs an average of $5,000 per person per year on a personal spending basis before even starting to put tax money toward road maintenance. That number balloons to $10,000 if you buy cars new.
Which country’s train system kills 30,000 people annually? Which train system emits more pollution per passenger mile than a car?
If cars are the cheapest way to get around, explain why the poorest countries have the lowest car ownership. Shouldn’t they all be jumping on cars and highways if it’s so cost efficient? Maybe all those people getting on trains in Mumbai should head down to their local Tri-County Ford dealer!
India's getting close: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/lucknow/every-hour-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
https://northeastmaglev.com/2023/04/06/the-status-of-high-sp...
We can be cynical and say this project is falling behind but it’s embarrassing that the richest country in the world has no such infrastructure plan and no presently operating high speed train that exceeds 150 mph.
You’d think that some of the larger metro areas would be connected with such a service in the world’s wealthiest nation.
America’s largest metro area is in a concentrated urban area that is continuously developed from Massachusetts to Washington DC with no rural area in between. But the best you get there is a train service that sometimes reaches 150 mph and only saves a sliver of time compared to a conventional train.
The second most wealthy nation has more high speed rail miles than the rest of the world combined. You’d think that the wealthiest country would at least be in the top 10 list.
If it burned natural gas it probably wouldn’t even be that polluting and it would rock hard.
I suspect the actual technology within the tube was never Musk's initial concern. Similar to his other industrial endeavors, I think the calculus with Hyperloop had more to do with the economics of being able to manufacture pylons and tube segments offsite for quick assembly onsite, leveraging factory production and avoiding as much as possible site-specific costs such as land grading. And presumably he had in mind repurposing SpaceX technology for welding rocket bodies. Given a cost-effective way to build and put these tubes into place, and some ballpark figures on their characteristics--e.g. how much of a pressure difference they could reliably keep without inflating production costs--figuring out how to actually use them was just an engineering problem, which he then took a first crack at to satisfy himself the overall concept might be feasible.
So you have self driving cars, which will probably improve traffic flow, but it's fundamentally limited by geometry. If people takes more car trips, this will reverse some if not all the benefit of self driving cars.
Acela takes 3h44m from Boston to New York. Not much faster than the scheduled buses (4h15m) and comparable to driving the distance in your own car (3h55m if you stick to the speed limits)
I'd much rather take rail relative to the alternatives even if it takes longer and maybe costs more (especially leaving aside parking). And many others do as well even if it would be faster to drive.
And generally Manhattan is pretty walkable once you're there.
In my imagination these tunnels are, like, 200' down. Like mole people.
Tunnels probably only make sense in cities, not wide open rural spaces.
Things I can think of: it is slow, so you burn through a lot of wages. To compare with road building the only major road I can think of, built in my lifetime, was the M40. It is 90 miles long and took 4 years to build but I don’t know what the cost was. The channel tunnel is much smaller than a freeway — two train tunnels and an escape tunnel in between. It is 30 miles long, took 6 years to build, for £9bn at the time.
Tunnelling also must require a lot of energy. What it probably doesn’t lean heavily into, in terms of cost, is either compulsory purchasing of the majority of the route or the political consultation and planning process. Those were both a huge deal when building a motorway through the Oxfordshire countryside.
This doesn’t require a discussion to figure out. You just have to mentally walk through the process and do some back of the envelope math.
Designing a high capacity train station or highway exit in the middle of a city is quite expensive.
Its super common in Australia for railways to shut down due to warping of the rails from heat.
- no impact on environment, birds, bugs, animals, trees, etc...
- can use surface land for other things
- no weather exposure
It requires tons of concrete, which causes lots of CO2.
Also might require ground water control, which might impact lakes etc. nearby.
Tunnels often are still beneficial, but it's not like there is no impact.
Being intelligent yet humble isn't mutually exclusive, but I see a lot of elitism in that 'oh I have this concept which must be totally novel and I'm gonna implement it now' with engineering at large before we all start laughing at their inevitable failures from things they could have learned in the past. Crypto is cool, even cryptocurrency. 99.9% of people in the space though have no idea what they're doing with it. I still think it could be useful for voting and/or DNS for distributed consensus, the cryptocurrency aspect could be improved and already is a better backend imo than our batched out wire transfers with traditional banking (but it lags well behind credit cards or cash for point of sale transactions), and hell merkel trees are supremely useful already for supply chain or ex version control, but the hype and path of crypto currencies is an embarrassment in light of history.
Recent examples:
- mastodon and the fediverse in relation to the threads backlash
- cryptocurrency markets and the desire for regulation for when things go wrong (someone stole my coinz! My smart contract was exploited! My exchange was hacked! Fraud!)... Like it was speed running what the Netherlands+UK+us faced over 400 years in a period of 4 years
- any libertarian when they start to run their own government (sorry grandpa)
Which, in the US, typically have been heavily monopolized and poorly regulated and existing regulations poorly enforced. The history here is pretty extensive, actually, and often forgotten, because rail has significantly lost it's power.
So, we keep trying to make better roads, it frees up space for individual travel, it prioritizes commerce, and roads seem better fitted to a Democratic society than what rail ends up being here.
I thought of this idea when I was 14 and immediately dismissed it- long before this guy came along and claimed it was such a "great idea." Why did I dismiss it?
Terrorism. In the best case, all you'd need to do is punch a hole in the side of the tubes, and any train would hit a wall of air at supersonic speeds. In the worst case, it would derail catastrophically when it hit my hole if it were big enough.
It's a terrible idea for so many reasons.
I just invented trains again didnt I? Whatever you do, you always end up with trains
I'm... not convinced it scales well, cost-wise!
If I were to invest into something today it would be medium size (about a tall van size) autonomous containers that can drive at night within city limits and drop off small reusable containers at delivery points such as apartment buildings. Case in point: Luxer One is a fairly common setup in SF today, the next step would be to stop delivering individual packages and, instead, deliver daily boxes for the whole building.
> Small electric vehicles
why not just use pneumatics? It's a proven technology used in sufficiently large facilities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube#Contemporary_us...
Edit: Actually, I can't count. Only a few hundred thousand pounds. That's still probably a bunch of zeppelinworths though.
Design the Zeppelin for literal tons of ballast, trade out sandbags/dirtbags for product or waste on docking, andaybe add an aerodynamic shield if you don't care about speed as much
We already sacrifice significant speed for boats, but I grant they're several orders of magnitude better at balancing buoyancy with cargo given they flot in the water rather than atmosphere
I still haven't seen the math to prove ground effect aircraft are less efficient than cargo ships, but I suppose it's true or it would've been done already.
The German rail network is in shambles - but compared to how some American freight rail looks like, even that is more like Japan's excellent railways... I've seen far too many examples like [1] for my liking on youtube. This kind of shit would actually land you jail time here if you as a responsible person would let a train run there. Or this legit, on-camera derailment [2] - no way the train would be allowed to just continue to move on, it would get a full-blown investigation and those responsible for the dereliction probably a criminal trial for endangering rail traffic [3].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X2A2f6E5DI
I'm actually looking forward to future me being able to ride my motorcycle around a freight-train's worth of semi-automated cargo-haulers on interstates that are mostly devoid of vacationing families.
To my knowledge it has never serviced freight, only transit.
I aim to keep calling it the Bus tunnel—even though the transit authorities are keen on changing it—and I hope fellow Seattlites keep the name alive just for the pure quirkiness of the concept.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Seattle_Transit_Tunne...
Go through the Bus tunnel and Ride the SLUT.[1]
[1] South Lake Union Transit. I presume all the paraphernalia around 'ride the slut' is semi-official at best.
Less now that I've moved out of premiere on line, but still
The point wasn’t to work. The point was to kill/delay CAHSR.
Can't think of why a car company owner/CEO would want to do that...
The simplest reason seems to be that he expected it not to work, at least with current technology.
He successfully made investors waste hundreds of millions into these hyperloop startups, which are like real life parody of high-tech scam startups.
On the other hand, one must be quite illiterate scientifically to buy into Musks grand sci-fi projects. Should only work on 5 years old. But you don’t have to believe, you just have to pretend and take these easy millions from rich but dumb VCs.
You mean like the world's first reusable rocket, the only private company to sent astronauts to the ISS, the world's biggest rocket, or mass producing EVs?
Yeah, you're right, it's good he stuck to the easy stuff!
He also talks about a supersonic electrical passenger jet from time to time, but he says he don't have the time to do that either.
No, the tech is not fine. There are really serious, showstopper issues with it. Issues that were known way back in the early 1900s and there is still no feasible way to overcome them.
Look there are mag lev trains in Japan that run on superconductors. By all means you can put that tech in a tube and call it a hyperloop. Absolutely feasible.
That is why all of the companies doing it switched to maglev. And we know the issues with maglev.
A partial vacuum would be trivial to achieve and you could by all means use mag lev + partial vacuum in a tube.
The tech already works even without a partial vacuum. But a partial vacuum would be all the better.
Mag lev works: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCMaglev
Nothing in the idea of a hyperloop precludes the use of a maglev propulsion system. The partial vacuum wouldn't even be necessary but might help with efficiency. Partial vacuums are just air pumps.
If you don't have an atmosphere, the near vacuum conditions are free
You need robots to dig tunnels if you want sizeable bases. Figuring that out on earth just gives you a headstart.
What should transit look like on the moon? On Mars? Can you use those tunnels? What will be different with lower gravity?
This is the most charitable interpretation I can make, fwiw
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car#Early_development...
A bomb would be a serious threat, the shockwave from both the explosion and rapid decompression, but I believe it can be mitagated. Bombs are bad for pretty much everything anyways.
The other problem is if the walls don't break but the pipe crumples. But this is more likely to have a self-sealing effect, and with enough overbuilding, it shouldn't cause a chain reaction.
I don't believe in hyperloop, but I think catastrophic implosions are rather low in the list of reasons why it won't happen. It doesn't even make it at the top of safety related reasons.
I have yet to see a convincing simulation of how a would be hyperloop would behave of one were to poke a hole in it. And by convincing situations, I mean one with an appropriate model, that is a very long tube engineered to hold a vacuum.
An then you can downvote this post too, a good explanation is well worth a few karma points :)
I think the idea was wrong and wouldn't actually work. But the assertion that its simply exactly the same isn't the case.
That said, even if an idea is old, that doesn't mean a new take isn't warranted. They considered rocket re-usability in the 1960 and tried in the 1970. EV are 100+ years old.
Apparently not, I suppose is your point.
Of course, reversed stupidity is not intelligence, this isn't evidence that hyperloop is good, just a suggestion to choose a better source for your arguments.
In other words, the misconception is yours.
One example of many is the weird conversations he was having about sonic velocity robots and "lights out dreadnaught" sort of auto factories, which just about every other automaker has been trying on and off since the 80s, and has worked out that it doesn't work. So Tesla's modern lines, after quite a bit of fooling around with that sort of rubbish, look just like everyone else's lines, because as soon as you have humans in the loop for the things robots can't do well, you may as well run the line at human speeds.
SpaceX disrupted the space launch industry, which had not advanced at all since the 1970s. SpaceX really just picked up and ran with the idea of vertical landing reusable rockets, which was not new. Werner von Braun was exploring it for Saturn V back in the 60s, and Lockheed finally did it at prototype scale with the DC-X in the 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv9n9Casp1o (You can see at the end that the DC-X even does the same "hover slam" maneuver as Falcon 9 to land with maximum propellant efficiency.)
Tesla was similar. Auto manufacture itself isn't moribund, but old school auto makers always hated EVs and resisted doing anything serious with them. Tesla's rise was a classic exploitation of the innovators' dilemma by calling them on this and forcing their hand. Now that some are embracing EVs, Tesla is facing increasingly stiff competition but has at least carved out a brand.
Musk has not been particularly successful competing in less moribund industries. The Boring Company is kind of a flop. Neuralink seems questionable so far, to say the least. The Hyperloop, even if it worked, wouldn't be competitive at all with high speed rail on cost. It'd be faster and in theory more energy efficient but nowhere near enough to compensate for the added capital cost or complexity.
Now if Musk had created, say, a rail transport division of Tesla he could have absolutely disrupted rail transport which is another fairly sluggish moribund industry. Imagine modern unmanned trains (FSD on rails is WAY easier than on roads) with batteries to allow them to span un-powered sections of track and recharge on sections with third rail or overhead catenary wires. But that would have been a threat to the car market. Innovators' dilemma anyone?
My point is that Musk isn't superman... he just picked industries that were ripe for disruption and built teams that executed well enough to succeed.
Of his companies SpaceX is by far the most impressive in its own right. What Tesla did could have been done much much better by a "legacy" car maker if they'd been willing to disrupt their ICE business. Nissan actually beat Tesla to market with an affordable mass market electric (the Leaf) but didn't put as much heart into it. The result was okay but not nearly as cool as what Tesla did, especially in Tesla's glory days. (I own a Leaf and have no complaints, but it's not sexy.)
like with Tesla they're ahead of other companies in multiple ways, but still behind in some aspects as well.
And it's fine to not trust prevailing wisdom, but when you don't even bother trying to learn from them because "they're dumb dinosaur companies that don't even know code" (which has utterly nothing to do with reality), re-learning the same lessons yourself isn't some amazing foresight. It's simply a stupid waste of resources.
Any one of these would have cemented him as a premier industrialist.
In the end, there's legions of Internet commenters who complain about Elon Musk in between complaining about their bosses or complain about Google and Facebook or what have you. And then there's this guy doing things successfully.
The Silicon Valley attitude that I love is that when someone tells you "that's not going to work", you just go ahead and do it if you have conviction. After all, you're only sacrificing your own self.
Yes, we've ruined astronomy with a ton of LEO satellites, but we've got some internet in exchange (I'm rural, I have it, I'm quite honestly not impressed with what it delivers for how much I pay, and how inconsistent it is - on some days, it's quite good, on other days it's more or less dialup grade).
And we'll see how that lift capacity works. Everyone will continue insisting that Kessler Syndrome Won't Possibly Happen until about a year after it's happened, at which point, welp. It was fun while it lasted!
I've done computer security a bit too long, I think.
This is exactly why the stated goal of Tesla is to accelerate the advent of electric cars - in other words, make it happen a lot sooner than it otherwise would have.
I personally think making internet available to people who don't have it is far more important than people who do have home internet complaining about their view of the stars during their camping trip.
China and others have done far, far more to contribute to space junk than SpaceX has.
Who? And how did they mainstream EVs more than Tesla? Fisker was in the market early, but didn’t mainstream EVs. GM was in way early, but probably held the market back.
Making EV mainstream is about more then a big company throwing a few batteries into an existing car platform. It was about shifting perceptions, starting a public conversation and making people actual demand EVs. And making EV profitable.
> and the price drop in lithium was obvious to everyone who was paying attention at the time.
Ah that's why Tesla is such a small an insignificant company now, because everybody else knew everything. Brilliant logic.
> It would have happened one way or another.
That is literally what Musk has said for 20 years. Its gone happen anyway, Tesla is about making it happen faster. And his building of the Roaster, Model S were clearly huge steps. Building the Gigafactory Nevada was a huge signal, and lead to a huge amount of investment all threw the supply chains, and lots of companies thinking bigger. The biggest European battery maker is people who helped build Giga Nevada and then went and started a new battery company in Europe.
The Model 3 reaching profitability was a absolutely huge signal in the automotive industry. Tesla building it with 20%+ margin was a literal bomb in the industry. Until that point it was almost universally believed that high volume EV were just not gone be possible. After that pretty much all car companies accelerated their EV strategies.
> Yes, we've ruined astronomy
How this nonsense claim gets repeated over and over again is just beyond me. Anybody who still argues this is just willfully ignorant at this point.
> I'm quite honestly not impressed with what it delivers
And more then 2 million people disagree with you and that number is growing.
> Everyone will continue insisting that Kessler Syndrome
The inherent permission in your worldview is just sad and depressing. Everything bad must happen even when most experts agree it wont happen.
Tesla absolutely was and still is. They dominate the market.
> on other days it's more or less dialup grade
You’ve either got bad hardware or you’ve never used dialup. Even in congestion on the RV product (lower priority than residential) I’ve only seen down to 20mbps. That’s 400x dialup.
> I'm quite honestly not impressed with what it delivers for how much I pay
Please cancel! I could use the capacity when I’m out in the boondocks.
> Everyone will continue insisting that Kessler Syndrome Won't Possibly Happen until about a year after it's happened, at which point, welp. It was fun while it lasted!
LEO natural decay means a royal fuckup locks out <10 years.
If you have any actual meaningful analysis to add on why these constellations are Kessler risks, please notify the space force! Everyone involved seems to think it’s not a problem so you should probably correct them.
It's 2023. I'd like to buy a car, TV, phone, or computer that isn't, by default, "slurping as much behavioral data as it thinks it can possibly get away with, routed out whatever connection it can find, to be sold to others who want to influence my thinking." It's hard to find.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket#Pendulum_rocket_falla...
He didn’t intend to build it.
They also just announced the massive expansion to include the whole strip
https://interestingengineering.com/culture/vegas-loop-the-bo...
[1] “He admitted to his biographer that the reason the Hyperloop was announced—even though he had no intention of pursuing it—was to try to disrupt the California high-speed rail project” -- https://gizmodo.com/silicon-valleys-transportation-failures-...
Can we build it? Yes. The issue is mostly that we have so much process that delays building and scope creep for what does get built.
Obviously he has gotten some things right, which is a good thing. But Musk has an extraordinary track record of being wrong about a lot of things. That, by itself, is not a problem - you lose, you learn, you fix, you win. The problem is that Musk aggressively attacks public policy with his aggressive wrongness:
- Don't invest in surface public transit, we're so close to full self-driving cars and then traffic will be solved! - Don't invest in subway systems, we're gonna build better tunnels for self driving cars! - Don't invest in high speed rail, we could build a hyperloop for much lower cost and it would be 3x faster! - Don't dive in there to save those kids dying in the flooded tunnel, that's dangerous! Trust me, I'm gonna build a submarine that can get them out!
As far as I'm concerned, Musk can be wrong all he wants, but stop fucking with the world's decisions if you're gonna insist on being wrong all the time.
I mentioned it in the first place because him being right about something like this is peculiar, not because it's typical.
You do need a good business model and a solid technical foundation. Hyperloop needs a lot of technical work still. Arguably this was also true of SpaceX in the early days, but Elon (and the team he assembled) could execute before running out of runway.
I still think Hyperloop is worth working on, but it needs a lot of funding. The Boring Company will get to it eventually, because something like Hyperloop is required for the Mars colony.
It's a fun, futuristic idea, but just falls down when you start to think about the problems. Sure, they could be solved if we were willing to spend hundreds of times as much per kilometer as we do for high-speed rail (which is already really expensive), but that's not practical in the real world.
What does The Boring Company have to do with Hyperloop?
I am not an expert, but seems like building a Maglev track on Mars with its low-pressure atmosphere would be far easier than on Earth. Taking into consideration how far we are from the first manned flight to Mars, this sounds more like wishful thinking than a serious proposition.
That's because it wasn't intended to be a solution, it was intended to kill the high speed rail in California.
https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1571628269555826688?lan...
It's not "Musk" who's responsible for that.
Edit: link.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-11/new-cost...
You could make Highspeed rail FREE and I'm not sure I would take it. I might. Maybe.
As soon as it costs what gas costs to get to LA from SF ($100 round trip max, so usually $50-33 a person), there is NOOOO way I am ever taking it. Heck, I still need a way to get around once I get there.. so how would the train ever really work for anyone? Now I'm renting a car or taking Uber? Why wouldn't I just take my own car I like. And take more items without lugging them on a train. Without traveling to the train. Without paying parking at the station. Who is this train for?
With some 383 miles between San Francisco and Los Angeles that's $287 one-way or $575 round-trip. You'll need to add parking fees on top of that.
For some people it's totally worth it to bring their own car. That's also why some people drive over flying.
But there are also many people who would gladly take a free high-speed train service between those cities, just like there are many who currently fly.
For that matter, I've flown into San Francisco for work and not needed a personal vehicle at all.
And that includes overall age depreciation which I wouldn't count, because most people that consider taking high speed rail would have a car anyway that's already depreciating.
Heck, I saw a post last night about getting dropped off at LAX. It was taking hours to get close to the airport so they got out of their car and walked the last mile or two to the airport with their luggage. I just can't imagine the scale of what would need to change to accommodate cars.
If out of pocket cost and having your car are the two things you value, do you never plan on flying? The out of pocket cost is often comparable and even with security, it's faster. It's also nice to be able to not have to focus on the road for hours.
It was taking hours to get close to the airport so they got out of their car and walked the last mile or two to the airport with their luggage.
Even free can be more expensive than driving.
With 40,000kms of high speed rail [1] (by far the most in the world), China must then have very few electric vehicles.
In reality they are the world leader. [2]
[1] https://www.statista.com/topics/7534/high-speed-rail-in-chin...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-17/how-china...
https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews/news-wire/china-buil...
https://sfstandard.com/2023/10/27/san-francisco-downtown-rai...
Else, maybe if the new runway interferes with existing infrastructure and retrofits are needed, it could make sense too.
You comment reduced a complex issue to an elementary word problem in math.
Therefore, you're right. It will cost tens of billions once maintenance is included. As a comparison for how much benefit will be gained, presently 12000 people board transit at the 4th and King station every day.
I suppose it's my fault for having underestimated the total cost of this section of CA HSR. But perhaps you can link some of your analyses that include these various numbers for other projects and then we can put together one such analysis in these comments together.
It tells you enough: Europe, more specifically Germany, builds HSR for about 40 million euros a kilometer [1].
This project here is 8 billion dollars for about 3.2km, or about 2.500 million dollars a kilometer - that is three orders of magnitude more expensive than Germany.
[1] https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article171431132/Die-Beule-in...
Probably deserves as much recognition as the original Dropbox thread, but for different reasons.
This isn't unique to rail, either - if a Hyperloop was built, it'd be NIMBYed just as badly.
What's the biggest threat to the USA?
Is anyone building autonomous medium size containers today (about van-sized)? Basically a container without a cabin, fairly slow moving, very conservative in terms of traffic, that can drive at night within city limits and drop off reusable smaller containers with packages for entire apartment complexes? This seems to me like a reasonable solution for where we are headed in terms of buying everything online. Many apartment buildings in SF already have Luxer One systems, now we need to start delivering packages in bulk daily (or N-times per week), instead of making individual trips.
Instead of this vehicle having to deal with unloading dozens of small packages at each destination. Just a way to optimize delivery further.
> sound like a miserable thing to unleash on the streets, even at night
It's about finding the right balance. At night streets are mostly empty (e.g. 2-5am). What we have now is not optimized at all - hundreds of Amazon trucks moving through the city during the day.
If I recall it’s a composite (stack) of nearly 100 photos.
my goal was to show an industrial startup in one image.
BTW, I signed a 10-year NDA and I’m guessing their employees probably did too. I got to see a lot of stuff behind the curtain.
Such a shame…
[0] https://www.instagram.com/p/BMiyAIdhCJn/?igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA...
Only once you have those, does adding a vacuum and accelerating make sense. I think Musk believed this as well, which is why he floated the idea of Hyperloop (pun intended) but bankrolled the Boring Company. I think another 10 years of tunneling improvements, and the hyperloop part may make sense to try.
That's why the Boring Company hasn't made any progress on this grand vision - they seemed to set out by assuming there were easy wins to be had (seemingly not consulting any actual experts in the field), and then there just... weren't... Basically the only thing they have been able to do is to make smaller tunnels that lack any kind of emergency egress - which is kind of important in real mass transit systems where people would rather be able to get out if there was a fire.