Hyperloop
spacex.com
spacex.com
As a professional mechanical engineer I have worked on high quality steel tubes (nuclear submarines) before. The immediate thing that sticks out to me in this proposal are the tight mechanical tolerances that have to be maintained. Talking about tens of thousandths of an inch tolerances on a 10' diameter tube is not to be dismissed lightly. That is going to be tough to maintain - especially with welding heat distortion. I would image the tubes will be joined with automated friction stir welding or something similiar, but that will still require a fair amount of post weld machining which has its own pitfalls. Not to mention simple thermal expansion and contraction as the temperature changes could change the circularity and inner diameter.
I would be more interested to see a tolerance stack up of those considerations than an FEA model of the concrete pylons. I can gaurentee that we can build concrete pylons capable of holding up a steel tube, that is done all over the country dozens of different uses cases. But can we build a multi-hundred mile long steel tube to the required tolerances?
I would be inclined to trade off efficiency for manufacturability. I.e. maybe a higher internal pressure or larger diameter to make it less sensitive. There should be plenty of power from the solar panels so it doesn't have to be perfectly efficient.
I'm also surprised that the I-5 plan is cheaper than buying private land. I may be naive here, but the pylons really do take away most of the objections from farmers and installing tubes over farmland has to be a lot cheaper than doing construction above a highway. I just look at boondoggle that was the SkyTrain in NYC (tram running over a highway out to JFK airport) and wonder if that is a great option.
The document mentions standard orbital seam wlelding, plus specialized machining equipment that travels along the tube to smooth out the gliding surface.
The capsules are only 60% the diameter of the tube, or 36% it's area (68/47% for the vehicle-carrying version), it doesn't seem to require tight tolerances for operation. I got the idea that tube distortion and movement is taken into account into the system.
Well, it's true that the top and sides of the tube don't get too close to the capsule, so those parts seem relatively low-tolerance, as you say.
But the load-bearing skis ride on an air bearing of 0.5mm to 1.3mm (see page 20), moving at over 1000km/h. As rossjudson notes, the skis are on mechanical suspension, to smooth out shocks to the riders, but it's not clear (to ignorant me) how much of a bump those skis can glide over. 0.1mm, no problem. What about 1.0mm?
On a related note, Musk seems sanguine about the sag you'd get in any structure supported by pylons (see e.g. page 27). Even with inch-thick steel walls, with pylons an average of 30m apart (100'), you'll see some sag, right? Any engineers want to comment on the deviation in 30m of inch-diameter-wall steel tubing? Let's see, 1200kph, 30m, so you pass a pylon 11 times per second. So in 0.09 seconds, you have to go from the top of one pylon, to the valley between two pylons, and back to the top of the next pylon. I guess that's all absorbed by the mechanical suspension?
So thanks for whatever you did in keeping the boats safe (both in design and construction), it was certainly much-appreciated in the Fleet.
http://stopandmove.blogspot.fr/2013/08/hyperloop-proposal-ba...
It seems that the proposal is actully much less serious than on the first glance:
Amusingly enough, the California HSR budget for the Central Valley is under $10 billion. Ie, in the same ball-park as this proposal. The reason the HSR project is going to cost $60 billion is because it has to face an uncomfortable truth; actually getting to LA and SF is expensive. Very expensive.
Moreover, would you like to be sitting in the tube on the chair from which you can't even stand up for a half an hour without the chance to do anything but remain sitting, not getting any help the next half hour on the occasion when you get sick? Would you take your kid there? Your parent?
Designing mass transportation while ignoring such aspects is like programming without handling the limit cases "it works for N between 2 and 100 but not for 0, 1 and MAX_INT, even if these are allowed inputs." It's bad, very bad for the user, only an "astronaut developer" can love such a solution.
The first time a kid dies because it got sick the first minute of a 30-minute ride, the project is dead for good. Imagine the press, imagine the public response.
I can imagine entering the capsule to reach the international space station, preparing a whole year before. I can't imagine doing the same preparations for the ride between SF and LA. Give me the real train, thank you.
The public seems to have no issue with that concept, it is a simple risk that goes with getting on the train.
It would be cool if you could take another look and see if the tolerances are truly what you describe, or if there's actually more room for variance.
13 × 10^-6 thermal expansion coefficient of steel
45 - -40 max temp difference
570k length of tube in meters
line1 × line2 × line3 = 629m (~1890') of thermal expansion over a 570 km tube.
Did I read it right that they will take out all that expansion at the ends? To get that down to say 30m between pylons you have to have about 30 expansion joints. Can they go full speed through an expansion joint?
In fact you might be able to handle some thermal expansion (at least seasonal, not daily) that way - release some clamps on a telescopic section, adjust, reclamp, melt and re-smooth the wax.
And who says that big government stifles entrepreneurial innovation?
If ALL Musk does with the Hyperloop announcement is shed more light on the potential debacle that is to be our $70b+ high-speed rail in California, we owe him a debt of gratitude.
PS - Direct link to the Hyperloop plans .PDF http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/hyperloop_alpha-201...
I've lived in China for over 3 years, and spend countless hours riding the HSR system. HSR combines the speed of a plane, with the cost and convenience of a regular bus. Traveling through the countryside of China at 380km/h made me feel like I was in the future. Coming home and seeing the the sad state of our infrastructure was a harsh reality check.
Granted China has a massive manufacturing/mining complex and cheap labor. But if we hadn't squandered 5 Trillion on "War on Terror" and domestic spying, I'm sure we could kept our lead in infrastructure and still has some left over to boost education / R&D spending.
In the past 20 years China's moved their mountain. Hopefully the hyperloop will help us to catch up.
The problem with CAHSR isn't the "HSR" part, it's California's utterly dysfunctional political system, and going faster and putting the track up on pylons isn't going to cut through that morass without a stronger group of people standing up and saying YES, WE NEED THIS.
At the price point I suggest, the operator is STILL effectively going to be making 150% margins, so there is a lot of room to lower the cost, but that just isn't going to happen unless there is a competitive pressure to keep lowering the price.
If that's not "social justice" enough for you, then consider that at least the thing is going to be run nearly 100% if not better than 100% renewable.
You mention that he considers the alternative as supersonic jets, and discusses why they don't work for SFO-LAX.
If the Hyperloop works as Musk imagines, then it'll be more like hopping on the subway: go to the station in the middle of town, wait maybe 10min at most, ride, get off in the middle of town.
On the other hand I sure don't wanna be crammed in that recliner looking at a ceiling five inches away from my feet for a half hour. Room to stand up and stretch please.
Well, except that the termini aren't even close to the "middle of town" (at least, not of the cities motivating the plan). There way out on the fringes of the metro region, and unlike CA HSR, none of the costs of improving connecting systems are part of the plan.
The low cost estimate is due in large part because it gets you from the place people aren't to the place people don't want to be. (On either end)
Which is one (of the many) reasons its not a serious alternative to HSR -- even if the technology was ready, what Musk is proposing fails to do the hard part of transportation improvement: connecting the places people are with the places they want to get.
If I could take one of these from SF to LA in a weekend to take my kids to Disneyland, that would be awesome. As it is now, that's a multi-hour process on each side of the trip. Reducing that to 30min (+ some logistics time) would be wonderful. Especially if they can reduce the amount of time required at the terminals.
Sadly, I think the first place a Hyperloop will be built is China. Chances are there are engineers there looking it over now, and figuring they can knock out a test system in a year or two.
Until a major accident at least like with Fukushima and nuclear.
Yes, preventing a debacle is a win.
It's mind boggling to me that the California HSR isn't being built from DC to Boston instead.
The difference is, we already have the Acela, so it just needs a speed upgrade.
A major premise of the California HSR plan is that it isn't just about the main HSR lines, but upgrades, improvements, and new lines for connecting conventional regional and commuter rail, light rail, and other public transit.
Boston (4.5M metro area) New York (8-20M depending on how far you stretch the metro area) Philadelphia (6M metro area) Washington D.C. (5.7M metro area)
Upgraded high-speed rail in the Northeast corridor (where the US's only existing HSR is located) is being planned. [1] California HSR being built in California doesn't preclude HSR from being built/upgraded in other parts of the US.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_the_United_S...
magic response: "of course we may be wrong, we'll look into this immediately." and then they decide to build it.
likely answer: praise, perhaps even an evaluation, then disregard as unrealistic a year from now.
why would "big government" ignore this idea? fairly simple: risky and unproven, for a politician, in a career where risk is not related to upside; and probably more important is the ability to control $70bn in spending to private citizens and contractors - far more valuable to their careers (leading to donations and influence) than spending a smaller amount (a mere $7bn) on fewer contractors. For the most part, the hyperloop contractors would not be the same guys who have been donating to politicians for the past decade in support of the train.
so yes, big government and the natural corruption of a large budget (donations->spending with favored constituents) will likely lead to the status quo - a ludicrously overpriced train.
as far as political repercussions, california is not a two party state any more, so there's no one to capitalize on the idiocy of the folks in power. i guess, we reap what we sow.
Influential people and money people and politicians are all going to read this and say Sounds great. Elon Musk? I'm listening. 7 Billion? Go on. And scientists are going to chime in, and universities, and people always forget the global reactions. Momentum.
I'm going to keep my faith that this idea has legs.
http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/California_Proposition...
> If you don't want to be searched at the train station, you have the freedom to not ride the train.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-23677205
I'm sure there some contingency has been thought of, unfortunately it's just the world we live in these days :(
I responded to concern over the Hyperloop shutting down for hours whilst the damage is repaired.
And, if someone fired a few pot shots into a taxing A380 at LAX, I have to imagine that the whole place would be shut down for a few hours.
As mhandley noted, Hyperloop might be more susceptible, as the concern is more like your airplane flying an inch off the ground and hitting a stationary large brick.
...which reminds me of an old analogy: Back when large-capacity (ooh! 10MB!) hard drives were becoming common, I recall hearing the comparison that the read head was akin to a 747 traveling Mach 3 just 1 inch off the ground. Perhaps Elon wondered how this might work in real life, and so came up with Hyperloop.
Of course, if any damage occurred on the ground, this would be a non-issue entirely as the aircraft wouldn't be pressurized at all.
Most likely safer than a train.
Remember a big part of TSA isn't to protect the people on the planes, but to protect other people from the planes themselves. It's pretty hard to weaponize a vehicle that's stuck inside a tube or on rails.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/magazine/14Train-t.html?pa...
407/km² England
256/km² UK
93/km² California
32/km² USAAnd here you can travel from most parts of Melbourne to most parts of Sydney with just two train changes. One at a Melbourne hub to the interstate trains and one at Sydney to the local system.
Even so, we feel our train systems suck too.
Unless you can take a train into the center of Australia, in which case I apologize.
But building one across the coastal part of California? Or across the NE United States? Why yes, that does make sense, and why yes, it is warranted by the densities in those areas. The fact that the U.S. also owns Alaska doesn't really matter. No one is arguing Alaska needs a high-speed rail network.
Build fast trains connecting all the red areas:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ae/Californi...
Repeat for suitable other areas across the U.S.
The California coastal cities (and connecting areas) are still pretty sparse, comparatively. And the marquee High Speed Rail project takes a big inland detour to the smaller interior cities, for political reasons. If ever finished, that will hurt its price/time attractiveness compared to flying.
You'll notice that Elon Musk's plan for the Hyperloop includes an option for shooting automobiles through the tubes. That's because the mass transit within the cities on that coast is shit.
Inter-city mass transit only makes sense once you've solved intra-city mass transit. Unless you really, really love hanging out within a few city blocks of an inter-city train station, you need to have a convenient, desirable mass transit system waiting for you in the city you're going to. If you're linking Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and DC, you're liking the best mass transit system in America with four other pretty good transit systems. Cutting Boston to DC from 6.5 hours to 90 minutes is definitely worth doing.
As someone who uses only mass transit, I think that's untrue.
Even in Oklahoma City, where only ~1% of people commute via mass transit, there are still thousands of people who can live happily without a car because mass transit serves them fine. That does not mean that Oklahoma City has a great transit system.
http://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2012/07/10/north...
I wonder. It's easier to find low cost airfares to Las Vegas than other cities. A conduit to Las Vegas from the populated west coast might be interesting to some.
Edit: correction from dragonwriter, via wikipedia [1]:
"The cost of the initial San Francisco-to-Anaheim segment was originally estimated by the CHSRA to be $33 billion (2008) / $35.2 billion (2013), but a revised business plan released in November 2011 by the CHSRA put the cost at $65.4 billion (2010) / $68.9 billion (2013) / $98.5 billion (YOE). The latest plan has revised the costs down to $53.4 billion (2011) / $54.5 billion (2013) / $68.4 billion (YOE)."
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail#Fund...
you should check cost of highways in Moscow - $300M/mile. Hint - it isn't about terrain :)
Another factor at play is that TGV lines are purpose built for high-speed traffic (curve radius, climb rate, ...) while for example in Germany they are mostly shared. That makes the single TGV track cheaper, but you still ahve to built another track for lets say freight. If want another track, that is.
But the cool thing ist that TGV don't stop at every single village that happens to be the hometown of some polititian.
But the U.S. delegates decision-making to agencies and courts in a way that this doesn't happen. California might take input for a long time before deciding on its plan, but its final plan is still not final. Anyone can sue it for many different reasons. Maybe it violates the federal Clean Air Act, maybe it violates property rights, maybe something else. The decision is never final until every challenge to an agency or court is decided, which massively adds to uncertainty and costs.
Though it's somewhat difficult to separate out the 42km of new tunnels (expensive) and a whole bunch of new stations (expensive) including a whole bunch of revamped ones in the centre of London (very expensive).
$6.4 trillion in total government expenditures.
Largest welfare and entitlement programs.
Nearly 15% U6 unemployment. Collapsing labor force. Falling real incomes. 15% on food stamps. Massive fiscal mismanagement in every respect. Endless QE just to fund the government. 0% interest rates just to reach 1% GDP growth. Healthcare is clearly moving toward a completely socialized approach over time and completely away from any free market solution. Taxes are extremely high, between federal and state; typically higher than supposedly socialist European countries. America also has more economic regulations on the books than any other country (and that's rapidly expanding). The largest land owner in America is the government, by a drastic margin. Half of all mortgages are held by the government. And on and on.
Doesn't get any more old European Socialist than what America is today. It would be fiscally impossible to go any further.
We'll try.
The only hope would be that the anti-rail side could point to the growth of projections as either incompetence or out of control budgeting, which could both sway the vote. But I think if you go back to 2008 and say, "This will cost $100 billion," the vote would be the same.
And as I said in above comment, the $9.95 billion was for the initial bond issuance. The estimate on the ballot was $40 billion versus the current estimate of between $98.5 billion and $118 billion.
The estimate from the current Business Plan is $68.4 billion, not "between $98.5 and $118 billion."
In fact, some of the highest resistance to the high-speed rail project that would run from L.A. to the Bay Area comes from Angelenos, according to new data released over the weekend by the USC Dornsife / Los Angeles Times Poll:
About 56 percent of would-be voters in L.A. County would say no to the train if allowed to vote on it again; 37 percent would be in favor. In San Francisco the train would win 47-45.
About 66 percent of Central Valley voters were opposed to the train, which would run through their farm region.
Statewide, if a re-vote on the train were allowed, 59 percent of would-be voters would say no; only 33 percent would give reaffirm it.
About 55 percent of statewide voters said they'd be down for a re-vote.
The article later goes on to state:
The biggest problem for this train is timing -- California is facing another crushing budget deficit and a stalling economic recovery. Dan Schnur, director of the poll:
Californians aren't necessarily against the idea of high-speed rail. But they don't want to spend all that money right now, and they don't trust the state to make the trains run on time.[1] http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2012/06/california_bullet...
If California ditches its HSR plans for hyperloop today and ends up with a 700 km/h line running in 30 years' time, busiest lines in Japan and China will have been upgraded to maglev or another 500+ km/h technology and they would have had 300+ km/h technology for the interim 30 years. Meanwhile California would have had what, driverless car trains on freeways going 200 km/h 5 years from now?
... which closed a few years ago :(
he is in bed with gov employees unions (the unions are primary driving force behind 200-300K/year gov employees pensions (http://www.mercurynews.com/salaries/pensions) with retirement age of 55, CA is something like $200B deep in that hole), and especially with prison guard union - of course huge prison population resulting from "toughness on crime" may not be viewed as government waste by some.
Building a bridge or high-speed rail to nowhere - just a [large] peanut in that picture.
200-300K/year (and higher) pensions are pretty much entirely executives who weren't union members, it has nothing to do with unions.
e.g., the #1 highest: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/dec/27/opinion/la-oe-cole-v...
"Denson also earned $407,908 in total wages in 2011, according to city data, making him the highest paid city worker in 2011. Of this sum, $212,738 consisted of "cash out" pay, which accounts for such factors as vacations, holidays and unused sick pay. His regular salary was $195,169."
All defined benefit pensions -- whether set by union contract or not -- use these kind of formulas. But the high pensions are not the product of the formula alone -- even if you work long enough at one of the formulas to get near (or over) 100%, you still aren't going to get 200-300K per year pension unless you have a last/highest/(average of last three)/etc. years salary (which ever is the base for the particular formula you have) high enough to push the pension that high.
Surprisingly enough, almost no rank-and-file workers have that kind of salary. The people with 200K and higher pensions are mostly people that are retiring from executive positions.
Of course he's with the government employees unions, he has to live with them every day.
>>> Of course he's with the government employees unions, he has to live with them every day.
Having to work with them and being in bed with them is not the same thing. Though many politicians fail to see the difference, it is a known problem.
what if the prison guard union got in on the contract to have the prisoners build the hyperloop?
How about large scale funding of science and technology is an "engine of innovation", whatever that term means.
On top of that, the government used to take such risks in unproven technologies, underlined by tolerating the non-trivial odds of spectacular lethal failure...but that was decades ago. Now it can't even make a bus door without plastering eighteen warning signs around it [1].
Exploratory spending is great when you have money to spare. We don't. Now we have to rely on Elon Musk et al to pursue outlier projects - and they only reason they can is because of the big literal payoff if it works.
[1] - Have you counted 'em? I have. 18.
Not to mention safety. Nobody is going to just trust Musk to say it's safe. There will be a decade of trials to test it before it even gets green light approval for a small practically useable section.
The Republicans haven't yet adapted to the people of the State taking away their ability to roadblock budgets from the minority, which is a crutch they'd come to rely on to avoid dealing with the difficulty of trying to build a minimum winning coalition in CA while at the same time toeing the line of the national party.
I'd be surprised though if they haven't started returning to being an effective opposition by the 2014 elections.
Politicians aren't all afraid to take risks, especially when they believe a particular policy they like will live on and be remembered.
Our former governor Jesse Ventura overcame incredible resistance and media scorn to get our first light rail line built. Almost all casual observers thought major health care reform was impossible in Washington. These things actually happened.
The key to passing a good policy is to reduce the risk. Politicians love projects where someone else was the guinea pig for them and/or someone else pays for studies and prototypes. Usually, they look for other units of government that have done something very similar with great success.
If I wanted to get Hyperloop to pass, I would first aim to table discussions on high speed rail for the proposed route. You would find allies among politicians who don't want to spend any money on transit, usually to appease highway contractors.
Secondly, I would immediately aim to seek R&D money for a high-profile demonstration project with plenty of funding for a study to project potential costs and impacts. This effort should even begin before the high speed rail bidding is tabled. I would leverage the demonstration results in the media and build a grassroots and lobbying organization around support for a Hyperloop.
Finally, I would seek advice from experts to craft a model bill with appropriate requirements for the bidding process.
It seems pretty clear that California needs it and generally HSR is a pretty sensible infrastructure investment.
That said like you I would love to see a superior alternative to the current situation but CA HSR is probably not it.
Edit: added some references
http://www.mercurynews.com/top-stories/ci_15746975
http://www.fresnobee.com/2013/08/01/3419259/high-speed-rail-...
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-califor...
The main cost of CAHSR will be the opportunity cost of not having built it.
I wonder: this is from an LA Weekly article from 2011 -- I remember it being an eye-opener when I read it back then [1]:
The authority had projected that 41 million people annually would ride the train between Anaheim and San Francisco, for example. But currently only 12 million customers fly nonstop on the extremely busy air route between Los Angeles and San Francisco each year.
The article goes on to say that Acela gets 3 million riders in the very dense east coast NY/Washington corridor but in less-dense California they were projecting a ridership around 10x of Acela's (!).
The LA Weekly has had a bunch of articles about the project over the years criticizing everything from its cost to its leadership to its utility. If the picture they paint is mostly correct, perhaps the only way to win is not to play.
And it's not just the LA Weekly -- a third party independent review came to similar conclusions apparently, as described in this LA Weekly article from Jan. 2012 [2]:
On top of skepticism from the state auditor, inspector general and legislative analyst -- as well as university researchers, federal transportation experts and this very news blog -- a "peer review group" for the California High-Speed Rail Authority, formed for the sole purpose of independent review, has declared the project neither physically nor financially feasible at this time.
The train's roster of supporters tells us everything we need to know:
"The project has won major support from organized labor, some big-city mayors and many state lawmakers," reports the Los Angeles Times today.
The article quotes the following from the report:
"We cannot overemphasize the fact that moving ahead on the HSR project without credible sources of adequate funding, without a definitive business model, without a strategy to maximize the independent utility and value to the State, and without the appropriate management resources, represents an immense financial risk on the part of the state of California."
[1] http://www.laweekly.com/2011-11-24/news/100-billion-bullet-t...
[2] http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2012/01/california_bullet...
And...so? California has dense areas in the north and south and a big (relatively) empty gap between them. California HSR is designed to connect those dense areas. The overall density of the state (or the corridor) is pretty much a side issue.
And, if your city is not on the Acela route, you may well be able, due to the area's density, to take a commuter rail or another train to get to a city that is on the Acela route.
Similarly for Acela's Boston-NY route -- New Haven is on the route, so people from Connecticut can likely get to it.
And, of course, people in NJ can easily pop into NYC and grab Acela as well.
By contrast, the lack of density in CA would mean that aside from LA - SF (and a bit of traffic to and from Sacramento), you wouldn't likely have that sort of potential passenger-base.
Actually, since California has a large total population, and its mostly concentrated in a few major urban areas, what that means is you have a natural constituency for high speed rail with few stops, spending more time at speed.
LA (and San Diego) to SF (and Sacramento) is a lot.
There might be a bit more interaction between LA's entertainment industry and the Bay Area's tech industry, but how many additional people would be travelling for this purpose?
I expect that, given that the northeast corridor comprises the nation's capitol, its financial capitol and its academic capitol (the latter two also being high-tech centers), one would expect movement between these places and would want high-speed transport.
I just don't see a similar dynamic operating in CA. Sacramento cannot compare to Washington, D.C. and LA and SF are pretty self-sufficient, as I expect San Diego is as well.
California has a very large amount of regulatory burden compared to almost anywhere else in the US. High speed rail there is likely to cost overrun by a massive factor, and under deliver by a massive factor, and both, for no actually good reason, instead, only theoretically good ones.
SPUR's data comes from the SF planning department, which is now under tremendous pressure to at least claim they are doing something. Data on the actual ground (IE real estate listings, etc) do not support their claims, as anyone who tries to get a residential unit in SF can tell you. I'd love to know what they consider a "start". It shouldn't take multiple years for a simple residential unit to be completed.
You are also talking about places where it takes months to get a tree removed from your property and requires approval from the "county arborist". It often takes years for people to acquire permits to do remodeling.
California also has significantly different and more stringent energy/building codes from all other places, in areas completely unrelated to things like 'earthquake protection' (or anything reasonably related to California issues)
It absolutely has a high regulatory cost compared to most other places, and past HN, i don't think i've seen anyone dispute this (IE AFAIK, California doesn't dispute it, they simply claim it's worth it)
I've been in plenty of places like SF, which, when under pressure, simply make up statistics or change what they mean.
It's simply not a "fact beyond argument", when the only source of this "fact" are a group with a very strong vested interested in high numbers and a history of not truth telling. The 100-200 units number only came out after a lot of pushing.
They claim there are 22,000 units in planning/approval as of 2012, and we are 3/4 of the way through 2013.
Combined with the 4000 that were under construction, they should be visible by now somewhere.
Maybe you'd like to point out where you see 20k+ units under construction?
At that many, it should be blindingly obvious. SF is simply not that large, and does not have that much hidden space (open or otherwise).
If you are feeling exceptionally lazy and only have time to look outside your bubble once, go to Market between 7th and 9th. The new building on 8th between Market and Mission has over 1900 units (over 1400 units net of what were demolished) and the one at 55 9th Street has 300 new units on what used to be an empty field.
You also seem like a bit of a dick.
I don't believe that high speed rail will necessarily be a debacle.
But the route was largely chosen for political considerations. It was decided downtown San Jose, Fresno, and Bakersfield must have stations. (This requires an additional long tunnel, and urban construction is much more expensive.) The route takes a detour through Palmdale[1], an underdeveloped part of Los Angeles County.
The 'straight shot' route down I-5 that Musk proposes was also considered for HSR, and rejected even though it would have been much cheaper and simpler to construct.
However, CA-HSR chose the nearly the most complex and expensive route possible (even though they don't have a funding source), so we shouldn't make a direct cost comparison with Musk's route down I-5. HSR would also be much cheaper on the mostly unpopulated I-5 corridor. Also, the right-of-ways that Musk proposes to get into SF and LA are sketchy.
(Silicon Valley business interests wanted the HSR stations in San Jose & Mountain View, and apparently quite interested in using lower-cost areas such as Fresno for back-office activities. So while they will be impressed by Hyperloop's techno-wizardry, they may actually prefer the HSR project.)
If you can afford to rent a car at the end of your train ride, you can afford a plane ticket.
In my opinion, most likely, the CA rail proposal is just a political folly being undertaken by corruptocrats who have ideas to profit from it.
Yes, the rail would be useful for poor people who want to visit family, but that is not a business case, and does not justify harvesting tens of billions from the innocent citizens of CA. (Even if a tyranny of the majority voted to do it.)
Which is one reason a not-insignificant part of the HSR plan in California is improving commuter rail and other connecting mass-transit systems that will interface with HSR, to reduce exactly that problem.
Just metro: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/Spring-20...
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_County_Metro_Rail
Maybe I'm naive... or maybe Musk for all his genius is focused on the Government grants too much instead of being focused on the investors in the business world.
If this brings profit, everybody want to own piece of the pie, no?
Or just have Jobs resurrected. This way we save $1B on the "fees" and he'll talk the Government officials into this for free. They'll think they get the best deal in the world once Steve is done talking to them and the Distortion Field is permanently present in the Government heads.
If you're traveling at 600 mph, you do not want to have that tunnel unexpectedly move even a foot sideways during an earthquake.
Not to mention it's got to be really close to a strait track so your more dealing with scraping forces than a direct strike.
You still need government permission to use the median like that.
Because you can't, in practice, acquire the rights of way necessary to build a substantial railroad/hyperloop/freeway or other major infrastructure project of that type without government (specifically, without use of eminent domain).
(2) A CA-sponsored bond issue must be by far the lowest cost way to finance a $7B infrastructure project that's amortized over 30 years.
It's called a "public-private partnership" and it's not completely impossible but it does require some person or persons to cough up the cash.
Compare what would have happened if Tesla needed to raise $500m from private investment at the start. Musk would have been diluted up front.
This is a classic example of socializing the risk while privatizing the profits. Yes, Musk is a smart guy with plenty of great ideas and good execution. But he's also plenty good at funneling government money to himself.
The government makes these investments all the time. In fact, usually the (barely implicit) goal of government funding is to also encourage job and wealth growth. $12 million isn't much of a return, but even revenue neutral is a win for the average government investment. And, like the tax breaks to encourage people to buy the very cars the government was helping pay to produce, the idea is to help kickstart an industry that might not have the differential to self-start, but has the potential to eventually be self sustaining and bring outsize benefits compared to the investment. Basically the same reason we fund basic science research as well.
And again, this is highly selective outrage. You can disagree with the whole category of government-sponsored industry, but you have a bit of an uphill battle there. Meanwhile, there are far more "classic" examples all around, not to mention the two other major car companies that together received nearly 16x what Tesla received and have so far not exactly put in a great showing for the industry-creating change that money was supposed to help fund.
They had a loan program to kick-start electric vehicles. One of their loans was largely responsible for the existence of Tesla and its ensuing success. The loan was paid back.
Should the government have been more profit-maximizing? Do we want civil servants taking large equity stakes in private companies? We fund research (both directly and through the university system) all the time with the understanding that the net benefits to society outweigh the direct costs of the programs.
AFAIC Tesla upheld their end of the bargain and society is up by quite a bit. This is in stark contrast to other bullshit that the US government has funded which is wasteful at best. War, war on drugs, war on privacy, bankers, ...
That said, the interest was low, but it was meant as a public good. Without Tesla, I very much doubt the big car companies would be pushing out their own EVs on nearly as aggressive a timescale.
Someone get me his phone number right this moment.
When you consider the growth in air travel, and the fuel options for air travel, the Hyperloop IS effectively a low emission energy source. I suspect he's more than interested.
few investors would touch this. It doesn't fit into any investment category that's approved.
There are infrastructure funds but they're looking for sleepy assets. Stuff like toll roads and ports that have an established operating history and are supposed to be low risk.
This is a whole different animal. It's almost infrastructure VC. I don't see how this fits in any part of the institutional world. That leaves wealthy individuals and I don't think there'd be a lot of interest there. They're looking at Berkshire and steady growth vs. an investment in speculative infrastructure. I could see $10M investments but I think it'd be hard to get people to put a big chuck of their net worth into it, which is what you need (i.e. you need a couple people putting in $1-2B). Furthermore, historically public transportation hasn't been very profitable. Realistically you probably need the state to build it.
Really? Because it looks like this is an attempt to derail CA HSR using a proposal for an experimental technology that offers a fraction of what CA HSR does, but is potentially faster.
CA HSR replaces/upgrades two metropolitan rail systems (Caltrain/Metrolink) in addition to connecting SF (as opposed to Oakland!) and LA, requires no R&D, is supposed to handle significantly greater ridership, has detailed cost estimates which include things like take into account electrification costs (because it does get cloudy), support facilities (because there is maintenance of these cars), administrative buildings (because someone has to run the system), bypassing/rebuilding overpasses (which are all over I-5) that are in the way and grading land.
Did Musk say his Hyperloop wouldn't be tied to the grid?
Not to mention their estimates actually include going into downtown SF and LA, unlike Musk's $6B figure.
But more to the point, it's costed through the straightest, least dense, cheapest part of a "SF to LA" route. It's shown with 3 km of tunnel west of Dublin and you'd need at least five times more to get to usefully located stations. This isn't how real infrastructure projects are estimated unless you're purposefully trying to arrive at a low cost estimate.
The East Bay (and even Oakland specifically) does not have a complete lack of moneyed NIMBYs. There are at least as many of those in the East Bay as in SF and the Peninsula.
And its actually a lot easier to "punch a line through" over land than over the Bay, and existing SF-Oakland transit capacity is fairly well saturated and expensive to expand (because, again, of the Bay).
You could maybe find some non-insane argument that extending Caltrain as conventional rail to San Francisco and running HSR to Oakland makes more sense than HSR to San Francisco and existing conventional rail to Oakland, but I doubt there's much case even for that; in any case, any sane strategy for rail is going to involve a fork with lines running up the Peninsula to SF and up into the East Bay separately.
Now compare to the kind of 19th-century legacy gazillionaires along the CAHSR route in Atherton.
Oakland was chosen to make this thing look cheaper, not because it makes sense from a civil planning perspective.
Instead, I think of it this way... if it's so cheaply do-able, then - do it! Sounds like an easy money making idea if you can build it for the figures proposed. While you may only need to charge $20 each way to break even, why not charge double what it costs to go the next most fast, convenient way, and you would make bank! I mean, who wouldn't do this if it works as envisioned? It's a genius business plan, right!?
So do it! Some rich bold genius! Build us a hyperloop - so cheap and obvious and do-able! And whenever we get to HSR, we'll build it so it connects to the awesome LA-SF express hyperloop.
We would owe a debt of gratitude to a hypothetical public transport project for helping to obstruct or kill a real public transport project?
"A brilliant exploration of new ideas in business argues that government is behind the boldest risks and biggest breakthroughs"
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/32ba9b92-efd4-11e2-a237-00144...
I don't have much of an opinion on this topic, since it seems to me that any large concentration of money and smart people produces innovation (so do lone geniuses). But I thought this article was interesting.
What do most of us in the general public really know about how projects like the high speed rail get on the ballot. A lot of people have their suspicions, but we have to ask ourselves if there was a competitive bid process to determine the best solution.
I, for one, would have voted to throw money into future technologies over current rail solutions. Mostly because I shudder to think how much current tech will be old news in ten years when the high speed rail is completed (if at all).
If we pursue the hyperloop or similar tech, and whether it can be completed or not, at least it would be a first of it's kind and on the cutting edge.
Now, I am not trying to defend California's HSR, specifically. I agree with Musk that it appears to be very poorly done. However, the answer, to my mind, is to do it properly rather than propose a wild experiment with hand-wavy arguments as to why it would be politically easier to do. Do you really think the special interests that are making HSR so difficult and expensive would say, "Oh, do whatever you like with your tube."?
Now, in an attempt to end on a positive note, I do like his proposal as a possible next step beyond HSR. Rail can go up to 350km/h currently (perhaps more in the future--why wouldn't California design with this goal in mind?), but Musk's hyperloop is proposed up to ~1000km/hr. It is definitely an idea worth exploring, but I think it falls far short as a serious alternative to the current high speed rail plans.
Even when done properly, HSR has most of the limitations stated by Musk. And while it is possible that special interest groups would make the construction of Hyperloop more difficult than it is, I don't think that's an argument against giving it a try.
Do you really think the special interests that are making HSR so difficult and expensive would say, "Oh, do whatever you like with your tube."?
These are extremely important issues that advocates seem to be glossing over. Putting the guideway on pylons doesn't magically eliminate land issues, you will still have to deal with visual impacts, along with any number of anticipated and unanticipated problems.
Musk should do what the Germans did with the TR0x series of maglev vehicles, build a 10-20 mile test section someplace and demonstrate that is analysis is sound.
(perhaps more in the future--why wouldn't California design with this goal [350 km/h] in mind?)
There are a variety of reasons, but one important reason I have to deal with is that the speed of shear waves through soil is only on the order of a couple of hundred miles per hour. When a train exceeds the shear wave speed, ground-borne vibration waves "build up" in a manner similar to the shock wave created in air when a plane exceeds the speed of sound, causing a ground-borne vibration equivalent of a "sonic boom" that can cause problems for wayside structures. I believe the French have started to experience this with some of their higher-speed TGV experiments and we don't have a good way to handle this yet.
Putting the railway or tubes on pylons would give you an opportunity to dampen or otherwise transform those vibrations wouldn't they?
Maybe, maybe not. Guideway supports (pylons) are typically founded into the bedrock which does reduce vibration somewhat, but the vertical motion of the pylon moving against the soil will still generate shear waves.
This is why a demonstration project would be useful.
Passive resilient systems could help with higher frequency vibration (above say 100 Hz or so, depending on the forces and weights involved), but for lower frequency vibration (especially below 20 Hz), the resilient elements would have to be so compliant that even a gentle breeze would create very high vibrations in the guideway itself, which would be incompatible with the speeds of the cars inside.
You could make the pylons so massive that the forces from the vehicles couldn't move it, but again you're talking about higher construction and material costs, as well as visual impacts.
edit: though, mind you, the whole capsule also has mechanical suspension
Musk has already given more than enough for the world and done more than enough. Somebody should do it, but we should not expect him to do it.
Specifically, an affordable Tesla car could benefit the entire world, whereas the Hyperloop would (at least initially) only benefit people living in LA and SF.
They both have the potential to be hugely beneficial to the entire world. Although in Tesla's case it's more of a certainty... fortunately we can have both :-)
True innovators carry all of humanity on their backs, and give massively to all of humanity, present and future.
The fact that they get some monetary compensation doesn't entitle you to not be grateful and to not recognize their heroism.
It does not entitle you to imply, as you have, that they deserve the same level of praise as any person who is paid for any work whatsoever.
You are, by implication, equating Elon Musk to the teenager flipping burgers, or any other menial laboror.
That is moral treason.
Without innovators, we would all be dying in pestilence-ridden Stone Age villages. In my opinion, those who claim that innovators do not deserve the highest of possible praise _deserve_ that fate.
Musk would have a hard time innovating if he had to build his own house, grow his own food, knit his own clothes, etc. etc...
We all rely on each other to provide our basic standards of living.
Without our basic needs being satisfied, we don't have a platform from which to focus on innovation.
Yes, innovation is great, but don't act like they are the entire backbone of humanity.
If you were to calculate the sum of gains and losses between Elon Musk and humanity, it would balance out that Elon Musk is overwhelmingly the creditor, and humanity is overwhelmingly the debtor.
As with the great-grandparent of this comment, your comment is a massive moral equivocation.
Perhaps a stupid question, but the shock wave forms because the trains is moving continuously over the ground? So if you put the entire thing on stilts, there would be one wave formed at t0, x0 when the train reaches pylon 0 and the next wave would be at t1, x1 etc. So the interference pattern for the waves would look vastly different. ( This holds of course only for point like trains... )
A test segment would go a long way to determining if/how much of a problem this might be in a hyperloop system.
It's interesting to think about, but also there are probably much higher costs associated with a completely untested system like this than estimated. I wouldn't be surprised if this system, if it actually worked at all, ended up being more expensive than a HSR proposal through California that actually made sense.
Also, drag is a huge killer of efficiency and hence overall economics. Even at 500kph the drag on a train at sea level is enormous. At 1000kph it's 4 times bigger again, and you've got the sound barrier to worry about. Trying to do the same with multiple small capacity trains is astronomically worse. So, better to have reduced drag... and by now you've basically got the hyperloop.
The short answer is, "yes." I've ridden on it. The slightly longer answer (as another commenter has pointed out) is that it depends on the weight of the train versus the weight of the hyperloop. I see no fundamental reason to assume that the hyperloop is lighter than the train. It could be so, but then, we could make smaller and lighter trains, too (light rail).
Plus you don't get the same natural banking off the walls he talks about, which is relevant at these speeds. While rail could bank, you better be going at the right speed when doing so, too slow and you just fall laterally off the tracks.
This is a problem even when you are at grade. The solution is known: tilt-trains. The track is banked such that the train will not fall over if it has to stop on the curve. The passenger cabin then tilts with respect to the wheels so that it always feels like the floor is "down" regardless of the speed that the train goes around the curve. The radius of curve sets the maximum speed the train can travel around it.
Did you actually read the PDF?
It doesn't carry its motor with it. That's a pretty big reason. Nor does it need the heavy-duty (and heavy!) trucks of a standard rail car.
The motor that it carries with it is about 146 horsepower. That's less than a Kawasaki Ninja street bike.
The General Electric E60 locomotives currently in use on Amtrak crank out 6,250 hp (4,660 kW) and weigh 423,000 lb (192,000 kilograms).
The weight of the tube doesn't really enter into it.
My bet is that it's not significantly different to compare a light rail (subway-like) system to a hyperloop in terms of weight.
Then you get to add the rails and ties (or concrete sleepers), plus the vastly more heavy rolling stock.
The reason I said that the weight of the tube doesn't enter into it is because the tube isn't moving. The only thing that matters in terms of energy use is the rolling stock.
? You don't need to use ballast & tie track on elevated structure, in fact it's rare to do so on modern rail structures.
...now I'm contributing to this thread -- shoot!
So yes, you could make the rail lighter, but in order to match the proposed passenger throughput, it would have to go 700mph. Good luck with that.
Why is speed relevant?
(People/Car)*(Car/Hour) = (People/Hour) = Throughput
At a constant frequency and higher speeds, you will simply have less trains on the track at the same time.
A bigger factor in practical capacity is loading and offloading people and switching near termini.
As a matter of fact, only the frequency and the capacity matter. Speed matters to passengers but not to the amount of people you can move.
The hyperloop as proposed actually has fairly low throughput; conventional rail systems, particularly of inter-metro variety where high throughput is most important, best it easily. 28 passengers per capsule at a capsule every 30 seconds makes 3360 pph during rush hours. RER line A averages 30000 passengers per hour over the entire year, with rush hour capacity being much higher.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV
Edit: I had the wrong numbers before, thanks to Shiffern for the correction.
Edit: apparently, the weight of the train/car/etc matters more.
Out of curiosity (I'm not at all familiar with HSR)—does the Hyperloop plan increase the distance between columns or the cost to build the columns (due to materials or any other factors)?
I think, if anything, safety aspects haven't been sufficiently explored in the pdf. I'm quite happy to believe it's safer than other modes of transport, but I wouldn't be too quick to overstate it. Also, if anyone can explain what "Tubes located on pylons would limit access to the critical elements of the system." is meant to mean in §4.5.6 I'd be grateful...
I was worried this was going to be some pie-in-the-sky idea that was nebulous on a lot of basic details with quite a bit of "we can figure that out later".
Sure, they put a lot of theoretical analysis into it, but its still pretty pie-in-the-sky. From the last page, note that
The authors recognize the need for additional work,
including but not limited to:
1. More expansion on the control mechanism for
Hyperloop capsules, including attitude thruster or
control moment gyros.
2. Detailed station designs with loading and unloading
of both passenger and passenger plus vehicle
versions of the Hyperloop capsules.
3. Trades comparing the costs and benefits of
Hyperloop with more conventional magnetic
levitation systems.
4. Sub-scale testing based on a further optimized
design to demonstrate the physics of Hyperloop.
You don't have to worry about cows wandering into oncoming vehicles like you do with cars and trains. It's also harder for non-determined people with malicious intent to interfere with operations.
A determined attacker can, of course, scale pylons. But you don't have to worry about stuff like kids lobbing bricks from overpasses, or people pushing others onto subway tracks.
On the other hand even with a recommendation to use something similar to TSA doing something similar to airport security, his response plan to a terrorist attac--, er, a "human related incident" is basically to say that the system will have redundant power and vacuum pumps.
I suppose this isn't his area of expertise and so it's better to say little, but this is the kind of thing people are going to worry about before they board a small tube hurtling at 700 mph while 100 feet above the ground.
For instance, does a HRI impact his plan for rapidly handling luggage pods at all? Just one thing to think about...
The big benefit of hyperloops over planes would all depend on how quickly you could brake those pods and re-pressurize the tube to let people escape. Because that's something you definitely can't do on a plane and it governs most of our thinking about them - if anything happens, you're possibly over an hour from being able to land anywhere and no one is able to get off quickly.
Oh, bus-bombing happens; mostly in the middle-east, but it did happen in London once. You can google it.
I also expect that an explosion inside a depressurised pipe would shut the whole thing down in a way that an explosion above a road surface would not.
An ingenious solution appears so obvious in hindsight that it leads you to ask "why didn't I think of that?" While being subtle enough to confound all those who came before.
I have been following the developments of the ET3 Consortium for the past year. I have read virtually all the technical literature available online on the topic of alternative high-speed transportation systems going back as far as the RAND paper and even reading related patents from much earlier.
Looking at the genius of Elon Musk's insight is both inspiring ang greatly humbling - but mostly inspiring. Holy awesome! I would love to see this innovation take root. It could be the perfect elixer to our stagnant economic malaise.
Well done Mr. Musk!
Not that it still wouldn't be comparable to the cost of a high speed rail system.
That was true of everything, once.
All the cost skeptics want to roll all the R&D costs into one line. That wouldn't be the case.
This is not aimed at you, but when I started reading Hacker News I was amazed how excited, interesting and smart people were on this site. But now Im starting to get tired of this 'valley think'. Greetings from Switzerland where mind blowing infrastructure projects are still happening. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel
I don't think such a company would be hard to find because if they get this done, they are now the only vendor of a highly desirable technology. Pretty sure they'll be able to get back that early investment... and then some.
(And remember - Musk contrasts $6b to what he estimates could possibly grow to $100b for the current proposal, so even if they end up needing to double their budget, they'd still be off by an order of magnitude.)
Why should we think that Musk's estimates for a technology which still isn't well defined (read the "Future Work" section at the end of the document) are reliable even to within an order of magnitude, and why should we accept Musk's assumption that the actual cost of the HSRA will be 50% higher than its official estimate?
Even if you worst-case Musks plan and best-case the traditional concept * , you end up in about the same cost bracket. Just that in the one case you get incredible space tech and in the other, you get a boring train that isn't even as great as it could be with 20 years old tech.
As for the "Future Work" section - I don't really see how they could explode the budget. Only two points (station design and comparison with traditional Maglev) seem concerned with R&D work - for station design, you're not really looking for any breakthroughs, just packaging and mentioning Maglev seems more like a "just make sure" point that isn't really about physical cost at all.
* This part is highly unlikely - government issued endeavors like a long distance train routes have a pathological tendency to run over budget (a few billion here and there, who's going to notice?!). Of course, the same applies to Musks concept, but starting at an order of magnitude lower means that the kind of petty "I'm going to carve a piece from that cake, too" budget overruns should be well within range.
The geography is probably less favourable for Hyperloop in the eastern Australia context (e.g. Sydney is in a basin bordered by low mountains north, south and west), whereas the route it would follow in California is mostly flat?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World's_busiest_passenger_air_r...
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.
Even a Ford F150 truck only weighs 2 tons.
Otherwise very, very cool.
The only thing I really dislike so far is the battery pack in the pod. I would have wanted to see something more elegant instead. And this way we halve the weight of the pod.
Perhaps the redundant vacuum pumps are spaced frequently enough that the power transfer problem would be easy, but I doubt it.
I've only had time to skim the full PDF, but there's something about experiencing 0.5g of acceleration - unsure if that is a constant or if that is simply right at the very beginning.
If you're going to experience 0.5g of acceleration over a prolonged period, letting passengers get up and move about is going to be a bad idea. It also doesn't look like there's enough roof to get about in that capsule. 0.5g doesn't sound like a lot until you think about it as 50% of your body weight tacked on, in a direction you're not used to having it tacked on. Pretty simple in a seat, much less simple trying to walk.
If the top speed is 700mph then you'd have 142 seconds of 0.5 g acceleration to get to top speed. How often you'd be accelerating or decelerating would depend on how many intermediate stations there are.
That's not how vectors work. It's only 11% extra weight. If its reasonably smooth, that's easy walking.
The problem with the images of the Hyperloop interior is that it looks very much unlike anything you currently find in trains. It looks more like the inside of a race car – with a belt and all – and it doesn’t look like you are supposed to get up and walk around. It doesn’t seem as though there is enough space for that. Maybe that’s just some designer having an unnecessary flight of fancy (but that doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the design if it’s that badly though out), maybe that’s an inherent downside of the design. Either way, not good.
Smoothness is mostly due to track quality, and is a practical result of design for high-speed running.
At least in Germany WiFi sucks and is not available everywhere – and even if it is you have to be lucky and actually be in a train that supports it. In general seats are most definitely more comfortable in longer distance trains. Yeah, you can find a seat that’s less comfortable in a long distance train than in a regional train, sure, but that’s hardly the point, is it?!
And electrical outlets are getting more common, sure, but the vast majority of German regional trains does not have them and you can only be certain that there will one in a high speed train.
WiFi varies a lot from country to country — some places you're lucky to get it on any train, others it's becoming coming common on even regional trains; seats on a lot of the older ICE2 sets were really quite terrible prior to their recent refurbishment, and a lot of IC trains in Germany had far better seats; electrical outlets differ from place to place — the TGV Duplex will never have power outlets at all seats, for example, despite being a high speed train, as there simply isn't sufficient power spare to provide them, and as another example in the UK it depends far more on rolling stock age (or refurbishment date) than whether it's a long-distance train or not.
and if you go to the bathroom right before takeoff, you'll delay the flight.
The meta point: If you can't plan around a 30-minute window of no bathroom access, that biological restriction is a bigger concern than arriving at your destination quickly.
For the advantage of a short journey people will put up with it, especially if it can get you to the centre of the city rather than an airport on the outskirts.
Translation, it's going to cost more than $20.
Try LA to Sydney in coach.
Plus, with a car you'd have a 7-8 hour journey to look into.
And with an (equally cramped if not worse) plane you'll have more traval time than in this scheme, if you include waiting to depart, the lengthy procedures at the airport and getting to the airport in the first place.
It's a failure of the onboard steam tanks that scares me. ("The steam is stored onboard until reaching the station. Water and steam tanks are changed automatically at each stop")
I don't want to think about what the result of that would look like for the cleanup crew. Eeeewww.
They're just gonna have to send in a crew of astronauts to chisel the freeze-dried human stew off the inside of the tube.
The failure mode for composite overwrap pressure vessels is a slow leak, due to the overwrap containing the metal.
The current design has the passengers in an enclosed capsule in between the compressors and the batteries, with a pressurized air channel running right down the center isle.
Keeping the cabin cool will be a challenge. If that emergency braking is activated, it could get a little warm in there before they are rescued.
I think they may have to quickly repressurize the loop if a car ever gets stuck.
The pressure ratio for the compressors in the CFM56 engines in current model 737-800 models is 32.8:1, so somewhere in the neighborhood of 400-500 psi (will depend a lot on altitude).
Seriously, we've been building machinery to operate safely in this pressure and temperature range for a long time.
Engines do fail on passenger jetliners from time to time. There are numerous stories of planes landing safely after an engine catches fire. But the plane is travelling at a good speed through the atmosphere. How would things be different in a much smaller vehicle sitting stationary in a mild vacuum?
How would passengers escape a battery fire? (as has been seen multiple times on very modern jets)
If the tube had to be repressurized in an emergency, how long would the tube be out of service to be pumped back down again?
Is it worth building a three tube system for such a possibility?
I have to wonder, would making the capsule the size of a small subway car completely destroy the economics of it?
It seems that detecting failures of this nature quickly would be the important thing. The fix looks to be relatively easy, though you would cause a major disruption to the whole Loop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_South_Dakota_Learjet_cras...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armstrong_Limit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_of_useful_consciousness
Also look at the TUC (time of useful consciousness) that it´s below 5 secs when flying that high. That means that you have less than 5 secs to put your oxigen mask on before you lose conciousness, or behave with out knowing what is happening. Also due to the extreme low pressure, you´ll have a horrible a horrible stomach ache due to the expansion of the gases inside you. Your blood (or at least the corporal fluids exposed directly to the low pressure) will start boiling.
Not funny. Maybe one solution could be wearing some kind of pressure suit for this trips. But that is not going to be very convinient..
At or above the Armstrong limit, exposed bodily liquids
such as saliva, tears, and the liquids wetting the alveoli
within the lungs — but not vascular blood (blood within the
circulatory system) — will boil away without a pressure suit
The Armstrong Limit is at 62,000 feet. Jetliners fly at below 45,000 feet.
http://www.google.be/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=...
You got to think that a decompression will happen. Something traveling that fast inside a tube is probable to develope vibrations and material fatigue if something is not working properly (like the compressor or a air cushion), also there can be small parts released from the front pod impacting on the next one.
It doesn´t need to be a huge crash, just a crack on the hull, it will decompress that small pod in seconds.
Also what will happen when of tens of pods traveling that fast, find that there is a sudden recompression of the tube? How fast are they going to stop due to the front overpressure (the compressor is relatively low powered)?. Is not going to be a gentle stop either.
I still think that it´s a great idea, and that there will be ways of solving those problems, but it´s going to be difficult and require lots of R&D.
The passenger plus vehicle version of the Hyperloop will depart as often as the passenger only version, but will accommodate 3 vehicles in addition to the passengers. [p12]
The passenger plus vehicle version of the Hyperloop capsule has an increased frontal area of 43 ft2 (4.0 m2 ), not including any propulsion or suspension components. This accounts for enough width to fit a vehicle as large as the Tesla Model X. [p15]
Tubes would be bigger, and the system would cost more.
Edit: First article - http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-08-12/revealed-elo...
Edit2: Site OP linked to is up, but may be cached for you. Try http://www.spacex.com/hyperloop?1
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/05/business/la-fi-0506-...
Take for instance, the DC metro system. There is an expansion underway to extend the system west to Dulles Airport, about 30 miles or so from downtown DC. A huge project, no doubt, but it is about ten years behind schedule. What was a seemingly great idea (mass transit to a major airport and outlying regions of DC) was almost ruined by all the fighting.
This is for a project spanning 30 miles. Imagine the politics and fighting that occurs between politicians, contractors, lobbyists, and residents on a public works project that spans hundreds of miles between two of the most populous cities in the world.
A project this ambitious is only well-suited for a small, independent group of like-minded people, which unfortunately will never be possible with all the interests involved.
I see no reason that boarding a plane cant be as efficent or almost as efficent as getting on a train.
I don't know if that's a good reason, but that's the reason.
Of course in the contract you have to agree that its ok with you that if the plane does get hijacked its ok with you to shut it down.
They both have right-of-way issues, but what land-based project doesn't?
That's my main point- land-based projects are a nightmare to coordinate. I would actually think the DC metro would be one of the easier to get done because it receives federal funding.
(1) yes, a change could be an absolute net win for everybody, but it cannot be a relative win for everybody. In many cases, people will prefer to have less, as long as 'the others' have even less.
That's a bit of an exaggeration. Construction was scheduled to begin in 2005 and actually got started in 2009 [0]. Also, Metro is something of a special case in general with the system spanning 2 states and the District while having no dedicated source of funding [1].
0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Line_(Washington_Metro)#...
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Metropolitan_Area_Tr...
So the question is not whether projects like this can happen, but rather whether politicians in the USA can be beaten into allowing them to happen there.
Ugh. That only seems feasible if back-scatter scanners are the only option (but would you still have to take your belt off and put all metal in a little bowl?).
Such machines are still in use and besides, neither machine machine has provably been better than plain old metal detectors.
Knives or even guns would only pose a problem to the few passengers in the capsule with you (yeah, you might be able to shoot a hole through the tube, but it would take a LONG TIME for a bullet hole to let in enough air to affect the pressure in a LA-SF-sized tube).
It's not like you can hijack the thing. :-)
* Structural requirements
The hyperloop has much less structural requirements than a traditional train. The reason is that its cars are separated, so it is 'less dense'. If a train goes over an overpass, the overpass has to be engineered to carry the weight of the rail and the train, whereas the hyperloop only has to handle the weight of the tube (30m between pylons at about 8 tons/m is 240 tons plus the negligible weight of the capsule).
The upshot of this is that the pylons can be much less invasive on the real-estate requirements. This is important because now you have more choices with regards to routes, which leads to less curvature and higher speeds. Looking at it from the reverse angle, High Speed Rail design suffered because the massive real-estate requirements imposed such a burden that route choices were compromised, and thus the projected travel time was lengthened.
* Tube manufacture.
It occurs to me that there already exists expertise in manufacturing elevated, highly reliable large diameter steel tubes hundreds of miles long. Oil pipelines. Moreover, these companies perhaps would be interested in diversifying their business away from oil.
* Development
High Speed Rail has issues, but they are political and financial, not technological. We're really just buying the technology from other countries. Much of the cost and the incredibly lengthy construction time for HSR is coming from building overpasses and the foundations for the rail, so far as I can tell.
But hyperloop is something that requires some development. This is a good thing because investors can sell that technology and get some return. It's difficult to attract private funding for HSR, but I can definitely see someone stepping forward to fund the development of the technology.
Pretty much once someone builds the hyperloop demonstration system, you'll know if you have a winner on your hands, but with HSR, you don't know if you'll be successful until the whole thing is built (and with a 2:30 travel time LA->SF, it's not going to be a slam dunk against air).
There are plenty opposed to HSR, but I see very few alternative solutions being proposed. This might be something those opposed to HSR jump onto, and it might get a lot of support quickly.
Shameless plug of the day :) So far it does not break too much of the laws of physics and is indeed workable.
I would love to see this happen though, and to see Elon become a trillionaire.
My main concern is the air-bearing suspension system. Barring very high flow rates, the fly-height of an air-bearing system is very small. Some systems[1] fly at 5 microns, for instance. That being the case, any sort of particulate or imperfections in the tube will cause the air-bearing to 'land' with a large amount of friction. Perhaps this is alright if you're already going 700mph, but it would reduce the overall coasting efficiency of the system.
The engineer in me sees this as the most important design consideration of the project.
As an aside, I would like to see trade studies done on filling the tube with other gasses whose speed of sound is much higher than air's, allowing the capsules to travel even faster before shocks begin to form.
[1] http://www.newwayairbearings.com/products/flat-rectangular-a...
I don't think this is a good idea for production use, because then you have to worry about air leaks to/from the passenger compartment.
As it is, you still have to guard against explosive decompression for the passengers.
Your gut feeling is probably right, though, at least for this length of trip. The increased cost of a different tube gas probably won't outweigh the benefits of arriving 5-10 minutes earlier.
Now if there were a cross-continent Hyperloop system, then for segments of the trip it might be much better to have a different gas. But again, it might simply be better to invest in better vacuum pumps for certain legs of the journey to get lower drags and higher speeds.
The only ones I see that are significantly higher than nitrogen/oxygen are methane, hydrogen, and helium.
Helium is mondo-expensive. It's not cheap even in welding-tank quantities, much less in the amounts you'd need here.
Hydrogen is flammable and/or explosive (depending on mixture) and is a huge pain in the butt to keep confined (so is helium).
Methane is cheap (but not as cheap as air :-)), and we have lots of experience with keeping it confined in big pipes. However, it's also flammable or explosive.
Using anything but air is going to require some sort of complicated replenishment/purging system and an air lock at both ends, whereas air leaks just require pumping it out again.
Krypton -> 2505mph
Xenon -> 2,438mph
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=speed+of+sound+in+neon
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=speed+of+sound+in+krypt...
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=speed+of+sound+in+xenon
But even Neon (which is more abundant in the atmosphere than Helium) would cost ridiculous amounts of money to use.
High Speed Rail between downtown LA and downtown SF:
2 hours, 28 minutes
Hyperloop trip between downtown LA and downtown SF:
1 hour from LA to Sylmar via Metrolink
20 minute transfer
35 minutes to Dublin
20 minute transfer
1 hour 10 minutes from Dublin to SF via BART
Total: 3 hours 25 minutes
The project also doesn't even attempt to price the connection into LA or SF. That's where the high costs are.
Amusingly enough, the California HSR budget for the Central Valley is under $10 billion. Ie, in the same ball-park as this proposal. The reason the HSR project is going to cost $60 billion is because it has to face an uncomfortable truth; actually getting to LA and SF is expensive. Very expensive.
Is Elon Musk's s mega-announcement really just a last-ditch attempt to sabotage the California High Speed Rail (HSR) project, rather than a serious proposal to revolution travel? Something smells very fishy.
The motive is clearly there.
First of all, I think it's genius how nobody saw this solution coming, despite all the speculation. Put the air compressor on the pod, and use Tesla's battery technology to power it. Seems evident in hindsight.
My biggest gripe is the non-inherent safety and thus the security issues. The evacuated tube is a real issue in my mind, and saying it will be re-pressurized in case of an accident seems dubious. Yes, like a modern jet, but planes can descend to 15,000 and people live. Also, planes don't fly at 150,000 feet (the pressure equivalent in the tube) and there may be other biological hazards other than breathing. But mainly, the vehicles are subject to the same exterior threats as airplanes, so security will need to be similar. In addition the tubes are also a target of threats, which is less of an issue with trains and not an issue with planes.
My takeaway is that while the 7 billion fixed costs will be low, the operating costs are going to be huge.
Battery packs and solar cells will need replacement. Large maintenance teams will be needed with immediate response times to fix issues such as complete seal blowouts, etc.
I think the first few years will be great! But in my opinion maintaining this system over the long term will be very, very expensive compared to slower rail.
I'm still optimistic that most of these and other issues will be worked out in the long term.
EDIT: Did he post what this tube will be made out of? How will he prevent solar degradation?
At a first look I didn't get that the proposed passenger capsule would be so small. That's pretty cramped.
Edit: Isn't the the ft to m conversion for the height wrong?
If the feet are correct, (6.11 ft), then it should be 1.86m, not 1.10m (or 2.10m as you suggest.)
If the meters are correct (1.10m), it should be 3.61 ft (not 6.11 ft).
Mind blown.
Edit: yes I was referring to the power to sustain a vacuum in a leaky system, of course no power is required to maintain a vacuum in a perfectly sealed system :)
It doesn't require any power, if there are no leaks. The power required will be determined by the amount of leakage that is considered tolerable to the system.
But in my experience, small mechanical leaks are usually of the order of a hPa or so, meaning no high vacuum tech will be needed. Just a fleet of giant blowers and mechanical pumps. (I worked on a wide area sputtering machine for a few years with a few hundred HP of mechanical backing pumps for about a hundred foot long chamber with a 10 sq foot average cross section (order of magnitude error for anonymity ;)) The machine would haul down to 10 or 1 hPa with leaks you could _hear_.
So yeah, it could work practically, especially if it's a welded system and not a giant mess of bolts and o-rings.
It made an awesome sound when it ground into the atmospheric pressure on initial pumpdown, but at about 1/100 atmo it got bored (mere minutes), and without additional high speed stages the mechanical pumps would backwash at 1/10000 atmo (though it would take a while to get from 1 hPa to 0.1 hPa, many multiples of the time it to to get from 100 hPa to 1 hPa).
Edit: fixed units (0.001hPa is still leaky for base pressures but a completely different thing from 0.001atm).
I also second the great sound they made. It was like 2 very angry horses going 'Brahbrahbrahbrahbrahrbah...' getting quieter all the time.
If the system will be welded together that'll reduce the leaks quite a bit and the maintenance too, which I think will be the biggest problem. It's not making it work, it's keeping the thing working that will eat up the costs. Eventually, as the thing ages, you'll have bigger and bigger leaks. Figuring out how to deal with that will be a moon-shot on it's own.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigging#Intelligent_pigging
Or you just slam another plate on the outside, glue/weld it up and just sorta not worry about it. Heavy pumping covers a multitude of leaks.
Pinholes might be repairable by pressing a sapphire drift against the leak and melting the metal underneath by shining a laser through.
I mention in another reply that Mr. Musk also has plans that involve vacuum differences and not a lot of wiggle room. On a trip to Mars a robot hull fixing machine would sure be nice to have.
On the other side, Mr Musk gains a hell lot of know-how about plugging vacuum leaks quick, reliably and possibly automatically. Where do you think that might come in handy? Hmmm, on trip to Mars maybe?
The machine was so big that it was easy to forget where it was, which o-ring had the clear super glue on it (after a few weeks it was covered in plant filth anyhow, the tags were lost, and too many of the seals had sharpie Xs on them to trust anyhow). It was MASH's meatball surgery, but with low energy plasma physics instead.
I ab-so-freaking-lutely guarantee they will use gorilla glue on the Hyperloop once leak failures become boring and routine. Or super glue. Or giant sheets of Kapton.
Eventually, it'll all add up.
I'm reminded of this water slide at the Gold Coast's Wet and Wild - you end up going upside down - but in order to attain the velocity required to make the loop, you need to be dropped from a particular height, only some people don't make it - so they have a single access point into the tube where people who haven't made it, can get out, but I'm sure it wouldn't be a fun experience, so I opted for not going on that slide, even though my kids were pleading with me to do it. No thanks.
The hyperloop looks amazing, but my heart rate went up reading that document, and it wasn't out of excitement
Serious question BTW, I'm not sure what exactly ADA mandates.
Now, I am sure that some variations on the system (have one row with only one chair for obese or no chair to allow people with wheelchair) would increase the % of people that can use the hyperloop.
After she returned home she said that she really had enjoyed the trip, especially the trip on "the old, historical train".
She was talking about Amtrak.
Also, with a 35-minute trip time, these concerns are well within the realm of "hold it" till the next stop.
You're stuck in the "long trip" "it's like a train" framework.
It is neither.
Schedule: http://www.mta.info/nyct/bus/schedule/xpress/x001cur.pdf
In peak hour it would probably be fine, when everyone is fairly sensible and not drunk. But after hours, I've had quite a few uncomfortable bus rides due to the various anti-social behaviours of fellow passengers. That was with the hand-brake of a driver who obviously isn't getting involved, but can avoid escalating behaviour by stopping the bus or calling authorities.
I have great faith in the technology! I just wish I had as much faith in the people riding inside it :)
Seriously? It's like laying in a not quite horizontal bed for 30 minutes. If you can't plan your bathroom usage 30 minutes ahead of time, then don't use this transportation system (or wear a diaper). I can almost always hold it for 30 minutes after I am really feeling the urge to go. With 12-14 million trips per year, will there be accidents? Certainly. So that capsule gets diverted to be cleaned. Big deal.
> At least on BART you can move away from the crazy
It looks like those spaces are small enough that only 1 person could easily interact with you. If that's a problem, they could probably build in plastic dividers. Or you could just buy two tickets. If you can't tolerate that level of risk, then again, don't ride this thing.
I can assure you that there are plenty of people who are not bothered by these issues.
There are not earthquakes in Brazil and the length should be around 500km. It seems like a better candidate than SF-LA.
just saying,
Sure there will be private contractors but is there really any private interest in building and/or operating high speed rail in CA? Perhaps Hyperloop will change things but so far it has been government led and financed.
More potential passengers in the latter, more potential passenger revenue in the former.
> Brazilians may be poorer today but they are catching up fast.
Per capita GDP in Brazil is less than 1/3 of that in California, and is increasing at about 1.7%/annum (2.7% GDP growth, 0.9% population growth); assuming no growth in California GDP per capita, it would take Brazil more than 65 years to catch up.
It's probably moot comparison anyway as best I can tell the Brazil HSR is not going to happen. There have even been giant protests over transportation and government spending.
I'm also pretty skeptical that CA HSR will actually get built - numbers don't add up and popularity is declining. If they can build and operate the Bakersfield to Fresno segment on schedule and budget it might have a chance - but I have doubts they can even do this.
São Paulo - Rio is actually the 3rd most busy airplane route in the world. With over 7.7M passengers in 2012. [1]
[1] http://www.amadeus.com/web/amadeus/en_US-US/Amadeus-Home/New...
http://jacquesmattheij.com/elon-musk-and-the-hyperloop
Looks like I nailed most of it. So, who is going to build a proof-of-concept scale model of this thing a few kilometers long?
Tunnel is pressurised - wrong.
Use of the word "loop" means that something is 'recycled' - wrong.
Parallel tracks used for acceleration - wrong.
Carriages help push each other - wrong.
Internet analogy - wrong.
Summary: scaled up pneumatic tube - wrong.
The total trip time is approximately half an hour, with capsules
departing as often as every 30 seconds from each terminal and carrying 28
people each. This gives a total of 7.4 million people each way that can be
transported each year on Hyperloop. The total cost of Hyperloop in this
analysis is under $6 billion USD. Amortizing this capital cost over 20 years and
adding daily operational costs gives a total of about $20 USD (in current year
dollars) plus operating costs per one-way ticket on the passenger Hyperloop.
For aerodynamic efficiency, the velocity of a capsule in the Hyperloop is
- typically: 300 mph (480 kph) where local geography necessitates a tube bend radii
< 1.0 mile (1.6 km)
- 760 mph (1,220 kph) where local geography allows a tube bend > 3.0
miles (4.8 km) or where local geography permits a straight tube.A country like America today...who knows?
This plan has the perfect mix of reasonably practical yet slightly unsettlingly new and unfamiliar. It is just the sort of thing that meaningfully evolutionary changes are built on, like airliners or cross-country trains or steam-powered ships. If America builds this, great! If not, watch for which country does and move there post-haste!
nm, they fixed it
http://mappery.com/maps/Los-Angeles-California-Transportatio...
My only guess would be to build it vertically. . which is were everything is going anyways, right?
2 minutes is all you have - to detect the situation, make a decision, then stop.
We have become risk averse. No grand sweeping visions of building interesting infrastructure like TVA, the Interstate (though that was poorly implemented in many areas), etc.
There is enough traffic to support it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World's_busiest_passenger_air_r...
Not going to happen, but would be awesome if it did.
Only a small point. Other than to display ghastly advertising, why not a dumb monitor that interfaces with your phone/tablet? It's not like you're going to be able to watch a movie. And if we're seven years into the future on this, I'll be wearing my Oculus Rift 4.0 anyway.
Maybe I'm just too disillusioned by the systems used in aircrafts with their awful interfaces, lag, etc.
* I don't think the Hyperloop is viable and I hope they kill the $100B High Speed Rail (HSR) project before it ruins the SF Peninsula and budgets across the state.
* Setting aside the $100B HSR cost (yes, I know current estimates are $70B but it was sold at $10B and will easily exceed $100B if/when completed) the operating costs will have to be subsidized for every minute of its existence just like every other govt boondoggle. This is a white elephant and, in case you weren't paying attention, California and most cites are or soon will be bankrupt. We can't afford this, cut our losses now.
* If I was made Bay Area/CA public transportation csar (with suitable budget and dictatorial powers) my first step would be to extend BART through San Jose so it actually loops the bay and (finally) complete BART. (I am old enough to recall that that was the original design)
* I do think a high speed rail connection SF/LA is economically viable but would need to do research and crunch numbers while finishing BART. I would move the SJC airport south (with a BART extension) to Morgan Hill/South San Jose and build the connection from there to LA.
* From SJ to LA I would confiscate I5, leave two lanes for truckers and local traffic but build a high speed (300MPH) car/ferry train system so you could be blasted to LA in a little over an hour and have your car there when you arrive. Home by dinner.
* I would build a nuclear plant somewhere halfway between LA and SF on I5 so my trains would not have to use diesel fuel (too smoggy) or solar (too expensive).
Nothing here is any less fanciful than Musk's musings and far, far more practical.
Source: http://live.theverge.com/live-hyperloop-announcement-elon-mu...
Love the idea but the cost projections here seem extremely optimistic.
He says they will cool it with on-board water and storing the steam (I don't see a pressure here)in the vehicle. Given the tight space, will any kind of thermal insulation breakthrough be needed?
What about freight?
* OC -> SF -- Left at 3pm, took 9.5hrs to drive * SF -> OC -- Left at 9pm, took 7 hours to drive
There is random night construction as well as detours and traffic to worry about on I-5. Half an hour would be a no-brainer, even if it only went so far as downtown LA.
If I tried to do it in 5.5 hours in the real world, with traffic, I'm pretty sure I'd get arrested at some point.
The real problem, even once you add self-driving cars, is I-5's limited capacity.
Airline tickets would be pretty cheap if all they were paying was the 20-year amortized capital cost of the airplanes + airports, too.
Better:
RMS is rolling over in his -- oh wait, he's still alive.
How about a ReST or LaTeX document that generates this PDF?
Interesting. No comment on the potential outcome of a passenger-filled capsule being ejected from a burst tube on high pylons at 350mph.
I would totally ride this. I hope there's a way for California to build it, and more importantly, I hope we can fix our government somehow to allow projects like this to actually happen in multiple fields.
Seriously though, this would be an incredible project to work on. I wonder, outside of Elon Musk, who would take on the challenge?
I can also imagine that from an infrastructure standpoint building across desert you'd run into fewer obstacles, although that might be wishful / oversimplified thinking.
But the solar power mechanism would definitely be more viable in the desert.
Do you just keep going? Stop the Fire suppression systems?
Given any worst-case scenario.. how do you escape from the tunnel?
Cost is probably off by an order of magnitude, if not more. Why? Unions and other groups. Building anything in this country costs massively more (and takes significantly longer) than one could imagine because of our unions are not business symbiotic. The goal of union leadership is to extract as much as they can out of the businesses they infect, even if this means their demise.
A lot of the unions that would be part of such a project have some of the laziest and most problematic people working for them. If you come from the Silicon Valley tech world my words make no sense to you. In fact, you might think I am nuts. All I have to say is: Do a good size trade show exhibit at a few of the unionized convention centers in the US and then see what you think about US unions. Then repeat that experience at various locations in Europe and Japan and see the difference. I have done just that. US labor unions are destroying our country from the inside out.
How many significant new civil engineering projects in the US can you name over the last, say, fifty years. Right.
Hyperloop cost would be way more than this paper seems to predict.
The political factor is grossly underestimated. Our reality is that we live at a time of political deadlock. Nobody can or wants to make a decision and the decisions we do make tend to be suboptimal, sometimes grotesquely so: example, California high speed rail.
Finally, it addresses the wrong market. I am not sure why people insist on applying trains to transporting people in the US. Sorry to resort to reality folks: If you build it they will NOT come. We do not have that culture and you will not inspire it simply by building trains. You'd have to forcefully push people in that direction through legislation that would make it too expensive to not use rail. In other words you'd have to declare war against other methods of transportation through punitive actions.
The right place for high speed rail in the US is cargo, not passenger rail. If we could evolve our cargo rail systems to move at 300 km/hr rather than 50 the consequences would provide economic benefits and development beyond a century.
The final point is related to politics. We have a decision making system that allows anyone to vote. And, while this is commendable, it does create horrible problems. Imagine allowing a random group of, say, ten people deciding whether or not your child should have surgery. I'd be surprised if anyone thought this to be a good idea. No, most people would rather have a group of experts in the field, more than likely MD's in this case, vote for such a decision. The ridiculous California high speed rail project is a result of hordes of low-information, mathematically challenged, technologically ignorant and financially ignorant voters being led by the nose by unions, media and political forces.
How do you move forward when people like that can vote on these issues and their vote has equal value to that of an expert in the relevant fields: a PhD in Physics, an engineer, a financial expert, etc.
Regrettably this is not a technological problem. It is far more complex than that.
Musk is in the car industry, one of the hardest hurt by unions and their ilk, so I would find it hard to believe that he didn't take that into account.
> Finally, it addresses the wrong market. I am not sure why people insist on applying trains to transporting people in the US. Sorry to resort to reality folks: If you build it they will NOT come. We do not have that culture and you will not inspire it simply by building trains.
Again, Musk is building and selling electric cars in a country that LOVES gas guzzlers. His track record would suggest that he knows what he's doing.
> Regrettably this is not a technological problem. It is far more complex than that.
I don't know why you think that this paper/concept only addresses technological issues, because it is clearly much more broad in scope than that.
That is irrelevant. He did not go into Tesla honoring the contracts that were put into place by GM, Ford, Chrysler and others. Those companies actually have tens of thousands of very well paid workers sitting around --literally-- all day doing nothing due to union contracts dealing with automation and other issues. He, in other words, did not experience the almost surreal lunacy that the full union experience can be.
I'll give you an example of this. Las Vegas Convention Center. Trade show. Small booth, 20 x 20 ft. I needed the lights on top of my booth turned off so that I could control my own lighting. No problem, we can do it for $360 per light. I asked what was involved. The response was that they'd have to throw a switch. Same thing at the RAI in Amsterdam. Free. Same thing in Munich (forgot the name of the venue), free. Same thing in New York City, $400.
Want another example? Again, Las Vegas Convention Center. I could not hookup my own computers. Somehow, magically, once you enter union-land the engineers who actually design the equipment are suddenly incapable of properly connecting equipment into power outlets. No, union electricians have to wire your booth at a massive fee. If you screw around with them they will literally use mafia techniques and shutdown your booth without so much as a hint in the middle of a show. I've seen it happen.
So, yes, again, just because the science is brilliant it does not mean it can be built. I've made that mistake before. I've dealt with city and state governments. I have sold product to the US government as well. I have equipment in places like the White Sands Missile Test Range and other notable spots. In some cases things flow smoothly. This is ALWAYS --and I do mean ALWAYS- the case when unions are not involved. If unions are involved, watch out! Enter surreal nightmare. The only way to have it not be surreal and not be a nightmare is to have some kind of an in or pay off the right people. What, that doesn't happen in the US? Please.
> Again, Musk is building and selling electric cars in a country that LOVES gas guzzlers. His track record would suggest that he knows what he's doing.
Tesla sells 20K cars per year to folks who can afford an $80,000 car. I love what they are doing. I am waiting for their SUV's and will likely buy two of them. But, please, don't make the comparison you just made. The other car companies are selling nearly A THOUSAND TIMES more cars than Tesla per year.
He does know what he is doing. I did not say he is not. I am simply proposing that the Hyperloop might be brilliant on paper but, barring a political, labor, fiscal, environmental and who-knows-what-else miracle it has zero probability of ever being built beyond, perhaps, a very expensive test setup.
>I don't know why you think that this paper/concept only addresses technological issues, because it is clearly much more broad in scope than that.
I don't think it addresses enough of the real world issues. When everything else is cleared off the table you still have to build it in the real world. And I think that's where the real problems lie, not in the science.
The proposal is to use elevated tube on pylons. The pylons are likely to be of a regular design, probably made with steel molds. The amount of skilled labor to build them is likely to be much less than building overpasses.
Musk has said that the tubes would be built in 30m segments in a factory, and welded in place. Given Musk's experience with robot assembly at Tesla (watch http://kottke.org/13/07/how-the-tesla-model-s-is-made), my guess is that much of the construction of the tubes, and the rebar mesh for the pylons will be automated.
Making stuff in your factory as much as possible means you can automate more. It doesn't eliminate the labor, but it does reduce it a long way.
I asked a question in my post. Can you name any new major civil engineering project in the US in the last fifty years? Refurbishing an existing project does not count. I am talking about something major, say, a new conventional railroad.
The reality is that these kinds of projects are just-about impossible to realize given our political and, yes, labor framework. So, yes, unions are very relevant because it matters not if the physics of the project is brilliant and utterly peer reviewed. The various externalities I mentioned almost guarantee that it cannot built.
I'd love to be wrong.
Boston's Big Dig (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_big_dig)?
Yes, the Big Dig cost a lot of money. More than expected. It was still worth it.
New San Francisco Bay Bridge. (No, it's not a refurbish -- it's a completely separate bridge with a separate design to replace the existing Eastern span.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_span_replacement_of_the...
It only supports my point. It's 2.2 miles long. Construction started in 2002. It was supposed to open in 2007. It will not open until the end of this year. Total cost is currently at six billion.
The Hyperloop is 400 miles long, will be built in seven years and will cost six billion.
See my point now?
I don't think it supports your point that US unions are destroying the country. That's complete hyperbole.
Cost overruns can be attributed to many factors, the largest being that they're usually underestimated on purpose to sell the idea in the first place.
Trying to compare the actual cost of actual projects with the first projected cost of an ideal, untested project is a bit silly, don't you think?
Not really. I would never estimate a six billion dollar cost for anything involving placing massive pylons on the center of the Golden State highway for four hundred miles.
It's the difference between reality and wishful thinking.
Look, I already said that I'd rather spend the sixty billion allocated for the bullshit high speed train on the Hyperloop. In other words, I am not saying we cannot build it. I am saying it will cost far more, take longer and be far more difficult (not technologically but unions, special interest groups and plain politics) than stated in the pdf.
Most of the interstate highway system, any number of lakes, many major bridges, the completed portion of the superconducting supercollider underground chambers, the brilliant Alaska pipeline pylon system, Florida's long elevated marine highways, the Norfolk (?) tunnel, the NYC aqueduct, most major airport runways.
What man has done he may aspire to do again.
These things move in cycles. Political patronage projects currently are in vogue, but their star is falling. You cannot credibly claim that unions will make any LA-SF project cost $100B, because Mr. Bond Market is about to have a mountain comes to Mohammed moment. At some point the market for rational projects will reopen for a few decades, like it does from time to time.
Elon Musk is just the man to make it happen. He already killed the Space Shuttle program and its standing army of $1B/yr payroll patronage jobs. Extending that to other projects is a matter of will and personality.
Largely agree with the rest of your comment though :)
Also, the highway through the Keys has seen very large infrastructure improvements over the last few decades, so while not a new project it is a significant civil engineering effort.
What did Musk have to do with Space Shuttle program cancellation? I thought it collapsed under its own weight - disasters, costs, slowness etc. Please provide links if any.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig
Expensive != impossible.
California is ready to spend $70. billion. dollars.... On a much slower technology rail platform.
The death toll during the (later) American phase of construction was dramatically lower, not because of unions. Here is the article you are looking for: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_measures_during_the_cons...
The "union solution" would have been to not dig the damn thing at all.
But think about how many aspects of our lives it would revolutionize. Simple example: can you imagine what would happen to the SF real estate market if it suddenly had to compete with the LA real estate market? If talented people who live in LA could suddenly commute to and from companies in SF?
And that's just real estate.
I eventually threw it away. Every time I saw it I was reminded of the huge chasm between ideas and their realization. Sure, if you knew you could not fail you'd do anything. "What would you do if you were Superman?. Same thing. Things are different in the real world.
So, how would LA/SFO change if we had Star Trek transporters?
Not sure. My guess is, not much. SFO real estate is about living in SFO. Just like Santa Monica real estate is about living there. The same being true about Beverly Hills or Hollywood.
The HUGE problem something like the Hyperloop has to deal with are the stations. You can't declare that you are going to have one every ten miles. The real world doesn't work that way. If I have to drive an hour to get to downtown Los Angeles (a place I personally avoid as much as possible) it is nearly a deal-breaker for me. Not interested. I'd rather get on a plane in Burbank.
The nature of Los Angeles is that the talented people you are referring to don't all live within biking distance of a Hyperloop station. Los Angeles talent is seriously dispersed all over the place. I know people who would be interested in working at SpaceX yet don't pursue it because it would take them two hours to get there in real-world traffic and they can't move because their kids go to good schools where they live.
Ultimately, I think that anyone who wants to work in SFO needs to move there or to a surrounding city.
I insist that cargo is where high speed rail belongs in our country. I don't see it happening for passenger transport.
Well, no. You would not do anything. You would only do the things that the prospect of failure is currently stopping you from doing. The underlying idea is that things can be worth doing even if you end up failing at them. In fact, this is an idea Elon Musk embraces very closely. He has admitted in interviews that when he starts pursuing an idea, he knows that the most likely result is failure. Yet he pursues it anyway. The end result is that we have PayPal and Tesla and SpaceX.
>>The nature of Los Angeles is that the talented people you are referring to don't all live within biking distance of a Hyperloop station.
They don't all have to live within biking distance of a Hyperloop station. It is sufficient even if only some of them do. That's still several thousand talented people you're talking about.
Furthermore, you are not considering the economics of it very thoroughly. Flying from LA to SF currently takes 3+ hours. You drive to the airport, go through security, board the plane, deal with occasional delays, and then when you get to your destination you have to wait for luggage. On top of this, it costs around $100.
Consider an alternative involving Hyperloop. Even if you live within 30 minute driving distance of it, you would still get to SF in a little over an hour and for only $20.
http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/08/01/statistics-co...
To be clear, I am not one to say that unions are not necessary. I think they most definitely are in a number of industries. I am also not saying that union membership is evil in any way. A good deal of union workers are nice hard working people who are only after stability and a decent wage in their lives. Nothing wrong with that.
The problem is that our unions have become monsters that have gobbled-up massive amounts of resources to the point of bankrupting companies and cities and making every US taxpayer liable for the benefits they have extracted. Union leadership AND the industry or government representatives they sit down to negotiate with are the evil in the system.
And, yet again, I am not sure I can even place the blame on union representatives. What's their job? To extract as many benefits as possible from the employers to the benefit of the membership. They do, and have done, that very well.
So maybe it is a case of a set of systems that have taken an optimization almost to the highest possible level and, as a result, caused a paradox of sorts: At the limit, making things better for members ends-up making things worst because they can cause irreparable damage not just to the company or entity they work for but the the entire "ecosystem" (the town, city or country) that supports them.
In other words, the optimization kills the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Unions need to learn to be better citizens and to truly understand and partner with businesses. Then, and only then, everyone wins.
There's two sides to this coin. Businesses don't have a very good track record of treating their employees well without some outside influence like government or unions.
By the way, this comment here reads very differently from and much more reasonably than your "the goal of union leadership is to extract as much as they can out of the businesses they infect, even if this means their demise" rhetoric in the first comment.
Yes, it does. I have no love for unions as they stand today. Tis comes both from personal experience at several levels. I was in a union for a few years and saw the innards of the beast first hand. I saw that the rules they put into place allowed lazy, incompetent and almost useless people earn a wage they did not deserve by any possible measure. I saw management poweless when dealing with such employees, wanting to fire them to hire a worthy replacement and not being able to.
Later in life as I launched into entrepreneurship I dealt with the other side of unions. I got to see just how efficiency, productivity and profit-sapping their rules are. I got to see the dehumanizing and almost surreal culture it develops. Example:
Javitz Convention Center, New York. Asked a union guy to hand me a cord so I could, in turn, hand it to the union electrician working on my booth. The guy refused, "not in my union contract" and walked off. The union electrician told me the I could not handle the powe cord. You know, an extension you buy at Home Depot for $30, nothing special. He had to get down from his ladder to get the extension. He also went out of his way to do it as slowly as he could.
I also saw an entire union crew drop everything amd leave this guy hanging and in fear for his exhibit when he dared to plug a cord into the electrical system in his booth. He was a newbie to unionized US trade shiow crews. They were teaching him a lesson, showing him who the alpha dog was. I had a talk with the poor fellow and shared some of my insight. Several hours later they returned, he apologized and they went to work.
I have never experienced anything even remotely similar to this in Europe in over ten years of doing business with their unions in various countries. If anything they've always gone out of their way to help and get the job done quickly and efficiently. In other words, by American standards you would not have guessed that these European workers were unionized.
So, yes, I do think that our unions, as currently realized and run have been damaging our businesses, towns, cities, schools and the entire country for decades. That does not mean I am proposing they be dissolved or that they have no place in our society, not at all.
US unions won tremendous concessions early on, at horrible costs to their members (a lot of blood was shed) - they were instrumental in laying the ground work for the 8 hour working day (and most of the world celebrate May Day in their honour, and in commemoration of the Haymarket Massacre), but unlike Europe where the workers movement continue to grow in influence and eventually effectively won a place at the table supported by governments friendly to their causes that forced business to learn to work with unions in a completely different way, the antagonism just kept escalating in the US.
If you treat people like shit long enough, they'll do their best to live up to the image you portray of them.
If you do not account for this, you will have no budget left for technology.
Making the design an open source project is a major step towards European style (socialist) unions, where the unions help decide what to do and how to make it succeed.
The difference between European unions and US unions is probably a big part of the reason for the negative connotation of the word "socialist" in the US. If US unions behaved like those in Europe, we would have a more positive connotation.
Please, tell me more.
Look at the union-born gigantic pension issues in California and Illinois. http://www.illinoispolicy.org/blog/blog.asp?ArticleSource=60... or http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-01-29/news/ct-met-su...
Check out what unions did/do to convention centers in Chicago and Las Vegas. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-01-17/business/chi-0...
Look at the pay of BART employees. http://www.mercurynews.com/salaries/bay-area?Entity=Bay%20Ar...
Or is that all just anecdotal as well? I could go on.
“It is impossible to bargain collectively with the government.” - George Meany
If this was done right, why would the unions would be involved with anything other than the pylons?
At 120 miles long[1] compared to the SF<->LA ~350 miles, a UK hyperloop would be even cheaper, especially since the major cost is the tube itself. A back of the envelope calculation[2] gives a cost of about £1.9bn ($2.9bn) which is suspiciously, almost absurdly, cheap.
If anyone can find any flaws in this argument (specifically related to e.g. UK-specific issues/laws that I may be unaware of) I'd be very interested to hear them!
[0] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/revealed-hs2s... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HS2 [2] using average cost values from the pdf, not accounting for differences in pylon height/amount of tunnel required etc.
A 57 page document
I expected mostly fluff.
http://charlesalexander2013.wordpress.com/2013/07/18/hyperlo...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newest http://gingkoapp.com/hyperloop
>All capsules would have direct radio contact with station operators in case of emergencies, allowing passengers to report any incident, to request help and to receive assistance. In addition, all capsules would be fitted with first aid equipment
>Typical times between an emergency and access to a physician should be shorter than if an incident happened during airplane takeoff. In the case of the airplane, the route would need to be adjusted, other planes rerouted, runways cleared, airplane landed, taxi to a gate, and doors opened. An emergency in a Hyperloop capsule simply requires the system to complete the planned journey and meet emergency personnel at the destination.
What happens if a brawl erupts inside a capsule? What happens if a suicide bomber boards the Hyperloop?
What happens if a suicide bomber boards a train or bus?
What happens if a suicide bomber rents a car and crashes it into you as you walk along the sidewalk?
Rather than living in perpetual fear, you could try making the world a place where people who can't get food or work aren't trying to blow you up as a last resort?
Americans seem to be the most worried about suicide bombings out of anybody else, yet America has probably seen the least suicide bombings per capita of any country in the world. (yes, exaggeration)
Humans don't always behave as they're expected to by the engineers of a system. That happens in software, happens in hardware, and in public transportation too.
[EDIT] I think these paragraphs give an idea of how an incident would be handled:
>If a capsule were somehow to become stranded, capsules ahead would continue their journeys to the destination unaffected. Capsules behind the stranded one would be automatically instructed to deploy their emergency mechanical braking systems. Once all capsules behind the stranded capsule had been safely brought to rest, capsules would drive themselves to safety using small onboard electric motors to power deployed wheels.
>All capsules would be equipped with a reserve air supply great enough to ensure the safety of all passengers for a worst case scenario event.
>In the event of a large scale leak, pressure sensors located along the tube would automatically communicate with all capsules to deploy their emergency mechanical braking systems.
>Hyperloop would feature the same high level of security used at airports. However, the regular departure of Hyperloop capsules would result in a steadier and faster flow of passengers through security screening compared to airports. Tubes located on pylons would limit access to the critical elements of the system. Multiple redundant power sources and vacuum pumps would limit the impact of any single element.
Not that I approve of many of the things we do to "prevent" them, but...
Perhaps worrying about preventing certain things sometimes actually helps reduce them?
Spending your time trying to prevent that kind of thing is futile and an enormous waste of resources. See: TSA
What's the point? Bombing this system would be unspectacular, and thus probably unlikely. Terrorists are in it for the spectacle.
Put plastic dividers between all the seats like they have in police cars. Problem solved.
Edited to add: My question was primarily legal - if someone were to step up and demonstrate this was feasible could it possibly make a difference?
No.
> I understand they're in the planning stages, and I don't think it'd be absurd to say "this is a train, just better and cheaper".
This is a hypothetical concept, while HSR is a widely demonstrated, well-established technology, with real vendors with proven situations. There's a lot of civil engineering to go into building the infrastructure, but the technology is there (and isn't still looking forward to "[s]ub-scale testing based on a further optimized design to demonstrate the physics", as is the case with hyperloop.)
Hyperloop as an alternative to HSR is about in the same situation as nuclear fusion as an alternative to wind (or nuclear fission) power. .
But frankly if the project polled well enough, you might be able to make it a reality.
[1] http://www.bart.gov/docs/barttimes/BTimes0707.pdf
[2] http://cahsr.blogspot.com/2009/10/la-sf-nations-second-busie...
http://books.google.com/books?id=DenWKRgqzWMC&pg=PA67&lpg=PA...
These arguments always seem to presuppose that the status quo is optimal, and ignore the limiting cases.
Except that the chairs on a high speed lift have to be so much further apart, so you're not actually getting more people to the top in the same unit of time.
Source: I'm an Engineer and worked on fixed grip (slow) and detachable (fast) chairs and gondolas for 5 seasons.
p.11
At ~850 passengers / hour, Hyperloop seems like it's operating in another realm entirely....
Ironically, at Musk's "projected" low ticket prices (which granted probably aren't anywhere near realistic) and short travel times, one would expect a huge demand for hyperloop, so its relatively low capacity seems like a serious issue...
Why would anyone want to live in LA and commute to SF, or vice versa? Even if ticket prices are low, property prices on both sides are very high. It would make much more sense to build a hyperloop to nowhere economically, and turn that area into a bedroom community.
The bulk of the riders are business people going back and forth for meetings etc, and ordinary people going on holidays and the like. The most insane peak periods are around national holidays, especially long ones like golden-week where the trains are often running at significantly over 100% capacity (I've stood the entire way between Tokyo and Osaka, crammed up against others in the car vestibule...).
You're right that the shinkansen prices are significantly higher, but if anything that demonstrates how great the demand would be for a really cheap service (as Musk seems to be claiming, however dubious that claim may be), and thus how limiting the low projected capacity would be...
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I wouldn't read into that. Musk has said he has no intention of developing it; he probably just needed a place to put it. SpaceX makes as much sense as anything else.
That being said -- hopefully he lied when he said he had no interest, in order to quell speculation until the announcement. Kind of like how Apple says they'll never ever launch certain things... right up until they do it.
[Edit: If anything, this might lead people to take this type of eccentric and radical design more seriously. But given the criticism Musk's engineering ventures have had before, I wouldn't count on it.]
- from the pdf
"Feedback would be most welcome – please send to hyper loop@spacex.com or hyperloop@teslamotors.com . I would like to thank my excellent compadres at both companies for their help in putting this together."
Freight shipping would greatly benefit. Build a freight tube only across the US mainland. Amazon Prime? Same day delivery.
http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/intelligent-energy/new-york-...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frYWTrEfPRs
This reminds me a lot of that, but without the vacuum tunnel... there was a proposal in 1960's apparently... so no so new after all.
Musk himself stands just below 6', so he may not naturally think of us taller folk. I'd hate to have to slouch for the trip, even if it is only projected to be 35 minutes.
edit: dear tall people who have ridden in one of Tesla's cars: how's the headroom in a Model S?
Does he say this explicitly? (Sorry if I missed it.) Why can't you make a train car just as light as these cars, and also skip the weight of the tube?
For example FRA requires train rolling stock to withstand 800,000lbs of force on impact without permanent damage. The European requirement on the other hand is less than half of that. The European requirements instead aim for adding "crumple zones" to the cars to absorb energy and protect occupants similar to how automobiles use crumple zones.
This is why there's an obsession in the USA regarding light-rail. Light-rail sidesteps the FRA regulations by creating a separate track and rolling stock that doesn't have crossing with heavy rail.
I believe if we simply reformed FRA regulations we could probably cut all rail development by a sizable chunk as we would be able to buy rolling stock as-is from European and Asian suppliers.
But anyway, back to the point being discussed. A sizable chunk of China's HSR network was built elevated so it is certainly feasible to put today's HSR tech on pylons. But just because you elevate something doesn't magically get you away from Environmental Reviews which I think is another area where a majority of the cost in public works project lies.
Environmental reviews will still be required for Hyperloop. Since it is actually a new system, I would expect it to get even more scrutiny in the public eye because it will sound even more magical and also offend even more people since there won't be any intermediate stops. Remember that much of the California HSR political issues are because central valley cities and towns want an HSR station in their town (of course they don't want to fund the station). So many of these towns basically come to the table and say "we'll give you the land if you give us a station, otherwise we won't help you." The Hyperloop concept basically ignores this argument.
Keep in mind that despite environmental reviews having the word "environment" in them, they are actually also public hearings where the public can voice their opinions which can include things like additional noise and traffic. For example if your project blocks out the beach view of a home-owner's house overlooking the ocean, you can sure bet that they'll be at the environmental review and give you an earful about how you can't build your tube/track/freeway/skyscraper/windmill there. Yes that's a bit of hyperbole but that's basically how the environmental review phase is abused.
Because of that, I've come to the conclusion that we won't have any significant improvement in infrastructure in this country until CEQA/NEPA are reformed to allow not just public entities to build infrastructure, but also private entities as well.
This may work but it will be several times more expensive than the HSR system.
* Oh and by the way, it is completely misleading and annoying for musk to refer to this as merely 1/6th of Mars's pressure. That would be a really relevant statistic if he was building his thing on mars.
Fucking awesome, Elon.
It's an exciting approach to high-speed land travel at a proposed cost of far far less than the California coastal rail's $70 billion minimum price point.
The failure scenarios are interesting too. Lets say a tube breaks, if the linear motors are spaced out, how do they brake? Turn off the air lift? Does that then destroy the tube they are in? What is the emergency exit like?
But, the numbers don't quite crunch for this to be a legitimate business (unless we are talking no returns for 25 years charging customers an average of 1500-3000 dollars per ride .. but the demand is not there for those prices).
Idea is awesome .. yes! Viable ... yes, yes!! A business ... idk. :(
Vehicle loading and unloading terminals can fan out from the automated system that loads them and unloads them from the actual Tube.
"Maybe guide rails leading up to it"
He seems to be planning to build this over farmland? Because farmers aren't going to be happy about someone blocking their light.
Light is the limiting factor in plant growth.
If he's going to block the light to farms he'll have to pay them for the lost crops, and then he might as well just buy the land.
At the same time, the aquaduct runs along I-5 for a considerable length. I think building along the aquaduct would make a lot of sense. I'm assuming that land is already owned by the gov't, and is already somewhat protected along it's length.
And after checking a map of the area and realizing farmland there is water limited, not space limited I withdraw my objection.
When railways happened, B through Y believed they would see economic benefit, and often did. They got a station. Not so here, correct?
There for, wouldn't this need a government to force it through? How would that happen in the USA?
To me this is where the idea runs in to the buffers, as it were.
Easy. You pay them.
Who? How much? All the same? When?
Then imagine all the people from B to Y who see an opportunity to screw the project for huge amounts of cash. Decades of lawyers arguing in court over every conceivable point, or opportunity.
And that before environmental, and god know what else, groups get involved.
Sorry, no, not easy at all. Not even slightly.
Untrue [1].
[1] http://www.hsr.ca.gov/docs/newsroom/fact%20sheets/High-Speed... - all but the "Northern California Unified Service" and "Amtrak Surfliner" runs are planned HSR lines/stations, and all (including those) are getting upgrades/improvements or new rail/connections as part of the HSR project.
Also B-Y is currently very low density and paying someone $X,XXX/yr for this nearly silent tube to pass through their field is not exactly a hard-sell.
Hyperloop should be an AND proposition to HSR, not an either/or.
When I heard the news about this announcement on the radio today, I thought that my local news station was just a week behind the times as usual. Apparently they were not?
This is the key that will drive massive adoption. Wrote about this here:
"Hyperloop = Warp Speed for Your Car" https://medium.com/hello-hyperloop/82cb2069112f
http://www.swissmetro.ch/en/content/technology
Same idea, different technology. Anyway, implementation is important, not the idea itself.
1) We don't have to hit the ball out of the park on our first time out. I'd be happy to see a hyperloop prototype from, say, Manhattan to JFK built.
2) Which countries might "race" to get something like this sorted out (which may compel a more world-wide movement)? China? Spain? Japan?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%C3%A9rotrain
This guy isn't really a genius, he's just rich.
Aérotrain is a magnetic levitation train, Hyperloop does not use magnetic levitation. Read the PDF.
"The capsules travel at 760 mph (1,220 kph, Mach 0.91 at 68 ºF or 20 ºC)"
1200 km/h is still subsonic
Mach(20 C, 1 atm): 343.051 m/s
Mach(20 C, 0.1 atm): 343.182 m/s
Not much higher, but definitely not lower.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=speed+of+sound+in+dry+a...
Unfortunately, it refuses to show Mach(20 C, 0.001 atm), since the lowest supported pressure is 0.098 atm.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier%E2%80%93Stokes_equations
Quote: "The Navier–Stokes equations are also of great interest in a purely mathematical sense. Somewhat surprisingly, given their wide range of practical uses, mathematicians have not yet proven that, in three dimensions, solutions always exist (existence), or that if they do exist, then they do not contain any singularity (smoothness). These are called the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problems. The Clay Mathematics Institute has called this one of the seven most important open problems in mathematics and has offered a US$1,000,000 prize for a solution or a counter-example."
> There's still a chance that Wolfram Alpha is incorrect ...
At the moment there is no "correct". It's all based on field observations, numerical modeling, and estimation.
And a self-promoter. This is how you maintain you image of a super-hero.
The Hyperloop is a cool idea, and I hope its the future. But anyone who believes this can be built, today, for $6BB is out of their mind.
It's the same reason that pg & YC say that they really care about the founding team and frequently encourage the founders to pivot far away from their original ideas.
Not applicable to Hyperloop, which he has pretty clearly said he is not going to get done.
But he conceived the idea. Ideas have value and can be said to be "done". To argue that pure ideas have no substance is to argue against science.
I think it's admirable that he published the idea without attachment or limitation, in such a way that others can turn it into hardware.
I'm not so sure. When Hyperloop was unknown, HN spent far too much time enthusing about obviously nonsense guesses about what Hyperloop might turn out to be. Let's not get too conceited about HN's abilities.
I'm glad they didn't just let the idea die on a drawing board somewhere because of a lack of time/money. Now, someone has to just develop it faster than someone else can legislate against it.
This is one of the biggest reasons northern CA doesn't already have a bunch of such systems already in place.
The question for GE and other similar industry companies which have build-in capability to construct this is if they can lift themselves out of the comfort their existing markets.
With all that money I rather give a Cessna to 1M people so they can fly anywhere without restriction.
Or make special small airports for direct flight between cities. Much less infrastructure.
Kudos to Elon, I love they guy and his incredibly visionary mind.
"What could possibly go wrong..."
The average driver can't control a vehicle safely in two dimensions, much less three. :-)
http://dmitry.gr/index.php?r=06.%20Thoughts&proj=01.%20Hyper...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Bay_Area_Rapid_T...
Edit: nevermind, it is about 30 minutes
The final frontier is space, not San Fransisco.
(I am wide eyed and crazy about the Hyperloop)
Could that be a path to getting it prototyped, profitably?
Whatever you were launching would have to move through normal air, not the minimal pressure you have in the Hyperloop tube. It is hard to pass an airlock at supersonic velocities...
Hopefully their inability to publish this page on time will prove to be another example of the same. ;-)
For example, a sufficiently fast and massive object can derail and hit a large building killing many, while a 80Mph SUV hitting a building wall will still, most likely, not be able to bring down the whole building.