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Comment by chrismealy | Hacker News Reader

So, it's a two-lane highway where the cars are 5 miles apart? How many people will be able to use this thing?

"The Hyperloop is sized to allow expansion as the network becomes increasingly popular. The capacity would be 840 passengers per hour which more than sufficient to transport all of the 6 million passengers traveling between Los Angeles and San Francisco are as per year. In addition, this accounts for 70% of those travelers to use the Hyperloop during rush hour. The lower cost of traveling on Hyperloop is likely to result in increased demand, in which case the time between capsule departures could be significa ntly shortened."

p.11

Thanks. By comparison HSR in Europe carries 300-500 people with three minute headways (according to wikipedia).

... and the Tokaido shinkansen carries 1300+ passengers per train, with up to about 15 trains per hour at peak times, so about 20,000 passengers / hour (per direction).

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...

The Tokaido shinkansen serves commuters in a very dense area. Also, Tokyo to Nagoya will run you a hundred bucks last time I rode.

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.

People do commute on the Tokaido shinkansen, but that is not the majority of its ridership. The numbers I've seen give about 10% of Tokaido shinkansen ridership as being due to commuter passes (and anybody who doesn't use a pass for that would be completely insane), measured by "trips"; if measuring by "passenger-km", of course, the proportion due to commuters is much much lower, about 2%, because commuters tend to travel much shorter distances.

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...

I still don't think SF/LA are as interconnected economically as Tokyo/Osaka/Nagoya are. You have a lot of manufacturing in that area of Japan, while the big population areas of California are much more separated and specialized. One could live their entire life and career in the Bay Area without any reason to ever visit LA, and the other way around.

From the report: "...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."

Eventually hits up against this problem:

http://books.google.com/books?id=DenWKRgqzWMC&pg=PA67&lpg=PA...

Question: if speeding up the ski lift cars makes the lines longer, why wouldn't slowing them down make the lines shorter?

These arguments always seem to presuppose that the status quo is optimal, and ignore the limiting cases.

Ehh, really you don't just speed up the lift you redesign the whole loading and unloading system to allow it to load and unload more people per second. You see this in actual high speed lifts.

> You see this in actual high speed lifts.

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.

"We have a circulating system with a fixed population..." Not quite the same since people getting off the hyperloop won't be turning around to get on it again.

He said the primary use case was commuting..

Wow...this is one of those rare intuitive insights that make you think "I'm not as smart as I thought"

Schelling! Forgot about that one.

That seems like a pretty optimistic estimate, but I suppose its a guessing game for such a hypothetical system anyways. Also, for comparison BART ridership tops up at over 100 million a year[1], and 6 million fly between LA and SanFran annually[2].

[1] http://www.bart.gov/docs/barttimes/BTimes0707.pdf

[2] http://cahsr.blogspot.com/2009/10/la-sf-nations-second-busie...

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