Hyperloop: Why can't we believe in the big ideas?
news.cnet.com
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There's already a "high speed" rail system between those points. Of course, that depends on your definition of high speed.
http://www.amtrak.com/acela-express-train
Having been on that line, you're lucky when you're going 50 mph. Having a hyperloop on those points would be insane. You could live in Boston and work in NYC.
It would be better to concentrate on increasing public transport in the road and air. Build a separate road network for freight and coaches. Make energy efficient airplanes that can fly short distances quietly and land on short runways. Build systems to automatically route parcels to make same day delivery possible. This would create a network that would be much more adaptable and complement what already exists.
Rail is like dial-up between a few key points that ignores existing networks that could be upgraded. Hyperloop is just a faster connection to a dysfunctional network.
Multi-lane roads are fixed routes that can be blocked by a single lorry and frequently are. Without a massive network increase, roads are rapidly becoming of appalling value on many major routes. Everything fails in the long run, including the current road network and we need ways to build capacity with minimum land use, because land rights are often the major cost.
Also, the car hauling version integrates directly with the road network anyway so I don't know really what your network complaint is about.
Besides, all transport upgrades, including road or rail, are just a faster connection to a dysfunctional network. If we were happy that it was properly functional, we wouldn't be looking to upgrade it.
That doesn't follow. You can still upgrade something that is properly functional.
I am not anti-roads. Roads are great, they can link everywhere really easily, however they have issues that can be reduced by pairing them with high speed rail and air for long distance travel and light rail in urban centers for bike and foot passengers.
Never mind just freight, imagine removing intercity traffic from roads and being able to visit the next town along without having to compete for the road with the folk going 500 miles.
1- Allow private & small mini-busses.
2- Provide the community hanging out near the bart exits in Mission better public gathering places so we don't need to smell heavy amount of pie every morning.
3- Make screens in bart and stations that show the upcoming trains, current train, route etc.
4- Ban smoking, eating, talking loudly, and leaving garbage in the trains.
5- Replace all the seats with smaller ones like all other subways have.
6- Replace shitty Subway shops with good hipster alternatives that people actually enjoy.
7- Improve ferry transportation between east bay and san francisco.
8- Establish shuttles.
As I observe, nobody responsible is giving a fuck to the problems of bart. A friend I met almost threw up in the 16th bart exit since it's used as public toilet. Aren't we paying half amount of the money we make to the government? Then why can't we push the city government to fix the bart?!
Just a thought. Show the skeptics what is possible.
For these reasons I think this proposal is brilliant. It's a hack on government, business, media, and engineering all at once. As well, it's something the customers would prefer. Well played Musk.
I am not from California so I am not familiar with the HSR project. But this doesn't seem right to me. HSR is proven and Hyperloop is experimental. Why is it plausible that the same route for both would be cheaper on the one that is going to require more engineering and V&V?
Not to say that we shouldn't move forward with hyperloop, or at least build a proof-of-concept somewhere. At the proposed price for hyperloop, you could replace all existing Amtrak transportation in America with a hyperloop and still pay about the same amount for a ticket.
To me, that's worth investing in.
Also, I bet NYC-Washington or NYC-Boston hyperloops would pay for themselves in two weeks.
But we had books and encyclopedias and telegraphs and telephones and phonographs a century ago. Just ... not as distributed, or portable.
If you were to look at the inventions and advances of the last quarter of the 19th and first quart of the 20th centuries, I suspect you'd find a few more significant items than smartphones: electric light, telephones, phonographs, radio, television (just under the wire), indoor plumbing (made possible by central heating, so your pipes wouldn't freeze), air conditioning, and even the first practical computers. Oh, and airplanes.
If you had the choice of technology since 1925 or before, I think you'd go with the latter choice.
... or cheap. The greatest inventions of the XX century are the mass-market and the mass-democracy.
Or as fast, or as comprehensive, or as cheap per unit of accessible data, or as connected, or as quick to improve and update, or as multi-functional, or as useful, and so on.
It's the difference between having "food" as a barbarian in 10,000 BC and having an integrated and highly advanced system of feeding an entire civilization of 300 million people. That is to say, the difference between night and day.
Prior to Gutenberg, if you wanted a copy of something, it had to be copied out by hand (often with errors introduced). Copies of a great book might be numbered in the double digits. Newspapers didn't exist. Few people were literate, let alone possessed a library. By the 19th century you had penny dreadfuls, mass-market novels, and literacy rates in some countries approaching 100% (Sweden, Finland, and Estonia in particular -- England as late as 1843 had a literacy rate of 67% among men and around 55% for women).
The marginal benefit of additional technology, as with all marginal returns with stunningly few exceptions (Moore's law chief among them) is increasingly low, while the costs of its discovery increases in real energy terms.
Convenience is a big deal. There were books before the printing press (and if you want to argue that they weren't like printed books, then you're invalidating the premise of your argument that the books, telephones of a century ago are like the smartphone ones we have today), and all the printing press did was add a certain degree of convenience in their production, dissemination - and this was a big deal.
I think the article and even you underestimate the impact of smart phones and mobile devices. There has been an incredible windfall of technologies, financed by the exponential growth of the smart phone market:
* Power saving microprocessors
* Ultra high resolution display technology
* MEMS sensors
* High power density batteries
* Many layer PCBs
* Size reduction of passive SMD components (0402 and smaller)
* High rate wireless transmission
* High fracture strengths glass
And many more I am probably forgetting.
All these technologies enable innovation in smaller markets that would otherwise not have been able to finance this incredible development.
For example Quadrocopters, cheap drones sold as toys but stuffed with incredible technology, would be multi-million secret military projects without the smart phone industry.
Budget of the NSA: $10 Billion (http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/07/news/economy/nsa-surveillanc...)
Hopes and dreams of 1960s youth looking at Apollo and entering STEM fields: priceless
There are some things money still buys. For everything else there's PayPal??
But well, is there a pretty easily understood, common sense way to compare an yearly budget of $10B with a total cost of $6B, especially in terms of a trade off?
Especially when faced with certain tradeoffs, like comparing a $6B hyperloop with an agency with an annual budget of $10B?
Explaining it the other way around, if you had $270 billion now, you could fund the NSA by $10 billion per year in perpetuity based on the interest. That's a simple calculation of $270B x 3.71%.
I'll trade 7 1/2 months of the NSA annual budget for one hyperloop.
Some will point to Space X as violating that last line, but look at it from the perspective of that it really is only affected by one part of government. Large transportation projects like the hyperloop would require approval at so many levels and be subject to the whims of so many outside groups that it is insurmountable by private enterprise. Only government can build it because only government can ignore its own rules.
So its not a matter of that we can't think big, we can think big all we want. We just have to find frontiers where bureaucracy is not the primary obstacle.
First of all, it would be utterly impossible for a purely private initiative to build the hyperloop as proposed. Most obviously, the unique feasibility argument here is that the government already owns highways that could bear the tube for most of the distance between SF and LA. But no serious rail line has ever or could ever be built without government help, because it would be impossible to negotiate the purchase of all the land without eminent domain.
Pragmatics aside, this is also just a very facile way of looking at things that belies, I think, a certain amount of laziness. The government isn't perfect, and sometimes bureaucracy does hinder good projects, but really the challenge for hyperloop would be garnering public support. If the proposal becomes massively popular, the government will have a huge incentive to build it. Unfortunately it's easier to complain vaguely about the government than it is to convince weary tax payers to fund a massive project using unproven technology. I'd love to see hyperloop built, but I am not desperate for other services that would be provided with the same money (better schools, for example).
Much of the reason American business thrived in the second half of the twentieth century is because of the superior infrastructure the government built. Every business in Y Combinator relies on services provided by the government and couldn't function nearly as well if Ron Paul were king. And, obviously, the government has achieved radically ambitious projects before. Have you ever been to Hoover Dam? Driven from coast to coast?
Government isnt perfect and can be frustrating, but bureaucracy is almost never the primary obstacle. It's just a convenient excuse.
With reasonable timing: it's just coming up to a decade of supersonic air travel being commercially unviable.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-08/elon-musk-just-may-...
The only other way it might get built is if someone lobbies the state to fund the project, and in that case it's probably not worth it because the market didn't even want to do it. Isn't this what happened with California's new rail project?
Edit: more like 6 million people fly between LA and SF annually. I was thinking of the Amtrak Northeast Corridor ridership, which is about 12 million annually.
Beyond that, the paper also claims a total annual ridership of 7.4 million people, so approximately the same ridership as currently served by air travel. So, other than acting as a jobs program, in what way will this alter the economic landscape of California?
Given how fuel dominates the cost of operating an airline, I'd say that something that is net neutral in terms of energy usage should be able to compare quite favorably in terms of marginal operating cost. I think that that $100 each way figure is very conservative in terms of what it would cost to transport a person.
I'd say the ridership assumptions are very conservative, the experience described is so much better than flying that I would guess that ridership will increase quite a lot. I would visit LA many times as frequently as I do now. It should also cannibalize car traffic quite a lot.
As far as economy goes, this would make intercity business much easier, decrease congestion of the freeways, save many man-years of time that would be otherwise spent in airports or driving, and it would be generally more efficient.
If it was that cheap and fast I'd think nothing at all about travelling between the cities a couple times a month. Not daily, but far more frequently than I do now. I wouldn't be the only one.
The alternatives are lighter-than-air craft, where speeds of up to 130 MPH are possible in current designs, it's unlikely that we'll do much better than this. These have _vastly_ lower energy requirements, and could be feasibly powered by solar cells plus either batteries or a small hydrogen fuel reserve capacity, or perhaps wholly by hydrogen-fueled engines, as the volumetric constraints of an airship are much lower than that of a HTA craft.
Or you could offer high-speed ground travel. Conventional high-speed rail is one option, the Hyperloop would seem to be another. I suspect that conventional HSR could achieve higher throughput -- 840 passengers/hour would be about 16 x 60-passenger rail cars. HSR offers lower speeds and longer transit times (2h 38m SF-LA projected), but might also serve more end-points for a roughly equivalent door-to-door trip time, though I suspect that's pushing feasibility. Musk discusses 2 minute to 30 second headways between pods, which is ... pretty aggressive (that still puts between 5 and 24 miles between pods, but you're moving at 700 mph top speed).
Either way, planes are going to be excluded by and by.
For me, that's one of the most significant things about the whole project. I'm no sandal-wearing Greenpeace-type, but I am convinced that if we're to continue trying to achieve developed-world quality of life for everyone on the planet then we need to start getting much smarter and more efficient with our energy usage. One way is 'stop living the way we do', the other way is this (and other advances like it).
It still runs, and you can ride it for a few dollars. But a bus will take you end-to-end cheaper and faster.
There are reasonably a few individuals or groups of people in the world that can very safely spare the resources to build it (such that paying for it it wouldn't materially damage their business or ability to run their business, or otherwise tank their stock, put them in the poor house, and so on).
Bill Gates (Cascade can raise $10 billion quickly), Carlos Slim, Warren Buffett (the street already knows he's going to liquidate), the Koch brothers together could easily do it, Ellison could do it with leverage (he'd never sell that much Oracle stock in one go, and he earns enough annually in dividends to pay off the loan), and the Walton clan (but they'd be very unlikely to coordinate on such a thing).
For almost anybody else, the liquidity or leverage it would take would be overwhelming or very risky at the least.