The Hyperloop - Not just SF to LA
dojomouse.com
dojomouse.com
Everyone reading this (unless they're on the ISS or flying a plane in a sine curve) is presently experiencing 1G, give or take a tiny bit. 2G is felt by lots of people on a day-to-day basis during normal activities. Some rollercoasters get up to 4.5G. Astronauts train at very high G. If there's a catastrophic failure, the hyperloop could slow down at much higher Gs (some informal calculations says between 5 and 6 Gs wouldn't be unreasonable). If 0.5G is 60 seconds, 5G is well under ten seconds. Pods spaced 30 seconds apart would have plenty of time to stop.
Some might say, "But 4+ Gs can cause an untrained person to black out!" Yeah, and you're on a hyperloop traveling 750+MPH that's just experienced catastrophic failure. And the scenario that is being explored involves either the tube in front of you having been obliterated, the pod in front of yours having come to a complete halt instantly, or someone dropped a blue shell.
To address the pod loading/unloading issue: stations are not located along the main track, they happen at branches. Proper timing means that branched stations can be bypassed, allowing pods to bypass the station ("nonstop" pods, if you will) without shortening or lengthening delays for pods at the station. This means that when a station diverts a pod, it creates a 60 second gap instead of two 30 second gaps. Another station further down the line could then fill that gap with a train that had arrived earlier.
This means that pods could load/unload much more slowly than if they were forced to arrive/depart in the order that they passed through the vicinity of a station. And pods that are not stopping at a station would experience no delay.
Main stations ("terminal stations") could have a buffer of pods. If it takes granny five minutes to get off the pod, who cares? Just put a different pod in the queue for departure. Order shouldn't matter, you're at the end of the line. Ever been on MUNI and seen the inbound trains show up on the outbound tracks in a different order? Exactly.
To address the time comparison between the hyperloop and HSR: this is completely speculative, but it's doubtful that the HSR could achieve its proposed time of 2:48. The author talks about this like it's a hard fact. I'd be surprised if HSR could hit three hours, or even four. Has this guy ridden on Caltrain? The sheer number of delays is startling.
Hyperloop, OTOH, is decidedly much more reliable since the tube is sealed. Nothing can get in the way of the tube, cars can't collide with pods, it doesn't matter what the weather is, etc. Even if the Hyperloop doesn't meet its 30-40 minute target, I think it would be much more reliable than HSR, and there's room for it to improve as well as the technology improves.
I totally agree though. The g limit acceptable, especially in a reclined couch, is much higher than is applied. Would be a trade off with speed and curve radius. Regarding stopping I agree even more (yes, even more than totally). Trying to limit the design 'emergency' G to 1g lateral (so 1.4g net) is about as reasonable as trying to limit the design g in a plane crash to 1g lateral. As a passenger my main concern in an infrequent emergency is that I a) don't die and b) am not significantly injured. If it happens once in a hundred thousand journeys and I walk away with light bruising from the harness, I couldn't care less.
Las Vegas could pay for it - sidestepping California's budget issues. In return they would get a giant vacuum cleaner nozzle for gamblers from southern California.
A friend went to Las Vegas a few years ago and said condos are sold along a proposed high speed train route but it's always "just a few years from completion".
The main problem with the xpresswest train is that it basically went from nowhere to nowhere. Still needed a car at both ends. That and its being grossly expensive.
For instance, the Chicago-New York route is roughly 800 miles, which is about an hour of hyperloop time. If the tickets were still priced in the $20 range each way, just think of how many more people would travel between the two cities.
People could live in Chicago while commuting to work in NYC. Others could live in NYC and impulsively decide to travel to Chicago for a fun night out on the town. Surely, the route would increase in popularity - perhaps vastly so.
What I love about the hyperloop is that it's like a physical embodiment of the internet - shrinking the geographical distance that separates us.
* There won't be $20-40 tickets on the SF/LA route, because (a) capex costs will be much higher than the white paper anticipates (it costs its el line at 1/10th the going rate for viaducts and its tunnel at a tiny fraction of any other tunnel, even given the narrower tube --- not to mention an extremely optimistic projection for much much tunneling will be required, projections lower than those for the Tejon Pass HSR concept, which runs at 1/3rd the speed or less and can thus follow a tighter course) and (b) ticket prices have to account for opex as well, which will be substantial; having built the thing, it does not simply run itself.
* Land in the central valley might be cheap, but the ROWs you'll need to do anything from Chicago to NYC won't be anything resembling cheap. Note that the "hyperloop" painfully acknowledges this, by terminating in Sylmar, on the far northern outskirts of LA, because integrating more thoughtfully with LA's transit system would have been prohibitively expensive; similarly, the "SF" end of the route is actually San Leandro, which is an hour easy from SF in traffic.
HSR goes from city center to city center because that's where people actually want to go. Not only that, but it's much cheaper for them to get to city centers, because they can use existing rail lines, which is something blue-sky proposals like Hyperloop can't do.
The point is that the transit time from SF to Hayward is part of the SF/LA transit time. That's all.
edit: Oh, I think you're sort of a mentor figure to one of my friends from kindergarten (and a board member of my startup nonprofit...) HN isn't really the best venue for a nuanced discussion, if you'd like to talk about the problems with CHSR and why comparing Hyperloop to CHSR official figures is charitable to CHSR - feel free to contact me personally!
Something else to consider though - those prices are for ridership levels that you could expect by connecting SF and LA. If you start to link up more points (Vegas, San Diego) the utilization of ALL the lines increases, which means you're amortizing the capex over more passengers... which helps a lot given the small fraction Opex will constitute.
To your second point, are you sure it'll be prohibitively expensive to integrate it into the city transit systems? As an elevated system I don't think it'll necessarily cost that much. I suspect it was omitted as much because it'd be expensive in concept evaluation time to sort the details of the integration as because they're just crazy expensive. Is it really that hard to get 2 x 3m tubes on stilts with a foundation every 30m out of a city? It's a very different proposition to putting in a new ground level rail line.
It gets even more attractive once you link up the dots between areas. If you built a hyperloop between NYC and Chicago, for example, you'd probably route it through Detroit... which means you also capture the NYC-Detroit and Chicago-Detroit traffic.
As far as proposed routes, train stations would be a better marker than air travel (to eliminate trips over water and mountains, etc.) In which case Japan would dominate with 45 of the 51 busiest stations in the world. The top trip on his chart has 10 million travelers a year, Shinjuku station sees 1.25 billion. http://www.japantoday.com/category/travel/view/the-51-busies...
Another big benefit of an ET3 type system that you don't mention is the tube fill factor. In ET3 you can take up basically the whole tube, because there's so little air that you don't need to worry about the Kantrowitz limit (I think). In Hyperloop, you can only take up 30%. This means that ET3 can either have much smaller tubes (big cost saving) or much larger capsules (same cost... but TOILETS!!! ;-)).
Sigh.
If Musk (or anyone else) wants to address the criticism, that someone needs to build a demonstration systems. This was done for HSR (the US even as a test facility outside Pueblo Colorado for rail research) and MAglev (the now defunct TransRapid facility in Germany, plus a couple of Japanese facilities). Once something has been built that people can observe and ride, a lot of these questions will go away. For know, what else can we do?
He had to build Tesla to prove it would work. He had to build SpaceX to prove it would work. I think Musk knew, the moment he first mentioned it, that it would be nothing but endless pedantic discussions about trivialities.
[0] http://www.earningsimpact.com/Transcript/82715/TSLA/Q2-2013-...
But still seems to miss all the human elements in the equation. What about if someone is seriously sick can they be evacuated in a reasonable manner ? Likewise what about the inevitable "I need to use the toilet" scenario ?
I tend to agree with the "it's not that big a deal" sentiment. Usually you're not allowed to go to the toilet for 30min before landing on a commercial jet either. And on a smaller regional jet it's unlikely there's any serious medical help available. Help is only 30min away, and that's assuming you got sick right at the very START of the trip. I think allergic reactions and choking are probably the biggest risks. One to think about, but probably not a reason to write off a game changing transport method!
I do think it's funny that the most common question when someone proposes a super efficient super fast transport solution is "How will people go to the toilet?".
I guess people who have real trouble can still take the bus or a plane. I'll go before departure, and cross my legs if need be :-)
Honestly though, if they would ever expand it to cross country, or like CHI-LA, which would probably be an hour long trip, they better have a break somewhere in Kansas, just because I can't stand to be in such a small enclosed space for very long, trains are great, airplanes, also fine, but something without windows and where I can't stand (if the renders are any indication) is gonna cause problems.
Toilet is a minor worry and if it really is such a big deal to you (and other crazies who can't wait 30 minutes), reducing the passenger capacity of a car by 1/3rd so that a toilet can be added is a very simple and obvious solution that just means your ticket price goes up a bit. The toilet's waste could be emptied automatically at each stop in the station. With how much people bring this issue up however, I'm incredibly surprised we have no toilets in buses! You'd think this was the biggest issue to ever hit public transport... No doubt it was left out of the original spec because nobody even considered it worth including.
EDIT: Feels like a debate someone must have had when they first started riding horses. "I'm not going to ride up on that horse, what happens if I need to use the toilet? When I'm just walking I just need to bend down in the bushes! Nobody will ever want to ride horses - consider the human implications of being up in the air!"
You don't? Pretty much all long distance buses (many hours ride; very few stops, usually clustered at the beginning and the end of the journey) have had toilets on board. Where you can get away without toilets is public transport in cities, and to some degree overland if there are enough stops (though that can be a problem). With a bus there's also always the option of just asking the driver to stop for a couple of minutes if it's really urgent.
Maybe we can have an option - double ticket price with toilet, or half price without? I have a feeling the double ticket price cars will be empty.
"Transporting 7.4 million people each way every year and amortizing the co st of $6 billion over 20 years gives a ticket price of $20 for a one - way trip for the passenger version of Hyperloop. "
$20-$40 doesn't seem terribly expensive.
Also carrying changes of clothes, wipes, plastic bags, etc is recommended.
Found the quote (http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/hyperloop_alpha.pdf):
"The Hyperloop (or something similar) is, in my opinion, the right solution for the specific case of high traffic city pairs that are less than about 1500 km or 900 miles apart. Around that inflection point, I suspect that supersonic air travel ends up being faster and cheaper"
But again, I'm pretty sure they if we can surmount the rest of the barriers we can solve the toilet one...
That's an unnecessarily dismissive attitude to a very common medical problem.
Similar attitudes cause distress for lots of people, and contribute to excluding people from everyday life.
Luckily it's probably easy enough to solve. The low-tech solution isn't very nice. (http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2006-01/24/content_...) (http://rense.com/general69/kdll.htm)
> Migrant workers in south China are wearing adult diapers on packed trains heading home for the Lunar New Year holiday because they have no access to a toilet, state media said Tuesday.
> About 120 million peasants from China's vast rural areas swarm the cities for work and all try to make it home for the holiday, filling all standing room on trains and making access to the toilet impossible during trips often lasting 24 hours or more.
Anyway, what's likely more of an issue than either pod or bodily evacuation, is the possibility of motion sickness owing to the lack of a visible steady horizon from inside the capsule (no windows, no transparent aluminum pipes).
I suspect this is one of the reasons Musk mentions something about landscape images being displayed on the pod interiors. Some kind of projected artificial horizon, always steady no matter what the orientation of the pod, would likely keep people from getting too loopy.
Similarly, the very first subway in NYC (pneumatic, no less) [1] had cars without windows, but the line was only a few hundred feet long, so it's doubtful motion sickness was an issue.
[1] http://freetoursbyfoot-nyc.blogspot.com/2013/02/today-in-187...
This isn't an abstract issue, like the diaper requirements. The vehicles in this proposal travel 3x faster than HSR; it thus can't use the exact same path as HSR; for instance, it might need much wider curves, which in the mountains might involve substantially more tunneling.
Motion sickness is a pragmatic concern for air travel too; it dictates that you want to run routes above the weather.
I think the main thing needed to prevent motion sickness would be a virtual 'view' with horizon, which isn't hard to create.