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Comment by loudin | Hacker News Reader

I think it's worth thinking about how some routes would enjoy increased popularity given the existence of a hyperloop mode of transport.

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.

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Not that a "hyperloop" is ever going to happen anywhere, but:

* 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.

The interstate ROW were held up as a possible solution -- I say good luck there. I've seen a half dozen projects try to use, cross or borrow interstate rights of way. You'd probably need a $1B of waters and lobbyists just to make that happen.

I'm unconvinced by the "doesn't connect up with transit" arguments. If it's built, and there's demand, the transit will catch up. That the CHSR goes to downtown LA/downtown SF and incurs extra cost is a FAULT, that smacks of overplanning to satisfy irrational demands of politically connected constituencies.

Nobody is saying Hayward is the moon. Of course people will get to Hayward to ride the thing. The problem is that their door to door times won't be that much better than HSR.

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.

"HSR goes from city center to city center because that's where people actually want to go." citation? Last I checked, people aren't squeamish about going all the way down to san mateo to get to SFO. OK. So let's say it takes about the same time as HSR (keeping in mind that in the real world "existing lines" are not rated for High speed, and are subject to congestion problems with existing commercial and freight routes)... The pricepoint for hyperloop is about the same as an airplane, which is half as expensive as rail travel. So, you could either take hyperloop or take HSR. The times are the same (assuming no express routes crop up to get to hyperloop), but you do still have to take some public transport or cab or whatever, is it worth it to pay half as much? I think so.

Wow does this ever miss the point. It's not that nobody is willing to drive to Hayward. It's not that Hayward is on the moon. It's not that nobody would go to Hayward to get on the Hyperloop. Millions would.

The point is that the transit time from SF to Hayward is part of the SF/LA transit time. That's all.

So if I'm in mountain view, what is the differential (public) transit time to the HSR termini/stations in Bay area, versus Hayward? How about Berkeley? Vallejo? I guess part of my point also that I'm not articulating well, is that if you're not on the HSR line (which most of the bay area isn't) you have to spend non-zero time commuting to the HSR station, too. Even if you are relatively close, say, cupertino or mountain view (closest stations: Palo Alto or San Jose) there is a commuting time-cost, too.

The comparison is LA/SF. It would also be cheaper for the Hyperloop to go to Death Valley, and would serve any nearby residents of Death Valley well.

I'm guessing you don't live in california, do you?

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!

Wait, what? I'm on a board?

no, my friend is on the board, I believe he used to work for you.

Opex won't be zero, but I don't think it'll be anything like HSR (or an aircraft). $20 seems too cheap. But I don't think $50 is out of the question at all if (and, agreed, big 'if') the capex costs are close to target.

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.

Definitely. This can totally change the economics too. If you calculate the ROI based on passenger numbers from the existing air travel market but your ticket pricing (and other factors - speed, comfort) is so good that ridership increases by a factor of 4, revenues go through the roof and you only have to buy a few more capsules and stations to support the demand... and those are the cheap part. So you probably go from 20% ROI to 100%+ ROI. Not bad :-)

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.

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