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Comment by trose | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why there is so much focus on doing this in California where they have tons of development and the huge issue of earth quakes. Surely there's somewhere else that could reap the benefits of fast travel. Off the top of my head I would suggest doing this through the midwestern states which are incredibly flat and mostly void of development for hundreds of miles. You can pay ranchers and farmers for the right to build the support towers on their land. You'd have to worry about tornados and hail storms though. I'm not sure how much concern that would be. If this this is all steel and concrete it should be strong enough right?

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This is something the midwest desperately needs. Unfortunately, we tried high speed trains during the stimulus, but the GOP governors of Wisconsin and Indiana didn't want to play ball with Obama's policies.

Imagine a fast line or a hyperloop between Chicago > Des Moines/Indianapolis/Madison/Cleveland/Memphis, etc.

We've got the flat land, maybe the money, but we don't have the political will. On a more positive note, the 300 mile Chicago > Columbus line is funded and happening:

http://thelantern.com/2014/10/plans-for-train-connecting-col...

>The high-speed train would make the Chicago-to-Columbus travel time three hours and 45 minutes, compared to an almost six-hour drive.

Not bad. No hyperloop, but if this is the begining of high-speed rail in America, it will be a game changer. Shame guys like Musk can't figure out ways to make traditional high-speed rail cheaper. I suspect that's just too unsexy of a problem for him.

You don't need guys like Musk. Here's how to make high-speed rail cheaper:

- Remove or upgrade all level crossings.

- Allow passenger trains to have priority over freight trains.

That's it. It's literally just two things. You don't need elevated tracks or magnetic levitation or airtight tubes. You just need to be able to accelerate the train to its maximum speed and not have to slow down until it reaches its destination.

Currently, Amtrak travel sucks due to the fact that when you board the train, no one can guarantee when or where you will be able to get off. Every passenger route passes over tracks owned by a railway company that makes far more money on moving coal or cattle than on people. And the freight trains may not have a regular schedule. So every time a passenger train leaves a station, it might be stuck on a siding for hours in the middle of nowhere, waiting for higher-priority freight to pass.

And all those tracks cross automobile roads, where an unnervingly large fraction of the level crossings don't even have warning signals. The trains still have to slow down for them, even if there are no cars in a 100-km radius, because at high speed, colliding with a smaller object, like a deer or cow, could cause a derailment.

There are no technical problems. They are all political and financial. As such, guys like Musk can't really help. He could spend his entire fortune and talk until his vocal cords snap, and still never make a dent. It's not just unsexy, but soul-crushing.

There's at least two caveats to those completely reasonable points: freight also is terrible, and cities build around trains. I won't touch the freight one, other than it seems to be abysmally unreliable compared to a semi.

But a high speed thoroughfare is great now, but soon someone's going to cheat and try to lay road across one of those tracks. The high speed lines really need to be separated with no outside interference.

I had a weird feeling a maybe ten years ago talking with a friend who is a surveyor. He noted that rail lines often take precedence in disputes, since they almost always predate any other landmarks, including roads. And over the intervening years, in the manufacturing towns I've been in it looks like we put all those rails in the most inconvenient places... Unless we actually just did the opposite and plopped our towns next to all the rail lines. And considering how vital rail was before the highways and cheap fuel, I think that's just what happened.

Anyhow, just my two cents on it. I think we sorta painted ourselves into a corner with this whole mess. It's certainly a political problem, but the solution really would involve positively stupefying amounts of capital, either to make bypass rail or to make those silly roads all overpasses. I say it's worth it, but, well, I'm biased.

Freight currently makes better use of US rail infrastructure than passengers do, because freight is less time-sensitive than passengers and the geography of the US makes that a problem for rail. It does not make sense to penalize the most efficient user of a resource to benefit one of its least efficient users.

Last time I was on an Amtrak train, for a 1000 mile trip, I was delayed by 24 hours. The published timetables advertise the trip at 18.25 hours. That was a grand total of 42.25 hours. By car, the trip is 14.5 hours. By plane, 2.5 hours. A competitive bicyclist with a crew van could have beaten that train to its destination that day.

The last Amtrak trip I made before that added 4 hours to a 5 hour trip. The same trip takes 3 hours by car or 1 hour by air.

From the anecdotes gathered from someone I know who used to make Amtrak passenger rail reservations, every last timetable is complete BS. Every single passenger route not on the east coast experiences a long delay, nearly every time it makes the trip. Sometimes, the train doesn't even get there at all, and the passengers are transferred to coach buses to be dropped off in a place that may be rather distantly removed from their intended destination.

The tickets themselves are not cheap, either.

I would say it doesn't make sense to have passenger rail at all, without some tracks completely dedicated to time-sensitive passenger traffic. In that sense, the freight lines are already being penalized.

Government shouldn't optimize for "users" (esp. when it's not human) but instead it's constituency. Is the country best served by timely transport of goods (which, at-best, fares poorer to trucks) or by timely transpiration of people?

Goods. Goods don't care if they arrive in the middle of the night, or if the trip takes a (predictable) couple hours longer than driving or way longer than a flight. They also don't need to be schlepped into the center of heavily populated areas at high speeds; in fact, they'd usually prefer not to be. People do: they have better options. Trains are a good way to move goods long-distance in the US, and a bad way to move people.

Businesses care about predictable logistics; they care about throughput (and jitter), but not latency. People are different.

The Federal Rail Authority ALREADY requires priority for passenger traffic. It's just not doable due to congestion from freight.

The current rail system is already being used optimally for freight. We need a separate right of way, with modern, HSR ready stock and pantograph ready lines for passenger traffic only. Good luck trying to make that happen!

Agreed about the issues with Amtrak. But in most locations, your 'two things' requires a completely separate right-of-way for authentic high-speed rail. That is exactly what happened with California HSR: Originally they planned to use freight rail corridors, but ended up with a plan which is only somewhat nearby existing rail.

That 3:45 travel time seems pretty unlikely. According to the feasibility study, it's based on the idea that trains with a 130MPH maximum speed will run at an average of 110MPH. The Acela Express maxes out at 150MPH, but averages only ~80MPH --- and that doesn't factor in service outages and other transient delays, which are common.

An HSR line between Chicago and Columbus would probably in the best case be competitive with driving. Which is itself an achievement, one supposes, given how much worse trains are than driving currently.

The Acela shares track with commuter and freight trains, as well as running on regular tracks, as opposed to tracks designed for HSR which is why it averages only a paltry 80 MPH. In comparison, the TGV in France averages 157 MPH (its top speed is 357 MPH), and Japanese bullet trains average somewhere in the neighborhood of 162 MPH.

The 'thelantern' link provided above doesn't go into detail if the plan involves laying all-new tracks to properly support HSR, or if existing tracks to be re-used.

Even then, parity with driving is an achievement. Drivers in traffic have this annoying habit of texting or worse while driving, even when illegal. I can put up with sitting next to someone texting on the train since they're not doing so while weaving in and out of traffic.

I looked this up a week ago on another thread and the numbers I got for average trip speed were lower: Paris-Lyon 140MPH, and Japan in the 140s-150s as well. The Columbus-Chicago route would involve upgrading existing tracks; the route times they're providing can safely be assumed to be best-case scenarios.

I only did a little bit of research, and the average speed was hard to find, with most official sources preferring to concentrate on highest speed achieved. I'm willing to accept your numbers, but I am curious as to your sources. It's a moot point to me though, as high speed rail, at 140 MPH or 150 MPH or even only 100 MPH will not come to California any time soon, and even then, it's not likely to positively affect the commute up and down the SF peninsula.

This really made me mad. Minnesota and Illinois were willing to pay for the whole project from Minneapolis -> Milwaukee -> Chicago (granted WI would need to pay recurring maintenance) and they refused...

Walker's rejection of WI HSR was based on the nearly $1Bn of federal dollars allocated to Wisconsin, in addition to the federal dollars that would have gone to the other states. Some portion of all those dollars came out of the pockets of WI residents. As would a portion of all the subsequent federal spending the WI HSR plan would set a precedent for.

I'm in favor of Chicago-MSP HSR, of infrastructure spending in general, and not a fan of Walker, but it's worth getting the argument right.

I think you also need the population density and a population that wants/needs to travel from A to B regularly to make it viable.

Musk proposed LA->San Fran as a commuter route - i.e. people would take it both ways 5 days a week.

How many people want/need to zip across the midwest both ways 5 days a week?

And while I could see that as a neat trick (I think Elon was going more for the comparison to the High Speed Rail boondoggle) it would be much more interesting if it could do something like Reno/SF or maybe Boise/SF so that folks could live in a nice place and work in a trendy place. But the whole notion of 'tasked' cities (living cities vs working cities) is still not well developed.

This is, perhaps, the most obvious Jetsons-suburb style future we can attain. It's so alluring and outlandish. I tend to work in plants, but I end up commuting just to stay away from the soul crushing industry. (Or soul-crushing industry, depending...) To be able to live in a nice garden village and then take a 40 minute ride out of state to my plant would be an utter joy.

Chicago to/from any city is great for freight and possibly commuters.

But the hyperloop isn't really targeted at freight, and would probably be a poor fit except for the most express of express freight. For general freight, Chicago already has plenty of railroad lines.

So yea, he 'designed' it basically for himself (SpaceX in LA, Tesla in the Bay). Who else would do this commute daily (because it will certainly prohibitively expensive for just daily commuting)?

People are using the Eurostar train to commute between France and London, apparently:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/f26fe984-943a-11dc-9aaf-00007...

Well yea... "Also, the cost of Eurostar itself is not inconsiderable. There is a frequent traveller service that provides benefits, although not on price and there is no equivalent of a season ticket. Return tickets start at £59". Frankly I've rarely seen tickets under 150-200$. Doing this DAILY for a commute would add up, unless you're ridiculously wealthy (which I then suggest just getting a second home at your place of work for during the week).

Also commuters with the capacity to pay for expensive tickets - this thing isn't going to be cheap, at least not initially.

That's a chicken and the egg sort of question. We've developed pretty separate east and west coast economies and cultures since the travel times preclude much else. If they didn't I think we would see a lot of demand come from it that we don't see the need for yet.

I would suggest China. They have already demonstrated their affinity for HSR by laying 10,000 miles of track. A couple weeks ago they opened 32 routes in one day.

http://qz.com/308791/china-flexes-its-high-speed-rail-muscle...

If the idea is to develop and prove the technology, China can accomplish this in a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost. Building the second one is always less of a risk.

The distance between Shanghai and Beijing is 800 miles, so the 1hr travel time should be very appealing.

You said it yourself, nobody lives in the midwest. By contrast, LA-SF is the second on third busiest passenger air route in the world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_busiest_passenger_air...). Moving all those people by plane is hugely expensive and inefficient, and the 5 cannot handle any more car traffic. By some accounts, this is the biggest unsolved public transportation problem in America.

That is news to the residents of Chicago, Minneapolis, Columbus, Milwaukee, Louisville, OKC, Nashville, Memphis, Detroit, and Indianapolis, which are some of the largest cities in the country.

Also: moving people by plane is probably more efficient than by high speed rail.

Freight boast some positively incredible efficiencies, so I'm assuming high speed rail simply loses it by holding the pedal to the metal the whole way, so to speak?

It's a cool comparison to me: you can either slam the accelerator/brakes for the duration of a trip or you can fight about 7 miles of head. Both are so extreme I don't really have much of an intuition on it, but I think it'd be fun to find out.

The total population of all of those cities barely exceeds the number of people who fly between LA and SF each year. Really.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+population+of+chi...

That is a weird apples-oranges comparison, because the total population of those cities is also a multiple of the combined population of LA and SF. CHI-MSP is the 6th busiest route in the US (LA-SF is the 2nd). Do you think the combined air passenger stats for the cities I just listed would be lower than that of LA-SF?

If you add up the trips that people take between all of those cities then sure, eventually you can make that number as large as you like. But that problem is not solvable by mass transit--you need O(k^2) direct links to get everybody efficiently between any pair of k cities. Meanwhile, here in California, we've got a graph with two nodes, one edge, 8 million people on one end, and about 32 million on the other. Which problem seems more straightforward to you?

That's not the argument you made. You said "nobody lives in the Midwest". Clearly that's not true. Meanwhile, a single midwestern city pair is the 6th busiest air route in the US.

This is my final comment in this thread. Yes, I was obviously being facetious, although having burned by the internet's ability to pick up on that in the past, I should have known better. Perhaps a better way to put it would be that in terms of population density (which is what really matters when we're talking about mass transit) the middle of the country loses out to either coast by a considerable margin. (Sorry.) I can't think of a simpler way to put it than the map on p. 24 of this PDF (http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/reports/c2010sr-01.pdf). You're looking for clusters of dark-blue squares arranged on a line. I see two (three if you count Milwaukee-Chicago but at 100mi. people will just drive.) One of them has a well-developed rail, bus, and highway infrastructure, and the other does not. End of argument.

The distance between Chicago and STL or Chicago and Indy is lower than the distance between SF and LA, which is about the same as the distance between Chicago and MSP. Lines of blue? The route between Chicago and MSP would be fed by MKE and Madison. I literally have no idea what this map has to say about rail or how it supports your argument.

Even though you have declared the preceding comment your last on the thread, I will do you the courtesy of replying if you choose to reply to this comment.

Just a note on city populations: the only reasonable way to compare different regions (on just about any metric) is (at the very least) at the level of the MSA. The Chicago MSA's population alone is a number larger than the total you've reached.

In terms of energy usage, transporting people by plane is not that efficient compared to alternatives:

http://adl.stanford.edu/aa260/Lecture_Notes_files/transport_...

I think you hit the nail on the head.

LA-SF is the busiest air route in North America, and it's one of the busiest air routes globally regardless of how it's ranked. On the number of seats flown per month it ranks comparatively low (number 18), meaning there's a bottle-neck being demonstrated. Either driving is too viable an option, or the airports can't handle extra flights.

The US is also notorious for having poor passenger rail. Seoul-Jeju carries a lot more passengers, a couple million, but they already have high speed rail, which makes the run in a time comparable to a flight. So being able to shave a half-hour off a commute isn't going to be commercially viable when implementing an entirely new infrastructure and design. Many routes out of Tokyo carry comparable numbers to LA-SF, but again Japan also has high speed rail - I think the time saving on the Tokyo-Okinawa (1500km distance) would be the only one capable of competing against high speed rail, but Japan is highly populated so likely not suited for massive and unproven new infrastructure projects.

The next option is in Brazil, is a slightly shorter route, but the issue being the economy is less likely to be able to support such a project, and the risk of corruption and embezzlement there could tank the entire project with cost overruns.

There's really no other credible short distance option in North America. New York to Florida (Miami 5.5mil + Orlando 3.7mil) would be a credible option, NY-Miami is a 2,000km run, passes by Orlando at the 1,750km mark, and the ticket price is almost triple that of the LA-SF run.

So if LA-SF isn't an option it's "Go Big or Go Home". Crossing states would be a big issue. So we're likely going to see this proven small scale on commuter routes in and out of big cities.

The bigger problem with the Tokyo-Okinawa route as a hyperloop candidate is that Okinawa is an island far away from the main islands of Japan (kind of like Hawaii). Not a great candidate for land-based transportation.

Well, actually that's not a massive problem. The spans between the individual islands isn't huge. The longest bridge in the world is 164km long and built for high speed rail.

The issue is Japan is earthquake prone, and big bridges in tsunami areas is probably a bad idea.

Yeah I'm thinking more like connect some of the major cities. Maybe Denver to Chicago to Austin? I'm not an expert on the geography between those places though. I'm just spitballing. The Hyperloop doesn't really make stops. Its designed for long distance end to end trips.

As much as I love California, countries/regions need to compete to be the first place where Hyperloop will be built.

Maybe it will be in USA (California, Texas, East Coast), maybe somewhere in Asia (China) or Europe.

Building innovating infrastructure requires huge resources: land, money and political will. I'm not optimistic that there is some place where government would take a leap of faith, but that would require a lot of convincing in many places even to get one committed state.

Musk's businesses are split between LA and SF. He and his employees travel back and forth and he wants to use it.

I doubt hail storms would be a problem, but tornadoes are another story. Maybe instead of the tube and pylons being exposed, they were covered in such a way that a tornado would go over top rather than through it.

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