The problems with building this have nothing to do with technology but with right-of-way, investment, and politics. If those factors were solved, we'd already have high-speed rail in places where Hyperloop has been proposed. The fact that we don't says that Hyperloop is unlikely to be feasible as well.
That "Gadgetbahn" article is great, but I do have one criticism.
From the article: "If the idea is viable and the people behind it are competent, it should have attracted private investment, as there should be a potential to make profit selling the technology. After all, the proposal has been around for 23 years."
High speed rail on a large scale is really something that has to come from the government. While there are small private HSR projects (e.x. Brightline, covering some 60 miles of the Florida coast), the big successes have all been governmental, and that shouldn't be surprising.
The uncomfortable part of HSR, of course, is that no matter how perfect your government is, it's going to involve bulldozing some people's homes, conflicting with other government projects, and interfering with nature. Don't get me wrong, I'm not part of team "screw the law, bulldoze straight lines between cities, people and nature be damned". But there do need to be sacrifices made. And a strong, coordinated government can pass the laws and write the checks to make that happen.
The interesting thing with HSR is that it is not about the technology. The TGV was operating at 300 km/h nearly 50 years ago, and that's the speed that most of the network operates at today. It's not about the safety (the TGV has never had a fatal accident in normal service) or even the cost (the TGV is also profitable!)
It's about the land. A fairly small strip of land in a straight line. My hope is that as people realize this, we'll do what has to be done and tear down a few villages in order to save the planet. But that's politically unpalatable, so instead we have Gadgetbahnen.
Since this is getting to be a bit popular, I'm going to push the "technology really doesn't matter" point a bit more here: in 1955 the French built this [0] (just look at the picture!) and sent it down a traditional (wooden sleepers, rocks for ballast) rail line between Bordeaux and Irun [1]. It got up to 333 km/h, which is faster than any TGV currently operates in the year 2020 on their fancy concrete HSR tracks.
To be fair, That was a test run, where the locomotives and infra where specially prepared and did take some damage. This was a long way from operating at 320km/h every day - and today there is a 10% safety Margin, so tgvs have to be able to run at 352km/h without special prep or damage in order to be allowed to run at 320km/h during normal operation.
For comparison, a tgv test run in 2007 got up to 575km/h on fancy new track, also with some prep but no damage, but operating at this speed would make little economic sense at this point.
Reading the article I got them impression that when the author said:
> "If the idea is viable and the people behind it are competent, it should have attracted private investment, as there should be a potential to make profit selling the technology. After all, the proposal has been around for 23 years."
They are referring specifically to the development of the technology I.E. the trains and rail equipment. Not to an actual infrastructure project.
The argument being that governments should find the infrastructure, and buy technologies developed using private funds.
Indeed this what we see in the rail industry where companies like Siemens develop rail “packages” which are then sold to multiple infrastructure projects with only minor customisation and modifications.
This is in contrast to the example project where a team wanted $250mil to develop new technologies, and also deploy them. Rather than just deploying an already developed technology.
High speed rail is also a bit of a red herring. In dense areas you’re not actually going to go fast! “Normal” trains would work fine and be helpful.
TGV and Shinkansen go really far! But what makes people in France or Japan take the train a lot is much more around local trains that are just going at normal speeds.
I think the counterpoint in the US is that most cities are very far apart and there is practically nothing in between. Obviously places like the northeast corridor or the Bay Area are much more dense. But even a route from SF->Seattle is mostly traveling through non-dense areas. That gets even better across the west and Midwest
Wires than that. Most people live on the border of the cities and the nothing. Suburbs are practically designed to make mass transit expensive and slow.
> The uncomfortable part of HSR, of course, is that no matter how perfect your government is, it's going to involve bulldozing some people's homes, conflicting with other government projects, and interfering with nature. Don't get me wrong, I'm not part of team "screw the law, bulldoze straight lines between cities, people and nature be damned". But there do need to be sacrifices made. And a strong, coordinated government can pass the laws and write the checks to make that happen.
It's worth pointing out that since the 1950s the government has been doing just that and more to build the vast network of interstate highways and state roads. People don't bat an eyelash at demolishing nature for a monster interchange, but propose more rail and suddenly it's so important to consider the environmental impacts and the eminent domain issues.
Interstate highway construction slowed dramatically in the 70s after federal funds largely dried up except for the remaining critical arteries like the Colorado I70. Since then, a dozen highways proposals have come and gone because of eminent domain and environmental impact lawsuits in Southern California alone.
The I710 expansion, for example, was finally axed a few years ago after six decades of opposition from South Pasadena and the surrounding cities. At one point the state was considering a plan to tunnel under the town for about a $billion a mile because the opposition was so intractable (well funded and connected) before Caltrans gave up and started selling all the housing they'd been accumulating for decades for the project.
During the era of freeway construction they usually built the enormous interchanges through marginalized neighborhoods. Nobody with political power cares because they don't live there; nobody who lives there can prevent it happening.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but my impression is that this is only true if one excludes the capital costs associated with the railroad (tracks, right of way, and I think also rolling stock). If you factor in the infrastructure construction costs (and reasonable lifetimes for replacing rolling stock), a high speed trail line will never be profitable without significantly higher fare prices than are presently charged.
But that goes to further support your point that high speed rail can only be accomplished with government input.
To be fair, I think that the same argument can be made for the costs of interstate highway systems and passenger air travel.
As far as I know, the TGV is indeed profitable even subtracting that. I believe the maintenance of the tracks falls under SNCF Réseau (owned by SNCF) and the rolling stock falls under SNCF.
Figures for the profitability of the individual lines, with construction costs included, can be found here [0] in French. You'll see several lines with yearly rates of return in the ~7-15% range depending on how you measure things. I'd call that excellent, especially given that there are other massive benefits (environmental, health, safety, national security etc) involved that are not included in that calculation.
That said, I may be forgetting to include something, so I may be wrong. But, like you said, only further supports the point that high speed rail can only be accomplished with government input :)
That's how it works in Japan. All the major train companies own the land around the major train stations and that's why you see all these department stores named after a train company.
Here's one, just follow the links to the group companies.
Yup, if you’ve spent time in Japan, you can see how stores, hotels and attractions are laid out to drive train passenger traffic.
The same was true for streetcars in the USA, many streetcar companies built amusement parks in the countryside at the end of their lines to encourage weekend trips.
Transfer taxes are avoided by the wealthy. See London and NYC. An LLC purchased property. From that point the LLC is bought/sold/merged and the assets never change ownership
libed there a bit and have this to say: to cover thise extra costs, they would have to charge a ridiculous amount per ticket. like double the cost if a flight to those destinations. and they do. $300 for a 5 hour train ride. so i can totally see this being profitable all costs uncluded.
here's why i think they get customers. people don't like airports and plane travel, so they'll pay more for rail. car travel is unpleasant. cars are tiny and uncomfortable. their tolls are insane. like $50 in tolls for that same drive. less people have cars, and getting an license is a big expensive thing. they don't do roadtrips.
"High speed rail on a large scale is really something that has to come from the government."
We learned about this in highschool history.
From wikipedia:
The Pacific Railroad Acts of 1862 were a series of acts of Congress that promoted the construction of a "transcontinental railroad" (the Pacific Railroad) in the United States through authorizing the issuance of government bonds and the grants of land to railroad companies.
All transportation is subsidized by government. Great investment; I'm completely on board. With the understanding that owners and operators pay back via taxes. (Whatever is fair, something modest.)
You can also, like the French or the Canadians or the Germans or really most countries, have your public transport infrastructure be outright publicly owned. Presuming the government is competent, of course.
It seems that the tunneling was meant to solve this in urban areas. Open farmland is easier to manage, perhaps leasing the strip from the owners, gaining right-of-way over roadways by working with local governments.
first time I heard that term was in donoteat01's video on the loop[0], haven't got around to reading that post till now though (thanks for the reminder)
There are multiple ways to solve this problem. It’s not a showstopper.
1) Bury the lines. Basically isothermal at depth.
2) insulate the tube and maintain stable temperature
3) use materials that don’t drastically change length with temperature
3) allow the tubes to change length. Put them on rollers.
4) use vacuum expansion joints just like us common in vacuum engineering.
People act like vacuum is this new thing. Physicists (well, Engineers/technicians hired by physics projects) have been making really long tubes with extremely high vacuum and incredibly high tolerances. This is easy in comparison.
No one has ever made a vacuum tube 600km long with a cross-section of over a meter. Much less one that has to maintain vacuum with a super heavy train going at 400m/s. This is at least an order of magnitude more difficult than anything of the same nature. It's really not comparable to anything in existence. CERN is a Tonka truck by comparison.
Burying the lines would already make it an order of magnitude more expensive than what was promised. And now you have to compensate for ground movements, since your tube is fat and hundreds of kilometers in length, which makes it even more expensive.
Insulating the tubes to maintain temperature would be incredibly costly, and if there ever was a failure or natural disaster that prevented you from keeping up the power need, your tube will break.
Materials that have such little temperature change coefficients are much too expensive to build a 600km long multiple meter wide tube with.
If you allow the tubes to change length, your stations will move, sometimes in unpredictable directions. You also risk gigantic stresses caused by temperature differentials causing bending forces.
Vacuum expansion joints of that scale, for such a length, with such reliability are literally unheard of. And would likely be insanely expensive.
It's puzzling how you could get this so backwards. Just how big do you think CERN is? Or are you comparing to to the 'Hyperloop test tracks which are mere hundreds of meters long and have enough problems already?
I am disagreeing with the article. Of course, when designing/selling new train systems, a lot of showmanship and gadgetery are involved, but there are real shortcomings with current train systems which cause people to develop new technologies.
First of all: trains are great, there are many places where they perform admirably. Many cities have a great subway network, countries like France, Japan, Taiwan and now China have great high speed reail networks. So if there are transportation problems to solve, it should be a no-brainer to consider traditional train systems first.
However, there are shortcomings wiht traditional train systems, these new systems try to address. One big limitation for trains is, where to put the tracks. Inside cities, going underground usually is the only solution. With traditional rail, this is extremely expensive and also a slow process. In Munich, not log ago the digging for a new underground train line started - it is expected to take a whole decade and going to be quite expensive (which has delayed the project by another decade, as people were discussing costs). Outside of cities, rail is possible, but still faces problems to get the necessary ground. Noise is a further problems with trains. Finally, most traditional train systems are not operated autonomusly, so costs are too high for high frequencies and often enough there are just not enough drivers available.
These shortcomings create a lot of creativity to address them. The Boring companie tries to lower tunnel costs by making them less in diameter. Other systems try carts which run on or hang from stilts, reducing the space needed or allowing the train installations to go on top of existing roads.
Maglevs are still a huge topic. On the one side, they do allow higher speeds, as rails get mechanically challenging above 300kph. The only challenge for maglev is air resistance, there is no risk of derailing. Also, at any speed, maglevs are less noisy than rails, they can accelerate faster than rail and most importanly, go up much higher inclines. Maglev is therefore not only interesting for long-distance transportation, but also inside city regions, especially due to the lower noise and also because of autonomous operations. A good example is this maglev system: https://transportsystemboegl.com/
It is designed for city regions, fully autonomous and not just some technology concept, but ready-to-buy. It has been developed by a major construction company. That means, they won't just sell you some fancy technology, they are going to build the whole infrastructure for you ready to use. This is one of the two companies responsible for the quick building process at the Tesla Giga Berlin factory. They are basically factory producing the parts for industrial buildings and just assembling them on-site.
(Ironically Volkswagen is also building a new factory for electric cars in Bremen, Germany at the moment and it looks exactly like what Tesla is building, as they ordered the factory from the same company)
> However, there are shortcomings wiht traditional train systems, these new systems try to address. One big limitation for trains is, where to put the tracks. [...] The Boring companie tries to lower tunnel costs by making them less in diameter.Other systems try carts which run on or hang from stilts, reducing the space needed or allowing the train installations to go on top of existing roads.
Which is one of the main points of the article: the limiting factor is not the type of propulsion, but how and where to put the tracks.
Tunneling is expensive. Decreasing tunnel diameter just turns one knob of that system. Emergency access, switching and mergeing systems, and access to the tunnel itself use space and cost money. And if the idea is to just add tunnels to increase capacity, then that is probably more expense than building a proper train system with higher passenger density in the first place.
Trains that hang from stilts still need the stilts to sit on the ground somewhere.
Trains that sit atop of roads are limitied in their speed, by the traffic these roads where originally designed for. The curves might not be suitable to go around at high speeds.
You can't also just increase speed - acceleration and deceleration forces as well as the forces acting on a whatever kind of pod on whatever kind of track are physical limitations that affect passenger safety and comfort.
All these ideas improve on some small aspect of the system as a whole, but they do not solve the fundamental difficulties inherent in designing public transportation - they do the job, but not without the same real world problems that we have with traditional rail.
Autonomous operation for increased frequency might make some sense, but then that's something that can probably be retro-fitted to existing systems, and has little to do with the propulsion system in use.
... and I know of at least one urban public transport system where the limiting factor for increased frequency is ( apart from the issue that six train lines share one bottleneck track ) the time the doors take to close safely... not something I would have had on my radar as being a problem.
Making train tunnels cheaper by making them smaller is not a new idea. it is a very old idea. Have a look at the deep level tube lines of the London underground. In some ways, we regret having trains that small since it reduces capacity and makes it nigh impossible to air condition.
It's possible to make normal trains go over existing roads, elevated rail is also a very old thing, a lot of it did get taken down though.
Normal trains are designed to support very high loads, as they are using tracks suitable for cargo transport. For urben people transport, you don't need that carrying capacity, so the rails as well as the trains are unnecessarily heavy. Also, the wagons are larger than needed. It absolutely makes sense to rethink the whole system.
There is such a thing as "light rail" though. Lighter tracks, lighter trains, and cheaper construction.
Also if you want small trains, just look at the UK. Normal trains here are much narrower than normal US trains, they are about as wide as modern trams! And the London underground has trains that are tiny and shaped to make the most out of circular tunnels.
You don't need to rethink the entire system for the points you've raised there...
Exactly this. That’s why The Boring Company is focusing on reducing the costs of tunneling dramatically. And they started by just using existing technology. With that (and without the cost inflation that many corrupted projects experience), they were able to achieve about $10 per mile of tunnel. A lane of highway per direction is $1m to $8m depending on if it’s rural or urban.
They’ve developed a new machine, Prufroc, that’s supposed to be much faster and capable of “porpoising” (ie angling back up and curving straight) so you can avoid having to excavate a deep station through other means.
If they can get the cost equivalent to a typical surface street in urban areas, they can now compete with surface streets. Much easier to autonomously drive in purpose-built tunnels. Or put a train or a bike trail or moving walkway or whatever.
So they are actually trying to solve the right problem. And using cars is a good idea because cars are really cheap per passenger in terms of upfront capital cost, and they meet the speed, autonomy, safety, and electrification requirements while also allowing use on just regular paved surfaces. If the one-dimensional autonomy works well, they might be able to reduce follow distance at speed enough to exceed a highway lane throughout. And with high occupancy, also a typical light rail train or whatever.
Would be kind of neat to have autonomous driving at 120mph immune to weather and with low enough capital cost that we could afford to crisscross the country with them, without much impact to existing land uses. A clear win if it works. Actually, a clearer win than full autonomous driving on existing roads, as that might quickly clog up surface streets. Plus this is probably technically easier than perfected level 5 autonomy which is still a sort of open ended problem.
The Boring company has nothing to do with the Hyperloop concept. The Boring company is about creating cheap tunnels quickly. Current tunneling technology is severely limited by its price. It is really open-ended, which transport system is going to be used inside these tunnels. Hyperloop might be one option, but currently, Elon is not pushing into that direction. Currently, they are using Tesla cars. For higher capacities, special vehicles for those tunnels could be constructed - using the basic Tesla technology, but looking more like normal trains.
“For higher capacities, special vehicles for those tunnels could be constructed”.
Congratulations, you’ve rediscovered the subway.
If Musk wants to make the argument that he’s found a way to drastically reduce subway construction cost, I’m all ears. But he should jump straight to that, rather than this ludicrous idea of zipping personal cars around under the streets; a proposal that doesn’t come anywhere close to the transit density needed for an actual mass transit system.
Yes, he claims to have found a way to drastically reduce construction consts. First of all, reducing the tunnel diameter, as the digging speed is constrained by volume. Second, he tries to improve the technology of tunnel boring machines. With the smaller tunnels, there is the requirement for smaller vehicles. You can't run standard trains through these tunnels. For now, he is using Teslas (quite obvious choice) to demonstrate the tunnels, but equally it is obvious, that to increase the capacity of tunnels, you want more bus or train-like vehicles. It is so funny how people critisizing Musk assume, he wouldn't understand so simple connections like seats per vehicle and transit density.
> It is so funny how people critisizing Musk assume, he wouldn't understand so simple connections like seats per vehicle and transit density.
Well, he does keep showing renderings of public transit stations full of Teslas and not, you know, people. It's not really a big leap to say that he doesn't understand when he keeps marketing as if he doesn't understand.
Sure he does. And he probably has a reason. But it is absurd to assume he hasn't considered that "trains" allow more people in shorter ties than a single car. So you can speculate why he does as he does, but you are talking about someone sending people to space.
If I am not mistaken the boring co test tunnels are actually slightly larger in diameter than the London tube tunnels (3.8m vs 3.6m), so you could actually run "standard" trains through those.
Ah, that is a very interesting detail. A compelling argument to stop with the whole “we’re going to zip around teslas” and just promise to make subways cheaper.
The Boring Company And Musk said they’d be willing to make Subway tunnels, too.
Turns out Teslas are cheaper per passenger seat than a subway car plus have less requirement for specialized infrastructure (rails, etc). So if TBC is gonna be doing the whole project, they intend to use Teslas. It’s not a bad engineering choice. With automation (not hard in a tunnel), can achieve similar throughput as a Subway.
There is no way you can get even close to the same capacity as a subway.. not even for a point to point setup.
Minimum train space with pretty standard signaling can be as low as 90s.
With modern moving block systems that can be pushed even lower.
The tube trains have a seating capacity of around 250 people and 800 people can be standing. This gives a capacity of between 3 and 12 people per second.
How are you going to inject 1 car per second (to reach the lower level) into the tunnel in a safe way?
And even if you could do it - Consider how huge the stations must be.
They have to contain 100+ cars plus space to enter/exit them (couple seconds to come to a stop, 10s of seconds to leave the vehicle - with some people quicker than others -, 10s of seconds for other people to enter the vehicle, couple seconds to accelerate and synchronize to the flow..).
The planned capacity is however only 4400 people per hour for the CES tunnel so about 14s spacing (some other projects even lower).
One train every 90s has a capacity of more than 10000 people (and that's not even rush hour with any people standing).
Sub-2 second spacing is quite unlikely to be used, since stopping distance (with 0 reaction time, which is not too unreasonable with LIDAR/RADAR) dictates around 2s spacing between vehicles (1.9s at 100km/h for teslas I believe). And while humans might be fine with ignoring safety aspects computers can't and shouldn't.
Nevermind that building a subway-light vehicles (more similar to a people mover) is not really the same thing as using slightly-modified Teslas as subway replacement (which is what it seems they will be using for now)..
So, just the tunnel, with nothing else, at small diameters, is $10m per mile. Whereas it's possible to build high speed rail, including the stations, fully furnished, for 15-20 million dollars per mile. Does not compare favourably, at all.
Watch The Hummingbird Project (2018) it's an interesting little movie.
From your link -
"The "ad infernum" theory positing property ownership "to the center of the Earth" has also been eroded. A review of modern American jurisprudence demonstrates that the theory is more poetic hyperbole than binding law, and that broadly speaking, the deeper the disputed region, the less likely courts are to recognize that the surface owner holds subsurface title. [21] Appraisal studies of subsurface projects such as subways, deep storm drainage tunnels, and particle colliders consistently conclude that such projects, built well below the area that the vast majority of surface property owners ever put to use, do not deprive the surface owners of any value."
I know, and this affects all players equally. For subways this usually is less of a problem because the actual subways don't need to travel vertically. Cars would need to get up and down, though, which means boring gets more expensive and throughput gets smaller.
It's not crazy talk. The truth is they likely belong both above ground and below ground, depending on urban density or geography. And tunnels tend to have escape ladders every so many feet.
Elevated train platforms may have escape ladders, but I thought the Hyperloop tube was depressurized and the car within it needs to be pressurized. This poses a problem for the escaping passengers before they reach the ladder.
It's only a partial vacuum from what I understand. I'm not sure what kind of difference that makes but presumably it would be easier to depressurize in an emergency.
Heh, look up "vacuum cannon" on youtube. The tunnel would need to be slowly depressurized, otherwise anything in it would turn into a bullet when the atmosphere rushes in.
This also applies to any sort of failure that compromises the vacuum. A dipshit with a rifle could kill anybody in the system in a fraction of a second. Burying the tubes is probably the only way to avoid this, but thankfully the whole thing is vaporware anyway.
You don't need a full vaccum. Even half an atmosphere would greatly reduce air resistance and allow for 4x the velocity in 1 atm.
Humans can survive (uncomfortably) at .5 atm and you eliminate the vacuum cannon problem simply by putting pressurization valves periodically throughout the tube.
Hyperloop is not a full vacuum, only partial vacuum if I'm not mistaken. I don't know what kind of difference that would make on pressure but I assume that means that the tubes are not air tight and actually breathe.
Hyper-loop requires 99.99% of the air to be removed from the tube, so it is complete vacuum from the lethality / safety and structure / pressure perspective.
I am not sure what do you mean by 'ubes are not air tight and actually breathe', but they definitely are not air permeable.
You're wise to point out historically tunnels were more expensive. And I shouldn't be making claims without a bigger dataset in front of me.
I'm just extrapolating from trends and some cherrypicking. The ongoing elevated rail project in Hawai'i is now running at $500M per mile. Boring Company projects they can get cost of tunneling down to $10M per mile.
What I forecast (without much data, so please correct me if I'm wrong) is that with more money going to tunnels, we will see the costs continue to drop. You don't have the quasi-extortion that goes on now over land rights above ground.
Tunnels also scale better long term—you can just keep adding tunnels.
But beyond cost and scale tunnels are just so much nicer. You can replace ugly, polluting above ground infra with parks and greenery. Even though the Big Dig in Boston took forever and went way over costs, the city is so much nicer now without the Central Artery.
> I'm just extrapolating from trends and some cherrypicking. The ongoing elevated rail project in Hawai'i is now running at $500M per mile. Boring Company projects they can get cost of tunneling down to $10M per mile.
Note that you're (or, rather, Elon Musk is) comparing apples and oranges. Tunnels are actually cheap, about $80m / mile. The expensive parts of metro systems is not the tunnels, but the things that go inside them and stations. This is doubly so for the inexcusably high costs of US transport construction. When people talk about the cost of metro systems, the divide the total cost of the expansion (or entire system if it's a new one) by the length of the system, so they include the amortized costs of new vehicles, infrastructure inside the tunnels, and stations (which often cost more than the tunnel to get to them! Station excavation isn't cheap).
You should take a second look at that. Average wages in China are $12k/year, only a third of the US, but higher in the industrial areas, and in terms of purchasing power it has surpassed every other country long ago since everything is so cheap at scale. They have half a billion people in the middle class.
When you are directly comparing how much something cost to build, such as a mile of track, in USD, Purchase Power doesn't matter, does it? This is what the Parent post was asserting.
China builds a mile of track at half the price because they literally pay their people half the price (or less). It doesn't matter that their local Purchase Power might be greater.
Taking it a step further, the Parent was comparing a mile of track in China to a mile of track in Hawaii, which literally has to ship all supplies, and likely a lot of labor, across an ocean. So it's not a great comparison even if we remove labor costs.
Well, if at labour prices at half of the US average China can build high speed trains at a fifth of the price that we can build tunnels, there is more to it than that.
Right of way of land works in largely the same way in China than in the US. If you have the 99 year lease for urban terrain, or ownership of rural terrain, the government pays you the amount it would cost for you to buy similar land in the case of rural expropriation, or a market rate for your lease. You are also compensated for improvements to your land, such a crops or buildings. In the case of land owned by collectives, the collective is paid for land value but not improvements, which are paid to the farmer.
In practice, laws are not always followed to the letter, but the same can be said in the US. You have the right to appeal to higher court, which is effective as unless it is a hugely major project, expropriations are generally made by the municipal or regional government.
As for environmental studies, they are directly paid for by the government. Environmental standards obviously vary, but have been strongly strengthened in the recent push against pollution.
> It doesn't matter that their local Purchase Power might be greater
It matters because it means that the economies are not directly comparable.
You said they can only do that "without paying US prevailing market wages to the contractors." as if that is somehow an unfair advantage. But if their workers don't need US salaries to have a good living standard, because purchasing power is higher, and are not being exploited, where does the problem actually lie?
Which is why the first Hyperloop will probably be built outside the USA.
Melbourne to Sydney always seemed like a good choice to me. It's one of the busiest air routes in the world[1], there is obviously tons of solar, lots of open land beside the existing road, no seismic activity to speak of and it's a good long distance to get up to speed (~1000km).
Factor in time wasted at the airport when you show up early because the TSA is unreliable. I always give myself at least an hour extra and sometimes that's cutting it razor close.
And frankly not being subjected to the TSA is generally worth at least a few hours of my time. I'll sooner drive six hours than fly one because of those worthless assholes.
This is false. In the case of the original Hyperloop idea which crosses the San Andreas Fault, a major earthquake on that fault in line with the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco should produce accelerations the ground surface within 10 km of the fault in either direction of around 1 g (i.e., 9.8 m s^-2), corresponding to Modified Mercalli intensities of disruption to people and infrastructure of X ("Extreme: Some well-built wooden structures destroyed; most masonry and frame structures destroyed with foundations. Rails bent")[1] Vertical Accelerations above 1 g will literally throw anything not bolted to the ground into the air. Not much will make it through this unscathed.
This isn't to say that engineering around these sorts of events is impossible. The Transalaksa oil pipeline crosses the Denali fault, and during the M7.9 Denali earthquake in 2002, the pipeline survived because it was built on sliders near the fault so it would bend when the earth shifted instead of breaking [3]. However, this is a big bend in the pipe; the lateral displacements are on the order of 5-10 m in an earthquake of this size, over a similar across-fault distance. Do you want to go at Hyperloop velocities through a tube with a bend this sharp?
There's a second reason. The hyperloop tubes can slide back and forth on the pylons. If you shake the ground underneath them, the pylons can move around but the tube (tube system) stays still (like moving your hand underneath a baseball -- the ball stays still, rolling).
>The problems with building this have nothing to do with technology but with right-of-way, investment, and politics. If those factors were solved, we'd already have high-speed rail in places where Hyperloop has been proposed. The fact that we don't says that Hyperloop is unlikely to be feasible as well.
I disagree with your conclusion. Hyperloop technology is so lucrative that it might galvanize America to update its long distance transportation infrastructure in a way that bullet trains couldn't have.
Bullet trains:
- Popularized when a huge network of new highways and slow rail were already built in America
- Faced a suburban, car-loving culture
Hyperloop:
- 2-3x speed of bullet trains. Can change the way we perceive geographic distance.
- Popularized during an increasingly urban culture with crumbling highway and train infrastructure
- Cost isn't as much of a concern because a national hyperloop network would create a lot more value than a bullet train equivalent. If the government doesn't want to shoulder the full cost, companies gladly will (when the tech is ripe). I'm hoping for full government funding.
> "Cost isn't as much of a concern because a national hyperloop network would create a lot more value than a bullet train equivalent."
What is the basis for such claim? Most of the information I come across points in the opposite direction.
Trains are a lot cheaper infrastructure wise, and have ~10x higher capacity. Many public transport infrastructure professionals consider hyperloop a joke because it can only move a fairly small amount of people. In UK we are running out of capacity on many rail lines.
So why do you believe hyperloop would generate more revenue or indirect economic benefits compared to a modern high-speed rail?
Especially since HSR isn’t experimental anymore, it’s approaching a century old. America could just buy the exact same parts either France or Japan uses.
> - 2-3x speed of bullet trains. Can change the way we perceive geographic distance.
> - Cost isn't as much of a concern because a national hyperloop network would create a lot more value than a bullet train equivalent.
High speed brings with it some pretty severe problems. The most well-known is curve geometry: curve radii scale with the square of velocity. Transition track (how long the "S" of a S bend needs to be) scales with the cube. But it's not the only issue. Also scaling quadratically with speed is energy consumption and stopping distance. Speed only gives you a linear improvement in time, so things like capacity decreases [1] and stop penalties are only linear.
But the difficulty you face is switches. Here, you have curve radii constraints, which means your problems are in the quadratic issue. I've never seen any depiction of a hyperloop switch [2], but I imagine it's going to be more in the vein of move the entire tube than just swap a point. In any case, a high-speed switch capable of being traversed at 200 km/h is... 164m long. To go 1000 km/h would require it to be 4.1km. That means it will take a vehicle at least 14.76s to traverse it. So you can't schedule vehicles any tighter than that, but for safety reasons, you want the following vehicle to be able to come to a complete stop in case the switch breaks down before it can complete moving--which is going to slow you down to minutes between vehicles [3].
With these constraints, you might think people would be trying to design high-capacity vehicles, competing with the ~1000 you can stick on a normal trainset. But the design is more akin to a small airplane with the wings and tail cut off, fitting maybe a few dozen people per pod. Actually, the more you look at the designs, the more you see airport-style operational motifs sinking in. It starts to look a lot more like a long chain of point-to-point links, with the capacity issue of airplanes, but the infrastructural cost of railroads. Even the modelling seems to basically assume that people will treat hyperloops as airplanes.
[1] Yes, making a train network higher speed decreases its total throughput.
[2] A telling sign in itself.
[3] The highest capacity metro systems today can manage to schedule 45 trains per hour, and most systems are typically about 25 trains per hour. I believe the highest capacity HSR line is 6 trains per hour.
Smartrail and PRT are designed as a point to point separated-grade network carrying on av. 1 person or a pallette of goods. With a hanging rail you don't need heavy batteries, parking for the vehicles, you can run a pod straight into the factory to pickup goods, and large/rich places can pay to have track straight to their door.
You can prefab the rail and as land usage is just poles in the ground it can be rolled out over fields etc quickly. Track is one-way to eliminate junctions. Pods are on-demand ie. No waiting.
Accessibility improves, you can use the top of the rail to generate (solar) power, run highspeed internet cables in the rail to improve comms across a country, and save on distribution center logistics as you're going point to point.
The last mile may possibly be an issue, but forklift drones and bicycles can take most of the load I feel.
Drivers for this are that it would go fast (200mph+ as light pods so little wear), can go overnight (sleeper pods), you could buy track to your door, personal transport (like a cinema room if you want). The main real issue with cars is that there's a large lobby behind what is a legacy transport solution...
By way of example, UltraPRT has been running flawlessly at Heathrow airport for 10 years, was built on time, on budget, and performs exactly as predicted/modelled.
Couldn't the capacity issue be somewhat mitigated by stacking tubes vertically and/or increasing the tube diameter?
As for the curvature issue, there seem to be a couple ways around that. One is to straighten the route to the maximum extent possible (not trivial but not impossible for some routes). The other is to build massive curves and decelerate into them. Again, there are tradeoffs (cost,speed) but it's not impossible. There are just so many variables. A hyperloop could end up being great for some areas and unworkable in others.
Lastly, right of way/land clearance should never be a key constraint. That won't stop us if we really want to build a hyperloop.
> Couldn't the capacity issue be somewhat mitigated by stacking tubes vertically
Significantly increased costs
> and/or increasing the tube diameter?
Immeasurably increased costs. Because hyperloop already operates on the idea of operating in vacuum. So let's say you have a 10-kilometer tube that you need to keep in vacuum and you want to increase its diameter...
Not really, there’s a fourth factor not listed here, which is government vs. private. A government project will, for political reasons, need to support universal access, and a public transit system will have a hard time telling a person “you smell too bad to get on the bus.” A private company won’t have any such problems and can build only for the rich and middle class. The problem that Hyperloop solves is creating 1/20th the throughput at 1/20th the cost, which brings the project feasibility into the private sector domain and allows a product to be sold to the richest and/or cheapest-to-serve 1/20th of the market.
Why is hyperloop 1/20th the cost? It seems like the expensive parts of high-speed rail (acquiring the land and moving earth to make a long straight path) would also apply.
In the case of Musk's original proposal posed against HSR, largely because it had far fewer stations and because it had termini nowhere near the notional urban endpoint destinations, because getting close to them required high-priced right of way.
It basically was a way to get from the distant (in transit time from SF) fringes of the Bay Area to the, IIRC, even more distant (in transit time from LA) fringes of the LA Basin.
Ok, so how is this cheaper than high-speed rail in a tunnel?
It seems to me that hyperloop is high speed rail with the addition of a vacuum, which gets you higher speed. The additional requirement of a giant vacuum tube should make the system cost more, not less.
Personally, I’m rooting for Elon Musk to figure out how to make tunnels cheaply with the Boring Company, so we can take that tech and use it to build a bunch of subways. Traffic within urban areas and suburbs is a much bigger societal issue than intercity travel anyway. Subways are a proven solution, but somehow we lost the ability to dig tunnels economically so we stopped building them.
Tunnel boring is actually not that expensive, for some projects the raw tunnelling isn’t a big portion of the overall cost. I think for crossrail in London (which includes a fair amount of tunneling ), the tunneling is 10-20% of the total Prüfer cost.
A large amount of cost is in the stations.
In the us, a large amount of cost is inefficiency, projects cost much more than elsewhere, even considering purchasing power parities. Alon levy has written and talked about it extensively, e.g. https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-c...
Which means the throughput per tunnel is more expensive, right? A tunnel with a half diameter will have a quarter the throughput (i.e. the ratio of circle diameter to area). Which is why TBM tech develops towards bigger machines, not smaller ones.
You don't need more tunnels -- you just limit your passengers to your most profitable, and make a luxury transit system rather than a mass transit system.
This is what Tesla did by starting with the Tesla Roadster then Model S then Model 3... and it's what the Hyperloop aims to do. Launch as a small throughput luxury product and if it's profitable then it doesn't matter if it ever expands beyond that or not.
Two of the largest sources of air pollution in the world are cars and airplanes, and Elon Musk has already been working on attacking the issue of car pollution. Imo extrapolating out from the combination of SpaceX and Starlink, subways are an obvious project for the Boring Company, especially once you have higher-speed boring machines. (Current boring machines move at about 10 meters/day.)
Years ago I remember reading about miles long test tracks being built. I haven't been following developments surrounding this at all, but as far as I can tell there are still no serious test tracks, why?
The ones that are out there are supposedly too short to get to full speed (or anywhere close to it!).
Given the hype surrounding it I have a hard time believing money is the limiting factor here. Sounds to me like the tech just isn't there and won't be anytime soon. And having a full test track would simply kill the deal flow.
"The near-term goal is to construct a 3-kilometer test track to conduct a full-speed prototype."
And it appears to me that what was supposed to be this 3km test track is a 500m Virgin Hyperloop test track today at the same location with some of the same people involved. So they might have land secured for the original length already.
"That startup has plans to build an 8-kilometer in Quay Valley"
"he expects to conduct the first test with live passengers in 32 months"
Elon seems to have moved on to non-vaccuum underground tunnels via The Boring Company, which is actually doing real projects.
Though apparently there are still Hyperloop competitions planned. The 2020 one was supposed to be "in a 10km vacuum tunnel with a curve", though that may be stalled by, well, obvious current events.
There are a number of metrics where it's clearly better.
Scheduling and routing. Not waiting 10-30 minutes for the next train depending on time of day. Not stopping anywhere but your destination. No connections or changeovers.
Personal space. Privacy, safety. Regardless of how you personally feel about this factor, it matters enough to some people to significantly impact usage.
Those factors may or may not be enough to warrant changing the systems, but they certainly are metrics by which Musk's systems are better.
Waiting 10-30 minutes for a train isn't a technological consequence of rail transportation, it's a symptom of a catastrophically inept transit agency.
What's stopping, say, Caltrain, from running trains at peak frequency all day? Incompetent leadership. They have the trains (which spend all day sitting idle _at_ terminus platforms), the have the crew (who also sit idle during the day), they have the capacity to run more trains off peak. They made a deliberate choice to not run the trains.
You might make the case that running more trains off-peak would increase maintenance costs. But I would wager that such maintenance costs pale in comparison to the cost of building enough platforms at your downtown termini to store trains all day. Moreover who cares about maintenance costs? It's insane to think that public transit should be profitable.
> You might make the case that running more trains off-peak would increase maintenance costs.
Alon Levy has done the math [1] and found that providing extra off-peak service is about 20% the cost of providing extra peak service, since the capital costs and labor costs dominate the actual operational costs.
Today Caltrain can't run more trains because diesel locomotives are too expensive and slow, and the current route has no passing tracks which makes scheduling hard to work in with express trains, which are needed to stay competitive to commuters. When they move to more modern EMU trains over the next couple years, they will be able run with 10 minute headways, potentially down to 6 minutes if you include the blended service with the CAHSR trains.
But that only solves the waiting-for-a-train problem. Regional train line still have trouble keeping up with expressways because of the time needed slow down, wait, and then accelerate up to speed at each station. Lighter rolling stock can make this a little bit better, but not dramatically; BART has always used relatively light EMUs and it still can only average around 55 km/h. Even the most fanciful of Caltrain upgrades would have a top speed of 180 km/h, which means they'd really be lucky to average 100 km/h on a train making every stop between San Jose and San Fransisco. Express trains would be slightly better (perhaps using the HSR trains to do SJ<->SF nonstop in ~30 minutes) but that could only cover a subset of trips. For most trips, if you can avoid terrible traffic, driving will remain faster.
Well, they don't run them all day because of the cost of the use of the trains and the cost of the crews. The crews can't be paid all day to do nothing.
Besides, capital costs of construction and vehicle acquisition absolutely dominates the cost of operation. The problem isn’t that running constantly available service isn’t affordable, the problem is that we lack the political will to make mass transit a meaningful alternative to cars.
I only know about Seattle where they were not paying for no work in the middle of the day. They had a last 2 mile transit van that would take you from your house to the P&R and back for a while. It was because the park and ride was filling up earlier and earlier and so people couldn't get to the bus to ride it. In this case, I know because I asked them how the pay went. They only got paid in the morning and the afternoon, there was no service and no pay in the middle of the day, only during rush hour.
The drivers I spoke to about this didn't like this because there wasn't enough time in the middle of the day to get a different job so they ended up getting a longer than 12 hour day to get 2 4 hour work periods.
It’ll also transit a tiny fraction of what a traditional subway would, and requires ownership of a car to use (assuming that a Tesla isn’t a requirement or at least preferred).
I’m thoroughly convinced that these types of systems, along with self driving cars, are purely fantasies to allow people to believe that we can fix all the problems of car culture without having to give something up. If you want to move a lot of people through a city, build a subway. They’re proven and effective. Stop trying to find a way to turn subways into cars, the result is always ridiculous.
Or, given the capacity limitations of the boring company thing, just build a segregated bus lane. The main advantage of subways over trams and fully segregated bus lanes is capacity, so if you’re not doing that...
Is it really 2 minutes longer? Subways move millions of people a day. Your loop tunnel will have 1/100th of that capacity. There will be no traffic jams, waiting at the elevators, to merge / separate traffic? Are you addressing some fantasy scenario where you are the only person using a city-wide system?
Yep, except that in order to match the capacity of the Montreal metro system you would need to have a car departing every 2 seconds, which is impossible.
One car every 2 seconds sounds totally plausible. In fact, that number actually seems pretty low to me. A single lane/tunnel should be able to handle automated cars traveling at a 2-second following distance no problem, so that just leaves loading/unloading as a potential bottleneck. How many on-ramps do you think it would take to reach a capacity of 0.5 cars/second? I'm really curious as to what sort of problems you're envisioning which would make that "impossible".
You need people to drive their cars safely into the intake with an average delay of two seconds, to match a very middling subway system running at a delay of 7 minutes instead of 2, assuming that every single car is filled to the brim. This is completely ridiculous. You won't be able to make people do anything with an average delay of 2 seconds, without any mistakes. The question isn't on-ramps, it's getting people to merge or arrive at the dispatch on average every two seconds without making any mistakes.
Nobody will be driving in these tunnels. Only fully autonomous cars running approved software will be allowed in. Those sort of problems go from "impossible" to "almost trivial" when the exact movements of every vehicle in the tunnels is being monitored and controlled by a centralized system.
They still need to get somewhere in order to enter the system, unless you're banking into full self driving. And they need to get there at a pace of one car every two seconds, or there needs to be a buffer.
How many amusement parks can load a ride car once every two seconds? Even continuously moving ski lifts aren't anywhere close to that and that's basically ideal conditions where the seat is delivered straight to your butt, and most users can reasonable be expected to be fit and coordinated. In the real world, people dawdle. You'd probably need dozens of loading lanes to reach .5/s, which means the stations are very large and expensive caverns.
Loop is basically a personal rapid transit system, which is an idea that keeps getting proposed for basically the reasons you cite, but the few implementations that do exist have generally underwhelmed.
The benefit of underground tunnels for electric vehicles is that you don't have to build to handle exhaust, so you can build tunnels with a smaller circumference (cheaper). And I believe underground tunnels are a perfect use case for Autopilot.
> Elon seems to have moved on to non-vaccuum underground tunnels via The Boring Company, which is actually doing real projects.
The Boring Company has never planned to build Hyperloop. They are about lowering cost and time of digging tunnels. Musk proposed Hyperloop but he said he'd leave implementation to others, so he hasn't moved on to anything.
In terms of car companies Tesla has gotten far less help then other car US makers, and its not even remotely close.
In terms of space launch SpaceX has absolutely collapsed prices of government launch and has been consistently been the cheapest government contractor and the one who delivered consistantly. This is all well document in public data and by statements of NASA and the DoE.
Please inform yourself instead of parroting these old myths. Honestly that sounds like nonsense from 2014 or something.
Those companies were not financed by taxpayers. Taxpayers bought some of their stuff, like flights to the space station from space x. Notice that not only did Boeing charge significantly more for human flights to space than spaceX, almost 50% more than SpaceX but they failed to deliver.
On evs, any company could get those subsidies that were designed to kick off the market. They worked brilliantly to kick off the market, it is just that most legacy car companies failed to produce evs, thus they had to pay other companies (Tesla is far from the only company to get money on top of sales for producing evs).
They weren't, if you meant taxpayers subsidized them. Have you seen the hops Tesla has to jump in order to sell cars to consumers, like in Texas or Michigan?
NASA is indeed SpaceX's most important customer, but taxpayers in fact save lot of money because SpaceX's offerings are much more competitive than those of other providers.
They were actually not. And in the cases tax payer funding was involved it was not some sort of blank check.
SpaceX got to orbit and was financed privately. Only once SpaceX had proven that capability, they were selected by the government to deliver cargo to ISS. SpaceX had to submit a competitive bid and was selected because they were the cheapest. SpaceX has fully executed on this contract and it was by far cheaper then any other transport to ISS service, including Russian, European, Japanese and US competition (Orbital ATK).
During its whole live, government contracts were never more then half SpaceX contracts and SpaceX was and is a viable buissness without government contracts. The main financing for SpaceX has been privately raised money.
NASA was a helpful costumer to SpaceX and helped it grow faster but calling that 'taxpayer funded' is a waste overstatement.
Tesla equally was privately funded and operate like that for much of its early history. The DoE loan only started rolling in by 2010 and helped them fund Model S. This loan was fully payed back with interest. Again, the majority of funding threw-out Tesla history is privately raised, including Roadster, Model X, Model 3, Model Y programs.
Its important to not that GM, Ford and Fiat-Chrysler received far, far, far more resources in the 2008-2012 timeframe and most of that has unlike Tesla not been payed back. GM of course had to be saved totally by the government.
Calling Tesla 'taxpayers funded' is just complete nonsense.
Teslas total subsidies divided by total amount of cars produced: $2500 per car. These, to my knowledge, do not include the various EV incentives the buyers get.
GM total subsidies divided by total amount of cars produced from 2010 onwards (couldn't find an all-times number): $77 per car.
> Its important to not that GM, Ford and Fiat-Chrysler received far, far, far more resources in the 2008-2012 timeframe and most of that has unlike Tesla not been payed back
Most has not been paid back? What figures are you using for this? My understanding is that the bailout was ~$80bn, but the final cost to the government was approximately $9bn.
When people complain about Tesla being taxpayer funded, they're generally referring to EV incentives, not the DoE loan. Tesla has indeed been supported quite a lot in that way.
But even if you value the environment at $0, other car manufacturers are going to benefit just as much from at least the FITC, so the argument is transient at best.
I have not researched this in many years but not all that money has been payed back by Ford, GM and so on. Just recently Ford moved back another payback claiming Corona as an excuse.
I assume the majority has been payed back but I have not followed this in exact detail. However the point stands that Tesla has not received the majority of government help.
> When people complain about Tesla being taxpayer funded, they're generally referring to EV incentives, not the DoE loan. Tesla has indeed been supported quite a lot in that way.
Frankly, this is just a wrong believe people have. Tesla has the exact same EV incentives as the competition, that amounts to 7500$ per car. Tesla has long run out of these, as they only cover 250'000 vehicles and then fall off. GM just like Tesla has made use of this and has also almost ran out as well. Ford still has many left and will and does make use of that to make their upcoming Mach-E a more price competitive product.
So there really is nothing Tesla specific and the competition has profited just as much.
Next up, there are credits based on fuel standard compliance. This existed long before Tesla. These are competitively sold for California (and other states) and Europe. Tesla does make a money from these this is not from the government or tax payers, rather other car companies who do not comply with fuel standards. Its a fine for car makers who fail to comply with regulation. But again, all car manufactures have the exact same opportunity to engage in that market.
Yes, it is a wrong belief. I think it was pretty clear I wasn't endorsing it, just explaining it.
It's a bit of a bummer to say something of the form: I think they mean X, which is still wrong because Y. Only to be downvoted and have multiple responses explaining that X is wrong because Y.
I don't disagree with anything you wrote in either comment (with the exception of the bailout payback thing, which I do believe you overstated).
> But even if you value the environment at $0, other car manufacturers are going to benefit just as much from at least the FITC, so the argument is transient at best.
My post should be read as: the position I think GP is taking is different to what you're responding to, but either way it's bullshit.
Did you know that LIGO designers had to add earthen berms to protect their vacuum pipes from bullets?
Not to mention the throughput issues, the energy budget, the cost of construction, the right-of-way issues...
Let's be frank: Hyperloop is dumb, and people who are spending money on it are too. You have better things to do with your time than analyzing it or defending it, and so do I.
This article[0] talks about how locals were shooting at it, although it doesn't mention the berms (talking to the sheriff must not have worked out). I think a hyperloop could avoid this problem by not locating in Louisiana.
Derailing a railroad is a complicated endeavor that will likely get detected and the train stopped, and even in the most catastrophic event only a very small fraction of the occupancy of one train will be killed.
Whereas a catastrophic dépressurisation event on a hyperloop will assuredly kill everyone inside. The amount of energy stored in such a pressure differential is equivalent to many hundreds of tons of TNT. It's not comparable at all.
Derailed train seems to injure most passangers, but kill only few of them [1] [2]. It would seem that hyperloop would be more similar to a plane - more deaths than injuries. Also damage to infrastructure, would be more than a few rails.
(please educate me if I'm wrong)
If you derailed a train, you'd lose what, tens of millions of dollars worth of locomotives, cars, and maybe a mile of track? When a hypertunnel explosively pressurizes, chances are you'd lose tens of billions of dollars of tube, plus anything that was anywhere in it.
The designs I've seen had very thin tubes. Certainly not anywhere close to 10 inch thick steel, no. The designs I've seen had thicknesses close to or under one inch.
A 50 cal APDS bullet would punch clean through the first layer and would likely leave an inch thick hole, and would likely cause significant damage on the other side if not penetrate it outright. This is almost certainly sufficient to cause explosive pressurization, which would likely cause immediately more damage and eventually create a powerful shockwave that would destroy anything in the tube.
Of course, a bomb next to the wall would be much worse.
If it was a 10 inch thick steel tube, it would be much better, but also ten times more expensive, making it prohibitively expensive.
You can't refuse to do something just because you're scared of a few bad actors. Otherwise we have to stop making cars (they get driven into crowds), building tall buildings (they get bombed or have aircraft flown into them), drinking public water (they get threatened with poisoning attempts), blah blah blah.
When an airplane is shot at by a civilian, in 99.999% of cases there will be no big issues (read : multiple deaths).
Making an entire transportation system with hundreds of thousands of people inside that can all be killed instantly by a single bullet or bomb is insane lunacy.
As dumb as the hyperloop projects may be, I think it's dwarfed by all the other money spending elsewhere. We can just look at it from afar and enjoy the mythbuster-XL show
The Dubai hyperloop project is supposedly proceeding. The 10km test track was supposed to open this year. Can't find any info later than January 2020.
The Dubai to Abu Dhabi link is the ideal case. The route is mostly flat, open desert. Funding is available. There is government support. There's considerable traffic between those points.
If that doesn't work, not much else will.
If built, it would compete directly with Etihad Rail, which is building a regular rail network throughout the entire UAE and already has its first phase operational:
This focuses primarily on cargo, but is built with passenger trains at up to 200 km/h in mind. And most Hyperloop business plans also seem to rely heavily on freight.
Interesting. The locomotives are Diesel-electrics made by what used to be a locomotive recycling company in the US. Then Caterpillar bought them, and they now have some decent products, apparently.
The railroad's main job is transporting mined sulfur to ports for export.
This is a total contrast to "hyperloops". It does a useful but boring job with useful but boring technology.
The vac-train concept is from 1799. Maglev tech is decades in production. I remember a Discovery Channel show 20 years ago about trains traveling 5000mph through tunnels at the bottom of the ocean to cross continents in an hour.
Hyperloop is fantastical renaming of old tech without solving any of the fundamental problems of economy, geography, energy and politics. We're capable of building incredible projects if only we had unlimited funding and will.
It's nice to see Tesla and Spacex changing global transportation so maybe better train systems will finally get some attention, but right now this is just not realistic.
Please remind me again how a company with a market share of 0.6% [1] is changing global transportation?
It's fascinating to me how people seem to vastly underestimate the actual volume of the global car market while overestimating the impact of unicorns.
In order to even make a dent in the global market, getting into the double digits would be required.
Even in the market "dominated" by Tesla (e.g. plug-in EVs), their market share is a combined 16.6%, meaning more than 83% of EVs are made by other companies [2]...
Tesla is to the car market quite literally what Apple is in the desktop PC and smartphone markets - a "dominating force" with a tiny market share in the global market.
Tesla already changed global transportation, by dragging auto manufacturers kicking and screaming to make real investments in electric transportation. They've averaged a CAGR of 40% or so for the fast decade and have no intentions of slowing down.
Obviously they won't get 100% of the global auto market, but they're much more influential and dangerous than you'd be led to believe just by looking at their market share.
By the way, SpaceX performed 65% of all the orbital space launches that happened in 2018. Worldwide. Competitors mainly being the ULA and the space programs of sovereign state actors.
These investments are due to changes and mandates from legislation, though, not market pressure [1]. Governments are pushing for total fleet emission limits and automakers are forced to either build EVs or pay fines (or Tesla - same deal).
> By the way, SpaceX performed 65% of all the orbital space launches that happened in 2018.
And that has what to do with EVs and Tesla? Whataboutism at its finest...
Call me pro tesla if you will but I think you're underestimating the influence Tesla has had and is having on the whole planet. Few years ago they were a ridicule curiosity. Now electric vehicles are everywhere, trucks are on the way.
It's highly debatable whether this was due to Tesla or actual legislation, though.
CO² fleet restriction forced the hand of automakers, not 3% EV market share.
A substantial portion of Tesla's operational income comes from CO² certificates from automakers that don't meet the CO² restrictions, by the way [1]. Also something that people tend to overlook.
You're mistaken, VW was caught cheating nitrogen oxide emission standards in America, not CO2. There have been some allegations they may also have been cheating CO2 emissions, but that's not nearly as clear and the nitrogen oxide emissions is really what the big fuss, and arrests, were about.
Market share is just the ranking of sales by brand over an arbitrary time period. It has nothing to do with innovation.
Tesla has clearly revolutionized electric vehicles to the point where they are not just viable but desirable, and are beating traditional luxury and sports manufacturers in technology and driving experience. They've moved the entire industry forward and now every major brand has committed to making electric vehicles.
I find your comparison to Apple strange since Apple has also, quite literally, changed the world with their iPhones.
Hyperloop has sex appeal, but it seems like Maglev or just plain old high speed rail makes more sense from an economics perspective. I can't imagine it's cheap to keep a tube evacuated. Either way, it seems good to try and build these sort of high-tech industries in the US.
The speed is supposed to be even higher than maglev, so it can compete with planes over longer distances.
But yes, any kind of high speed public transport would be great.
Hyperloop tubes were never meant to be fully evacuated, they operate at pressure differentials with air bearings (imagine a cylindrical air hockey table).
It may not be totally evacuated but the pressure difference between it and the outside world is still supposed to be very large isn't it? And if you want a hyperloop that actually goes anywhere that's going to represent quite a large volume of low pressure space that you need to create and maintain.
Surely this has to be quite energy intensive and generally difficult to maintain, especially since you have to get people in and out of it all the time. I'm not saying these problems are physically insurmountable but they sure sound expensive.
Another thing, is that anyone that punches a hole big enough in the tube basically transforms half of the hyperloop into a bomb. Energy = pressure * volume. That's a lot of energy smashing through a hyperloop capsule. Basically, imagine if 3% of the tube was filled with pipe bombs, but in reverse.
As long as pod moves, there's a constant pressure build-up of air in front of it, to the point that the design includes a compressor to pump air from the front of the pods because passively preventing the buildup by letting it blow through the pod would be insufficient.
So a leak would be a piffling little annoyance in comparison - there'd not be enough volume of air inside the pods to cause a problem compared to the air the compressor on the pod will be actively pumping from the front of the pod to get it out of the way.
That compressor is absent from every single design we've seen right now, The duct for air to go from front to back would also use up a significant amount of cabin space, and the electric-powered multi-stage high compression ratio high-speed compressor would have massive power usage, weight, and cost. Power usage that would have to be palliated via batteries, as the capsule supposedly has no contact with the tube.
Because of this, no full-scale design yet has incorporated a compressor.
The tube would need egress points, interfaces to stations. I think the difficulty of building one tube between stations is like building a 100km long airplane fuselage. But any proposal is little more than "'just' build a tube!"
The difference between what an aircraft fuselage and what the hyperloop tube needs to do actually seem to be quite massive (caution, back of napkin understanding from somebody who is casually interested but by no means an engineer).
The hyperloop is apparently to be pressurised at around 1/1000th of the pressure of the atmosphere (around 0.015psi). An airplane cabin is apparently pressurised to around 11-12 psi and at an altitude of 36,000 feet apparently the atmospheric pressure is about 3.3 psi so actually the plane fuselage only has to manage a pressure difference of about 3.6 times. So it's like building a 100km long airplane fuselage that has to deal with pressure differences that are something like 280 times greater (please excuse/correct me if this is not the relevant comparison) - although you probably claw back a lot of the difference from a generalised perspective of engineering difficulty from not having to put the thing in the air to begin with.
Edit: I suppose it's more like building 100km of space craft cabin, which probably underscores my understanding of the difficulty a bit better.
The only thing I can find which specifically mentions a pressure says 1 millibar, which is quite low.[0] The pressurization/depressurization cycle will also fatigue the pods, which will reduce their life-expectancy.
I recall at the time it was first proposed, Elon Musk said 0.1kPa which agrees with another comment stating 1 millibar. At the time, criticism comparing it to the old vactrain idea was dismissed as "but this tube is not fully evacuated". But it's about the same value that was proposed by vactrain, and is 99.9% evacuated.
It doesn't have to be that good a vacuum. It's probably really no more expensive than conventional high speed rail.
The hyperloop proposal is operating at approximately 1 millibar of pressure. That sounds CLOSE to a vacuum..and it is, roughly 0.01 atm, but with vacuums getting down to around there is easy. Getting down to, say, 0.00001 atm is much much much harder.
But you aren't just doing it a chemistry lab. You're doing it in an enormous tube and the tube has openings to allow pods in and out, so it's a lot more complicated.
With any new technology, the likelihood of failure is high but the expected value is positive. As Nat Friedman (CEO of GitHub) said: "Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money."
Yes, all those poor Tesla IPO investors who got misled by a loony are lining up for shareholder lawsuits and yelling for prosecution, due to the obviously financially irresponsible management of their investment.
(Refresh my memory here - would an 88X return on investment after IPO be classified as high returns on a high-risk investment?)
The likelihood of failure is 100% when the technology is as ridiculous as the hyperloop. It's just yet more gadgetbahn, except it's transparently worse.
Talk about a false dichotomy there. No person is fully a pessimist or optimist. Framing it in terms like this just serves to stifle actual discussion. A nice soundbite from someone who happened to be optimistic about the right thing.
A pneumatic railway was already built and functional in London in 1863. While designed for mail, humans rode on it and it was triple the speed of any transport of the time.
Technically it might qualify as a hyperloop so your prediction may already be wrong.
> “Mostly this would be for freight,” says Mark Patton, who oversees transport plans for the Columbus region. Paul Judge, who runs a thriving plastics manufacturer, Axium, in the city, says he would welcome it if it meant he could run a big factory, cheaply, in one spot and ship his billions of units of shampoo bottles, hand-sanitisers and the like to markets in the region.
This makes zero sense to me. Surely, there must be a law of decreasing returns in supply chain latency. How could reducing delivery times times to hyperloop levels possibly provide a reasonable pay-off period, given the considerable cost of building and maintaining a subterranean vacuum tube train network?
Let’s think it out (as in: add your thoughts). If it’s for goods, you don’t need a human size pod. You can scale pods to a size that represents goods that make sense to transport quickly. Obviously you want benefits that come from standardisation, like containers give you.
Fully automated transport between all major cities for anything less than a metre diameter? I think that looks like the future. Mail, Amazon, fresh produce, run as a stream rather than in large batches, automatically routed, staying off highways. More efficient stock management that can react to surges in demand. Charge for it with spot pricing so high value items get priority.
Edit: produce sounds a bit silly but taken to extremes might be interesting. When you deliver a ton of lettuce, it’s sold as a stream. Someone gets the fresh stuff and someone gets the three-day old stuff. If you can reorder every 30m, everyone gets fresh. Smaller shelves and stores, maybe no store except online.
First, very little freight is latency sensitive. The vast majority of cargo is cost sensitive, which is why most bulk goods coming from abroad arrive via cargo ship rather than airplane. There are a ton of companies that’ll accept days or weeks of delay to reduce overall cost; so a loop must compete with rail freight and semi trucks on cost.
Theoretically a cargo hyper loop network could compete with domestic air freight, but I find the idea that air freight alone could cover the cost of a hyper loop network hard to buy. This is doubly true when you consider the fact that air freight shares costs with commercial passenger travel, both in terms of infrastructure and vehicle development.
Second, they’re already working on automating existing railroads. There’s no particular reason why a hyper loop is necessary to automate a train, and we’re already seeing some of the very long haul train routes in Australia being automated. This comes with the benefit of much lower development time and cost, since it allows for the reuse of the most expensive bit of infrastructure: the rails themselves.
I never mentioned bulk goods. I mentioned items that are time sensitive. Most e-commerce is latency sensitive. I recently started getting groceries on an hour delivery. It’s a game changer. Amazon could probably power a network like that by itself. What would a 2 hour Amazon delivery to most cities do? What markets does it enable access to? How do you compete with that?
It’s too easy to think of why something won’t work. Rather think “is there a customer and a product for which latency is important but is unfulfilled by current infrastructure”. Don’t use my examples, make your own. Saying “no” to that question is to bet against human desires and ingenuity.
Freshest (anything) from 200km away within 2 hours. Will top restaurants pay for that? Latest widget from a warehouse 500km away in 2 hours. Allows Amazon to compete with local stores. Allows medical supplies to get there in a surge. I’m sure you can think of something.
That’s ... not how arguments work. You’ve got to provide your own examples. I’m not going to do your work for you.
> Saying “no” to that question is to bet against human desires and ingenuity
This is genuinely a bad way to approach these things, as you’re presuming that it’ll work based on enthusiasm and not evidence. This exact same logic would’ve led you to advocate for flying cars, as you would’ve assumed that ingenuity would triumph over the practical issues that have so far prevented them from working. Ingenuity is great, but market demand actually pays for the bills.
And predicting exactly what the market will do is impossible, but given the fact that this will cost trillions of dollars to actually build, it should be possible to predict use cases that’ll bring in billions of revenue.
> Allow Amazon to compete with local stores.
Amazon is already crushing local stores on price. It turns out that consumers value delivery speed but not as much as they value low cost.
A hyper loop might improve the speed of goods between Amazon warehouses (or run fewer), but it would do nothing to improve the “last mile” problem, which is where all the cost is.
Drone delivery + a hyper loop would actually be faster; but I’m dubious that this use case alone covers said trillions of dollars of cost; especially when drone delivery from local warehouses would work too.
> Will top restaurants pay for that?
No. Restaurants can barely afford the delivery fees of people with cars. Maybe Michelin Star restaurants can afford a bit more, but not that much.
> Allows medical supplies to get there in a surge.
Much easier to just shove it in the back of a C130J. And it requires us to invest a grand total of $0 in new infrastructure or hardware.
> I’m sure you can think of something.
Again, if you’re going to advocate that it will work, that’s your job.
I said let’s think it out. That’s an invitation to consider possibilities that might work, not a declaration that I’ve found the perfect example. Brainstorm, not argue.
But hey, argue gets your rocks off, go right ahead. Feel smarter pointing out that something very hard probably won’t work? We knew that already.
For "short" (< 500 mile?) journeys, a plane wastes a lot of fuel climbing to altitude. Hyperloop has an advantage there. But for those journeys, high-speed or even regular-speed rail is tolerable. The challenge a train has in enabling those journeys is the last mile, which is why trains work in older cities. I can, and do, get off a train terminus in the town centre and walk/cycle/bus to my destination.
For longer journeys, I'm not sure there's a technical case for hyperloop over a plane even with zero land cost - planes at altitude are good at what they do. The challenge a plane has in enabling those journeys is that, whilst a plane doesn't need much land in total, it needs an awful lot at the terminus. So it's a last ten miles, not a last mile. However, a good shuttle service can solve that.
it's not that planes need a lot of space, it's that many airports are ridiculously large to accommodate many planes, and far away from city centers. Those are choices made perhaps due to noise or pollution, but there are exceptions where airports are inside the city and small enough to walk from end to end, such as Burbank in Southern California. Why is there a tendency to build a few huge airports instead of smaller regional ones?
All this stuff does not solve the simple problem of moving the people to the rails to begin with.
Living in Germany, i can get onto an ICE and tear through the country at 280 km/h at any time (usually with huge delays though).
But often people still don't, for a few reasons which will be true for any technology, replacing the standard trains.
One reason is, that transportation is always a door to door problem and if the transport from and to the train stations sucks, the whole system will not be used.
Who wants to deal with changeovers from buses to trains all the time, if those have horrible working hours, constant delays or long waiting times?
The whole public transport system must be comprehensive, always available, reliable and fast. Being partially fast solves nothing.
He is awfully repetitive and his earlier videos on the subject are more informative, but he's basically right. If the basic science disagrees, it must be a scam until proven otherwise. Plenty of studies were done on the accuracy of labs done on finger sticks before Theranos, but investors were not paying attention.
It’s not legit at all. I’ve always been a fan, and all his busted videos in the past featured one very important feature: the violation of thermodynamics. He always showed why a product was physically impossible. But he doesn’t do that with a hyperloop. And ultimately, if you see through the repetition and downright nastiness, you see that his argument is essentially “hyperloop is very expensive, it would be unsafe and render artists don’t know science.” I wouldn’t have minded if he hadn’t taken that low shot at Elon when a rocket blew up on the pad. Honestly, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he started targeting Elon, with the sudden and notable lack of violation-of-physics, around the same time he started pushing his channel to have more engagement and make more money.
TLDR: I’ve seen all his videos and his hyperloop videos basically lack substance. Scott Manley is a much better source of opinions on such things.
The problem with criticizing hyperloop on technical grounds is that there often isn't even enough substance to really criticize. There are several designs, which only really have "you put it a vehicle in a vacuum tube and go zoom!" in common--and even then, there's contention about vacuum.
So the only way you can really criticize it is on gadgetbahn grounds: it's shiny new technology [1], that's safer, cheaper, faster, better, stronger, etc. than the stodgy old infrastructure plans. It'll come in sooner and cheaper than them, we just need a few years [2] to finish designing them, and a couple million dollars [3] as well.
And if you've read all of my footnotes, you'll realize why this pitch is too good to be true. I'm personally not bothered by that so much as I'm bothered by the argument to stop investing in infrastructure because gadgetbahn is the future.
[1] Except "put trains in a vacuum tube" is a really old concept. But hyperloop is something "new," and the differences from vactrains is, uh, see above about the difficulty of pinning down any technical details.
[2] Looking to be 2 decades from "initial" concept to first implementation at this point.
[3] If you tot up all the grants so far, we're past $1 billion at this point to just study how to build this thing.
Perhaps then wait with critisizing the hyperloop on technical grounds until there is enough with substance instead of making up fake technical facts? Currently the Hyperloop is basically just a concept and a couple of startups which are not connected to Elon Musk in any sense. Of course, as with any new startups, there is a lot of marketing and little substance. And yes, as with any startup in a completely new technological domain, one should be highly sceptical about their success chance. These kind of tech startups do have a huge chance of failing indeed. If it were trivial to pick up a completely new technology and bring it to the market successfully, everyone would be doing it. Also, there is quite a bit of shady business going on. A lot of startup companies are run just to finance large salaries, while the investment money lasts and to vanish after investment money ends[1]. But all of this is not a valid technical criticism of the hyperloop. There are certainly valid points to be made against the feasibility of the concept, but then these points should be made and not artificial ones invented.
1: I could once watch this from close-up. As a grad student, I was involved in optical data storage. We were able to store a few gigabytes in a small crystal. This work was financed by a startup company created by a consulting company. This startup would collect money - largely from state research investments to match to the private money promised to be invested by the consulting company. This did finance our work for some years and paid a couple of salaried employees of the startup - related to the consulting company. When the public investments ran out and no third party investments had arrived, the startup would fade away. And with that the project in spite of what we had achieved so far.
A very bad piece. The video uses the very techniques of showing shiny renders to make its point it critisizes. Also mixes up a lot of facts and pretends things are in a context which are not. While there is valid criticism of the Hyperloop concept, this video certainly isn't.
This is such a joke. I remember when it was first described, I predicted that it would do nothing but derail legitimate rail projects, and that's exactly what's happened in California city councils. People have been sold the idea of taking their car on the train like a ferry, for $5 instead of proper public transit, and it will never happen.
Vacuum equipment is notoriously difficult to maintain, especially sealing of moving parts. It was proposed to be cheap in part because you "just" make let the tube thermally expand and contract at the stations, rather than at regular intervals like rail. Based on the distances proposed, at California temperatures, you'd need roughly +/-20m of expansion capability, at each station. And you need this at the point where you are sealing things, and starting/stopping cars, having people move in and out (well, not many people because the capacity is a joke), and cleaning up vomit. To the safety standards for transportation. Plus all the same problems a normal train has, like getting right-of-way. Good luck with that.
One of the points in the proposal was "assuming 2.5G is an acceptable acceleration..." 2.5-3G is typical of a roller coaster, although the more intense one go to 5G or so.
What I'm failing to understand about the Hyperloop concept (apart from all the issues with thermal expansion, maintaining a near vacuum, safety consideration and passenger capacity):
In real life tracks will have to include curves, as there's already terrain, existing buildings, etc. Trains have to lean into curves, just like motorbikes. With high speeds, anything exceeding a more traditional maglev train, the angles required will become rather extreme with the track climbing up the sides of the tube. What is supposed to happen, if the train has to decrease speed below the planned cruising speed for the given section or even to halt? What about passengers inside? How could this pass any safety checks for mass transport operations?
(Notably, this was the only new thing addressed by Musk's original "air hockey puck", front fan driven air cushion concept, as this could have avoided any fixed installations, like rails or guards, (at the cost of other stability issues) and could have allowed a variable leaning angle. But, since this feature has been universally dismissed, how is this supposed to work?)
The article presents the expert case for why hyperloop is doomed to fail. Normally in this sort of situation, I assume the experts are correct, but not in this case. Let me explain why.
The reason is that we have been in this situation several times before with a Musk idea. The experts all said it was completely crazy, but nonetheless it succeeded spectacularly.
The reason the ideas succeeded is Musk is a genius and as a consequence he thinks things out much better than the experts, who are not geniuses, do.
I am not saying that hyperloop will succeed. No one succeeds all the time, and perhaps this time Musk will fail. I am just saying it seems to me virtually certain he is quite aware of all the factors that the experts say would cause hyperloop to succeed, and has developed surprising solutions to them, and there is a good chance these solutions will succeed.
"A hyperloop system involves passengers or freight transported by pods elevated by magnets, which travel within raised pipes. The pods can be propelled at 620mph (1,000kph), says Jay Walder, boss of Virgin Hyperloop One, one of the firms pushing the idea. At that pace 'you could move between Columbus and Chicago in 40 minutes', he says, so covering the 460 miles many hours quicker than by driving and at a cost (and overall carbon impact) that he says would be lower than flying."
If the economics work, for both people and goods, and if the environmental externalities are lower than cars/trucks/trains/planes, then it would be great to have regional networks of hyperloops in the US. I say, bring it on!
Lower than flying.
Train are the most efficient, simplest and oldest form of land transport. Where do you get the idea that hyperloop can even approach efficiency of a car, with all the energy wasted on high speed and keeping up near vacuum?
It already exists for freight. We have a large train network that is extremely efficient. Decreasing carrying capacity while vastly increasing energy costs isn't worth it just for a gain in speed.
That video doesn't talk about the Hyperloop at all. You're getting the Boring Company's Loop mixed up with the Hyperloop, which despite the similar-sounding names have close to no relation.
Off-topic: whenever I see a post here with much more comments then up-votes I suspect a train wreck of a comment section. Looking through it confirms my suspicion. I wonder how many unique commenters are here, and whether unique commenters to overall comments ratio is also a good indicator of quality.
From my perspective the best links have not more then around 350 up-votes (often less then 200) and less then third of that comments.
Can someone explain me how Hyperloop is supposed to work? There are so many things wrong with it.
- Hyperloop is a vactrain, a century old idea, and to this day, despite numerous attempts, nothing came close to a working prototype, let alone something production-ready.
- By contrast, high-speed trains carries millions of passengers every day in many parts of the world. They are safe, comfortable, and commercially viable. And for hyperloop-like distances (500-1000km), you can expect a 3h trip. It is not 40 minutes, but considering that high speed trains typically go downtown to downtown and usually don't require you to show up more than a few minutes in advance, it is often the fastest way to go in practice. Hyperloop doesn't bring much to the table compared to high speed trains.
- The individual pods are tiny compared to a train. And because of the high speeds involved, they certainly require a lot of spacing to stay safe, it means low capacities.
- There is a long list of technical challenges, most of them require engineering feats that have never been done on a large scale. It is an Apollo-scale experimental project presented as a commercial venture.
- Progress so far has been laughable, none of the hard problems have been solved. What about thermal expansion, the ability to maintain a vacuum while allowing people in and out, safety systems, the civil engineering required... The experimental pods are scaled down with no space for passengers. They can go fast, which is nice, but at 460 km/h they are still below conventional full scale high-speed train records.
Not really a technical challenge but it still ticks me off:
- Hyperloop is championed by Elon Musk, but he actually has very little involvement in it. He owns none of the hyperloop companies, it is all "open-source", "community", etc.. Basically, besides being a sponsor for "competitions", it is all talk.
I know that Elon Musk is far from stupid, he is a world-class businessman and a competent engineer. I can't believe he really sees Hyperloop as something viable.
So for me it just a daring publicity stunt (a borderline scam IMHO), something that Elon Musk is also known to be good at. After all, the story says that SpaceX started as a publicity stunt. He wanted to buy a Russian ICBM, repurposed to plant something on Mars. It didn't work, and the fact that he couldn't do it gave him the idea that he could be a market for a rocket company.
If you look at Hyperloop, it is essentially a battery powered electric car running inside a tunnel. And guess what, he makes battery powered electric cars, and now tunnels. I have a few doubts about Boring, but at least, it is concrete, and there is always a need for tunnels, even if it is just to dig sewer pipes.
Occam's Razor is sharper than Hanlon's. Elon clearly doesn't truly believe that Hyperloop could work. Hyperloop's intention being the disruption of working mass transit is the simplest explanation.
> Remember GM trying to scrap public transport projects?
I'm assuming you're referring to the GM streetcar conspiracy here. What GM actually did was try to monopolize the supply of buses--which is still a form public transport. They also did buy out several streetcar lines, but the streetcar systems they bought were already bankrupt or on the verge of bankruptcy. There's no real difference in the trajectory of streetcars in the cities which were bought out by GM and those in the cities were they were not bought out.
It's very irritating talking about whatever hyperloop is, because that the bar for what the hyperloop is keeps changing (Is it tunnels? Is it in a vacuum? If there's no vacuum isn't it just a tunnel? Is it your own car or a pod? There's solar panels somehow?).
If we wanted better transport we should invest in busses and trains, which have better carrying capacity and better failure modes than whatever hyperloop is supposed to have. Oh an over a hundred years of proven effectiveness.
But I think people want magic solutions to things rather than the simple, working solution that we already have.
> It's very irritating talking about whatever hyperloop is, because that the bar for what the hyperloop is keeps changing (Is it tunnels? Is it in a vacuum? If there's no vacuum isn't it just a tunnel? Is it your own car or a pod? There's solar panels somehow?).
The Hyperloop concept is exclusively a pod in a vacuum tube. The electric cars in a tunnel concept is called the Loop (no Hyper), and it's a different idea entirely developed by Musk's Boring Company (which in turn has no involvement with Hyperloop development). The names are very similar, which has caused a lot of confusion, even in mainstream media reports.
Even for hyperloop, the level of evacuation of air from the tunnels is an optimization problem. It's a question of where exactly is the intersection of cost of reducing the air pressure further vs. gain from being able to further increase pod speed.
Of course with no evacuation you're left with just a train in a tunnel, so I'd argue the defining factor of a hyperloop type transport is that at least partial evacuation of air from the tunnel, with a mechanism for preventing pressure buildup in front of the pods is the main defining characteristic.
> So for me it just a daring publicity stunt (a borderline scam IMHO), something that Elon Musk is also known to be good at.
Agree with you on this point.
Sometimes I feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I talk with friends about Hyperloop. From an economic and engineering standpoint, it’s a complete non-starter.
> So for me it just a daring publicity stunt (a borderline scam IMHO), something that Elon Musk is also known to be good at.
I think this is a very unfair and cynical way of looking at it. How it is a scam? He said, he thinks its a good idea and he released basically a little concept whitepaper on what his ideas are.
He has never attempted to make any money from it, and he clearly just thinks its a good idea and that's why he put the idea out.
There is every indication that he still thinks its a promising technology. He has hinted at this but clearly Starship, Starlink, Cybertruck and so on are priority for him. From a Boring perspective the non vac tunnels, ie Loop rather then Hyperloop, seem to have a more direct opportunity in the market as these require far less technical innovation.
I for one would not be surprised if Elon tries to take to actually take this on in 3-5 years. I for one would enjoy going insane speeds from city center to city center.
Maybe you should learn the basics about a topic before trying to argue about it. The Boring company fund raiser is not based any promises about Hyperloop.
A car salesman who talks the public into investing huge budgets into a mass transportation system that will never efficiently work and is basically a huge was of taxpayer money? Why would Elongated Muskrat do that, I wonder?
Hyperloop makes much more sense on Mars than on Earth. You need shielding anyway and the pressure gradient is much smaller, so the pipes don't need to be so thick, and leaks aren't so dangerous.
The problems with building this have nothing to do with technology but with right-of-way, investment, and politics. If those factors were solved, we'd already have high-speed rail in places where Hyperloop has been proposed. The fact that we don't says that Hyperloop is unlikely to be feasible as well.