As a professional mechanical engineer I have worked on high quality steel tubes (nuclear submarines) before. The immediate thing that sticks out to me in this proposal are the tight mechanical tolerances that have to be maintained. Talking about tens of thousandths of an inch tolerances on a 10' diameter tube is not to be dismissed lightly. That is going to be tough to maintain - especially with welding heat distortion. I would image the tubes will be joined with automated friction stir welding or something similiar, but that will still require a fair amount of post weld machining which has its own pitfalls. Not to mention simple thermal expansion and contraction as the temperature changes could change the circularity and inner diameter.
I would be more interested to see a tolerance stack up of those considerations than an FEA model of the concrete pylons. I can gaurentee that we can build concrete pylons capable of holding up a steel tube, that is done all over the country dozens of different uses cases. But can we build a multi-hundred mile long steel tube to the required tolerances?
I would be inclined to trade off efficiency for manufacturability. I.e. maybe a higher internal pressure or larger diameter to make it less sensitive. There should be plenty of power from the solar panels so it doesn't have to be perfectly efficient.
I'm also surprised that the I-5 plan is cheaper than buying private land. I may be naive here, but the pylons really do take away most of the objections from farmers and installing tubes over farmland has to be a lot cheaper than doing construction above a highway. I just look at boondoggle that was the SkyTrain in NYC (tram running over a highway out to JFK airport) and wonder if that is a great option.
> I would image the tubes will be joined with automated friction stir welding or something similiar, but that will still require a fair amount of post weld machining which has its own pitfalls
The document mentions standard orbital seam wlelding, plus specialized machining equipment that travels along the tube to smooth out the gliding surface.
The capsules are only 60% the diameter of the tube, or 36% it's area (68/47% for the vehicle-carrying version), it doesn't seem to require tight tolerances for operation. I got the idea that tube distortion and movement is taken into account into the system.
> it doesn't seem to require tight tolerances for operation
Well, it's true that the top and sides of the tube don't get too close to the capsule, so those parts seem relatively low-tolerance, as you say.
But the load-bearing skis ride on an air bearing of 0.5mm to 1.3mm (see page 20), moving at over 1000km/h. As rossjudson notes, the skis are on mechanical suspension, to smooth out shocks to the riders, but it's not clear (to ignorant me) how much of a bump those skis can glide over. 0.1mm, no problem. What about 1.0mm?
On a related note, Musk seems sanguine about the sag you'd get in any structure supported by pylons (see e.g. page 27). Even with inch-thick steel walls, with pylons an average of 30m apart (100'), you'll see some sag, right? Any engineers want to comment on the deviation in 30m of inch-diameter-wall steel tubing? Let's see, 1200kph, 30m, so you pass a pylon 11 times per second. So in 0.09 seconds, you have to go from the top of one pylon, to the valley between two pylons, and back to the top of the next pylon. I guess that's all absorbed by the mechanical suspension?
No you could not. The steel tube will expand and contract as temperatures change. Along most of the route, that longitudinal movement of the tube will be in the 10s and 100s of feet, which means that the "valley" could be anywhere on the tube according to temperature.
Also, tubes will resonate and vibrate as vehicles go by. This could be actively damped at the pylons though, like they already considered doing for ground subsidence.
Offtopic, but please consider writing some blog posts or articles about your experiences working on nuclear submarines. That just sounds so cool, and while the work is probably dull, I'd nonetheless be fascinated to read some detailed stories.
I will say as a former nuclear submariner myself, how appreciative we all were of the work the designers put into the boats. I was on an Ohio-class myself and got to appreciate the design first-hand. I've also heard simply marvelous tales about the Seawolf-class (pity she was so expensive).
So thanks for whatever you did in keeping the boats safe (both in design and construction), it was certainly much-appreciated in the Fleet.
As a fellow mech eng, what startup environment are you involved in and is it utilising your mech skillset or something else, eg: programming abilities?
My background is BS Mechanical Engineering, minor CS, primarily focused on robotics. Grew up programming and building robots. Worked at Bug Labs which bridged the gap pretty well, then went to General Dynamics for 100% mechanical engineering, now at getlua.com for 100% software. There are some mechanical startups around NYC (MakerBot is the obvious one) but I really liked the team and the product at Lua and I'm quite happy here.
If I read the proposal correctly, the system is less sensitive than the tolerances you describe. There is a tight tolerance to maintain between the "air skid" and the wall of the tube, but the air skid is mounted on a suspension system that is probably intended to deal with small variations away from the ideal tube shape. Those variations will manifest to passengers as "bumps" and will also result in transient additional drag, I suspect.
It would be cool if you could take another look and see if the tolerances are truly what you describe, or if there's actually more room for variance.
The tube is considerably larger than the vehicle, so really it's only the smoothness of the bottom part of the tube that is important, not the precise dimensions. And the surface the vehicle flies over doesn't need to be steel - you could line the bottom half of the tube with a wax, or something similar, and that would be much easier to smooth to the tolerances needed, and re-smooth if it suffers any damage.
In fact you might be able to handle some thermal expansion (at least seasonal, not daily) that way - release some clamps on a telescopic section, adjust, reclamp, melt and re-smooth the wax.
line1 × line2 × line3 = 629m (~1890') of thermal expansion over a 570 km tube.
Did I read it right that they will take out all that expansion at the ends? To get that down to say 30m between pylons you have to have about 30 expansion joints. Can they go full speed through an expansion joint?
They are taking it out at the ends. Assume a fixed point in the middle, and you have some 1000' of movement at either end. That should be feasible, but the tube needs to be designed for very significant longitudinal movement through the pylons, and the design needs to take into account the possible lateral loads on pylons from having to bend the tube away from the geometry it has at the baseline temperature.
Thanks for writing! I can also imagine that when there's one very long tube there's going to be a lot of the length change with the temperature, ideally one wouldn't want to have any hard joints at all to allow the individual pieces to extend and shrink. One hundreds of miles long welded tube does sound potentially problematic.
The biggest problem seems to be that Musk's costs don't include most of the costs actually included in High Speed Rail proposal that allow you to actually travel between SF and LA and not SF minus bay (they omitted that cost) and Sylmar (where you've still got over an hour to go on the Antelope Valley Metrolink Line to reach the LA city):
It seems that the proposal is actully much less serious than on the first glance:
Amusingly enough, the California HSR budget for the Central Valley is under $10 billion. Ie, in the same ball-park as this proposal. The reason the HSR project is going to cost $60 billion is because it has to face an uncomfortable truth; actually getting to LA and SF is expensive. Very expensive.
Moreover, would you like to be sitting in the tube on the chair from which you can't even stand up for a half an hour without the chance to do anything but remain sitting, not getting any help the next half hour on the occasion when you get sick? Would you take your kid there? Your parent?
You're in control of your car though so if you need to you can stop and get out to deal with any bodily functions or sickness. You can't do that in this train. There's a lot to be said for the effect of just having the option even if you don't exercise it. Control is very comforting to people.
Not only comforting, the seemingly "rare" cases actually happen all the time and the advantages of being able to stop, go out, help the person etc. are effectively used all the time.
Designing mass transportation while ignoring such aspects is like programming without handling the limit cases "it works for N between 2 and 100 but not for 0, 1 and MAX_INT, even if these are allowed inputs." It's bad, very bad for the user, only an "astronaut developer" can love such a solution.
The first time a kid dies because it got sick the first minute of a 30-minute ride, the project is dead for good. Imagine the press, imagine the public response.
I can imagine entering the capsule to reach the international space station, preparing a whole year before. I can't imagine doing the same preparations for the ride between SF and LA. Give me the real train, thank you.
The Channel Tunnel between the UK and France works fine, and if someone got sick at the start of the tunnel section then there isn't too much that could be done quickly.
The public seems to have no issue with that concept, it is a simple risk that goes with getting on the train.
Yes, that's why we built that airport and hospital on the North Pole. Now intercontinental flights can make emergency landings in under 30 minutes at all times.
With multiple stations between SF and LA, this could be mitigated with an emergency system that pulls the train off at the next stop. Similar to how some buses or trains have emergency stop systems, except instead of stopping, the capsule would divert to the next station.
"In the case of the Hyperloop, Musk started focusing on public transportation after he grew disenchanted with the plans for California’s high-speed rail system."
And who says that big government stifles entrepreneurial innovation?
If ALL Musk does with the Hyperloop announcement is shed more light on the potential debacle that is to be our $70b+ high-speed rail in California, we owe him a debt of gratitude.
Interesting point that big government provoked the advancement of the hyperloop idea - counterintuitive idea, and clearly yes. but any idea like this will need government cooperation. The real test of big government will be how they respond to the hyperloop.
magic response: "of course we may be wrong, we'll look into this immediately." and then they decide to build it.
likely answer: praise, perhaps even an evaluation, then disregard as unrealistic a year from now.
why would "big government" ignore this idea? fairly simple: risky and unproven, for a politician, in a career where risk is not related to upside; and probably more important is the ability to control $70bn in spending to private citizens and contractors - far more valuable to their careers (leading to donations and influence) than spending a smaller amount (a mere $7bn) on fewer contractors. For the most part, the hyperloop contractors would not be the same guys who have been donating to politicians for the past decade in support of the train.
so yes, big government and the natural corruption of a large budget (donations->spending with favored constituents) will likely lead to the status quo - a ludicrously overpriced train.
as far as political repercussions, california is not a two party state any more, so there's no one to capitalize on the idiocy of the folks in power. i guess, we reap what we sow.
I wouldn't be so fast to make that declaration. Elon Musk, Tesla, and SpaceX are pretty influential players right now, and I don't think anyone reading this white paper are anything less than wide eyed at the possibility that the future of travel is written right here and we could build it, for cheaper than the current slow expensive system.
Influential people and money people and politicians are all going to read this and say Sounds great. Elon Musk? I'm listening. 7 Billion? Go on. And scientists are going to chime in, and universities, and people always forget the global reactions. Momentum.
I'm going to keep my faith that this idea has legs.
I hope you're right, but in reality most people haven't even heard of Elon Musk. I've had to explain to many highly educated people what he has done, what SpaceX is, what Tesla is etc. While he's been rather successful so far, he's not in the clear when it comes to either of his companies right now, he's not exactly at the Gates level of success yet. I'm rooting for him though, he has the potential to be one of the most influential people in a long time if things go well.
3 months ago, none of my non-tech friends knew who Elon Musk was. In the past month or so, I would say 50% of my friends now not only know who he is, but praise him and his work. I think that by the end of this year, you will be hard-pressed to find someone that doesn't know who he is.
Musk is not financially Gates but he's already had a greater impact. PayPal, Telsa, SpaceX, and even that Solar company could easily be more important than creating the most successful PC operating system. The PC boom would have happened without Gates but Musk is pioneering entirely new business categories.
No he hasn't. He could, but not yet. We have other payment processors, car companies, solar companies, and we went to the moon over 4 decades ago. Musk is really awesome, but don't discount Gates. Frankly, his philanthropy might be more important than Windows, and the stuff that Musk has done.
Jerry Brown's political career is coming to an end, so there are no long term political consequences for him. He's also traditionally been an opponent of government waste. I don't think it's unreasonable to believe that he would choose an unproven but promising technology over our existing useless high speed rail project. The assembly is another matter. If you think hyperloop is interesting, write and call your state assembly member and encourage them to consider this plan, that's what I'll do.
>He's also traditionally been an opponent of government waste.
he is in bed with gov employees unions (the unions are primary driving force behind 200-300K/year gov employees pensions (http://www.mercurynews.com/salaries/pensions) with retirement age of 55, CA is something like $200B deep in that hole), and especially with prison guard union - of course huge prison population resulting from "toughness on crime" may not be viewed as government waste by some.
Building a bridge or high-speed rail to nowhere - just a [large] peanut in that picture.
Link describes one-time payouts upon retirement, not recurring pensions.
"Denson also earned $407,908 in total wages in 2011, according to city data, making him the highest paid city worker in 2011. Of this sum, $212,738 consisted of "cash out" pay, which accounts for such factors as vacations, holidays and unused sick pay. His regular salary was $195,169."
it describes his last salary, so if you know the formula, 3% at 55, and his years of service - 31 - stated in the article, it also allows to calculate his pension - 180K+
if you look at the original link (http://www.mercurynews.com/salaries/pensions), you'll see these "3% @ 60 Formula for Local Miscellaneous Members", "2% @ 55 State and School Miscellaneous" and "3% @ 55 Formula for State Peace Officer/Firefighter or Local Safety Member" - these formulas are mainly from union contracts.
All defined benefit pensions -- whether set by union contract or not -- use these kind of formulas. But the high pensions are not the product of the formula alone -- even if you work long enough at one of the formulas to get near (or over) 100%, you still aren't going to get 200-300K per year pension unless you have a last/highest/(average of last three)/etc. years salary (which ever is the base for the particular formula you have) high enough to push the pension that high.
Surprisingly enough, almost no rank-and-file workers have that kind of salary. The people with 200K and higher pensions are mostly people that are retiring from executive positions.
"especially with prison guard union - of course huge prison population resulting from "toughness on crime" may not be viewed as government waste by some" -
what if the prison guard union got in on the contract to have the prisoners build the hyperloop?
No, it's like saying he's a proponent of a healthy diet and eats a couple of hearty Big Macs with extra large fries and extra large cola five times a day. You can claim it is exactly what healthy diet means, but keep at it for couple of years and your look will certainly make it laughable. Exactly like Californian budget looks - both on state and local levels - makes claims of fighting waste laughable.
>>> Of course he's with the government employees unions, he has to live with them every day.
Having to work with them and being in bed with them is not the same thing. Though many politicians fail to see the difference, it is a known problem.
Having run for state office three times in Minnesota, I can respond to some of this.
Politicians aren't all afraid to take risks, especially when they believe a particular policy they like will live on and be remembered.
Our former governor Jesse Ventura overcame incredible resistance and media scorn to get our first light rail line built. Almost all casual observers thought major health care reform was impossible in Washington. These things actually happened.
The key to passing a good policy is to reduce the risk. Politicians love projects where someone else was the guinea pig for them and/or someone else pays for studies and prototypes. Usually, they look for other units of government that have done something very similar with great success.
If I wanted to get Hyperloop to pass, I would first aim to table discussions on high speed rail for the proposed route. You would find allies among politicians who don't want to spend any money on transit, usually to appease highway contractors.
Secondly, I would immediately aim to seek R&D money for a high-profile demonstration project with plenty of funding for a study to project potential costs and impacts. This effort should even begin before the high speed rail bidding is tabled. I would leverage the demonstration results in the media and build a grassroots and lobbying organization around support for a Hyperloop.
Finally, I would seek advice from experts to craft a model bill with appropriate requirements for the bidding process.
Though I'm not sure you intended it, this is an excellent summary of why the US doesn't have a decent mass transit system. Even if you get past the formidable political opposition to any public transit system, you must contend with a coalition of that opposition plus an assortment of interests that want a different system, possibly because it looks better on paper (hey, Hyperloop!) but more commonly because it benefits them financially. So in the end, no system is built at all. If the high speed rail project is scrapped, it won't be in favor of Hyperloop. It will be in favor of doing nothing.
It's interesting that in Jun 2012, voters might've voted differently if asked again [1]:
In fact, some of the highest resistance to the high-speed rail project that would run from L.A. to the Bay Area comes from Angelenos, according to new data released over the weekend by the USC Dornsife / Los Angeles Times Poll:
About 56 percent of would-be voters in L.A. County would say no to the train if allowed to vote on it again; 37 percent would be in favor. In San Francisco the train would win 47-45.
About 66 percent of Central Valley voters were opposed to the train, which would run through their farm region.
Statewide, if a re-vote on the train were allowed, 59 percent of would-be voters would say no; only 33 percent would give reaffirm it.
About 55 percent of statewide voters said they'd be down for a re-vote.
The article later goes on to state:
The biggest problem for this train is timing -- California is facing another crushing budget deficit and a stalling economic recovery. Dan Schnur, director of the poll:
Californians aren't necessarily against the idea of high-speed rail. But they don't want to spend all that money right now, and they don't trust the state to make the trains run on time.
I'm not from the area, so I don't know how such a ballot works but for voters who didn't have Musk-level engineering knowledge, was the choice the status quo of not fast trains and spending on fast trains?
Well, fast trains or no new trains. It is still technically possible to get on BART in San Francisco and get off from a train in Los Angeles. You wouldn't choose to do this -- nobody would choose to do this [1] -- but it is possible.
I see, fair enough, cheers for pointing that out. I'm in the UK and we're pretty well connected by rail, I wasn't expecting the alternative to be that ridiculous, just normal slower trains.
I don't know why the parent got downcoted. US rail freight is the envy of the world. You didn't get the European passenger rail experience without some trade offs. Here's a briefing on the subject from the Economist.
Australia is the same, here passenger rail between major cities is mostly something old person take as a scenic route. Often it is actually more expensive than flying.
A logical outcome of the combination of private companies owning the railways and the government's willingness to build a lot of road capacity for passenger use.
Considering that most rivers go from the north to the south and the big distances (compared to, say, Japan or Europe), that's logic. Also explains the role of air travel.
But this comparison is wrong and meaningless. Certainly no one would build a high-speed, dense train network across, say, Nevada.
But building one across the coastal part of California? Or across the NE United States? Why yes, that does make sense, and why yes, it is warranted by the densities in those areas. The fact that the U.S. also owns Alaska doesn't really matter. No one is arguing Alaska needs a high-speed rail network.
I can believe that's a good plan for the US NE corridor... which already has usable (but improvable) Amtrak.
The California coastal cities (and connecting areas) are still pretty sparse, comparatively. And the marquee High Speed Rail project takes a big inland detour to the smaller interior cities, for political reasons. If ever finished, that will hurt its price/time attractiveness compared to flying.
The US NE corridor is arguably the only place it makes sense to build a high speed train network.
You'll notice that Elon Musk's plan for the Hyperloop includes an option for shooting automobiles through the tubes. That's because the mass transit within the cities on that coast is shit.
Inter-city mass transit only makes sense once you've solved intra-city mass transit. Unless you really, really love hanging out within a few city blocks of an inter-city train station, you need to have a convenient, desirable mass transit system waiting for you in the city you're going to. If you're linking Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and DC, you're liking the best mass transit system in America with four other pretty good transit systems. Cutting Boston to DC from 6.5 hours to 90 minutes is definitely worth doing.
I was going to make a flippant comment about "Congratulations on living in San Francisco!", but hilariously, there's a better chance you live in Los Angeles (lower ridership percentage, but significantly higher population).
Even in Oklahoma City, where only ~1% of people commute via mass transit, there are still thousands of people who can live happily without a car because mass transit serves them fine. That does not mean that Oklahoma City has a great transit system.
I live in Oakland, have lived in San Francisco for a long time, frequently work in LA, and have lived in London, Amsterdam and Barcelona as well, so I feel I've had exposure to a good variety of transit systems in order to form my opinion.
> Certainly no one would build a high-speed, dense train network across, say, Nevada.
I wonder. It's easier to find low cost airfares to Las Vegas than other cities. A conduit to Las Vegas from the populated west coast might be interesting to some.
And here you can travel from most parts of Melbourne to most parts of Sydney with just two train changes. One at a Melbourne hub to the interstate trains and one at Sydney to the local system.
Yes, our high speed rail process is currently on a ridiculous timescale, something like 50 years out. If something isn't slated for major construction works within a single term of government you can pretty much assume it will never happen in its current form.
Whilst our train service in the UK is a mess (and it really is), I suppose at least we have a mess that we can moan about rather than "buy a car, hippy".
I've actually done this, but in the reverse direction and because I missed my flight (asked hotel in Burbank to take me to the airport and they brought me to the Burbank airport instead of LAX.) Since it was a redeye, I just slept most of the long trip.
IIRC, the choice was between no trains and a train. I think a lot of people voted for it so they had a cheaper alternative than planes and a less time/effort intensive alternative than driving.
I wonder what the security checkpoints would be like on the HyperLoop if it ever got built? They are saying capsules could depart 30 seconds apart. Imagine is there was an attack in on of them, with several others travelling at high speed just behind.
If they turn off the compressor there's a giant air cushion in front of them and the capsule no longer has air bearings. It probably lands on wheels and can then engage the breaks. A small capsule has low inertia as well.
Unfortunately the passengers inside still have high inertia. It doesn't matter if the capsule stops without damage if all the people inside are crushed by G-forces.
This is covered in some detail in the proposal. The capsules will be able to stop in the event of an emergency without hitting capsules in front or crushing passengers.
This system would seem very weak to criminals / terrorists / whatever firing bullets at it. It would be exceptionally difficult to track where the shot/s came from, and it would cause serious pressure problems.
Even if the pressure problems could be countered, a bullet hole is likely to leave a pretty ragged profile on the inside of the steel tube. The specification calls for the air bearing skis to ride 0.5 to 1.3mm off the tunnel wall. They'd need to be pretty robust to take hitting the ragged edge of a bullet hole at 700mph.
I think that a bullet hole in the type of tube that supports this much weight is unlikely. Oil pipeline tubes would typically be thinner (less weight to support) and the concept of a bullet piercing those tubes is unlikely.
I wonder - could you line the high-speed part of the tube with half an inch of soft wax or something similar? Then any dents or imperfections caused by bullets would rapidly be smoothed out again, and the damage to the skis would be minimized by vaporizing the wax you hit.
Aircraft sitting on the tarmac doesn't have to take off if it has been shot at. In the process of taking off could be more of a problem, I suppose. On the other hand, at least airports are a relatively small area to keep secure.
Airplanes leak so much air that a couple more half-inch holes would not affect overall integrity. Most control systems are implemented with redundancy, so taking out a control point would just failover to a backup. Occupants aside, there little such damage could do to an airplane; noting the occupants, worst case is a couple casualties, not loss of everyone on board. And, of course, you could simply choose to not take off.
As mhandley noted, Hyperloop might be more susceptible, as the concern is more like your airplane flying an inch off the ground and hitting a stationary large brick.
...which reminds me of an old analogy: Back when large-capacity (ooh! 10MB!) hard drives were becoming common, I recall hearing the comparison that the read head was akin to a 747 traveling Mach 3 just 1 inch off the ground. Perhaps Elon wondered how this might work in real life, and so came up with Hyperloop.
Aircraft are actually supposed to leak air. In non-bleedless aircraft, the engine compressors pressurize air to be used in the A/C unit, which then sends all the pressurized air throughout the cabin. To prevent excess pressure buildup, valves are opened partially most of the flight with a veinlike network of tubes venting air to the exterior of the aircraft.
Of course, if any damage occurred on the ground, this would be a non-issue entirely as the aircraft wouldn't be pressurized at all.
The Shanghai maglev has no security at all... or at least not last time I went on it. Neither do any of the European HSR systems I've been on.
Remember a big part of TSA isn't to protect the people on the planes, but to protect other people from the planes themselves. It's pretty hard to weaponize a vehicle that's stuck inside a tube or on rails.
They approved it at a much lower budget ($9.95 billion). It would be interesting for the voters to get another vote based on the current cost projections.
I honestly doubt the higher cost projections would change the vote -- when talking about that much money, most voters -- myself included -- can't really discern the impact of the difference between $10 billion and $70 billion.
The only hope would be that the anti-rail side could point to the growth of projections as either incompetence or out of control budgeting, which could both sway the vote. But I think if you go back to 2008 and say, "This will cost $100 billion," the vote would be the same.
The $9.95 billion was for the initial bond issuance. The estimate on the ballot was $40 billion versus the current estimate of between $98.5 billion and $118 billion.
Edit: correction from dragonwriter, via wikipedia [1]:
"The cost of the initial San Francisco-to-Anaheim segment was originally estimated by the CHSRA to be $33 billion (2008) / $35.2 billion (2013), but a revised business plan released in November 2011 by the CHSRA put the cost at $65.4 billion (2010) / $68.9 billion (2013) / $98.5 billion (YOE). The latest plan has revised the costs down to $53.4 billion (2011) / $54.5 billion (2013) / $68.4 billion (YOE)."
Those numbers still seem absurd to me. $120 billion? France built the entire TGV network, about 2,000 km (1250 miles, ~2x the length of LA-SF, including numerous stations in urban areas) for around $20-30 billion. Maybe the U.S. should borrow some management practices from inefficient socialist "old Europe".
Even the most expensive TGV lines, have a per-km cost of around $20m/km in present dollars, and that's high enough to cause controversy. The bulk of the network was built for prices of $2-4m/km at the time, which is about $3-5.5m/km if you adjust for inflation. For a 700-km line like SF-LA, even the $20m outlier cost would work out to only $14 billion. Where's the 8x multiplier coming from? No TGV line has cost >$100m/km, or even close, in 2013 dollars. I am not sure any line in the world has cost that much, even in inhospitable terrain like China's high-speed rail in Tibet, or Japan's high-speed rail through the mountains.
>I am not sure any line in the world has cost that much, even in inhospitable terrain like China's high-speed rail in Tibet, or Japan's high-speed rail through the mountains.
you should check cost of highways in Moscow - $300M/mile. Hint - it isn't about terrain :)
Crossrail is 118km and is going to cost 16bn GBP or about 135m GBP per km (~$209m/km) (if I've done my maths right.)
Though it's somewhat difficult to separate out the 42km of new tunnels (expensive) and a whole bunch of new stations (expensive) including a whole bunch of revamped ones in the centre of London (very expensive).
I'd just like to plug the Dictionary of Numbers chrome extension at this point which provides context for all of the numbers in this thread. For example, did you know that $14 billion [≈ net worth of Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft]?
Maybe the real estate that it goes through is significantly more expensive? I know if you wanted to build a new, totally segregated line from DC to Boston would probably cost 100B easily.
France probably doesn't tie both its rail agency's hands behind its back with pointless environmental impact reports (the sole purpose of which seems to be to generate extra revenue for civil engineering contractors) and then let NIMBYs sue because this or that insignificant detail wasn't included.
France is an interessting case. If I remember well, the have a group of people (project managers, politians, you name it) preparing the case well before any actual construction work starts. Yet, as afar as I remember, there actually were some controversies when they started a TGV line somewhere in northern France. But it still works pretty well, one benefit of being highly centralized.
Another factor at play is that TGV lines are purpose built for high-speed traffic (curve radius, climb rate, ...) while for example in Germany they are mostly shared. That makes the single TGV track cheaper, but you still ahve to built another track for lets say freight. If want another track, that is.
But the cool thing ist that TGV don't stop at every single village that happens to be the hometown of some polititian.
I think one aspect is just that the decision is made definitively at some point, in advance. People have different opinions: impact on historic buildings, noise, environment, other things. This is all debated up front, and then the legislature either approves it, or it doesn't. But when it was approved, it was approved. You can't sue in court to stop the plan on environmental grounds or noise grounds or something else, once the legislature has decided to go ahead with it, because the authorizing legislation supersedes any contrary legislation.
But the U.S. delegates decision-making to agencies and courts in a way that this doesn't happen. California might take input for a long time before deciding on its plan, but its final plan is still not final. Anyone can sue it for many different reasons. Maybe it violates the federal Clean Air Act, maybe it violates property rights, maybe something else. The decision is never final until every challenge to an agency or court is decided, which massively adds to uncertainty and costs.
Nearly 15% U6 unemployment. Collapsing labor force. Falling real incomes. 15% on food stamps. Massive fiscal mismanagement in every respect. Endless QE just to fund the government. 0% interest rates just to reach 1% GDP growth. Healthcare is clearly moving toward a completely socialized approach over time and completely away from any free market solution. Taxes are extremely high, between federal and state; typically higher than supposedly socialist European countries. America also has more economic regulations on the books than any other country (and that's rapidly expanding). The largest land owner in America is the government, by a drastic margin. Half of all mortgages are held by the government. And on and on.
Doesn't get any more old European Socialist than what America is today. It would be fiscally impossible to go any further.
BTW - the link disproves your point somewhat - voters approved a $10bn train, which is now expected to cost over 10x that. Brings into question what exactly they approved, or what it means to "approve" if there is no cost control in the approval.
I don't have a point really, I'm just saying this was a publicized ballot measure at the time and not carried out against the voters' will.
And as I said in above comment, the $9.95 billion was for the initial bond issuance. The estimate on the ballot was $40 billion versus the current estimate of between $98.5 billion and $118 billion.
(I voted against it) In the ballot, they claimed a cost of $45B. But after the measure passed, the cost ballooned to $98B (yes, you read that correctly). Then, after howls of protest, the cost now is $68B.
Are you seriously saying that government wont consider Hyperloop because they are averse to innovation? On the contrary, "big government" has been the largest engine of innovation the past century. NASA has put people into orbit, and on to the Moon, has launched the first space stations, and made several robotic probes to other planets and the depths of space. Musk founded SpaceX which has managed to do a fraction of the things NASA has decades after them. In 1972, the Rand corporation, financed by the United States, thoroughly researched a "Very High Speed Transit System" that is similar to Musk's proposal. Sure there will be political difficulties implementing something like The Very High Speed Transit System or Hyperloop, but realistically the government is the only entity that has the foresight, money, and motivation to undertake such a project.
NASA total budget over its lifetime: $790.0 B in 2007 dollars. Just the book cost of the wars since 2001, http://costofwar.com/ 1.45 T not including future costs (debt payments, health care, net drag on economy) are roughly 2 more entire lifetime-NASAs. Wow. How much innovation have those two wars earned us?
How about large scale funding of science and technology is an "engine of innovation", whatever that term means.
That's what I'm advocating, that the government spend more money on science and technology. The government is able to take risks in investing in unproven technologies and sciences where industry can't, because they aren't concerned with profit. I'm not an apologist for the wars.
Problem is, we don't have more money to spend on anything. The US government is spending twice revenue - not a position where you hemorrhage cash & credit with no concern for profit. (And no, it's not going to "stimulate the economy" back up to break-even.)
On top of that, the government used to take such risks in unproven technologies, underlined by tolerating the non-trivial odds of spectacular lethal failure...but that was decades ago. Now it can't even make a bus door without plastering eighteen warning signs around it [1].
Exploratory spending is great when you have money to spare. We don't. Now we have to rely on Elon Musk et al to pursue outlier projects - and they only reason they can is because of the big literal payoff if it works.
The problem is that, at least with the CA high speed rail system, the design is all theoretical at the moment. It may be a brilliant idea, but but moving from the core ideas in the document to actual working, build-able products, can be a slow process. And given the state of where CA is on their project, that may not put them on the same window.
I can assure you that the CA system isn't "theoretical" anymore. Terminals are already being constructed in SF and Anaheim. Right-of-way acquisition has begun and construction is scheduled to begin in the Central Valley this year.
I think that grandparent's "theoretical" was a poorly-phrased reference the problem with the hyperloop in the context of CA HSR, not a problem with CA HSR.
The R&D can't happen in government, but in some ways that's better - government projects are slower than this needs to be. What we need is for someone(s?) with deep pockets to bank-roll prototypes &c.
Are you guys serious? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev#Operational_systems_ser...
Linimo, Shanghai, Daejon, and then all the test tracks, e.g. the transrapid in germany... Maglev is reality now. It simply happened to be built in China, Japan and South Korea rather than in the US.
It's got three short (1 km, 9 km, 30 km) deployments around 40 years after work first started. Are you saying that's the kind of deployment record Musk would like to see for his wundertechnology?
The parent was me. I like maglev but it's hard to deny that as a mainstream transportation method it was completely trounced for the first 30 years of its existence by more traditional methods.
If California ditches its HSR plans for hyperloop today and ends up with a 700 km/h line running in 30 years' time, busiest lines in Japan and China will have been upgraded to maglev or another 500+ km/h technology and they would have had 300+ km/h technology for the interim 30 years. Meanwhile California would have had what, driverless car trains on freeways going 200 km/h 5 years from now?
No, indeed I haven't. I take it you will consider a 30 km line built 40 years after the idea was first conceptualized to be a success for Musk's technology as well? Should do a lot to relieve the I-5, certainly!
Frankly that would be a hell of a lot better than the result I'm expecting, yes. Maglev is real, working technology - delivery may have taken longer than you thought it should, but it's far more than "a neat idea on paper". Hyperloop is nowhere near that.
So we're all rooting for hyperloop to have test tracks in 2015, demo tracks in 2020, very limited real-life deployment in 2040, and sure to become inter-city mainstream reality sometime later? Some think we'll be on Mars by then ;)
If it's technologically possible, economically profitable, and people want it, then. Flying cars have difficulties this doesn't (seem to) on all three counts.
> as far as political repercussions, california is not a two party state any more
The Republicans haven't yet adapted to the people of the State taking away their ability to roadblock budgets from the minority, which is a crutch they'd come to rely on to avoid dealing with the difficulty of trying to build a minimum winning coalition in CA while at the same time toeing the line of the national party.
I'd be surprised though if they haven't started returning to being an effective opposition by the 2014 elections.
The reason this will never be built is because it's incredibly unproven. At least with HSR the unknowns are sort of understood and the costs can be calculated. Nobody knows what the unknown costs are with Hyperloop.
Not to mention safety. Nobody is going to just trust Musk to say it's safe. There will be a decade of trials to test it before it even gets green light approval for a small practically useable section.
If ALL Musk does with the Hyperloop announcement is shed more light on the potential debacle that is to be our $70b+ high-speed rail in California, we owe him a debt of gratitude.
Really? Because it looks like this is an attempt to derail CA HSR using a proposal for an experimental technology that offers a fraction of what CA HSR does, but is potentially faster.
CA HSR replaces/upgrades two metropolitan rail systems (Caltrain/Metrolink) in addition to connecting SF (as opposed to Oakland!) and LA, requires no R&D, is supposed to handle significantly greater ridership, has detailed cost estimates which include things like take into account electrification costs (because it does get cloudy), support facilities (because there is maintenance of these cars), administrative buildings (because someone has to run the system), bypassing/rebuilding overpasses (which are all over I-5) that are in the way and grading land.
> CA HSR replaces/upgrades two metropolitan rail systems (Caltrain/Metrolink) in addition to connecting SF (as opposed to Oakland!) and LA, requires no R&D, is supposed to handle significantly greater ridership, has detailed cost estimates which include things like take into account electrification costs (because it does get cloudy), support facilities (because there is maintenance of these cars), administrative buildings (because someone has to run the system), bypassing/rebuilding overpasses (which are all over I-5) that are in the way and grading land.
Not to mention their estimates actually include going into downtown SF and LA, unlike Musk's $6B figure.
To be fair, Oakland is a much more sensible ___location of the initial terminal for any rail system. It's very well-connected to SF, has a complete lack of powerful, moneyed NIMBYs, and it would be easy to punch the line through to SF once it's proven.
> To be fair, Oakland is a much more sensible ___location of the initial terminal for any rail system. It's very well-connected to SF, has a complete lack of powerful, moneyed NIMBYs, and it would be easy to punch the line through to SF once it's proven.
The East Bay (and even Oakland specifically) does not have a complete lack of moneyed NIMBYs. There are at least as many of those in the East Bay as in SF and the Peninsula.
And its actually a lot easier to "punch a line through" over land than over the Bay, and existing SF-Oakland transit capacity is fairly well saturated and expensive to expand (because, again, of the Bay).
You could maybe find some non-insane argument that extending Caltrain as conventional rail to San Francisco and running HSR to Oakland makes more sense than HSR to San Francisco and existing conventional rail to Oakland, but I doubt there's much case even for that; in any case, any sane strategy for rail is going to involve a fork with lines running up the Peninsula to SF and up into the East Bay separately.
I don't think that's really true. The people in Oakland who would be NIMBYs and have enough money to be effective at it all live in the hills, or in Piedmont. The people who live in the flat parts of Oakland, and to a large extent all of the flatlanders of the East Bay, don't have anything to fight with.
Now compare to the kind of 19th-century legacy gazillionaires along the CAHSR route in Atherton.
Sure, I'd grant Oakland. The line is shown ending roughly near Bay Fair station, an 18 minute BART ride from central Oakland, but perhaps that's still a good compromise. And North Valley? People in this comments thread were saying they'd rather take a flight from Burbank airport, but the train ends even further from central LA.
But more to the point, it's costed through the straightest, least dense, cheapest part of a "SF to LA" route. It's shown with 3 km of tunnel west of Dublin and you'd need at least five times more to get to usefully located stations. This isn't how real infrastructure projects are estimated unless you're purposefully trying to arrive at a low cost estimate.
The estimated ridership of even the Hyperloop is high enough that it would crush the Bay Bridge even if a majority used BART. Not to mention add an hour to the transit to people going to San Jose.
Oakland was chosen to make this thing look cheaper, not because it makes sense from a civil planning perspective.
The capacity of the proposed system at 28-person capsules every 30 seconds is 3360 pph at peak. Three thousand more people per hour would crush the Bay Bridge?
Ahahaha no. I live in Oakland, you're quite wrong. On the upside I do like that I can walk a short distance to catch a train that will take me to LA :)
It is presented to provoke and I think you're right, it does look like an attempt to derail CA HSR.
Instead, I think of it this way... if it's so cheaply do-able, then - do it! Sounds like an easy money making idea if you can build it for the figures proposed. While you may only need to charge $20 each way to break even, why not charge double what it costs to go the next most fast, convenient way, and you would make bank! I mean, who wouldn't do this if it works as envisioned? It's a genius business plan, right!?
So do it! Some rich bold genius! Build us a hyperloop - so cheap and obvious and do-able! And whenever we get to HSR, we'll build it so it connects to the awesome LA-SF express hyperloop.
One problem is that the land needed to build it belongs to the state. Admittedly another is that a massive amount of R&D remains to be done and is not factored into the cost.
West Oakland is 10 minutes from downtown SF (Embarcadero station, nearest to the HSR terminal) by BART, and you can take any eastbound train, so you rarely have to wait more than 2-3 minutes during the day to catch one. The area is already set up for rail, and land is relatively cheap. It's a fantastic ___location for it. The only reasons to go to SF proper are politics and pride.
So, we have "light shed" on the current "debacle" and neither system gets built. That's a win? HSR was first commerically available in 1964. Yes, it got really expensive waiting 50 years. I imagine it'll be even more expensive in another 20-30. California is going to get even more crowded.
That's an argument in favor of a useful HSR system. But politics have resulted California's HSR system being deliberately pessimized; it may do more harm than good to the HSR cause, right?
“The man who moved a mountain was the one who began carrying away small stones.” -Chinese Proverb
I've lived in China for over 3 years, and spend countless hours riding the HSR system. HSR combines the speed of a plane, with the cost and convenience of a regular bus. Traveling through the countryside of China at 380km/h made me feel like I was in the future. Coming home and seeing the the sad state of our infrastructure was a harsh reality check.
Granted China has a massive manufacturing/mining complex and cheap labor. But if we hadn't squandered 5 Trillion on "War on Terror" and domestic spying, I'm sure we could kept our lead in infrastructure and still has some left over to boost education / R&D spending.
In the past 20 years China's moved their mountain. Hopefully the hyperloop will help us to catch up.
I've been on one of the Chinese high speed trains and they are really impressive. The most striking thing about them is how smooth they are -- very little vibration at all, and very quiet. Far more pleasant than air travel, conventional trains, or anything else I've been on.
Sadly, I think the first place a Hyperloop will be built is China. Chances are there are engineers there looking it over now, and figuring they can knock out a test system in a year or two.
You mean Chernobyl and nuclear, or Three Mile Island and nuclear? Both of those had already soundly killed the prospect for large-scale nuclear power in the US long before the earthquake in Japan.
Also frankly, nuclear is its whole own category of unviable for its own special reasons. Cars, buses, trains, planes and ships have all killed scores more people then nuclear power ever will.
I don't see Hyperloop's constituency; there really aren't that many people who want to commute to work in SF from LA and can pay the roundtrip Hyperloop cost who can't pay the $80 on Southwest from Burbank to SJC.
The problem with CAHSR isn't the "HSR" part, it's California's utterly dysfunctional political system, and going faster and putting the track up on pylons isn't going to cut through that morass without a stronger group of people standing up and saying YES, WE NEED THIS.
It seems to me that to really force the issue, you'd need to be talking an order of magnitude difference in cost. For $20 r/t, ears would perk up -- even people who aren't making a $1/yr salary could conceivably afford that. But $120?
you speak as though it needs to be run as a charity to be a game changer. I only mention that price point because that is just underneath the cost of flying, and that's how economics works. The operator will likely want to make as much profit as it can, while still sucking customers away from the airports. In the beginning, the operator will likely charge MORE than the airplanes, because the customer will be liable to be ok with a "novelty" premium, and it's in the interest of the operator to amortize the costs as quickly as possible to secure itself against (unforseeable) price competitions or unpredicted costs.
At the price point I suggest, the operator is STILL effectively going to be making 150% margins, so there is a lot of room to lower the cost, but that just isn't going to happen unless there is a competitive pressure to keep lowering the price.
If that's not "social justice" enough for you, then consider that at least the thing is going to be run nearly 100% if not better than 100% renewable.
You have to get the thing built before you can start charging a premium for it. Without a strong constituency, you can't get a giant infrastructure project off the ground. If your constituency is people like me, who can afford to fly, you've already lost the game.
Don't forget about time... if this is faster than air travel, that alone could be wroth something. The fact that the cost might be equivalent to air-travel and be significantly faster would be the game-changer.
If I could take one of these from SF to LA in a weekend to take my kids to Disneyland, that would be awesome. As it is now, that's a multi-hour process on each side of the trip. Reducing that to 30min (+ some logistics time) would be wonderful. Especially if they can reduce the amount of time required at the terminals.
The total price of flying may be higher than you think. Don't forget to include:
* transporting you to and from the airport
* getting to the airport ~1h before your flight
* flight time of ~1:30 vs :30 on the Hyperloop
If the Hyperloop works as Musk imagines, then it'll be more like hopping on the subway: go to the station in the middle of town, wait maybe 10min at most, ride, get off in the middle of town.
On the other hand I sure don't wanna be crammed in that recliner looking at a ceiling five inches away from my feet for a half hour. Room to stand up and stretch please.
> If the Hyperloop works as Musk imagines, then it'll be more like hopping on the subway: go to the station in the middle of town, wait maybe 10min at most, ride, get off in the middle of town.
Well, except that the termini aren't even close to the "middle of town" (at least, not of the cities motivating the plan). There way out on the fringes of the metro region, and unlike CA HSR, none of the costs of improving connecting systems are part of the plan.
The low cost estimate is due in large part because it gets you from the place people aren't to the place people don't want to be. (On either end)
Which is one (of the many) reasons its not a serious alternative to HSR -- even if the technology was ready, what Musk is proposing fails to do the hard part of transportation improvement: connecting the places people are with the places they want to get.
> It's mind boggling to me that the California HSR isn't being built from DC to Boston instead.
Upgraded high-speed rail in the Northeast corridor (where the US's only existing HSR is located) is being planned. [1] California HSR being built in California doesn't preclude HSR from being built/upgraded in other parts of the US.
There are actually some serious efforts in place to get sanity back into urban planning, but (predictably I suppose) this is regarded as an attack on freedom and the lawsuits have already begun to fly.
Uhm, LA alone has more people than DC and Boston combined. Plus another 9 million living in the Bay Area. This is far and away the most obvious candidate for direct HSR in all of North America.
The core cities on the DC BAL PHL NYC BOS route total 11.5 million, while LA + SF is only 4.5 million. Thats arguably the more important figure because the relative advsntage of rail diminishes if you have to drive in from the suburbs. Also, four of those five cities have well developed public transit systems centered around the rail station. Metro area total for the five cities is not including any other regions in the path is almost 40m versus about 20m for SF and LA.
> arguably the more important figure because the relative advsntage of rail diminishes if you have to drive in from the suburbs.
A major premise of the California HSR plan is that it isn't just about the main HSR lines, but upgrades, improvements, and new lines for connecting conventional regional and commuter rail, light rail, and other public transit.
Unless you'd like to go from Boston to DC without making four stops along the way. In California you have two of the largest metropolitan areas in the country separated by 400 miles of nothing (with apologies to the Central Valley). HSR wins big when it goes fast without stopping, which is exactly the case out here.
NYC CSA is bigger than LA CSA, and DC CSA is bigger than "Bay Area" CSA. It seems weird, then, to argue it makes more sense to connect LA and SF just because in the northeast you can also hit two additional CSA's (Philadelphia and Boston, which are each about the size of the Bay Area), while you're at it.
Perhaps, but with New York and Philly in between, you're hitting four major population centers:
Boston (4.5M metro area)
New York (8-20M depending on how far you stretch the metro area)
Philadelphia (6M metro area)
Washington D.C. (5.7M metro area)
As currently envisioned CA HSR is likely to be more expensive and slower than current air travel. This is before the virtually certain cost overruns. To be competitively priced it would require large subsidies but still would be no faster than alternatives.
That said like you I would love to see a superior alternative to the current situation but CA HSR is probably not it.
Well, no. You just made that up. HSR is intended to meet a future need for transportation. The equivalent air transportation infrastructure to meet the same need is believed to cost at least $500bn, according to the environmental impact report. That's making the generous assumptions that this level of air travel is even possible without serious air traffic congestion problems, and the aviation fuel costs do not rise faster than general inflation.
The main cost of CAHSR will be the opportunity cost of not having built it.
The main cost of CAHSR will be the opportunity cost of not having built it.
I wonder: this is from an LA Weekly article from 2011 -- I remember it being an eye-opener when I read it back then [1]:
The authority had projected that 41 million people annually would ride the train between Anaheim and San Francisco, for example. But currently only 12 million customers fly nonstop on the extremely busy air route between Los Angeles and San Francisco each year.
The article goes on to say that Acela gets 3 million riders in the very dense east coast NY/Washington corridor but in less-dense California they were projecting a ridership around 10x of Acela's (!).
The LA Weekly has had a bunch of articles about the project over the years criticizing everything from its cost to its leadership to its utility. If the picture they paint is mostly correct, perhaps the only way to win is not to play.
And it's not just the LA Weekly -- a third party independent review came to similar conclusions apparently, as described in this LA Weekly article from Jan. 2012 [2]:
On top of skepticism from the state auditor, inspector general and legislative analyst -- as well as university researchers, federal transportation experts and this very news blog -- a "peer review group" for the California High-Speed Rail Authority, formed for the sole purpose of independent review, has declared the project neither physically nor financially feasible at this time.
The train's roster of supporters tells us everything we need to know:
"The project has won major support from organized labor, some big-city mayors and many state lawmakers," reports the Los Angeles Times today.
The article quotes the following from the report:
"We cannot overemphasize the fact that moving ahead on the HSR project without credible sources of adequate funding, without a definitive business model, without a strategy to maximize the independent utility and value to the State, and without the appropriate management resources, represents an immense financial risk on the part of the state of California."
> The article goes on to say that Acela gets 3 million riders in the very dense east coast NY/Washington corridor but in less-dense California they were projecting a ridership around 10x of Acela's (!).
And...so? California has dense areas in the north and south and a big (relatively) empty gap between them. California HSR is designed to connect those dense areas. The overall density of the state (or the corridor) is pretty much a side issue.
I'm not so sure it's a side-issue, in that the northeast corridor train routes don't just allow people in, say, NY to go to Washington, but also people in Philadelphia and Baltimore to go there as well, since those cities are on the Acela route.
And, if your city is not on the Acela route, you may well be able, due to the area's density, to take a commuter rail or another train to get to a city that is on the Acela route.
Similarly for Acela's Boston-NY route -- New Haven is on the route, so people from Connecticut can likely get to it.
And, of course, people in NJ can easily pop into NYC and grab Acela as well.
By contrast, the lack of density in CA would mean that aside from LA - SF (and a bit of traffic to and from Sacramento), you wouldn't likely have that sort of potential passenger-base.
> By contrast, the lack of density in CA would mean that aside from LA - SF (and a bit of traffic to and from Sacramento), you wouldn't likely have that sort of potential passenger-base.
Actually, since California has a large total population, and its mostly concentrated in a few major urban areas, what that means is you have a natural constituency for high speed rail with few stops, spending more time at speed.
LA (and San Diego) to SF (and Sacramento) is a lot.
But why would lots more people start going from LA to SF or on any of the other routes? As a comment to your previous comment below asks[1], what would the economic gain be?
There might be a bit more interaction between LA's entertainment industry and the Bay Area's tech industry, but how many additional people would be travelling for this purpose?
I expect that, given that the northeast corridor comprises the nation's capitol, its financial capitol and its academic capitol (the latter two also being high-tech centers), one would expect movement between these places and would want high-speed transport.
I just don't see a similar dynamic operating in CA. Sacramento cannot compare to Washington, D.C. and LA and SF are pretty self-sufficient, as I expect San Diego is as well.
The question is how many people really need to travel between the Bay Area and SoCal? Right now it is about 12 million trips a year. That would increase if the link is cheaper, but to what economic gain? These two areas are strongly connected economically, not like NYC and DC are.
Ya, those areas are strongly connected. There was a typo in my above reply, I meant to say that SF/LA are not as strongly connected economically as NYC/Boston/Philly/DC.
> Can you please clarify why the high speed rail is likely to be a debacle ?
I don't believe that high speed rail will necessarily be a debacle.
But the route was largely chosen for political considerations. It was decided downtown San Jose, Fresno, and Bakersfield must have stations. (This requires an additional long tunnel, and urban construction is much more expensive.) The route takes a detour through Palmdale[1], an underdeveloped part of Los Angeles County.
The 'straight shot' route down I-5 that Musk proposes was also considered for HSR, and rejected even though it would have been much cheaper and simpler to construct.
Counterpoint: rail that doesn't run through urban areas is far less useful. There is a reason Amtrak is taking over the northeast corridor: it's tough to beat to convenience of being able to walk from your office in manhattan to your office in DC without ever leaving public transit.
However, CA-HSR chose the nearly the most complex and expensive route possible (even though they don't have a funding source), so we shouldn't make a direct cost comparison with Musk's route down I-5. HSR would also be much cheaper on the mostly unpopulated I-5 corridor. Also, the right-of-ways that Musk proposes to get into SF and LA are sketchy.
(Silicon Valley business interests wanted the HSR stations in San Jose & Mountain View, and apparently quite interested in using lower-cost areas such as Fresno for back-office activities. So while they will be impressed by Hyperloop's techno-wizardry, they may actually prefer the HSR project.)
The same reason san francisco has built like 100 or 200 new housing units in the past year, and the same reason the california coastal commission was being sued (and found unconstitutional, etc):
California has a very large amount of regulatory burden compared to almost anywhere else in the US. High speed rail there is likely to cost overrun by a massive factor, and under deliver by a massive factor, and both, for no actually good reason, instead, only theoretically good ones.
The reason San Francisco built 269 units in 2011 was not bureaucracy, but that we were at the tail end of a real estate crash. More than 4000 units were started in 2012, and a further 30,000 have been approved. Source: http://www.spur.org/publications/library/article/san-francis...
Wake me when they actually happen (IE are built and available).
SPUR's data comes from the SF planning department, which is now under tremendous pressure to at least claim they are doing something. Data on the actual ground (IE real estate listings, etc) do not support their claims, as anyone who tries to get a residential unit in SF can tell you. I'd love to know what they consider a "start". It shouldn't take multiple years for a simple residential unit to be completed.
You are also talking about places where it takes months to get a tree removed from your property and requires approval from the "county arborist". It often takes years for people to acquire permits to do remodeling.
California also has significantly different and more stringent energy/building codes from all other places, in areas completely unrelated to things like 'earthquake protection' (or anything reasonably related to California issues)
It absolutely has a high regulatory cost compared to most other places, and past HN, i don't think i've seen anyone dispute this (IE AFAIK, California doesn't dispute it, they simply claim it's worth it)
Just because you're too ignorant and lazy to walk around looking at all the construction doesn't mean it's not there. There are over 4000 units actively under construction right now. That is a fact beyond argument.
I've been in plenty of places like SF, which, when under pressure, simply make up statistics or change what they mean.
It's simply not a "fact beyond argument", when the only source of this "fact" are a group with a very strong vested interested in high numbers and a history of not truth telling.
The 100-200 units number only came out after a lot of pushing.
They claim there are 22,000 units in planning/approval as of 2012, and we are 3/4 of the way through 2013.
Combined with the 4000 that were under construction, they should be visible by now somewhere.
Maybe you'd like to point out where you see 20k+ units under construction?
At that many, it should be blindingly obvious. SF is simply not that large, and does not have that much hidden space (open or otherwise).
I'm sorry that you don't know what it means for construction to be approved. It means the units will be built in the future. This isn't Sim City.
If you are feeling exceptionally lazy and only have time to look outside your bubble once, go to Market between 7th and 9th. The new building on 8th between Market and Mission has over 1900 units (over 1400 units net of what were demolished) and the one at 55 9th Street has 300 new units on what used to be an empty field.
You seem to be deliberately misrepresenting what i'm saying in order to argue about things i'm not claiming, so i'm just not going to continue this discussion.
Among other things, rail is worthless in CA, because you need a car to get anywhere anyway.
If you can afford to rent a car at the end of your train ride, you can afford a plane ticket.
In my opinion, most likely, the CA rail proposal is just a political folly being undertaken by corruptocrats who have ideas to profit from it.
Yes, the rail would be useful for poor people who want to visit family, but that is not a business case, and does not justify harvesting tens of billions from the innocent citizens of CA. (Even if a tyranny of the majority voted to do it.)
> Among other things, rail is worthless in CA, because you need a car to get anywhere anyway.
Which is one reason a not-insignificant part of the HSR plan in California is improving commuter rail and other connecting mass-transit systems that will interface with HSR, to reduce exactly that problem.
I don't have much of an opinion on this topic, since it seems to me that any large concentration of money and smart people produces innovation (so do lone geniuses). But I thought this article was interesting.
This may very well be at the heart of his submission, especially since he is the first to point out that most of the real kinks have not been worked out.
What do most of us in the general public really know about how projects like the high speed rail get on the ballot. A lot of people have their suspicions, but we have to ask ourselves if there was a competitive bid process to determine the best solution.
I, for one, would have voted to throw money into future technologies over current rail solutions. Mostly because I shudder to think how much current tech will be old news in ten years when the high speed rail is completed (if at all).
If we pursue the hyperloop or similar tech, and whether it can be completed or not, at least it would be a first of it's kind and on the cutting edge.
For a major infrastructure product? No, even if they could secure all the requisite permits and funding, which I can only imagine would be a nightmare to all but the wealthiest entrants, urban development would make actually putting the thing in the ground its own immense obstacle. The government uses the long-established practice of eminent ___domain to ensure that its projects may proceed unimpeded. Private industry doesn't have that, and we shouldn't consider giving it to them.
If the California high speed rail project is completed (or even makes progress) it will likely stifle any similar projects for decades. Competing against government projects is hard enough because the goverment has the incentive (from voters, contractors, workers, unions) to "succeed" regardless of costs and has access to vast resources thru taxation as well as control of the rules of the game (laws, regulation). Project with high fixed cost such as this would be impossible because of the huge financial risks. Once the government establishes its presence it will either be uneconomic (Amtrak) or illegal (US Post Office) to compete.
> If the California high speed rail project is completed (or even makes progress) it will likely stifle any similar projects for decades.
Building railroads (road networks, etc.) over non-trivial spans of land is practically impossible without active government support. Even if California doesn't build HSR, private efforts without government involvement would be pretty much impossible.
Agreed ANY project will require government support. I just don't see many governments supporting competing projects. So if CA HSR gets built competing projects, such as Hyperloop, are unlikely to get the required government support. Make sense?
> I just don't see many governments supporting competing projects. So if CA HSR gets built competing projects, such as Hyperloop, are unlikely to get the required government support.
Given how long it takes to build large scale infrastructure, and given that Hyperloop is still at a primitive stage as technology (the fact that the paper just released calls, as a next step, for reduced-scale testing to demonstrate the physics, whereas HSR is a widely-used, well-established technology with multiple vendors), its more of a long-term successor to HSR than a concurrent competitor.
OTOH, its true that HSR being built would reduce the problems that provide the incentives to build Hyperloop.
"its true that HSR being built would reduce the problems that provide the incentives to build Hyperloop."
not true at all, since, it would be too expensive to run at volume to help any significant amount of traffic and too expensive for most actual real-world commuters to use (they would just fly at that expense). It would reduce one problem: obtaining a right-of-way, by virtue of making it impossible.
You misread, I think. He was stating that it is a common claim that government can stifle innovation, particularly in the transit sector (look at the trouble that Uber has to go through in every large market to fend off government-backed taxi monopolies). In this case, it appears that government failure may help spur innovation in a very costly sector.
"If ALL Musk does with the Hyperloop announcement is shed more light on the potential debacle that is to be our $70b+ high-speed rail in California, we owe him a debt of gratitude."
We would owe a debt of gratitude to a hypothetical public transport project for helping to obstruct or kill a real public transport project?
but why to ask California State for subsidy? Why not to build it using private funds? I'd imagine that if this is economically sound idea there must be potential investors lining up to have their share in the Project? The estimated cost is $7B. Now, Musk just needs to make a few calls to his friends at Google, Amazon, etc. Can't these guys just form a company together just to build it?
Maybe I'm naive... or maybe Musk for all his genius is focused on the Government grants too much instead of being focused on the investors in the business world.
If this brings profit, everybody want to own piece of the pie, no?
(1) CA is much better positioned to straighten out the land use issues. It needs to use the existing I-5 right of way, it needs to tunnel through some mountains, and it probably needs to eminent ___domain some additional bits of land for pylon bases where I-5 curves too sharply. No matter what, this is a project that has to pass the legislature in order to get built.
(2) A CA-sponsored bond issue must be by far the lowest cost way to finance a $7B infrastructure project that's amortized over 30 years.
Can't (1) and (2) be solved by additional $1b to cover "cost" the Government might have? Just make it easier for them to move it through legislature, mountains, and such ;-)
You can already get the same effect by having a private investor agree to "pay back" the Government if there are really private investors who want to do that.
It's called a "public-private partnership" and it's not completely impossible but it does require some person or persons to cough up the cash.
> but why to ask California State for subsidy? Why not to build it using private funds?
Because you can't, in practice, acquire the rights of way necessary to build a substantial railroad/hyperloop/freeway or other major infrastructure project of that type without government (specifically, without use of eminent ___domain).
But as I recall, the gov't can use eminent ___domain to give land to a private entity if they're in favor of the idea for the "public good." Or am I way off base here...?
few investors would touch this. It doesn't fit into any investment category that's approved.
There are infrastructure funds but they're looking for sleepy assets. Stuff like toll roads and ports that have an established operating history and are supposed to be low risk.
This is a whole different animal. It's almost infrastructure VC. I don't see how this fits in any part of the institutional world. That leaves wealthy individuals and I don't think there'd be a lot of interest there. They're looking at Berkshire and steady growth vs. an investment in speculative infrastructure. I could see $10M investments but I think it'd be hard to get people to put a big chuck of their net worth into it, which is what you need (i.e. you need a couple people putting in $1-2B). Furthermore, historically public transportation hasn't been very profitable. Realistically you probably need the state to build it.
Not to be nitpicky but if you haven't driven the I-5 theres substantial room between each direction of the freeway so I don't think it will actually be above traffic if that's your concern.
I have driven the I-5, but good point. And the diagrams that you'll find on p28-29 of the presentation suggest that the supports would definitely fit on the median.
You still need government permission to use the median like that.
There are overpasses all along I-5. I seriously doubt you can put a 20 ft elevated tube under them and you certainly don't want them in a place where a truck can easily slam into the support pillars.
Depends on how strong the tunnel is. Assuming your taking 3/4 atmospheric difference your starting at ~11 pounds per square inch add in a 3-5x safety factor and that tunnel would be one tough son of a bitch.
Not to mention it's got to be really close to a strait track so your more dealing with scraping forces than a direct strike.
The government loan was hardly free. Not only did it incur interest, there was an equity component that nearly kicked in had Tesla not had sufficient funds to pay off the loan early.
Musk put $40m into Tesla and his stake is worth billions. The people put $465m into Tesla and their stake is worth nothing, after making a paltry $12m in interest. In addition, while Tesla was paying the government 3% on that loan, they were paying Musk 10% on his loans, in effect shoveling government money directly into Musk's account.
This is a classic example of socializing the risk while privatizing the profits. Yes, Musk is a smart guy with plenty of great ideas and good execution. But he's also plenty good at funneling government money to himself.
No, it's a very visible example of socializing the risk while privatizing the profits. It's pretty small potatoes compared to the normal contract guarantees to even, say, companies doing highway maintenance, and let's not get into the "socialization" of science funding. Where are our guaranteed ROIs on NSF grants?
The government makes these investments all the time. In fact, usually the (barely implicit) goal of government funding is to also encourage job and wealth growth. $12 million isn't much of a return, but even revenue neutral is a win for the average government investment. And, like the tax breaks to encourage people to buy the very cars the government was helping pay to produce, the idea is to help kickstart an industry that might not have the differential to self-start, but has the potential to eventually be self sustaining and bring outsize benefits compared to the investment. Basically the same reason we fund basic science research as well.
And again, this is highly selective outrage. You can disagree with the whole category of government-sponsored industry, but you have a bit of an uphill battle there. Meanwhile, there are far more "classic" examples all around, not to mention the two other major car companies that together received nearly 16x what Tesla received and have so far not exactly put in a great showing for the industry-creating change that money was supposed to help fund.
He put his money in at the beginning, the govt. put it in after they had a production car and the Model S R&D well underway. They're not at all equivalent in terms of level of risk.
That said, the interest was low, but it was meant as a public good. Without Tesla, I very much doubt the big car companies would be pushing out their own EVs on nearly as aggressive a timescale.
They had a loan program to kick-start electric vehicles. One of their loans was largely responsible for the existence of Tesla and its ensuing success. The loan was paid back.
Should the government have been more profit-maximizing? Do we want civil servants taking large equity stakes in private companies? We fund research (both directly and through the university system) all the time with the understanding that the net benefits to society outweigh the direct costs of the programs.
Well I guess judging by the poster's rage, they should have got a better return and folded that into another project. I'm just trying to empathise with the anger of taking risks with relatively low returns using public money.
AFAIC Tesla upheld their end of the bargain and society is up by quite a bit. This is in stark contrast to other bullshit that the US government has funded which is wasteful at best. War, war on drugs, war on privacy, bankers, ...
Or maybe - just maybe - without the Government he would have to spend more time and effort to persuade private investors and companies to help him. I think by choosing the Government he choose the path of the least resistance. I don't blame him, just saying, that for the rich getting the money from the Government might be much easier than getting it from the markets. Which would be just another example of why the Government should stay away from the economy.
Ah, that's boring. Look, we're talking about progress here, no Government burocrat should be able to stop us. Just $1B extra in "fees" would get us all the Government backing in the world we want. Unless we're not really serious about the whole thing and not really confident about the end result.
Or just have Jobs resurrected. This way we save $1B on the "fees" and he'll talk the Government officials into this for free. They'll think they get the best deal in the world once Steve is done talking to them and the Distortion Field is permanently present in the Government heads.
Well the issue, apart from getting the land to build, is probably that the public benefits a great deal more than a company can profit off. There are always going to be intangible benefits from huge infrastructure projects like this that a company can't monetize. Hence what is economically a good idea for the nation or state as a whole, is not necessarily a good idea for a private investor.
I live in los angeles and the proposed price is cheaper than taking a cab from the LAX to my place (4 miles). So no, this is not to help rich americans.
I think anyone who pays money to be transported from one place to another at high speed is too rich to be cared for by Bill Gates, from his perspective :)
There is a private bus service the runs between LA and SF for $40, which is probably less than the cab fare to the airport, or what a high speed rail ticket will end up costing.
Actually Bill Gates is on record saying that if he had 'one wish' it would be for an awesome low emissions energy source.
When you consider the growth in air travel, and the fuel options for air travel, the Hyperloop IS effectively a low emission energy source. I suspect he's more than interested.
I am intrigued, but not overwhelmed. Many of his reasons why his hyperloop is superior to high speed rail are not specific to the hyperloop. For example, you can put railway tracks up on pylons, too, with very little impact on the ground. It is common to do this in urban areas, but it is rarely done in rural areas because it is flat out cheaper to put it on the ground. I don't believe that an experimental tube is going to be somehow magically cheaper and easier to route and build than train tracks.
Now, I am not trying to defend California's HSR, specifically. I agree with Musk that it appears to be very poorly done. However, the answer, to my mind, is to do it properly rather than propose a wild experiment with hand-wavy arguments as to why it would be politically easier to do. Do you really think the special interests that are making HSR so difficult and expensive would say, "Oh, do whatever you like with your tube."?
Now, in an attempt to end on a positive note, I do like his proposal as a possible next step beyond HSR. Rail can go up to 350km/h currently (perhaps more in the future--why wouldn't California design with this goal in mind?), but Musk's hyperloop is proposed up to ~1000km/hr. It is definitely an idea worth exploring, but I think it falls far short as a serious alternative to the current high speed rail plans.
I don't believe that an experimental tube is going to be somehow magically cheaper and easier to route and build than train tracks.
Do you really think the special interests that are making HSR so difficult and expensive would say, "Oh, do whatever you like with your tube."?
These are extremely important issues that advocates seem to be glossing over. Putting the guideway on pylons doesn't magically eliminate land issues, you will still have to deal with visual impacts, along with any number of anticipated and unanticipated problems.
Musk should do what the Germans did with the TR0x series of maglev vehicles, build a 10-20 mile test section someplace and demonstrate that is analysis is sound.
(perhaps more in the future--why wouldn't California design with this goal [350 km/h] in mind?)
There are a variety of reasons, but one important reason I have to deal with is that the speed of shear waves through soil is only on the order of a couple of hundred miles per hour. When a train exceeds the shear wave speed, ground-borne vibration waves "build up" in a manner similar to the shock wave created in air when a plane exceeds the speed of sound, causing a ground-borne vibration equivalent of a "sonic boom" that can cause problems for wayside structures. I believe the French have started to experience this with some of their higher-speed TGV experiments and we don't have a good way to handle this yet.
> one important reason I have to deal with is that the speed of shear waves through soil is only on the order of a couple of hundred miles per hour.
Perhaps a stupid question, but the shock wave forms because the trains is moving continuously over the ground? So if you put the entire thing on stilts, there would be one wave formed at t0, x0 when the train reaches pylon 0 and the next wave would be at t1, x1 etc. So the interference pattern for the waves would look vastly different. ( This holds of course only for point like trains... )
Yes, rather than a line-source, you have multiple incoherent point sources, but those point sources are being excited along a line at a rate faster than the shear wave speed. So yes, it somewhat different, but also similar.
A test segment would go a long way to determining if/how much of a problem this might be in a hyperloop system.
> When a train exceeds the shear wave speed, ground-borne vibration waves "build up" in a manner similar to the shock wave created in air when a plane exceeds the speed of sound...
Putting the railway or tubes on pylons would give you an opportunity to dampen or otherwise transform those vibrations wouldn't they?
Putting the railway or tubes on pylons would give you an opportunity to dampen or otherwise transform those vibrations wouldn't they?
Maybe, maybe not. Guideway supports (pylons) are typically founded into the bedrock which does reduce vibration somewhat, but the vertical motion of the pylon moving against the soil will still generate shear waves.
This is why a demonstration project would be useful.
I recall reading that the pylons had vertical and horizontal dampers to protect against earthquakes (among other minor natural changes), so wouldn't those dampers be able to cancel out the shear waves?
No. Well, I suppose you could design an active vibration system to (almost) completely cancel the vertical vibration motion, but know you're talking about a powered system in each pylon of incredible complexity.
Passive resilient systems could help with higher frequency vibration (above say 100 Hz or so, depending on the forces and weights involved), but for lower frequency vibration (especially below 20 Hz), the resilient elements would have to be so compliant that even a gentle breeze would create very high vibrations in the guideway itself, which would be incompatible with the speeds of the cars inside.
You could make the pylons so massive that the forces from the vehicles couldn't move it, but again you're talking about higher construction and material costs, as well as visual impacts.
Vibration from trains is proportional to the unsprung weight of the vehicle (basically the axle, wheels and traction motors) rather than the vibration of the whole vehicle (which is isolated by the primary and secondary train suspensions). For a heavy rail transit vehicle (NYC transit, MBTA Red Line, CTA vehicle, etc), you're talking about 2,700 kg. I don't have numbers handy for HSR trainsets.
The plan uses an air bearing partly because an air bearing is exceptionally stiff. It's not like a hovercraft, with all that ability to squoosh up and down. So the unsprung weight might be the weight of the entire vehicle.
edit: though, mind you, the whole capsule also has mechanical suspension
Wow. I'm an Elon Musk fan too but this is a bit much. He didn't give anything to the world. He is a businessman-he gets paid very handsomely to do the things he does.
At very least, it is in society's best interest to socially reward people working on solving big problems instead of doing lucrative things that just exploit people.
True innovators carry all of humanity on their backs, and give massively to all of humanity, present and future.
The fact that they get some monetary compensation doesn't entitle you to not be grateful and to not recognize their heroism.
It does not entitle you to imply, as you have, that they deserve the same level of praise as any person who is paid for any work whatsoever.
You are, by implication, equating Elon Musk to the teenager flipping burgers, or any other menial laboror.
That is moral treason.
Without innovators, we would all be dying in pestilence-ridden Stone Age villages. In my opinion, those who claim that innovators do not deserve the highest of possible praise _deserve_ that fate.
Elon Musk is probably at least millions of times more productive than the average human.
If you were to calculate the sum of gains and losses between Elon Musk and humanity, it would balance out that Elon Musk is overwhelmingly the creditor, and humanity is overwhelmingly the debtor.
As with the great-grandparent of this comment, your comment is a massive moral equivocation.
I think tesla motors releasing an affordable car would benefit the world a lot more than the hyperloop. But it's nice that he is presenting the idea so the world can do their own analysis and even implement it before he has the chance.
>>I think tesla motors releasing an affordable car would benefit the world a lot more than the hyperloop.
Specifically, an affordable Tesla car could benefit the entire world, whereas the Hyperloop would (at least initially) only benefit people living in LA and SF.
They both benefit the world. Fact is, there is no modernized 3-Liter-Lupo, and I've heard no rumors that there ever will be (?). Until there is, Tesla will be the one who demonstrates what is possible.
Really specifically, an affordable Tesla would (at least initially) benefit only those who were able to buy an affordable Tesla given the still significant cost and Tesla production constraints.
They both have the potential to be hugely beneficial to the entire world. Although in Tesla's case it's more of a certainty... fortunately we can have both :-)
The pod is basically flying. Although its weight of course is still ultimately borne by the pythons, perhaps it's mushed out and dampened in a way that reduces the ground-boom effect? But it sounds like one of the (many) bugs that must be worked out. spaceX wasn't all smooth sailing.
Can you elevate rail as easily? We're talking a lot more weight being carried by the pillars in that case. Plus you don't get the same natural banking off the walls he talks about, which is relevant at these speeds. While rail could bank, you better be going at the right speed when doing so, too slow and you just fall laterally off the tracks.
The short answer is, "yes." I've ridden on it. The slightly longer answer (as another commenter has pointed out) is that it depends on the weight of the train versus the weight of the hyperloop. I see no fundamental reason to assume that the hyperloop is lighter than the train. It could be so, but then, we could make smaller and lighter trains, too (light rail).
Plus you don't get the same natural banking off the walls he talks about, which is relevant at these speeds. While rail could bank, you better be going at the right speed when doing so, too slow and you just fall laterally off the tracks.
This is a problem even when you are at grade. The solution is known: tilt-trains. The track is banked such that the train will not fall over if it has to stop on the curve. The passenger cabin then tilts with respect to the wheels so that it always feels like the floor is "down" regardless of the speed that the train goes around the curve. The radius of curve sets the maximum speed the train can travel around it.
A bigger factor is that the efficiency of a train depends on having all the cars connected to each other. With the hyperloop, the pods are spaced out, so there's no need for the structure to bear the load of a bunch of them at once.
Turn down the nastiness. It's totally non-obvious that this isn't overshadowed by the weight of the tube. And it does carry a motor with it, just not one that's responsible for initial acceleration or for large air resistances.
Flippant comments like "Did you actually read the PDF?" are exactly the kind of needless small escalations that destroys the tenor of commentary at HN. Any time you write that, you could be writing "It's discussed on page XX". If the comment doesn't deserve a cordial response, then just downvote and move along.
He responded to your points about the linked article. You went back to discussing why his language was out of line. Now you're destroying the tenor of commentary. Just append the etiquette suggestion to your previous post.
You can't edit a comment that's more than an hour or so old. Reasonable people can have disagreement about the ground rules for online discussions, and it's helpful to get everyone in the same page in a constructive way.
The weight of a 10' diameter steel tube with 1" wall thickness is 125,000 lbf per 100 feet. Note that does not include the reinforcing braces, that is just the plate. The actual weight could be easily 2-4x greater. It also doesn't include the weight of the solar array.
My bet is that it's not significantly different to compare a light rail (subway-like) system to a hyperloop in terms of weight.
The weight of the track ballast alone is more than that. Gravel is about 100 pounds per cubic foot, and you need about 12 cubic feet of ballast per foot of track, or 127,500 pounds.
Then you get to add the rails and ties (or concrete sleepers), plus the vastly more heavy rolling stock.
The reason I said that the weight of the tube doesn't enter into it is because the tube isn't moving. The only thing that matters in terms of energy use is the rolling stock.
You can't just make lighter trains; heavy rail is heavy because it has high capacity. These vehicles can be much lower-capacity per vehicle because the speed is very high, which means you get equivalent throughput even with much smaller per-vehicle capacity. It's just like how you can get the same amount of water through a high-pressure, low-diameter pipe as through a low-pressure, high-diameter pipe.
So yes, you could make the rail lighter, but in order to match the proposed passenger throughput, it would have to go 700mph. Good luck with that.
I would be very surprised if the numbers really work out the way you claim: that the weight for carrying a passanger is similar for trains and a tube, and that the weight advantage of a tube comes essentially from 3x speed allowing for a one third the linear density of passengers. Do you have a cite?
No, this is just back-of-the envelope, admittedly. But the three factors that determine how many people you can move past a given point per unit of time are the frequency of the vehicles, the capacity of the vehicles, and the speed of the vehicles, so if you want to match the throughput of the proposed Hyperloop, but with rail traveling at 164mph, you have to either make the vehicles more frequent or higher-capacity, or both. I would expect rail to be much less frequent, at least if typical rail conventions are followed, meaning you'd need much higher-capacity vehicles, combined with the engines to bring them up to speed (which move along with the train). It doesn't take that much weight to get past what you could reasonably support on a pylon in a median... there's a reason inter-city rail isn't built this way.
> But the three factors that determine how many people you can move past a given point per unit of time are the frequency of the vehicles, the capacity of the vehicles, and the speed of the vehicles
As a matter of fact, only the frequency and the capacity matter. Speed matters to passengers but not to the amount of people you can move.
The hyperloop as proposed actually has fairly low throughput; conventional rail systems, particularly of inter-metro variety where high throughput is most important, best it easily. 28 passengers per capsule at a capsule every 30 seconds makes 3360 pph during rush hours. RER line A averages 30000 passengers per hour over the entire year, with rush hour capacity being much higher.
And if someone would like a long-distance example, at its busiest the line between Tokyo and Osaka sees up to thirteen trains per hour each capable of carrying around 1300 people.
> the three factors that determine how many people you can move past a given point per unit of time are the frequency of the vehicles, the capacity of the vehicles, and the speed of the vehicles
Yes, I guess you're right, but the maximum frequency is bounded by vehicle length and speed (you can't have a vehicle pass every thirty seconds if it takes more than thirty seconds for a single vehicle to pass a given point).
The longest TGV and Shinkansen consists are around 400 m, so they pass a given point in 30 seconds at about 50 km/h (30 mph). Of course there's spacing for safety and so on, but 50 km/h is so low that it's really a factor in practice unless you also have non-HSR traffic on the line.
A bigger factor in practical capacity is loading and offloading people and switching near termini.
The tube is not nearly as wide or heavy as a traditional train, so I don't know that it's fair to say that you can just as easily put a train up on pylons as you could this tube.
It's interesting to think about, but also there are probably much higher costs associated with a completely untested system like this than estimated. I wouldn't be surprised if this system, if it actually worked at all, ended up being more expensive than a HSR proposal through California that actually made sense.
I'm sure he'd prefer someone else do it but then again he might have preferred that someone else would have conceived of and designed it -- or something similar. There's a chance, as with the leadership of Tesla, that no one else with the capability (or position/reputation) to execute will be found, and I'd be surprised if he were not heavily involved in seeing it through.
From what I understand he still sort of wants out of Tesla in the long term. SpaceX is his baby and he's only running Tesla because he feels that he has to. I suspect he isn't receptive to spreading himself out over a third project (he apparently doesn't do much work himself for SolarCity).
My bet is that people in the middle who don't get any benefit from it will prove just as obsrtuctive as they are towards any other large scale infrastructure project.
But why make it a traditional train? Just build a lightweight train if it gets you all of the hyperloop's cost advantages without the additional costs and complexity of a tube?
The reason we have to run long, heavy trains is it's unsafe to run two passenger capsules at 300kph a minute apart. I find it hard to believe regulations will permit that even when they're in a tube.
Traditional trains have wheels and engines, which are quite heavy. And with a traditional train you're trying to minimize losses due to air resistance, which is not an issue in a low pressure tunnel.
Above a certain speed wheels present huge issues, which means you need to change your drive mechanism and suspension mechanism.
Also, drag is a huge killer of efficiency and hence overall economics. Even at 500kph the drag on a train at sea level is enormous. At 1000kph it's 4 times bigger again, and you've got the sound barrier to worry about. Trying to do the same with multiple small capacity trains is astronomically worse. So, better to have reduced drag... and by now you've basically got the hyperloop.
>>However, the answer, to my mind, is to do it properly rather than propose a wild experiment with hand-wavy arguments as to why it would be politically easier to do. Do you really think the special interests that are making HSR so difficult and expensive would say, "Oh, do whatever you like with your tube."?
Even when done properly, HSR has most of the limitations stated by Musk. And while it is possible that special interest groups would make the construction of Hyperloop more difficult than it is, I don't think that's an argument against giving it a try.
> For example, you can put railway tracks up on pylons, too, with very little impact on the ground.
Out of curiosity (I'm not at all familiar with HSR)—does the Hyperloop plan increase the distance between columns or the cost to build the columns (due to materials or any other factors)?
The basic issue the hyperloop overcomes is the energy waste in train transportation, especially at high speeds. This is primarily about aerodynamics, and secondarily about carrying with you the propulsion system. Third, it overcomes the "chunkiness" of the rail system, where passangers needs to be assembled and grouped into train-sized lots for transportation, rather than being able to depart continuously. You get superior energy economics, speed and convenience. I cannot see how that would be disappointing.
Reading the entire PDF is highly recommended; it contains a surprising amount of answers already (including many to comments below).
I think, if anything, safety aspects haven't been sufficiently explored in the pdf. I'm quite happy to believe it's safer than other modes of transport, but I wouldn't be too quick to overstate it. Also, if anyone can explain what "Tubes located on pylons would limit access to the critical elements of the system." is meant to mean in §4.5.6 I'd be grateful...
> "Tubes located on pylons would limit access to the critical elements of the system." is meant to mean in §4.5.6 I'd be grateful...
You don't have to worry about cows wandering into oncoming vehicles like you do with cars and trains. It's also harder for non-determined people with malicious intent to interfere with operations.
A determined attacker can, of course, scale pylons. But you don't have to worry about stuff like kids lobbing bricks from overpasses, or people pushing others onto subway tracks.
Thanks–I think it was the fact that the pylons could presumably be scaled that was making the sentence difficult to parse (I wasn't sure how they were meant to prevent access). That, and that the pylons themselves are also presumably "critical elements" of the system.
Yes, but so could tracks on any high-speed rail, and in that case with considerably greater ease. In this case, the actual railway is sealed off from all but the most determined external forces, who would be able to do just as much damage to a conventional train.
Indeed, I started getting giddy when he was discussing how to get the best power factor from the stator of the linear induction motor. It's obvious there's been a lot of thought put into this.
On the other hand even with a recommendation to use something similar to TSA doing something similar to airport security, his response plan to a terrorist attac--, er, a "human related incident" is basically to say that the system will have redundant power and vacuum pumps.
I suppose this isn't his area of expertise and so it's better to say little, but this is the kind of thing people are going to worry about before they board a small tube hurtling at 700 mph while 100 feet above the ground.
For instance, does a HRI impact his plan for rapidly handling luggage pods at all? Just one thing to think about...
He does mention luggage would be 1) handled by hyperloop employees 2) removed from the pod all at once to be handled at a different time. Probably more like these pods, which are mostly "blast resistant" http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6918501.html
The big benefit of being "not a plane" is that your emergency measures can be built around that concept. There's also a big benefit to only moving 30 people at once - terrorism looks for mass casualties or mass hostages. Blowing up a hyperloop is basically like bombing a bus - no one really bothers to try.
The big benefit of hyperloops over planes would all depend on how quickly you could brake those pods and re-pressurize the tube to let people escape. Because that's something you definitely can't do on a plane and it governs most of our thinking about them - if anything happens, you're possibly over an hour from being able to land anywhere and no one is able to get off quickly.
I'm really impressed to see the entire thing out in the public. They showed the designs, proposed routes, stress analysis, cost analysis... It's quire clear that this isn't just some "Hey I thought of an idea", they really put a lot of work into this.
I was worried this was going to be some pie-in-the-sky idea that was nebulous on a lot of basic details with quite a bit of "we can figure that out later".
> I was worried this was going to be some pie-in-the-sky idea
Sure, they put a lot of theoretical analysis into it, but its still pretty pie-in-the-sky. From the last page, note that
The authors recognize the need for additional work,
including but not limited to:
1. More expansion on the control mechanism for
Hyperloop capsules, including attitude thruster or
control moment gyros.
2. Detailed station designs with loading and unloading
of both passenger and passenger plus vehicle
versions of the Hyperloop capsules.
3. Trades comparing the costs and benefits of
Hyperloop with more conventional magnetic
levitation systems.
4. Sub-scale testing based on a further optimized
design to demonstrate the physics of Hyperloop.
It's not a current competitor to high-speed rail, its more in the position that high-speed rail was in in the 1930s.
American high speed rail was more advanced in the 1930s than it is today. The Zephyr diesel passenger engine was faster than Amtrak's Acela speeds today.
Adding a compressor fan to actively transfer air from the front to the rear of the pod while simultaneously serving as an air cushion to support the vehicle is simple, elegant and absolutely brilliant!
An ingenious solution appears so obvious in hindsight that it leads you to ask "why didn't I think of that?" While being subtle enough to confound all those who came before.
I have been following the developments of the ET3 Consortium for the past year. I have read virtually all the technical literature available online on the topic of alternative high-speed transportation systems going back as far as the RAND paper and even reading related patents from much earlier.
Looking at the genius of Elon Musk's insight is both inspiring ang greatly humbling - but mostly inspiring. Holy awesome! I would love to see this innovation take root. It could be the perfect elixer to our stagnant economic malaise.
I'm pretty sure that idea has been thrown around, maybe even here on previous HN discussions, can't remember. The hard part is having really deep knowledge of the tech involved, manufacturing and costs, and producing a 50-page technical document with input from dozens of top minds in their fields :)
I am skeptical of the proposed cost were someone to actually build this. Sure, the cost of materials, labor, engineering, etc. is probably accurate, but something like this has never been built before. What about the cost of research and testing? Not to mention there doesn't currently exist an industry of contractors to build most of the parts of this system, which is not true in the case of traditional high speed rails. Citing the cost to build something like the Hyperloop as the entire cost of developing it seems a bit disingenuous.
Not that it still wouldn't be comparable to the cost of a high speed rail system.
The 5000th doesn't help the person who paid for the first one. That would be the State of California in this case. Unless Mr. Musk would be willing to sign a contract for expected-10th-implementation-cost and not a dollar more?
So who will be the first to offer a signed contract to build the SF-LA line for $6,000,000,000.00? Maybe A16Z will be interested in providing venture funding.
As others have pointed out, 6bn is about the cost of the Bay Bridge extension or, if you prefer, six Instagrams or other retarded "tech" startups.
This is not aimed at you, but when I started reading Hacker News I was amazed how excited, interesting and smart people were on this site. But now Im starting to get tired of this 'valley think'.
Greetings from Switzerland where mind blowing infrastructure projects are still happening.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel
In case it wasn't clear, I was voicing my doubt that any company would actually build such a line for $6B claimed by Musk, not an opinion that it was unduly expensive.
That may be true, but the only thing you really need is to find a company that is willing to build this while chipping in some of the R&D cost.
I don't think such a company would be hard to find because if they get this done, they are now the only vendor of a highly desirable technology. Pretty sure they'll be able to get back that early investment... and then some.
(And remember - Musk contrasts $6b to what he estimates could possibly grow to $100b for the current proposal, so even if they end up needing to double their budget, they'd still be off by an order of magnitude.)
> And remember - Musk contrasts $6b to what he estimates could possibly grow to $100b for the current proposal, so even if they end up needing to double their budget, they'd still be off by an order of magnitude.)
Why should we think that Musk's estimates for a technology which still isn't well defined (read the "Future Work" section at the end of the document) are reliable even to within an order of magnitude, and why should we accept Musk's assumption that the actual cost of the HSRA will be 50% higher than its official estimate?
Alright, safe for the fact that this may still turn out to be an impossible technology after all for something we're all missing and also for Musk being off by an order of magnitude (which I don't see to be that plausible).
Even if you worst-case Musks plan and best-case the traditional concept * , you end up in about the same cost bracket. Just that in the one case you get incredible space tech and in the other, you get a boring train that isn't even as great as it could be with 20 years old tech.
As for the "Future Work" section - I don't really see how they could explode the budget. Only two points (station design and comparison with traditional Maglev) seem concerned with R&D work - for station design, you're not really looking for any breakthroughs, just packaging and mentioning Maglev seems more like a "just make sure" point that isn't really about physical cost at all.
* This part is highly unlikely - government issued endeavors like a long distance train routes have a pathological tendency to run over budget (a few billion here and there, who's going to notice?!). Of course, the same applies to Musks concept, but starting at an order of magnitude lower means that the kind of petty "I'm going to carve a piece from that cake, too" budget overruns should be well within range.
Very good point. Another possibility is some forward-thinking government paying for the initial R&D effort to have one of these built in their state/country.
Someone needs to convince Musk to build this on the east coast of Australia; linking Brisbane-Sydney-Canberra-Melbourne. The Sydney-Melbourne air corridor is one of the busiest in the world (6,795,000 passengers in 2007, vs 6,306,638 for LA-SF in 2009 [1]). We recently had a feasibility study into HSR along the east coast (a condition of Greens support of the current Labor minority government) but it suggested that such a project would be ridiculously expensive and take upwards of 30 years to complete (some say the study was doomed to fail and the numbers are wrong).
The geography is probably less favourable for Hyperloop in the eastern Australia context (e.g. Sydney is in a basin bordered by low mountains north, south and west), whereas the route it would follow in California is mostly flat?
The key advantages of a tube vs. a railway track are that it can be built above
the ground on pylons and it can be built in prefabricated sections that are
dropped in place and joined with an orbital seam welder.
Did anyone else read this and imagine laser beams fired by satellites?
Not really. It's a valid welding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_welding), but I imagine it might be quite a task to scale it up to pipes as large as would be needed for this project.
For some reason Elon Musk is extremely enamored of welding technology. I remember seeing a page on an old version of the SpaceX site containing a high-level overview of the Falcon 9, where they went out of the way to mention how great circumferential friction stir welding is compared to whatever NASA used to do. And here he is bragging about it being the large stir welded thing ever created: http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2009/01/musk-ambition-spacex-.... It's a revolutionary vehicle in many regards, but Elon seems to have a particular soft spot for welds.
Makes sense, most of the volume in a rocket is a tube structure. I imagine that SpaceX has spent a lot of time evaluating ways to precisely and cost-effectively build tubes...
Orbital welders can be used in pipes on any size (smaller sizes often need special welders). Not sure what the record is but they are commonly used on water pipes that are several meters in diameter. Should work fine for the Hyperloop tube. Seems like all the required technology is proven but I'm sure we will hear more from all the experts in the various fields.
I do not get this part. These are not advantages of tube v railway track, because a railway track can also be built above ground and can also be build from prefabbed sections. In fact I would think that building a railway track would be much cheaper than building an airtight tube.
Unless Musk has found a way to make the cars weightless, the tube must support the weight of the cars. Further, the pylons must support the weight of the tube and the cars, over a smaller footprint.
Isn't that the case with planes also? As far as I know, at 35,000 feet altitude you'd die, too, if cabin pressure drops and the plane's life support system fails. And I don't recall ever hearing of an air plane accident that involved suffocation.
Amazing that there are so many safeguards in place to prevent what happened to HCY 522, and yet the crew managed to miss/ignore them all. I'm sure there have been many thousands of instances where a safeguard prevented such an incident, but in this case I suppose the fates aligned.
Also look at the TUC (time of useful consciousness) that it´s below 5 secs when flying that high. That means that you have less than 5 secs to put your oxigen mask on before you lose conciousness, or behave with out knowing what is happening.
Also due to the extreme low pressure, you´ll have a horrible a horrible stomach ache due to the expansion of the gases inside you. Your blood (or at least the corporal fluids exposed directly to the low pressure) will start boiling.
Not funny. Maybe one solution could be wearing some kind of pressure suit for this trips. But that is not going to be very convinient..
At or above the Armstrong limit, exposed bodily liquids
such as saliva, tears, and the liquids wetting the alveoli
within the lungs — but not vascular blood (blood within the
circulatory system) — will boil away without a pressure suit
As mentioned above, we have been boarding planes without pressure suits for decades, and the hyperloop has two security advantages: it has a large supply of compressed air to work with, and the tunnel can be quickly re-pressurized in the event of a severe rupture. A multitude of concurrent failures (much less likely than those in an airplane) would be necessary for a catastrophe.
You got to think that a decompression will happen. Something traveling that fast inside a tube is probable to develope vibrations and material fatigue if something is not working properly (like the compressor or a air cushion), also there can be small parts released from the front pod impacting on the next one.
It doesn´t need to be a huge crash, just a crack on the hull, it will decompress that small pod in seconds.
Also what will happen when of tens of pods traveling that fast, find that there is a sudden recompression of the tube? How fast are they going to stop due to the front overpressure (the compressor is relatively low powered)?. Is not going to be a gentle stop either.
I still think that it´s a great idea, and that there will be ways of solving those problems, but it´s going to be difficult and require lots of R&D.
Obvious engineering issues for further investigation. I would just point out that fatal failure mechanisms can be pointed out in any transportation system. The acceptance criterion is a sufficiently low fatality rate.
The great thing about the hyperloop, and other vactrain systems, is that you're at sea level... you're just not in atmosphere. The atmosphere can be restored in seconds. Sure, it'll stop the entire system and be a TOTAL pain in the arse because you'll have to restore the vacuum, but that's acceptable as long as it doesn't happen often.
The paper discusses supplemental oxygen and emergency tube re-pressurization in the case of sudden evacuation of the atmosphere of a capsule.
It seems that detecting failures of this nature quickly would be the important thing. The fix looks to be relatively easy, though you would cause a major disruption to the whole Loop.
You're pretty much done if the life support systems on a plane fail and you're pretty much done if your car has a massive failure while you're doing 70MPH. I can't imagine it being statistically more dangerous than driving.
Driving seems to get a special exemption in the public consciousness. Trains and planes are already much, much safer than driving, but they're still required to add additional redundant safety features, and there's still outcry when one crashes.
Except that planes have (supposedly) trained staff that can go around and make sure everyone is getting oxygen. These pods are automated and would most likely have no staff on board.
There is in fact a proposed passenger plus vehicle capsule:
The passenger plus vehicle version of the Hyperloop will depart as often as the passenger only version, but will accommodate 3 vehicles in addition to the passengers. [p12]
The passenger plus vehicle version of the Hyperloop capsule has an increased frontal area of 43 ft2 (4.0 m2
), not including any propulsion or suspension components. This accounts for enough width to fit a vehicle as large as the Tesla Model X. [p15]
Tubes would be bigger, and the system would cost more.
Most flights I've been on in the last decade, you don't want to leave your seat for anything except a bathroom break. It's not like we're flying on Pan Am Clippers with pianos and seven course meals. Air travel is a glorified cattle car unless you're willing to be financially raped for first class or a chartered jet.
I think one advantage of air travel is it's distracting. Busy flight attendants, announcements from pilots, plane moving to the runway, taking off... so there's less reason to concentrate on the lack of space while stuck in the seat.
Are you? I wouldn't rule it out, but personally I think getting an outside signal into a sealed capsule which is moving so rapidly that it must use battery power rather than a physically connected power source seems more than trivial.
The hop between two major cities where I live (~800km apart) takes around 50 minutes on a plane. For 15 minutes you can't get up, and for the remainder low altitudes keep the seatbelt sign on due to turbulence.
For the advantage of a short journey people will put up with it, especially if it can get you to the centre of the city rather than an airport on the outskirts.
I'd rather be stuck in my seat for 35 minutes than to travel to an airport, go through security, check-in, waiting and boarding, fly for 90 minutes and then apply all the logistics in the other end. Your point is valid, but I would contend that the total package is still superior.
That cost is the infrastructure cost, amortized over a long time, not counting R&D, maintenance, marketing, ticketing, and various personnel costs, assuming it's near capacity.
Also consider this is bus-tier people moving, not even train. You just have small individual units moving along one track. With even passenger rail, you have to have set departure times measured in at least 10 minute blocks, something like this could have a departing train every 5 minutes and you could go through a turnstable the same way you get on a subway.
Really? As a European I don't find the backseats of most American cars cramped at all.
Plus, with a car you'd have a 7-8 hour journey to look into.
And with an (equally cramped if not worse) plane you'll have more traval time than in this scheme, if you include waiting to depart, the lengthy procedures at the airport and getting to the airport in the first place.
Well, there's a low grade vacuum outside so you probably don't want to.
It's a failure of the onboard steam tanks that scares me. ("The steam is stored onboard until reaching the station. Water and steam tanks are changed automatically at each stop")
I don't want to think about what the result of that would look like for the cleanup crew. Eeeewww.
I really doubt the steam tank will be inside the pressurised volume. If they fail they would vent overboard. While an explosive failure would probably cause problems it wouldn't expose the passengers to high pressure steam.
The failure mode for composite overwrap pressure vessels is a slow leak, due to the overwrap containing the metal.
A vehicle near the end of its ride will be carrying up to 818 kg (1800 lb) of superheated steam (127 C, 260 F). The 4000 kg (8,900 lb) of onboard batteries and 1800 kg compressor will be dumping heat too. This is 6600 kg of "hot stuff", whereas the entire capsule is projected to have a mass of 15000 kg.
The current design has the passengers in an enclosed capsule in between the compressors and the batteries, with a pressurized air channel running right down the center isle.
Keeping the cabin cool will be a challenge. If that emergency braking is activated, it could get a little warm in there before they are rescued.
I think they may have to quickly repressurize the loop if a car ever gets stuck.
Sure - but that is happening dozens of feet away inside a can designed to contain it. This extremely high temperature and pressure air will be flowing right under your butt. Serious question, Is any kind of breakthrough in insulation needed?
Well, if the can fails you're toast either way. :-)
The pressure ratio for the compressors in the CFM56 engines in current model 737-800 models is 32.8:1, so somewhere in the neighborhood of 400-500 psi (will depend a lot on altitude).
Seriously, we've been building machinery to operate safely in this pressure and temperature range for a long time.
Yes, and it involves a lot of the considerations we're bringing up here.
Engines do fail on passenger jetliners from time to time. There are numerous stories of planes landing safely after an engine catches fire. But the plane is travelling at a good speed through the atmosphere. How would things be different in a much smaller vehicle sitting stationary in a mild vacuum?
How would passengers escape a battery fire? (as has been seen multiple times on very modern jets)
If the tube had to be repressurized in an emergency, how long would the tube be out of service to be pumped back down again?
Is it worth building a three tube system for such a possibility?
The same thing that happens when you develop gastric issues on a 30-minute helicopter tour, as the minister in a wedding ceremony, or in a dentist's chair.
Sure, unless that bathroom is occupied by someone who had gastric issues before you did :).
The meta point: If you can't plan around a 30-minute window of no bathroom access, that biological restriction is a bigger concern than arriving at your destination quickly.
Same thing that happens if you develop unexpected gastric issues during a 30 minute plane flight, I'd imagine, since you'd spend the whole time strapped in for take-off and then landing.
Well the pod has compressor - so it literally can hit the fan :)
The only thing I really dislike so far is the battery pack in the pod. I would have wanted to see something more elegant instead. And this way we halve the weight of the pod.
For the lack of space between the tube and the carrier, is wireless electrical transfer out of the question? Or is that not feasible with the amount of electricity being dealt with here?
Wireless power transfer would likely significantly complicate the design and construction of the tube itself, which as it stands can be just a dumb hollow cylinder on a stick for the vast majority of its length.
Perhaps the redundant vacuum pumps are spaced frequently enough that the power transfer problem would be easy, but I doubt it.
sbashyal pointed out in another thread that you can't use the restroom on a commercial airline during take-off or landing either, which I thought was a great point.
Fast trains are just fast trains. Inside there isn’t much special about them compared to slower ones, except that they are usually more comfortable (softer and adjustable seats, definitely wider, at least in first class, better and more tables, more storage space for luggage, electrical outlets, sometimes crappy WiFi, a crappy restaurant, relatively roomy bathrooms that don’t even look that bad). Also, they actually tend to run much more quietly and rumble less than slower trains, so getting up and walking around is usually never a problem, except maybe when the train is driving into and out of a station and over many switches. At least that’s my experience in Germany, but the TGV isn’t so different (maybe a bit better in some ways).
The problem with the images of the Hyperloop interior is that it looks very much unlike anything you currently find in trains. It looks more like the inside of a race car – with a belt and all – and it doesn’t look like you are supposed to get up and walk around. It doesn’t seem as though there is enough space for that. Maybe that’s just some designer having an unnecessary flight of fancy (but that doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the design if it’s that badly though out), maybe that’s an inherent downside of the design. Either way, not good.
In general, most of those things vary massively between classes of trains, and there's no simple low-speed/high-speed distinction. Seat width varies massively between body shell designs, softness often depends on how long since the last refurbishment more than anything else, number of tables and luggage space are often based on the target market for the class, electrical outlets are more and more common (even on commuter trains), WiFi is something I'd expect on most inter-city trains, and on-train restaurants (sadly) are dying out though have historically been common on all inter-city trains.
Smoothness is mostly due to track quality, and is a practical result of design for high-speed running.
At least in Germany WiFi sucks and is not available everywhere – and even if it is you have to be lucky and actually be in a train that supports it. In general seats are most definitely more comfortable in longer distance trains. Yeah, you can find a seat that’s less comfortable in a long distance train than in a regional train, sure, but that’s hardly the point, is it?!
And electrical outlets are getting more common, sure, but the vast majority of German regional trains does not have them and you can only be certain that there will one in a high speed train.
You said it may differ elsewhere — I was providing a more general view of what I would expect in Europe.
WiFi varies a lot from country to country — some places you're lucky to get it on any train, others it's becoming coming common on even regional trains; seats on a lot of the older ICE2 sets were really quite terrible prior to their recent refurbishment, and a lot of IC trains in Germany had far better seats; electrical outlets differ from place to place — the TGV Duplex will never have power outlets at all seats, for example, despite being a high speed train, as there simply isn't sufficient power spare to provide them, and as another example in the UK it depends far more on rolling stock age (or refurbishment date) than whether it's a long-distance train or not.
Currently you get up and go to the bathroom at the end of the car.
I've only had time to skim the full PDF, but there's something about experiencing 0.5g of acceleration - unsure if that is a constant or if that is simply right at the very beginning.
If you're going to experience 0.5g of acceleration over a prolonged period, letting passengers get up and move about is going to be a bad idea. It also doesn't look like there's enough roof to get about in that capsule. 0.5g doesn't sound like a lot until you think about it as 50% of your body weight tacked on, in a direction you're not used to having it tacked on. Pretty simple in a seat, much less simple trying to walk.
Assuming it's very smooth acceleration, it's just like standing on a 26º slope, feeling slightly heavier than normal. Healthy individuals should have no problem at all in such a situation.
> unsure if that is a constant or if that is simply right at the very beginning.
If the top speed is 700mph then you'd have 142 seconds of 0.5 g acceleration to get to top speed. How often you'd be accelerating or decelerating would depend on how many intermediate stations there are.
Or 3 million people donating $2000 each for huge discounts on long term access. I would donate $10,000 if the discount was steep enough on long term use and included use of future expansions of the system.
Or better yet, sell tickets at a discount that can then be re-sold when the system is complete. Someone could buy $1M of reduced price tickets and then resell them for $2M when the system is ready. This way wealthy individuals wouldn't hit a maximum investable amount based on their personal expected use of the system.
The main reason why air travel continues to be the most practical, cost-effective means of high-speed transport is that the politics involved in connecting two points with a transit system are enough to make you lose faith in humanity.
Take for instance, the DC metro system. There is an expansion underway to extend the system west to Dulles Airport, about 30 miles or so from downtown DC. A huge project, no doubt, but it is about ten years behind schedule. What was a seemingly great idea (mass transit to a major airport and outlying regions of DC) was almost ruined by all the fighting.
This is for a project spanning 30 miles. Imagine the politics and fighting that occurs between politicians, contractors, lobbyists, and residents on a public works project that spans hundreds of miles between two of the most populous cities in the world.
A project this ambitious is only well-suited for a small, independent group of like-minded people, which unfortunately will never be possible with all the interests involved.
>"There is an expansion underway to extend the system west to Dulles Airport, about 30 miles or so from downtown DC. A huge project, no doubt, but it is about ten years behind schedule."
That's a bit of an exaggeration. Construction was scheduled to begin in 2005 and actually got started in 2009 [0]. Also, Metro is something of a special case in general with the system spanning 2 states and the District while having no dedicated source of funding [1].
I like to think (hope?) that when a world changing idea comes along (and if this does work as described, it definitely is world changing), everyone can work together and implement it in a reasonable time frame. I think one of the reasons many projects take so long to complete, like the California HSR, is because the cost to benefit isn't all that great. It has no advantage over flying and little to no advantage over driving.
When a world changing idea comes along, there are always parties that stand to lose from it (1). If those parties are good capitalists, they will oppose the change. That is what stops many good ideas in their tracks.
(1) yes, a change could be an absolute net win for everybody, but it cannot be a relative win for everybody. In many cases, people will prefer to have less, as long as 'the others' have even less.
Plus Airtravle could be made 10x better without all that usless security shit. I fligh often from Switzerland to Germany and most of my time is spend standing in one line or another on the airport.
I see no reason that boarding a plane cant be as efficent or almost as efficent as getting on a train.
The problem (as I'm sure many others have stated before) is that airport security doesn't really solve the problem of being able to crash a plane into a skyscraper. However, reinforced cockpit doors, armed pilots, and a belief that a hijacker will use a plane to commit suicide instead of as hostage do effectively solve this problem.
I'm not saying that fighting won't bog a hyperloop down, but the Silver Line fighting was largely due to who was going to pay for it. You had Federal funds, VA state, each VA county, Dulles, and Metro all with their fingers in the pie. This hyperloop only has one state and a few stops, and it looks to be much cheaper than the HSR so it should be an easier pill to swallow.
They both have right-of-way issues, but what land-based project doesn't?
They both have right-of-way issues, but what land-based project doesn't?
That's my main point- land-based projects are a nightmare to coordinate. I would actually think the DC metro would be one of the easier to get done because it receives federal funding.
It depends on where you are. China is expanding their high speed rail network like crazy. 10,000km of line between 2007 (when it was created) and end of 2012.
So the question is not whether projects like this can happen, but rather whether politicians in the USA can be beaten into allowing them to happen there.
> 4.5.6. Human Related Incidents
Hyperloop would feature the same high level of security used at airports. However, the regular departure of Hyperloop capsules would result in a steadier and faster flow of passengers through security screening compared to airports.
Ugh. That only seems feasible if back-scatter scanners are the only option (but would you still have to take your belt off and put all metal in a little bowl?).
Knives or even guns would only pose a problem to the few passengers in the capsule with you (yeah, you might be able to shoot a hole through the tube, but it would take a LONG TIME for a bullet hole to let in enough air to affect the pressure in a LA-SF-sized tube).
The TSA phased out all the X-ray backscatter machines due to radiation concerns. All the scanners at airports use millimeter wave radar now. Still the same privacy concerns, but no ionizing radiation and thus no possible health concerns.
The hyperloop has much less structural requirements than a traditional train. The reason is that its cars are separated, so it is 'less dense'. If a train goes over an overpass, the overpass has to be engineered to carry the weight of the rail and the train, whereas the hyperloop only has to handle the weight of the tube (30m between pylons at about 8 tons/m is 240 tons plus the negligible weight of the capsule).
The upshot of this is that the pylons can be much less invasive on the real-estate requirements. This is important because now you have more choices with regards to routes, which leads to less curvature and higher speeds. Looking at it from the reverse angle, High Speed Rail design suffered because the massive real-estate requirements imposed such a burden that route choices were compromised, and thus the projected travel time was lengthened.
* Tube manufacture.
It occurs to me that there already exists expertise in manufacturing elevated, highly reliable large diameter steel tubes hundreds of miles long. Oil pipelines. Moreover, these companies perhaps would be interested in diversifying their business away from oil.
* Development
High Speed Rail has issues, but they are political and financial, not technological. We're really just buying the technology from other countries. Much of the cost and the incredibly lengthy construction time for HSR is coming from building overpasses and the foundations for the rail, so far as I can tell.
But hyperloop is something that requires some development. This is a good thing because investors can sell that technology and get some return. It's difficult to attract private funding for HSR, but I can definitely see someone stepping forward to fund the development of the technology.
Pretty much once someone builds the hyperloop demonstration system, you'll know if you have a winner on your hands, but with HSR, you don't know if you'll be successful until the whole thing is built (and with a 2:30 travel time LA->SF, it's not going to be a slam dunk against air).
There are plenty opposed to HSR, but I see very few alternative solutions being proposed. This might be something those opposed to HSR jump onto, and it might get a lot of support quickly.
Not only that, but they would also use a lot of technology that Tesla/SpaceX now has a lot of experience in: battery, eletric engines and turbines, the metal for the ski pads, etc. There's a reason why he is making the plan completely free: he has a lot to benefit if this ever really happens.
I would love to see this happen though, and to see Elon become a trillionaire.
My main concern is the air-bearing suspension system. Barring very high flow rates, the fly-height of an air-bearing system is very small. Some systems[1] fly at 5 microns, for instance. That being the case, any sort of particulate or imperfections in the tube will cause the air-bearing to 'land' with a large amount of friction. Perhaps this is alright if you're already going 700mph, but it would reduce the overall coasting efficiency of the system.
The engineer in me sees this as the most important design consideration of the project.
As an aside, I would like to see trade studies done on filling the tube with other gasses whose speed of sound is much higher than air's, allowing the capsules to travel even faster before shocks begin to form.
As an aside, I would like to see trade studies done on filling the tube with other gasses whose speed of sound is much higher than air's, allowing the capsules to travel even faster before shocks begin to form.
I don't think this is a good idea for production use, because then you have to worry about air leaks to/from the passenger compartment.
As it is, you still have to guard against explosive decompression for the passengers.
Well that's the point of a trade study: look at the cost/benefit of different gasses. Obviously one of the costs would be the increased engineering um...pressure put on the capsule design.
Your gut feeling is probably right, though, at least for this length of trip. The increased cost of a different tube gas probably won't outweigh the benefits of arriving 5-10 minutes earlier.
Now if there were a cross-continent Hyperloop system, then for segments of the trip it might be much better to have a different gas. But again, it might simply be better to invest in better vacuum pumps for certain legs of the journey to get lower drags and higher speeds.
The only ones I see that are significantly higher than nitrogen/oxygen are methane, hydrogen, and helium.
Helium is mondo-expensive. It's not cheap even in welding-tank quantities, much less in the amounts you'd need here.
Hydrogen is flammable and/or explosive (depending on mixture) and is a huge pain in the butt to keep confined (so is helium).
Methane is cheap (but not as cheap as air :-)), and we have lots of experience with keeping it confined in big pipes. However, it's also flammable or explosive.
Using anything but air is going to require some sort of complicated replenishment/purging system and an air lock at both ends, whereas air leaks just require pumping it out again.
High Speed Rail between downtown LA and downtown SF:
2 hours, 28 minutes
Hyperloop trip between downtown LA and downtown SF:
1 hour from LA to Sylmar via Metrolink
20 minute transfer
35 minutes to Dublin
20 minute transfer
1 hour 10 minutes from Dublin to SF via BART
Total: 3 hours 25 minutes
The project also doesn't even attempt to price the connection into LA or SF. That's where the high costs are.
Amusingly enough, the California HSR budget for the Central Valley is under $10 billion. Ie, in the same ball-park as this proposal. The reason the HSR project is going to cost $60 billion is because it has to face an uncomfortable truth; actually getting to LA and SF is expensive. Very expensive.
Is Elon Musk's s mega-announcement really just a last-ditch attempt to sabotage the California High Speed Rail (HSR) project, rather than a serious proposal to revolution travel? Something smells very fishy.
Wow, 300 comments in 2 hours--this is reaching the limits of readability. My first thought is that this release of Hyperloop details is like the geek's version of the Breaking Bad season premiere that is being so talked about in the US (didn't see it myself).
First of all, I think it's genius how nobody saw this solution coming, despite all the speculation. Put the air compressor on the pod, and use Tesla's battery technology to power it. Seems evident in hindsight.
My biggest gripe is the non-inherent safety and thus the security issues. The evacuated tube is a real issue in my mind, and saying it will be re-pressurized in case of an accident seems dubious. Yes, like a modern jet, but planes can descend to 15,000 and people live. Also, planes don't fly at 150,000 feet (the pressure equivalent in the tube) and there may be other biological hazards other than breathing. But mainly, the vehicles are subject to the same exterior threats as airplanes, so security will need to be similar. In addition the tubes are also a target of threats, which is less of an issue with trains and not an issue with planes.
I hate to be a party pooper, but I see some economic issues.
My takeaway is that while the 7 billion fixed costs will be low, the operating costs are going to be huge.
Battery packs and solar cells will need replacement. Large maintenance teams will be needed with immediate response times to fix issues such as complete seal blowouts, etc.
I think the first few years will be great! But in my opinion maintaining this system over the long term will be very, very expensive compared to slower rail.
I'm still optimistic that most of these and other issues will be worked out in the long term.
EDIT: Did he post what this tube will be made out of? How will he prevent solar degradation?
The tube is steel, shouldn't be a problem. The electronics are only a small fraction of the cost. It is mostly just the cost of the tube, pylons, and land.
"Hyperloop Passenger Capsule
The maximum width is 4.43 ft (1.35 m) and maximum height is 6.11 ft (1.10 m). With rounded corners, this is equivalent to a 15 ft2 (1.4 m2) frontal area, not including any propulsion or suspension components."
At a first look I didn't get that the proposed passenger capsule would be so small. That's pretty cramped.
Edit: Isn't the the ft to m conversion for the height wrong?
I suppose that's the most plausible explanation. (Doesn't seem to match the height-width relationship in the sketches, but its the only thing that makes the particular numbers used understandable as a fairly simple-to-explain error.)
But that's at a pressure of 100Pa (1/1000 atm). How much power does it take to maintain a vacuum of 1/1000atm in a tube hundreds of miles long? It seems this point is skipped over in the whitepaper, so perhaps its negligible.
Edit: yes I was referring to the power to sustain a vacuum in a leaky system, of course no power is required to maintain a vacuum in a perfectly sealed system :)
To me, a 1/1000 atmosphere vacuum system IS a really leaky machine :) Anecdotally, the machine I used to work on would gleefully chew on that for hours idling while we scrambled to find the hiss on the system.
It made an awesome sound when it ground into the atmospheric pressure on initial pumpdown, but at about 1/100 atmo it got bored (mere minutes), and without additional high speed stages the mechanical pumps would backwash at 1/10000 atmo (though it would take a while to get from 1 hPa to 0.1 hPa, many multiples of the time it to to get from 100 hPa to 1 hPa).
Edit: fixed units (0.001hPa is still leaky for base pressures but a completely different thing from 0.001atm).
I used to work with a system of about 1m^3, 2 little mechanical pumps would get you to 10E-6 atm or so. A turbo pump got you down to 10E-9 or there abouts. The door on the thing was about 2.5 feet in diameter, with a big ol' O-ring that would get twisted and tangled all the time (we broke it once, gorilla glue worked just fine to fix it).
I also second the great sound they made. It was like 2 very angry horses going 'Brahbrahbrahbrahbrahrbah...' getting quieter all the time.
If the system will be welded together that'll reduce the leaks quite a bit and the maintenance too, which I think will be the biggest problem. It's not making it work, it's keeping the thing working that will eat up the costs. Eventually, as the thing ages, you'll have bigger and bigger leaks. Figuring out how to deal with that will be a moon-shot on it's own.
To geek out for just a moment on the topic: we had two fix-a-flat substances that required two engineers to agree to use (mostly as a joke interlock - someone had to stop management from slathering it on everything). One was basically putty that you could smoosh over a leaky o-ring (clamp and all); with some work you could seal anything for a few days, but it made an awful mess and it was darn near guaranteed to destroy base pressures later. The other was a vial of clear stuff that was disturbingly like super glue, which would seal any micro leaks like a charm and would hold for a couple pumpdowns. At least, consistently until forgotten.
The machine was so big that it was easy to forget where it was, which o-ring had the clear super glue on it (after a few weeks it was covered in plant filth anyhow, the tags were lost, and too many of the seals had sharpie Xs on them to trust anyhow). It was MASH's meatball surgery, but with low energy plasma physics instead.
I ab-so-freaking-lutely guarantee they will use gorilla glue on the Hyperloop once leak failures become boring and routine. Or super glue. Or giant sheets of Kapton.
Guaranteed. This is going to end up as a union job due to the height requirements and the vacuum. It will be an honestly dangerous job. That means quotas and cutting corners, because there will be humans and it will be 105 out and I just wanna watch the Giants game, man.
I imagine you might be able to locate flaws with a custom capsule along the lines of a pipeline pig[1]. It would be exceptionally hard to actually fix it from the inside whilst travelling, so you either need to do it from the outside (which requires site access and elevation gear), or bypass/shut down the tube and fix internally.
As Balgair notes, you can get away with a lot on the short run, but leaks are notoriously difficult to patch up. Vacuum leaks are super hard to detect at these pressure ranges, where you're lucky to hear or feel them at all. More than likely, your only indication is to leak helium into the system on purpose and use a mass selector on the outside to 'sniff' for ambient helium (which is extremely rare normally). It's terribly slow and time consuming.
You can always take the short cut and just sorta gunk up the leak to mitigate it, but eventually it'll wear out. Vacuum welds are far better, but also take a lot of skill to perform on the spot: any sort of crevasse will act like a leak (albeit a small one - at these pressures it probably won't matter), so the bead needs to be nigh perfect.
Or you just slam another plate on the outside, glue/weld it up and just sorta not worry about it. Heavy pumping covers a multitude of leaks.
So, young man deciding on the Marine Corp or the French Foreign Legion: Just wait 10 years. Those precision welding jobs 50 feet up next to 1 tor vacuum are going to pay out the bank. Union too, and probably never going away if this thing comes to fruition.
On the other side, Mr Musk gains a hell lot of know-how about plugging vacuum leaks quick, reliably and possibly automatically. Where do you think that might come in handy? Hmmm, on trip to Mars maybe?
I would actually expect leaks to be easy to detect. Just run a high-frequency high-voltage plasma discharge detector on a skeleton vehicle. Wherever the discharge quenches you have a leak. Barcodes laser etched during construction could help you localize the leak to within a few centimeters.
Pinholes might be repairable by pressing a sapphire drift against the leak and melting the metal underneath by shining a laser through.
True, but this either has to be done by paid union labor 50 feet off the ground near 1 tor vacuum or by a heck of a robot. The union guys will be certified up the wazoo and paid to match that and persnickety about it. The robot will be and engineering marvel and a hell of a good idea.
I mention in another reply that Mr. Musk also has plans that involve vacuum differences and not a lot of wiggle room. On a trip to Mars a robot hull fixing machine would sure be nice to have.
I'm sitting here in a lab with a vacuum system that is in the process of being repaired for use in testing some new spaceflight components. 1/1000 of the atmosphere, even on this broken, leaky thing, is nothing. Mind you, it's also runnng off of pumps that are a decade or two old and cobbled together from various other labs around here.
How much power does it take to maintain a vacuum of 1/1000atm in a tube hundreds of miles long?
It doesn't require any power, if there are no leaks. The power required will be determined by the amount of leakage that is considered tolerable to the system.
Regular mechanical pumps can haul gas to pressures of a hPa. Any lower, and you're looking at something like turbomolecular pumps. (And efficiency may call for a second stage of specialized mechanical pumps.)
But in my experience, small mechanical leaks are usually of the order of a hPa or so, meaning no high vacuum tech will be needed. Just a fleet of giant blowers and mechanical pumps. (I worked on a wide area sputtering machine for a few years with a few hundred HP of mechanical backing pumps for about a hundred foot long chamber with a 10 sq foot average cross section (order of magnitude error for anonymity ;)) The machine would haul down to 10 or 1 hPa with leaks you could _hear_.
So yeah, it could work practically, especially if it's a welded system and not a giant mess of bolts and o-rings.
Sections 4.2 and 4.5. It estimates the cost of vacuum pumps for the tube and stations at $260 million. I haven't seen if they've broken out costs to maintain the pumps, but it specifically also mentions compensating for minor leaks with higher pump capacity to be able to continue operating and fixing smaller leaks as part of routine maintenance.
As someone who gets claustrophobic on planes - I have to fight the panic every time I fly, the dread that fills me at the thought of a service/system malfunction, while halfway between LA and SF, what happens then?
I'm reminded of this water slide at the Gold Coast's Wet and Wild - you end up going upside down - but in order to attain the velocity required to make the loop, you need to be dropped from a particular height, only some people don't make it - so they have a single access point into the tube where people who haven't made it, can get out, but I'm sure it wouldn't be a fun experience, so I opted for not going on that slide, even though my kids were pleading with me to do it. No thanks.
The hyperloop looks amazing, but my heart rate went up reading that document, and it wasn't out of excitement
If you can't stand being in an enclosed space like that, there's still the interstate. Is not meant to be everyone's ideal solution, it's meant to be a good solution for most people.
Given ADA, would it be even legal for the California government to build this instead of a classic HSR? It's not even about claustrophobics, people in wheelchairs couldn't be serviced at all and obese people would be trouble too.
I don't see why they couldn't. You could just leave out one or two rows of seats and have plenty of room for a wheelchair, also extra luggage and package (if no wheelchair was onboard). You could have that in maybe one car out of five or ten, given that a new car arrives every thirty seconds.
From the pictures it looks like able-bodied passengers don't sit upright, so a person in a wheelchair wouldn't fit. Perhaps they could be helped into a seat and then helped out, though.
Serious question BTW, I'm not sure what exactly ADA mandates.
I think it is a pretty fair question, even though I am not entirely sure of what is the definition of minority on this matter. What is the percentage of people that the system should take care of? There are always outliers for which this (or any) transportation will never be a possibility.
Now, I am sure that some variations on the system (have one row with only one chair for obese or no chair to allow people with wheelchair) would increase the % of people that can use the hyperloop.
No toilet, and no way to get off, or even really stand up? I know some personal jets lack such facilities, but they're not exactly open to the public. At least on BART you can move away from the crazy...
The distance is just about what I commuted on a bus for many, many years, also with no facilities.
In peak hour it would probably be fine, when everyone is fairly sensible and not drunk. But after hours, I've had quite a few uncomfortable bus rides due to the various anti-social behaviours of fellow passengers. That was with the hand-brake of a driver who obviously isn't getting involved, but can avoid escalating behaviour by stopping the bus or calling authorities.
I have great faith in the technology! I just wish I had as much faith in the people riding inside it :)
I visited my friend in New York, and he took the express from Staten Island to Manhattan, and it was ~45 minutes without any stops (from the last Staten Island one to the first Manhattan one)
> No toilet, and no way to get off, or even really stand up?
Seriously? It's like laying in a not quite horizontal bed for 30 minutes. If you can't plan your bathroom usage 30 minutes ahead of time, then don't use this transportation system (or wear a diaper). I can almost always hold it for 30 minutes after I am really feeling the urge to go. With 12-14 million trips per year, will there be accidents? Certainly. So that capsule gets diverted to be cleaned. Big deal.
> At least on BART you can move away from the crazy
It looks like those spaces are small enough that only 1 person could easily interact with you. If that's a problem, they could probably build in plastic dividers. Or you could just buy two tickets. If you can't tolerate that level of risk, then again, don't ride this thing.
I can assure you that there are plenty of people who are not bothered by these issues.
In Brazil the building of a new high speed train between São Paulo and Rio was just delayed for the third for for lack of interested companies to build the system. The estimated cost is at US$ 17B.
There are not earthquakes in Brazil and the length should be around 500km. It seems like a better candidate than SF-LA.
California is more able to attract interested private operators because the availability of potential passengers with money to spend on fares is substantially greater.
Not sure why you think there would be more passengers on LA-SF versus SaoPaolo-Rio: Greater populations, shorter distances and lower costs ($17 vs 68 billion). Brazilians may be poorer today but they are catching up fast.
Sure there will be private contractors but is there really any private interest in building and/or operating high speed rail in CA? Perhaps Hyperloop will change things but so far it has been government led and financed.
> Not sure why you think there would be more passengers on LA-SF versus SaoPaolo-Rio
More potential passengers in the latter, more potential passenger revenue in the former.
> Brazilians may be poorer today but they are catching up fast.
Per capita GDP in Brazil is less than 1/3 of that in California, and is increasing at about 1.7%/annum (2.7% GDP growth, 0.9% population growth); assuming no growth in California GDP per capita, it would take Brazil more than 65 years to catch up.
People in Sao Paolo and Rio are about 40% richer than average Brazilians which reduces the gap somewhat. And GDP growth in Brazil has averaged 3.1% since 1991 with Sao Paolo growing faster. Costs are expected to be much lower for construction ($17 vs $68B) and probably operation. Also they expect it to take 5 years to build versus 15. Not sure how it would all shake out but does not seem to be a clearly worse project.
It's probably moot comparison anyway as best I can tell the Brazil HSR is not going to happen. There have even been giant protests over transportation and government spending.
I'm also pretty skeptical that CA HSR will actually get built - numbers don't add up and popularity is declining. If they can build and operate the Bakersfield to Fresno segment on schedule and budget it might have a chance - but I have doubts they can even do this.
The total trip time is approximately half an hour, with capsules
departing as often as every 30 seconds from each terminal and carrying 28
people each. This gives a total of 7.4 million people each way that can be
transported each year on Hyperloop. The total cost of Hyperloop in this
analysis is under $6 billion USD. Amortizing this capital cost over 20 years and
adding daily operational costs gives a total of about $20 USD (in current year
dollars) plus operating costs per one-way ticket on the passenger Hyperloop.
For aerodynamic efficiency, the velocity of a capsule in the Hyperloop is
- typically: 300 mph (480 kph) where local geography necessitates a tube bend radii
< 1.0 mile (1.6 km)
- 760 mph (1,220 kph) where local geography allows a tube bend > 3.0
miles (4.8 km) or where local geography permits a straight tube.
A country like America in the '60s, '70s, or maybe even '80s would build this in a heartbeat.
A country like America today...who knows?
This plan has the perfect mix of reasonably practical yet slightly unsettlingly new and unfamiliar. It is just the sort of thing that meaningfully evolutionary changes are built on, like airliners or cross-country trains or steam-powered ships. If America builds this, great! If not, watch for which country does and move there post-haste!
From my skimming of the PDF, it sounds like a pneumatic tube transportation system with a compressor fan on the front of the vehicle that moves high-pressure air from the front to the back maintaining a low-pressure state around the vehicle. Kind of like an Earth-bound Alcubierre drive.
The pumped air is also used to create an air cushion around the pod to keep it suspended at high speeds. Also, solar panels line the top of the tube so that it is self powering.
It would not be built anywhere on the map in your link. The LA station is in Santa Clarita which is further north and west. It seems to me that he has laid out a route that avoids as much as possible dense urban areas. Even his extensions out to Vegas and San Diego by pass most of the urban development in the LA basin.
Yes, but no discussion of how you'd bring the system down if one broke down mid-trip or how you'd bring it back up. The individual cars only carry power to maintain speed, no to accelerate, so if they have to stop because something goes wrong, a whole bunch of people are stuck in the middle of nowhere without a toilet (or air?)
I stand corrected. In fact it comes down to two paragraphs and doesn't really cover much including, for example, just how long this would take (the cars behind the stalled vehicle would use emergency brakes then proceed at low speed on wheels to the nearest station -- sounds like at least half a day of down time).
Four seconds, if you're driving the way you were instructed. But you've got multiple options: go left or right, and if you slam the brakes they'll stop you in time. If something broke the tube, are we looking at several pods slamming into the obstruction one after the other?
Most fascinating likely medium-term event: The hyperloop will be built outside the US, most likely in China, after changes and development that help China claim it as primarily Chinese in design.
I agree. This is great but it won't be built in the US.
We have become risk averse. No grand sweeping visions of building interesting infrastructure like TVA, the Interstate (though that was poorly implemented in many areas), etc.
I think his vision is based on Futurama: electric cars -> spaceships -> elevated transportation tubes -> hover cars -> robots. I bet if the government still goes with the traditional rail plan, then Elon will build "his own hyperloop", adding "blackjack..." and other stuff.
I think it's fair that he said that. A vacuum tube has as little air as possible to help things move. His paper explicitly says it is more cost effective to have some air and his capsule design depends on air as a levitation cushion. If he had said it was a vacuum tube, no one could have guessed the levitation method.
"... each passenger will have access their own personal entertainment system."
Only a small point. Other than to display ghastly advertising, why not a dumb monitor that interfaces with your phone/tablet? It's not like you're going to be able to watch a movie. And if we're seven years into the future on this, I'll be wearing my Oculus Rift 4.0 anyway.
Maybe I'm just too disillusioned by the systems used in aircrafts with their awful interfaces, lag, etc.
Best comment on reddit so far "this is a pipe dream"
* I don't think the Hyperloop is viable and I hope they kill the $100B High Speed Rail (HSR) project before it ruins the SF Peninsula and budgets across the state.
* Setting aside the $100B HSR cost (yes, I know current estimates are $70B but it was sold at $10B and will easily exceed $100B if/when completed) the operating costs will have to be subsidized for every minute of its existence just like every other govt boondoggle. This is a white elephant and, in case you weren't paying attention, California and most cites are or soon will be bankrupt. We can't afford this, cut our losses now.
* If I was made Bay Area/CA public transportation csar (with suitable budget and dictatorial powers) my first step would be to extend BART through San Jose so it actually loops the bay and (finally) complete BART. (I am old enough to recall that that was the original design)
* I do think a high speed rail connection SF/LA is economically viable but would need to do research and crunch numbers while finishing BART. I would move the SJC airport south (with a BART extension) to Morgan Hill/South San Jose and build the connection from there to LA.
* From SJ to LA I would confiscate I5, leave two lanes for truckers and local traffic but build a high speed (300MPH) car/ferry train system so you could be blasted to LA in a little over an hour and have your car there when you arrive. Home by dinner.
* I would build a nuclear plant somewhere halfway between LA and SF on I5 so my trains would not have to use diesel fuel (too smoggy) or solar (too expensive).
Nothing here is any less fanciful than Musk's musings and far, far more practical.
From the conference call: "I'm tempted to at least make a demonstration prototype, but I think I would have to punt it for a little bit of time, it wouldn't be immediate."
The total cost of the Hyperloop passenger transportation system as outlined is less than $6 billion USD (Table 8). The passenger plus vehicle version of Hyperloop is including both passenger and cargo capsules and the total cost is outlined as $7.5 billion USD (Table 9).
Love the idea but the cost projections here seem extremely optimistic.
I have somewhere read, that large cities are usually the size one can travel in under an hour. So this could have quite interesting effects in effectively joining LA and SF.
I see just a little bit of hand-waving with how to deal with the 300 psi and 1000 degree F air.
He says they will cool it with on-board water and storing the steam (I don't see a pressure here)in the vehicle. Given the tight space, will any kind of thermal insulation breakthrough be needed?
Probably not, the pressure and thus the density of the air is really low and therefore it simply does not have the energy density needed to cause problems.
The almost vacuum at the front of the pod is compressed and piped out the back and to the air bearings. After it is compressed it is 1000 deg. F and 300 psi. That sounds pretty energetic to me
$20 plus operating costs. That is, the $20 is just the additional cost to pay off the capital cost over $20 years, and doesn't include any of the amount necessary to pay the operating costs.
Airline tickets would be pretty cheap if all they were paying was the 20-year amortized capital cost of the airplanes + airports, too.
$20 is the unsubsidized 20-year-amortized cost of building the thing, there would be additional costs to run it, not the least of which being insurance.
Time is money too. The drive from SF to LA is about 5.5 hours (per Google Maps). 5.5 hours of stress and frustration, compared to 30-40 minutes of hyperloop...
Just as an anecdote.. We had some friends from Orange County come visit us in SF this past weekend.
* OC -> SF -- Left at 3pm, took 9.5hrs to drive
* SF -> OC -- Left at 9pm, took 7 hours to drive
There is random night construction as well as detours and traffic to worry about on I-5. Half an hour would be a no-brainer, even if it only went so far as downtown LA.
It's kind of cool that Elon Musk is competing with himself here -- Hyperloop vs. a 3rd generation Tesla (which should be even cheaper than $45 one-way per car, including depreciation and electricity.)
The real problem, even once you add self-driving cars, is I-5's limited capacity.
Seems like this would be particularly vulnerable to terrorist attacks. There is a huge surface area that needs to be protected (tubes/pylons). If there are pods leaving every thirty seconds and traveling at supersonic speeds then taking out one pylon could kill several hundred people and leave the entire train inoperable. In a future where this design was used extensively to connect cities on the coasts it would quickly become a critical piece of transportation infrastructure. Attacking several arcs of the city graph simultaneously would be utterly debilitating. Especially if the system's relative efficiency leads to the displacement of other forms of transportation.
Nope. Read the document. Subsonic speeds with capsules 2 minutes apart. In the event of a catastrophic depressurization (i.e. bomb on a capsule or a pylon), all capsules stop. Worst case, 28 people in one capsule die. The rest are stuck for awhile until they can be evacuated. Not very spectacular.
Also, I wonder what HSR incidents he's referring to. The Spanish relatively low-speed human error crash? Systems like Japan's Shinkansen have never had a fatal accident, despite operating at the edge of technology for 50 years. I don't think a derailing accident is at all likely on a modern system like California's plan or the UK's HS2.
If the tube bursts so wide that the capsule could be ejected from it, the inrush of air would likely be so great that capsules probably wouldn't even make it out. The bigger concern would be that they could decelerate too quickly.
Wow. I was expecting it to be something like the UW Ram Accelerator (RAMAC), but he put a fan in front. I was thinking it would have natural gas/detonation for propulsion, using the ram jet principle, and continuous acceleration, but I guess that rapidly gets you to totally absurd speeds (10km/sec+) and wouldn't really be viable, plus humans aren't so into 10G+ acceleration even when mounted laterally.
I would totally ride this. I hope there's a way for California to build it, and more importantly, I hope we can fix our government somehow to allow projects like this to actually happen in multiple fields.
The pressure difference is higher than in a passenger jet. The pressure vessel must be a tubular structure with small well sealed doors. None of this prism with whole fuselage gull wing door stuff.
That could definitely make sense. Vegas might even put up some capital to make it easier for people to visit and put their hard earned dollars to good use.
I can also imagine that from an infrastructure standpoint building across desert you'd run into fewer obstacles, although that might be wishful / oversimplified thinking.
None of this is to say that Hyperloop is a bad idea. The idea sounds very interesting and I'd rather spend sixty billion building a Hyperloop --even if it fails-- than the ridiculous California high speed rail project.
Cost is probably off by an order of magnitude, if not more. Why? Unions and other groups. Building anything in this country costs massively more (and takes significantly longer) than one could imagine because of our unions are not business symbiotic. The goal of union leadership is to extract as much as they can out of the businesses they infect, even if this means their demise.
A lot of the unions that would be part of such a project have some of the laziest and most problematic people working for them. If you come from the Silicon Valley tech world my words make no sense to you. In fact, you might think I am nuts. All I have to say is: Do a good size trade show exhibit at a few of the unionized convention centers in the US and then see what you think about US unions. Then repeat that experience at various locations in Europe and Japan and see the difference. I have done just that. US labor unions are destroying our country from the inside out.
How many significant new civil engineering projects in the US can you name over the last, say, fifty years. Right.
Hyperloop cost would be way more than this paper seems to predict.
The political factor is grossly underestimated. Our reality is that we live at a time of political deadlock. Nobody can or wants to make a decision and the decisions we do make tend to be suboptimal, sometimes grotesquely so: example, California high speed rail.
Finally, it addresses the wrong market. I am not sure why people insist on applying trains to transporting people in the US. Sorry to resort to reality folks: If you build it they will NOT come. We do not have that culture and you will not inspire it simply by building trains. You'd have to forcefully push people in that direction through legislation that would make it too expensive to not use rail. In other words you'd have to declare war against other methods of transportation through punitive actions.
The right place for high speed rail in the US is cargo, not passenger rail. If we could evolve our cargo rail systems to move at 300 km/hr rather than 50 the consequences would provide economic benefits and development beyond a century.
The final point is related to politics. We have a decision making system that allows anyone to vote. And, while this is commendable, it does create horrible problems. Imagine allowing a random group of, say, ten people deciding whether or not your child should have surgery. I'd be surprised if anyone thought this to be a good idea. No, most people would rather have a group of experts in the field, more than likely MD's in this case, vote for such a decision. The ridiculous California high speed rail project is a result of hordes of low-information, mathematically challenged, technologically ignorant and financially ignorant voters being led by the nose by unions, media and political forces.
How do you move forward when people like that can vote on these issues and their vote has equal value to that of an expert in the relevant fields: a PhD in Physics, an engineer, a financial expert, etc.
Regrettably this is not a technological problem. It is far more complex than that.
> Cost is probably off by an order of magnitude, if not more. Why? Unions and other groups. Building anything in this country costs massively more (and takes significantly longer) than one could imagine because of our unions are not business symbiotic. The goal of union leadership is to extract as much as they can out of the businesses they infect, even if this means their demise.
Musk is in the car industry, one of the hardest hurt by unions and their ilk, so I would find it hard to believe that he didn't take that into account.
> Finally, it addresses the wrong market. I am not sure why people insist on applying trains to transporting people in the US. Sorry to resort to reality folks: If you build it they will NOT come. We do not have that culture and you will not inspire it simply by building trains.
Again, Musk is building and selling electric cars in a country that LOVES gas guzzlers. His track record would suggest that he knows what he's doing.
> Regrettably this is not a technological problem. It is far more complex than that.
I don't know why you think that this paper/concept only addresses technological issues, because it is clearly much more broad in scope than that.
> Musk is in the car industry, one of the hardest hurt by unions and their ilk, so I would find it hard to believe that he didn't take that into account.
That is irrelevant. He did not go into Tesla honoring the contracts that were put into place by GM, Ford, Chrysler and others. Those companies actually have tens of thousands of very well paid workers sitting around --literally-- all day doing nothing due to union contracts dealing with automation and other issues. He, in other words, did not experience the almost surreal lunacy that the full union experience can be.
I'll give you an example of this. Las Vegas Convention Center. Trade show. Small booth, 20 x 20 ft. I needed the lights on top of my booth turned off so that I could control my own lighting. No problem, we can do it for $360 per light. I asked what was involved. The response was that they'd have to throw a switch. Same thing at the RAI in Amsterdam. Free. Same thing in Munich (forgot the name of the venue), free. Same thing in New York City, $400.
Want another example? Again, Las Vegas Convention Center. I could not hookup my own computers. Somehow, magically, once you enter union-land the engineers who actually design the equipment are suddenly incapable of properly connecting equipment into power outlets. No, union electricians have to wire your booth at a massive fee. If you screw around with them they will literally use mafia techniques and shutdown your booth without so much as a hint in the middle of a show. I've seen it happen.
So, yes, again, just because the science is brilliant it does not mean it can be built. I've made that mistake before. I've dealt with city and state governments. I have sold product to the US government as well. I have equipment in places like the White Sands Missile Test Range and other notable spots. In some cases things flow smoothly. This is ALWAYS --and I do mean ALWAYS- the case when unions are not involved. If unions are involved, watch out! Enter surreal nightmare. The only way to have it not be surreal and not be a nightmare is to have some kind of an in or pay off the right people. What, that doesn't happen in the US? Please.
> Again, Musk is building and selling electric cars in a country that LOVES gas guzzlers. His track record would suggest that he knows what he's doing.
Tesla sells 20K cars per year to folks who can afford an $80,000 car. I love what they are doing. I am waiting for their SUV's and will likely buy two of them. But, please, don't make the comparison you just made. The other car companies are selling nearly A THOUSAND TIMES more cars than Tesla per year.
He does know what he is doing. I did not say he is not. I am simply proposing that the Hyperloop might be brilliant on paper but, barring a political, labor, fiscal, environmental and who-knows-what-else miracle it has zero probability of ever being built beyond, perhaps, a very expensive test setup.
>I don't know why you think that this paper/concept only addresses technological issues, because it is clearly much more broad in scope than that.
I don't think it addresses enough of the real world issues. When everything else is cleared off the table you still have to build it in the real world. And I think that's where the real problems lie, not in the science.
I don't know much about unions, I admit. But, I offer these this counterpoint:
The proposal is to use elevated tube on pylons. The pylons are likely to be of a regular design, probably made with steel molds. The amount of skilled labor to build them is likely to be much less than building overpasses.
Musk has said that the tubes would be built in 30m segments in a factory, and welded in place. Given Musk's experience with robot assembly at Tesla (watch http://kottke.org/13/07/how-the-tesla-model-s-is-made), my guess is that much of the construction of the tubes, and the rebar mesh for the pylons will be automated.
Making stuff in your factory as much as possible means you can automate more. It doesn't eliminate the labor, but it does reduce it a long way.
This is all rather absurd given that the Western European nations that haven embarked on major infrastructure projects in recent decades tend to have higher rates of unionization as well as stronger labor and environmental regulations than the United States. That Europe has high-speed rail and the United States doesn't can hardly be chalked up to unions.
European unions do not behave as American unions do. They seem to know how to balance their wants with the idea of allowing their host to survive, grow and succeed. American unions tend to extract as much blood as possible out of their hosts. They are really selfish, to the point of causing terminal damage. Look at the cities they've killed off.
Can you take your political opinions and shove them down a dark hole somewhere? Most people are here for a discussion of the technology, not your rhetoric.
It's not really an opinion so much as fact. Labor unions have proven to be beneficial only for the members of the union and politicians. If you had ever done business around them, you'd agree.
That would be ridiculous, since that is not the argument that needs to be made. Instead, you want a logical argument as to why the concept of collective bargaining in the public sector is a bad one. I won't provide one since they are readily available if you have an ounce of curiosity. I'll just leave this:
“It is impossible to bargain collectively with the government.” - George Meany
American unions are political patronage jobs. They will quite cheerfully spend the entire budget digging holes and filling them back in.
If you do not account for this, you will have no budget left for technology.
Making the design an open source project is a major step towards European style (socialist) unions, where the unions help decide what to do and how to make it succeed.
> Making the design an open source project is a major step towards European style (socialist) unions, where the unions help decide what to do and how to make it succeed.
The difference between European unions and US unions is probably a big part of the reason for the negative connotation of the word "socialist" in the US. If US unions behaved like those in Europe, we would have a more positive connotation.
There's a difference between theory on a piece of paper the the reality of building something. In the real world unions will be all over a project like this. Up every crevice. So will environmental groups and other special interest groups. None of this is good for any major civil engineering project.
I asked a question in my post. Can you name any new major civil engineering project in the US in the last fifty years? Refurbishing an existing project does not count. I am talking about something major, say, a new conventional railroad.
The reality is that these kinds of projects are just-about impossible to realize given our political and, yes, labor framework. So, yes, unions are very relevant because it matters not if the physics of the project is brilliant and utterly peer reviewed. The various externalities I mentioned almost guarantee that it cannot built.
Can you name any new major civil engineering project in the US in the last fifty years?
New San Francisco Bay Bridge. (No, it's not a refurbish -- it's a completely separate bridge with a separate design to replace the existing Eastern span.)
It only supports my point. It's 2.2 miles long. Construction started in 2002. It was supposed to open in 2007. It will not open until the end of this year. Total cost is currently at six billion.
The Hyperloop is 400 miles long, will be built in seven years and will cost six billion.
Yes, and when the new Eastern span of the Bay Bridge was proposed, it too was cheap and fast: less than $1B. The dramatic difference in the actual cost has a lot to do with the mayors of nearby cities pushing for a much fancier and complex design, and to a sudden spike in demand for global steel and concrete.
Trying to compare the actual cost of actual projects with the first projected cost of an ideal, untested project is a bit silly, don't you think?
> Trying to compare the actual cost of actual projects with the first projected cost of an ideal, untested project is a bit silly, don't you think?
Not really. I would never estimate a six billion dollar cost for anything involving placing massive pylons on the center of the Golden State highway for four hundred miles.
It's the difference between reality and wishful thinking.
Look, I already said that I'd rather spend the sixty billion allocated for the bullshit high speed train on the Hyperloop. In other words, I am not saying we cannot build it. I am saying it will cost far more, take longer and be far more difficult (not technologically but unions, special interest groups and plain politics) than stated in the pdf.
I'm assuming you're being facetious. A picture of the big dig belongs in the dictionary under the word boondoggle, and proves robomartin's point better than almost any other example could.
> Can you name any new major civil engineering project in the US in the last fifty years?
Most of the interstate highway system, any number of lakes, many major bridges, the completed portion of the superconducting supercollider underground chambers, the brilliant Alaska pipeline pylon system, Florida's long elevated marine highways, the Norfolk (?) tunnel, the NYC aqueduct, most major airport runways.
What man has done he may aspire to do again.
These things move in cycles. Political patronage projects currently are in vogue, but their star is falling. You cannot credibly claim that unions will make any LA-SF project cost $100B, because Mr. Bond Market is about to have a mountain comes to Mohammed moment. At some point the market for rational projects will reopen for a few decades, like it does from time to time.
Elon Musk is just the man to make it happen. He already killed the Space Shuttle program and its standing army of $1B/yr payroll patronage jobs. Extending that to other projects is a matter of will and personality.
> [Elon Musk] already killed the Space Shuttle program and its standing army of $1B/yr payroll patronage jobs.
What did Musk have to do with Space Shuttle program cancellation? I thought it collapsed under its own weight - disasters, costs, slowness etc. Please provide links if any.
SpaceX was running an entire rocket development program for the price of one Shuttle launch. When they kept hitting their performance/schedule targets, the Shuttle lost all credibility within NASA. It's hard to predict a past that did not happen, but the Shuttle would probably have been kept going for longer if there has been no alternative waiting in the wings.
The Florida highway through the Keys dates to the 1930s and the NYC Catskill aqueduct to roughly 1916 - those are certainly great projects but aren't the last fifty.
Largely agree with the rest of your comment though :)
Also, the highway through the Keys has seen very large infrastructure improvements over the last few decades, so while not a new project it is a significant civil engineering effort.
I'm with you that Musk seems to have ignored the human factor when estimating the cost or even the feasibility of the project.
But think about how many aspects of our lives it would revolutionize. Simple example: can you imagine what would happen to the SF real estate market if it suddenly had to compete with the LA real estate market? If talented people who live in LA could suddenly commute to and from companies in SF?
I would say any stop in between the two cities would have a large spike in growth, as they suddenly become viable commuter communities, much like how suburban towns on the east coast grew out of proximity to regional rail lines. Suddenly a little rural truck stop town like Lost Hills becomes a viable commuting suburb.
A number of years ago a friend gave me a coffee mug that read: "What would you do if you knew you could not fail?".
I eventually threw it away. Every time I saw it I was reminded of the huge chasm between ideas and their realization. Sure, if you knew you could not fail you'd do anything. "What would you do if you were Superman?. Same thing. Things are different in the real world.
So, how would LA/SFO change if we had Star Trek transporters?
Not sure. My guess is, not much. SFO real estate is about living in SFO. Just like Santa Monica real estate is about living there. The same being true about Beverly Hills or Hollywood.
The HUGE problem something like the Hyperloop has to deal with are the stations. You can't declare that you are going to have one every ten miles. The real world doesn't work that way. If I have to drive an hour to get to downtown Los Angeles (a place I personally avoid as much as possible) it is nearly a deal-breaker for me. Not interested. I'd rather get on a plane in Burbank.
The nature of Los Angeles is that the talented people you are referring to don't all live within biking distance of a Hyperloop station. Los Angeles talent is seriously dispersed all over the place. I know people who would be interested in working at SpaceX yet don't pursue it because it would take them two hours to get there in real-world traffic and they can't move because their kids go to good schools where they live.
Ultimately, I think that anyone who wants to work in SFO needs to move there or to a surrounding city.
I insist that cargo is where high speed rail belongs in our country. I don't see it happening for passenger transport.
>>A number of years ago a friend gave me a coffee mug that read: "What would you do if you knew you could not fail?".
I eventually threw it away. Every time I saw it I was reminded of the huge chasm between ideas and their realization. Sure, if you knew you could not fail you'd do anything.
Well, no. You would not do anything. You would only do the things that the prospect of failure is currently stopping you from doing. The underlying idea is that things can be worth doing even if you end up failing at them. In fact, this is an idea Elon Musk embraces very closely. He has admitted in interviews that when he starts pursuing an idea, he knows that the most likely result is failure. Yet he pursues it anyway. The end result is that we have PayPal and Tesla and SpaceX.
>>The nature of Los Angeles is that the talented people you are referring to don't all live within biking distance of a Hyperloop station.
They don't all have to live within biking distance of a Hyperloop station. It is sufficient even if only some of them do. That's still several thousand talented people you're talking about.
Furthermore, you are not considering the economics of it very thoroughly. Flying from LA to SF currently takes 3+ hours. You drive to the airport, go through security, board the plane, deal with occasional delays, and then when you get to your destination you have to wait for luggage. On top of this, it costs around $100.
Consider an alternative involving Hyperloop. Even if you live within 30 minute driving distance of it, you would still get to SF in a little over an hour and for only $20.
Good article, until I realized he was setting-up to make an argument for software and hardware engineers unionizing. I did enjoy the first part though.
To be clear, I am not one to say that unions are not necessary. I think they most definitely are in a number of industries. I am also not saying that union membership is evil in any way. A good deal of union workers are nice hard working people who are only after stability and a decent wage in their lives. Nothing wrong with that.
The problem is that our unions have become monsters that have gobbled-up massive amounts of resources to the point of bankrupting companies and cities and making every US taxpayer liable for the benefits they have extracted. Union leadership AND the industry or government representatives they sit down to negotiate with are the evil in the system.
And, yet again, I am not sure I can even place the blame on union representatives. What's their job? To extract as many benefits as possible from the employers to the benefit of the membership. They do, and have done, that very well.
So maybe it is a case of a set of systems that have taken an optimization almost to the highest possible level and, as a result, caused a paradox of sorts: At the limit, making things better for members ends-up making things worst because they can cause irreparable damage not just to the company or entity they work for but the the entire "ecosystem" (the town, city or country) that supports them.
In other words, the optimization kills the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Unions need to learn to be better citizens and to truly understand and partner with businesses. Then, and only then, everyone wins.
> Unions need to learn to be better citizens and to truly understand and partner with businesses. Then, and only then, everyone wins.
There's two sides to this coin. Businesses don't have a very good track record of treating their employees well without some outside influence like government or unions.
By the way, this comment here reads very differently from and much more reasonably than your "the goal of union leadership is to extract as much as they can out of the businesses they infect, even if this means their demise" rhetoric in the first comment.
> By the way, this comment here reads very differently from and much more reasonably than your
Yes, it does. I have no love for unions as they stand today. Tis comes both from personal experience at several levels. I was in a union for a few years and saw the innards of the beast first hand. I saw that the rules they put into place allowed lazy, incompetent and almost useless people earn a wage they did not deserve by any possible measure. I saw management poweless when dealing with such employees, wanting to fire them to hire a worthy replacement and not being able to.
Later in life as I launched into entrepreneurship I dealt with the other side of unions. I got to see just how efficiency, productivity and profit-sapping their rules are. I got to see the dehumanizing and almost surreal culture it develops. Example:
Javitz Convention Center, New York. Asked a union guy to hand me a cord so I could, in turn, hand it to the union electrician working on my booth. The guy refused, "not in my union contract" and walked off. The union electrician told me the I could not handle the powe cord. You know, an extension you buy at Home Depot for $30, nothing special. He had to get down from his ladder to get the extension. He also went out of his way to do it as slowly as he could.
I also saw an entire union crew drop everything amd leave this guy hanging and in fear for his exhibit when he dared to plug a cord into the electrical system in his booth. He was a newbie to unionized US trade shiow crews. They were teaching him a lesson, showing him who the alpha dog was. I had a talk with the poor fellow and shared some of my insight. Several hours later they returned, he apologized and they went to work.
I have never experienced anything even remotely similar to this in Europe in over ten years of doing business with their unions in various countries. If anything they've always gone out of their way to help and get the job done quickly and efficiently. In other words, by American standards you would not have guessed that these European workers were unionized.
So, yes, I do think that our unions, as currently realized and run have been damaging our businesses, towns, cities, schools and the entire country for decades. That does not mean I am proposing they be dissolved or that they have no place in our society, not at all.
Part of the problem is that by European standards, unions in the US have been treated as pariahs for a century or more, and been fought relentlessly, whereas in Europe, parties supported by unions have been in power for lengthy periods in lots of countries.
US unions won tremendous concessions early on, at horrible costs to their members (a lot of blood was shed) - they were instrumental in laying the ground work for the 8 hour working day (and most of the world celebrate May Day in their honour, and in commemoration of the Haymarket Massacre), but unlike Europe where the workers movement continue to grow in influence and eventually effectively won a place at the table supported by governments friendly to their causes that forced business to learn to work with unions in a completely different way, the antagonism just kept escalating in the US.
If you treat people like shit long enough, they'll do their best to live up to the image you portray of them.
Note that the UK's new high speed rail (HS2) is budgeted at £33bn ($51bn) and likely to exceed that[0]. Being mostly straight, and across land already approved for rail use, it seems like an ideal candidate for a hyperloop alternative.
At 120 miles long[1] compared to the SF<->LA ~350 miles, a UK hyperloop would be even cheaper, especially since the major cost is the tube itself. A back of the envelope calculation[2] gives a cost of about £1.9bn ($2.9bn) which is suspiciously, almost absurdly, cheap.
If anyone can find any flaws in this argument (specifically related to e.g. UK-specific issues/laws that I may be unaware of) I'd be very interested to hear them!
The two biggest budgeted costs in the latest report I can find (£16B) are stations (£1.7B) and tunnels (£1.4B). (Also noteworthy is that almost £10B of the overall £16B figure is for risk provision.) More directly comparable is the £1B figure for land acquisition: that isn't going to fall by much.
A wonderful proposal and inspiring: I think the air bearing, partially evacuated tube and axial flow compressor powered by onboard battery are an innovative combination worth exploring, and I am sure with the correct leadership and political will could produce a really useful enhancement of transport infrastruture. However on reading many of the comments bemoaning current state of construction in the US, as well as unions and vested interests; had to provide this quote of Machiavelli's:
It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.
To me those sentences don't really fit together. 57 pages is a lot so let's hope it actually is not mostly fluff. I won't read that so I would be much happier with a 100 word tldr.
I'm impressed, but I'm afraid Hyperloop's operation is modeled after airplanes, while the actual use of the system would be closer to a city bus.
>All capsules would have direct radio contact with station operators in case of emergencies, allowing passengers to report any incident, to request help and
to receive assistance. In addition, all capsules would be fitted with first aid equipment
>Typical times between an emergency and access to a physician should be shorter than if an incident happened during airplane takeoff. In the case of the airplane, the route would need to be adjusted, other planes rerouted, runways cleared, airplane landed, taxi to a gate, and doors opened. An emergency in a Hyperloop capsule simply requires the system to complete the planned journey and meet emergency personnel at the destination.
What happens if a brawl erupts inside a capsule? What happens if a suicide bomber boards the Hyperloop?
What happens if a brawl erupts inside a moving bus or taxi?
What happens if a suicide bomber boards a train or bus?
What happens if a suicide bomber rents a car and crashes it into you as you walk along the sidewalk?
Rather than living in perpetual fear, you could try making the world a place where people who can't get food or work aren't trying to blow you up as a last resort?
Americans seem to be the most worried about suicide bombings out of anybody else, yet America has probably seen the least suicide bombings per capita of any country in the world. (yes, exaggeration)
I'm an advocate for not living in perpetual fear too, but I couldn't find specifics of how unexpected passenger behavior would be handled. Assuming it's as cheap and easy to operate as it seems, I really want the Hyperloop to succeed and be installed in as many metro areas as possible, but for the Hyperloop to succeed, it has to be resilient and not overly optimistic, and not assume everyone onboard will sit and stay still for the whole trip.
Humans don't always behave as they're expected to by the engineers of a system. That happens in software, happens in hardware, and in public transportation too.
[EDIT]
I think these paragraphs give an idea of how an incident would be handled:
>If a capsule were somehow to become stranded, capsules ahead would continue their journeys to the destination unaffected. Capsules behind the stranded one would be automatically instructed to deploy their emergency mechanical braking systems. Once all capsules behind the stranded capsule had been safely brought to rest, capsules would drive themselves to safety using small onboard electric motors to power deployed wheels.
>All capsules would be equipped with a reserve air supply great enough to ensure the safety of all passengers for a worst case scenario event.
>In the event of a large scale leak, pressure sensors located along the tube would automatically communicate with all capsules to deploy their emergency mechanical braking systems.
>Hyperloop would feature the same high level of security used at airports. However, the regular departure of Hyperloop capsules would result in a steadier and faster flow of passengers through security screening compared to
airports. Tubes located on pylons would limit access to the critical elements of the system. Multiple redundant power sources and vacuum pumps would limit the impact of any single element.
Americans seem to be the most worried about suicide bombings out of anybody else, yet America has probably seen the least suicide bombings per capita of any country in the world.
Not that I approve of many of the things we do to "prevent" them, but...
Perhaps worrying about preventing certain things sometimes actually helps reduce them?
I'd agree in some cases, but realistically there isn't much you can do against people using bombs to blow up bridges - or in this case, hyperloop pylons. It's just not something that you can 'design around'. Designing the pylons to survive if one is blown up? If someone can put a bomb on one pylon, he can put 5 bombs on 5 pylons. Or under 5 cars.
Spending your time trying to prevent that kind of thing is futile and an enormous waste of resources. See: TSA
Regarding suicide bombers: all pods are equipped with emergency brakes, and wheels as a (slow) backup transportation method. Life support on each pod is powered by redundant batteries. Capsule depressurization can be dealt with airplane-style, with oxygen masks, or by doing an emergency repressurization of the whole tube.
>In the event of a large scale leak, pressure sensors located along the tube
would automatically communicate with all capsules to deploy their emergency
mechanical braking systems.
Exactly. Best case, you'll kill 28 people. The other capsules will stop, and the hyperloop will be out of commission for awhile. Definitely not spectacular. They'd be better off attacking a more densely populated area. Much more hysteria...
... could CHSRA just build this? I understand they're in the planning stages, and I don't think it'd be absurd to say "this is a train, just better and cheaper".
Edited to add: My question was primarily legal - if someone were to step up and demonstrate this was feasible could it possibly make a difference?
> I understand they're in the planning stages, and I don't think it'd be absurd to say "this is a train, just better and cheaper".
This is a hypothetical concept, while HSR is a widely demonstrated, well-established technology, with real vendors with proven situations. There's a lot of civil engineering to go into building the infrastructure, but the technology is there (and isn't still looking forward to "[s]ub-scale testing based on a further optimized design to demonstrate the physics", as is the case with hyperloop.)
Hyperloop as an alternative to HSR is about in the same situation as nuclear fusion as an alternative to wind (or nuclear fission) power. .
New laws would have to be enacted to amend some of the requirements of the funding sources. Both federal and state. Potentially another ballot measure as well.
But frankly if the project polled well enough, you might be able to make it a reality.
"The Hyperloop is sized to allow expansion as the network becomes increasingly
popular. The capacity would be 840 passengers per hour which
more than
sufficient to transport all of the 6 million passengers traveling between Los
Angeles and San Francisco are
as per year. In addition, this accounts for 70% of
those travelers to use the Hyperloop during rush hour.
The lower cost of
traveling on Hyperloop is likely to result in increased demand, in which case
the time between capsule departures could be significa
ntly shortened."
... and the Tokaido shinkansen carries 1300+ passengers per train, with up to about 15 trains per hour at peak times, so about 20,000 passengers / hour (per direction).
At ~850 passengers / hour, Hyperloop seems like it's operating in another realm entirely....
Ironically, at Musk's "projected" low ticket prices (which granted probably aren't anywhere near realistic) and short travel times, one would expect a huge demand for hyperloop, so its relatively low capacity seems like a serious issue...
The Tokaido shinkansen serves commuters in a very dense area. Also, Tokyo to Nagoya will run you a hundred bucks last time I rode.
Why would anyone want to live in LA and commute to SF, or vice versa? Even if ticket prices are low, property prices on both sides are very high. It would make much more sense to build a hyperloop to nowhere economically, and turn that area into a bedroom community.
People do commute on the Tokaido shinkansen, but that is not the majority of its ridership. The numbers I've seen give about 10% of Tokaido shinkansen ridership as being due to commuter passes (and anybody who doesn't use a pass for that would be completely insane), measured by "trips"; if measuring by "passenger-km", of course, the proportion due to commuters is much much lower, about 2%, because commuters tend to travel much shorter distances.
The bulk of the riders are business people going back and forth for meetings etc, and ordinary people going on holidays and the like. The most insane peak periods are around national holidays, especially long ones like golden-week where the trains are often running at significantly over 100% capacity (I've stood the entire way between Tokyo and Osaka, crammed up against others in the car vestibule...).
You're right that the shinkansen prices are significantly higher, but if anything that demonstrates how great the demand would be for a really cheap service (as Musk seems to be claiming, however dubious that claim may be), and thus how limiting the low projected capacity would be...
I still don't think SF/LA are as interconnected economically as Tokyo/Osaka/Nagoya are. You have a lot of manufacturing in that area of Japan, while the big population areas of California are much more separated and specialized. One could live their entire life and career in the Bay Area without any reason to ever visit LA, and the other way around.
From the report: "...with capsules departing as often as every 30 seconds from each terminal and carrying 28 people each. This gives a total of 7.4 million people each way that can be transported each year on Hyperloop."
Ehh, really you don't just speed up the lift you redesign the whole loading and unloading system to allow it to load and unload more people per second. You see this in actual high speed lifts.
Except that the chairs on a high speed lift have to be so much further apart, so you're not actually getting more people to the top in the same unit of time.
Source: I'm an Engineer and worked on fixed grip (slow) and detachable (fast) chairs and gondolas for 5 seasons.
"We have a circulating system with a fixed population..." Not quite the same since people getting off the hyperloop won't be turning around to get on it again.
That seems like a pretty optimistic estimate, but I suppose its a guessing game for such a hypothetical system anyways. Also, for comparison BART ridership tops up at over 100 million a year[1], and 6 million fly between LA and SanFran annually[2].
This is not going to happen. It is a very rich, successful engineer musing at what might be possible if we thought radically different about transportation. I'm as big a fan of Elon Musk's projects as anyone, but the weight assigned to these napkin calculations is ridiculous.
[Edit: If anything, this might lead people to take this type of eccentric and radical design more seriously. But given the criticism Musk's engineering ventures have had before, I wouldn't count on it.]
I hope this happens. I've only started reading the .pdf and cannot claim I will understand everything but it seems like a very promising read.
If Musk can partner with Richard Branson and other billionaires (along with contributions from people on the web) it could happen!
I wouldn't read into that. Musk has said he has no intention of developing it; he probably just needed a place to put it. SpaceX makes as much sense as anything else.
That being said -- hopefully he lied when he said he had no interest, in order to quell speculation until the announcement. Kind of like how Apple says they'll never ever launch certain things... right up until they do it.
"Feedback would be most welcome
–
please send to
hyper
[email protected]
or
[email protected]
. I would like to thank
my excellent compadres at both companies for their help in putting this
together."
Probably because SpaceX has more autonomy since it doesn't need to meet the expectations of shareholders -- the same reason Musk isn't planning on an IPO with SpaceX for a really really long time.
I think the SpaceX IPO is planned for about 5-10 years from now - that's not too long. The only indication we have is that MCT will be making regular trips to Mars before SpaceX IPOs, and they seem pretty set on that happening in the next decade.
I like the idea of transporting cars with passengers or just cars/SUVs. That would be ideal. Travel from point a to point b like a ferry. Or extension of our current super highway network. Use your personal transport machine after arrival. In most of the USA when traveling outside the dense urban areas driving a automobile is the preferred form of transportation. It would make the world a smaller place much like how cars and paved roads did 100 years ago. If we could hyper transport our vehicles at large chunks of distances say 300+ mile integers. I could only imagine this future.
Freight shipping would greatly benefit. Build a freight tube only across the US mainland. Amazon Prime? Same day delivery.
It's actually really stupid. Car sharing models mean you'll have a car waiting for you at the destination. There's no reason to bring your own steel and rubber.
What is Car sharing models ? It's simple and could be the best use of this technology. Make all the US superhighways major and key corridor stretches hyperloop. Enabling you as a driver to get around the country faster saving energy and time.
Aside from the whole "will they actually build it" debate, I'm worried that if they do, the capsule ceiling won't be high enough for someone fairly tall (let's say 6'5'' or taller) to sit in comfortably. I'd assume the height of the capsule will have some effect on the drag involved, as well as the necessary size of the tube, so it makes sense to make it as short as possible.
Musk himself stands just below 6', so he may not naturally think of us taller folk. I'd hate to have to slouch for the trip, even if it is only projected to be 35 minutes.
edit: dear tall people who have ridden in one of Tesla's cars: how's the headroom in a Model S?
Originally I thought it was going to be inside a transparent tube that you could see out of - one of the only downsides to this is that you are inside a steel tube with no view. Technically not important, but may be important for some passengers.
OK, so he says it's much cheaper than high-speed rail mostly because pylons require taking much less land through eminent ___domain. Can anyone explain to me then why high speed rail can't be built on pylons?
Train cars must be connected to each other because of how trains work, whereas the Hyperloop pods are separate from each other. I haven't yet seen anyone actually crunch the numbers on the proposed weights for the Hyperloop (which are in the PDF) vs existing light rail solutions. You certainly can put a light rail up on pylons, it just might be a lot easier/cheaper to do so with the Hyperloop. I do think he's playing up the benefits of using pylons too much, since the real benefit here is the 35 minute travel time and affordable ticket cost.
Probably regulations. They have to maintain integrity in collisions. I don't know if they have to take into account having very heavy freight trains on the same tracks as well.
Train regulations are retarded in the US and haven't been reformed for over 50 years. Basically if you plan on having a crossing or sharing track with a freight train you automatically are stuck with the FRA regulations which apply to freight trains and are also pointless. Those regulations require absurd rigidity of rolling stock to the point that train-sets built for those specifications actually are more expensive to maintain, fail more often simply (rolling stock becomes too heavy), and are much more unsafe.
For example FRA requires train rolling stock to withstand 800,000lbs of force on impact without permanent damage. The European requirement on the other hand is less than half of that. The European requirements instead aim for adding "crumple zones" to the cars to absorb energy and protect occupants similar to how automobiles use crumple zones.
This is why there's an obsession in the USA regarding light-rail. Light-rail sidesteps the FRA regulations by creating a separate track and rolling stock that doesn't have crossing with heavy rail.
I believe if we simply reformed FRA regulations we could probably cut all rail development by a sizable chunk as we would be able to buy rolling stock as-is from European and Asian suppliers.
But anyway, back to the point being discussed. A sizable chunk of China's HSR network was built elevated so it is certainly feasible to put today's HSR tech on pylons. But just because you elevate something doesn't magically get you away from Environmental Reviews which I think is another area where a majority of the cost in public works project lies.
Environmental reviews will still be required for Hyperloop. Since it is actually a new system, I would expect it to get even more scrutiny in the public eye because it will sound even more magical and also offend even more people since there won't be any intermediate stops. Remember that much of the California HSR political issues are because central valley cities and towns want an HSR station in their town (of course they don't want to fund the station). So many of these towns basically come to the table and say "we'll give you the land if you give us a station, otherwise we won't help you." The Hyperloop concept basically ignores this argument.
Keep in mind that despite environmental reviews having the word "environment" in them, they are actually also public hearings where the public can voice their opinions which can include things like additional noise and traffic. For example if your project blocks out the beach view of a home-owner's house overlooking the ocean, you can sure bet that they'll be at the environmental review and give you an earful about how you can't build your tube/track/freeway/skyscraper/windmill there. Yes that's a bit of hyperbole but that's basically how the environmental review phase is abused.
Because of that, I've come to the conclusion that we won't have any significant improvement in infrastructure in this country until CEQA/NEPA are reformed to allow not just public entities to build infrastructure, but also private entities as well.
Sorry, but I do not believe this will be cheaper than conventional rail. This is essentially a vacuum tunnel. Ok it is not a perfect vacuum but it is still supposed to keep 1/1000th of the earth's pressure.* Keeping such a vacuum over several hundred miles of metal tubing would be very very expensive.
This may work but it will be several times more expensive than the HSR system.
* Oh and by the way, it is completely misleading and annoying for musk to refer to this as merely 1/6th of Mars's pressure. That would be a really relevant statistic if he was building his thing on mars.
Just finished reading the pdf and now I understand why this is by far the most popular HN post for a long time (ever?). I now post my feeble comment to be lost in a sea of enamored nerd buzz.
It's an exciting approach to high-speed land travel at a proposed cost of far far less than the California coastal rail's $70 billion minimum price point.
From a telecommunications stand point, we were just starting to get handovers to work on high speed rail, now we have to get it to work on super sonic transport? come on now :D
I'm really curious about turns and switches. The latter more about loading and unloading. If you have a platform to carry 300 people / hr to or from the other city how do you load them and keep them organized.
The failure scenarios are interesting too. Lets say a tube breaks, if the linear motors are spaced out, how do they brake? Turn off the air lift? Does that then destroy the tube they are in? What is the emergency exit like?
God damn it, Elon! It looks amazing but the logistics are just not adding up! 2-minute departure time scales? Good luck getting the future Hyperloop TSA to do that.
But, the numbers don't quite crunch for this to be a legitimate business (unless we are talking no returns for 25 years charging customers an average of 1500-3000 dollars per ride .. but the demand is not there for those prices).
Idea is awesome .. yes! Viable ... yes, yes!! A business ... idk. :(
Does anybody else wonder how easily the rotor will slot into the stator at 700 MPH? It looks like pretty small tolerances. Maybe guide rails leading up to it?
I'll believe anything now I've seen the videos documenting the Talgo variable-gauge system. Also, the tolerances in terms of distance from track of the Transrapid maglev are pretty good. I wouldn't be surprised if you can fly an air-cushioned vehicle with similar precision.
If he's going to build it over farmland, whether he uses solar panels or not is irrelevant to the farm. The land would be rented/bought/imminent domained just like normal rail would.
He makes the point that he doesn't need to block 100 feet from each side of the track, as well as put barriers in place to prevent animal crossing and blocking farmers from getting to the other side of the farm, in the same way power lines today use space. That means he would need some non-farmable area around the track, yes, but that it wouldn't disrupt the farm like a normal HSR track would.
I've driven from LA to SF and back along I-5 a few times, I recall lots of cattle farms, I don't recall ass much agriculture (though their definitely was some).
At the same time, the aquaduct runs along I-5 for a considerable length. I think building along the aquaduct would make a lot of sense. I'm assuming that land is already owned by the gov't, and is already somewhat protected along it's length.
I couldn't find the aquaduct on google maps, but I do see lots of "brown" land, so I guess it's not as heavily farmed as I thought. Not enough water presumably?
The tube will hew closely to existing highway I-5 eliminating most right-of-way issues (since the state controls the land already.
Also B-Y is currently very low density and paying someone $X,XXX/yr for this nearly silent tube to pass through their field is not exactly a hard-sell.
Then imagine all the people from B to Y who see an opportunity to screw the project for huge amounts of cash. Decades of lawyers arguing in court over every conceivable point, or opportunity.
And that before environmental, and god know what else, groups get involved.
> The high speed rail wasn't going to stop at B through Y anyway
Untrue [1].
[1] http://www.hsr.ca.gov/docs/newsroom/fact%20sheets/High-Speed... - all but the "Northern California Unified Service" and "Amtrak Surfliner" runs are planned HSR lines/stations, and all (including those) are getting upgrades/improvements or new rail/connections as part of the HSR project.
Fair question. I would build 3 tubes instead of 2. That would help with repairs as well as with handling asymmetry in demand (for example, if more people want SFO->LA in mornings and LA->SFO in evenings)
I was thinking the same thing. Eat the up-front build costs, but assure yourself a persistently-functional loop. Probably the type of thing best determined as part of the review-process, and not listed a requirement in the technical draft.
I'm curious how well this thing can "maintain distance between the capsule and tube walls". It seems like this is a much tougher problem than simply levitating the whole thing off the ground where the forces are relatively stationary. It also doesn't look like any of the artist renderings address this, and only consider the airflow lifting the thing off the ground.
Why not go ahead and build the Hyperloop, and when CA HSR gets around to actually building the links into downtown LA and SF, design them to connect up to the Hyperloop, which will surely be complete and running by the time HSR is projected to be available. The Hyperloop can even share some rights of way with HSR. Why not have both?
Hyperloop should be an AND proposition to HSR, not an either/or.
I don't know where he got his stats, but the energy per passenger for a train cannot be right. CSX advertises daily they can move a ton of freight 400 miles for a dollar. A person weighs much less than a ton. Granted there are additional expenses to make a human comfortable, but these are relatively low fixed costs --you know like a chair.
I thought it was just a few days ago that elon musk said that he "wished he had never mentioned the hyperloop as he doesn't have enough time to work on it" [sic].
When I heard the news about this announcement on the radio today, I thought that my local news station was just a week behind the times as usual. Apparently they were not?
Just FYI, [sic] is used when you're quoting something with a mistake and you wish to indicate that mistake is in the source document, and not added unintentionally.
430 km/h (Aerotrain) vs 1200 km/h (Hyperloop) is a big deal. That is possible with the tube design. Aerotrain operated on the "free air" and that was the reason to lose the competition with TGV.
man, the air cushion behavior at 1200 km/h (speed of sound at normal pressure, and 1.2 Mach at the proposed decreased pressure in the tube) would be a subject of a lot of PhD works. Or in other words - it will be hell of an engineering (stability of the cushion and parasitic oscillations come to mind - that is with respect to compressor created cushion, and in addition to the compressor created air cushion the cushion's airfoil will be riding its own shock wave between tube surface and the airfoil in front of the cushion's high pressure volume) to make supersonic ground effect from concept into product.
I'll go out on a limb here and wager that SpaceX engineers know the Mach value for various permutations of temperature and air density. But I might be wrong...
The problem is that atmospheric Mach numbers don't follow from first principles, and the Wolfram Alpha values emanate from an empirically derived approximation. An analytical relationship between the speed of sound and air pressure arising from first principles would require a solution to the Navier-Stokes equations, for which solution a million dollar prize lies unclaimed:
Quote: "The Navier–Stokes equations are also of great interest in a purely mathematical sense. Somewhat surprisingly, given their wide range of practical uses, mathematicians have not yet proven that, in three dimensions, solutions always exist (existence), or that if they do exist, then they do not contain any singularity (smoothness). These are called the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problems. The Clay Mathematics Institute has called this one of the seven most important open problems in mathematics and has offered a US$1,000,000 prize for a solution or a counter-example."
> There's still a chance that Wolfram Alpha is incorrect ...
At the moment there is no "correct". It's all based on field observations, numerical modeling, and estimation.
Just the simple fact that the Aerotrain was on a track and not in a tube makes all the difference in the world. And I don't get this "look someone proposed something similar before" thing (everything from vacuum tubes to maglev to this thing). These previous inventors failed to get their ideas realised. Now a visionary has his own tweak on things and should have a good shot. Rejoice!
I honestly expected better work. I feel like this is something everyday users on Reddit or HN could have put together in a report. I only gave it a look because Elon Musk's name is on it. That says something sad about me when it comes to the Big Imagination projects :-/
Part of what has made Musk so special is that he gets things done. As they say, ideas are a dime a dozen - what matters is execution and Musk has proven time and again that he can nail execution.
It's the same reason that pg & YC say that they really care about the founding team and frequently encourage the founders to pivot far away from their original ideas.
I feel like this is something everyday users on Reddit or HN could have put together in a report.
I'm not so sure. When Hyperloop was unknown, HN spent far too much time enthusing about obviously nonsense guesses about what Hyperloop might turn out to be. Let's not get too conceited about HN's abilities.
"In addition, safety emergency exits and pressurization will be added in key locations.."
How could anyone predict what 'key' locations an emergency is going to happen at?
And how would eviction happen, given the tube's low pressure?
> Hyperloop is considered an open source transportation concept.
I'm glad they didn't just let the idea die on a drawing board somewhere because of a lack of time/money. Now, someone has to just develop it faster than someone else can legislate against it.
It would be more interesting to see a company with the technical (and probably political) chops to pick it up. GE comes to mind because they have the industrial and scale out know how in multiple system areas needed for hyperloop. But maybe it would interfere to much with their air and train businesses. Then again, if you established yourself as being able to build all components of a hyperloop system, I imagine that could be a long lucrative business market...
The question for GE and other similar industry companies which have build-in capability to construct this is if they can lift themselves out of the comfort their existing markets.
Given the sort of heavy infrastructure required and their related permits, I'd assume that whoever actually starts an effort to build a HL-like system, will have local politicians on board.
I would dedicate 6-10 years getting something like this off the ground. Unfortunately I don't think anyone without the political and financial connections could pull this off. Musk could probably do it because of Musk Mania. But few others.
I wonder if that $70 billion price tag is partly tied to the "I created x many jobs in my time as a politician" rhetoric. I'm just assuming high cost means a higher number of people being paid.
It's nice that it doesn't have drivers. As someone who visits the SF area a lot, the BART drivers strike way too much and have to be replaced by automated trains. So this is a nice step forward.
Although Musk has said this idea stems from his frustrations in traveling through California, I wonder if he's contemplating something similar for transportation on Mars?
Let the tech workers test it out on their SF-Silicon Valley commutes first. Maybe Elon's musk will help convince all the millionaire tech NIMBYs that own the peninsula.
I was thinking that a well-timed explosive charge on a support pylon would make for a nice mess, but I suppose it's not any easier to secure a conventional railway.
The distance between the pylons is small enough that adjacent pylons may be redundant. It's also a massive steel tube which would be pretty strong in itself compared to rails (or roads).
I think it's interesting to devote so much space in the introduction to hypothetical supersonic air travel. Might this be what Musk actually intends to do next?
In an interview last we he stated that his next company would be vertical take off supersonic electric jet, if he decided to start another company. He said he's not likely to start another company any time soon.
What is the feasibility to construct one within a metropolitan area, like Greater Boston, Bay area etc. Example: One between South bay and SF in the Bay area?
My dad has worked on at least one proposal for linear rail in California in the past. Emailed him the whitepaper for comments. Delivery not guaranteed :)
the real future of space is Hyperloop v2.0 - 20 miles long or something like it, pointed at the end toward the sky with final exit speed of let's say 10 Mach (and this also will help to reach Hong Kong from SF in 1-2 hours)
Whatever you were launching would have to move through normal air, not the minimal pressure you have in the Hyperloop tube. It is hard to pass an airlock at supersonic velocities...
The page contains a full description of the Hyperloop and a link to a PDF with technical details.
You're linking to your own HN story, which has fewer comments, and fewer details in the actual story. (Also, why not link directly to the _actual_ news story @ Businessweek as you mention?)
By the time I've posted both the Businessweek link and the comment the SpaceX.com page was a mere placeholder. A few minutes later their site cache cleared.
Context is everything. ;)
In any case, I've deleted the comment you were referring as it's not relevant anymore.
Lets be honest, the difference between 700mph and 80mph head across the median on is negligible. Either way you are almost certainly dead or crippled. Past a certain speed the only real difference is how large of an area your body is spread out over; dead is dead.
of course, once it hits you it doesn't make much difference. However, the faster and/or more massive an object is, the bigger is the radius of damage that it can do, hence the more likely is for you to be affected by it.
For example, a sufficiently fast and massive object can derail and hit a large building killing many, while a 80Mph SUV hitting a building wall will still, most likely, not be able to bring down the whole building.
As a professional mechanical engineer I have worked on high quality steel tubes (nuclear submarines) before. The immediate thing that sticks out to me in this proposal are the tight mechanical tolerances that have to be maintained. Talking about tens of thousandths of an inch tolerances on a 10' diameter tube is not to be dismissed lightly. That is going to be tough to maintain - especially with welding heat distortion. I would image the tubes will be joined with automated friction stir welding or something similiar, but that will still require a fair amount of post weld machining which has its own pitfalls. Not to mention simple thermal expansion and contraction as the temperature changes could change the circularity and inner diameter.
I would be more interested to see a tolerance stack up of those considerations than an FEA model of the concrete pylons. I can gaurentee that we can build concrete pylons capable of holding up a steel tube, that is done all over the country dozens of different uses cases. But can we build a multi-hundred mile long steel tube to the required tolerances?
I would be inclined to trade off efficiency for manufacturability. I.e. maybe a higher internal pressure or larger diameter to make it less sensitive. There should be plenty of power from the solar panels so it doesn't have to be perfectly efficient.
I'm also surprised that the I-5 plan is cheaper than buying private land. I may be naive here, but the pylons really do take away most of the objections from farmers and installing tubes over farmland has to be a lot cheaper than doing construction above a highway. I just look at boondoggle that was the SkyTrain in NYC (tram running over a highway out to JFK airport) and wonder if that is a great option.