- The Hyperloop paper doesn't mention how trains would cross San Francisco Bay, or include a cost estimate for doing so. A new bridge? A new tunnel? Both would add greatly to the $6 billion cost estimate.
- That $6 billion estimate also assumes that elevated concrete pylons can be built for much cheaper than any other project, with no mention of how.
- The proposed track doesn't go to downtown LA; it ends at Sylmar, which is still ~25 miles from downtown and even further from most of the LA area. A 30 minute ride becomes much less exciting when it takes another hour or more to reach your real destination.
- With the proposed 30-second headway, the system's capacity is only about 25% of a high-speed rail line, and 30 seconds still violates the crap out of typical safety standards (you can't run trains too close together without risking a collision if you can't brake quickly enough).
- There are no intermediate stations; this is obviously a problem for the Central Valley, but it makes life inconvenient for plenty of other people too. Eg. someone in San Jose (pop. ~1 million, greater than SF's) would need to spend an extra hour or more getting to San Francisco vs. a station in San Jose itself.
Actually the paper answers the question of how it would cross the bay--it wouldn't. The proposed "San Francisco" terminus is in the East Bay (IIRC, pretty far east, as well). A significant part of the cost savings of the route proposed as an alternative to the HSR route cones from, unlike HSR, not actually going anywhere near the urban centers on either the SF or LA end.
Elon Musk seems to have a particular version of a progressive vision of the future that accomplishes environmental sustainability without requiring people to make any real lifestyle changes. After all, his solution to the environmental unfriendliness of cars is more environmentally friendly cars (Tesla), not other modes of transport that are more efficient per passenger.
So, the cynical take: of course he's going to back a high-speed transportation option that still assumes cars and driving everywhere, rather than one that potentially obviates the need for them by taking people directly from high-density center to high-density center.
Hayward, I think. This is an interesting definition of "reality", and hyperloop is a deeply unserious Elon Musk Gedankenexperiment that's only given column inches because of the deeply unserious nature of what passes for journalism among the lickspittle shoeshine boys of Silicon Valley wannabes.
Well, its probably not surprising that a startup ecosystem that is all about selling longshots attracts around is peripheries, journalistic and otherwise, people who are prone to accept longshots as much more probable than they are.
I'm not sure how 'an extra hour' is critical when driving takes many hours. Its still an order of magnitude faster, right? It takes 'an extra hour' at the airline terminal and I put up with that for every flight.
Well, as a European, that's actually interesting to compare it to high speed train. Outside the US, high speed train is not only something we can do, it is something already done.
I am curious to see whether the net benefits have been positive. My understanding even in Europe most of the links are unprofitable. Sure, there are positive externalities that may not be factored into the accounting profits, but there is also opportunity cost of the money. Are there good studies on this ?
Note that the Northeast Corridor, the only thing approaching high speed rail in the US, is very profitable. Unfortunately Amtrak then has to take that surplus to subsidize unprofitable routes elsewhere.
I know that in France the high speed lines connecting areas with high population density like Paris-Marseille or Paris-Lyon are among the most profitable for the SCNF.
But of course that's a complex issue, some say that the local service degraded as more resources were diverted to the TGV lines. I can't really imagine that having the center of Marseille 3 hours away from the center of Paris can be a net negative overall. It beats the plane every time, that's for sure.
It takes half an hour from Marseille to its airport. Another hour because you have to be early for check-in and 'security' procedures. Yet more 30 minutes in Paris to get back to the city center (no matter at which airport you land).
The high speed train stops right in the city center.
So unless one of your endpoints is close to one of the airports it's 3 hours for both of them.
The airport is not in either city centers, there are more security checks, you have to check your luggage in etc... The door-to-door travel time is significantly more than 1hour for the plane.
Also in my experience the TGV is much more comfortable than similarly priced airplane tickets. You can look at the landscape (unless you're traveling by night), you have more room, you can walk around etc...
I've got nothing to back this up, but every high speed train project I've heard of in the US - which is admittedly like 2 or maybe 3 - has failed due to budget mismanagement, politics or both. Do we have any meaningful HSR in this country?
This is IMO the biggest issue w/ Hyperloop - budget and/or politics will kill it well before engineering challenges.
We have the Acela which isn't quite high speed rail (it is higher speed rail - up to 150mph in some areas but a lower speed limits in others). The Acela is very popular and actually profitable. The Acela has the potential to improve speeds by improving tracks to be able to accommodate higher speeds safely in places as well as removing the remaining grade crossings and probably more infrastructure to ease some congestion. High speed rail has huge potential in some areas. Hopefully this potential can be realized!
The FRA puts out a lot of stupid safety regulations that don't apply in Europe and which make high speed rail much more difficult. US trains have to be built like tanks in the theory that this will help them survive collisions with freight trains. The fast accelerating French trains can't be used on US rail without special permits.
And for various reasons rail construction in the US costs about 5 times as much as it does in France. And because it costs more we do less of it. The figures below are for subways but I believe long distance rail sees the same effect.
The fastest train time I can find between London and Cologne (almost the same distance as Los Angeles to San Francisco) is 4 hours, 11 minutes, about 130 km/hr or 81 miles/hour. Paris to Nuremberg (also a similar distance) is 9 hours, 53 minutes. Berlin to Stuttgart (within the same country) is 6 hours, 9 minutes.
How about Paris to Marseille (775km vs 615km for LA to SF) in 3 hours 15 min, Paris to Bordeaux (584km) to be 2 hours by 2017, or Brussels to Lyon (734km) in 3 hours 43 min?
According to two different air miles calculators I tried, the distance from Paris to Marseille is only about 630 km, so I'm not sure where you're getting 775 (I used air miles for LAX-SFO too).
Paris to Lyon is a similar (slightly shorter) distance and done in 1:53 (average 208 kph). Beijing to Zhengzhou is slightly further and takes 2:24 (average 304 kph). These are best cases running directly along the high-speed line, but presumably the direct LA-SF service will be one of those too.
Edit: the closest comparison distance-wise is probably Barcelona to Madrid; 2:45, average 227kph.
Travel time by train is mostly about how many stops [edit: legs] you need (which add through wait times) and what part of the network you're on:
Brussels/Cologne, which is used on the London/Cologne route was only usable up to 60km/h or so 7 years ago. That part took nearly as long back then as the entire LON/CGN trip does now.
Paris - Stuttgart - Nuremberg (580km) takes 6h51 including one hour between connections in Stuttgart.
Berlin - Stuttgart (591km) has a 5h34 direct connection.
Frankfurt - Bern - Milano (~700km) takes 7h47 including 30 minutes in Bern
OTOH, Frankfurt - Cologne (for which a dedicated high speed rail route was built nearly 20 years ago) is about 200km in 1h04.
> Travel time by train is mostly about how many stops you need (which add through wait times)
The wait times are not the big problem - the problem is the time needed to decelerate and accelerate the train at each stop. E.g. a freight train of 1.200 tons needs 1km from 100 km/h to 0, and a high-speed passenger train, e.g. ICE 3, needs 3.3km from 330 km/h to 0.
Madrid - Barcelona (504.64 air km or 313.5 air miles) in 2:30h, and often just 2:15h (they give a longer time due to a delay over 15min means they've to refund 50% of the ticket.
Looking at the French high speed rail system (which is the one we seem to hear the most about in the United States), the longest link I see is 106 km. Los Angeles to San Francisco is 544 km.
New York to Los Angeles is about 4,000 km. London to Moscow is only 2,500 km.
Edit: the point here is that Europeans, in general, have no conception of the distances involved in the U.S. transportation network. Passenger rail (high speed or otherwise) works well for relatively short distances in relatively densely populated regions. The trouble is that we don't have very many of those regions.
Edit 2: so you're moderating down arithmetic now? Awesome.
I'm moderating down seriously misinformed posting.
I'm not sure what's worse, that you seriously think the longest high speed rail link in France is 106km, or that you think London to Moscow is reasonably compared to New York to Los Angeles. Why would you start from a city that's nowhere near the edge of the continent in question? The NYC->LA analog would be something like Lisbon to Moscow which, guess what! Is almost exactly the same distance.
Where are you looking for these data? The longest link in France is probably Brussels-Montpellier, which is about 850 km. Paris-Nice might be longer than that, though it's very slow after Marseille.
There used to be a slow Quimper-Vintimille journey that was more than 1000 km, but it's been significantly shortened since then.
Your numbers show you have no conception of the distances involved in Europe. Thinking that the longest train link in France, a country that's 1000 km wide and 1000 km high, is 100 km long is completely ridiculous.
Well I'm talking about high speed train lines, I only included Quimper-Vintimille for comparison.
Even if you somehow counted only >300km/h as high-speed, then the LGV Est is a bit more than 300 km long and rated at 320 km/h. I suspect a 100 km-long high-speed line would not even be competitive against cars, except maybe in dense urban areas where car traffic is often slow.
What was said up there was that the longest high-speed rail link in France is 106km long. This is obviously absurd and wrong, which even the most cursory investigation would reveal.
What did I fail to read, exactly? Is it that seszett didn't explicitly specify "high speed" in that one sentence? As I said in my reply, so what? The overall point, that the 106km figure is ridiculous, stands regardless.
Not exactly sure why the downvotes, but I guess maybe it has to do about offtopic comparisons.
Hyperloop is designed for medium distances transportation like between 300 and 1000. Over that, it probably make no sense against air travel.
So Europe is kind of the perfect place for hyperloop, and probably the reason why its traditional tech competitor, the high speed train, is successful. That's also the reason of my comment - if hyperloop can deliver cheaper, faster to build and plain faster connection for medium distance travel that could revolutionize transport in Europe even more than for the US.
EDIT: as another reader has noted, I missed the "106" km link. I suppose you mean 1060 or something ?
Would the Russian Trans-Siberian line compare? Almost 10.000 kilometers in length, takes eight days to complete it (because it's got branches, isn't a high-speed rail, etc). Longest train line is Kiev - Vladivostok at 11.000 kilometers.
I'd say nobody has any conception of distances involved in the really big countries.
Parent post has a good point. "High speed rail" (aka the bullet train) in California is a cruel joke. The current plans have been utterly corrupted by various special interests--for example, the trains being forced to share slow commuter tracks near wealthy Bay Area housing developments. The project--if it ever gets built--will be nothing like the rail networks of Europe, unfortunately.
You are forgetting something which everyone seems to ignore. There are no toilets and other facilities. With high speed rail it's either on board or you can get off on the next stop. With a car you can drive to a gas station etc. An 'extra hour' is a very long time for someone to wait and I would be surprised if anyone would want to be stuck without access to one for that period of time.
>An 'extra hour' is a very long time for someone to wait and I would be surprised if anyone would want to be stuck without access to one for that period of time.
How's that different from most long-way (Greyhound etc) bus rides with lots of hours (3-4) between stops? Don't know about how's that in the US in particular, but had such in most of Europe, Asia etc, and people are perfectly capable of "holding it".
Capsule size. The last I saw the pod designs, passengers are all reclined cockpit seats that aren't going to have a whole lot of elbow-room, let alone any chance to stand. "Holding it" is an option, but it caps trip time at an hour or so. Past that you're going to be hosing down an awful lot of capsules.
Every (non-local) bus I've ever been on (Greyhound, Megabus, BoltBus, smaller local companies, etc... I've been on a lot over the years) has had a bathroom.
Every design I've seen of the hyperloop had people seated with no provision for facilities. I am assuming there are engineering reasons for it otherwise it logically would've been included.
And of course it is different from a bus. If a women is pregnant or violently ill on a bus you can stop at any time. And in fact every Greyhound bus I've been on will stop at various gas stations for toilet/food/drink breaks.
It's worth mentioning because what good is the technology of hyperloop if the economics fail (because no one will use it).
the extra hour would consist of you driving to a terminal. why couldn't you use the toilet at the station? pr perhaps stop at a gas station along the way to/from the terminal?
Agreements secured do not a reality make. It's one of the very first steps, now to be followed by a whole bunch more. It's a misleading headline, and I reject the notion out of hand. Running up the "mission accomplished" poster now is ridiculous. Before it becomes a "reality", there are some much larger hurdles to clear. Once they overrun their budget by 2x, complete their environmental surveys, get each town to sign off on land rights, get their work insured, work out a deal with whatever transit unions there are along the way and open for business for real, then you can call it a "reality".
Everything revolving around Musk seems fishy to me. His Tesla and Solar companies are harvesting government subsidies and he writes a half-baked technical paper on hyperloop and suddenly there is money to spend on this boondoggle too. Something just doesn't add up (like Enron or Worldcom from a few years back) and I suspect that Musk and/or associated companies are (willing or unwilling) fronts for the FED to directly push money into the economy. The problem the FED has is that lowering the interest rates no longer works to boost the economy once you are at zero and they still need/want inflation to recover from the mortgage bust. I'd bet that there are academic papers on how to deal with ZIRP when you need to inflate that advocate such direct funding policies.
Such negative responses. Isn't prototyping and actually just doing it part of innovation? I think it's great that this is being tried, and I hope that if it become a success they will extend the existing track to other cities.
I was super negative when it started because I expected the initial release that they pulled an all-nighter for (according to his Twitter feed) to have been more than just like a sketch of an idea typed in Word.
Now that things are moving forward, my opinion has radically changed. That, and in the meantime his car won the Consumer Report's Best Buy, SpaceX darn near landed a rocket vertically in the ocean, and ground has been broken on their spaceport.
From Elon's tweets it certainly looked like all they had was that small document, which was less in content than most white papers that are often released.
Yeah. And looking back over it now, the document is a lot longer than I remember. I think this is what biased me: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/366964441159438337?lang=...
I remember then seeing the doc after that Tweet and thinking "You and others worked all night on that?" It reminds me of that interview with Jerry Seinfeld where he mentions the worst thing you can do is introduce a comic as "The funniest guy in the world" because it biases the audience right before you come out on stage.
This is what I keep thinking. I'm excited about the tech that will be developed to make it work!
I live in Texas. I can't give a flying tube torpedo about whether CA gets a fancy speedy train thing. But I would love to have some very large-scale vacuum tube tech developed that can safely launch people. There's all kinds of great innovation that will come out of it.
exactly. Why is everyone so negative? Sure, it hasn't been fully worked out yet. So, isn't still fantastic that we have yet another potential alternative ?
Reading the McCullough biography of the Wright Brothers, I found myself wondering "what if they had read the Hacker News comments for flight?" The answer I found was that they were completely unperturbed by such trivialities, and that was a major part in their success. I'm happy to see somebody's testing out the concept and look forward to continued progress in the areas of transportation.
I will say that the end of the article makes quite the proclamation regarding Hyperloop, with a big "If" but I think measured positivity is certainly warranted here.
The Wright Brothers were also just trying to fly. They weren't trying to compete against well-established technology (such as trains that have already been built).
The Wright Brothers also weren't asking for $5 Billion+ for a test flight. They mostly self-funded IIRC.
The Wright Brothers also weren't asking for $5 Billion+ for a test flight. They mostly self-funded IIRC.
Every human endeavour until incredibly recently in our timeline was a self-cost, whether it be in health, time or wealth. Only in the last blink of an eye have we expected a Govt or Govt funded entity to do it for us. And it's clear they can't.
Personally I couldn't be happier that someone is trying something new. It might not be a success, but it might lead to an innovative new industrial process, or way of constructing something, or it might work.
Who cares if it costs $5billion if we can progress from it and someone will fund it? What else is that money going to do? Sit in a hedge fund? Get invested in a WhatsApp clone? What does that do for us as a society and a species?
> Every human endeavour until incredibly recently in our timeline was a self-cost, whether it be in health, time or wealth. Only in the last blink of an eye have we expected a Govt or Govt funded entity to do it for us. And it's clear they can't.
Absolutely not. Governments have been funding innovation since the dawn of time, nearly every royal court hired scientists in some capacity. Many developments in navigation and transportation were funded by governments looking to improve their armies. Its not like a the average scientist could have afforded to make their own train engine, or a large sailing vessel to test their new technologies.
> Who cares if it costs $5billion if we can progress from it and someone will fund it?
Hey, if it isn't coming from taxpayer money, I don't care.
But this whole California High-speed rail vs Hyperloop thing? That's a publicly funded project, slated to be funded by California bonds and California debt. I say California should buy the proven system, while the private sector can go play with their own innovative products until they can at least demonstrate a working prototype.
There's no reason for California to fund the hyperloop project... not yet anyway.
So you could build dedicated infrastructure that within 25 years might meaningfully move people and/or goods between two points at 500 mph to 800 mph via a single tube. Or you can move to complete self driving cars and trucks that without the risk of human error could travel on the existing infrastructure (in many case 2 - 5 lanes wide) at 200 - 300 mph within the same timeframe or shorter.
I think self driving electric vehicles on the nation's roadways make the hyperloop at best something like Amtrak today in the US. Valuable and profitable only a few short routes/use cases.
EDIT: I do think we'll solve for 200 - 300 mph in 20 - 25 years. But insert 150 - 200 mph. The main premise is we're not going to build multi billion new infrastructure when a "good enough" solution is organically evolving. Same reason why we don't have high speed trains in the US.
It's functionally impossible to drive at 250 mph for any meaningful period of time. Drag is a gigantic problem (as james may says "it's like driving through custard"), not to mention the fuel requirements to go that speed. One of the bigger problems is actually tires. The veyron's tires can only last ~20 minutes at those speeds and a new set is 20 grand. If you want to go those speeds you can't do it in the open air (unless you're actually flying) and you certainly can't do it on rubber tires.
Self driving cars, which aren't likely in that timeframe to do 200-300mph on roads that will exist, make rail and similar things, including hyperloop, more, not less, viable. They provide a solution to the need for a local transport component that doesn't rely on everyone owning a personal vehicle but still provides good local point-to-point transport to help enable the centralized long-distance arteries whose termini can't be convenient to every source and destination point without a good local network.
Self-driving cars that eliminate the need for personal car ownership (i.e. robo-Uber) are also unlikely to exist in that timeframe. What likely will exist is relatively slow travel on Interstate highways that don't require the driver to pay attention. Which will likely be interesting to a lot of people.
But the real benchmark for high speed rail (including hyperloop-like things) is how it competes with air on both total cost and time (the latter of which could be improved as a matter of airport policy and infrastructure). New York to Chicago in 8 hours--about half the current time--even at prices competitive with air--which Amtrak really isn't today--isn't going to be popular, especially among the business travelers who buy most of the tickets.
> on the existing infrastructure [...] at 200 - 300 mph within the same timeframe or shorter.
This isn't even remotely plausible. 250 mph in a conventional car is more of a party trick than a transportation strategy.
You can get a few very specialized cars up to these speeds on a few very specialized tracks, that's it. Even if you built a much longer straight section (you're not cornering significantly at these speeds) the question isn't going to be how many of them can you get from A to B, it's going to be what runs out first, fuel or tires. The range would make todays electrics look positively luxurious. Fuel efficiency would be low single figures.
You can't beat the physics here - you are fighting a velocity cubed term and it will always win (on existing infrastructure).
The few cars capable of driving over 200mph (none exist that can break 300, and they probably never will) are incredibly fuel inefficient. The Bugatti Veyron will empty its entire 26 gallon tank in 12 minutes at top speed, that's not sustainable for mass-transit.
I have a hard time believing that the infrastructure here in the Northeastern US could sustain vehicles regularly traveling at speeds in excess of 200 mph. Which means the cost would also require a great deal of overhaul to the existing infrastructure. It seems that many public works departments are having trouble keeping up with the demands of repairing roads for 40 - 60 mph.
If you could do a few hyperloops* that would connect Boston - NYC - Philly - DC, suddenly the strain on the highway system plummets. That gives self-driving cars even more room to speedily take people between locations outside of the reach of public transportation.
* I don't mean it would have to be hyperloops. Any HSR system would be beneficial.
Right but the challenge works the other ways. It wouldn't take much to support 150 to 180 mph. So Boston to NY which is more or less 200 miles becomes a 90 minute trip on a self driving car. So a good hyperloop gets it to say 30 - 40 minutes. Add to that all the approvals of laying one down in that heavily congested land ownership corridor vs the roads that are already in place. I just don't see it.
Do you have a source on this? I did a little napkin math based on these suggested curve radii[1]; namely, I fit a function to the data points in this SageMath worksheet[2] and extrapolated. The fit a) looks good and b) seems to imply that the vastly increased minimum radius of curvature of turns would require significantly re-engineering the interstate highway as it exists today.
300 mph at sea level atmosphere on land is pretty tough to do efficiently, you're looking at ~18x the drag force of normal highway travel with only a ~4x speedup. Self-driving "trains" of cars can alleviate the drag force, but I haven't seen any 300mph "train"ed proposals that would work on existing road and bridge infrastructure.
Fast cars like that already exist, the main problem with those is that thanks to drag (air + surface), they become really uneconomical at higher speeds. 800 of the Bugatti Veyron's 1000 BHP only kicks in above 200 kph, maybe later - that's how much extra power is needed to squeeze out the last bit of performance to reach that max speed. Do that times the amount of cars, and you see the problem there.
Although it probably would work if the cars drove in a partially evacuated tunnel. But then you wouldn't have the downforce needed to get the cars through corners at those speeds. If you put the cars on monorails though, maybe...
I would think fully electric buses on dedicated roadways would be cheaper and more flexible in the end. Automated driving is coming closer and the best uses are for those which travel well marked and maintained routes, hence long distance trucking, buses, and the like. It certainly would be cheaper than building any type of elevated rail system.
However with most transportation projects rail has way to much allure even when its financially stupid. Just look at the costs of some light rail projects in our cities and it never makes sense.
Maybe it's because I don't live in the US but I couldn't disagree more with this. Public transport is infinitely more valuable than just something used on a few short routes/use cases. When designed properly they are far quicker, safer and cheaper even if we had self driving cars on the road.
And it is ludicrous to imagine self driving cars moving around at that speed: (a) there will always be non self driving cars which will cause accidents and (b) self driving cars no matter how good will still cause accidents e.g. sensor failure, poor weather condition, inability to determine future road quality, edge conditions etc.
Why can't self driving cars be public transport? Why will there always be non self driving cars - especially 20 years out? If they're inherently riskier and cause minor irritations (slow down traffic) to major irritations (human driven cars are 6x more likely to cause a human death than a self driving car etc) then how long will we the "i'm in a hurry" allow the indulgence? And interstates are multiple lanes so 2 dedicated lanes to self driving vs 1 or 2 to human driven while we transition.
> EDIT: I do think we'll solve for 200 - 300 mph in 20 - 25 years. But insert 150 - 200 mph.
Honestly, averaging 150-200mph is still hopeless for conventional infrastructure and cars. Hell, 100mph averages are probably out for conventional cars due to fuel efficiency. You could imagine an improvement from co-ordinated drafting (don't try this at home) but that's too marginal to make up the difference.
I'd love to hear your reasoning behind thinking that we'll solve 200-300mph in the next three decades on conventional roads. What kind of vehical are you thinking of?
I think they're gas/electric or all electric motors. The next gen GTR is twin V6 + electric and has top speed of 197mph. Think of how far a Tesla could get 10 years ago vs today too.
For that matter, so long as we're having blue sky thinking involving untold billions of dollars of infrastructure, you might as well bring in new airports well out of the urban centers because that's what hyperloop is likely to be anyway.
Self-driving cars going at 200-300mph for long periods of time seems unlikely. At that point you might as well build lanes for maglev trains.
Also, the hyperloop technology could at the very least be useful for transporting stuff across the ocean (and hopefully cheaper than it is to do it by plane).
