Hyperloop Transportation

Let's continue it here, it can be its own thread. Even though it qualifies to the crazy area too.

In response to Matthew, I understand the skepticism. The price sounds absurd. But I wouldn't dismiss it with allusions to sell electric cars (how does HSR even attack cars? planes yeah, but not cars).

I think the right approach is this. Prove it. Make a concept prototype. Show it can work and work at the cost claimed. Else, we can just play this youtube video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEZjzsnPhnw
 
I don't doubt its viability as a concept. Pneumatic transit in the 19th century was viable as a concept. It's just that a white paper is nothing to judge the practical viability of the concept. Pneumatic transit worked the first time around, but it stalled almost as fast as the first test demos came on the scene because the cost of implementing it usably was astronomical and never ever would return on investment. Meanwhile, the old-timey "obsolete" technology kept evolving incrementally and kept being good enough that the Jetsons Shit never put a dent in its cost/benefit deficit. And not only that..the viable concept itself stopped evolving and advancing towards practicality.

Maglev is the same way...and that is a HELL of a lot more real than this. The technology has been proven in test labs since the early-70's, has 2 established revenue installations with a third about to open and a 4th in design. It is real-deal mature tech. But HSR (non-U.S. variety) has never stopped evolving either. And is good enough that when station stops are factored into the schedule vs. an endpoint-to-endpoint sprint at max track speed the speed advantage for Maglev isn't great enough to justify building an isolated unicorn mode over an interoperable common-carrier railroad. That's why there are more Maglev test labs being built or planned today rather than actual installations. You can string together an HSR network from dedicated track, some mix of legacy track, gradual evolution from legacy to dedicated, mix freight (yes...even the Chunnel and other Euro HSR lines carry freight and have seen freight increases on higher-demand corridors), funnel commuter rail into the same terminals, whatever. You can't, however, get from Points A to C or B to D on a dedicated mode that is only built for A to B...and may not have enough ridership between B to C to bother hooking up with also-isolated C to D. That's what upended the L.A.-Las Vegas Maglev. It's been recast (if the private investors can get fed approval) as the DesertXPress generic True HSR 150 MPH choo-choo that dumps off in the desert with a piggyback onto CAHSR + Metrolink for the last few miles into the terminal. It would never work as Maglev that stops miles outside of L.A. requiring a slow-speed transfer. And they probably still need to rope in a daily mid-speed revival of the old Amtrak Desert Wind LD train from L.A. to Utah via Vegas on the same track in order to get some other shared stakeholders chipping in costs on the corridor...which they wouldn't get on a dedicated Maglev.


A more famous example of unicorn modes vs. "boring" old common carriers is the Space Shuttle. The most complex machine ever built by humans, 30 years proven. And always a boondoggle that never found its calling. Heavy-lift rockets were infinitely most cost-effective at launching unmanned payloads. 1960's-tech capsules infinitely more cost-effective and reliable at launching humans, where the Shuttle's huge cargo capacity was wasted. And the reusability advantage was an illusion because post-launch servicing was so invasive it didn't end up very reusable at all. About the only thing it did well was in-space repairs (e.g. Hubble Telescope). And that's been virtually obsoleted by robot tech. The "common carrier" equivalents kept incrementally evolving and staying good enough, and not only did the Shuttle never close its cost/benefits gap...but that gap widened almost unabated over its lifespan.


That's where this is. There is no freakin' way it's as neat and tidy as the whitepaper says it is. EVERY whitepaper, right down to the 19th century pneumatic tube equivalents, looks unassailable until you actually start modeling it for real-world conditions. I don't know how they can ever build an El across California. You can't do interstate medians when there's an overpass every half-mile. At those speeds it would take 2 miles worth of inclines and declines to dip around them unless you relocated all the overpasses. So there's a couple dozen billion dollars right there, plus some potentially very motion-sick riders.

And how the hell are they going to achieve these headways and travel times--even assuming TOD gets built around the endpoints--with how many pods they would have to load and unload. A roller coaster takes several minutes and lots of employee assistance to strap everyone in. And a roller coaster has significantly higher seating capacity than one of these van-sized pods. Is it going to take excessive boarding times with how securely a person has to be strapped in...THEN require an hour-long wait behind 30 other pods to get shot out on allotted headway...THEN require an hour-long queue at the destination for 30 pods in front of you to unload? CAHSR full-build is going to be faster than that. This is why public transit smaller than city/coach buses simply isn't done except for localized paratransit. If you're going to have dwell penalties, you have to make up for it by moving more people per headway. Otherwise the operating cost in time, labor, and money is a loser to the extreme.


And on and on and on. What you're seeing here is a well-connected billionaire following the Steve Jobs blueprint at creating his own media cult following. Tesla's got major flair boosting it (in addition to being a quality product). The idea of SpaceX has got flair, although their actual product is about as utilitarian for what it does as a diesel locomotive. This is a publicity stunt to sell the "Elon Musk" personal brand, being no more than a whitepaper. He pretty much can't proceed into design-and-build without massive public-assistance R&D from the state and federal gov't like Maglev tech got in the 60's and 70's, and that is not going to happen in a less- R&D-for-R&D's-sake era like today without a huge groundswell of engineering interest in the technology like there was/still is with Maglev and boots on the ground actively building and testing components. Nobody has done that with pneumatic transport in nearly a hundred years, save for a fleeting revisiting of the tech in the early-60's that was abandoned when they found the same basic cost/benefit hurdles hadn't budged much since the 1890's.

He's certainly not going to get that far winging it with his own engineers, any more than any one lab is going to plausibly prove everyone wrong on cold fusion. Jetsons Shit never gets built by a single innovator. And Steve Jobs never ever built any Jetsons Shit...he just created a design cult around commodity tech. Much like Tesla and SpaceX are doing. The fact that this is SOOOOOOO different and out there from what Tesla and SpaceX are doing makes me that much more suspicious that it's little more than publicity stunt. And perhaps him trying to troll CAHSR a bit.
 
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I liked Alon Levy's coverage of it: http://pedestrianobservations.wordp...oopy-ideas-are-fine-if-youre-an-entrepreneur/

Some choice passages:

There is no redeeming feature of Hyperloop. Small things can possibly be fixed; the cost problems, the locations of the stations, and the passenger comfort issues given cost constraints can’t. Industry insiders with ties to other speculative proposals meant to replace conventional rail, such as maglev, are in fact skeptical of Hyperloop’s promises of perfect safety.

It’s possible to discover something new, but people who do almost always realize the context of the discovery. If Musk really found a way to build viaducts for $5 million per kilometer, this is a huge thing for civil engineering in general and he should announce this in the most general context of urban transportation, rather than the niche of intercity transportation. If Musk has experiments showing that it’s possible to have sharper turns or faster deceleration than claimed by Transrapid, then he’s made a major discovery in aviation and should announce it as such. That he thinks it just applies to his project suggests he doesn’t really have any real improvement.
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We already have really good high speed, long distance travel in the jet aircraft. We have really good short distance travel options in buses and cars. IMO the best bang for the buck that is totally underfunded but would make a huge impact is more subway in large cities. Not more commuter rail or intercity rail, just more subway. IMO a far better and less exotic alternative to high speed rail or hyperloop for mid-range, intercity travel of a few hundred miles or less as an alternative to planes would be computer controlled cars and buses operating on existing roads. Just take one travel lane in each direction.
 
tocoto said:
IMO a far better and less exotic alternative to high speed rail or hyperloop for mid-range, intercity travel of a few hundred miles or less as an alternative to planes would be computer controlled cars and buses operating on existing roads.
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Setting hyperloop aside, high speed rail isn't exotic. It's a technology that's been deployed since the 1960s and gradually upgraded in the decades since. In comparison, self-driving cars are still an experimental technology that haven't been deployed in revenue use anywhere yet.
 
metasyntactic said:
I liked Alon Levy's coverage of it: http://pedestrianobservations.wordp...oopy-ideas-are-fine-if-youre-an-entrepreneur/

Some choice passages:
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I don't always agree with the nits Levy compulsively picks (although he's always breathtakingly well-sourced), but that was about as damning, comprehensive, and on-point a takedown of this thing as anyone could ever write. He even nails the whole billionaire entrepreneur "Cult of Steve Jobs" trolling element behind Musk's motivations.
 
metasyntactic said:
Setting hyperloop aside, high speed rail isn't exotic. It's a technology that's been deployed since the 1960s and gradually upgraded in the decades since. In comparison, self-driving cars are still an experimental technology that haven't been deployed in revenue use anywhere yet.
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The problem with HSR is that it is expensive and requires tracks most of which don't exist in the US meaning it would cost a lot of money and political wrangling to create - so we will not have it anytime soon. Computerized driving uses existing roads and modified existing vehicles at far lower cost. For modest distances, what really maters is consistent relatively modest average speed. The Acela can go 150 mph when the tracks are good and theoretically could make the trip to NYC in less than 2 hours. In fact, it takes 3.5 hours and the high speed capability of the Acela is largely wasted by inadequate tracks, platforms and other factors. If a bus could average 90 MPH it would reach NYC from Boston in 2 hours. All I am saying is less exotic and costly technologies much of which are already in existence could make a huge impact on higher speed transportation. Hyperloop (not a new idea) and even HSR make great stories but given the cost and political situation in the US they just divert attention from more realistic and plausible alternatives.
 
If you take the 35 minute LA to SF claim at face value, the capacity is nowhere near enough for the induced demand this would create.
 
tocoto said:
The problem with HSR is that it is expensive and requires tracks most of which don't exist in the US meaning it would cost a lot of money and political wrangling to create - so we will not have it anytime soon. Computerized driving uses existing roads and modified existing vehicles at far lower cost. For modest distances, what really maters is consistent relatively modest average speed. The Acela can go 150 mph when the tracks are good and theoretically could make the trip to NYC in less than 2 hours. In fact, it takes 3.5 hours and the high speed capability of the Acela is largely wasted by inadequate tracks, platforms and other factors. If a bus could average 90 MPH it would reach NYC from Boston in 2 hours. All I am saying is less exotic and costly technologies much of which are already in existence could make a huge impact on higher speed transportation. Hyperloop (not a new idea) and even HSR make great stories but given the cost and political situation in the US they just divert attention from more realistic and plausible alternatives.
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Help me understand - you believe that self-driving cars already have all the existing infrastructure (note: until every car on the road is a self-driving car, they don't) to be a far better alternative than the proven (and always-improving) efficacy of rail transit?

Sorry to say - what it would take to rebuilt the HSR along the northeast corridor is nothing compared to the investment that business, government and society at large would need to invest into a completely new transportation milieu of self-driving cars.
 
tocoto said:
The problem with HSR is that it is expensive and requires tracks most of which don't exist in the US meaning it would cost a lot of money and political wrangling to create - so we will not have it anytime soon. Computerized driving uses existing roads and modified existing vehicles at far lower cost. For modest distances, what really maters is consistent relatively modest average speed. The Acela can go 150 mph when the tracks are good and theoretically could make the trip to NYC in less than 2 hours. In fact, it takes 3.5 hours and the high speed capability of the Acela is largely wasted by inadequate tracks, platforms and other factors. If a bus could average 90 MPH it would reach NYC from Boston in 2 hours. All I am saying is less exotic and costly technologies much of which are already in existence could make a huge impact on higher speed transportation. Hyperloop (not a new idea) and even HSR make great stories but given the cost and political situation in the US they just divert attention from more realistic and plausible alternatives.
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Except driverless cars are still not ready for prime time. They're a hot R&D field much like Maglev was in the 70's and 80's, but the projections for when this is going to be a real thing are wildly optimistic with all the innumerable things they have to correct for re: Murphy's Law on the roads. Google is doing the right thing promoting it as right around the corner because the publicity sends a stampede of researchers into the field trying to solve those problems (if there is anything Google does better than anyone else, it's mobilizing engineers en masse). But they know internally that this is a decades marathon not a sprint to produce workable product. I bet that's a no-joke 20 years away from being fail-safe enough for limited adoption.

And it DOESN'T solve the problem of vehicle congestion from oversaturation of single-person autos on the road. It corrects for flow issues, but if you have too many fucking cars for the SE Expressway's capacity you're going to have too many fucking cars for the SE Expressway if it's filled with a significant mix of driverless vehicles. It is not public transit and not public transit-level efficiency at carrying lots of people. If you want to consider unbuildable things, completing the inside-128 highway grid is even more unbuildable than the Super-NEC. And so is widening I-93 in most spots.

HSR is real. And very widespread worldwide, and growing hyper-aggressively worldwide. The fact that we won't fucking fund it in this country and the fact that NIMBY's have too much power to hold *reasonable-impact* beneficial solutions hostage in a political problem. Not an engineering problem. The NEC has a lot of improvements to tap south of NYC on its existing footprint. It is easily bypassable on the unimprovable Shoreline. It might be bypassable through Metro North congestion or might not. But consider that Euro HSR uses a lot of upgraded legacy track too that's very congested with commuter rail and freight. They make up for those compromises in constrained areas by being hella fast where they can be hella fast.

Don't forget...CAHSR started out with fully dedicated ROW until the political and NIMBY opposition whittled it down, whittled it down, whittled it down into compromises sharing the Caltrain and Metrolink corridors, sharing (with extra capacity) some freight corridors. And even the 'true' all-new Asian HSR-style ROW through a whole lot of nothing is being NIMBY-fought harder and booby-trapped more deviously than any public works project in recent memory.


They are ALL common-carrier railroads just like highways are common-carrier roads. There is no magic to it. You mitigate where you can mitigate by upgrading the existing corridors, bypassing existing corridors, punting freight to secondary routes, etc. That is why HSR is popping up like weeds worldwide. Relatively little of it is being clean-roomed like some of these gaudy Chinese lines built from scratch through the mountains by a government trying to exert its manifest destiny. Or other places in the Pacific Rim like island Japan that had almost bupkis in the way of rail network to start with. U.K., Continental Europe, everywhere else...it's a patchwork of new and old. With the old being remade. The fact that we refuse to do that in the U.S. is not a modal or engineering problem. There are PLENTY of arrow-straight routes nationwide in not-hilly and not-shoreline inlet laden places like the northeast (including--YES--in the northeast with the Empire and Keystone corridors that aren't advancing like they should). They just die death from a thousand political cuts and if built at all end up a compromised sausage factory like CAHSR.

That's not a flaw in the mode of transport. Europe did exactly what the U.S. aims to do, especially in the U.K. which is the most U.S.-like country in the world at having a crazy-quilt 19th century network of legacy lines. The difference is they did it.


If we can't do that with common carriers, there is no fucking way we're doing it with unicorn modes like Maglev or Hyperloop. And the stringent (for some good and some bad reasons) bureaucracy are going to leave us waiting longer than expected for real driverless cars. Just like we have been for real electric cars.


Levy lays that out in his post. It is disingenuous to think there's a eureka Jetsons Shit solution out there that we just haven't entrepreneured hard enough. Civil engineering doesn't work that way. It never has. And Musk knows this because he put his own money into evolutionary, common-carrier using Tesla and SpaceX but is asking for total public bond commitment to this one. Which is a bit disingenuous given that there ARE some privately funded HSR and HSR-lite efforts going on like DesertXPress and All Aboard Florida. It's the smoking gun that even he doesn't believe his own hype on this one.
 
It's 220 miles from Boston to NYC so even 90 MPH under ideal conditions doesn't cut it in under 2 hours.

And this ignores the terrible state of highway infrastructure. Interstate highways are not built to the standards required to have heavy buses traversing them at 90+ MPH in the quantities required to match railroad capacity. Maintenance-of-way costs would soar through the roof. Trucks already beat them up quite badly at 65 MPH. And that's ignoring the fundamental congestion limitations of highways, mentioned by F-line.

Of course, this is just another example of how the general public thinks roads are "free" and provided by the asphalt fairy, and that they last "forever" and never need to be fixed, other than pothole filling.

Self-driving cars/buses will, after a long period of maturation, have a great deal of impact on the way we make short trips. But why would you ride a 90 MPH self-driving, dinky little bus on a bumpy, degrading highway when you could ride a 220 MPH self-driving, comfortable train between the same destinations? Oh, and the technology to do the latter already exists. And we know very well how to maintain high speed rail tracks safely and still come out with an operating profit.
 
Matthew said:
It's 220 miles from Boston to NYC so even 90 MPH under ideal conditions doesn't cut it in under 2 hours.

And this ignores the terrible state of highway infrastructure. Interstate highways are not built to the standards required to have heavy buses traversing them at 90+ MPH in the quantities required to match railroad capacity. Maintenance-of-way costs would soar through the roof. Trucks already beat them up quite badly at 65 MPH. And that's ignoring the fundamental congestion limitations of highways, mentioned by F-line.

Of course, this is just another example of how the general public thinks roads are "free" and provided by the asphalt fairy, and that they last "forever" and never need to be fixed, other than pothole filling.

Self-driving cars/buses will, after a long period of maturation, have a great deal of impact on the way we make short trips. But why would you ride a 90 MPH self-driving, dinky little bus on a bumpy, degrading highway when you could ride a 220 MPH self-driving, comfortable train between the same destinations? Oh, and the technology to do the latter already exists. And we know very well how to maintain high speed rail tracks safely and still come out with an operating profit.
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short trips:

Bicycles are already perfectly capable of transporting a lot of people short distances for much of the year with minimal impact on our infrastructure. They take up much less space than any other mode (aside from walking) and the infrastructure is much cheaper to install. Problem is not many people want to ride in/with traffic (even with bike lanes - and "mixed use" paths aren't exactly good either), we have maybe a few weeks a year where the weather doesn't cooperate, and of course the political will to make true dutch-style infrastructure happen. Aside from that - most reasonably healthy people who commute 7 miles or less could easily get there by bike.

if we were really truly concerned about the cost of maintaining our infrastructure we'd be encouraging a lot more people to ride bikes for the majority of their trips. self-driving cars are nice, but they would still have the same impact on our infrastructure - and I think there will come a time in the not-so-distant future where we're going to have to start making hard decisions on infrastructure spending.

long trips:

I'm with you on high-speed rail - plus they can take you right to the center of cities and can repurpose existing rail right-of-ways. hyperloop requires a completely new infrastructure to be built.
 
Oh I agree about the desirability of walkable and bikeable trips. I think we're going to have a challenge making sure self-driving cars don't try to take over our lives the way ordinary cars have. It'll be nice not to have to fight the parking wars anymore, though. And self-driving cars can be programmed to be much safer than human drivers.

I'm sure different places will have different approaches. But I hope that cities retain and promote the walkable core. The self-driving car will be a nice thing to have, in that case, but it won't be a necessity. Cars, self-driving or not, don't work well in densely populated urban cores for fundamental geometric reasons anyway. So unless human nature changes, there's still too much congestion for car-dependency to work.
 
Autodesk tackles the Hyperloop:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/autodesk/a-new-look-at-the-high-speed-hyperloop-b3y4

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(Ignore the fact this is on Buzzfeed. This is actually 100% pure Autodesk content)
 
Total BS

If you want something truly "Jetsons" to Chew-On --- look around for information on the "Planet Train" which was conceptualized around gravitational transport -- aka essentially orbital-like in the ground. On a Planet Train you ease away from South Station at 5:00 PM EST and arrive at Paddington at a bit after 10:40 GMT -- travel time hypothetically 42 minutes essentially respective of distance

This was first imagined of by Robert Hooke who discussed the concept with Isaac Newton in the 1600's. A few centuries later a patent was issued in Paris. There are some practical issues involving tunneling which precluded it from being reduced to practice. Musk is just spewing at a far less exotic level.
 
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