Is Hyperloop the future of travel?
bbc.co.ukThere's a palpable excitement around Hyperloop and I can't wait to know if this will reshape our world or not.
One of the largest problem I can see is not technical. The consensus is that a "standard" Hyperloop track (between 2 cities, 300 to 800km apart) would have a ~1,500 passengers/hour max capacity. High speed rail, such as Eurostar, would be around 10,000 passengers/hour.
Even if Hyperloop managed to get built at half the price of HSR (which would already be a feat, there's zero chance they'll do it at 10% of HSR price), this makes a very thin passenger flux to deliver reasonable amounts of operational cash.
Where HSR can deliver $7M to $14M daily with $150 ticket price at peak time, Hyperloop would max out at $2M daily with $300 tickets during peak hour. And those prices would probably kill their market anyway.
And that's with an entirely new transport platform to fund with many unknowns such as metal fatigue for pods in near-vacuum at those speeds, passenger tolerance for accelerations and lateral movements etc.
Maybe the business plan for passenger planes and trains was also that hazy back then?
The world's busiest high-speed rail is the Japanese Shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka. It was doing 23,000 passengers per hour way back in 1992.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkansen
The newest trains have capacity for 1323 seated passengers each, plus plenty of room for standing passengers, and run 13 times an hour in each direction. These things do regularly fill to capacity, too; I've ridden them standing in the door vestibule.
https://www.japanrailpass24.com/about-japan/shinkansen/
I'm sure the Chinese system, such as the line between Shanghai and Nanjing, also has really high ridership, particularly during Chinese New Year.
To me, Hyperloop is a distraction from high speed rail... I'd love to be able to ride an efficient train from SF to LA.
It's not a distraction, it's a better alternative. HSR is too slow and too expensive.
As for passenger capacity, who cares? This is not Japan, where density is very high and lots of people don't have cars. What's important is demand: how many passengers are actually flying between LA and SF right now? And how does that compare to the capacity of Hyperloop? Hyperloop is being positioned as an alternative to regional air travel (and maybe later for cross-continent air travel). I'm sorry, but I seriously doubt 23,000 passengers are flying in jets from LA to SF every hour right now.
It's funny that hyperloop proponents both argue that it is better for HSRs role, but that it's main purpose is to replace airline flights.
HSRs main justification is reducing the increase in long-range intrastate auto trips.
Also, whether an air travel or auto trip replacement, the hyperloop paper relied for its low cost on a route that doesn't have the transit connections to either where people are from or where they are trying to go be useful, whereas HSR both connects population centers and includes investments in improving connecting regional transit around the termini (and other stations). Hyperloop aims for a much smaller goal than HSR, and even at that has an alignment which makes it useless for the goal.
how many passengers are actually flying between LA and SF right now?
Good question. About 3.4 million per year (I think that's both ways based on other sources) according to this:
http://www.statista.com/statistics/536977/domestic-air-route...
Subway line 14 in Paris is fully automated, has trains arriving every 85 seconds during peak hours, and has an hourly capacity of 30'000 - 40'000 seats/hour.
Subway is complementary to high speed rail (or hyperloop).
The trains travel (on average) about 1/10th the speed, and the distances covered are much smaller.
The Hong Kong MTR (the worst commuter crush I've personally experienced) handles an eye-popping 75,000 commuters per hour per direction: https://www.mtr.com.hk/en/corporate/operations/detail_worldc...
It's $130 one way. Surely, people don't use that to commute on a daily basis? A round trip flight is faster and cheaper ($80-$300 vs $260).
Having done both, I'd say door to door total travel time of Tokyo -> Osaka is shorter by train. But I like to get to airports two hours early to deal with security non sense. YMMV.
Also, a standard Shinkansen seat is far more spacious and comfortable than any economy plane seat.
> High speed rail, such as Eurostar, would be around 10,000 passengers/hour.
How is that remotely true? There is one Eurostar approximately every 30 minutes (looking at the departures from London [0], it seems that there are 32 Eurostar leaving London every day), and I seriously doubt one train can carry 5000 passengers (I would say about 500 passengers), so your approximation is completely off (even taking into account the fact that Eurostar can go from London, Paris and Brussels) and 1500 passengers/hour is comparable to the number of passengers the Eurostar carries in an hour.
[0] http://www.eurostar.com/uk-en/travel-information/service-inf...
Europe's busiest express train line seems to be LGV Paris-Lyon, with a peak scheduled capacity of 13 TGV trains per hour. Given that a TGV duplex fits 545 passengers, we are above 7000 per hour. Now couple two TGVs together, and you'll be well above.
Weirdly enough, the only source I found was German wikipedia on the train track (LGV Sud-Est[1]). Neither English nor French wikipedia have capacity information, and neither of the respective articles on the train itself have capacity information, even though the TGV duplex was introduced for this very reason.
In Germany there are some tracks with higher usages, but those are not the same line – they just share part of the line (imagine on the track A -- B -- C -- D, a train going from A to C, and from B to D, both every half hour – between B and C now you have 15min frequencies).
But the point is the same, regardless of if we use Japan, Germany, France, Spain, etc: 10k people per hour, or more, is easily possible.
Hyperloop transports less people than a single lane of highway. And with the cost you could maintain teslas for rental on a dedicated highway for many decades.
>Hyperloop transports less people than a single lane of highway
So what? Airplanes also transport fewer people than a highway. How many people travel by air between LA and SF right now per hour? Probably no more than the capacity of Hyperloop.
>But the point is the same, regardless of if we use Japan, Germany, France, Spain, etc: 10k people per hour, or more, is easily possible.
What makes you think 10k people per hour actually want slow train service between LA and SF, when they can just use their car, get there in about the same time, and then not have to rent a car at their destination?
>And with the cost you could maintain teslas for rental on a dedicated highway for many decades.
You're placing passenger capacity above speed. The whole point of Hyperloop is speed: it's faster than an airplane, without all the downsides of the airplane (terrorism, TSA, crashing, etc.) HSR is not, it's slow (esp. the way they'll build it in this country). Of course, Hyperloop doesn't have the advantage of not having to rent a car like driving yourself does, but it makes up for it with very high speed.
> when they can just use their car, get there in about the same time
> HSR is not, it's slow
Have you ever seen an actual HSR system?
We’re talking about 220mph minimum. That’s quite a bit faster than per car.
And, due to TSA, it’s faster than an airplane, and without the annoying stuff. And cheaper.
Hyperloops only differences over HSR is that it’s 15min faster, is a lot more uncomfortable, a lot more expensive to build, a lot more expensive to use (due to few people per capsule), etc.
>Have you ever seen an actual HSR system? >We’re talking about 220mph minimum. That’s quite a bit faster than per car.
Sorry, that's complete bullshit.
We're not talking about HSR in Japan, China, or Germany here. We're talking about "HSR" in California, USA.
The California system will be very, very lucky if it manages to ever hit 200mph in a short stretch. Realistically, it might be about the speed of the Amtrak Acela Express, which is basically no faster than any regular train, except that it manages to hit 150mph once or twice, briefly.
You seem to be making the ridiculous assumption that HSR in America will resemble HSR in other countries somehow, in both speed and cost. Nothing could be farther from the truth. HSR here is a horribly expensive boondoggle. It'll be worse than the F-35.
I’ve only seen German and French HSR, but the one in the US can’t be that bad.
Worst case, you just let some Germans build it for you.
>I’ve only seen German and French HSR, but the one in the US can’t be that bad.
This is your problem then: you're speaking from ignorance. Yes, it really can be that bad. Acela Express is a total joke compared to foreign HSR, and the one in California isn't even built yet, the cost projections are insane, and the proposed top speed is only 200mph.
>Worst case, you just let some Germans build it for you.
We can't do that. I'm not joking, I mean that literally. We simply cannot do that, and will not do that. Sure, it'd make sense to just let a company that's already an expert do that, but we won't. We'll do it with crappy domestic companies (though perhaps getting the passenger cars made by Bombardier in Canada) at an absolutely astronomical cost, because that's just how things are done in this country now for anything that's government-funded. Just look at the F-35 jet for proof.
From: http://www.eurostar.com/uk-en/about-eurostar/press-office/pr...
"Eurostar, the high-speed passenger rail service between the UK and mainland Europe, today reported the highest ever number of passengers transported on Eurostar in one quarter with over 2.8m customers travelling between the UK and the continent in Q2 2015. This represents a year-on-year increase of 3% in passengers compared with the same period last year (2.8m 2015: 2.7m 2014)."
2.8m in a quarter = 31,000 a day. Given the trains only run for just over 14 hours a day (London departure board for tomorrow) - then that's a mean passengers per hour over the quarter during operating hours over all days in the quarter of 2,214. Note this actual passengers not capacity. If you assumed say an average load ration of perhaps 70% (over all times of day all over the quarter) then the mean capacity per hour would be 3,100. Then at some times there are more trains than others, so the peak capacity per hour is probably at least 4,000.
Perhaps Tōkaidō Shinkansen would be a better example? 331 trains / day, 391 thousand passengers / day according to: http://english.jr-central.co.jp/company/ir/annualreport/_pdf... (pdf)
And Beijing-Shanghai highspeed railway? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing%E2%80%93Shanghai_High-... 100M rides/year in 2014, similar to the number of Shinkansen, far larger than eurostar.
Yes, but you also have loads of Eurotunnel (car and truck carrying trains) and Southeastern High Speed (non-international) trains on those tracks.
Add the capacity of those in.
Say 3x Eurostar, 5x southeastern hsr and 4x eurotunnel.
The new e320 trains have 900 passenger capacity (could be more with less first class, so let's call it 1000). With 12x departures per hour that's 12,000, and there would be more spare capacity left over because there wouldn't be local and express trains mixed together which kills capacity.
I think you could easily do 15k p/h on Eurostar + related infrastructure. Maybe more if you used TGV Duplex double decker trains.
Eurostar capacity is driven by demand though. There's no practical limit that forces trains to be 30 minutes apart.
Simply, because you don’t have to run them every 30 minutes.
In Germany and Japan on select few HSR lines trains are operating with a frequency of 2 minutes, and 800 passengers per train.
That’s 24'000 per hour.
The record is probably the Yamanote Line in Tokyo, with about 165,000 passengers per hour at peak. That's effectively a conveyor belt made out of trains; there's a loop in each direction with trains every 2 minutes in each direction during peak periods. Each train carries up to 1600 people, and there are 50 trains on the loops during peak periods.
Gp is referring to 'max capacity'. As others have noted 10k/hr is conservative.
I'm not sure where your consensus is coming from, but it's not what I've seen/heard working on this stuff.
Hyperloop One (formerly Hyperloop Tech) said in an info session last Fall that they were targeting launch intervals below 15 seconds. They also want a pod to comfortably carry a single intermodal container - 8'x8'x40'.
That space can seat around 40, which works out to 9600 passengers/hr capacity at 15 second intervals, on a single track.
The other angle to consider is that tracks very likely won't be singular. The tubes are light by infrastructure standards, you could pack two for each direction onto a route without dramatically increasing pylon costs. Add in the relatively low trip times, and in route segments with varying asymmetric demand it's feasible to switch one in four tracks' direction at midday. Eg a route into the city could easily run 3 in 1 out for mornings and 1 in 3 out for evenings.
> That space can seat around 40, which works out to 9600 passengers/hr capacity at 15 second intervals, on a single track.
Thanks, didn't have those figures. I used a study from a Hyperloop study group (can't find the URL) who found that the most efficient setup would be to assemble 5 pods together (total ~100-150 pax) , with 1 departure every 5 minutes so ~1500pax/hour.
Now a realistic turnover time (unload, clean+inspect, load, launch and contingency) would be 10' per pod - and this would already be pretty agressive.
So if you launch a pod at 15 seconds intervals, a station would need capacity for >40 pods. Inbound and outbound pods would need to station 3' upon arrival and pre-launch - again, super aggressive figure. Imagining we keep the whole setup on 6 tracks with a swapping device at the end of the tracks and relatively narrow 3m wide platforms, a station would be >40m wide and long, not accounting for circulations etc. Realistic figures would be 100x50m stations - or an equivalent volume if tracks are stacked instead of juxtaposed.
This amount of underground real estate would just not be found in most Europe cities, or at punitive prices, not even mentioning NYMBYism. HSR managed to take off thanks to heavy direct or indirect subsidies and by leveraging existing infrastructure (stations and many rail connections). Hyperloop won't get the same sweet deals.
I'm a Hyperloop supporter for the scifi potential in it, though I just don't get how and where it can get built in this world.
> The other angle to consider is that tracks very likely won't be singular. The tubes are light by infrastructure standards, you could pack two for each direction onto a route without dramatically increasing pylon costs.
This observation fails to take into account real-world requirements of building this sort of infrastructure. Pylon costs (queue the starcraft references) are irrelevant. The relevant bit is building all the tunnels, bridges, and earthworks required to get a smooth-enough train route that is able to safely support the track, provide a safe ride at Hyperloop's projected speeds, provide a conformable ride, and do it all in cost-effective an easy to maintain technology.
In high-speed railway, track defects are measured in wavelengths of fractions of a milimeter in amplitude and periods of 6 to 10 to 50 meters. If you increase the speed, either the limit for the wavelength period increases or the amplitude limits need to be further reduced. Setting up a 200-meter track segment with a sub-milimeter tolerance limit isn't cheap.
This assumes that the HSR would operate at full theoretical capacity, which wouldn't be true of all potential lines. If a locality is deciding between HSR and Hyperloop, it would be better to compare costs based on projected passenger load. That measure would presumably benefit Hyperloop on lower-activity lines, where HSR would have difficulty recouping costs, and HSR on higher-activity lines.
I wonder would this reshape our world or just make it a little different.
I don't want to get from Montreal to NY in 40 minutes. Or 10.
I want to be able to live somewhere where I do not have to commute because tech has solved remote working. I don't want them to make me travel further for the same time.
For example were they to build radial hyperloop around NY it's just more of the same drudgery. Only now bigger.
...but how do we get to remote working without crushing isolation? Can tech solve that problem?
Can tech solve the problem of getting a coffee with a couple of coworkers and feeling connected to them in a way that helps the technical argument two months from now?
Can tech solve the "Do I have my coworker's undivided attention or are they multitasking and ignoring me" problem?
Can tech solve the "I'm in the room with my boss and he can't ignore that I'm a human being" problem?
We are social creatures. A slack conversation isn't the same, and I don't think a VR conversation will be the same, especially with further distances. Do we say that everyone must live within 1,000 miles?
Let me deal with the crushing isolation. Give me the choice.
you already have the choice if you're willing to make some sacrifices.
> There's a palpable excitement around Hyperloop and I can't wait to know if this will reshape our world or not.
I find it rather doubtful that it will change anything for a number of reasons, including:
- governments don't even care to invest in their existing railway network, and are highly resistant in finding any justification for high-speed networks (not even very-high speed)
- the hyperloop concept is only a concept, it's disastrously expensive, based on untried technology, and highly vulnerable to a disastrous PR campaign. Keep in mind that it took a single accident to ground the whole Concorde fleet, in spite of all its history and having major backers.
- mass transit decision-makers are very conservative and highly risk-adverse. Money is spent only on tried-and-true technology. In the rare cases that it isn't, all hell breaks loose (see BART)
- no one knows what will it cost to maintain it, or its reliability.
- High-speed railway only makes sense in the small window of opportunity sandwiched between cases where air travel and car/roadway travel makes sense. That window of opportunity is located somewhere, IIRC, between travel distances between 200 and 600km. Additionally, for high-speed railway to make sense, it needs to be connected with other mass transit systems through effective multimodal transport hubs. This is very expensive and takes a lot of planning respected throughout centuries of investment in infrastructure and urban planning. The hyperloop concept fails to deliver in any of the requirements while in return bringing nothing to the table.
Let's keep things in perspective: France, Germany, and Japan already have decades of high-speed railway under their belt and are packed with success stories. Yet, the whole world in general, and the US in particular, decided not to follow them in their successful venture. These decisions are made rationally. Why would anyone suddenly invest in a high-risk concept that fails to justify itself?
>Maybe the business plan for passenger planes and trains was also that hazy back then?
Except flying is fast, safe, and cheap. Our problem is airport design and airport security. Fix those so we get on a plane in 20 minutes instead of two hours and everyone will be happy.
Ryanair takes about 30 minutes to turn a plane around with say 170 seats. It's also a large object that requires spacing to get in and out of the gate.
There's no real way I can see to improve airport design with those constraints.
You can fit maybe 4 platforms each holding 10 car trains in the space of one gate at a train station.
A380s require even more space and take even longer to deplane and board, so I don't think fewer but larger planes would work either.
EG: Atlanta airport does around 100m pax. So does Waterloo station in London. Look at the land take and size of terminals required in each of those cases.
What about the massive environmental impact that flying has?
You also need to get to the airport and from the airport. Airports are usually quite far from city centers.
Well, thats what light rail and cars are for. I mean, how are you getting to this proposed hyperloop station? Same way.
You could build hyperloop stations in city centers. That's why travelling by train is (often) so convenient. No need for 1h trip to/from the airport.
I think that is exactly why I "think" hyperloop doesn't solves the problem we hope it would. But will likely provide another set of transport to complement Air traffic. The amount of passenger / hour is simply... too low, ( Doesn't handle peak traffic )
"May" be it will work in US or EU where it is less populated, but it seems hard to scale in places like China and Japan
These are good points — many have tended to look at just the consumer applications. It may be that the economics lend themselves more to industrial transport or logistics than they do to moving bodies.
> Except it is really, really expensive.
> Mr Musk says the cost of building the route would be in the region of $6bn (£4.1bn), an estimate most agree is extremely conservative.
I'm pretty sure that should say "extremely optimistic". Musk's estimate of $6bn is over 10x cheaper than the high speed train line cost for the same route
If I remember right, part of the reason why Musk estimated that the hyperloop would be so cheap was that he assumed it could be built on highway meridians for free, and the tracks were to end end far outside the city centers. It also had a fraction of passenger capacity and number of stations as high speed rail.
It seems likely that for the same amount of service as high speed rail, the hyperloop would be a lot more expensive.
Don't forget that the cost estimate included drilling holes in mountains for magically minature amounts of money than current technology provides.
Maybe that's why he's not building it himself?
>> an estimate most agree is extremely conservative.
> I'm pretty sure that should say "extremely optimistic".
A conservative cost estimate is essentially an optimistic cost estimate. A stronger statement might be that it is unrealistic.
Last I checked, wasn't the project over budget and hitting close to $100Bn in costs?
Honestly, even $50Bn sounds like chump change for a project as ambitious as the Hyperloop. Nearly all large scale public infrastructure projects end up costing billions of dollars over estimated costs anyway.
If you're saying that the HSR project is over budget, you're right, but you're not helping the Hyperloop argument. The point is that if the HSR people can't get something done for $X, it's unlikely that Musk can do something even more ambitious for $X/10.
IIRC, one of the big sources of cheap money is expecting that easements for giant elevated tubes would be available for much less than the land value of the required land underneath.
The analysis I read, back when the Hyperloop proposal was released, took this into account and still found Musks's cost reductions versus HSR were so profound as to suggest major changes for all of civil engineering.
Like how he's lowering the price of rocketry by 90%?
His last bid was 40% less than United Launch
SpaceX received uncounted billions' of dollars worth of R&D for free thanks to the existence of government-funded space programs, which already solved many of the difficult fundamental problems in the field of rocketry so SpaceX wouldn't have to. And while it's neat to watch the stuff they do, there's very little SpaceX is doing that's revolutionary as opposed to evolutionary. So of course now SpaceX can come in and reduce the costs by building on the existing base of work in the field.
Hyperloop doesn't have anywhere near that amount of free R&D or established, easy-to-increment-to-get-there technologies to draw on.
I wouldn't be so sure on that. The R&D transfer and ready human capital was definitely profound in SpaceX's case, but if it was that incremental, why didn't NASA or anybody else do it before?
I think almost the sae can be said for Hyperloop. There's no fundamentally new technology that needs to be engineered for it to work. Maglevs are common in many countries, evacuated tubs aren't complicated.
All that said, the US seems to be the wrong place to start Hyperloop. Regulation and land property will most likely be the biggest hurdle, not technology, especially in California. Hyperloop seems to me like a perfect project in China though, in regard to property rights, regulation, city planning, human capital in the high speed train sector, as well as crazy supply side economics.
why didn't NASA or anybody else do it before?
Why haven't we gone to the moon since the 1970s? Because there wasn't the political will to keep funding the programs that went there. Why was the Space Shuttle such an awkward and ultimately non-viable way to go to space? Because there wasn't the political will to fund genuine reusable launch technology. SpaceX's big advantages are in having the hard up-front R&D already done for it by someone else, and in not having to rely solely on political decisions for the existence of its market; even if there are no more nice-PR resupply missions to the ISS, there are still going to be private actors who want to launch satellites.
You're moving the goalposts. The argument isn't that evacuated tubes are "complicated". The issue is that the cost estimates Musk provided appear to assume secret Musk space alien technology.
Why doesn't my laptop battery last 10X longer? Why doesn't my favorite IPA has 1/10th the calories? Can't Elon Musk fix those things first?
That's pretty unfair. He's not making a rocket that's magically 10x lighter, he's making it cheaper. And he is helping make batteries cheaper.
Isn't that exactly what SpaceX did?
SpaceX entered a market with few competitors, none of which are defacto government agencies. The civil engineering market is much more competitive. Expecting the same level of cost reduction just by having better operational efficiency is naive.
Thus the argument needs to be that Hyperloop is intrinsically cheaper, whether built by Musk's company or any random civil engineering company. I don't see any reason why that is the case, Hyperloop looks a lot more complicated than HSR to me.
Musk himself didn't expect SpaceX to succeed. It was one launch away from complete failure. You're essentially making the argument "If NASA can put a man on the moon why do I still have to buy toothpaste?"
SpaceX has and continues to do amazing things, that doesn't mean suddenly everything we want is feasible.
They are two different technologies. Budget estimates will involve different tradeoffs with different risk assumptions.
Civil engineers have looked at the Hyperloop proposal and declared themselves unable to determine how Musk proposes to reduce the costs of long runs of overpass, or of tunneling.
A simpler way to make the same argument:
If Musk can actually build a Hyperloop across California at his proposed cost, he's made revolutionary improvements to civil engineering that will be far more impactful than the Hyperloop itself; the same techniques should revolutionize, well, much of conventional civil engineering! Why isn't that happening?
Rockets = big long tubes. Big long tubes = something robots can make easily?
The tube isn't the problem. Among various problems include: the building access roads to every pylon base, conducting site surveys and environmental impact studies for each site then figuring out what to do when those studies and surveys declare a patch of dirt to be unacceptable. The original route was also going to need something on the order of kilometers of tunnel through mountains.
> The point is that if the HSR people can't get something done for $X, it's unlikely that Musk can do something even more ambitious for $X/10
IDK, indeed $X/10 is ambitious but he does have a decent track record with this already. SpaceX is already $X/3 or $X/4 and is on the path to $X/10 with reusable rockets, and it's also more ambitious (rocket reuse, highest payload in the world by 2x, new capsule has powered rocket landing on any surface in the solar system).
In my mind he's earned some benefit of the doubt. Of course, there's still a ton to prove, and the idea sounds looney. You'd also have said that about SpaceX 10 years ago, though.
Can he make my car get 10X the mileage first? Or my wireless have 10X the range? Argumentum ad Musk doesn't seem like a particularly powerful way to make a point.
It's better to spend $100Bn on something that is tried and tested, than spending $50Bn on a risky proposition that could end up simply not working for whatever reason.
The golden gate bridge costed about 1.5 Billion dollars when it was built.
$6 Billion is something that I think many civil engineers would consider to be a dubious figure, even as a first estimate. I'm sure Musk is cognizant of this.
roads are also expensive and trucks (combined with weather) destroy them very fast. Hyperloop cylinder should be far cheaper than trucks in the long run. I think hyperloop would be useful for amazon to reduce delivery delays.
No, it's not.
There's also the Vactrain concept. Several variants were pursued from 1914 on, with Robert Salter of RAND writing a couple of proposals in the 1970s.
The idea's not new, has been seriously explored previously, and has been rejected or failed on technical, cost, political, practical, and economic grounds.
Some forms of local or highly-dedicated application, possibly. But for general use, no.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain
Salter, Robert M. (August 1972), The Very High Speed Transit System, RAND Corporation
https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P4874.html
Salter, Robert M. (February 1978), Trans-Planetary Subway Systems: A Burgeoning Capability, RAND Corporation
https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P6092.html
And, despite Musk's ability to prove me wrong, I'll stick with this projection for now.
Musk plan:
1. Announce Hyperloop to the world
2. Let someone else build it with tubes
3. Go to Mars
4. Use everything people have built - and went bankrupt - in the thin atmosphere on Mars with success without expensive tubes.
Now the SpaceX plans, the Mars plans and Hyperloop come together.
I wouldn't be surprised if his involvement in Solar City comes into the picture somehow either.
+100
You still need tubes on Mars for a vanilla air-levitation based Hyperloop. Martian fines would wreak havoc on your compression system.
The mag-lev systems could perhaps run on exposed pistes though.
Haven't really fast trains (sometimes maglev) inside evacuated tubes been proposed over and over again. Trying to work out what is new here.
For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain
Vacuums get much more costly as you get ever lower pressure. Hyperloop is an interesting cost / benefit between fast travel and lower construction and maintenance costs which is why the speeds are relatively low. The vehicle is also closer to an electric aircraft than an electric train. Note the big fan on the front: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop#/media/File:Hyperloo...
Another consideration is the faster you travel the straighter your path needs to be. 4,000+MPH paths require incredibly strait designs.
You realize that the fan concept, and the hovercraft concept both were cancelled?
The new hyperloop concept is just a fan-less capsule hovering on a MagLev track.
It’s just VacTrain over again, but more expensive and with lower capacities.
I don't think that qualifies as 'HyperLoop' even if they keep the name. It's like building an airplane except you use it underwater, sorry that's a sub.
That said, it suggests that the HyperLoop concept is not viable which is not that surprising IMO. However, it might also just be a case of lower R&D costs.
Well, obviously they want to keep the hype alive. So it’s understandable that they’d refuse to change the name.
Sadly, this also means we have a lot of people think this is something revolutionary, although I guess that’s intentional.
It’s really annoying when you consider how the US refused a proposal from japanese companies a few years ago to build a MagLev system between Boston, NY, Washington, with capacities around 10k people per hour.
"Cancelled" by who?
Hyperloop One is by far the most credible project, with HTT somewhere behind them in second. They haven't revealed anything about their compression systems or lack thereof. HTT has backed off air levitation, but they're still using Inductrack which is radically cheaper than conventional MagLev and hasn't been applied commercially yet.
Several of the competition teams (like the one in this article) have built MagLev sleds with nice brakes, but they're just trying to win a speed record competition. That has no bearing on the real Hyperloop. Other teams are focusing more on scalable tech and doing some pretty innovative work.
The lower per-vehicle capacities also aren't a negative if launch cadences can be kept high enough to maintain throughput. Smaller vehicles let the network operate in a more point-to-point manner instead of the stop-and-go crap that trains have done since day one.
The tube would not be evacuated. The train sucks the air in front of it and pushes it around and especially below, creating an air cushion just like an air hockey, further decreasing energy requirement for movement. That way you also get rid of the air evacuation cost.
The tube would be evacuated on earth. Which is why they need a tube in the first place:
Mars
According to Musk, Hyperloop would be useful on Mars as no tubes would be needed. This is because Mars' atmosphere is about 1% the density of the Earth's.[10][45][46] For the hyperloop concept to work on Earth, low-pressure tubes are required to reduce air resistance. However, if they were to be built on Mars, the lower air resistance would allow a hyperloop to be created with no tube, only a track.[47] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop
The important point is 0.01 ATM is a long way from high vacuum. Pumps can get down to that pressure very easily and individual Pumps can cover wide sections of track.
> a hyperloop to be created with no tube, only a track
Don't we call that a “train?”
The original design did not have a 'track' along the full route. Cars would more or less hop between different sections. On Mars that represents clear reliability issues, but the ability to avoid building load barring bridges over gorges could be a major cost savings.
Sure, but I think it's fair to call a train that is powered with electromagnetic pulses from stationary coils something different than a train that is powered by an onboard engine.
You just described a Maglev
Yes, although I think maglev trains use continuous linear motors while if I understood the original proposal correctly, the hyperloop would be more like a series of railguns evenly spaced along the route.
yep
"What is Hyperloop?
"Hyperloop is a conceptual transport system in which passengers are loaded into pods and fired through vacuum tubes at more than 600mph (1,000km/h)....
"Pumping the air out of the tubes reduces resistance, allowing high speeds to be achieved, potentially using less energy than a train."
The journalist is wrong/simplifying
See wikipedia [0]: "pressurized capsules ride on an air cushion driven by linear induction motors and air compressors"
You cut off that quote:
> incorporating reduced-pressure tubes in which pressurized capsules ride on an air cushion driven by linear induction motors and air compressors.
So the tubes are low pressure. Perhaps not vacuum, but in reality so called vacuum tube delivery systems aren't actually a vacuum either, that's why a more accurate name for them is Pneumatic Tube Systems.
I'm not sure what it is exactly you're trying to argue, above you made it sound like the system isn't low pressure at all.
The MIT prototype, and some of the other proposals, are really a maglev system. The original Hyperloop proposal called for aerodynamic support, with very tight tolerances, but that turns out to be iffy.
A maglev system needs a much more expensive track and/or a lot of energy from the vehicle to power the lift. This is the big problem with maglev - track cost. Maglev works fine; the Transrapid system in Shanghai has been running for 12 years now without serious problems. Top speed 300 MPH.
The Hyperloop is only interesting if it's far cheaper than a maglev. The Transrapid maglev system has far more capacity, can corner better, and can climb steeper grades.
Ah that explains all the maglev. I could have sworn that the original version rode on air and used its electric turbine for propulsion.
Anything good you've read that explains why they've abandoned that route?
The Berkeley team proposed aerodynamic suspension. There's an analysis with ANSYS which indicates that the design can be tweaked so that at no point does the air go supersonic.[1] But nobody seems to have published a stability analysis for the vehicle in the tube.
The "flying height" in the original proposal was to be about 1mm, so this thing has to be really well behaved aerodynamically. And the tube has to be really smooth. (Expansion joints, emergency escape hatches, pressure doors, and switches would be problems.) The whole point of the Hyperloop is that it's cheap because the tube is simple and dumb.
When you look at the MIT design [2] it's really a maglev monorail that operates in an evacuated tube. (Or outside of one, as they've demonstrated by sending down a rail). It doesn't have any of the fan propulsion or air cushion lift or tight tolerances from the original Hyperloop proposal.
[1] http://www.ansys-blog.com/20130925hyperloop/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiyPQU48Ef0
Same source: "The Hyperloop resembles a vactrain system but operates at approximately one millibar (100 Pa) of pressure." That would be a "medium vacuum" according to Wikipedia.
Both BBC quotes are in full agreement with the document at http://spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/hyperloop_alpha.pdf . Page 12, "100 Pascals", that's roughly 99.9% of the air removed.
The distinction between "very low pressure" and "vacuum" that is implied by the "hyperloop is not a vactrain" camp is a fantasy.
It is pretty relevant at the speeds being discussed.
For the design of the vehicle, yes, for the design of the infrastructure, not so much. Those 100 Pa are actually much lower than what previous vactrain proposals suggested. The only difference is that hyperloop is trying to do something useful with the unavoidable trace atmosphere instead of just overcoming it.
>Trying to work out what is new here.
As with most very large scale projects, PR is the game changer. Elon Musk's backing of the concept and investment into competitive solutions for a hyperloop has created publicity and driven interest. The hyperloop doesn't need to be an innovative technological advancement to benefit society. It just needs to be safe, fast, and cost effective.
The whitepaper was more than just usual PR: he got lots of input of top engineers in the travel space and made the design free. I don't remember the CEO of Boing or BMW or any other transportation company doing anything similar.
I know Elon Musk has a lot of goodwill around here, but is no one else cynical about the notion of a smart, ambitious automobile CEO coming up with some plausible-seeming science-fictional FUD to torpedo a high speed rail project that may very well compete with his interests?
The California HSR project hardly needs extra FUD, it's managing just fine on its own. And I'm not sure that it's really a competitor to owning a Tesla anyway -- people don't own cars in order to drive back and forth between LA and SF (or Modesto and Stockton), but for local commutes and errands.
I'd argue the two synergize. Electric cars have a limited range and while there's going to be plenty of charging stations that's still time and effort. Seems much more likely to me that his end-game is hyperloop for longer travel and then a self driving fleet of teslas in an on-demand service at each station.
You're suggesting Musk is so concerned with the success of Tesla that he is willing to torpedo alternate projects to drive up sales of his own product. If that is true why did he release the patents for those products into the public domain where someone could build a directly competing product?
Because electric cars need a critical mass in order for charging stations to reach a critical mass in order for electric cars to become ubiquitous.
> automobile CEO
I'm not sure he's any more "automobile" than he is "rocketry" or "PayPal".
Cynical theory #2: Elon thought that HSR projects in America needed a serious alternative ? How is that Californian HSR coming along ?
In his case I sort of doubt it since he doesn't seem to operate that way.
In any case Tesla sales are not going to be impacted much by rail.
>In any case Tesla sales are not going to be impacted much by rail.
Says who? I have light rail/uber/bus/cabs in my city and if I had HSR to neighboring regions I could just give up my car entirely with no anxiety.
The HL paper wasn't FUD to torpedo the HSR project, as I see it, it was leveraging existing skepticism (and also quite a bit of irrational opposition) with HSR to draw attention to HL. I don't think Musk cares one way or another about HSR, I think he cares about getting people to work on realizing HL so its ready for his Mars colonies, which is the real point of the technology.
Not many people are buying Teslas to primarily commute between SF and LA. Also, the HSR project is a disaster - it's incredibly expensive and it's slow.
Fun fact, New York City's subway started out with a similar system (between 1870 and 1873, called the Beach Pneumatic Transit): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beach_Pneumatic_Transit
& London's Crystal palace pneumatic railway predated that by 6 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Palace_pneumatic_railw...
Not a roaring success though!
Related: http://quora.com/Will-Hyperloop-One’s-Hyperloop-product-work...
I think the deal breaker is the high speeds, which require a much straighter track and much larger turn radius (410ft for a train, ~4.6 mi. for HL). That means a lot of tunneling through mountains and bulldozing expensive buildings. Land is the biggest expense in these projects.
I'm more hopeful of NASA's current work trying to reduce the sonic boom on airplanes. Flying high solves the air resistance problem, and going in a straight line isn't a problem up there.
The problem with flights is the time and trouble spent getting to and getting through airports so the flight time has to be long enough to justify the wasted time.
Hyperloop has same problem as flying with terminals being located away from the city. With Hyperloop, the issue is that would require expensive right-of-way or tunnels to bring it into the center of the city. Which is why the initial proposal had end in San Fernando Valley, an hour from LA.
High speed rail has the big advantage that it can use existing tracks, at slower speed, to reach the center city train stations.
The other problem with flights is that it’s incredibly carbon polluting, compared to trains.
I remember Elon Musk saying, at Hyperloop POD design weekend, Hyperloop is for short distance travel, because in short flights planes spends most of it's time in ascend or descend.
And for air travel, I think suborbital flights are definitely the future.
Exactly. HL is for 200-1000 km. distances. Suborbital is for intercontinental. By the way, getting to orbit takes an amount of fuel similar to flying USA to Australia. Once we stop throwing the planes away . . In between those distances is flying.
My answer to the question, is 'NO'.
I love trains, and use them whenever possible.
However, with static start and endpoints, and existing low-cost air infrastructure that is dynamically reroutable and equivalently fast, why spend the hundreds of billions of dollars to recreate something so fragile and limited?
Municipalities are wisely, generally in a 'wait and see' phase for the next decade, as autonomous personal transport guarantees to spur the redesign and redevelopment of entire cities and transportation infrastructure.
The autonomous transport you mention in the end is also an issue for Hyperloop directly. Highways are "easy mode" for autonomous cars, so automated services to move you between cities may be available substantially before they can necessarily move you within the city. Sure, they'll be a lot slower than the hyperloop, but they'll probably be a lot cheaper. Perhaps the hyperloop could win the deploy-to-production race with fully autonomous cars, but at this point, I bet it can't win the race with autonomous cross-city quasi-personal transport.
I wonder how the economics would work out for something the size of a bus, but with much better aerodynamics? (Perhaps with laminar flow boundary devices?)
Bay area's problems are best solved with having some kick ass public transport which afaik nobody is working on. IMO, that is a real game changer as opposed to hyperloop, electric cars :/ Most european countries have this already and they are such great places to visit and live.
For a more advanced concept with a working prototype, see [1]. The Applied Superconductivity Laboratory of Southwest Jiaotong University has a maglev train in a glass tube about two meters in diameter. Their goal is 3000 KPH.
Here's a technical paper on the maglev system used.[2] They discovered a problem with bumps in the magnetic field at rail joints, and figured out a way to fix that.
Maybe that's the future. If you're going to have a maglev system, you may as well go all the way and ditch the air turbine propulsion.
[1] http://english.swjtu.edu.cn/public/viewNews.aspx?ID=154 [2] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40064-016-1965-3
The German Transrapid gave very little advantage over regular trains and was bound to fail from the beginning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transrapid
The Hyperloop has the same problems (technology still developing, requires new, incompatible infrastructure) but it has one big advantage:
In contrast to the Transrapid, it can compete with planes regarding to speed.
What both technologies share: They require electricity, which is good. Electricity can be generated easily, possibly with thorium reactors in the future. It is hard (but possible, e.g. reduction of CO2 to methanol) to create combustible fuels for plane engines from electricity. Electric transport will likely overtake all kind of combustion engines.
I'm still wondering how a neighbourhood will react if you want to build two massive tubes through it. I can't imagine people will like those tubes.
Yes, you could put them underground but this will increase your costs.
Wasn't one of the ideas to put them through the existing highway infrastructure, elevated in the meridian?
Hyperlink turning radius (at top speed) is on the order of 100s of km, due to g-forces. You don't have much routing flexibility.
Following the kinks of a 100 kph expressway is likely not feasible.
Alternatives are to slow down massively as you approach / traverse urban areas, but this further increases trip time, changes acceleration and energy needs, and reduces the already abysmally low net passenger throughput.
Yeah, I'm still wondering for how long the Hyperloop can keep its high speed before it has to break again. This is already a big issue with high speed trains in Germany, so that some people say, why do we waste money on 300 kph trains which have to break after six minutes anyway. The energy needed to reach this speed is way too high and you don't save a lot of time either.
And with Hyperloop it will the same thing. It might work to go from LA to San Francisco without too many stops but Think about Boston to Washington DC.
Ah, but the Hyperloop will allow for small, individual cars of maybe 8 people (I'm guessing). This means that you get in the car based on destination and it uses switches so that there are no in-transit stops.
Following the kinks of a 100 kph expressway is likely not feasible.
Again, my understanding was that this was part of the original TDD (SF to LA) and they found that it was, indeed, feasible.
Sydney is just about to roll out a new (mostly) sub-terrainian train system [1] which would be an interesting demo for hyperloop tech, except for the large numbers of stops being incorporated into the trip. Despite this problem, the costings should be an example of how much it would cost to build new, tunnel based, infrastructure through similar areas (admittedly, Sydney is mostly soft sandstone).
Hyperloop is designed to be above-ground, which is significantly cheaper. Also, musk's original route plan has it stopping outside city-centers (presumably to keep the cost-estimate down)
I know it's a cynical point of view, but IMO these companies working on Hyperloop is akin to Hooli building inside out compression. I don't think it's going to work.
I just think it is scary going that speed in a tube. To be a terrorist all you would have to do is like stick a beer bottle in the tube and when a train comes a 700mph shit going to start happening
Just imagine the TSA line for the hyperloop.
You'll have to arrive days ahead of time.
Why? Wouldn't it be more like a train than a plane?
A terrorist would only be able to kill ~28 people at a time (1 pod), compared to >200 for a plane
Blowing up inside a tube would be a lot more expensive than blowing up a train on the tracks.
But then again, someone could just plant a bomb on the outside of the tube so I guess it's moot.
More to the point, you can't weaponize any fixed-track conveyance like a train/monorail/HL system like you can a plane.
I agree. A domestic train/pod based travel network doesn't have the same security implications as an airport.
Hasn't the TSA wanted to move into train stations as well? The TSA has shown that they aren't bounded by either what's sensible (ineffective rules) nor the will of the people (buying the backscatter machines without Congressional approval).
TSA has already tested forcing people to screen getting on/off trains and even the highway - seriously.
I wonder if people will start throwing tantrums once they are getting yanked from their cars just going down the highway to work or the store.
I want to point out you are trying to use logic to argue about the TSA
Why not create hyperloops for ultra-fast (yet relatively cheap in volume) trans-Atlantic merchandise shipping? Surely that would be a highly profitable project from the start?
> Why not create hyperloops for ultra-fast (yet relatively cheap in volume) trans-Atlantic merchandise shipping
1) There's very little merchandise that needs to be shipped trans-Atlantic that quickly.
2) Shipping containers are huge and heavy. Transporting a cargo-ship's worth requires a lot of energy, which translates into high expenses.
3) If shipping a cargo-ship's worth of containers, this will become an impossibly long train, nearing 70 miles long (around 18,000 containers per ship, and each container is about 20ft long)[1]
This has been the crux of the hyperloop since inception. The numbers really don't add up to making it more economical than any already existing alternative (even for transporting people). Shipping things via slow boat in a container is surprisingly not very expensive (given you've filled a container with goods, the goods value will greatly exceed your transport costs).
The original plan was to reuse existing infrastructure and have very few stops outside city center. For that scenario the number were holding up.
Now the question is what problem is this solving: you have cheap novel transport system for passenger between 2 points nobody is really interested in.
And that's the wall all the project around hyperloop are hitting. Either you need the government to step in to make it competitive for endpoint that people are currently interested in. Or you keep the original design, but you need the government to step in to ensure those uninteresting endpoints become interesting.
Hyperloop Technologies is focussing on using it for cargo, at least at first until "the infrastructure is built and the kinks are worked out": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11668414
why can't they just use existing shinkansen technology instead of reinventing the wheel with this pie in the sky nonsense?
Also, will it render autonomous trucks obsolete? [1]
How will the goods get from the source to the hyperloop stations? There's your answer.
I think you know you've got a winning idea when the esteemed commenters on HN all dismiss it out of hand.
I hope I can Hyperloop from NY to LA some day, and if we can leverage the current high investment traffic to get that to happen, I'm all for it.
> I think you know you've got a winning idea when the esteemed commenters on HN all dismiss it out of hand.
Please don't diss the community as a rhetorical device. There's no substance in that, and since you're also an esteemed commenter on HN, it's false.
I understand what you're getting at, and you make a fair point, but you really don't think there's a trend on HN where pretty much every idea is called obvious or terrible by some of the most popular comments on a given submission?
I was hoping to put some red ink on the trend and maybe curtail it slightly, for what that's worth.
> you really don't think there's a trend on HN
It's really hard to assess that objectively because the cognitive biases affecting such perceptions are so strong. Certainly we don't want HN to be that way and try to nudge it in more fruitful directions. But the way to fight an undesirable pattern on HN is not with another undesirable pattern.
I'll defer to you on identifying undesirable patterns from now on, sorry.
This technology has been around for over a century. Remove wheel friction and air pressure as the primary barriers to speed with the pinnacle being maglev in a full vacuum (something that was proposed for 5000mph trains crossing the ocean on the seabed at one point). The Hyperloop concept has relaxed these constraints by allowing for some atmosphere, which also greatly reduces the top speed, but fundamentally it's the same thing. And it's all perfectly possible given enough engineering.
The only real problem is the financial viability of such a project.
Air travel is already very streamlined and inexpensive for crossing big distances and has the advantage of not requiring the infrastructure and real estate that a train needs. Just the land rights alone will quickly balloon the cost into 100s of billions for any sizable project between two major cities that people want to travel between - and until that gets figured out, this will never happen.
The recent news around a startup raising 80M is meaningless because they will waste all that money chasing tech without realizing that they will never be able to successfully lay track anywhere.
> Air travel is already very streamlined and inexpensive for crossing big distances and has the advantage of not requiring the infrastructure and real estate that a train needs.
Hyperloop is very specifically aimed at medium distance routes. SF to LA, for example, where the plane has relatively little time cruising at altitude, where it can fly efficiently. If a plane is spending most it's time flying through denser aid, then it's not flying efficiently, and burns a lot of fuel on a per-mile basis relative to a longer flight. Hyperloop is specced to be more efficient than air travel at the distance it's proposed.
Efficient != cheaper.
The only thing that matters is what people are willing to pay, and that's not much for medium distance. And for the billions it costs to install the track in the first place, you can buy several airlines and operate them for years.
Cheaper != better.
It's important to look at the hyperloop in the context in which it was proposed. This is California and environmental aspects need to be taken into account. Airlines are a major source of CO2 and California wants a more environmentally friendly solution. There is a proposed high-speed rail project with a $10B initial estimate that's sure to at least double by the time the project is complete. The high-speed rail project is only high-speed compared to existing rail since the max speed will be around 200 mph.
It's into this environment that Musk proposed the Hyperloop. On paper, it's better than the high-speed rail in every way. Cheaper, faster and with less pollution. The "more airplanes" alternative may be cheaper and probably faster (with the TSA is doing its best keep air travel slow) but fails horribly on the CO2 emissions front.
> It's important to look at the hyperloop in the context in which it was proposed.
I don't think it really is, because the proposal was a comically unserious one designed to generate interest in the underlying technology. The route proposed in the paper as a supposed alternative to HSR which has termini outside of the immediate area of the population centers which it notionally connects would never be useful and will never get built.
OTOH, the interest the technology has drawn from that splashy initial PR campaign means enough people are working to develop it that that, if anything like it is viable, one or more commercially-viable variants will likely be ready for Musk's Mars colonies.
> On paper, it's better than the high-speed rail in every way. Cheaper, faster and with less pollution.
Its only "cheaper" because the proposal both made unrealistic assumptions about real estate costs and avoided much of the real estate costs by not terminating any place with useful transit access to the population centers at either terminus.
Unlike HSR, which not only terminates near the population centers, but includes as part of the same project improvements in the local connecting transit systems.
The proposed Hyperloop route was the high-tech version of a bridge-to-nowhere.
Its only "cheaper" because the proposal both made unrealistic assumptions about real estate costs and avoided much of the real estate costs by not terminating any place with useful transit access to the population centers at either terminus.
It's supposed to be an alternative to a short airplane flight, so the latter assumption isn't so bad.
> > Its only "cheaper" because the proposal both made unrealistic assumptions about real estate costs and avoided much of the real estate costs by not terminating any place with useful transit access to the population centers at either terminus.
> It's supposed to be an alternative to a short airplane flight, so the latter assumption isn't so bad.
It was pitched as an alternative to the actual HSR proposal, which both connects the population centers and includes connecting improvements on both ends to regional transit. So, yes, as an alternative to HSR, it was comically unserious.
(Even as an alternative to air travel, its still comically unserious for the same reason -- while the major airports are farther from the population centers than the proposed HSR termini are, they are much closer than the termini for hyperloop that were proposed, and do have significant transit connections into the population center and the surrounding region, so terminating in place without either that proximity to where people would want to come from and go and without including the cost of transit improvements to make the termini useful in the cost of the proposal is ludicrous.)
What does "better" mean?
Outside of governmental regulations, the market is what determines progress and there isn't much push by consumers for environmental impacts. They just want cheap and reliable transit. Price also wins over speed (and it's been show things like wifi have a greater effect on travel comfort than speed).
Unless you cut down the travel time significantly, it just doesn't matter. And at those speeds there are more engineering, operational and logistical costs that increase the ticket price so the value is reduced further. I also don't see how the engineering for a pioneering vactrain concept will somehow be cheaper than existing understood infrastructure.
Unless you can charge $50 and get from LA to SF in 30 mins while building the entire thing for just a few billion, this won't work.
> the market is what determines progress and there isn't much push by consumers for environmental impacts.
That's only because externalities haven't been included in the pricing. What about the $14t that it will take to relocate people displaced by rising oceans? The repair costs from the increasingly-common severe weather events? There are real costs of climate change that aren't being accounted for and will have to be paid by future generations.
Sure, by future generations. Do you think we're suddenly going to start pricing in the externalities of the whole world for train tickets?
The market won't do this, it's human behavior.
I think the difference maker here could be Elon Musk. He has the force of will to make believers out of all of the obstacles (technological and political) in the way.