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What it’s like to ship yourself overnight on Cabin’s sleep pod bus

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Re: What it’s like to ship yourself overnight on Cabin’s sleep pod bus

#21

Post by majewsky »

atemerev wrote: post #19
toomanybeersies wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do, if you fly first class. You just have to spend several thousand dollars on a ticket. Air New Zealand also offers skycouch ( https://www.airnewzealand.co.nz/economy-skycouch ), which is similar and cheaper, but really is only worth it if you're traveling with your partner or someone else you feel comfortable spooning for an entire flight.

Capsules are arranged differently — they can be stacked together vertically, and probably be offered at least for the price of business class seats. (If the weight is a great concern, and it is, and capsules are too heavy — hammocks can also be an option).

> hammocks

Hammocks with seatbelts!?

Re: What it’s like to ship yourself overnight on Cabin’s sleep pod bus

#22

Post by ubernostrum »

exDM69 wrote: post #11
fruitcake wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a sleeper train up the coast from Los Angeles to San Francisco: https://www.amtrak.com/coast-starlight-train

Someone in the comments mentioned that Amtrak's sleeper train travels daytime on the SF to LA stint and the terminals are some way away from the city. So the travel by night advantage is gone. Amtrak's sleeper cars are also quite expensive when I last looked at it as an option for getting from Colorado to San Francisco. The price compared to a seat on the train was 2..3x or more (but it includes food).

In the case of San Francisco it's a bit unfair to knock Amtrak for the location of the terminal, because it's not their fault, it's the fault of geography. San Francisco sits at the tip of a peninsula; for a train to stop in SF -- actually in SF and not Oakland or San Jose -- and also continue on to other locations would require the train to come up the peninsula, make its San Francisco stop, then turn around and go back down the peninsula in order to continue north (up the east side of the Bay) or south to other destinations.

Since that would be wasteful, Amtrak doesn't do it; instead they stop in San Jose (where you can switch to Caltrain to run up the peninsula into SF) and Oakland (where you can hop on BART or a ferry to cross the Bay into SF).

Re: What it’s like to ship yourself overnight on Cabin’s sleep pod bus

#23

Post by gargravarr »

majewsky wrote: post #21
atemerev wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capsules are arranged differently — they can be stacked together vertically, and probably be offered at least for the price of business class seats. (If the weight is a great concern, and it is, and capsules are too heavy — hammocks can also be an option).

> hammocks Hammocks with seatbelts!?

If they're anchored correctly, you'd probably be quite safe in a hammock during an emergency landing, in a relative sense - being suspended would absorb a lot of the energy. But agreed, it does seem pretty silly and probably wouldn't feel very safe!!

Re: What it’s like to ship yourself overnight on Cabin’s sleep pod bus

#24

Post by gargravarr »

atemerev wrote: post #19
toomanybeersies wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do, if you fly first class. You just have to spend several thousand dollars on a ticket. Air New Zealand also offers skycouch ( https://www.airnewzealand.co.nz/economy-skycouch ), which is similar and cheaper, but really is only worth it if you're traveling with your partner or someone else you feel comfortable spooning for an entire flight.

Capsules are arranged differently — they can be stacked together vertically, and probably be offered at least for the price of business class seats. (If the weight is a great concern, and it is, and capsules are too heavy — hammocks can also be an option).

I've thought about exactly this. Take a cue from Japanese honeycomb hotels and stack them three high in the place of the current seats - you could get equivalent passenger numbers on the plane, while giving people a safe way to stretch out on a long flight. Correctly designed, they would be safe, possibly safer than seats, during an emergency landing, although I can see getting out in a hurry being a major setback for implementation.

Re: What it’s like to ship yourself overnight on Cabin’s sleep pod bus

#25

Post by nkoren »

ubernostrum wrote: post #22
exDM69 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone in the comments mentioned that Amtrak's sleeper train travels daytime on the SF to LA stint and the terminals are some way away from the city. So the travel by night advantage is gone. Amtrak's sleeper cars are also quite expensive when I last looked at it as an option for getting from Colorado to San Francisco. The price compared to a seat on the train was 2..3x or more (but it includes food).

In the case of San Francisco it's a bit unfair to knock Amtrak for the location of the terminal, because it's not their fault, it's the fault of geography. San Francisco sits at the tip of a peninsula; for a train to stop in SF -- actually in SF and not Oakland or San Jose -- and also continue on to other locations would require the train to come up the peninsula, make its San Francisco stop, then turn around and go…

Engineering can easily trump Geography in this case: you could just tunnel under the Golden Gate and keep going north. This would be a utterly trivial compared to something like the Seikan Tunnel[1].

Just to be clear: not knocking Amtrak here. They're virtually budget-less, for the most part disallowed from owning or even maintaining their own infrastructure, so building new infrastructure would be completely beyond the Pale. Not knocking Amtrak at all -- it's America's collective ability to get its infrastructure act together that is just sad.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikan_Tunnel

Re: What it’s like to ship yourself overnight on Cabin’s sleep pod bus

#27

Post by throwanem »

anotheryou wrote: post #7

You americans don't have any trains, eh? :) Not exactly the ritz, but does the job: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=sleeping+train

Everywhere except the eastern seaboard from roughly DC north, we really don't - we have a freight rail system that occasionally hosts passenger trains, too.

It's super annoying. I hate to fly - well, that's not true; I hate the pervasive unpleasantness and inconvenience of US commercial air travel - and find trains much more congenial, but e.g. two days to get from where I live to where I grew up, plus two more days to get back, is more travel time than I can afford.

Unfortunately, while we have an activist billionaire interested in trying to improve this situation, he appears to prefer vacuum-tube moonshots, starting in the country's best-served and most infrastructurally complex transit market, to doing anything useful right now. So it goes.

Re: What it’s like to ship yourself overnight on Cabin’s sleep pod bus

#28

Post by throwanem »

gargravarr wrote: post #24
atemerev wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capsules are arranged differently — they can be stacked together vertically, and probably be offered at least for the price of business class seats. (If the weight is a great concern, and it is, and capsules are too heavy — hammocks can also be an option).

I've thought about exactly this. Take a cue from Japanese honeycomb hotels and stack them three high in the place of the current seats - you could get equivalent passenger numbers on the plane, while giving people a safe way to stretch out on a long flight. Correctly designed, they would be safe, possibly safer than seats, during an emergency landing, although I can see getting out in a hurry being a major setback fo…

You're describing something not wholly unakin to sleeping racks aboard a naval vessel, although no doubt much more comfortable. They are more space-efficient than beds, but less so than seats.

In order to stack hammocks or racks three-high, transversely to the fuselage axis, as I suspect you intend, you need both a large amount of vertical space - eight or nine feet, minimum - and roughly a second row's worth of space between racks, in order for people to get into and out of them. The former requirement can be reduced at the cost of squeezing people unpleasantly together and potentially dismaying claustrophobes; the latter requirement can be eliminated at the same cost, plus that of exclusively end-on entry to and exit from the rack, two-thirds of the time via a ladder.

At this point the only customers you've got left are those fit enough to be physically able to use your service, and also unconcerned about being cheek by jowl with at least two strangers - or, if the racks have sidewalls, unconcerned about spending however many hours in a box too small to sit up in. A lounge might alleviate that concern, but what about the others? And where will people put their shoes? (Do you wear yours into bed?)

The alternative is to compromise space efficiency for comfort, and a lot of airlines already do substantially that with A380s and individual sleeper pods.

Re: What it’s like to ship yourself overnight on Cabin’s sleep pod bus

#29

Post by sunir »

anotheryou wrote: post #7

You americans don't have any trains, eh? :) Not exactly the ritz, but does the job: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=sleeping+train

They have trains but all track is owned by freight train providers.

Here's a good overview why.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mbEfzuCLoAQ

Re: What it’s like to ship yourself overnight on Cabin’s sleep pod bus

#30

Post by InitialLastName »

dewey wrote: post #18
nkoren wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ridden trains in America? I've travelled almost every Amtrak route across the country. In a country that properly maintains its rail infrastructure, Cabin will definitely lose much of its competitive advantage. In America, however...

Only used trains in Europe so far hence why my impression of trains is probably a bit biased...

Not biased, you just have an impression of trains in systems that are well-funded as a public service. Come to America to experience the opposite.
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