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Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

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Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amen. If you want a fast train in 2017, hire the people who have been winning in that department since 1964.

Also, the リニア will cut travel time between Tokyo and Nagoya from about 100 minutes to 40 minutes, which is a big difference for people who do business between those two regions.

Its absolutely nuts. With all the housing pricing problems we have in the US its crazy to me that we don't have HSR popping up everywhere to ease restrictions on commute.

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tunnels are very, very expensive.

e.g. https://pedestrianobservations.com/2016/12/15/second-avenue-... > The total length of the project, from 96th Street and 2nd Avenue to 125th Street and Lexington, is about 2.7 km. At $2.2 billion per km, this sets a new world record for subway construction costs, breaking that of the first phase of the same line, which only cost $1.7 billion per km.

I read one article that blamed the high cost of modern subways primarily on the hyper-elaborate modern subway stations and the actual tunnels are a small component of the cost.

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#503
post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's insane. If you didn't have to switch trains for Philly (30th St) to NYC, an avg ride could take a bit than 100 min if there are only around 7 stops the entire way (normal stops would make the ride like 2 hours). Reducing those numbers by more than half would be incredible. Even if this is just a pipe dream and there isn't a direct train between the two cities right now anyway.

Stops and waiting are by far the biggest slowdown in train travel. In a moderately dense area, if you could magically put enough trains on the tracks to offer all important connections as high frequency point to point connections, you would get enormous improvements in travel time even at moderate cruise speed. Tracks are empty almost all the time because trains cannot evade and have very low deceleration, they have…

I think you can get most of the benefits just from a well designed timetable. I get the impression that's mostly how they make it work so well in Japan.

There tend to be at least local and express services on almost all routes, and often multiple tiers of express. Another common pattern I've seen is having several commuter services which each run stopping for a different section of the route, and then run express to the central stations. This gives passengers the benefits of swapping between local and express services, without them loosing time changing trains.

Of course, all of this is a lot easier when you already have the passenger numbers to support it.

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#504
post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lateral acceleration is much more annoying to deal with than longitudinal or vertical, even if it's constant. Perhaps they could tilt in bends to convert some of that lateral to vertical?

Banked corners are a thing. The problem is that when you have delays and vehicles operating at low speeds the track is still banked

Hence tilting - high speed vehicles tilt, low speed vehicles don't, and everything works out ok.

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#505
post #463
post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also a good time to introduce the concept of survivorship bias. There's a fair chance that it was mostly luck, not ability, that it ultimately succeeded.

I used to think that about Musk, but his successes seem to be piling up. Specifically: Paypal, Tesla, and Space-X all seem to be rather successful.

SolarCity failed (and he had to buy it back himself with Tesla), Paypal was a success but it wasn't his, his part was x.com which was kind of a failure on its goal and had to sell (just because it sold for a lot of money doesn't mean it succeeded, in the terms of "success" we're discussing in this thread).

Tesla has yet to make any money and fails to meet its deadline, and it's yet to see how it will far now that the car giants are turning to EV (especially with many countries setting deadline in 2016 and 2017 about the end of non EV cars, which jolted all the big ones into joining).

Space-X is for me his one real success so far, it leaned on a lot of public funding to do it so it's really not the kind of things usual for HN, but they said they would re-use when everyone else said "can't be done" or "not worth it", and they're getting there.

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, the リニア will cut travel time between Tokyo and Nagoya from about 100 minutes to 40 minutes, which is a big difference for people who do business between those two regions.

Its absolutely nuts. With all the housing pricing problems we have in the US its crazy to me that we don't have HSR popping up everywhere to ease restrictions on commute.

Highways are paid for w/taxes. Rail gets no subsidy. Sad really.

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#507
post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stops and waiting are by far the biggest slowdown in train travel. In a moderately dense area, if you could magically put enough trains on the tracks to offer all important connections as high frequency point to point connections, you would get enormous improvements in travel time even at moderate cruise speed. Tracks are empty almost all the time because trains cannot evade and have very low deceleration, they have…

I think you can get most of the benefits just from a well designed timetable. I get the impression that's mostly how they make it work so well in Japan. There tend to be at least local and express services on almost all routes, and often multiple tiers of express. Another common pattern I've seen is having several commuter services which each run stopping for a different section of the route, and then run express to…

NJ transit does do the minimum of express for the farther out places from NYC. Nothing as in-depth as you're explaining. But as you said. The numbers wouldn't support making things too much more complex. That's why my original post mentioned a limit or 7 stops between philly and NYC as an example of a semi-express train. Though a hypothetical express train would probably actually be 5 stops max.

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's insane. If you didn't have to switch trains for Philly (30th St) to NYC, an avg ride could take a bit than 100 min if there are only around 7 stops the entire way (normal stops would make the ride like 2 hours). Reducing those numbers by more than half would be incredible. Even if this is just a pipe dream and there isn't a direct train between the two cities right now anyway.

I think straight line distance of NYC -> DC is a little further than Tokyo -> Nagoya, but even the current Nozomi Express Shinkansen would be a huge improvement over Amtrak.

Oh wow didn't realize the distance.

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#509
post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, the Dunning-Kruger thing applies equally well to Tesla and SpaceX. He had no experience in either field before starting those companies. It's just that he has, in spite of all probability, succeeded and so you see them in a different light.

Didn't he actually design the first rocket himself? He's quite smart. I don't think "industry experience" counts for much. By the way you're using "Dunning-Kruger," it's unclear that you actually know what it means...

> Didn't he actually design the first rocket himself?

I'm pretty sure there were core employees (not Musk) working on every part of the rocket from the beginning. This is documented in the Vance biography, IIRC.

Re: Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’

#510
post #240
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot compare D.C to Boston with SF to LAX. The east coast has much denser population so that you need more tunnels. LAX to SF HSR would not cost $151bn. Start and end are expensive but the part in the middle is "relatively" cheap.

Right, for comparison's sake I chopped off $51 billion bucks from the Northeast Corridor projection in the interest of balancing out the two. Just because I felt like doing some more Google-fu, I found an article in the LA Times[0] that says a California HSR/bullet-train project is going to overshoot it's original budget (and deadline) of $68 billion. There's a lot of info out there about this project, and it's poten…

> If we are going to hold Elon to his "we can do it for 1/8th the cost" blurb, then we are giving him like $8.5 billion to use for his SF/LA Hyperloop. Still, that doesn't sound unreasonable, right

I think boring company claimed it can bring down costs to 100 million dollars per mile (how? Just reduce tunnel size! SMH. Plus 100 million dollar a mile isn't too far from prices of current tunnels). Sf to la is 380 miles. That's 38 billion dollars just for the tunnel?

I think hyperloop is certainly feasible, if you spend hundreds of billions in it, the problems can be dealt with costly engineering.

If you think hsr will cost 150 billion, a maglev will be costlier, tunnels are extremely costly to build, but building a maglev in a vacuum tunnel will cost only 6 billion? How will cost savings of an order of magnitude happen?

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