Does anyone know why they are building it in a seemingly less populated/ prosperous province?
Since the capacity of a Hyperloop system is close to zero (less than 1000 passengers per hour, much less than a lane of highway and two orders of magnitude less than an ordinary railroad), it doesn't really matter where you put it.
Care to back up your statement with sources or data ?
I see these claims every now and then and never have seen a decent justification. Would be great to have that to have a more informed debate ...
Very cool to see this technology progress. Will be interesting to track. China certainly has shown that it both can invest in and build public infrastructure at an amazing scale and pace. It's a little concerning that this isn't really a sale - it's a joint venture. From the article: "HyperloopTT will form a joint venture with the Tongren authorities, according to the Guizhou provincial government, though the company…
China probably sees it as being in their long-term interest to prop up American hyperloop companies so that Americans don't come to their senses and build trains. The longer we're distracted by hyperloops, on-demand taxi services, and self-driving cars the deeper our technological hole becomes.
Since the capacity of a Hyperloop system is close to zero (less than 1000 passengers per hour, much less than a lane of highway and two orders of magnitude less than an ordinary railroad), it doesn't really matter where you put it.
Should we be comparing it to trains or planes though?
Of course, it's just a different form of public transportation. It needs to be competitive on a cost per passenger per hour basis in order to be viable.
Since the capacity of a Hyperloop system is close to zero (less than 1000 passengers per hour, much less than a lane of highway and two orders of magnitude less than an ordinary railroad), it doesn't really matter where you put it.
Care to back up your statement with sources or data ? I see these claims every now and then and never have seen a decent justification. Would be great to have that to have a more informed debate ...
The 2013 Hyperloop paper claims a capacity of 840 pax/hour under some pretty optimistic assumptions. I'm willing to grant them all these assumptions because this number is tiny and pathetic. A highway has a nominal capacity of 1800 vehicles per hour at a 2-second following distance, which works out to a capacity of at least 1800 people/hour and at most, in a dedicated bus lane, something more like 20000 per hour. Railroad capacity is much higher. Even bad railroads like UK National Rail have demonstrated over 200k pax/hour into a single station.
Should we be comparing it to trains or planes though?
Did you mean should we compare it to airports? LAX will land 54 aircraft in the 60 minutes starting now, and I assure you that amounts to rather more than 1000 pax/hour.
LAX is 3,500 acres and only provides 1/2 the land area need for a flight. Worse you can't build anything tall near by and need all that land close to cities, making high speed trains a surprisingly good trade-off.
Hacker News has assured me repeatedly that this is an imaginary technology that cannot possibly work, so I assume this must be fake news.
I think something similar to the original Hyperloop proposal can work, but I'm not going to actually believe it until I see at least one real world implementation.
Very cool to see this technology progress. Will be interesting to track. China certainly has shown that it both can invest in and build public infrastructure at an amazing scale and pace. It's a little concerning that this isn't really a sale - it's a joint venture. From the article: "HyperloopTT will form a joint venture with the Tongren authorities, according to the Guizhou provincial government, though the company…
China probably sees it as being in their long-term interest to prop up American hyperloop companies so that Americans don't come to their senses and build trains. The longer we're distracted by hyperloops, on-demand taxi services, and self-driving cars the deeper our technological hole becomes.
>so that Americans don't come to their senses and build trains
And how is that working out for California? Rail is by far the single most expensive form of transportation on a per-passenger basis.