Hyperloop: Pipes of Fancy

It seems to me that hyperloop is high speed rail with the addition of a vacuum, which gets you higher speed. The additional requirement of a giant vacuum tube should make the system cost more, not less.

Personally, I’m rooting for Elon Musk to figure out how to make tunnels cheaply with the Boring Company, so we can take that tech and use it to build a bunch of subways. Traffic within urban areas and suburbs is a much bigger societal issue than intercity travel anyway. Subways are a proven solution, but somehow we lost the ability to dig tunnels economically so we stopped building them.

- Hyperloop is a vactrain, a century old idea, and to this day, despite numerous attempts, nothing came close to a working prototype, let alone something production-ready.

- By contrast, high-speed trains carries millions of passengers every day in many parts of the world. They are safe, comfortable, and commercially viable. And for hyperloop-like distances (500-1000km), you can expect a 3h trip. It is not 40 minutes, but considering that high speed trains typically go downtown to downtown and usually don't require you to show up more than a few minutes in advance, it is often the fastest way to go in practice. Hyperloop doesn't bring much to the table compared to high speed trains.

- The individual pods are tiny compared to a train. And because of the high speeds involved, they certainly require a lot of spacing to stay safe, it means low capacities.

- There is a long list of technical challenges, most of them require engineering feats that have never been done on a large scale. It is an Apollo-scale experimental project presented as a commercial venture.

- Progress so far has been laughable, none of the hard problems have been solved. What about thermal expansion, the ability to maintain a vacuum while allowing people in and out, safety systems, the civil engineering required... The experimental pods are scaled down with no space for passengers. They can go fast, which is nice, but at 460 km/h they are still below conventional full scale high-speed train records.

Not really a technical challenge but it still ticks me off:

- Hyperloop is championed by Elon Musk, but he actually has very little involvement in it. He owns none of the hyperloop companies, it is all "open-source", "community", etc.. Basically, besides being a sponsor for "competitions", it is all talk.

I know that Elon Musk is far from stupid, he is a world-class businessman and a competent engineer. I can't believe he really sees Hyperloop as something viable.

So for me it just a daring publicity stunt (a borderline scam IMHO), something that Elon Musk is also known to be good at. After all, the story says that SpaceX started as a publicity stunt. He wanted to buy a Russian ICBM, repurposed to plant something on Mars. It didn't work, and the fact that he couldn't do it gave him the idea that he could be a market for a rocket company.

If you look at Hyperloop, it is essentially a battery powered electric car running inside a tunnel. And guess what, he makes battery powered electric cars, and now tunnels. I have a few doubts about Boring, but at least, it is concrete, and there is always a need for tunnels, even if it is just to dig sewer pipes.

From the article: "If the idea is viable and the people behind it are competent, it should have attracted private investment, as there should be a potential to make profit selling the technology. After all, the proposal has been around for 23 years."

High speed rail on a large scale is really something that has to come from the government. While there are small private HSR projects (e.x. Brightline, covering some 60 miles of the Florida coast), the big successes have all been governmental, and that shouldn't be surprising.

The uncomfortable part of HSR, of course, is that no matter how perfect your government is, it's going to involve bulldozing some people's homes, conflicting with other government projects, and interfering with nature. Don't get me wrong, I'm not part of team "screw the law, bulldoze straight lines between cities, people and nature be damned". But there do need to be sacrifices made. And a strong, coordinated government can pass the laws and write the checks to make that happen.

The interesting thing with HSR is that it is not about the technology. The TGV was operating at 300 km/h nearly 50 years ago, and that's the speed that most of the network operates at today. It's not about the safety (the TGV has never had a fatal accident in normal service) or even the cost (the TGV is also profitable!)

It's about the land. A fairly small strip of land in a straight line. My hope is that as people realize this, we'll do what has to be done and tear down a few villages in order to save the planet. But that's politically unpalatable, so instead we have Gadgetbahnen.