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Hyperloop One to shut down

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Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roads safe for cycling is half the battle. The other half is around zoning and mixing residential with businesses.

Legalize biking on the sidewalk nationwide. I don’t want to bike on the road for any reason. Bikers have far far lower chances of hurting pedestrians than cars do of bikers.

Sidewalks are in fact, more dangerous. Tree roots, unseen level changes, pets, not to mention pedestrians - it's tolerable if you're a kid going 3-7 mph with training wheels but for everyone else hitting on of those obstructions are a decent cycling speed of 12-15mph could cause you to flip.

Not to mention cars won't see you so they will turn into or pull out of driveways, or fail to stop for you as you're trying to cross a road.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legalize biking on the sidewalk nationwide. I don’t want to bike on the road for any reason. Bikers have far far lower chances of hurting pedestrians than cars do of bikers.

As a bicyclist: no. The problem is the disparity of speed between travelers, same as for a highway. Pedestrians appear suddenly or don't know about your sudden appearance or intended motions, and pain or injury results.

As another bicyclist: yes. That's how we do it here in Tokyo. Almost no one rides on the roads, despite the painted bike lanes that are always ignored by cars and delivery trucks using them as parking spaces.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#323
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying that something is an average cost does not mean everything costs that much. For example, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38234972 you said you have a 2001 Chevy Silverado short bed regular cab 4x4 truck. That's going to have higher fuel costs than a Honda Civic. Even if you leave out depreciation - and low-mileage vehicles have a higher resale value than high-mileage ones so I don't think you can do th…

This is supposed to be a forum where people think a little... You extrapolated depreciation due to age on a new car (which isn't anywhere near the same later), full coverage insurance that seems grossly over priced anyway (that people change to lower coverage as a car becomes worth less), taxes and fees that are not as high by the time a car is older, and you added $12000 of finance charges on a $20000 car. It does n…

> due to age on a new car

As I wrote, I chose a used car.

As I wrote, I have no idea what expenses are needed to get a car to 200K miles, and it hardly matters for this discussion, does it?, as very few people do that.

The point of showing the breakdown was to highlight that maintenance for the car you showed was more than the fuel cost, which is why your original estimate, based only on fuel cost, did not reflect the true price of driving a car that distance.

I do know that it's unwise to consider only gas money as the cost to get somewhere. There's a reason GSA mileage reimbursement is $0.67/mile and California's is $0.625 /mile.

You show your math for why your numbers are correct.

And remember, you can't look at the cost for a car which reached 200K miles and assume that's the normal cost, because it excludes all Hondas which were scrapped before then, eg, because any damage or repairs needed were not economically worthwhile.

> I usually take my Chevy Volt.

You have at least two cars, neither of which is a Honda Civic? Did you pick a Civic because you knew it was an outlier of some sort?

You have plenty of money - enough to afford at least two cars. Of course a free high-speed rail trip would do little to change your mind; you aren't affected by costs in the several hundred dollar range.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was in Tokyo in the 1980s, there were no street signs. The taxi drivers just knew where to go. A tip I received was to always carry a brochure of your hotel. Hop in cab, show the driver the brochure, "Hai" and off we went!

There's no street signs here in Tokyo because almost none of the roads have names; only the really huge boulevards do, and most people probably don't even know those names. I'm not sure how it was in the 80s, but these days people just use Google Maps to navigate to wherever they're going.

During the occupation after the war, the US put up street signs. After the occupation, the Japanese took them down.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#325
post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and we have generations of people trained to think that walking further than a hundred feet is an extreme workout to be avoided and that transit systems are full of criminals. It seems like that culture is headed for a cliff, however, as the cost of cars continues to increase (the average sale last year was a year’s median pay!), budgets for road infrastructure become tighter, and climate change becomes harder t…

The people of Singapore pay a minimum of 100K for the privilege of owning a bottom tier car and the demand for cars there is overwhelming and insatiable, despite the world class and extremely clean mass transit systems. The reality is that cars are freedom and still superior from a continence and comfort standpoint. Americans are insanely privileged to have cheap, powerful cars.

> The reality is that cars are freedom

You are not allowed to run a small business out of your house in US, so i dont think you have any freedom.

Private jets are freedom. like actual freedom.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is supposed to be a forum where people think a little... You extrapolated depreciation due to age on a new car (which isn't anywhere near the same later), full coverage insurance that seems grossly over priced anyway (that people change to lower coverage as a car becomes worth less), taxes and fees that are not as high by the time a car is older, and you added $12000 of finance charges on a $20000 car. It does n…

It’s the same bad math that says it costs $250k to raise a kid so the family down the street with five kids must have access to $1.25 million.

Yes, that's why cherry-picking a Honda Civic reaching 200K miles is an outlier which does not provide insight on the average vehicle operating cost per mile.

It's also bad math to say the only cost to driving 383 miles is the fuel.

If you would believe talldatethrow's math, you should get a job driving your car for a CA state job. You would get reimbursed $0.625 /mile for something which costs you no more than $100/383 miles = $0.26/mile.

The extra $0.37/mile at 30 mph is an extra $10/hour of income.

I don't think the government is really that generous, do you?

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#327

The original Hyperloop paper had a lot of gaps. How does the thing move in low speed until it's fast enough to have aerodynamic lift? Does it use wheels? I don't think the paper talked about it. You do need a good business model and a solid technical foundation. Hyperloop needs a lot of technical work still. Arguably this was also true of SpaceX in the early days, but Elon (and the team he assembled) could execute be…

> The Boring Company will get to it eventually, because something like Hyperloop is required for the Mars colony What does The Boring Company have to do with Hyperloop? I am not an expert, but seems like building a Maglev track on Mars with its low-pressure atmosphere would be far easier than on Earth. Taking into consideration how far we are from the first manned flight to Mars, this sounds more like wishful thinkin…

Boring Company lists Hyperloop as one of their projects (not related to Hyperloop One) - https://www.boringcompany.com/projects

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#328

The original Hyperloop paper had a lot of gaps. How does the thing move in low speed until it's fast enough to have aerodynamic lift? Does it use wheels? I don't think the paper talked about it. You do need a good business model and a solid technical foundation. Hyperloop needs a lot of technical work still. Arguably this was also true of SpaceX in the early days, but Elon (and the team he assembled) could execute be…

It's not worth working on - the problems with it are insurmountable at any reasonable cost and verifying that could have been worked out just with engineering analysis and simulations... It's a fun, futuristic idea, but just falls down when you start to think about the problems. Sure, they could be solved if we were willing to spend hundreds of times as much per kilometer as we do for high-speed rail (which is alread…

In countries with functioning permitting systems, HSR planning and construction works well. Famously, SNCF said Morocco is less dysfunctional than California.

In the USA, with NEPA - and especially California which also has CEQA - the permitting for any kind of project is super expensive. A lot of design decisions in the Hyperloop paper are for avoiding CEQA constraints.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#329

I think we should accept that, at least in the case of the US, most future transit infrastructure will be built on existing roads. Every other options is an order of magnitude more expensive. Plus, we have so many roads! If we didn't use them it the most inefficient way possible - cramming them full of giants cars for single people who also happen to be terrible pilots - we could get a ton of bandwidth out of them. A…

Unless there is a sudden energy price spike, then things might become different fast.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roads safe for cycling is half the battle. The other half is around zoning and mixing residential with businesses.

Legalize biking on the sidewalk nationwide. I don’t want to bike on the road for any reason. Bikers have far far lower chances of hurting pedestrians than cars do of bikers.

Maybe not in urban places, but it absolutely makes no sense that it's not legal in my rural area to bike down (some) trails/sidewalks that run along roads. Usually if you bike down them it's rare to see another person even on them, and and motorists surely aren't on the lookout for bikers like they should be/are in some cities.

They even put a bike lane in on the road at my parent's house. Again, there's a perfectly usable trail/sidewalk right alongside the road that's far, far from busy, and the bike lane is also used for parking. I'm not going to swerve in and out of the road when there's a place that's 100% safe to bike down.

Hell, for that matter - laws be damned, I bike down the left side of the road here. I want to see a car that's not paying attention to me coming, where I'll at least have a chance to react. Again, it's not like a city where you're sometimes in the flow of traffic. The cars are going 40mph when I'm going maybe 15mph?

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