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Is Hyperloop the future of travel?

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Is Hyperloop the future of travel?

#101

Post by stcredzero »

dragonwriter wrote: post #66
curun1r wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheaper != better. It's important to look at the hyperloop in the context in which it was proposed. This is California and environmental aspects need to be taken into account. Airlines are a major source of CO2 and California wants a more environmentally friendly solution. There is a proposed high-speed rail project with a $10B initial estimate that's sure to at least double by the time the project is complete. The h…

> It's important to look at the hyperloop in the context in which it was proposed. I don't think it really is, because the proposal was a comically unserious one designed to generate interest in the underlying technology. The route proposed in the paper as a supposed alternative to HSR which has termini outside of the immediate area of the population centers which it notionally connects would never be useful and will…

Its only "cheaper" because the proposal both made unrealistic assumptions about real estate costs and avoided much of the real estate costs by not terminating any place with useful transit access to the population centers at either terminus.

It's supposed to be an alternative to a short airplane flight, so the latter assumption isn't so bad.

Re: Is Hyperloop the future of travel?

#102

Post by freyir »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #5

> Except it is really, really expensive. > Mr Musk says the cost of building the route would be in the region of $6bn (£4.1bn), an estimate most agree is extremely conservative. I'm pretty sure that should say "extremely optimistic". Musk's estimate of $6bn is over 10x cheaper than the high speed train line cost for the same route

>> an estimate most agree is extremely conservative.

> I'm pretty sure that should say "extremely optimistic".

A conservative cost estimate is essentially an optimistic cost estimate. A stronger statement might be that it is unrealistic.

Re: Is Hyperloop the future of travel?

#103

Post by dragonwriter »

stcredzero wrote: post #101
dragonwriter wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's important to look at the hyperloop in the context in which it was proposed. I don't think it really is, because the proposal was a comically unserious one designed to generate interest in the underlying technology. The route proposed in the paper as a supposed alternative to HSR which has termini outside of the immediate area of the population centers which it notionally connects would never be useful and will…

Its only "cheaper" because the proposal both made unrealistic assumptions about real estate costs and avoided much of the real estate costs by not terminating any place with useful transit access to the population centers at either terminus. It's supposed to be an alternative to a short airplane flight, so the latter assumption isn't so bad.

> > Its only "cheaper" because the proposal both made unrealistic assumptions about real estate costs and avoided much of the real estate costs by not terminating any place with useful transit access to the population centers at either terminus.

> It's supposed to be an alternative to a short airplane flight, so the latter assumption isn't so bad.

It was pitched as an alternative to the actual HSR proposal, which both connects the population centers and includes connecting improvements on both ends to regional transit. So, yes, as an alternative to HSR, it was comically unserious.

(Even as an alternative to air travel, its still comically unserious for the same reason -- while the major airports are farther from the population centers than the proposed HSR termini are, they are much closer than the termini for hyperloop that were proposed, and do have significant transit connections into the population center and the surrounding region, so terminating in place without either that proximity to where people would want to come from and go and without including the cost of transit improvements to make the termini useful in the cost of the proposal is ludicrous.)

Re: Is Hyperloop the future of travel?

#104

Post by setpatchaddress »

bluthru wrote: post #78
shawabawa3 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Wouldn't it be more like a train than a plane? A terrorist would only be able to kill ~28 people at a time (1 pod), compared to >200 for a plane

Blowing up inside a tube would be a lot more expensive than blowing up a train on the tracks. But then again, someone could just plant a bomb on the outside of the tube so I guess it's moot.

More to the point, you can't weaponize any fixed-track conveyance like a train/monorail/HL system like you can a plane.

Re: Is Hyperloop the future of travel?

#105

Post by nandhp »

philwelch wrote: post #50

I know Elon Musk has a lot of goodwill around here, but is no one else cynical about the notion of a smart, ambitious automobile CEO coming up with some plausible-seeming science-fictional FUD to torpedo a high speed rail project that may very well compete with his interests?

> automobile CEO

I'm not sure he's any more "automobile" than he is "rocketry" or "PayPal".

Re: Is Hyperloop the future of travel?

#106

Post by adamt »

S4M wrote: post #79
pi-err wrote: post #67

There's a palpable excitement around Hyperloop and I can't wait to know if this will reshape our world or not. One of the largest problem I can see is not technical. The consensus is that a "standard" Hyperloop track (between 2 cities, 300 to 800km apart) would have a ~1,500 passengers/hour max capacity. High speed rail, such as Eurostar, would be around 10,000 passengers/hour. Even if Hyperloop managed to get built…

> High speed rail, such as Eurostar, would be around 10,000 passengers/hour. How is that remotely true? There is one Eurostar approximately every 30 minutes (looking at the departures from London [0], it seems that there are 32 Eurostar leaving London every day), and I seriously doubt one train can carry 5000 passengers (I would say about 500 passengers), so your approximation is completely off (even taking into acco…

From: http://www.eurostar.com/uk-en/about-eurostar/press-office/pr...

"Eurostar, the high-speed passenger rail service between the UK and mainland Europe, today reported the highest ever number of passengers transported on Eurostar in one quarter with over 2.8m customers travelling between the UK and the continent in Q2 2015. This represents a year-on-year increase of 3% in passengers compared with the same period last year (2.8m 2015: 2.7m 2014)."

2.8m in a quarter = 31,000 a day. Given the trains only run for just over 14 hours a day (London departure board for tomorrow) - then that's a mean passengers per hour over the quarter during operating hours over all days in the quarter of 2,214. Note this actual passengers not capacity. If you assumed say an average load ration of perhaps 70% (over all times of day all over the quarter) then the mean capacity per hour would be 3,100. Then at some times there are more trains than others, so the peak capacity per hour is probably at least 4,000.

Re: Is Hyperloop the future of travel?

#107

Post by dimino »

dang wrote: post #69
dimino wrote: post #35

I think you know you've got a winning idea when the esteemed commenters on HN all dismiss it out of hand. I hope I can Hyperloop from NY to LA some day, and if we can leverage the current high investment traffic to get that to happen, I'm all for it.

> I think you know you've got a winning idea when the esteemed commenters on HN all dismiss it out of hand. Please don't diss the community as a rhetorical device. There's no substance in that, and since you're also an esteemed commenter on HN, it's false.

I understand what you're getting at, and you make a fair point, but you really don't think there's a trend on HN where pretty much every idea is called obvious or terrible by some of the most popular comments on a given submission?

I was hoping to put some red ink on the trend and maybe curtail it slightly, for what that's worth.

Re: Is Hyperloop the future of travel?

#108

Post by misnome »

Chathamization wrote: post #19
shawabawa3 wrote: post #5

> Except it is really, really expensive. > Mr Musk says the cost of building the route would be in the region of $6bn (£4.1bn), an estimate most agree is extremely conservative. I'm pretty sure that should say "extremely optimistic". Musk's estimate of $6bn is over 10x cheaper than the high speed train line cost for the same route

If I remember right, part of the reason why Musk estimated that the hyperloop would be so cheap was that he assumed it could be built on highway meridians for free, and the tracks were to end end far outside the city centers. It also had a fraction of passenger capacity and number of stations as high speed rail. It seems likely that for the same amount of service as high speed rail, the hyperloop would be a lot more…

Don't forget that the cost estimate included drilling holes in mountains for magically minature amounts of money than current technology provides.

Re: Is Hyperloop the future of travel?

#109

Post by azurezyq »

ycitm wrote: post #97
S4M wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> High speed rail, such as Eurostar, would be around 10,000 passengers/hour. How is that remotely true? There is one Eurostar approximately every 30 minutes (looking at the departures from London [0], it seems that there are 32 Eurostar leaving London every day), and I seriously doubt one train can carry 5000 passengers (I would say about 500 passengers), so your approximation is completely off (even taking into acco…

Perhaps Tōkaidō Shinkansen would be a better example? 331 trains / day, 391 thousand passengers / day according to: http://english.jr-central.co.jp/company/ir/annualreport/_pdf... (pdf)

And Beijing-Shanghai highspeed railway? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing%E2%80%93Shanghai_High-... 100M rides/year in 2014, similar to the number of Shinkansen, far larger than eurostar.

Re: Is Hyperloop the future of travel?

#110

Post by Inthenameofmine »

ubernostrum wrote: post #89
elchief wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like how he's lowering the price of rocketry by 90%? His last bid was 40% less than United Launch

SpaceX received uncounted billions' of dollars worth of R&D for free thanks to the existence of government-funded space programs, which already solved many of the difficult fundamental problems in the field of rocketry so SpaceX wouldn't have to. And while it's neat to watch the stuff they do, there's very little SpaceX is doing that's revolutionary as opposed to evolutionary. So of course now SpaceX can come in and…

I wouldn't be so sure on that. The R&D transfer and ready human capital was definitely profound in SpaceX's case, but if it was that incremental, why didn't NASA or anybody else do it before?

I think almost the sae can be said for Hyperloop. There's no fundamentally new technology that needs to be engineered for it to work. Maglevs are common in many countries, evacuated tubs aren't complicated.

All that said, the US seems to be the wrong place to start Hyperloop. Regulation and land property will most likely be the biggest hurdle, not technology, especially in California. Hyperloop seems to me like a perfect project in China though, in regard to property rights, regulation, city planning, human capital in the high speed train sector, as well as crazy supply side economics.

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