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Is Hyperloop the future of travel?

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Is Hyperloop the future of travel?

#141

Post by tehabe »

dredmorbius wrote: post #124
david927 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't one of the ideas to put them through the existing highway infrastructure, elevated in the meridian?

Hyperlink turning radius (at top speed) is on the order of 100s of km, due to g-forces. You don't have much routing flexibility. Following the kinks of a 100 kph expressway is likely not feasible. Alternatives are to slow down massively as you approach / traverse urban areas, but this further increases trip time, changes acceleration and energy needs, and reduces the already abysmally low net passenger throughput.

Yeah, I'm still wondering for how long the Hyperloop can keep its high speed before it has to break again. This is already a big issue with high speed trains in Germany, so that some people say, why do we waste money on 300 kph trains which have to break after six minutes anyway. The energy needed to reach this speed is way too high and you don't save a lot of time either.

And with Hyperloop it will the same thing. It might work to go from LA to San Francisco without too many stops but Think about Boston to Washington DC.

Re: Is Hyperloop the future of travel?

#142

Post by mulmen »

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?

You're suggesting Musk is so concerned with the success of Tesla that he is willing to torpedo alternate projects to drive up sales of his own product. If that is true why did he release the patents for those products into the public domain where someone could build a directly competing product?

Re: Is Hyperloop the future of travel?

#143

Post by krschultz »

bobcostas55 wrote: post #49
tptacek wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're saying that the HSR project is over budget, you're right, but you're not helping the Hyperloop argument. The point is that if the HSR people can't get something done for $X, it's unlikely that Musk can do something even more ambitious for $X/10.

Isn't that exactly what SpaceX did?

SpaceX entered a market with few competitors, none of which are defacto government agencies. The civil engineering market is much more competitive. Expecting the same level of cost reduction just by having better operational efficiency is naive.

Thus the argument needs to be that Hyperloop is intrinsically cheaper, whether built by Musk's company or any random civil engineering company. I don't see any reason why that is the case, Hyperloop looks a lot more complicated than HSR to me.

Re: Is Hyperloop the future of travel?

#144

Post by Dylan16807 »

tptacek wrote: post #93
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

Why doesn't my laptop battery last 10X longer? Why doesn't my favorite IPA has 1/10th the calories? Can't Elon Musk fix those things first?

That's pretty unfair. He's not making a rocket that's magically 10x lighter, he's making it cheaper. And he is helping make batteries cheaper.

Re: Is Hyperloop the future of travel?

#145

Post by ebiester »

branchless wrote: post #131
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…

I wonder would this reshape our world or just make it a little different. I don't want to get from Montreal to NY in 40 minutes. Or 10. I want to be able to live somewhere where I do not have to commute because tech has solved remote working. I don't want them to make me travel further for the same time. For example were they to build radial hyperloop around NY it's just more of the same drudgery. Only now bigger.

...but how do we get to remote working without crushing isolation? Can tech solve that problem?

Can tech solve the problem of getting a coffee with a couple of coworkers and feeling connected to them in a way that helps the technical argument two months from now?

Can tech solve the "Do I have my coworker's undivided attention or are they multitasking and ignoring me" problem?

Can tech solve the "I'm in the room with my boss and he can't ignore that I'm a human being" problem?

We are social creatures. A slack conversation isn't the same, and I don't think a VR conversation will be the same, especially with further distances. Do we say that everyone must live within 1,000 miles?

Re: Is Hyperloop the future of travel?

#146

Post by rqebmm »

mulmen wrote: post #142
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?

You're suggesting Musk is so concerned with the success of Tesla that he is willing to torpedo alternate projects to drive up sales of his own product. If that is true why did he release the patents for those products into the public domain where someone could build a directly competing product?

Because electric cars need a critical mass in order for charging stations to reach a critical mass in order for electric cars to become ubiquitous.

Re: Is Hyperloop the future of travel?

#147

Post by deftnerd »

_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #136
dredmorbius wrote: post #126

No, it's not. There's also the Vactrain concept. Several variants were pursued from 1914 on, with Robert Salter of RAND writing a couple of proposals in the 1970s. The idea's not new, has been seriously explored previously, and has been rejected or failed on technical, cost, political, practical, and economic grounds. Some forms of local or highly-dedicated application, possibly . But for general use, no. https://en.…

Musk plan: 1. Announce Hyperloop to the world 2. Let someone else build it with tubes 3. Go to Mars 4. Use everything people have built - and went bankrupt - in the thin atmosphere on Mars with success without expensive tubes. Now the SpaceX plans, the Mars plans and Hyperloop come together.

I wouldn't be surprised if his involvement in Solar City comes into the picture somehow either.

Re: Is Hyperloop the future of travel?

#148

Post by vladd »

samcheng wrote: post #128
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…

The world's busiest high-speed rail is the Japanese Shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka. It was doing 23,000 passengers per hour way back in 1992. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkansen The newest trains have capacity for 1323 seated passengers each, plus plenty of room for standing passengers, and run 13 times an hour in each direction. These things do regularly fill to capacity, too; I've ridden them standing in t…

Subway line 14 in Paris is fully automated, has trains arriving every 85 seconds during peak hours, and has an hourly capacity of 30'000 - 40'000 seats/hour.

https://www.systra.com/IMG/pdf/metro_meteor_en-3.pdf

Re: Is Hyperloop the future of travel?

#149

Post by Grishnakh »

samcheng wrote: post #128
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…

The world's busiest high-speed rail is the Japanese Shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka. It was doing 23,000 passengers per hour way back in 1992. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkansen The newest trains have capacity for 1323 seated passengers each, plus plenty of room for standing passengers, and run 13 times an hour in each direction. These things do regularly fill to capacity, too; I've ridden them standing in t…

It's not a distraction, it's a better alternative. HSR is too slow and too expensive.

As for passenger capacity, who cares? This is not Japan, where density is very high and lots of people don't have cars. What's important is demand: how many passengers are actually flying between LA and SF right now? And how does that compare to the capacity of Hyperloop? Hyperloop is being positioned as an alternative to regional air travel (and maybe later for cross-continent air travel). I'm sorry, but I seriously doubt 23,000 passengers are flying in jets from LA to SF every hour right now.

Re: Is Hyperloop the future of travel?

#150

Post by Grishnakh »

kuschku wrote: post #96
hengheng wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe's busiest express train line seems to be LGV Paris-Lyon, with a peak scheduled capacity of 13 TGV trains per hour. Given that a TGV duplex fits 545 passengers, we are above 7000 per hour. Now couple two TGVs together, and you'll be well above. Weirdly enough, the only source I found was German wikipedia on the train track (LGV Sud-Est[1]). Neither English nor French wikipedia have capacity information, and nei…

In Germany there are some tracks with higher usages, but those are not the same line – they just share part of the line (imagine on the track A -- B -- C -- D, a train going from A to C, and from B to D, both every half hour – between B and C now you have 15min frequencies). But the point is the same, regardless of if we use Japan, Germany, France, Spain, etc: 10k people per hour, or more, is easily possible. Hyperlo…

>Hyperloop transports less people than a single lane of highway

So what? Airplanes also transport fewer people than a highway. How many people travel by air between LA and SF right now per hour? Probably no more than the capacity of Hyperloop.

>But the point is the same, regardless of if we use Japan, Germany, France, Spain, etc: 10k people per hour, or more, is easily possible.

What makes you think 10k people per hour actually want slow train service between LA and SF, when they can just use their car, get there in about the same time, and then not have to rent a car at their destination?

>And with the cost you could maintain teslas for rental on a dedicated highway for many decades.

You're placing passenger capacity above speed. The whole point of Hyperloop is speed: it's faster than an airplane, without all the downsides of the airplane (terrorism, TSA, crashing, etc.) HSR is not, it's slow (esp. the way they'll build it in this country). Of course, Hyperloop doesn't have the advantage of not having to rent a car like driving yourself does, but it makes up for it with very high speed.

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