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Hyperloop One to shut down

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Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#311

Post by backwardsmoo »

bobthepanda wrote: post #224
heads wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not arguing with you here but it would be interesting to know what about tunnelling is fundamentally expensive. Things I can think of: it is slow, so you burn through a lot of wages. To compare with road building the only major road I can think of, built in my lifetime, was the M40. It is 90 miles long and took 4 years to build but I don’t know what the cost was. The channel tunnel is much smaller than a freeway…

The most expensive parts of tunnels are where you come to the surface. The Channel Tunnel is cheap in that regards because there is countryside on either end and no exits in the middle. Designing a high capacity train station or highway exit in the middle of a city is quite expensive.

What? The chunnel cost £26 billion in (2023 equivalent), and is 31 miles long. That's nearly a billion a mile. This is by no means cheap (yes yes cheap is a comparative term), tunnelling is absurdly expensive and not realistic.

It's impossible to make the case for thousands of miles of underground tunnels that will add no benefit (what happens when something goes wrong? you can't simply overtake when something inevitably goes wrong (three train derailments per day in the US), it's underground so it's hard to access / fix problems etc etc.

It's a foolish, expensive idea, when the US struggles to take care of it's own railway systems.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#312

Post by cycomanic »

cdelsolar wrote: post #273
midasuni wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boston to NY is 215m, it should take at most 90 minutes by modern train, 2 hours by century old lines. York to London is 215m and 2 hours, along a line that’s nearly 200 years old. Paris ti Lyon is 290 miles and takes 2 hours on a 40 year old track.

What is the typical charge for those? I remember traveling around Italy by rail pretty cheaply.

SNCF prices vary a lot of when you book. You can see [1] that prices in the next week vary from 29 to 85 euros (I think you can get even cheaper booking further in advance)

[1] https://www.sncf-connect.com/app/en-en/home/shop/results/out...

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#313

Post by marcus_holmes »

I thought the point of Hyperloop was to head off the upgrading of Californian railway systems? Created and Hyped by Tesla's owner because Tesla needed Americans to stick to buying ever-more-expensive cars.

So, its purpose is done now and it can retire gracefully.

Or am I being too cynical?

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#314

Post by kortilla »

Syonyk wrote: post #71
renewiltord wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and because of that, today we have mainstream electric cars, an Earth blanketed with Internet from space, and the cheapest spacelift cost ever achieved. Any one of these would have cemented him as a premier industrialist. In the end, there's legions of Internet commenters who complain about Elon Musk in between complaining about their bosses or complain about Google and Facebook or what have you. And then there…

Musk was not instrumental in mainstream EVs. He was on the early wave of it, yes, but other companies had EVs out at the same time or before, and the price drop in lithium was obvious to everyone who was paying attention at the time. It would have happened one way or another. Yes, we've ruined astronomy with a ton of LEO satellites, but we've got some internet in exchange (I'm rural, I have it, I'm quite honestly not…

> Musk was not instrumental in mainstream EVs.

Tesla absolutely was and still is. They dominate the market.

> on other days it's more or less dialup grade

You’ve either got bad hardware or you’ve never used dialup. Even in congestion on the RV product (lower priority than residential) I’ve only seen down to 20mbps. That’s 400x dialup.

> I'm quite honestly not impressed with what it delivers for how much I pay

Please cancel! I could use the capacity when I’m out in the boondocks.

> Everyone will continue insisting that Kessler Syndrome Won't Possibly Happen until about a year after it's happened, at which point, welp. It was fun while it lasted!

LEO natural decay means a royal fuckup locks out If you have any actual meaningful analysis to add on why these constellations are Kessler risks, please notify the space force! Everyone involved seems to think it’s not a problem so you should probably correct them.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#315

Post by akira2501 »

alangibson wrote: post #142
thechao wrote: post #12

There is a world where we dig tunnels under federal highways, and stick freight trucks down there. They'd run on a monorail, at 120+ mph. Surface vehicles would be dramatically limited in terms of height, width, and length. Maybe people buses could go down there? In my imagination these tunnels are, like, 200' down. Like mole people.

Why do people keep trying to invent more expensive, less traffic dense railroads. Did they stop teaching arithmetic in school?

> railroads

Which, in the US, typically have been heavily monopolized and poorly regulated and existing regulations poorly enforced. The history here is pretty extensive, actually, and often forgotten, because rail has significantly lost it's power.

So, we keep trying to make better roads, it frees up space for individual travel, it prioritizes commerce, and roads seem better fitted to a Democratic society than what rail ends up being here.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#316

Post by fifilura »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #243
acdha wrote: 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.

I alwas thought that the Singapore car thing was a reason for dads to get a break from a crowded appartment.

Sleeping-car-dads-under-newspaper was a common thing to see when I was there 25 years ago...

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#317

Post by Veedrac »

melling wrote: post #145
vorticalbox wrote: post #7

Robert Goddard designed a vacuum train in the 1910s, why did Elon think it was going to work a century later?

Didn’t Musk come clean and say he was trying to stop the California HSR? He didn’t intend to build it.

No, this is manufactured.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#318

Post by shiroiuma »

WalterBright wrote: post #289
ljm wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in Miami some time ago, around Wynwood. Never really saw anyone walking around, and if we wanted to go anywhere then it basically required ordering an Uber. The difficult part was getting a sense of direction because there aren't really any obvious landmarks to look out for when wandering through wide-scale suburban sprawl. It's like the availability of GPS has just allowed this kind of sprawl to become even mo…

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.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#319

Post by throwaway2037 »

pfranz wrote: post #215
talldatethrow wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm from Europe originally, and visit often. And now in California. You could make Highspeed rail FREE and I'm not sure I would take it. I might. Maybe. As soon as it costs what gas costs to get to LA from SF ($100 round trip max, so usually $50-33 a person), there is NOOOO way I am ever taking it. Heck, I still need a way to get around once I get there.. so how would the train ever really work for anyone? Now I'm re…

I have the opposite problem. I'll drive from LA to SF for a conference or to visit friends and I have no place to ditch a car I don't need. Finding parking is miserable and hotels will charge $50-70/night. Heck, I saw a post last night about getting dropped off at LAX. It was taking hours to get close to the airport so they got out of their car and walked the last mile or two to the airport with their luggage. I just…

    It was taking hours to get close to the airport so they got out of their car and walked the last mile or two to the airport with their luggage.
This is ridiculous. Why didn't they drop their friend at the nearest Metro Line C (Green Line)? There is an airport shuttle from Aviation/LAX station.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#320

Post by throwaway2037 »

eesmith wrote: post #92
talldatethrow wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think that when a Honda Civic reaches 200k miles, $150k were spent on it? And that includes overall age depreciation which I wouldn't count, because most people that consider taking high speed rail would have a car anyway that's already depreciating.

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 insane. There is no way that Civic drivers are spending 2.2k USD per year on maintenance! This dumb tool has no idea how insanely low are maintenance costs for a Civic. Please: Civic drivers: Share some ridiculous stories of 200K+ miles, but no major repairs. This forum will flooded...
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