The author notes that HT wants to focus on moving shipping containers before people.
What are examples of physical goods that people would pay a premium to move very fast between Los Angeles and Las Vegas (I think it's fair to say two or three times as fast as a courier in a private jet), and which can be quickly bundled together at either end into a big enough batch to make sense to move them in a container?
Fresh seafood comes to mind. At least in Phoenix, it's flown in daily at great expense. Other highly perishable luxury foodstuffs would similarly follow, I'd imagine.
That's what I was thinking, but someone more well-versed in matters lobster-related tells me they do fine driven there in vans.
You're looking for something that goes bad in less than 1.5-two hours. Say it takes 30 minutes to get to the hyperloop depot, 30 mins to Vegas, then 30 minutes from the Vegas hyperloop dept to get to the final destination casino or wherever its going.
And it needs to be something numerous enough that you could consistently fill a shipping container with it.
> You're looking for something that goes bad in less than 1.5-two hours
I don't think the target is "goes bad" as much as "degrades in quality to a perceptible–or marketable–degree". Oysters, crab, et cetera (not sure about lobster) taste different, in New York, between the restaurants that make daily fish-market visits and those that skimp to three (or fewer) times a week.
And, yet, good sushi places in California get fish and shellfish flown in from Tokyo. Also, the tuna and some of the other fish sold in the Tokyo fish market is actually frozen.
To be fair, the practice of flying in fish from Tsukiji could easily be more related to prestige than quality. There are three major fish markets in Tokyo, and nobody cares about two of them (Kanda and Koto).
So, instead of transporting passengers, they go for the more profitable and easier to handle cargo. I am not confident that they will circle back to passengers given the different facilities that are required for people versus cargo.
Unless you're being sarcastic, "more profitable" cargo? Yes, in the sense that cargo rail is profitable and passenger service is not. But certainly not in terms of pound of thing moved. Cargo rail (and shipping) is profitable because it's such a cost effective way to move high volume and high weight materials that aren't time sensitive.
I didn't think I wrote that with the ambiguity that you are reading into it. Cargo is cheaper to handle and more profitable than human transport. They realized this and moving into the high speed delivery of cargo. FedEx built a business off low weight, time sensitive delivery.
[edit: also note jonnycowboy's comment that I was replying to]
What is this fixation with LA-LV? In the 1950s, a monorail was proposed. In the 1980s, a maglev was proposed. High speed rail has been proposed. None were built.
As a freight carrier, the Hyperloop has a capacity problem. The stopping distance is huge. So the distance between trains must be huge. Real freight trains have hundreds of cars, but the Hyperloop doesn't do that.
The killer problem with the Hyperloop is curve radius. Unless you're a very powerful government, like China's, acquiring the very straight right of way to go any place populated will be tough.
Are they building this as a maglev? That means either expensive track or lots of onboard power. Transrapid's maglev works great, but it just costs too much.
At first glance, I'd say that there isn't much freight that people would pay much of a premium to chop 30 minutes or so off the e2e time.
But I guess the concept would be that there's no long-term premium -- that cost/mile is lower than air freight, after the initial (I'm sure insanely expensive) costs to build the track. If the cost/mile was competitive with rail but the e2e time was competitive with air, I expect you could find a lot of demand for it. That's a big if, of course.
Longer term, in terms of freight, if the system basically worked and you could build your practices around it, you'd expect to see people delivering goods that don't necessarily have much "freshness" requirement per se in the name of the great god of Shortening Supply Chains, which might even be worth paying a premium for -- but only if there's an extant hyperloop network that you can plan your business around.
If the hyperloop is physically basically sound (that is: it works more or less as described) but either the up-front costs are so huge or the operating costs are higher than expected that you have to long-term pay a premium over air, I'd expect it would have some success as a people-mover, even if the first freight route ended up being unprofitable.
If the Hyperloop had a very predictable timeline compared to some feight or other transport, it might make more sense to use it, if the lower deviation from leadtime lead to reduced safety stock inventory costs.
I found it amusing it mentions the London & Croydon pneumatic railway [1] - I live just a few hundred meters or so from where the tracks used to run. The local museum has some artefacts from it.
EDIT: The entire area is quite interesting in terms of early rail. I live near streets with names like Canal Walk and Towpath Way. There's no canal, and no coast line - we're more than 10 miles from the Thames. The names are in recognition of the Croydon Canal [1] which was constructed in 1809 and closed in 1836. The path the canal followed now makes up part of the rail route between Croydon and London Bridge.
I'm pretty sure they will do some sort of service entrances which could be used in an emergency.
I also doubt they will actually be able to do a 1000 mile long section. If they actually think they can cross a state without putting at least one station in, they are blissfully unaware of state politics.
It's not the exits you have to worry about, it's the low vacuum inside the tunnel! Seriously, unless they let the air back into the section you're in, attempting to get out would mean a fairly swift death.
Not to mention a potential catastrophic re-pressurization event if this long tube gets a crack in it... or catastrophic depressurization event if the train gets a crack in it. There's a lot of extremely dangerous and difficult to safeguard failure modes for this idea.
while i don't think they (or anybody else in the foreseeable future, save for Chinese Communist Party taking over the Western states :) will be able to build a real infrastructure piece of several hundred miles length - politics, economy, etc. wouldn't let it, the HT looks like a starting point to develop a space or subspace launch system - it has all the necessary components like evacuated pipe, EM acceleration and levitation. Nevada desert isn't a bad place for it (while throwing over Pacific is less favorable than the other direction would be, the cheapness of ground boost compensates for the loss of Earth rotation boost).
HT's hired Bruce Upbin (@bupbin) as head of Comms. Bruce was Managing Editor of Tech at Forbes for years and is a good, smart guy. Also means we'll be hearing a lot from HT beyond this MIT Tech Review coverage. They've got US$100MM already; some progress and some strategic comms will make that grow.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 34.1 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Hyperloop begins testing this week, aiming for 400mph"
What are examples of physical goods that people would pay a premium to move very fast between Los Angeles and Las Vegas (I think it's fair to say two or three times as fast as a courier in a private jet), and which can be quickly bundled together at either end into a big enough batch to make sense to move them in a container?
You're looking for something that goes bad in less than 1.5-two hours. Say it takes 30 minutes to get to the hyperloop depot, 30 mins to Vegas, then 30 minutes from the Vegas hyperloop dept to get to the final destination casino or wherever its going.
And it needs to be something numerous enough that you could consistently fill a shipping container with it.
I don't think the target is "goes bad" as much as "degrades in quality to a perceptible–or marketable–degree". Oysters, crab, et cetera (not sure about lobster) taste different, in New York, between the restaurants that make daily fish-market visits and those that skimp to three (or fewer) times a week.
The "fresh sushi" is more marketing than palate based - so say sushi/sashimi lovers.
[edit: also note jonnycowboy's comment that I was replying to]
As a freight carrier, the Hyperloop has a capacity problem. The stopping distance is huge. So the distance between trains must be huge. Real freight trains have hundreds of cars, but the Hyperloop doesn't do that.
The killer problem with the Hyperloop is curve radius. Unless you're a very powerful government, like China's, acquiring the very straight right of way to go any place populated will be tough.
Are they building this as a maglev? That means either expensive track or lots of onboard power. Transrapid's maglev works great, but it just costs too much.
But I guess the concept would be that there's no long-term premium -- that cost/mile is lower than air freight, after the initial (I'm sure insanely expensive) costs to build the track. If the cost/mile was competitive with rail but the e2e time was competitive with air, I expect you could find a lot of demand for it. That's a big if, of course.
Longer term, in terms of freight, if the system basically worked and you could build your practices around it, you'd expect to see people delivering goods that don't necessarily have much "freshness" requirement per se in the name of the great god of Shortening Supply Chains, which might even be worth paying a premium for -- but only if there's an extant hyperloop network that you can plan your business around.
If the hyperloop is physically basically sound (that is: it works more or less as described) but either the up-front costs are so huge or the operating costs are higher than expected that you have to long-term pay a premium over air, I'd expect it would have some success as a people-mover, even if the first freight route ended up being unprofitable.
EDIT: The entire area is quite interesting in terms of early rail. I live near streets with names like Canal Walk and Towpath Way. There's no canal, and no coast line - we're more than 10 miles from the Thames. The names are in recognition of the Croydon Canal [1] which was constructed in 1809 and closed in 1836. The path the canal followed now makes up part of the rail route between Croydon and London Bridge.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_railway#London_and...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croydon_Canal
I also doubt they will actually be able to do a 1000 mile long section. If they actually think they can cross a state without putting at least one station in, they are blissfully unaware of state politics.
And at what speed does the hyperloop starts to be more viable than an airplane?
http://www.spacex.com/hyperloop