I can't believe how many adults actually fall for this garbage. There's too much that's just broken about it, from fundamental design to implementation.
Russia may be one place this technology makes sense. They have to rebuild the Trans-Siberian Railway anyway to get it up to modern standards, so why not skip ahead to something faster than a subsonic flight to Vladivostok? Additionally, an elevated tube might be able to take a more direct route, as the pylons could better deal with permafrost than a continuous roadbed.
Paying for it is left as an exercise to the voter.
I'm reminded of when those tubes that drive-through bank tellers send get stuck and go out-of-order. And i'm reminded of earthquakes. Burying the tubes? Maybe not such a great idea.
There was a time, not terribly long ago, where the HN hivemind could tolerate a bit of sarcasm. Now it goes full on "mommy and daddy are fighting again" at the faintest whiff of real controversy. I leave it to the reader to decide if this shift represents an improvement.
The shit talking about this is disappointing to me. Isn't this the route of crazy idea that moves us into the future? It's not supposed to be easy. You think people would put their livelihood and reputation on the line for something that they think is a sham?
Seriously, if this mentality were pervasive we would not be having this conversation on the internet or driving cars to knowledge work jobs, we would be riding horses to the field.
I love the nerve and ambition it takes to try something that seems impossible, these are the people moving the world forward.
I don't understand your capacity comment. The original doc estimated 850 per hour on the average (sufficient to accommodate current demand) with room to grow.
850 / hour sounds wildly optimistic for something that can carry only 28 passengers in a pod, but even at face value, that's peanuts compared to what trains can do (especially since travel isn't evenly spread over 24 hours). Trains can easily reach 20-25 times that capacity.
Anyway, it's silly to consider current demand. The demand currently is capped by the time / expense/ inconvenience it takes to get from one place to another. If it really took half an hour, people would start using it to commute, go out for dinner in other city, etc, and one would need to meet demands similar to rapid transit lines. BART can move 25,000 people / hour (and it's full during peak demand). Hyperloop would need similar demand.
Being a realist I have to be skeptical about the idea of building miles of vacuum tube through earthquake country.
It still smells like one of those crazy Sci-Fi ideas that crashes and burns when people do the math and discover that they'll need to charge $10,000 a ticket and be at 100% capacity for decades before they break even.
The cost estimates I have seen for constructing the tubes are hilarious lowballs thus far. It's definitely not going to be cheaper than high speed rail per mile, especially when you're talking about California (land of NIMBY).
Perhaps, but by all accounts Elon is a pretty smart engineer and has ready access to smarter engineers. Not to mention those actually working on it. It just seems unlikely to me that none of them accounted for something so obvious? Certainly they did and felt it was a solvable problem.
If nothing else, if it increases expectations people have about transit then that's good. The currently planned California "high-speed" rail is pretty underwhelming.
I have heard, but don't know whether or not to take seriously, the argument that the proposal is designed to derail CAHSR in order to sell more cars. If that's the case, it seems to be working.
What part of CAHSR do you find underwhelming (other that it will take too long to build?). I disagree with some of the routing decisions (I think it should go SJ ->SF -> Oakland -> Central Valley -> LA ), but what would conceivably make it better?
My main issue with the whole thing is that it is immediately used as an excuse to do down and prevent real engineering that can actually happen in the next 30 years like HSR. Blue sky thinking is good, but you can't sit back doing nothing and using unlikely predictions about the future to sneeringly criticize real things with real budgets that people can really do today
If the project was so great Musk would be leading it, not giving it away to the public.
The original whitepaper included absurd assumptions related to cost.
Even if the CA highspeed rail is underwhelming, it's already under construction. Nobody is going to pay for a competitor project because you'd split the market.
There is no serious hyperloop project. Just pie-in-the-sky projections from someone who isn't really that serious about pursuing it.
If Elon Musk seriously cared about the Hyperloop project, his FEA simulations would have looked better than the crap I pulled in an optional class from college. His "proposal" was the most modest of sketches, and should be treated with only the same amount of rigor that Elon put into it.
Ignore it, it's an emotional reaction from people frightened of change.
But I would say that I have some doubts about this tech from an engineering point of view.
What if the carraige gets stuck in the tube? How do you get it out at reasonable cost and before everyone suffocates? You can build in escape hatches every x meters, but isnt that going to be extremely expensive, given the sheer length of the pipe and the need for an airtight seal?
Its not hard to think of more. They may be economically surmountable, they may not. But you never know until you try!
Definitely worth a shot in my humble opinion.
Like the article says skepticism is warranted cynicism is not useful.
You think people would put their livelihood and reputation on the line for something that they think is a sham?
Pets.com. South Sea Bubble. Tulip mania. et omnium cetera.
It may work, but that's not the way to bet, right now. (Unless you've done a lot more math on it than I have, or, like the VCs and angels backing it, you're getting really good odds).
Also its proponent notably didn't commit to involvement in the project, despite being comfortable juggling multiple other projects. I don't think that means he's not keen on the idea, but I do think it means he knows its risk/reward ratio is vastly worse than other ambitious projects he's involved with, especially if he's judged on the ability to hit the rather... optimistic metrics in his original paper.
I optimistic. I'm hoping its the new thing garners excitement and political good will and someone builds one. It works and spreads.
In the US the shifting of the populace to the left after the long period of "we need smaller government, get government out of the way" (see Bernie Sanders).
As someone in a small Northeast City that can't seem to extend a trolley based subway line 3 miles, and commuting time here is stupid... I'm a little worried, plus I"m not sure I'd like to ride it..
You have to remember, you're in America (I'm assuming, since this story is about something in America). This isn't the country you might think it is.
You might be thinking this is the country that put men on the Moon. That's incorrect. That country is in the past, and no longer exists; most of the people involved in that are dead.
This country couldn't put men on the Moon right now, with far better technology than existed back then, if its survival depended on it. This is a country that doesn't do anything big any more, it just sits back and says "that can't be done", and "that'll never work". This country says these things even while other countries like China actually go out and do them.
These people are probably right: this fancy new ideas never will work, here. Instead, they'll be taken overseas somewhere where people there will make them work. And we'll continue to sit around here, telling ourselves "no way, that'll never work, it's not feasible, etc." while our economy stagnates more and more.
No, it's stagnating because of a growing income inequality and a hollowing-out of the middle class. Innovation isn't enough to fix this, and eventually it's going to bite us in the ass. But infrastructure is also important for the economy, and US infrastructure is in a shambles and getting worse. Big infrastructure projects (which actually work) are desperately needed, especially ones which make transport more efficient and less polluting. I'm not entirely sold Hyperloop is really the answer BTW, I think SkyTran would be a lot more useful overall and a lot more technically feasible not to mention cheap to build, but I see the same naysaying for any new transportation technology that comes along.
Note that it took eight years to put the first men on the moon for a short stay. It's quite likely that within the next eight years there will be men on the moon, maybe even to establish a base.
Where did you get that crazy idea? There's no action at all in the US government and NASA to pursue such a plan, and they'd need to be starting this far ahead to actually do that. If you're talking about China, that's a possibility, but we're not China, I'm talking about the US here and how it's unable to accomplish such projects any more.
Hyperloop feels a lot like supersonic, vactrain, maglev PRT--which is to say, 4 technologies that have all ended up miserably failing.
It's worth noting that the skepticism involved is not in any way displaced by the recent test. The major problems with Hyperloop boil down to:
1. High-speed switching, necessary to expand more than single-city pairs
2. Ability of the loop to maintain tolerances and structural integrity after weather and seismic considerations (particularly CA!) take their toll
3. Right-of-way feasibility, both in terms of cost-effective land acquisition and in terms of curve radii tolerances (note that even 300 km/h HSR systems in practice often have effective speed limits lower than that on much of the track)
4. The ability to get safety certifications--and the implications that would have on headways and consequently passenger throughput
5. Ability to maintain the necessary pressurization of such a long pneumatic tube
6. The cost/benefit of hyperloop relative to other technologies (like conventional HSR, maglev, even highways and airports).
The way that the company seems to be shrugging off all of these questions is not a good sign.
Certainly in the short term, perhaps in the long term, but even automated cars come with externalities we might want to reduce such as costs/inputs of manufacturing, pollution, addition time compares to a fast point-to-point link, etc.
For some popular long distance routes, I could see the Hyperloop being useful. Between all reasonably large cities? Probably not.
You're comparing capex vs opex, once you get past a certain period of time. It's possibly cheaper to build automated cars - we have the infrastructure to do so already, and we're close to having the software - but is it actually cheaper to run them, after all externalities are considered?
Not immediately. But in a future where all vehicles are automated it might be safe to have 200 mph highways or cars that automatically drive onto high speed trains, or cars that can also run on rails, etc.
Reasonable points, but just because technologies have failed in the past is not predictive of what will come in the future. It's often times hard for us to observe progress in technology development, particularly when exponential change is involved, but the pace of development keeps accelerating and all of the sudden you reach viable points in technologies that historically took a very long time to see any advances or progress.
> Reasonable points, but just because technologies have failed in the past is not predictive of what will come in the future.
True.
But if the only track record is a string of failures, it would be madness to expect this time to be different, particularly as the main problems that plagued other technologies still persist and are being repeated while being brushed aside.
> particularly when exponential change is involved
Even minor changes have disastrous results. Case in point: BART. It's a conventional railway service in the same fashion that's being done for decades all over the world, and somehow the "exponential change" that has been attempted in that project was more than enough to render it a failure.
The main reason why people keep investing in tried-and-true technologies is because the risk of trying it again and succeeding is far lower than reinventing the wheel, even if it's a fancy, popular wheel that is promised to go very fast.
The Chinese maglev projects are white elephants. All they demonstrate is that maglev can kind of work if you have a government willing to write a blank check in order to demonstrate the power of the glorious People's Republic; but this says nothing about their practicality in the rest of the world, where their cost/benefit ratio has to withstand comparison against other technologies.
The one maglev costs $656,729,196, if I did the conversation right. That's 9 miles of track. Is that expensive for a major city? The Second Avenue subway cost a lot more, for example:
"The first phase will be within budget, at $4.45 billion. The total cost of the 8.5-mile (13.7 km) line is expected to exceed $17 billion.'
This article says that low-speed maglevs are competitive:
"The line costs between 150 million yuan and 250 million yuan per kilometer, making it highly economical compared to subways and light rail, which cost up to 800 million yuan and 300 million yuan per km respectively"
Do you have any facts to back up your "white elephant" claims?
This is an apples and oranges comparison. Big construction projects will always cost a lot more in the United States because of high labor costs, getting a plan that is acceptable to all levels of government and other stakeholders, environmental impact studies/minimization, and all those other pesky things that China doesn't have to worry about. You would have to do a comparison with a Chinese rail project to get useful results.
I think when you say glorious People's Republic you invite cross border comparisons.
I also agree that the comparison with a Chinese rail project would be more interesting, but the miserable political climate for large projects in the US would apply to a good Maglev technology just as much as it would apply to a junk Maglev technology.
> "The line costs between 150 million yuan and 250 million yuan per kilometer, making it highly economical compared to subways and light rail, which cost up to 800 million yuan and 300 million yuan per km respectively"
Putting a viaduct in the middle of nowhere, where eminent domain committed by a totalitarian state lets you get access to very cheap land usage, is not a fair comparison with having to dig holes in a high-density city.
I'm responding to the claim that it's a "white elephant" project in China. I'm not asking why we can't do it here.
Yes, China can build a 21st century infrastructure more easily than the US. They already have 10,000 miles of high-speed rail, for example, while the US has none.
The thing is - if you look at Musk's other ventures they were in dire straits for a long time, critics called them impossible even, but he managed to turn them solvent ... somehow. SpaceX for instance was a money-pit for the longest time and was lambasted by every sensible investor. So while I share your skepticism, the "shrugging off" you are observing here is pretty much par for the course. True, Musk does indeed have a tendency to over-promise and over-sell but this is a trait he shares with almost every CTO.
> Neither SpaceX nor Elon Musk is affiliated with any Hyperloop companies. While we are not developing a commercial Hyperloop ourselves, we are interested in helping to accelerate development of a functional Hyperloop prototype.
"Mr. BamBrogan’s real first name is Kevin. This is just one of many aspects to this undertaking that makes me feel that it will all be revealed as a breathtaking piece of performance art."
Is entrepreneurship sometimes completely, or partially, performance art?
66 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadSome people LOVE bad ideas.
That immediately reminded - state owned Russian Railways Corp has just recently publicly expressed huge interest in it :)
Paying for it is left as an exercise to the voter.
On HN, the idea is to post civilly and substantively, or not at all. For example, neutrally explaining how an idea is broken would be substantive.
(I'm assuming everyone read the article?)
Especially please don't post comments that do nothing but call names.
Seriously, if this mentality were pervasive we would not be having this conversation on the internet or driving cars to knowledge work jobs, we would be riding horses to the field.
I love the nerve and ambition it takes to try something that seems impossible, these are the people moving the world forward.
Edit: words
There are far more efficient ways of transporting people at high speeds and lower costs than this.
What are the advantages here? It's more expensive than high-speed rail, for example.
Anyway, it's silly to consider current demand. The demand currently is capped by the time / expense/ inconvenience it takes to get from one place to another. If it really took half an hour, people would start using it to commute, go out for dinner in other city, etc, and one would need to meet demands similar to rapid transit lines. BART can move 25,000 people / hour (and it's full during peak demand). Hyperloop would need similar demand.
It still smells like one of those crazy Sci-Fi ideas that crashes and burns when people do the math and discover that they'll need to charge $10,000 a ticket and be at 100% capacity for decades before they break even.
The cost estimates I have seen for constructing the tubes are hilarious lowballs thus far. It's definitely not going to be cheaper than high speed rail per mile, especially when you're talking about California (land of NIMBY).
But then you have to build transit into dense cities, where a single building that you have to go through might cost $1 billion.
And then you realize why infrastructure is so expensive when you actually figure out the real costs.
If nothing else, if it increases expectations people have about transit then that's good. The currently planned California "high-speed" rail is pretty underwhelming.
What part of CAHSR do you find underwhelming (other that it will take too long to build?). I disagree with some of the routing decisions (I think it should go SJ ->SF -> Oakland -> Central Valley -> LA ), but what would conceivably make it better?
The original whitepaper included absurd assumptions related to cost.
Even if the CA highspeed rail is underwhelming, it's already under construction. Nobody is going to pay for a competitor project because you'd split the market.
Skepticism is fine but doesn't warrant calling off the project at this point.
If Elon Musk seriously cared about the Hyperloop project, his FEA simulations would have looked better than the crap I pulled in an optional class from college. His "proposal" was the most modest of sketches, and should be treated with only the same amount of rigor that Elon put into it.
That's enough to call it off.
But I would say that I have some doubts about this tech from an engineering point of view.
What if the carraige gets stuck in the tube? How do you get it out at reasonable cost and before everyone suffocates? You can build in escape hatches every x meters, but isnt that going to be extremely expensive, given the sheer length of the pipe and the need for an airtight seal?
Its not hard to think of more. They may be economically surmountable, they may not. But you never know until you try!
Definitely worth a shot in my humble opinion.
Like the article says skepticism is warranted cynicism is not useful.
Pets.com. South Sea Bubble. Tulip mania. et omnium cetera.
It may work, but that's not the way to bet, right now. (Unless you've done a lot more math on it than I have, or, like the VCs and angels backing it, you're getting really good odds).
In the US the shifting of the populace to the left after the long period of "we need smaller government, get government out of the way" (see Bernie Sanders).
As someone in a small Northeast City that can't seem to extend a trolley based subway line 3 miles, and commuting time here is stupid... I'm a little worried, plus I"m not sure I'd like to ride it..
You might be thinking this is the country that put men on the Moon. That's incorrect. That country is in the past, and no longer exists; most of the people involved in that are dead.
This country couldn't put men on the Moon right now, with far better technology than existed back then, if its survival depended on it. This is a country that doesn't do anything big any more, it just sits back and says "that can't be done", and "that'll never work". This country says these things even while other countries like China actually go out and do them.
These people are probably right: this fancy new ideas never will work, here. Instead, they'll be taken overseas somewhere where people there will make them work. And we'll continue to sit around here, telling ourselves "no way, that'll never work, it's not feasible, etc." while our economy stagnates more and more.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swissmetro
It's worth noting that the skepticism involved is not in any way displaced by the recent test. The major problems with Hyperloop boil down to:
1. High-speed switching, necessary to expand more than single-city pairs
2. Ability of the loop to maintain tolerances and structural integrity after weather and seismic considerations (particularly CA!) take their toll
3. Right-of-way feasibility, both in terms of cost-effective land acquisition and in terms of curve radii tolerances (note that even 300 km/h HSR systems in practice often have effective speed limits lower than that on much of the track)
4. The ability to get safety certifications--and the implications that would have on headways and consequently passenger throughput
5. Ability to maintain the necessary pressurization of such a long pneumatic tube
6. The cost/benefit of hyperloop relative to other technologies (like conventional HSR, maglev, even highways and airports).
The way that the company seems to be shrugging off all of these questions is not a good sign.
For some popular long distance routes, I could see the Hyperloop being useful. Between all reasonably large cities? Probably not.
Automated automobiles won't help cutting trip times, which is the main reason why people pay to fly or to ride a high-speed train.
True.
But if the only track record is a string of failures, it would be madness to expect this time to be different, particularly as the main problems that plagued other technologies still persist and are being repeated while being brushed aside.
> particularly when exponential change is involved
Even minor changes have disastrous results. Case in point: BART. It's a conventional railway service in the same fashion that's being done for decades all over the world, and somehow the "exponential change" that has been attempted in that project was more than enough to render it a failure.
The main reason why people keep investing in tried-and-true technologies is because the risk of trying it again and succeeding is far lower than reinventing the wheel, even if it's a fancy, popular wheel that is promised to go very fast.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2016-05/06/c_135339867.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_S1,_BCR
San Francisco/LA is only 400 miles. We need a 700 mph train because there's no affordable direct route.
"The first phase will be within budget, at $4.45 billion. The total cost of the 8.5-mile (13.7 km) line is expected to exceed $17 billion.'
This article says that low-speed maglevs are competitive:
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2016-05/06/c_135339867.htm
"The line costs between 150 million yuan and 250 million yuan per kilometer, making it highly economical compared to subways and light rail, which cost up to 800 million yuan and 300 million yuan per km respectively"
Do you have any facts to back up your "white elephant" claims?
This is an apples and oranges comparison. Big construction projects will always cost a lot more in the United States because of high labor costs, getting a plan that is acceptable to all levels of government and other stakeholders, environmental impact studies/minimization, and all those other pesky things that China doesn't have to worry about. You would have to do a comparison with a Chinese rail project to get useful results.
I also agree that the comparison with a Chinese rail project would be more interesting, but the miserable political climate for large projects in the US would apply to a good Maglev technology just as much as it would apply to a junk Maglev technology.
Putting a viaduct in the middle of nowhere, where eminent domain committed by a totalitarian state lets you get access to very cheap land usage, is not a fair comparison with having to dig holes in a high-density city.
Yes, China can build a 21st century infrastructure more easily than the US. They already have 10,000 miles of high-speed rail, for example, while the US has none.
Or a bed on a truck. $48, no subsidies needed, get there in ~0 waking hours, sold out, mostly 5* reviews http://www.autoblog.com/2016/05/09/sleepbus-la-sf-overnight-...
http://cahsr.blogspot.com/2009/10/la-sf-nations-second-busie...
6.3 million people fly it every year.
http://www.spacex.com/hyperloop
Unless this has changed, Musk just had the idea; he's not doing any of the implementation.
Above ground tube is probably going to make it for flatter countries.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swissmetro
"Mr. BamBrogan’s real first name is Kevin. This is just one of many aspects to this undertaking that makes me feel that it will all be revealed as a breathtaking piece of performance art."
Is entrepreneurship sometimes completely, or partially, performance art?