Pipeline Mass Transit? 557
pipingguy writes "'Evacuated Tube Transport (ETT) is a new kind of transportation system that requires less than two percent of the energy of current transportation methods. It is also much safer, and can be faster. [...] Anyone can visualize 2 tubes (one for each direction) along a travel route. Air is permanently removed from the tubes; so travel takes place without friction. Pressurized passenger capsules (like a 2 - 8 person airplane cabin), travel in the tubes on thin steel wheels or on nearly frictionless Maglev. Airlocks allow access without admitting air to the tubes. Linear motors (as used on new rollercoasters) accelerate the capsules. During most of the trip the capsules coast; using no power. When the capsules slow down, linear generators recover most of the electrical energy used to accelerate the capsules.' Some CG images and drawings here, the FAQ is here." MSNBC had an article on monorails a few days ago. Don't bother making Simpsons jokes, the article has them covered already.
It will never happen (Score:4, Interesting)
1) The government never funded the interstate highway project, which was a military-industrial complex endeavor that would provide ways to move troops across the country in case of invasion like the Autobahn did in WWII, but was more to serve the needs of making the automobile the main form of transportation in the US.
2) The auto and oil companies didn't conspire [mlui.org] to rip up all the rails so the automobile could take over.
Efficient mass transportation will never happen as long as cuthroat greedy multinational corporations control the world -- and we are going to pay for it dearly when we run out of fossil fuels in 40 years.
Childhood dream (Score:2, Interesting)
It won't be the same without giant quarters and nickels along side of me though.
Re:It will never happen (Score:4, Interesting)
3) If a mass-transit system could somehow avoid the beaurocratic nightmare of individual power-grabs and assheaded planning and become a useful system which serviced its customers in a logically optimized manner.
I take BART into work every day. Every day, I end up standing for half an hour on the way in and another half hour on the way out. Now, remind me, why is mass transit unpopular?
Re:Not a new concept? (Score:3, Interesting)
Hugo Gernsback wrote about such a system
(between New York and Brest, France) in
his 1925 novel "Ralph 124C41+".
>;K
Re:From now on, we'll all travel in TUBES! (Score:5, Interesting)
I doubt it'll see the light of day anywhere for quite a few years. The massive, extraordinary effort to make a pressureless vacuum in a tube long enough that trains are going 300kmh just boggles the mind: We can barely dig a little tunnel under the English Channel, and we're seriously proposing vacuum tubes? We have enough trouble making little spheres as vacuum tube, much less some sort of system that's supposed to let people in and out, etc. Maintaining a vacuum at sealevel would be a massive energy sucker.
BTW: Some other people mentioned a prior New York system of pneumatic trains that used suction, basically, to pull the train forward. This was immediately pooh poohed (hehe...just had to use that phrase) by some saying it's so much different. Of course the advantage of a vacuum is that there is no wind resistance: The exact feat can be accomplished by accelerating the air in the tunnel to the same speed as the train (of course it'd be a circular system, so there wouldn't be the energy requirements of a standard wind tunnel where stationary air is pulled in and then forced out against more stationary air). Impossible? Certainly not any more impossible than magically making a multi hundred KM vacuum tube. It'd be a lot safer too.
Re:whooosh.. (Score:4, Interesting)
I was going to knock you about that comment. Vaporware requires the promise of a product--and there is no chance this is close to the realistic implementation plan--so vaporware would put this in a more "advanced" state than any promise they could make.
Except--the company actually is promising this.
It's an interesting idea, but it's wrong on so many levels
tell me again how you would get on these things?? (Score:2, Interesting)
correct me if i am wrong but... wouldnt that be kind of a pain in the arse to stop every few minutes... I dont know if i quite grasp the concept, but that would add alot of travel time with acceleration and deceleration, and how do these things fit together? do they all connect? do they go to within a few minutes away to anywhere... hmmmm... sounds like a few bugs yet... I would think that there would need to be some sort of connecting transportation to the main system... I would think that these wouldn't be anygood for anything but, what i would call, interstate driving
Re:Another thing about friction (Score:2, Interesting)
Turns up in the Empire of the Petal Throne RPG as well - world-spanning tubes that require no power, you just drop the capsule and gravity does the rest. You don't need escape velocity; the tube, from a geometric point of view, is dead straight, but from a gravitic potential point of view, it's a slope down for half the way and a slope up for the second half. Since the the energy gained from the "fall" is exactly the same as that lost on the "rise" (not allowing for friction), you don't need any power at all.
Re:don't mean to be a pessimist, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
- Need for constant pumping takes energy. In our lab a vacuum pump consumes 3 kW in order to maintain pressure of 10 ^-6 Torr for a modest 30 l chamber.
-From the article: "Constructing a highway causes over twenty times the environmental damage as building ETT. ETT uses much less materials."
Bull! Vacuum chamber of that volume must be made of metal (stainless steel probably) with massive walls.
"tube capacity is high (can exceed 80 lanes of traffic)"
Can you imagine amount of metal needed for say 100 miles of this miraculous transportation system? BTW, prior to the commission, Vacuum vessels must be cleaned with nasty chemicals in order to avoid degassing.
I am under the impression that et3.com is also offering the Brooklyn Bridge for sale.
Re:It's a SCAM (Score:2, Interesting)
I would imagine the cost for a mile of continous rigid tube strong enough to maintain near-perfect vacuum in the same environment would be fantastically higher than a concrete rail on stilts.
Still, even if such a thing were to be adopted with enough zeal to pay for it, the inherent security risks are incredibly complicated. The number of ways the system could fail due to accidents or hardware failure are numerous. The number of ways the system could be intentionally damaged are huge.
Realize that air travel is inherently insecure, and we generally only have to focus on the entry and exit points (airports) as well as the vehicle itself. Endangering an aircraft in flight from outside the vehicle is relatively expensive and difficult. (Hence most security failures are from within the vehicle.)
The security focus for the ETT system would have to encompass the entire travel environment, unlike air travel. I see no practical way to protect 100% of a length of vacuum tubing on any scale useful for transportation.
If such a system did enter into use on a scale large enough to be more than a novelty, then there is also the risk to public infrastructure in the event of interrupted service. For example, one bomb and not only is every passenger killed instantly as air friction causes rapid deceleration to all cars, but the entire system becomes unavailable for a significant time which forces (hopefully available) alternative transportations methods into use. System reliability can't be any higher than security vulnerabilities allow it to be.
So yes, were an ETT system to exist, the operation costs may well be low enough to be payed for with advertising. But only after development and construction costs were paid for. I would expect those costs to be high enough to take more than one generation to pay for, possibly several. And for all the effort and expense, we'd have something ridiculously easy to damage and destroy for any evil nutball.
Re:not practical (Score:5, Interesting)
No. Say you have a train tube that's a reasonable length-- LA to San Francisco, Dallas to Houston, New York to Washington. You have to maintain a high-quality vacuum over that entire length. It's really late, so I'm not going to do the math for fear of getting it wrong and ruining my point, but the volume of such a tube would be really, really large. The surface area would also be really, really large. The likelihood that you could maintain a vacuum in such a tube is essentially zero. This is particularly true in an environment like the central California valley, where two points of land on either side of a fault line can shift as much as a foot in either direction over the course of a year or so, and that's without an earthquake.
More dangerous than flying?
Definitely. If a plane crashes, it's obviously horrible for the passengers, but the danger to bystanders is minimal. A plane crash-- one caused by failure or error, not deliberate malice-- might kill a few people on the ground, and that would be terrible. But a catastrophic failure of an evacuated tube would have the force of a medium-sized bomb, and it would be spread out all through the city, the countryside, et cetera. Thousands could be killed in a catastrophic evacuated tube failure, unless the tubes were all buried deep underground. As has already been discussed elsewhere, that idea has survivability problems of its own.
And cars are still much more dangerous.
That's a common misconception caused by the careless application of statistics. The total number of automobile fatalities per year is umpty-thousand. That sounds like a big number, even when you compare it to the total population. But when you look at the numbers another way, calculating an individual person's likelihood of being involved in a fatal automobile accident in his or her lifetime, the percentages come out very close to zero. That's why automobile liability insurance is still available, and affordable. Automotive transport is actually quite safe from an actuarial point of view.
Re:Hm (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't find any reference to it online, but in the early 80s or late 70s NASA came out with a design for a trans-continental train... in a vacuum tube.
The train was to have (guess what?) two tubes, and would be driven by maglev (360 degree maglev -- on all sides of the train, keeping it centered in the tube). There was much discussion of what happened if the power went out, how it would come to a soft landing, etc.
The other idea in the design was that to save energy, most of the power used to accelerate one train would come from the power generated in decelerating the other.
The design document included the projected costs of construction ($100 billion or so, if memory serves me correctly), the speed (5000 MPH), and the projected ticket cost ($40 NYC to LA).
The train cars were designed with chairs which rotated, because half the trip would be acceleration, and half deceleration, so you'd face forwards for the first half and backwards for the second.
The trip was projected to take about 45 minutes.
I wish I could find it online, but I was very impressed with the design at the time, and remember most of the details.
Hey, has anyone read NASA's "Space Communities: A Design Study" from 1976? That's another not-well-remembered document. We're barely at stage 2 (out of 6 or so in the book) so far. The L5 space station NASA's just proposing is in there... these guys think long term (or some of 'em anyway).
Re:don't mean to be a pessimist, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't think it's that much of a problem. For a start we're not talking about the kind of vaccuum nuclear physicsts need. Get it down to 10% of outside pressure and you'll have gone a long way towards reducing friction.
Stick a slow pump in every couple of hundreds of meters and you can cope with some leakage very easily. And after all, nuclear physicists have shown us that you can keep an extreme vaccuum in kilometer long tubes..
> There's no way to overcome the problems
is always a dangerous thing to say.
Now I don't think I'm going to see this technology happen in my lifetime, but I don't think it's as impossible as you say.
SAFER?!? (Score:2, Interesting)
These tubes are at least as dangerous as ordinary mass transit because they're moving people at high speed inside heavy machinery.
Then there's all these fun differences to keep in mind:
Safer? Sheesh.
Re:Previous art...Rand Organization (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:From now on, we'll all travel in TUBES! (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:It will never happen (Score:3, Interesting)
Now i live in Manhattan, and the subways are terrific (if a bit more filthy)
I'm sorry that your BART service is too crowded -- a friend of mine from SF once told me how she would get on a train in the wrong direction so that she could sit down, go two stops to the terminating station, and have a seat all the way home.
But i think that local and commuter mass transit can work really well if enough of an investment is made (running trains all night is a huge help too)
What other industry could survive like that? "You can either pay us a reasonable rate and be almost certain to sit around in the station while your train is delayed forever, or you can pay us double, and for that, we'll actually provide you the service we advertise."