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.
Hm (Score:2, Insightful)
Not much different than with a plane... (Score:2)
Re:Not much different than with a plane... (Score:5, Funny)
Except without the falling and the crashing and the screaming.
Re:Not much different than with a plane... (Score:2, Insightful)
Or, at the very least, God forbid let's say there was some emergency to do with cabin air when they were over water at least an hour out from any landmass. The plane could descend and as a last resort, crack a window or two (literally).
But this capsule thing.. No different from being out in space. If there's a serious problem with the system, such as the city suffers a power failure, like has happened to me once on the SkyTrain in Vancouver, or perhaps an earthquake kills the power station(s)... well... I sure wouldn't want to be in those little coffins...
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:Hm (Score:3)
1) contact with the tube will negate the lack of friction which makes the system workable -- so the emergency hatch would need to telescope to touch the ceiling. fine.
2) piercible? ok. Spelling aside, you can make the membrane out of whatever you desire, however, it still needs to hold against 1 atmosphere. It's very difficult to do that with somethat that is piercable AND durable enough to last a while.
3) So now you've pierced the wall --- you're in dirt. Great. That solved that problem real good!
yes. this IS a problem. However, it's a problem easily solved. Just equip each car with x hours of emergency air. As soon as something goes wrong, open the evacuated tunnel to the atmosphere. Choose x so that all the cars can withstand the induced wind thus induced.
Infrastructure. (Score:2)
Re:Infrastructure. (Score:3, Insightful)
Which, of course, is why Chicago has never had a widely-used mass transit system consisting of, say, an elevated train of some sort.
I don't see why this sort of system couldn't be used to replace an existing one. Living in the Bay Area, however, I can testify that the major problem with mass transit isn't the technology behind it, but rather the corrupt, power-hungry shills who plan and execute it. Our BART system, for example, has been in service for something like 30 years and still doesn't run to the Silicon Valley or any of the airports.
Re:Infrastructure. (Score:2, Funny)
Um... (Score:2, Funny)
The very first underground train in New York worked exactly like this, pneumatically. Everything old is new again, eh?
Re:Um...not quite (Score:2, Troll)
Re:Um... (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, just like the old pneumatic underground made by Alfred Ely Beach, except it's not pneumatic. And it uses two single directional tubes, recycles energy, travels at 300mph, is powered by an electric motor, and runs in a vacuum. But, other than that it's exactly the same.
Re:Um... (Score:4, Insightful)
How exactly does this qualify as pneumatic? I think this would be "anti-pneumatic" if such a term existed...
Pneumatic implies they are using air-pressure as the driving force. Most pneumatic systems (like money tubes at some theatres and large stores) actually suck air out, and as the air at the intake of the tube rushes to fill the vacuum, it has to push the capsule. This system talks about using evacuated tubes (ie: a vacuum), so that the capsules can travel with pretty much no friction. The entire tube system is a vacuum, so there's no suck and no blow; the actual driving force would likely be electric...
Re:Um... (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/technology/nyundergro und/secret.html [pbs.org]
not practical (Score:2)
2) maintaining a vaccuum could conceivably be dangerous.
3) most right-of-ways for such a huge undertaking are probably already claimed by other projects in any major metro. Yah, I know eminent domain & all that, but that'll end up in court forever.
Re:not spellable (Score:2)
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:It could be practical for sending materials (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact is, speed doesn't kill, acceleration kills. Especially sudden deceleration. That's why the Apollo astronauts were able to reach the Moon in just a matter of days. By going very fast.
From now on, we'll all travel in TUBES! (Score:5, Insightful)
Why, you ask? Not because it's not interesting and efective technology, but because we Americans don't like mass transit. We want cars. We have a *right* to cars. Look in the Bill of Rights. It's there. Or if it's not, I think it should be, so it might as well be there right next to my right to own a minigun.
Seriously, though, there are hundreds neat ideas for viable mass-transit available, but I'm stuck riding a 30 year-old, beaurocracy-lader system called BART to work everyday. That has, to put it mildly, soured my viewpoint somewhat. Until we remove the corruption that wil always accompany mass transit, we might as well forget about it.
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.
closed loop wind tunnels (Score:2)
Shock tubes (Score:4, Informative)
They are talking about the fact that there will be SOME gas in the tube, not much, but it will be there.
Aerospace engineers have been doing this kind of problem in the lab for years, we call them shock tubes [aerodyn.org], you can also check google [google.com].
Re:From now on, we'll all travel in TUBES! (Score:5, Insightful)
Looks like the busses here don't serve their passengers, but serve those traveling by car (by removing other's cars during peak hours).
So I use the car only because I may sometimes (3-5%) need it. If the bus was available (at least once an hour) anytime it is needed, I would not use my car and switch to bus.
I talked with American (car mechanic ironically) who just returned from a trip to Russia, and he was amazed by availability of all the options of mass transit - buses that go 24 hour a day, trams, trains that go to almost every town (and do this often and fast). He traveled by mass transit, and he traveled a lot. Tired after the plain, he was so annoyed that he had to drive 4 hours to his home town, instead of sleeping those 4 hours in the train :)
Re:From now on, we'll all travel in TUBES! (Score:4, Informative)
I knew several people who lived outside of London, as well - and only two of them had cars.
As a whole, Americans are too lazy to make public transportation viable. Unless you're in a big city, the only people who take the bus are people too poor to have a car - and since so few people use the buses, there is no incentive to a) have busses stop more often, or b) put stops closer together.
I couldn't even get a job this summer because I didn't have a car...
Re:From now on, we'll all travel in TUBES! (Score:4, Insightful)
I remeber one morning walking to vauxhall train station to get the train to victoria and seeing cherie blair (the pm's wife) walking to to train, and she was pregnant at the time, and had just 1 unarmed bobby (uniformed police officer) with her, and he was just escorting her till she got on the train.
Thats the big difference, in the UK public transport IS just how you get from one place to another, not a social idelogical or ecological choice, and thats the way it should be.
Screw travelling in tubes, point to point transport, high speed transport is not what you need. What you need is a broad interconnected, slow safe and frequently opperating network.
Re:From now on, we'll all travel in TUBES! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:From now on, we'll all travel in TUBES! (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe you should come to NY... I live in a small part of NYC (Staten Island) and even here there are buses that run 24/7. A bus usually comes every half hour all day. There's also a ferry that goes to manhatten (when people talk about NYC, they're usually talking about manhatten), from staten island, at least every hour (every 15 minutes during rush hour.) There's the metro north also, I can take a train to just about any place in the state of NY for a few dollars. The buses and subways cost $1.50 (the ferry is free and express buses are like coaches, comfy seats and stuff, they're $3.)
There's also this great little card called a metrocard. You can go to just about any deli or small store or whatever and pick one up. They usually have $15 metrocards, they work on buses and trains, when you get on the bus you just stick the card in the slot and get on, very quick and very easy. You can refill them too, much easier than carrying change or tokens. The trains have turnstyles so you just slide the card through and go through the turnstyle. You can also transfer from one thing to the next, like lets say you needed to take the S74 (S is for staten island, 74 is the route) to the ferry and needed to get onto the 1 train in manhatten, you just pay for the bus and on the metrocard you get a transfer (or you ask the driver for one if you payed with tokens or change) and you get onto the train for free.
Re:From now on, we'll all travel in TUBES! (Score:3, Funny)
kinda like in hover carnage [sourceforge.net] except without all the death and stuff...
Re:From now on, we'll all travel in TUBES! (Score:2)
Pfeh. If the population density of a place gets high enough that people start talking about mass transit, move. Cities are generally not a healthy environment for humans. Some people may prefer to live in them, but you certainly don't have to.
Flee the cities. Flee the suburbs. Move to west Texas, or Montana, or Nebraska... or Australia. Whatever floats your boat. Get yourself some land and live in a house where you can't hear or smell your neighbors.
Don't fence me in, baby.
Re:From now on, we'll all travel in TUBES! (Score:2)
If you could drive a car between San Francisco and New York in five and a half hours, nobody would ever fly...
Re:From now on, we'll all travel in TUBES!-Weeeh! (Score:2, Funny)
If you can get the police to stay out of my way. I bet I could.
Re:From now on, we'll all travel in TUBES!-Weeeh! (Score:3, Funny)
Mapquest says it's 2906 miles from SF to New York. That puts your average speed at about 530 MPH. I'm pretty sure the cops wouldn't be able to catch you at that rate, anyhow.
If you decide to try it out, let me know and I'll race ya.
Re:From now on, we'll all travel in TUBES!-Weeeh! (Score:2)
It's already been done [gumball3000.com]. Well, New York to LA anyway. Next year, they're doing San Francisco to Miami. I hope you have a lot of money, an exotic car, and no fear of tickets or jail time (and have the money to bail yourself out of jail). It takes a little more than 5 hours (more like 5 days), but it's about as close as you're going to get.
If you don't have the balls to participate in person, there's a Gumball 3000 [sci.co.uk] video game on the PS2 (seems to be only in Europe, or at least I couldn't find a US version). It's based on the pre-2002 European Gumball 3000 races, not the latest US races (2002 and upcoming 2003).
Re:From now on, we'll all travel in TUBES! (Score:4, Funny)
Where can I get an ejection seat for my Honda?
Re:From now on, we'll all travel in TUBES! (Score:2)
Re:From now on, we'll all travel in TUBES! (Score:2)
Around here (los angeles) it seems like control of the vehicles is securely in the hands of the idiots. And that idiocy doubles when considering bus drivers. Personally, I would welcome a train system. I realize it will never happen though. Or when it happens, people won't need to physically commute as much since everything will be done online so it will be useless.
Re:From now on, we'll all travel in TUBES! (Score:2)
Your prayers have been answered ... [metrolinktrains.com]
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.
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: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."
Re:It will never happen (Score:2)
Re:It will never happen (Score:5, Insightful)
Notice how "mass entertainment" in movie theaters is facing a challenge from the home theater trend. People are increasingly choosing to watch movies at home on their DVD players and big-screen TVs with surround sound systems. It puts the individual in control of geographic location of viewing, start time, end time, pausing, instant replays, volume, language, viewing angle, viewing chair/sofa/bed/carpet, lighting, smoking/non-smoking, drinking if you please, any food allowed, and countless other variables that affect the entertainment experience.
Childhood dream (Score:2, Interesting)
It won't be the same without giant quarters and nickels along side of me though.
A fascinating Idea... (Score:3, Insightful)
Pre-emptive Simpsons jokes (Score:5, Funny)
That's unpossible! (Score:2, Funny)
But that's the kind of commentary Slashdot does best!
But it's not open source... (Score:3, Informative)
The next step: (Score:2, Insightful)
I hope that by the 30th century, we too will have mastered the technology required to insert a human being in a vacuum tube without them exploding or asphyxiating
I see some errors in this reasoning (Score:2, Insightful)
"During most of the trip the capsules coast; using no power."
Um, no. It either has to be running on wheels or constantly supported by electromagnets the entire time. If the first, there is a constant requirement of energy to continue moving a massive object against ground friction. If the second, well, maglev isn't cheap. Even if, as suggested, "linear generators recover most of the electrical energy used to accelerate the capsules", that is certainly not a lossless process.
Second, how do you maintain a seal on a tube the length of a subway tunnel? That's a huge surface area, and not particularly easy to make either waterproof or airtight, even underground. And what happens if there is a breach in a passenger car? Your passengers will suddenly find themselves in an oxygen-less environment. Even a cabin depressurization on an aircraft at 10 km doesn't subject the passengers to total vacuum.
This proposal doesn't strike me as being fully thought out.
Re:I see some errors in this reasoning (Score:2)
Then again, I could be wrong...
As for the problems that would be caused by a breach in a passenger car - you are 100% on that one - bad mojo would happen.
Re:I see some errors in this reasoning (Score:2, Informative)
Magnetic field strength falls off very quickly: "From single conductor sources, magnetic field strengths decrease directly proportional to the distance from the source (1/D). From multiple conductor sources, magnetic field strengths decrease as the square of the distance (1/D). And, from coils or loops, magnetic field strengths decrease as the cube of the distance (1/D)" (grabbed this quote here [fms-corp.com].)
Someone further down was talking about superconductors; while in theory much more energy efficient, there are none currently that don't require massive cooling systems to lower them to the necessary temperatures. The cost of laying out miles of superconductors below ground is mind-boggling.
A neodynium magnet is incredibly powerful for its size(I've managed to squash a thumb between two hard drive magnets while being stupid), but the field strength fall-off means that a huge mass would be required. It might even be cheaper to build a superconducting system after all.
whooosh.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Re:whooosh.. (Score:3, Funny)
Actually, from reading the FAQ, it seems like the company is merely promising franchise rights to this, not any actual end-product itself. That's worse than vaporware. That's meta-vaporware. Yuck.
Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)
Another thing about friction (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Another thing about friction (Score:5, Informative)
Finally, friction isn't the only source of energy loss in a rolling tire. In fact, as long as you aren't skidding, almost none of the energy is lost to friction (because rolling friction is really a special case of static friction and energy is lost in dynamic friction). Most of the energy in rolling a tire is lost continuously flexing (and heating) the tire sidewall under the weight of the vehicle.
Thin steel wheels deform a whole lot less than radials and will therefore lose less energy when rolling.
But Heinlein had the right idea. Dig the tunnels deeper and have them follow great circles through the crust. Then launch the cabs to orbital velocity (but inside the earth). No wheels. Or expensive magnets. Just a nice vacuum and a very fast ride. Of course, the acceleration/deceleration might be a bit brutal...
Regards,
Ross
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.
Can't say I'm sold into this... (Score:2, Insightful)
I can see it now. They'll get Gates to finance this thing (he just loves innovation, and giving money, doesn't he?). Now, he'll make them use Windows boxes for traffic control. Next thing you now, some controller downtown will get a blue flash on his face, and you'll find yourself in a cute little cylindrical coffin stuck in a tube-traffic jam, in vacuum, with 18 minutes of oxygen left and a real urgent need for a bathroom. You can say I'm old fashioned, but I'll stick to my bike for a while, thank you very much.
Re:Can't say I'm sold into this... (Score:3, Funny)
Maintaining the Vacuum (Score:4, Insightful)
But you didn't warn us off of Futurama.... (Score:5, Funny)
Man: Radio City Mutant Hall! [The man is sucked up into the tube]
Fry: Um. Cross Town Express? [He is sucked up into the tube] Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! [People look up from the street and stare at him. He is taken across the city, past the Statue of Liberty, underwater and finally out the other end smack into a building.]
Man: Pfft! Tourist!
don't mean to be a pessimist, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Not with the hundreds of miles of tube.
Not with termal expansion/contraction.
Not in an active city with people building, digging holes, running infrastructure.
Not in an even remotely seismic active area (remember the earthquake in NY?).
While its a cool idea, its just that, an idea. There's no way to overcome the problems and still make it as durable and cost less than existing technology.
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:don't mean to be a pessimist, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
- As you say, keeping the vacuum would be a significant problem, which conveniently is ignored in the writeup. Saying that, if a very gas impermiable material is developed the rate of gas inflow could be limited such that low level pumping would keep the systems stable.
- The idea that this company holds a patent is a bit of a joke. Anyone who wants to do something like this can avoid the patent, or invalidate it. Prior art is everywhere. Sounds like someone has convinced a VC to provide money on the basis that there is the potential to rake it in in future. That's good, nice to see something useful being done with the money, but god, I hate using patents to do it, it just brings the whole thing into disrepute.
- Terrorist action would be a significant problem. Take out one of these carriages and the fact that all the rest are close behind, travelling at 400-4000 mph, makes for a tempting target. The system is in no way robust enough.
- Construction costs would be MASSIVE. This thing has to be fairly straight and flat, otherwise the stress of the forces as these carriages 'go round the corner' will pull it apart. We are back to the situation of the railways. Laying two strips of metal is fairly cheap. Laying two strips of metal straight and flat, by cutting through hills and building viaducts is very expensive.
- The carriages are too small and cramped to be serious for travel. With so few passengers per carriage the cost of the upkeep and construction starts to dominate. Better to use a train concept, with large carriages and longer trains, and only a few with drive units etc.
Saying all this, there is a way that something related to this type of concept can be made practical - but it won't be in the US. Its much more likely in Japan or China.personal rapid transit (Score:3, Insightful)
Note that for local transportation, the problem isn't speed but coverage. I can't realistically take public transportation to work because it would take me far too long to get to the nearest station and because trains take far too long to get to the destination (because of a lot of stops).
For local transportation, another concept makes more sense to me: Personal Rapid Transit [1] [cprt.org], [2] [washington.edu]. Personal Rapid Transit consists of small passenger cabins (1-3 people) that you call to the nearest station and take to the station nearest to your destination, almost like a taxi or chauffeur. And unlike evacuated tube transports, they do not require a lot of digging or construction.
And, politically, personal rapid transit seems more promising in the short term: it's something that can be done at the local level.
Re:personal rapid transit (Score:2)
Strange that the patent examiners would be unaware of at least 30 years of open speculation.
If I didn't accept their competence as an absolute, I'd start wondering about the credibility of the patent office.
Re:personal rapid transit (Score:2)
That's exactly why mass transit in its current form will never be popular in the USA. My personal pet idea (probably already invented somewhere else) would be a standardized mini car that could be instantly loaded in and out of one of these tube transports. You would have three modes: free range electric mini car (manually driven) for getting to/from the end destination, mini-car loaded on transporter in normal tubes (automatically driven) for urban commuting, and mini-car in vacuum tube for 300MPH interstate trips. (Note that without having to deal with scheduled flight times, airplane taxiing and cow herding delays, you'd get to your destination much quicker in a 300MPH self-scheduled tube than all but the very longest scheduled 500MPH flights.)
The mini car could be electric and would recharge whenever it's in the system. When you request your destination, a central computer instantly allocates the tube transports and adjusts all tube traffic to give you a clear shot to where you're going.
With this kind of system, you'd get the best of both worlds: The freedom to get within a few feet of anywhere you want on your own schedule, and the ability to sit back and read during the bulk of your commute time. As a bonus, the 300MPH evacuated tubes eliminate the hassles of airports and rental cars. You just stay in your own personal germ-free car in all of these cases.
Re:personal rapid transit (Score:2)
Re:personal rapid transit (Score:3, Insightful)
Except they don't. Read the hundred or so comments criticizing this idea on the grounds of practicality (that much vacuum is effectively impossible) and safety (that much vacuum is effectively a giant bomb).
As for personal rapid whatever you said, it suffers from exactly the same problem as all other rail-based transportation: there will always be many more destinations than there are stations. For the majority of the population, such a system would be an inconvenience at best.
huge vacumn filled tunnels? Get real! (Score:2)
Moreover this is not like the pneumatic tubes you might have seen at various places that use differential air pressure to suck or push canisters along. Those are hardly high speed and hardly frictionless.
L. Neil Smith's "Express" (Score:2)
Several Comments (Score:5, Insightful)
Another thing is suppose one of the cars gets stuck. These things are going 300-4000mph in an environment that's supposed to be virtually frictionless. How do you stop all the other "cars" behind the broken one in time?
How gradual do the turns have to be? You can't exactly make a quick right turn at 300+mph and still have a comfortable ride. Maybe there will be no turns and it will stop every time it needs to change direction.
And doesn't this kinda remind people of network switches? Computerized management of "people packets" zooming through tubes?
Strange New World (Score:2, Insightful)
It was a transcontinental and transoceanic system that ran a mile or more underground. The system did not necessarily require a true vacuum, just enough to permit travel at Mach 2+. Once established the vacuum would be easy to maintain since their is very little air or other gases a mile down. The reason for the depth was that it eliminated the need to go around obstacles, just straight lines. Safety wise, it is similar to the Chunnel, with a smaller maintenance tunnel running parallel to the main tunnel which could be used for emergency exists.
How safe is it? Remember modern airplanes have similar problems at 40,000 feet. Outside temperature is -40, almost no air pressure, and a loss of power or structural integrity is almost always fatal. Your choice of asphyxiation or hyperthermia in 20 seconds!
All of it assumed that we would have nuclear powered tunneling machines that could allow the construction off a coast to coast tunnel in a decade. Basically you would take an elevator down to a subway station and travel from New York to Los Angeles in an hour.
Re:Strange New World (Score:2)
I think this idea is totally possible. But so are Dyson spheres, and I'm not expecting that project to start for a while. The capital expenditure for any large scale aplication of this is far too high.
I think the ETT people basicly have an idea (a bit loopy) and a patent (from a loopy patent office), some cool-looking CGI, and a website.
Oh yeah, and seeing as the posters name is 'pipeguy', they might have some good alternative marketing techniques. Still, good luck to them.
LEGOs! (Score:2)
Must.... Resist.... Urge... (Score:2, Funny)
"So, in closing, mono means one, and rail means rail."
This is the most retarded idea ever (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Doesn't make sense. (Score:2)
Imagine if we had a tube at ground level going all the way around the Earth.
If the tubes are vacuums, you can continually accelerate an object within them, since there is no terminal veolicity at constant acceleration the way there is from air. (At least at nonrelativistic speeds.)
Now let's calculate what orbital speeds are at sea level. At sea level, if you start out with zero downward momentum, you fall less than 10 meters in 1 second. If during that time you shoot forward far enough in a straight line that the Earth's curviture lifts you 10 feet, you've achieved orbit. NASA gives [nasa.gov] the Earth's diameter at the equator as 12,756 KM. Now the following calculation is REALLY easy using a diagram, but a bit tricky to describe. It uses only the pythagorean theorem.
Draw a circle, and two radii, one due west, one appreciably north. Draw a tangent at the circumference where the westerly radius touches (tangents are at right angles with radii). Now extend the second radius until it touches the tangent line. You should have a triangle whose hypotenuse is 12,756 KM + 10 M, of which one leg is 12,756 KM, and the other leg unknown. The other leg (along the tangent line) represents how much we need to move forward in 1 second, and we calculate it by taking the square root of the difference between 12,756.01 squared and 12,756 squared.
This number is 15.972. In other words, by MY calculation (I'm fresh out of high school though, so YMMV), orbiting at sea level requires you to go 15.972 miles in a single second. Compare that with the Space shuttle's "velocity of 27,880 km per hour" (/3600 seconds-per-hour) = 7.744. In other words, at an altitude of 322 KM, it can take nearly twice as long fall the same amount, which is explained by lower value of acceleration-due-to-gravity at that height. (Repeating our calculations above, substituting 12,756+322 for 12,756, we get sqrt( (12756+322+0.01)^2 - (12756+322)^2 ) = 16.172 KM, versus the 15.972 we had at ground level. However, to cover the same 10 feet, it now has a longer time to fall.
ANYWAY, the upshot of all this is that if you can accelerate something to 15.972 KM/s or (57,499.2 KM/h or (x0.62) 35,649 miles per hour, it will coast its way along without needing anything under it, and without consuming further gas.
This could be a really great way to deliver packages.
Draw a circumference at sea level that goes through a lot of interesting places, lay down a vacuum line (it doesn't actually need to support anything!! All it needs to do is be thin plastic that holds its shape at 1 atmosphere crush) all around it, then start this huge, heavy monolithic Delivery Bird sailing around at 35,649 mph, reaching every point along your line every fifteen minutes. I'm not sure how you get packages (including passengers) on and off the thing, but it sure sounds cool.
So, in conclusion, it's too cool to work.
Re:Doesn't make sense. (Score:3, Informative)
Not a bad way to do this calculation, if you don't have access to calculus and the like. Unfortunately, your answer is wrong, because the radius of the Earth is a touch under 7000 kilometers, not 13000 as you claim.
An easier way to do this would be to remember that the centripetal force required to keep an object with mass m moving in a circular orbit of radius r and speed v is just m*v^2/r. Equate that to the force of gravity at sea level and you have that:
v^2 = g*r
Just think of gravity as being the "string" that keeps the satellite in its circular path. At sea level, this works out to 8.3 km/sec or thereabouts. Incidentally, it can be shown that the minimum escape velocity is just this number multiplied by the square root of two.
Cheers,
Mouser
Everything Old is New Again (Score:2)
What would be more logical, however, would be to simply evacuate the air on one side of the car, to provide propulsion, making the train almost silent...
Problems (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Cost. How much will it cost to put down those tubes everywhere, keep them vacuum, maintain them, etc? How much does it cost to manufacture a vehicle for this system? Is this all going to be cheaper than driving an automobile (especially in countries with lower fuel prices)?
2. Popularity. Although I don't know the situation in the rest of the world, I know that in Holland people prefer going to work by car over going there by train even if trains are cheaper, faster, more comfortable, safer, better for the environment, don't have parking problems, and allow them to do some work or socialize while traveling. For some, this goes even if the train stops just as close or even closer to work than they could part their cars.
3. Usefulness. A transportation system is only useful if it gets you where you want to go. How precise this needs to be depends on the distance traveled and the frequency of the visits to this destination. The greater the distance, and the lower the frequency, the more willing people are to use additional means of trasnportation to get to their destination. Since it would probably be impossible for this system to achieve anywhere near the granularity of the road infrastructure, it's use is probably for longer distances. There, it competes with cars, trains, and aircraft. This syste will never be able to beat the flexibility of cars, nor the speed of aircraft. Trains are higly impopular with travelers. What niche will this system occupy?
Just some thoughts...
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Caution: breathing may be hazardous to your health.
Mass transit costs not driven by energy (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Yeah, lots of people don't use public transport (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't do the math, as I haven't the figures available. I suspect you can't do the math either, as you don't quote any figures. :-) What I can say is that I've been to a number of countries that run very efficient public transportation (I'm especially thinking of the Netherlands, and the Amsterdam trams). India, Japan, northern Europe all have at least adequate public transport systems. You don't say how far Jersey City is from your fiancee, so it's hard to say if the train cost is reasonable or not. The question to ask is how much it would cost her, considering fuel and maintenance to run a car for that same commute each month (and don't forget parking fees, of course).
Now, your crack about the middle east is low. I like driving my PERSONAL automobile. It is gas fueled, but it isn't a gas-guzzling SUV....it's a VW golf, and it gets great gas milage. I'd use an ethanol-gasoline mix if I could buy it somewhere near me.
Nice car, I'm a big fan of the Golf (my advisor runs one). While you have a point that personal transportation is more useful in general than public transport (no schedules, service to everywhere there's a road, etc.), this doesn't preclude public transport at all. Most people put a large chunk (most?) of the miles on their vehicles going to work every day, and this ratio likely increases if one works in a city one can't afford to live in (working in NYC, living in Jersey). Use public transport during the week, drive to your vacation paradise in your gas-electric hybrid on the weekend...
Public transport, when properly executed, doesn't just cut on gas usage, but also smog, noise and traffic. It puts less strain on a city's infrastructure (bridges, tunnels, parking ramps, &cet.) And it also encourages slightly more walking, which is vastly better for the population for other reasons.
Your point about Amtrak is well-taken, but I don't see it as particularly relevant. Do most roads pay for their own maintenance? Isn't that what part of a state's gas tax goes towards? Aren't there Federal highway subsidies? Toll roads may mitigate the cost of upkeep, but I hardly think they are self-sustaining. Why should public transport networks be less worthy of tax dollars? Why a different standard, especially given the health and environmental bonus?
For examples, New York has an adequate public transport network, and Washington D.C.'s is absolutely first-rate. So, it can be done, at least on an intra-city level. Most of America's public transport problems come from attitude, not because the concept is inherently unworkable.
Cheers,
The Mouser
Swissmetro (Score:4, Informative)
This has already been researched in Switzerland... (Score:3, Informative)
A quick summary of it here [laiwww.epfl.ch].
The most complete analysis of the project I've seen here [www.strc.ch].
Basically, it's probably doable, but the major roadblock is a VERY strong political support (even in a very pro-mass transit country like switzerland), because of the massive costs to validate the faisability of it. In Switzerland, that support has not materialized in the last 20 years.
My idea... (Score:5, Funny)
OK, you're all skeptical. Here's the FAQ from my investment prospectus.
What about leaks in the cars? (Score:3, Informative)
Imagine if two of these pressurized cars collide, and their seals break. All their air would escape into the tube, and any passengers that survived the impact would suffocate in a fairly gruesome Total-Recall-like manner.
The safety section of their FAQ doesn't even address this.
They are a Rambus company (Score:5, Informative)
From their site ("company summary" page)
Our aim is to generate returns for our shareholders by acting now to acquire control of important blocks of intellectual property (patents and trade secrets) in the ETT field. We currently own the patent and trade secret rights to Evacuated Tube Transport, the first practical evacuated tube transport technology. We believe that these ultra efficient and environmentally benign systems, will become key components of numerous future worldwide transport systems. ET3.COM INC. intends to take full advantage of the generic nature of this unique technology by securing the intellectual property rights on the lion's share of all specific applications, new devices, and novel systems issuing from it. Management also believes that we are well positioned to gain control of other major intellectual property by developing new patents and trade secrets through our own internal efforts and by developing patent-exploitation agreements for the patents and trade secrets belonging to others.
Re:Simpsons? (Score:2)
Re:Frictionless (Score:2, Funny)
1. Create vacuum.
2. ???
3. Violate thermodynamics!
Ele-fucking-mentary, my dear Watson.
Re:Frictionless (Score:2)
Re:dangerous? (Score:2, Funny)
Read the FAQ
To change the subject, did you know they've removed gullible [dictionary.com] from the dictionary?
Re:dangerous? (Score:2)
You are perhaps familiar with space travel? Seems to work okay.
-- Brian
Not any moreso than flying... (Score:2)
This is not to say I wholly agree with their idea, just that your concerns are largely unfounded.
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:Not a new concept? (Score:3, Funny)
C1Q3
When the litter is overturned by the whirlwind,
and faces will be covered by their cloaks,
the republic will be vexed by new people,
then whites and reds will judge in contrary ways.
which obviously foretells a terrorist attack by the Chinese on one of these systems.
The litter (to contemporary term for a carriage or capsule) is destroyed when the vacuum is lost and the air rushes in. The Republican president has to deal with the 'reds' aka the Chinese.
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.