The Smog To Fog Challenge: Settling the High-Speed Rail vs. Hyperloop Debate 333
waderoush writes "Elon Musk thinks California should kill its $68 billion high-speed rail project and build his $7.5 billion Hyperloop instead. It's a false choice. We should pursue all promising new options for efficient mass transit, and let the chips fall where they may; if it turns out after a few years that Musk's system is truly faster and cheaper, there will still be time to pull the plug on high-speed rail. But why not make things interesting? Today Xconomy proposes a competition in the grand tradition of the Longitude Prize, the Orteig Prize, and the X Prizes: the $10 billion Smog to Fog Challenge. The money, to be donated by big corporations, would go to the first organization that delivers a live human from Los Angeles to San Francisco, over a fixed ground route, in 3 hours or less. Such a prize would incentivize both publicly and privately funded innovation in high-speed transit — and show that we haven't lost the will to think big."
300 MPH flesh sacks of water (Score:2, Insightful)
What is the obsession with flinging your sack of water down a track at 300 miles per hour. In a world of diminishing cheap energy, why travel fast? You know, in many cities, the tram systems carried more people everyday than most cities now transport people in cars into the city from the suburbs.
Ding Ding!!
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Understanding (Score:5, Insightful)
If you waste money to procure a handshake, you shouldnt be in business.
If you don't understand the true value of a real face to face handshake is at times immeasurable, you DEFINITELY should not be in business.
Telecommuting is such a failure. (Score:2, Insightful)
This is true.
Nothing beats actual human interaction.
Telecommuting is such a failure.
Nobody wants their human interaction cheapened. If you ever want to build any kind of relationship (sales, groups, fucking, etc..), you actually have to meet people in real life.
Telling someone you want to telecommute is telling someone you aren't worth their time to do something expensive for them
Telecommuting is for people that want to cheapen relationships.
Also, 100% of the population needs to build relationships. It's n
Re:Telecommuting is such a failure. (Score:4, Insightful)
Only libertarian losers that believe in "freedom" think life shouldn't be about building relationships and think of life as for themselves. Nothing could be further from the truth. You have to kiss ass to those in power if you want power back.
Ah, yes, the instinctive urge to bash so-called "libertarians" brings out the inner cockroach. Libertarianism has nothing to do with "building relationships," but is merely a philosophy about governance. In a libertarian society, there would be an even greater need to build relationships because you couldn't use the force of the state to insure compliance or seize resources. The mugger doesn't need to build a relationship. While much is made of self-reliance, less is discussed of the new opportunities for building relationships that would exist in a libertarian society.
There's a portion of the population that is for lack of a better word, "introspective". They don't interact well with people or easily build relationships. They aren't naturally libertarians any more than anyone else. So labeling this group as "libertarian losers" just indicates ignorance on your part.
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And all these straw men libertarians? Can't say that I really care what you think there. One can study actual libertarian philosophy, discussion and such. What you claim just isn't true.
Fo
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You are looking at it in the wrong terms. The majority of individuals get more out than they put in. Those who don't are not greatly harmed because they are still rich. In fact those who get less monetary value out for their own personal use still benefit from living in a relatively content and healthy society.
You, like many people, made the mistake of trying to put a dollar value on everything. You know the price of everything and the value of nothing, as we like to say.
There is also the assumption that ha
tl;dr (Score:3)
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In other words, let's use 10,000 year old primitive rules and notions to drive 21st century transportation expenditures.
Of course. We've not had telecommunications for nearly long enough (less than 140 years, with widespread telephone ownership for quite a lot less and videoconferencing for a lot less) for us to have evolved significantly to be happier using it than seeing people in person. Give it a few thousand years, say 100 generations, and I'm sure humanity will be far happier with telecoms.
Or all dead from some random passing apocalypse.
Re:300 MPH flesh sacks of water (Score:4, Insightful)
Furthermore, for the 0.001% of people who truly need to be somewhere that fast, let them take their corporate jet to LA. Don't sink $70 billion to support a couple of hundred of sales people. Nobody else needs to get from LA to SF at 300 mph to see their relatives.
Dude, your virtual Disneyland still sucks; how long have you been working on it now? Even Euro Disney sucks less than your virtual Disneyland.
Fix that, and we don't even have to talk about how much your virtual Grand Canyon and Virtual Arches National Park and virtual Machu Picchu and virtual Angkor Watt and virtual Great Wall of China and virtual Tunguska site suck, because if you can make your virtual Disney unsuck, you can probably fix those other things. Eventually.
Until then, I'm throwing my sack of water in a tin can headed to the physical reality of those things.
Re:300 MPH flesh sacks of water (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed, in a world of increasing teleconferencing and telecommuting, you'd think the attraction of high-speed travel would be less pressing with each year that goes by.
Since 1993, the number of journeys by rail has gone up in the UK every year except 2008.
Better teleconferencing and better journey times means more business happens, which more than compensates for the people who no longer need to travel. A manufacturer likes to have their suppliers nearby. The distance "nearby" increases with better railways, and the number of potential suppliers the manufacturer is aware of increases with better telecoms.
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More likely the result of an increasing population and the London congestion charge.
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Re:300 MPH flesh sacks of water (Score:5, Insightful)
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Three hours? All that money to shave away 120 minutes?
If it weren't for CHP, I'd make it in five, every time, no problem...
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Not to mention... airplanes. So many billions would probably pay for an extra/improved airport or two. Airplanes don't require any infrastructure in between, and you could link the airports to the city center with regular rail at a fraction of the cost. For that cost, you could even set up some kind of pre-screening on the train that links the city center to the airport so that the train can deliver the passengers on the secure side of the airport.
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Airplanes don't have to be carbon polluters. You could run them on biofuels or capture the carbon. Carbon offsets are fairly cheap - probably under a buck per passenger per typical flight.
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Re:300 MPH flesh sacks of water (Score:5, Insightful)
The alternative to building California's HSR is spending $38.6 to $41.0 billion on 115 new airport gates and 4 new runways, plus $119.0 to $145.5 billion building 4,295 to 4,652 new lane-miles of highway, all just to move the same number of people as $98.1 billion spent on HSR.
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Three hours? All that money to shave away 120 minutes?
If it weren't for CHP, I'd make it in five, every time, no problem...
Google Maps reports LA-->SF at 382 mi, 5 hours 35 minutes. To do this in 3 hours, on existing roads requires an average speed of 382/3 = 127 mph.
Tomorrow's NASCAR race at Michigan will be 500 miles and the winner's average speed is likely to be over 160 mph including pitstops and caution periods to clean up wrecks. A number of cars qualified (solo run) at over 200 mph. The Silver State Classic Challenge is held on closed public roads, http://www.sscc.us/history.aspx [www.sscc.us] and the current record for 90 miles
He did say five hours... (Score:3)
Google Maps reports LA-->SF at 382 mi, 5 hours 35 minutes.
He said "if it were not for CHP, I could make it in five every time".
Shaving 35 minutes off a five hour trip is really easy if you drive reasonably (i.e. non-dangerously) fast.
In fact pretty much all the time I am somewhere five-ten minutes per hour faster than the Google estimate.
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If it weren't for CHP, I'd make it in five, every time, no problem...
Google Maps reports LA-->SF at 382 mi, 5 hours 35 minutes. To do this in 3 hours, on existing roads requires an average speed of 382/3 = 127 mph.
Keep in mind that the SF-LA high speed rail is scheduled to be under construction for thirty years before it is operational. By that time we will almost certainly have self driving cars that can do 127mph safely. We could build streamlined self driving buses that could go from SF to LA in three hours on existing interstate highways for about 1% of the cost of the HS rail boondoggle.
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False. The Initial Operating Section (220 mph or 350 km/h from San Jose to Palmdale) is scheduled to be operational in 2022, just nine years from now.
You must be thinking of the full build-out, from San Diego and Anaheim to San Francisco and Sacramento.
Re:300 MPH flesh sacks of water (Score:5, Interesting)
Doing that journey in 3 hours wouldn't even be stretching modern technology. You do, however, hit diminishing returns quite quickly. At 125mph, it's about 3 hours. To get to 2 hours, you need to go up to 191mph. To get down to 1 hour, you're up at 382mph and the Hyperloop speed makes it just over half an hour. While there's an obvious advantage to half an hour over 3 hours, there's not much difference in convenience between a 2-hour and a 3-hour journey. Even getting a 3-hour trip down to 1.5 hours isn't something that many people would be willing to pay a significant premium for, especially when you have half an hour of much slower travelling to get you to the station at each end.
If California wants to spend a lot of money on their train system, they should consider improvements to the Caltrain. It's under 80 miles of track, but getting between San Jose to San Francisco on a Sunday is painful. Upgrading 80 miles of track to support even 150mph trains and replacing the archaic rolling stock would mean that most of the valley on the Caltrain would take less time than one side of San Francisco to the other on the BART (which could also benefit from some modernisation). And if you've ever driven from one side of SF to the other, then you'll see the attraction of public transport...
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BART was the only chance, and when it wasn't extended many
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Goddam Ponch and Jon.
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Perhaps in a generation or two (or after a few energy crises) you could convince people to sacrifice a full day traveling from LA to SanFran, but for the moment, take it as a given that people want and, to a small extent, need to travel that distance in a short period of time. Given that, consider the available alternatives to Hyperloop or the proposed High Spe
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Are there figures on passenger rail energy cost available?
I know freight does a lot better than aircraft, but buses and commuter rail tend to have a lot of starts and stops, can't get away with keeping the speed below 50mph or mile-long trains, and often are far from full, and there's not much you can do about the over-capacity - you must run at low-volume times or people won't have confidence they'll be able to make the return trip (or won't be able to make the original trip...) using the mass transit ser
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I'm sorry, but that's an idiotic attitude to hold. From a business perspective it's invaluable to meet in person. Telecommuting isn't all it's cracked up to be and often is detrimental to the workplace. But there are a multitude of reasons why people would want to physically travel somewhere. People move where the jobs and opportunities are. This often means separation from friends and family which in turn means that they're more likely to travel to see them. How about sightseeing and vacations? Who in the
No. (Score:2, Insightful)
"conventional" high-speed rail is a proven concept in use today in many non-North American countries. Musk's idea, while based on things that are already being studies, contains a lot of unproven technology.
Even if we could do the necessary R&D in a *reasonable* amount of time, the 7+ billion price-tag is way too low.
It's a pipe dream - er, tube dream - to think this is a practical transportation solution right now or even in the near future.
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contains a lot of unproven technology.
No, actually it doesn't. Obviously all this proven technology has never been combined in this particular way before, but there's nothing in the plan that's not available off the shelf today.
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If the technology is all ready then why doesn't he build a test track out in the desert to prove it?
Re:No. (Score:4, Informative)
If the technology is all ready then why doesn't he build a test track out in the desert to prove it?
Because he is busy running Tesla and SpaceX. He just proposed the idea, it is not his duty to "prove it". If it is a good idea, it should be adopted regardless of who proposed it.
Personally, I think neither HS-Rail nor Hyperloop should be built. They are both decades away, and by that time we will have self-driving electric cars. It would be far cheaper to build a streamlined self-driving bus that can do 120MPH on existing road infrastructure. It could go from LA to SF in about three hours. That is "good enough" and would be about 1% of the cost. The other 99% of the price tag for rail could be used to pay down our 14 trillion dollar debt.
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Good point. It is not his duty to prove it. But smart ideas alone are not going to convince California taxpayers to invest a few billion dollars in something that has never before been built. Someone is going to have to prove it.
Re:No. (Score:4, Informative)
Where to start...?
- Why should I accept what the Parent is saying if the Parent shows significant ignorance of the topic?
- Why should I give the Parent's armchair ramblings more credence than the 57-page write-up of one of the most innovative and successful entrepreneurs of recent years, which was produced with the help of some of the top engineers in the field?
- Why should I accept the Parent's arbitrary declaration that "the 7+ billion price-tag is way too low"?? (Would there be cost overruns? Almost certainly, but even at 2x the price, it's still a fraction of the projected cost of the proposed HSR line.)
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, the actual high speed rail technology is a concept that's been done before - however, stomping over all of that privately owned land between LA and SF is a political concept that's completely infeasible at this point in time.
Although Elon Musk is using a bunch of existing technology in new ways, his plan is politically feasible - and it's not like we would just start building the Hyperloop without doing a proof-of-concept first. If it turns out that the idea doesn't scale, we'd do something else.
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Yes, the actual high speed rail technology is a concept that's been done before - however, stomping over all of that privately owned land between LA and SF is a political concept that's completely infeasible at this point in time.....
It's called right of way. The government has used right of way before to build the highways (freeways in CA). The only difference is CA has become much more densely populated in the last 60 years, so more than just orange groves would be displaced.
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Yes that's why the problem with the high speed rail plan is political, not technical.
Can you imagine the size of the shitstorm that would happen if the government nabbed all that land? It would be insane. The lawsuits alone would cost billions.
On the other hand, a bunch of pylons is fine - they don't split your land in half, and the footprint is relatively small.
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Actually it's called "eminent domain" (at least I think that's what you're getting at) and this is one of the greatest advantages of Musk's plan. There is already a broad "right of way" along the I-5 corridor, and the Hyperloop can be built on top of it, whereas the proposed HSR line would require the gov't to use its power of eminent domain to acquire the right of way for an entire new rail line.
Even in those few places where the Hyperloop cannot track the I-5 corridor, it only needs a house-sized plot of
Proven that it's wrong for that area (Score:3)
"conventional" high-speed rail is a proven concept in use today in many non-North American countries.
I have used high speed rail in Europe, including Germany.
It's nice but usually slower than planes.
The hyperloop has the chance to be significantly better than airplane travel, at a reduced environmental (and noise) impact compared to a train.
I am totally against the California rail project because even the current high estimates are probably 5x lower than actual cost. But if we build the hyperloop, we advan
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No. (Score:4, Informative)
It's neither going to be "high speed" nor actually in the cities that it is supposedly to linking.
To be fair, Musk's proposed Hyperloop isn't city center to city center either. The rental car or shuttle service is still required. I want to know more about many passengers the loop can carry and how much it would cost to ''terminate'' the route downtown.
It is the difference between practical and efficient mass transit and a $6 billion dollar thrill ride.
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The above statement is only partially true. In 2022, the Initial Operating Section will run at full speed (220 mph or 350 km/h) from San Jose to Palmdale, requiring a transfer to Caltrain in the north and Metrolink in the south.
Later in 2026 (Bay to Basin), the bookend from San Francisco to San Jose will run on electrified Caltrain tracks, eliminating a transfer at San Jose. And in 2029 (Phase 1 Blended), this
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It is a boondoggle. Ridership estimates are being grossly inflated and the final legs will likely never be completed due to objections of property owners. Even now the average Amtrak trip is less than half full and all are subsidized by taxpayers. The Los Angeles to New Orleans leg is subsidized by over $400 for every passenger. How bad must passenger rail be for many states to turn down billions from the federal government? California was once always at the top but now because of many years of Democratic l
TSA (Score:5, Funny)
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You are right, this thing might become a target, just like airplanes. Or maybe not... it depends how spectacular the failure is. I suspect it won't be very spectacular - a break in the tube would slow the trains immediately and reduce the damage potential. I think it would be like a normal passenger rail disaster... that is to say, bad, but not what terrorists are after.
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High speed rail generally doesn't get the same thorough screening as airline boarding, with the exception of the line that goes through the Chunnel.
It's moderated funny but coming true (Score:2)
I've seen police checkpoints when I was boarding an Amtrak train already and there was a remarkable case where the TSA searched people *leaving* a train.
The TSA gets to define its own scope. Guess what happens when a bureaucracy can do that.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Estimates (Score:3, Insightful)
California's high speed rail was originally going to cost $33 billion. (2008's Proposition 1A was a $10 billion bond).
5 years later, the estimate is $68 billion and it won't actually be high speed.
the race (Score:5, Insightful)
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Unless you have figured out a way to get electricity out of the air, for the forseeable future, we are going to be using fossil fuel
Wind power exists. Solar power exists. Hydro power exists. Nuclear power exists. None of those are horribly experimental (unlike fusion) so all that's needed is rolling them out. We also know how to move electrical power long distances. We have all the technology already.
It will be a long time before solar and wind and other sources can replace fossil fuel plants.
Not as long as you think. It's not a scientific barrier. It's not a technological barrier. It's not even an engineering barrier. In many ways, the biggest barrier to fixing things is actually nay-sayers like you.
While it may be more economical to generate electricity in a central point and then transmit it where needed, the maintenance of those transmission lines, particularly for thousands of miles of railroad track would more than offset the savings.
No, but you're having to in
both lose (Score:4, Funny)
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Viva Las Vegas! (Score:5, Interesting)
As a test, it might be better to try this out on the LA to Las Vegas route.
This is shorter and land acquisition costs across the desert would be very low.
The route today is currently very heavily traveled so there would be a good market for passengers.
The casinos would love it and would probably fund it.
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Isn't LA-LV too hilly for a high-speed hyperloop at ground level or even ground level plus a few meters? I think it would be a vomit comet in a can.
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Don't know what the engineering parameters are for the hyperloop but I imagine that they have figured out something reasonable that works with the real world which has hills everywhere.
Quick look at Google Earth shows max elevation 1475 meters with average slope 2.3% for the current I-5 route. I don't know if this is within their parameters but there is a lot of empty space out there for route selection.
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As a test, it might be better to try this out on the LA to Las Vegas route.
This is shorter and land acquisition costs across the desert would be very low.
The route today is currently very heavily traveled so there would be a good market for passengers.
The casinos would love it and would probably fund it.
The casinos have been pushing for high speed rail for years. Two obstacles - environmentalists and they want somebody else to pay for it. Other than that, they think its a great idea.
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Interesting that there already is a proposal for a high speed rail link:
http://www.xpresswest.com/ [xpresswest.com]
http://www.xpresswest.com/network.html [xpresswest.com] (they have grand plans for the entire Southwest).
They have done a lot of work on it but recently hit a block when they couldn't get the Feds to loan them the money:
http://www.reviewjournal.com/transportation-insider/prospects-dim-high-speed-rail-link-la-vegas [reviewjournal.com]
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The casinos would love it and would probably fund it.
video poker games and minibars built into the seatbacks which activate as soon as the pods enter Nevada?
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Not sure whether it would matter or not, but the insulation provided by the near vaccum in the tube is likely to make heat more, not less, of a problem. It wont do anything to prevent sunlight from entering and being absorbed to create heat (or to stop the other sources of heat involved here either.) What it WILL do is prevent that heat from dissipating back out. This is why solar-thermal tubes use vaccum - to reduce heat LOSS back into the surrounding area, after the heat is initially converted from sunlig
neither (Score:3, Insightful)
They are both a waste of money.
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They are both a waste of money.
Yes, that's how the Europeans feel about it as well.
Not just the Europeans, but Asia, too. Pretty much the US is the only country that hasn't embraced high speed rail, something that has been available everywhere else for 50 years. Even the passenger trains of the 1920s ran faster than today's trains.
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I think you fail to account for a big difference between the EU and the USA: the USA has much more long-distance freight movement. I assume -- tell me if I'm wrong -- that someone sending food across California doesn't ship it by rail. The extra time + logistics (farm - road - rail - road - shop/warehouse at worst) isn't worthwhile.
Europe has much less inter-state freight movement, and thus there's less advantage to rail freight. See: http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php/Freigh [europa.eu]
Idiotic (Score:2, Interesting)
What a truly idiotic proposition. A fixed route implies ground travel, which implies buying up tons of land, which implies god awful levels of politics and zoning, which implies buy in from the state and laws to make it possible, etc. etc. It's impossible to even get started. Any proposal has to be approved by the public. You can't just start digging up pristine forest or people's back yards for your rail.
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Fundamentally flawed (Score:2)
Even worse the fundamental idea of is deeply flawed - Hyperloop, high speed rail, or anything else that requires serious infrastructure have most of their costs up front - in order to qualify for the competition the system already has to be fully completed. You could skimp on the trains/pods/etc, but those are a tiny fraction of the overall cost.
So what exactly would be the point of a competition? Even if you could somehow fund all the competitors, you're building a bunch of alternate solutions to a probl
It's not a fair test. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not a fair test. Railroads could deliver that speed today if not for government regulation. Even today's high speed rail projects only get rail travel speeds up to what was normal 100 years ago. Now, if you remove all of the restrictions imposed by the government facing railroad then you level the playing field. In addition, it shouldn't be about getting 1 person there in 3 hours. What is more efficient, moving 1 or a small group of people from point a to point b in x amount of time or moving a large group of people from point a to point b?
The Concorde was very good at moving a small group of people from point a to b at a high speed, but it wasn't economically sustainable. The slower jumbo jets, because they could carry more passengers were actually more efficient. So, if your goal is to get a single person from point a to be as fast as you can, then neither high speed rail nor hyperloop are the way to go. Both would be a collosal waste of resources.
OTOH, if your goal is to move the most number of people from point a to b in a reasonably fixed period of time, then that is a different problem and would probably call for a different solution.
Basically, before throwing money at a problem, you should be sure you have defined the problem you want solved. Otherwise, you might just pay a lot of money for a solution that you don't really need.
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The reason why people like rail as a means of high speed transport is because you can move a large number of
It's the Right of Way that's the problem. (Score:2)
Right of way has always been the problem for transportation. Long narrow corridors intersect many landowners. One of the major reasons the transcontinental railroads were able to be built by private industry is that the US Government owned much of the land, and gave it to them. They didn't have to go buy small strips of land from thousands of land owners.
Follow a small road project in your area. Land acquisition will take years, decades usually. There will always be several people who just don't want t
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Actually one of the benefits of the Hyperloop idea is that it's designed to follow the existing government-owned highway right-of-way except for in a very few places where its path winds too much to allow for the high pod speeds. This is actually an advantage shared by most elevated transport systems - since it's relatively easy to span 100 yards or more between pylons there is minimal impact at ground level which radically reduces both land acquisition and preparation costs, as well as radically reducing
The bullet train is dumb (Score:2)
68 billion for this thing is madness. So anything that undermines the project and shuts it down is in the public interest.
Further, if we're going to build a silly vanity project, I'd much rather have the hyperloop. The hyperloop is at the very least cutting edge and not something out of the 70s. California is supposed to be cutting edge. We deserve better then an over priced crappy train.
oops (Score:3)
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Big-setback-for-California-high-speed-rail-project-4739710.php [sfgate.com]
"the agency overseeing the bullet train failed to comply with the financial and environmental promises made to voters when they approved initial funding for the project five years ago."
OP (Score:2)
Everyone in California knows that the high speed rail project is crap. Over budget by miles. Will not go to LA or SF. Will not be high speed.
This should never be built.
Partial success == partial payment? (Score:2)
So what do I get for delivering a dead human?
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20 years?
Science Fiction, meet Science fact (Score:2)
Commuting 300 mph to another city? That's science.
To work at a job there? Now that's fiction.
Airline Industry (Score:2)
I wonder if the airline industry would try to stop or slow this down. Every ticket sold to get from NY to LA via hyperloop would be a ticket not sold to an airline company.
Given the choice between waiting in long lines to be TSA manhandled, sitting on a runway for who knows how long, then suspended in air for more hours by a machine that could fail in one of any of a million ways and plummet from 30,000 feet for 15 minutes of sheer terror before violent death -- or getting on a sleek new sexy technology gro
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Don't Forget: Excess Electricty (Score:4, Interesting)
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What about capacity (Score:2)
The largest issue I have with the hyperloop proposal is its rather pitiful capacity. At the highest rate proposed, with once cart every 30 seconds it still only transpoprts ~3600 PAX/hr, which is about on par with a 3 lane highway and that is before mixing in the car carriers.
Bog standard high-speed train lines do 30000 PAX/hr routinely, and while the hyperloop carts might be able to scale some, based on how they do the air bearing and that I think linked carts likely will not work, I doubt they can scale m
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The largest issue I have with the hyperloop proposal is its rather pitiful capacity. At the highest rate proposed, with one cart every 30 seconds it still only transports ~3600 PAX/hr, which is about on par with a 3 lane highway and that is before mixing in the car carriers.
Musk writes in his proposal: "Assuming an average departure time of 2 minutes between capsules, a minimum of 28 passengers per capsule are required to meet 840 passengers per hour." So it's even worse than 3600PAX/hr.
Compare current flight capacity. At peak, there are 5 flights an hour from SF to LA. The most common plane on that run is a Boeing 737 with 137 seats, for 685 seats/hour. So the Hyperloop has more capacity than the current aircraft. Comparing with other tunnel systems, Eurotunnel moves about
uh huh (Score:2)
1) you really expect to get $10 billion in corporate donations?
2) anyone who can make it through the state of California's environmental, legal and political gauntlet and build ANY dedicated passenger train system from LA to San Francisco deserves an award.
The problem is not that we don't know how to build great trains, the problem is that we don't know how to build a large project across multiple counties in California.
Hyperloop... (Score:2)
Giving people the chance to be stranded 50ft off the ground a few miles outside of Coalinga while the scent of 5000 heads of cattle wafts your way...
Simple math (Score:3)
My main issue with the tube technology is that all the articles seem to assume that the tube will be straight. In the real world there are very few straight lines. Between any two distant points there will be mountains, valleys, cities, rivers, hills, houses, etc. The tube will not be straight unless you want to build it underground all the way then it becomes very expensive. Even underground there will be issues with valleys where the tube may have to be suspended. To me it is a given that the tube will have to have curves in it which brings me to the math of curves.
The acceleration of an object moving along a curve is a= v^2/r or r = v^2/a. If the object is moving at 600kph and we want to keep the acceleration to 1/2G at most the radius would be 167^2/4.9 = 5.7 km. That would mean to alter course by 45 degrees it would take 9kms. That is a very long curve. It is even worse in that the curve would have to have an in run and an out run to make the transition manageable. Remember that these curves are not just left and right. If one goes over the brow of a hill negative G's could be an issue. The human body can not handle feeling lighter very well. people get sick pretty fast.
To keep these smooth curves there will be very few places where the tube will be sitting on solid ground. Much of the time it will be under ground or suspended in the air. Both of those make construction and maintenance very expensive.
Re: (Score:2)
"Musk's" system will not be cheaper and it couldn't be profitable - let alone break even.
Maybe, maybe not.
But 'profitable' in this era of large transit systems isn't a goal. The system that gives politicians the greatest opportunity to play hide the tax revenue will be the one that succeeds. The politicos will see to that. You need to ask the question: Which system will provide the most opportunities to skim funds for projects ranging from save the gay whales to housing for hobos? That will be the winner. The technology doesn't matter.
Re: (Score:2)
"Musk's" system will not be cheaper and it couldn't be profitable - let alone break even.
Maybe, maybe not.
But 'profitable' in this era of large transit systems isn't a goal. The system that gives politicians the greatest opportunity to play hide the tax revenue will be the one that succeeds. The politicos will see to that. You need to ask the question: Which system will provide the most opportunities to skim funds for projects ranging from save the gay whales to housing for hobos? That will be the winner. The technology doesn't matter.
Well, then based on your question, the answer would be Musk's system, since it is all new and never been tried, there is ample opportunity to have cost overruns and blame it on the new technology that is paving the way for the future (whether that is true or not). The cost overruns with the high speed rail in California have nothing to do with the technology but everything to do with land acquisition costs and environmental impact studies causing delays. Musk tries to get around the land costs by proposing
Does not NEED them (Score:2)
Other than up to $5,000-$10,000 in federal and state tax credits
The point is the Telsa is the first electric car that does not NEED to subsidies to sell, not that they do not exist - people would still be buying the car without those credits.
The lever you have pulled, "Brakes," is no longer (Score:2)
The lever you have pulled, "Brakes," is no longer in service. Please make a note of it.