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The shit talking about this is disappointing to me. Isn't this the route of crazy idea that moves us into the future? It's not supposed to be easy. You think pe

The shit talking about this is disappointing to me. Isn't this the route of crazy idea that moves us into the future? It's not supposed to be easy. You think people would put their livelihood and reputation on the line for something that they think is a sham? Seriously, if this mentality were pervasive we would not be having this conversation on the internet or driving cars to knowledge work jobs, we would be riding horses to the field. I love the nerve and ambition it takes to try something that seems impossible, these are the people moving the world forward. Edit: words

Reedx 10y ago
"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
- noobermin 10y ago
  Half an hour in a tube is better than 4 hours of flying with wifi (including the security and delays in an airport)...not to mention the cost.
mozumder 10y ago
It's not an impossible idea. It's just a really bad idea. There are far more efficient ways of transporting people at high speeds and lower costs than this. What are the advantages here? It's more expensive than high-speed rail, for example.
- pbreit 10y ago
  SF to LA in 30 minutes for $20? Seems advantageous to me.
  - cozzyd 10y ago
    This thing barely has more capacity per day than a few trains. If it really was $20, the induced demand would kill it.
    - pbreit 10y ago
      I don't understand your capacity comment. The original doc estimated 850 per hour on the average (sufficient to accommodate current demand) with room to grow.
      - cozzyd 10y ago
        850 / hour sounds wildly optimistic for something that can carry only 28 passengers in a pod, but even at face value, that's peanuts compared to what trains can do (especially since travel isn't evenly spread over 24 hours). Trains can easily reach 20-25 times that capacity. Anyway, it's silly to consider current demand. The demand currently is capped by the time / expense/ inconvenience it takes to get from one place to another. If it really took half an hour, people would start using it to commute, go out for dinner in other city, etc, and one would need to meet demands similar to rapid transit lines. BART can move 25,000 people / hour (and it's full during peak demand). Hyperloop would need similar demand.
jandrese 10y ago
Being a realist I have to be skeptical about the idea of building miles of vacuum tube through earthquake country. It still smells like one of those crazy Sci-Fi ideas that crashes and burns when people do the math and discover that they'll need to charge $10,000 a ticket and be at 100% capacity for decades before they break even. The cost estimates I have seen for constructing the tubes are hilarious lowballs thus far. It's definitely not going to be cheaper than high speed rail per mile, especially when you're talking about California (land of NIMBY).
- mozumder 10y ago
  Indeed. High-speed rail would be cheaper when using the same cost estimates, if land was cheap like out in the country. But then you have to build transit into dense cities, where a single building that you have to go through might cost $1 billion. And then you realize why infrastructure is so expensive when you actually figure out the real costs.
- Reedx 10y ago
  Perhaps, but by all accounts Elon is a pretty smart engineer and has ready access to smarter engineers. Not to mention those actually working on it. It just seems unlikely to me that none of them accounted for something so obvious? Certainly they did and felt it was a solvable problem. If nothing else, if it increases expectations people have about transit then that's good. The currently planned California "high-speed" rail is pretty underwhelming.
  - cozzyd 10y ago
    I have heard, but don't know whether or not to take seriously, the argument that the proposal is designed to derail CAHSR in order to sell more cars. If that's the case, it seems to be working. What part of CAHSR do you find underwhelming (other that it will take too long to build?). I disagree with some of the routing decisions (I think it should go SJ ->SF -> Oakland -> Central Valley -> LA ), but what would conceivably make it better?
  - takno 10y ago
    My main issue with the whole thing is that it is immediately used as an excuse to do down and prevent real engineering that can actually happen in the next 30 years like HSR. Blue sky thinking is good, but you can't sit back doing nothing and using unlikely predictions about the future to sneeringly criticize real things with real budgets that people can really do today
jddjdbdbd3 10y ago
Ignore it, it's an emotional reaction from people frightened of change. But I would say that I have some doubts about this tech from an engineering point of view. What if the carraige gets stuck in the tube? How do you get it out at reasonable cost and before everyone suffocates? You can build in escape hatches every x meters, but isnt that going to be extremely expensive, given the sheer length of the pipe and the need for an airtight seal? Its not hard to think of more. They may be economically surmountable, they may not. But you never know until you try! Definitely worth a shot in my humble opinion. Like the article says skepticism is warranted cynicism is not useful.
MaysonL 10y ago
You think people would put their livelihood and reputation on the line for something that they think is a sham? Pets.com. South Sea Bubble. Tulip mania. et omnium cetera. It may work, but that's not the way to bet, right now. (Unless you've done a lot more math on it than I have, or, like the VCs and angels backing it, you're getting really good odds).
- notahacker 10y ago
  Also its proponent notably didn't commit to involvement in the project, despite being comfortable juggling multiple other projects. I don't think that means he's not keen on the idea, but I do think it means he knows its risk/reward ratio is vastly worse than other ambitious projects he's involved with, especially if he's judged on the ability to hit the rather... optimistic metrics in his original paper.
acomjean 10y ago
I optimistic. I'm hoping its the new thing garners excitement and political good will and someone builds one. It works and spreads. In the US the shifting of the populace to the left after the long period of "we need smaller government, get government out of the way" (see Bernie Sanders). As someone in a small Northeast City that can't seem to extend a trolley based subway line 3 miles, and commuting time here is stupid... I'm a little worried, plus I"m not sure I'd like to ride it..
Grishnakh 10y ago
You have to remember, you're in America (I'm assuming, since this story is about something in America). This isn't the country you might think it is. You might be thinking this is the country that put men on the Moon. That's incorrect. That country is in the past, and no longer exists; most of the people involved in that are dead. This country couldn't put men on the Moon right now, with far better technology than existed back then, if its survival depended on it. This is a country that doesn't do anything big any more, it just sits back and says "that can't be done", and "that'll never work". This country says these things even while other countries like China actually go out and do them. These people are probably right: this fancy new ideas never will work, here. Instead, they'll be taken overseas somewhere where people there will make them work. And we'll continue to sit around here, telling ourselves "no way, that'll never work, it's not feasible, etc." while our economy stagnates more and more.
- knieveltech 10y ago
  To clarify you claim our economy is stagnating predominantly due to a lack of innovation?
  - Grishnakh 10y ago
    No, it's stagnating because of a growing income inequality and a hollowing-out of the middle class. Innovation isn't enough to fix this, and eventually it's going to bite us in the ass. But infrastructure is also important for the economy, and US infrastructure is in a shambles and getting worse. Big infrastructure projects (which actually work) are desperately needed, especially ones which make transport more efficient and less polluting. I'm not entirely sold Hyperloop is really the answer BTW, I think SkyTran would be a lot more useful overall and a lot more technically feasible not to mention cheap to build, but I see the same naysaying for any new transportation technology that comes along.
- MaysonL 10y ago
  Note that it took eight years to put the first men on the moon for a short stay. It's quite likely that within the next eight years there will be men on the moon, maybe even to establish a base.

Reedx 10y ago

"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."

noobermin 10y ago
Half an hour in a tube is better than 4 hours of flying with wifi (including the security and delays in an airport)...not to mention the cost.

mozumder 10y ago

It's not an impossible idea. It's just a really bad idea. There are far more efficient ways of transporting people at high speeds and lower costs than this. What are the advantages here? It's more expensive than high-speed rail, for example.

pbreit 10y ago
SF to LA in 30 minutes for $20? Seems advantageous to me.
- cozzyd 10y ago
  This thing barely has more capacity per day than a few trains. If it really was $20, the induced demand would kill it.
  - pbreit 10y ago
    I don't understand your capacity comment. The original doc estimated 850 per hour on the average (sufficient to accommodate current demand) with room to grow.
    - cozzyd 10y ago
      850 / hour sounds wildly optimistic for something that can carry only 28 passengers in a pod, but even at face value, that's peanuts compared to what trains can do (especially since travel isn't evenly spread over 24 hours). Trains can easily reach 20-25 times that capacity. Anyway, it's silly to consider current demand. The demand currently is capped by the time / expense/ inconvenience it takes to get from one place to another. If it really took half an hour, people would start using it to commute, go out for dinner in other city, etc, and one would need to meet demands similar to rapid transit lines. BART can move 25,000 people / hour (and it's full during peak demand). Hyperloop would need similar demand.

jandrese 10y ago

Being a realist I have to be skeptical about the idea of building miles of vacuum tube through earthquake country. It still smells like one of those crazy Sci-Fi ideas that crashes and burns when people do the math and discover that they'll need to charge $10,000 a ticket and be at 100% capacity for decades before they break even. The cost estimates I have seen for constructing the tubes are hilarious lowballs thus far. It's definitely not going to be cheaper than high speed rail per mile, especially when you're talking about California (land of NIMBY).

mozumder 10y ago
Indeed. High-speed rail would be cheaper when using the same cost estimates, if land was cheap like out in the country. But then you have to build transit into dense cities, where a single building that you have to go through might cost $1 billion. And then you realize why infrastructure is so expensive when you actually figure out the real costs.
Reedx 10y ago
Perhaps, but by all accounts Elon is a pretty smart engineer and has ready access to smarter engineers. Not to mention those actually working on it. It just seems unlikely to me that none of them accounted for something so obvious? Certainly they did and felt it was a solvable problem. If nothing else, if it increases expectations people have about transit then that's good. The currently planned California "high-speed" rail is pretty underwhelming.
- cozzyd 10y ago
  I have heard, but don't know whether or not to take seriously, the argument that the proposal is designed to derail CAHSR in order to sell more cars. If that's the case, it seems to be working. What part of CAHSR do you find underwhelming (other that it will take too long to build?). I disagree with some of the routing decisions (I think it should go SJ ->SF -> Oakland -> Central Valley -> LA ), but what would conceivably make it better?
- takno 10y ago
  My main issue with the whole thing is that it is immediately used as an excuse to do down and prevent real engineering that can actually happen in the next 30 years like HSR. Blue sky thinking is good, but you can't sit back doing nothing and using unlikely predictions about the future to sneeringly criticize real things with real budgets that people can really do today

jddjdbdbd3 10y ago

Ignore it, it's an emotional reaction from people frightened of change. But I would say that I have some doubts about this tech from an engineering point of view. What if the carraige gets stuck in the tube? How do you get it out at reasonable cost and before everyone suffocates? You can build in escape hatches every x meters, but isnt that going to be extremely expensive, given the sheer length of the pipe and the need for an airtight seal? Its not hard to think of more. They may be economically surmountable, they may not. But you never know until you try! Definitely worth a shot in my humble opinion. Like the article says skepticism is warranted cynicism is not useful.

MaysonL 10y ago

You think people would put their livelihood and reputation on the line for something that they think is a sham? Pets.com. South Sea Bubble. Tulip mania. et omnium cetera. It may work, but that's not the way to bet, right now. (Unless you've done a lot more math on it than I have, or, like the VCs and angels backing it, you're getting really good odds).

notahacker 10y ago
Also its proponent notably didn't commit to involvement in the project, despite being comfortable juggling multiple other projects. I don't think that means he's not keen on the idea, but I do think it means he knows its risk/reward ratio is vastly worse than other ambitious projects he's involved with, especially if he's judged on the ability to hit the rather... optimistic metrics in his original paper.

acomjean 10y ago

I optimistic. I'm hoping its the new thing garners excitement and political good will and someone builds one. It works and spreads. In the US the shifting of the populace to the left after the long period of "we need smaller government, get government out of the way" (see Bernie Sanders). As someone in a small Northeast City that can't seem to extend a trolley based subway line 3 miles, and commuting time here is stupid... I'm a little worried, plus I"m not sure I'd like to ride it..

Grishnakh 10y ago

You have to remember, you're in America (I'm assuming, since this story is about something in America). This isn't the country you might think it is. You might be thinking this is the country that put men on the Moon. That's incorrect. That country is in the past, and no longer exists; most of the people involved in that are dead. This country couldn't put men on the Moon right now, with far better technology than existed back then, if its survival depended on it. This is a country that doesn't do anything big any more, it just sits back and says "that can't be done", and "that'll never work". This country says these things even while other countries like China actually go out and do them. These people are probably right: this fancy new ideas never will work, here. Instead, they'll be taken overseas somewhere where people there will make them work. And we'll continue to sit around here, telling ourselves "no way, that'll never work, it's not feasible, etc." while our economy stagnates more and more.

knieveltech 10y ago
To clarify you claim our economy is stagnating predominantly due to a lack of innovation?
- Grishnakh 10y ago
  No, it's stagnating because of a growing income inequality and a hollowing-out of the middle class. Innovation isn't enough to fix this, and eventually it's going to bite us in the ass. But infrastructure is also important for the economy, and US infrastructure is in a shambles and getting worse. Big infrastructure projects (which actually work) are desperately needed, especially ones which make transport more efficient and less polluting. I'm not entirely sold Hyperloop is really the answer BTW, I think SkyTran would be a lot more useful overall and a lot more technically feasible not to mention cheap to build, but I see the same naysaying for any new transportation technology that comes along.
MaysonL 10y ago
Note that it took eight years to put the first men on the moon for a short stay. It's quite likely that within the next eight years there will be men on the moon, maybe even to establish a base.