8 ms·

Hyperloop sounds like a bunch of hype. High speed trains are a thing already, as are MagLev trains, as are trains that go through tunnels, called the subway. Th

by soyiuz 6y ago

Hyperloop sounds like a bunch of hype. High speed trains are a thing already, as are MagLev trains, as are trains that go through tunnels, called the subway. The lack of their success in the US market has little to do with the technology itself and more to do with politics. The addition of vacuum tunnels does little to alleviate the administrative / financial challenges of our struggling train systems. Vacuum has few practical upsides and a lot of downsides such as safety, reliability, and cost. It boggles the mind as to how investors are falling for this idea. But perhaps marketing and branding are where Musk/Bronson's talents lie when it comes to high-speed rail? Please tell me otherwise, as I would love to see better rail infrastructure in the US.

briefcomment 6y ago
One way to overcome politics is to make something sound so cool that the public is generally on board with it.
- dave5104 6y ago
  I have little faith in something being cool preventing people from being up in arms about infrastructure builds in their backyard.
  - handmodel 6y ago
    100% - thousands of points of local veto
- sandworm101 6y ago
  >>> ...sound so cool that the public is generally on board with it. Simpsons. Monorail. The song is what sold me on the idea.
- handmodel 6y ago
  I feel like this doesn't quite work. The vast majority of people may be for trains but there are so many points of local veto. If a train/hyperloop needs to cut through a neighborhood in order to avoid taking a 5 mile detour the 20 people effected are going to use everything in their power to stop it - who can blame them. Even road expansion is slow and costly and hard to navigate.
- hammock 6y ago
  Like.. war?
peterwoerner 6y ago
I think the goal with the vacuum is to get to even higher speed rail which can compete with airplanes for speed and convenience. The thought being, rail has to be clearly better than flying for it work. That said vacuum comes with many technical issues.
- timerol 6y ago
  The Northeast Corridor is wildly profitable for Amtrak (based on operating costs), despite being significantly worse than flying, and often slower than driving. (It's faster than rush-hour driving, but that's about it.) Making fast-enough rail that connects useful places, and upgrading the speed of existing rail that meets the same criteria, is a much better strategy IMO than trying to do "better than flying" rail based on unproven technology. Moonshots have their place, but America should try to catch up to the rest of the world in rail transport instead of pretending we're on the bleeding edge of innovation.
  - dragontamer 6y ago
    > The Northeast Corridor is wildly profitable for Amtrak (based on operating costs), despite being significantly worse than flying, and often slower than driving. (It's faster than rush-hour driving, but that's about it.) Worse than flying? I can take the train from Wash. DC to New York City Penn Station, visit my friends who live in the city by walking alone, and then come back home in time for dinner. (Broadway, Time Square, and Wall Street are all walking-distance from Penn Station) The closest airport to NYC center is LaGuardia Airport, off of the island. Then you have to spend money on an Uber (or take the train!) into the city anyway. (Cheapest to Uber to the Purple line, then take the purple line into the city). ------------ The Train's competition is a Bus. There are PLENTY of cheap busses that travel the route. -------- Even if you're off of Manhattan in say... Brooklyn. I'd rather be at Penn Station than LaGuardia Airport. Penn Station has a direct subway line to Brooklyn. Its non-obvious how I'd get from LaGuardia to Brooklyn unless my friends spend time to pick me up (or I take an expensive Uber)
    - bigbubba 6y ago
JPKab 6y ago
You're focused too much on the vacuum aspect of the tube, and not nearly enough on the fact that it's a tube, with enough self-support to be elevated on pylons and is an order of magnitude easier to build than pouring a foundation for maglev tracks. High speed rail track is dramatically more difficult and expensive to build than a hyperloop tube system. This was, from the beginning, the huge differentiator between the two. Hyperloop tubes aren't comparable to road or rail bridges/tracks, but instead are comparable to constructing oil/gas/water pipelines. We know how much easier it is already to build those.
- bigbubba 6y ago
  Hyperloop tubes are pipe dreams, nobody has actually ever build one, so all the pros you cite are purely speculative.
- jcranmer 6y ago
  > Hyperloop tubes aren't comparable to road or rail bridges/tracks, but instead are comparable to constructing oil/gas/water pipelines. How many pipelines are wide enough diameter to move an entire vehicle and designed to handle the stress of multi-ton vehicles as their dynamic loads? And how many of those are supported on pylons rather than being fully buried?
- rini17 6y ago
  Roads and rails can have small gaps to allow for stretching from temperature changes. Pipelines solve this with U-shaped segments. Hyperloop can't do either, requires something with airtight-enough seals or some expensive materials. At such high speeds as proposed, any sagging is impermissible (again, unlike pipelines). Of course it's solved engineering problem but it markedly increases the construction price and complexity. So, no, hyperloop is not really comparable to pipelines.
- soyiuz 6y ago
  See my comment above. An elevated (or submerged) tube with rails (or a track) inside cannot be less expensive than those rails or track elevated (or submerged) alone. I get the pipeline metaphor, but a pipeline with infrastructure inside is just infrastructure + pipeline. So instead of a train system the proposal has always been to build a train system inside a pipeline, which has to be more expensive than either. We have no indication of cost savings here.
dangus 6y ago
While I agree with your overall point, and I also think that hyperloop deployment is unrealistic, I think part of the idea of the concept of hyperloop is to make high speed rail fast enough for the expansive sizes of America. If you took a 300km/hr train from Orlando to New York City, you’d still be competing poorly with a $100 Spirit Airlines flight. That’s almost 6 hours on the train compared to a 2 hour flight. Even in China where they’ve got the best high speed rail system in the world, most of the major cities are concentrated on one cost with huge populations and you still have Chinese travelers choosing low cost airlines for many longer trips (air travel in China was exploding before Covid). I think what America needs to do is not to focus on long distance rail (which is what the current Amtrak CEO is doing) and to expand intercity high speed rail lines between major cities. There should be high speed rail linking relatively close regions that have clusters of cities. (And of course, all of this is a great argument for making airline tickets pay more for their climate externalities - trains should be more attractive to consumers on price because they’re the lowest carbon form of transport)
- dmos62 6y ago
  I think you might be underestimating the comfort and convenience of train travel. > That’s almost 6 hours on the train compared to a 2 hour flight. A 2 hour flight also has you getting to the airport early-ish (~1h), going through check-in and/or security (0.75-2.0h, 1.5h average in my experience), waiting for luggage upon arrival and navigating the airport (~0.5h), getting to center city from the airport (~1h). So in addition to 2 hours in the air, there's an additional cost of 1h+1.5h+0.5h+1h=4h, so that's 6 hours in total, and that's best case scenario. I'd choose train travel over plane travel always, provided the trip is not more than a couple thousand kilometers and it's an express. Trains are spacious (in comparison), and you don't experience intense pressure changes, or the bad air conditioning that you have in planes. Air travel tires me out for the rest of the day; after train travel I find myself energetic enough to do things the same day.
  - jaclaz 6y ago
    Yes. Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19557848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19557848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19560125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19560125
flavor8 6y ago
We don't have a solution for flying without oil based fuels (yet). We might get there, but it makes sense to try to develop much faster ground based transportation in parallel. If they efficiently can hit 600mph without risk of obstruction on the tracks, it becomes a contender. Money will become available to develop the infrastructure if flying becomes prohibitively expensive due to carbon offsets and/or dwindling reserves. As a 25-50 year plan it's fine.
nickik 6y ago
The original Hyperloop concept avoids the things you mentioned. It does not use vacuum: > The problem with this approach is that it is incredibly hard to maintain a near vacuum in a room, let alone 700 miles (round trip) of large tube with dozens of station gateways and thousands of pods entering and exiting every day. All it takes is one leaky seal or a small crack somewhere in the hundreds of miles of tube and the whole system stops working. > However, a low pressure (vs. almost no pressure) system set to a level wherestandard commercial pumps could easily overcome an air leak and the transport pods could handle variable air density would be inherently robust. It does not use MagLev: > A viable technical solution is magnetic levitation; however the cost associated with material and construction is prohibitive. There are still challenges, but because of the Hype any company doing anything related just calls their system 'Hyperloop' as well. > It boggles the mind as to how investors are falling for this idea. > But perhaps marketing and branding are where Musk/Bronson's talents lie when it comes to high-speed rail? Please tell me otherwise, as I would love to see better rail infrastructure in the US. Musk has not asked a single investor for money for Hyperloop. He likely knows its currently not a great investment. Bronson is a guy who jumps on anything related to Musk and makes a bad copy of it that gather lots of money and then doesn't do much with it.
- jcranmer 6y ago
  > It does not use vacuum: IIRC, the proposed pressure was less than 1 kPa. That would be less than the pressure at the Karman Line, the boundary of space.
  - nickik 6y ago
    Many people compare it to scientific vacume chaimers that is why its worth pointing out.
  - intotheabyss 6y ago
    The proposed pressure was equivalent to 70k feet altitude, IIRC. So a pressure of about 3.5 kPa.
- 6y ago
Meandering 6y ago
I tend to agree. There are a lot of different aspects of market economics and environmental issues at play. The hyperloop, as a concept alone, has value if the marginal cost over conventional methods is supplemented by the increased efficiency in transportation. It will only make sense where predictable constant travel occurs (i.e. NY to DC). The is the same for trains or any other communal means of transport. I primarily don't think it should be a passenger driven technology. The issue with passengers is they don't travel consistently for 24hrs a day. I honestly think a vacuum train for commercial logistics has far more economic viability. A tube from LA to KC,KS or one from KC to the east coast would drop transportation time and labor cost significantly. This is obviously a huge endeavor but, something along this line would allow product to ship half way or completely across the country in less than an hour[1] with availability 24hrs a day. This would be a huge boost in productivity and resource availability. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain.
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  Replacing truck or rail transport with a vacuum tube cargo network does sound like it could be reaL useful! Building the tubes is a big cost, but they should be much less intrusive and politically problematic than roads or rail.
carabiner 6y ago
The mandatory "less space than a Nomad" comment. I suspect this will not age well.
InvisibleCities 6y ago
The point of Hyperloop is to provide a shiny new technology that municipalities can use as an excuse for not investing in public transportation, ensuring that America switches to electric cars instead trains/buses/trams/bikes/etc as ICE automobiles are phased out over the next 20 years.
- nickik 6y ago
  As in the US the majority of people don't demand public transport, I don't see why municipalities would need an excuse. Outside of nerd circles the hyperloop is rally not even very well known so I don't even understand how that would make sense. And 'the point' of Hyperloop certainty never was that, that is just conspiracy nonsense by people who are bitter that most people don't share their opinion. The most you could say is that 'hyperloop has been abused by XY people to avoid investing in public transport' but I have not seen a single piece of evidence for that. Are you really so cynical that every new technology that you don't like, is instantly put to 'ah this is a conspiracy to prevent adoption of what I like'.

by soyiuz 6y ago

briefcomment 6y ago

One way to overcome politics is to make something sound so cool that the public is generally on board with it.

dave5104 6y ago
I have little faith in something being cool preventing people from being up in arms about infrastructure builds in their backyard.
- handmodel 6y ago
  100% - thousands of points of local veto
sandworm101 6y ago
>>> ...sound so cool that the public is generally on board with it. Simpsons. Monorail. The song is what sold me on the idea.
handmodel 6y ago
I feel like this doesn't quite work. The vast majority of people may be for trains but there are so many points of local veto. If a train/hyperloop needs to cut through a neighborhood in order to avoid taking a 5 mile detour the 20 people effected are going to use everything in their power to stop it - who can blame them. Even road expansion is slow and costly and hard to navigate.
hammock 6y ago
Like.. war?

peterwoerner 6y ago

I think the goal with the vacuum is to get to even higher speed rail which can compete with airplanes for speed and convenience. The thought being, rail has to be clearly better than flying for it work. That said vacuum comes with many technical issues.

timerol 6y ago
The Northeast Corridor is wildly profitable for Amtrak (based on operating costs), despite being significantly worse than flying, and often slower than driving. (It's faster than rush-hour driving, but that's about it.) Making fast-enough rail that connects useful places, and upgrading the speed of existing rail that meets the same criteria, is a much better strategy IMO than trying to do "better than flying" rail based on unproven technology. Moonshots have their place, but America should try to catch up to the rest of the world in rail transport instead of pretending we're on the bleeding edge of innovation.
- dragontamer 6y ago
  > The Northeast Corridor is wildly profitable for Amtrak (based on operating costs), despite being significantly worse than flying, and often slower than driving. (It's faster than rush-hour driving, but that's about it.) Worse than flying? I can take the train from Wash. DC to New York City Penn Station, visit my friends who live in the city by walking alone, and then come back home in time for dinner. (Broadway, Time Square, and Wall Street are all walking-distance from Penn Station) The closest airport to NYC center is LaGuardia Airport, off of the island. Then you have to spend money on an Uber (or take the train!) into the city anyway. (Cheapest to Uber to the Purple line, then take the purple line into the city). ------------ The Train's competition is a Bus. There are PLENTY of cheap busses that travel the route. -------- Even if you're off of Manhattan in say... Brooklyn. I'd rather be at Penn Station than LaGuardia Airport. Penn Station has a direct subway line to Brooklyn. Its non-obvious how I'd get from LaGuardia to Brooklyn unless my friends spend time to pick me up (or I take an expensive Uber)
  - bigbubba 6y ago

JPKab 6y ago

You're focused too much on the vacuum aspect of the tube, and not nearly enough on the fact that it's a tube, with enough self-support to be elevated on pylons and is an order of magnitude easier to build than pouring a foundation for maglev tracks. High speed rail track is dramatically more difficult and expensive to build than a hyperloop tube system. This was, from the beginning, the huge differentiator between the two. Hyperloop tubes aren't comparable to road or rail bridges/tracks, but instead are comparable to constructing oil/gas/water pipelines. We know how much easier it is already to build those.

bigbubba 6y ago
Hyperloop tubes are pipe dreams, nobody has actually ever build one, so all the pros you cite are purely speculative.
jcranmer 6y ago
> Hyperloop tubes aren't comparable to road or rail bridges/tracks, but instead are comparable to constructing oil/gas/water pipelines. How many pipelines are wide enough diameter to move an entire vehicle and designed to handle the stress of multi-ton vehicles as their dynamic loads? And how many of those are supported on pylons rather than being fully buried?
rini17 6y ago
Roads and rails can have small gaps to allow for stretching from temperature changes. Pipelines solve this with U-shaped segments. Hyperloop can't do either, requires something with airtight-enough seals or some expensive materials. At such high speeds as proposed, any sagging is impermissible (again, unlike pipelines). Of course it's solved engineering problem but it markedly increases the construction price and complexity. So, no, hyperloop is not really comparable to pipelines.
soyiuz 6y ago
See my comment above. An elevated (or submerged) tube with rails (or a track) inside cannot be less expensive than those rails or track elevated (or submerged) alone. I get the pipeline metaphor, but a pipeline with infrastructure inside is just infrastructure + pipeline. So instead of a train system the proposal has always been to build a train system inside a pipeline, which has to be more expensive than either. We have no indication of cost savings here.

dangus 6y ago

While I agree with your overall point, and I also think that hyperloop deployment is unrealistic, I think part of the idea of the concept of hyperloop is to make high speed rail fast enough for the expansive sizes of America. If you took a 300km/hr train from Orlando to New York City, you’d still be competing poorly with a $100 Spirit Airlines flight. That’s almost 6 hours on the train compared to a 2 hour flight. Even in China where they’ve got the best high speed rail system in the world, most of the major cities are concentrated on one cost with huge populations and you still have Chinese travelers choosing low cost airlines for many longer trips (air travel in China was exploding before Covid). I think what America needs to do is not to focus on long distance rail (which is what the current Amtrak CEO is doing) and to expand intercity high speed rail lines between major cities. There should be high speed rail linking relatively close regions that have clusters of cities. (And of course, all of this is a great argument for making airline tickets pay more for their climate externalities - trains should be more attractive to consumers on price because they’re the lowest carbon form of transport)

dmos62 6y ago
I think you might be underestimating the comfort and convenience of train travel. > That’s almost 6 hours on the train compared to a 2 hour flight. A 2 hour flight also has you getting to the airport early-ish (~1h), going through check-in and/or security (0.75-2.0h, 1.5h average in my experience), waiting for luggage upon arrival and navigating the airport (~0.5h), getting to center city from the airport (~1h). So in addition to 2 hours in the air, there's an additional cost of 1h+1.5h+0.5h+1h=4h, so that's 6 hours in total, and that's best case scenario. I'd choose train travel over plane travel always, provided the trip is not more than a couple thousand kilometers and it's an express. Trains are spacious (in comparison), and you don't experience intense pressure changes, or the bad air conditioning that you have in planes. Air travel tires me out for the rest of the day; after train travel I find myself energetic enough to do things the same day.
- jaclaz 6y ago
  Yes. Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19557848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19557848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19560125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19560125

flavor8 6y ago

We don't have a solution for flying without oil based fuels (yet). We might get there, but it makes sense to try to develop much faster ground based transportation in parallel. If they efficiently can hit 600mph without risk of obstruction on the tracks, it becomes a contender. Money will become available to develop the infrastructure if flying becomes prohibitively expensive due to carbon offsets and/or dwindling reserves. As a 25-50 year plan it's fine.

nickik 6y ago

The original Hyperloop concept avoids the things you mentioned. It does not use vacuum: > The problem with this approach is that it is incredibly hard to maintain a near vacuum in a room, let alone 700 miles (round trip) of large tube with dozens of station gateways and thousands of pods entering and exiting every day. All it takes is one leaky seal or a small crack somewhere in the hundreds of miles of tube and the whole system stops working. > However, a low pressure (vs. almost no pressure) system set to a level wherestandard commercial pumps could easily overcome an air leak and the transport pods could handle variable air density would be inherently robust. It does not use MagLev: > A viable technical solution is magnetic levitation; however the cost associated with material and construction is prohibitive. There are still challenges, but because of the Hype any company doing anything related just calls their system 'Hyperloop' as well. > It boggles the mind as to how investors are falling for this idea. > But perhaps marketing and branding are where Musk/Bronson's talents lie when it comes to high-speed rail? Please tell me otherwise, as I would love to see better rail infrastructure in the US. Musk has not asked a single investor for money for Hyperloop. He likely knows its currently not a great investment. Bronson is a guy who jumps on anything related to Musk and makes a bad copy of it that gather lots of money and then doesn't do much with it.

jcranmer 6y ago
> It does not use vacuum: IIRC, the proposed pressure was less than 1 kPa. That would be less than the pressure at the Karman Line, the boundary of space.
- nickik 6y ago
  Many people compare it to scientific vacume chaimers that is why its worth pointing out.
- intotheabyss 6y ago
  The proposed pressure was equivalent to 70k feet altitude, IIRC. So a pressure of about 3.5 kPa.
6y ago

Meandering 6y ago

I tend to agree. There are a lot of different aspects of market economics and environmental issues at play. The hyperloop, as a concept alone, has value if the marginal cost over conventional methods is supplemented by the increased efficiency in transportation. It will only make sense where predictable constant travel occurs (i.e. NY to DC). The is the same for trains or any other communal means of transport. I primarily don't think it should be a passenger driven technology. The issue with passengers is they don't travel consistently for 24hrs a day. I honestly think a vacuum train for commercial logistics has far more economic viability. A tube from LA to KC,KS or one from KC to the east coast would drop transportation time and labor cost significantly. This is obviously a huge endeavor but, something along this line would allow product to ship half way or completely across the country in less than an hour[1] with availability 24hrs a day. This would be a huge boost in productivity and resource availability. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain.

BurningFrog 6y ago
Replacing truck or rail transport with a vacuum tube cargo network does sound like it could be reaL useful! Building the tubes is a big cost, but they should be much less intrusive and politically problematic than roads or rail.

carabiner 6y ago

The mandatory "less space than a Nomad" comment. I suspect this will not age well.

InvisibleCities 6y ago

The point of Hyperloop is to provide a shiny new technology that municipalities can use as an excuse for not investing in public transportation, ensuring that America switches to electric cars instead trains/buses/trams/bikes/etc as ICE automobiles are phased out over the next 20 years.

nickik 6y ago
As in the US the majority of people don't demand public transport, I don't see why municipalities would need an excuse. Outside of nerd circles the hyperloop is rally not even very well known so I don't even understand how that would make sense. And 'the point' of Hyperloop certainty never was that, that is just conspiracy nonsense by people who are bitter that most people don't share their opinion. The most you could say is that 'hyperloop has been abused by XY people to avoid investing in public transport' but I have not seen a single piece of evidence for that. Are you really so cynical that every new technology that you don't like, is instantly put to 'ah this is a conspiracy to prevent adoption of what I like'.