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The Race to Create Elon Musk’s Hyperloop Heats Up
- grecy 11y agoGreat! I can't wait to see the pieces of this puzzle that turn out to be much harder than they first appear, and the pieces that turn out to be much easier. No matter the final outcome, we'll learn tons, which is a win.
- dmfdmf 11y agoWho is paying for this pipe dream?
- enraged_camel 11y agoI know Hyperloop has a ton of naysayers -- partly because the initial price tag of $6 billion is most likely a severe underestimation -- but... It has the potential to make a tremendous impact on society, much more so than self-driving cars in my opinion. Just as a simple example, imagine what would happen to the Bay Area housing market if people could live in a ~300 mile radius and still get to work in downtown SF in less than 30 minutes.
- kbenson 11y agoI doubt it will be like current rail systems with multiple stops. There will probably be a very few stops, likely once every hundred miles or so. Getting to downtown SF within 30 minutes is unlikely for the vast majority of people within that 300 mile radius, Hyperloop or not.
- bdamm 11y agoHyperloop doesn't solve that problem. You can't have a hyperloop station in every town in a 300 mile radius.
- weaksauce 11y ago5 years ago you probably would have said "we can't have a self driving car... there is <problem1> that we can't surmount." Yet, now we are on the brink of it. Hell, even at the start of this year I would have laughed if you said we will have aerial drones delivering amazon goods. Yet, here we are with a pretty impressive POC from amazon. we can merge onto a freeway why can't we merge these hyperloop pods so we can have many stops?
- ygra 11y agoBecause deceleration takes time, unless you want to be flattened to the front of the vehicle. The more stops you have, the lower the overall speed will be at which this thing operates. High-speed trains in Germany that can drive up to 350 km/h often only average around 120 km/h over their total distance because with stops in between you spend a lot of time accelerating and decelerating. And where stops are more frequent you can't even reach the full speed since you have to start breaking already before you're done accelerating. There's nothing inherent in physics that prevents self-driving cars, but unless you want to jump out of a moving hyperloop pod, it has to come to a stop and accelerate again; and it does so slowly enough not to kill its passengers.
- epicureanideal 11y agoThere are a lot of strategies for handling this. One of which is, accelerate the pods on a separate, shorter (semi-circular?) track before merging into the main "pod stream". Similarly, decelerate on a separate, shorter (semi-circular?) track. There was some prototype (or theory) of this discussed in a link on HN several months ago in which a Chinese train station accelerated (or decelerated, I forget) a car to match the speed of a passing train to append that car to the train as it went by. Just because you need to accelerate and decelerate doesn't mean you need to do it on the same shared track as the main line.
- lsc 11y agoI think the only game changing thing about the hyperloop is that it is getting rich people excited about public transit. I mean, my guess is that we're never going to get a SF <-> LA transit path that is faster than a airline with a "skip the security" pass; I don't believe that the hyperloop as envisioned will never be built. I know that sounds trivial... but it's not. Public transit is a failure in America in large part because wealthy people, even wealthy people who support public transit in general, don't want public transit near them.
- donkeyd 11y ago> even wealthy people who support public transit in general, don't want public transit near them. This seems very odd to me. Here in the Netherlands, housing prices actually increase when there's good public transport. In the north of Amsterdam a new metro line is being built, which is already causing an increase in housing prices there.
- simoncion 11y agoYep. Here in SF, housing is more expensive when it's near a subway station.
- zzleeper 11y agoIt's odd but true. For instance, biking to school or work in the US means you are kinda poor or a cheapskate (not for everyone, and not in densely populated cities such as DC/Arlington, SF, NYC and Perhaps Boston) On the other hand, in Europe I've seen deans biking to school and the feeling is exactly the opposite ("wow that's so cool!") Sorry for generalizing, but that was what I saw, having lived on both sides
- iso8859-1 11y agoA reference for Toronto: http://www.metronews.ca/views/toronto/condo-trends/2015/02/19/buying-a-toronto-condo-close-to-the-subway-will-cost-you-more.html http://www.metronews.ca/views/toronto/condo-trends/2015/02/1...
- roel_v 11y ago
- eagsalazar2 11y agoToo bad I can't think of anywhere within 300mi that is both (a) large enough to justify a hyperloop stop and (b) isn't an awful hellhole (Fresno). Maybe east of Sacramento?
- vidarh 11y agoLook at the history of the rail network and see how cities were made (or undone) by where rail stations were placed.
- Tepix 11y agoSo, changing the Bay area housing market is a "much more tremendous impact" than self driving cars? Maybe you haven't thought this through. Self driving cars are likely to create world wide significant changes to mass mobility. The bay area is a drop in the bucket in comparison.
- Shivetya 11y agohyperloop will not solve this problem just as any FIXED point transportation system cannot. Autonomous driving will serve far more people where they want and when they want than any fixed point system. Autonomous buses can move people in large numbers and is infinitely adjustable to changes in usage patterns Now it might be possible that something like this could reduce the need for short hop flights. Even if it did not I would put both end points onto existing airports to take advantage of the existing infrastructure that already serves them. tl;dr fixed point to point fails long term
- dgoldstein0 11y agoI don't think it matters which one is better - each has a niche to fill. I would much rather hop on a train and be in LA or Seattle in an hour, than get a self-driving car and be there in 6+. But for short distance, cars or a slower, more traditional public are the better option (mainly because you can't have high-speed lines to carry people a few blocks at a time)
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- negativity 11y agoThe political implications tied to self-driving cars are all scary. The political implications tied to self-driving trains are not. The difference being the rails that bind and inhibit true autonomy. An internet of two-ton things hurtling at 60+ MPH should not be an idea tossed about dismissively. It should at least be locked into track systems, or loops as training wheels, for baby's first sentient AI.
- donkeyd 11y agoThose 'two-ton things' are already hurtling at 60+ MPH with human drivers, who are distracted by cell-phones, radio, birds, etc. or are under the influence of something. I find the thought of human drivers being replaced by AI very comforting to be honest.
- bluthru 11y agoYou know what's really scary? Humans driving two-ton things at 60+ MPH.
- Tepix 11y agoYou're talking about tracking the populace? What if you could use a self driving car in an anonymous manner (paying cash)?
- donkeyd 11y agoOr Bitcoin.
- MrBuddyCasino 11y ago> "The pod has been pressurized to minimize the G forces effects on a passenger" Anyone's got an idea what they meant with that?
- nielsole 11y ago> Suprastudio’s students suggested pods pressurized like airplanes to reduce G forces They even put it in there twice.
- Mvandenbergh 11y agoThey could put it in as many times as they like, it doesn't make any sense.
- unwind 11y agoThey're are trying to communicate, in a humorous way, that they have absolutely no grasp of physics and will report anything that sounds cool, and thus are best ignored if you're looking for actual news and facts about a project like this. That's my take, at least ...
- lumberjack 11y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-suit https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-suit I guess it's the same concept.
- masklinn 11y agoThat makes no sense, the point of pressurising a G-suit is to physically press on the pilot's lower body and drive blood towards the upper body, think adaptive high-pressure compression stocking. Pressurising the cabin can have no such effect. Plus the point of G-suit is high-G manoeuvres, not linear acceleration or deceleration: untrained humans can handle 17g eyeballs in and 12g eyeballs out for several minutes versus instants of 4~6 g along other axis, Stapp's work demonstrated that properly restrained humans could walk away from 46G eyeballs out (decelerating while facing forwards)
- titzer 11y agoI hate to be so negative. Elon is a really bright guy and electric cars are fantastic; a real advancement away from fossil fuels. We need more of that! But we don't need hyperloop. We need decent subways, lightrail, buses and trams. And decently fast (200km/h) intercity trains. We don't lack the technology or the engineering, we lack the political will. Pissing away billions on more techno fantasy is just a distraction while the number of cars and parking lots and freeways just keeps on growing, accreting ever more, little by little, like it has for the past 60 years in the US. The layout of and density of US cities is already profoundly inefficient due to streets, parking lots, and freeways. A lot of comments here seem to be betting big on self-driving cars, like somehow magic chariots will appear from the sky and whisk us away to fairy land where we never have to look at a stranger or sit in a seat next to someone we don't know, or god, touch a railing! And they'll just as easily disappear into the ether where they require neither maintenance nor upkeep, storage, or cleaning. Apparently these self-driving cars will also run on magic engines that are somehow going to be more efficient than electric light rail or subway, or god forbid, a bike.
- zimbatm 11y agoThen don't be. There is room for one more transportation system. Money is not a single pot which gets distributed to a number of things. It's a fallacy to think that if hyperloop didn't happen more money would go to other transportation systems.
- masklinn 11y ago> And decently fast (200km/h) intercity trains. Surely you mean 200mph? 200km/h barely qualifies as high-speed rail on old lines in europe, new lines require 250, 350 lines are being rolled out and plans are being drawn for 400 lines in the UK and Russia.
- titzer 11y ago200km/h would be smoking fast in the US. Sadly.
- Scarblac 11y agoAlmost all Dutch intercity trains run 140km/h, and that's fast enough (it's faster than cars, and goes city center to city center). Of course cities are close together here, but we are in Europe. I'd certainly call 200km/h "decently fast".
- dsfsdfd 11y agoWhy do we insist on character worship. Hyperloop is not his idea - it's a totally obvious idea that has popped up many times since the 1800s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop#Historical https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop#Historical Compressing the air in front of the capsule is not some fantastic stroke of genius - it's trivially obvious. All he has done is drawn our attention to a really good idea.
- lmm 11y agoWith rail - particularly these days when it's practical to work on trains - it's not really the speed, it's the capacity. And Hyperloop's capacity advantage seems to come solely from the assumption that their cars will be allowed to run as close as buses or trams or lorries. We allow lorries to run at 56mph less than a meter nose-to-tail, with a human at the controls. Yet we require signalling blocks that put miles of clear air between two successive trains even when automatically operated. We could make rail vastly more economic overnight if we simply allowed it to operate at the same safety levels that we accept for road traffic.
- jacquesm 11y agoThe mass and stopping distance of trains is what dictates the length of the space, so we are already operating at the 'same safety levels that we accept for road traffic'. It's all based on the friction between the vehicle and the surface, in road vehicles that's typically asphalt and rubber and stopping distances are relatively short because of reduced mass. In trains the materials are steel and slightly harder steel and stopping distances are much larger, especially when the rails are wet. A loaded freight train running 55 Mph will take more than a mile to come to a full stop. A passenger train doing 100 Mph takes 750 meters to stop with emergency brakes applied. This will lead to lots of people being wounded due the fact that trains don't normally have seatbelts, unsecured overhead luggage and people standing if the train is relatively full. Trains also can't evade, they're tied to the rails.
- lmm 11y agoIt's not the same level. You're quite right that stopping distances are longer but we don't require road traffic to be its full stopping distance apart (you have to be much much closer before you'll get stopped for tailgating), and we do see much higher accident rates for buses and other road traffic than for trains as a result.
- jacquesm 11y agoExactly, buses and road traffic have higher accident rates than trains (and aircraft) and this has everything to do with how those means of transportation are being operated. Rail and aircraft operators are companies that take responsibility for the lives of a large number of people and that typically have a long term view, as in, they'd like to be in business in half a century or more. Tourbus operators (not the same as public transport) are responsible for a large number of the road traffic accidents involving buses, public transport involving buses is involved in accidents at a much lower rate. The reasons are: tourbuses tend to go faster, drive much longer distances (exhaustion), drive routes that are less safe to begin with and so on. The way the rail industry deals with a capacity problem on a line is not to send more trains with a decreased train-to-train spacing but simply to send longer trains. You can't really make longer buses beyond a certain maximum length due to the fact that the minimum turning radius of roads is a very small fraction of the minimum turning radius of a train.
- tptacek 11y agoReminders about the initial criticisms of the Hyperloop plan, which I do not see rebutted anywhere in this article: * It's riotously expensive, far more so than the white paper indicates; simply building the elevated track overpasses at the costs listed in the white paper would imply a revolution in civil engineering. * Door-to-door transit times are within the same ballpark as HSR, because it's not possible to terminate Hyperloop tracks downtown in LA or SF; ROW issues put them roughly an hour outside each city. * Hyperloops will have approximately the same security concerns as airplanes --- they fail more dangerously than normal trains --- and so will have TSA-style security checks, further slowing travel. * At the speeds Hyperloop advocates claim, there is virtually no tolerance for bends on tracks without inducing nausea.