4 ms·
One thing the article misses is inflexibility. One of the big disadvantages of rail is that once the track is deployed it is very costly and difficult to upgrad
by bigger_cheese 10y ago
One thing the article misses is inflexibility. One of the big disadvantages of rail is that once the track is deployed it is very costly and difficult to upgrade it. One thing I'd want in any "futuristic" freight hauling method would be ease of scaling I don't think Hyperloop offers anything over rail in this regard once track is installed you are more or less stuck with the installed capacity forever.
A computer analogy I'd give is to think of freight handling like information communication - the big issues are bandwidth (How much can you send/receive in one shipment) latency (How long does it take to arrive) and throughput (How many shipments can you handle at once).
Hyperloop addresses the latency issue but does little to nothing to address the other two problems
From what I see working in a heavy industry which relies on bulk freight (for import and export). Throughput (i.e Congestion) is the hot issue - we have a rail terminal and a deep water berth (which handles capesized ships). The rail corridor is shared and at times pretty heavily congested we use road trains (b-double trucks) to make up for the shortfall.
- manicdee 10y agoThe thousand-dollar-per-strawberry market cares a lot about latency, and not one jot about bulk handling capacity. Getting from Napa Valley to New York, New York in an hour without sitting in a box in the sun would be a big win.
- misnome 10y agoI imagine strawberries (and squishy cargos) might be more sensitive to high acceleration and jerk.
- toomanybeersies 10y ago> A computer analogy I'd give is to think of freight handling like information communication Unsurprisingly, a lot of the theory for transport networks maps extremely well to computer networks. Transport is essentially a literal packet switched network. You have routers (depots), routes (roads, rails, etc), packets (in many cases, literally packets), MTUs (twenty foot containers, or truckloads). Queuing theory equally applies to both as well (and a lot of other physical applications, at university we had an exercise applying it to customer support).
- agumonkey 10y agoI remember talks of propping up underground rails as internet of things, literally pushing things instead of data toward any place automatically. I'd love to test this.
- bigger_cheese 10y agoAnecdotally one of my Engineering lecturers at university was an expert on human logistics. (i.e the physical queuing of people) I remember talking to her about a project she was working on with a large retail chain advising them on how to funnel people through store checkouts more efficiently.
- woodpanel 10y agoWell the article's author could have put more emphasize on the inflexibility, but reading the Parts on airfreight and trucks I think he got the gist of it. Good read. Concerning "barf rides": wouldn't Strong and well-timed anesthetics help?
- ThrustVectoring 10y agoUhhh, no. Anesthesia is rather dangerous. It's unsafe without medical supervision, which means it just shunts the costs from passengers to the anesthesiologists that'd have to accompany them.
- emodendroket 10y agoYeah, let's just fill the cabins with laughing gas; can't see any way that could go wrong.