3 ms·
>The hyperloop is actually something worth having as it will get you from SF to LA in 30 mins. Even if it costs more and takes less people than HSR, it's still
by mistercow 13y ago
>The hyperloop is actually something worth having as it will get you from SF to LA in 30 mins. Even if it costs more and takes less people than HSR, it's still far better than HSR for actually getting you between the two cities in the kind of time people would like.
Not necessarily. It depends on demand.
Think of travel time as latency, and volume as bandwidth. If the system is unsaturated, then the 30 minute travel time is great. You show up, get on, and ~30 minutes later you're at your destination.
But if the system is saturated (which seems likely at $20/ticket), then latency becomes more or less irrelevant because you're limited by bandwidth. Sure, once you get on the car, you'll arrive in half an hour. But you will have to wait in line, and that wait will be determined by the volume limitations of the hyperloop. If the hyperloop attempts to serve the same demand as the proposed HSR, a passenger's total travel time will be four times as long.
The solution is to charge more for a ticket. The actual price needs to be calculated in terms of a point where you don't end up with more than 3000 passengers per hour (at which point you break even).
However, even if you do that, it doesn't as effectively solve other problems that the HSR will help with, like total car traffic.
- superuser2 13y agoWhy would we create one of the most sophisticated transit systems in history and then use standing in a line as the method of reserving a space? Web-based reservation systems are not hard. Last-minute tickets could be sold at higher price for those that need and can afford them as well.
- tptacek 13y agoYou're not waiting in line for a ticket. You're waiting in line to get through security and to board the capsule. This is one of SWA's core optimization problems, and door-to-door times for SWA are still swamped by human-factor airport issues. You can't wave a web browser around as a magic wand to solve these problems.
- superuser2 13y ago>and that wait will be determined by the volume limitations of the hyperloop This is what led me to believe he was talking about standing in line for a place in a capsule. Why is the wait for security determined by the volume limitations of the Hyperloop? Isn't that a function of demand, security lanes, and space to fill with waiting passengers?
- tptacek 13y agoFly a lot? How much time do you give yourself to get through the lines?
- RyanZAG 13y agoGenerally around 5 minutes off peak, and 10 minutes at peak flying times. Then again, I don't fly to the USA much and so don't have to deal with the TSA. Security in the rest of the world is not much of a problem.
- superuser2 13y agoI print my boarding passes at home (or use Passbook) and never check luggage, so the only line I deal with is security. Passing through the checkpoint itself takes ~90 seconds. The other 20-90 minutes is waiting for the queue in front of me to be processed by 1-2 lanes working in parallel. If the airport had a wide enough hallway and a big enough payroll, why couldn't it run 10-20 lanes and cut down the wait by an order of magnitude? Obviously the federal government doesn't choose to spend money that way, but it could - regardless of the seating capacity of the aircraft. In fact low-bandwidth aircraft make the problem easier because fewer people need to depart at once. I trust that you know what you're talking about when it comes to security, but I don't see it. Why does Hyperloop's low bandwidth make the security line problem worse than HSR?
- tptacek 13y agoThe HSR plan doesn't involve TSA-style security checkpoints. The Musk plan explicitly does. HSR trains have derailed in the past with minimal fatalities. The expectation is that the same scenario on Musk's trains would be catastrophic.
- mistercow 13y agoRight, I didn't mean a literal line. It does help that you aren't stuck on a train for that time, but the increased wait is still a consideration.