I saw that Mustang Bobby gave us an update and wanted to front page it:
Checking in to report that I made it through the hurricane with no damage to my house, although the storm surge apparently ventured into my front yard. I blogged about it yesterday.
I’m without landline phone, internet, or cable at home but got power back on Wednesday noon. As I note in the post; I had it easy compared to my friends in the Keys and on the west coast.
I hope everyone else who went through it is doing well or getting better.
How is everyone else in our hurricane areas doing? Give us an update if you can.
This is all over the news here yesterday:
Hyperloop One, Colorado in the running:
What seems like a far-out, sci-fi mode of transportation hit home Thursday as a Colorado-based public-private partnership was named one of 10 finalists in the Hyperloop One competition to build a vacuum-sealed tunnel that would shoot pods between cities at up to 700 miles per hour.
The Los Angeles firm Hyperloop One, which sponsored the competition, now moves to the next phase, in which it will invest its own time and resources to narrow down the candidates.
But Colorado may have the advantage. The company liked the Colorado team’s proposal so much, it announced that it is partnering with the state’s Department of Transportation to work on a feasibility study to build the futuristic transportation system, which would stretch from Cheyenne to Pueblo, and west to Vail.
I have very, very mixed feelings about it.
What are you up to this Friday morning? I have to go now and rescue Jake from his duck-groupies.
Ohio Mom
Is getting people to Vail for their ski vacations really a priority?
vickie feminist
Honestly I’m finding I can not get enough of your ducks. Eggs, kitty-crush, I love it all. Please keep sharing.
Major Major Major Major
Ah, yes, the nation’s most underserved travel corridor.
Some horrifying animal washed up on the beach in Texas.
TaMara (HFG)
@vickie feminist: I am happy to report we are getting one egg a day, which means only one is producing. Nothing about Maddie says boy, but you never know, I may have to rename her/him. Or one of them became fully matured before the other. We’ll have to see. (Mabel is for sure a duck not a drake).
Betty
What happens to a body moving at 700 mph when the capsule stops? I’m seeing concussions as your brain bounces around inside your head. Looks like Big Money is behind this goofy idea.
Betty Cracker
Glad to hear Mustang Bobby weathered the storm. All of my relatives save one have had their power restored as of yesterday. Life is pretty much back to normal for us; the only signs of the storm in my immediate community are piles of debris on the curb awaiting removal and still-bare store shelves. Could be a lot worse. Still have not heard from our friend in St. Thomas since I wished him luck right before Irma hit there.
Mom Says I*m Handsome
Denver to Vail is a good route for a bunch of reasons:
1) It’s already a congested travel route.
2) Expanding I-70 through the mountains is difficult, expensive, and has environmental downsides.
3) Skiers will pay the price.
TaMara (HFG)
@Betty Cracker: My cousin’s daughter is in the Coast Guard and she headed out with them to St. John to help out. I’m still in denial about how bad it is there.
Citizen_X
@Betty: If it’s sudden, you die; if it’s gentle, you disembark. Same as an airplane.
NYCMT
It’s stupid. Fix the local Colorado and Southern rail system first? Cripes. God-Almighty! The capital is forthcoming for stupid shit for rich people, but for incremental improvements and repair to existing infrastructure…
Major Major Major Major
@Mom Says I*m Handsome:
But a big untested vacuum tube is a piece of cake?
Cheryl Rofer
Here’s a kitten to start your day.
Mike J
@Cheryl Rofer: Spell it with a K for the Tottenham fans.
nonynony
@Major Major Major Major:
But you don’t understand! This is based on a half-formed napkin scrawl that came from the fingers of Elon Musk! It MUST be important and amazing if such a visionary threw that idea out for
grifters to use to steal money from vulture capitaliststhe betterment of mankind!(It’s funny how if you say “we should build a high-speed rail between Denver and Cheyenne” you’d likely get a lot of angry pushback. But if you say “we should build A HYPERLOOP which ELON MUSK SAYS IS THE FUTURE OF TRANSPORTATION” everyone is ready to throw money at you. Because a lot of people are morons, and a lot of venture capitalists are morons with money.)
Barbara
@Ohio Mom: Maybe not, but getting people who work in Vail to their jobs might be. I have mixed feelings too, but overall, anything that makes it easier to navigate the modern world without a car should ameliorate the need for the most troublesome aspects of modern development: more and wider roads and more and more land devoted to parking lots. Not sure this will do it, but I think that’s really the goal.
WaterGirl
@Major Major Major Major: I took a gamble that there would be some adorable kitty or some other adorable creature at your link. I lost. Would not want to meet that guy anywhere.
Barbara
@nonynony: Well, this company is different from Elon Musk’s. For all I know, he got the idea from them.
Percysowner
My hometown, Columbus, Oh, also made the final 10 for Hyperloop. It would set up a Chicago, Columbus, Pittsburgh route.
NCSteve
@Mom Says I*m Handsome: Also, less air to pump out of the tube given that Denver’s partial pressure is already close to vacuum. (Possibly, that’s just how it felt to me the one time I was there.)
Barbara
@NCSteve: Yep. They sell oxygen at every retail location in Vail.
Emma
My area of Cutler Bay had power by Monday afternoon (FPL had been doing a lot of desperately needed repairs less than a year ago and I think this was the result). Internet took a while longer but not by much. My sister and her family have been staying nights with us because in her area so many power lines are down — and tangled into trees — that they might not have electricity for a while. As I’ve mentioned before my house is ok but the yard is completely trashed. A friend of the landlord next door who is an independent insurance agency told me my insurance company would likely not give me even a half of what I need to put up a new fence. We’ll see.
Wayne
I made it through the storm OK. I’m not far from Mustang Bobby’s stall. It was pretty intense for a while but having gone thru Andrew I was confident of the house holding up, which it did.
Fence down, screens on the patio torn, no house damage, not too bad on my trees. Overall just a light flesh wound. Biggest pain is no power but have generator and no internet. At a friends house now with A/C and internet.
rikyrah
Tillerson reveals State Dept. reform plan
BY JOSH DELK – 09/14/17 09:30 PM EDT
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson released the first installment of a State Department reform plan on Thursday that may merge the department with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), CNN reports.
The “employee-led” plan was developed through a survey sent to employees of the State Department and USAID, which Tillerson said would be “the most important thing” he would accomplish as head of the department.
Tillerson suggested the State Department may merge with USAID, saying that the plan would aim to “align” the agencies’ resources, and improve the department’s efficiency across the board as well as its technology infrastructure and human resources.
The secretary’s proposed plan comes as the Trump administration faces a series of international challenges, including over North Korea’s advancing nuclear program.
Tillerson backed President Trump’s plan to slash the department’s budget by roughly a third, which was met by resistance from Congress.
The secretary said that his reorganization plan would work to slash over $10 billion from the department’s budget over the next five years, according to CNN.
The plan unveiled Thursday seeks to shave nearly 2,000 jobs through reforms over the next two and a half years.
Major Major Major Major
@WaterGirl: nope, was playing it completely straight when I said it was a horrifying animal. Shmeesh!
@nonynony: Musk’s whole notion was that it was cheaper to build and had a much smaller footprint than rail, especially at the ends. Which is probably not true, but that was his whole point. We also should stop worshiping every idea that comes from the mind of eccentric billionaires. I saw an exhibit of Frank Lloyd Wright’s stuff at MOMA when I was in New York and he suggested things like replacing Chicago with eight-lane roads and mile-high cantilevered skyscrapers, which is cool and all but… yeah. I don’t think it got the same hearing as Musk’s loony notions.
Major Major Major Major
@Percysowner: Columbus doesn’t even have buses so they want a hyperloop to leapfrog them into the next century? Wtf
rikyrah
Albright: Trump should focus on himself instead of ‘always blaming Obama’
BY JOSH DELK – 09/15/17 09:34 AM EDT
Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on Friday suggested that President Trump think “about what he was doing” in office instead of targeting former President Obama on Twitter.
“The Obama administration worked very hard on dealing with the terrorist issues. It would be really nice if President Trump actually thought about what he was doing rather than always blaming president Obama,” Albright said on CNN.
Petorado
I’m all for fast mass transit, but hyperloop looks to be as much of a solution to large scale transit as the Concorde: it’s great if you have the money but meaningless if you don’t. If it can significantly reduce traffic congestion and commutes for great numbers of folks then great, but if it merely provides fast access to jobs for those in expensive bedroom communities (through significant public subsidies) then no.
rikyrah
It never fucking ends.
Graham-Cassidy might be the worst plan yet. Good explainer from @sarahkliff here: https://t.co/WLlHqOISJ5 https://t.co/pIbWHW9ZZH
— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) September 15, 2017
Major Major Major Major
My bus driver right now is insane! I wish I could replace him with a hyperloop driver. That would solve the problem for sure.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
you may have seen there was an IED in the London underground, and of course to the Rough Beast this proves…. something about American immigration rules and Obama
“nasty”. He’s over 70 and discussing national security, counter-terrorism and foreign policy. Also, too:
He’s also spinning himself into a bullshit tornado over DACA. So much for independent bipartisan chess player trump
jeffreyw
@rikyrah: That fucker. He sees employees as costs instead as the assets they are. Those people, with their knowledge of the world we live in, help to ease our way through that world. Without them there is unnecessary friction, and the heat that causes is avoidable. Those people will likely be gone forever.
Dave
@Major Major Major Major: This is why I have mixed feelings. Everything is untested until it’s been done but it working out the kinks on something like this if it’s reasonably feasible given current capabilities is almost certain to be much harder and more expensive than they are imagining.
I get Musk to some degree I like that there are people pushing the boundaries of what we do and can do even if it is attached to more than a whiff of Silicon Valley Techbroism. And then of course there is the obvious fact that Musk’s final goal is uploading his consciousness into a giant-mecha located in his layer on Olympus Mons.
And then we have the fact that we have places like Flint where we have huge numbers of people living without reliable drinking water and that’s hard to ignore as well. Still I don’t think pie in the sky hyperloop funding is why Flint hasn’t been remedied but I do understand why seeing this sort of thing in relief against the immediate needs of marginalized people everywhere can be frustrating.
Well this comment turned into a big shoulder shrug. Real decisive on my part.
TaMara (HFG)
@Wayne: Good to hear!
Mike J
@Major Major Major Major: Musk’s whole notion was, “how can I kill high speed rail?” If they ever got hyperloop working and wanted to spend tax money on it he come up with a new wacky idea that was the one true way.
toschek
@Petorado:
Denver area traffic is insane since every other Californian has decided to move here. Rush hours feel worse than LA. Anything that leads to fewer cars on the road is worth looking into IMO.
Major Major Major Major
@Dave: I’d be all for building a shortish, extensible proof-of-concept somewhere flat and without too much tendency for natural disasters.
@toschek:
But Bay Area traffic has been bad since every other person from Denver moved here, go figure
NotMax
For movement of freight, sounds intriguing (although perhaps not all that cost effective a trade-off for removing long haul trucks from highways). For movement of people, not so much.
The Moar You Know
@nonynony: It originated in the pneumatic mail delivery system that was installed through London in the 1800s and parts of which still are active today. Same design was used for moving money in banks later, and is still in use at Costco for cashier drops today. It was fully fleshed out in a Larry Niven novel back in the 1970s, in pretty much the exact form Musk is proposing now.
rikyrah
@TaMara (HFG):
Saw a tweet this morning –
For the first time in 300 years, there is not a single living person on the island of Barbuda.
germy
@Major Major Major Major:
Nightmarish.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@rikyrah: Good god
Petorado
@Barbara: People who work in Vail live in places the hyper loop won’t be going to so it won’t solve that problem. What it will do is open up that labor market to people living on the Front Range, possibly driving down labor costs, and opening up the second home market to even more wealthy Denverites. This project would create some unintended social engineering that would significantly alter the character of mountain communities and ramp up the demand for, and value of, land in the mountains.
Barbara
@Major Major Major Major: Not to unduly defend Musk, but I don’t think of him as an eccentric billionaire in the same sense that you do. Musk was not a billionaire when he co-founded PayPal and when he cashed out he didn’t buy an island or a sports team or co-opt the city by the bay into spending millions of dollars to host a rich person’s sporting event. He put it on the line and started an electric car company, making cars in the U.S., and his friends thought was completely insane. All these Silicon Valley entrepreneurs peddling apps and what not as agents of change are just poseurs compared to Musk. I have no opinion on the Hyperloop but the fact that it was proposed by Musk doesn’t make it automatically suspect. IMHO.
Dave
@Major Major Major Major: Makes sense this entire fuck it lets make the first one seven hundred miles long is silly hubris.
Raoul
@Ohio Mom & @Major Major Major Major: Getting people N-S on the Colorado Front Range is a priority. Denver & surrounds (ie: Fort Collins to Colorado Springs) are growing like crazy and will have LA level traffic soon, imo. Comparable to the San Antonio-Austin-Georgetown mega-city that is developing there.
And the highly fit, highly outdoor-active four season users of the high country west of Denver is causing some ungodly amount of carbon to be spewed in legendary traffic every weekend of winter and summer.
As one ski industry pro put it some years ago about the Denver day-skier and weekend-skier population and the carbon output/long-term climate impact of all the driving (and I’m adding summer use, which can in my experience have worse traffic) “We are loving our mountains to death.”
Ohio Mom
@Barbara: All right. I haven’t been to Vail but did drive by on my way to Aspen to visit Ohio Dad’s cousins, the ski instructors, about ten years ago. I know that it’s almost feudal in that part of the world: there are the well-to-do and then there are the very strapped servant class, who can’t afford to live near their jobs.
But wouldn’t more bus routes be easier, faster, and cheaper to put in place?
All this is assuming that making sure people can have hassle-free ski vacations is a super-important social good.
Barbara
@Petorado: Not an expert in Denver area real estate by any means but Vail and neighboring communities already strike me as more expensive than I would ever want to spend on a second home. I don’t own a second home. My husband and I are strictly snow chasers when it comes to skiing, but I did like Vail for its skiing. Was underimpressed by everything else, e.g., restaurants.
randy khan
@Major Major Major Major:
Why not, if someone else is going to pay for it?
I don’t want to discount the general skepticism about this idea too much, but it’s not insane by any means. (One thing that’s interesting in terms of scaling is that the individual pods hold fewer than 20 people, which means that they can leave with almost the frequency of subways over a sufficiently-traveled route, and the design also assumes no stops along the way because you can route pods individually.) And if you don’t have any kind of real intercity ground transportation infrastructure and you’re a city the size of Columbus, it’s entirely reasonable to see if you can get some. If nothing else, the studies necessary to show that it would make sense in terms of passenger load can be used to prod bus companies &etc. to step up to the plate.
Spanky
Scarborough’s op-ed in today’s WaPo. Ahh! The refreshing self-awareness of ol’ Squint!
NotMax
@germy
In the mid-19th century, downtown Chicago was jacked up anywhere from four to fourteen feet higher.
Ohio Mom
@Major Major Major Major: Columbus has a city bus system and a Greyhound station. IIRC, Megabus dropped them.
Major Major Major Major
@randy khan: I guess I just think that proposed transportation policies in a city should be achievable politically and based on technology that’s been successfully implemented recently for things at least within the same order of magnitude of size.
@Raoul: yeah, I misread the proposed route basically and only saw the Vail part.
@Barbara:
Apparently you do since you described him mostly the same way I would.
randy khan
@Ohio Mom:
This is not a comment about the Hyperloop, but about transit in general. It’s *always* cheaper to do buses at the start, but compared to any fixed-route solution they are a lousy choice in the long run. For one thing, they are subject to the same traffic as cars, so they’re not faster. More broadly, while the capital costs of rail, light-rail, monorail and/or fancy pneumatic tube systems are greater, the operating costs are much lower, and you generally can get much more passenger density than is possible with buses. (And I’d add that rail and possibly the Hyperloop also can carry freight, which you can’t do with buses.)
MaxUtil
@jeffreyw: The State Department is never going to hit its quarterly profit goals if they don’t make a few painful cuts. That’s just smart business.
randy khan
@Major Major Major Major:
The problem is that there’s not much that fits both criteria. High speed rail has been successfully implemented all over the world, but because of Cleek’s law (only slightly kidding there), is not politically achievable right now. The Hyperloop probably is much more feasible from the political point of view, but is unproven. If I’m the mayor of Columbus, I am going to give the Hyperloop a shot and see what happens.
Raoul
@Major Major Major Major: “Ah, yes, the nation’s most underserved travel corridor.”
Not the point for the hyperloopers, I’d imagine. They are private investors who want a successful business launch. That requires a combination of demand and projected willingness to use the product, and a government entity (like COdot) that wants it. The front range most likely has some key things going for it:
Rapid population and economic growth.
Acceptance of transit — LRT and heavy rail are well supported (ie: extra taxes to pay for it), well used, and developers are responding with TOD projects (transit-oriented design).
Desire by/intent of more high-tech firms to move/grow/invest in the Denver region for their businesses.
Building a bleeding edge technology in the most underserved area first could be a recipe for disaster. Look at the fuckery happening over one single HSR line from LA to Bay Area.
Build this first hyperloop where business and government is excited about it. Once the proof of concept is running and people like it, then develop it in the underserved (aka most entangled, crowded, NIMBY-laden megalopolises).
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@nonynony:
I keep wishing for a Carrington Event, all so I can fantasize about Silicon Valley venture capitalists trying to eke out a position by the guttering fire under a freeway overpass as they tell tales of the Before Time, when they disrupted whole industries by the introduction of new paradigms and synergies.
The proprietors of the campfires can demand payment from the VC folks in the form of clothing, jewelry, canned goods and sexual favors in the NEWEST industry disrupting paradigm…
MaxUtil
@randy khan:
Hyperloop looks to have the same problem with freight as it will with people. It will only carry tiny amounts at a time, so it will be very expensive.
As to carrying freight by bus, I believe they have a new innovation called “trucks” that basically do that already.
Humboldtblue
@Mike J: August is over and that means he’s back to being the goal-scoring machine he can be.
You may enjoy this lovely photo essay done in England of Urban Goals.
Raoul
@Percysowner: Cool! I am still sad/angry that shitweasle Walker quashed the planned HSR for Minneapolis-Milwaukee-Chicago. One of the better mid-distance, high demand stretches for the US to properly dip our toe in to HSR. It drives me nuts how many people fly back and forth (or clog up I-90).
Whenever I am out of the US and see the HSR networks of other first world nations, I want to just yell my damn head off at our idiot Republican/oligahrical overlords.
Jeffro
@Mom Says I*m Handsome:
1) Amen, 2) Amen, and 3) Amen (although this year the Fro family is heading further west for some post-Christmas skiing! We’ll pay the price once this is built, though)
Matt McIrvin
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Translation: Killing the guilty is never enough; we have to kill the innocent or we’re not being tough enough. The blood god demands sacrifice.
Chyron HR
Re: Hyperloop: Is there a chance the track could bend?
cope
No power yet at casa cope, minor roof damage, piles of debris, frogs coming and going in through open windows (indoor temp hit 89 yesterday), two refrigerator freezers worth of food thrown out yesterday and ice intermittently available. The pool is nearing cement pond status but echoing others, nothing compared to what happened to various islands sprinkled through the Caribbean.
As for any notions of a hyper-loop, drop the “loop” and the “r” and you have a pretty good description of what it all is.
Not only are there physics issues in stopping from x00 miles per hour, there are acceleration problems designing a track with curves that wouldn’t snap your head off sideways. Any good high school physics student (I wasn’t one) could easily calculate the minimum radius of a curve that would generate a safe, comfortable lateral acceleration at those x00 miles per hour.
Not to mention the difficulties of creating and maintaining a near vacuum in the total volume of the transport tube.
Matt McIrvin
@MaxUtil: It makes no sense to use something like Hyperloop for most freight, because most freight doesn’t have to be fast; it just has to get there in high volume as cheaply as possible. I guess it might compete with air delivery for high-value packages.
Jeffro
@toschek: @Major Major Major Major: Y’all aren’t helping me and the missus decide where we want to retire (both SF and Denver are way up on the list).
Another Scott
@Dave: That’s kinda the way I feel.
Research is good, pushing the boundaries is good, but actually trying to use this for transportation is nuts.
CERN’s vacuum system:
The Hyperloop wouldn’t need pressures that low (maybe 10^-3 -10^-6 mbar would be fine), but that is the kind of technology involved. Vacuum systems always develop leaks and they have to be designed to be detected and repaired.
What happens when there’s a vacuum leak in the pod? What happens when there’s a vacuum leak in the tunnel? What happens when the pod has to stop away from a station and people have to evacuate? What happens when there’s a power glitch and the pumps shut off briefly? What happens when there’s a power outage and the pumps stop for an extended period? What happens when the pumps fail or need maintenance? I’m sure people are thinking about these issues, but it’s details like these that make or break real projects.
This makes much more sense for transporting goods than for transporting people – at least until all the kinks are worked out. But even then, the stations would have to be like freight yards to move stuff in and out and have temporary storage while the goods wait to go to their next destination.
Sure, do research on this stuff. But also invest in improving conventional and high-speed rail in the USA to have right-of-ways and infrastructure in place when/if Hyperloops make sense to deploy.
Cheers,
Scott.
NotMax
@Chyron HR
Certainly works for particle accelerators.
FlipYrWhig
@Chyron HR: Not on your life, my Hindu friend
Raoul
@germy:
Basically Dubai is nearly Wright’s [insane, terrible] vision. Plenty of enormous roads (12-lane freeways even), and the Burj Khalifa, while not cantilevered, is over half the way to a mile high.
germy
@Raoul: How horrible. And a 12-lane freeway is my idea of hell.
Chyron HR
@FlipYrWhig:
What about the noble white working class?
Cermet
First off, not gonna ever work at a cost even tens time what they will believe; second, not gonna work due to the vast array of problems they would discover if they really ever tried; third, not gonna work because, except for the really wealthy, no significant number of people would be able to afford the extremely subsidized ticket prices (Make the Concord look cheap); fourth, this poorly thought out idea is inferior to most modes of transport because it can’t handle short stops allowing anything but between major city to major city – not what any rich person wants; finally, it won’t work because it is a stupid idea any way you look at it.
Another Scott
@Cermet: But, other than that, and the mv^2/r issue mentioned above, it’s genius, right?!?!?
Cheers,
Scott.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Jesus weeps, railroads have problems keeping their road beds flat and they expect a good vaccum over how many hundered of miles over how many decades of opperation? This is the reverse of engineering.
Shrillhouse
@Chyron HR: Not a chance, my Hindu friend…
Barbara
@Raoul: My family went to Vail during the last part of inauguration week, and came back for a mid-morning flight out of Denver on Sunday morning. We white knuckled the early AM ride out of Vail during a snow storm in a car that was probably not equipped for the weather, but we diligently crept along and followed the tracks of the vehicle in front of us and finally made it to the downhill side of Vail, and were utterly astonished at the amount of traffic coming from the other direction. I mean, it was bumper to bumper for miles and miles and miles, of people going to ski areas probably for no more than one or two days. My bottom line on hyper loop is that it might be one more tool in the mass transit box that will get tested and maybe find its place in suitable conditions.
FlipYrWhig
@Chyron HR: They’ll be given cushy, um, ass!
trollhattan
@Spanky:
Hannity’s abandonment? Hannity will be remora’d to Trump’s yuge ass to the very end. Coulter’s pissed he’s not being sufficiently mean to Mexicans.
trollhattan
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Zactly. I’ve read the TGV needs to run maintenance over their tracks nightly to check condition and alignment. How the fig do they expect an elevated tube to remain perfectly in spec, particularly in a mountain environment? Not to mention upscaling the pumps to a system that size. Let’s not bother to ponder them as a terrorist magnet for the moment.
Jeffro
Hey – everyone please be careful reading Brooksie today, he managed to drop just a bit of truth into his usual nonsense:
But David, I thought…I thought ALL LIVES MATTER to Republicans? Couldja let us know a little more about how we Dems should sell “addressing the inequalities that are the result of deeper social forces” to the Freedumb Caucus??!?
randy khan
@Matt McIrvin:
@MaxUtil:
From what I’ve seen, a hyperloop pod is about big enough to hold maybe half as much as a semi trailer (depending on how much of it is devoted to the mechanical parts). As for how much it will cost, one of the selling points is that the incremental cost of sending a pod should be pretty low. It’s the capital costs that will be significant, but that just argues for getting as much traffic as possible in the system.
I also note that actual testing has begun on the system. The first test got to 70 mph, which obviously is not fast enough to serve the purpose. If it scales to 250 mph, which apparently is the next step, that would be NY to DC in an hour, just about 3 times faster than Amtrak, and in practice slightly faster than a plane from portal to portal. Then the next question is one mentioned above, which is how you maintain sufficient vacuum over long distances to make it practical.
My real point here is that “never gonna happen” may be right, but there’s more to this than a lot of people think. It could happen. (Note that I don’t say “will,” as there are lots of hurdles, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility.
FlyingToaster
FWIW, my mom is still without everything in Lehigh Acres; power went out Sunday afternoon, landline phone, cell, cable went out early Monday morning when the Able Canal overtopped and took out the buried switches. It also trapped most of the neighborhoods in Lehigh because the main roads (Lee Boulevard, Sunshine, Joel) had standing water. Verizon is having a few hours a day with a generator so we’re getting messages from her neighbor, but the situation in SW Florida massively sucks. At least she’s not in Fort Myers with sewage in the streets.
David Evans
Cope: if the pods can tilt inside their tube (and why not?) a lateral acceleration of 1/3 gravities would be felt as only a 6% increase in weight. I think that would be tolerable. At 700 mph that would equate to a track radius of 18 miles.
NotMax
In light of the proposed Hyperloop tube, may we take a moment to remember Alfred Beach.
chopper
@FlipYrWhig:
the ring came off my pudding can!
Major Major Major Major
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Not a big fan of hospitals, I take it?
ETA or agriculture
Major Major Major Major
@Jeffro: I grew up in Denver and it’s turned into a fantastic city IMO, don’t move to SF, it’s a disaster.
Chyron HR
@chopper:
Blame the Jews, my good man!
Another Scott
ObOpenThread – GovExec:
It’s always the Democrats fault, never the Teabaggers fault…. :-/
I assume they’ll come to some agreement – even the House can see that a 13% across-the-board cut at DoD would be a huge own-goal. How they get there is hard to see, though. The GOP is still in the posturing phase, not in the hair-on-fire-we’ve-got-to-do-something phase.
Cheers,
Scott.
Corner Stone
@Percysowner:
I’m still trying to figure out what this means. Columbus does not have a bus system?
Corner Stone
@FlipYrWhig: I’m not sure why they are suggesting Cheyenne as it’s clearly more of a Shelbyville idea.
Barbara
@Corner Stone: They have buses. How many and how extensive the routes are I cannot tell you.
Major Major Major Major
@Another Scott: the sequester was their fucking demand, arfg
@Barbara: that’s a major problem with the article’s fact pedigree then.
The Moar You Know
@Major Major Major Major: Africa doesn’t have wired phones, never mind internet and is leapfrogging both mediums using little more than SMS, M’Pesa, and What’sApp. I’m studying the hell out of what they’re doing there in my spare time. Completely not how the rest of the world has done it, pretty resistant to monetazation of users, and relies in no way on wired carriers. The future of the internet is in Africa for those who are willing to look at what they’re actually doing.
Columbus, since they don’t have buses or anything else, is exactly where you want to put a hyperloop.
Omnes Omnibus
@Major Major Major Major: Columbus has buses.
SatanicPanic
I thought the awesome thing about the electric car and self-driving cars was that you’d never need this kind of permanent infrastructure again.
Major Major Major Major
@Omnes Omnibus: take it up with the quoted article.
@The Moar You Know: ‘Africa’ is indeed doing that. What they aren’t doing is building massive untested infrastructure. What they’re doing makes sense.
ETA: in this analogy what they’re doing is about the equivalent of buses
catclub
@Mom Says I*m Handsome:
ha ha, just like private plane owners pay their fair share for FAA Air Traffic Control.
I would adjust this to: rich skiers get the government to subsidize their vacation travel.
rikyrah
Read then-AJC editor Eugene Patterson’s column after the Birmingham church bombing. 54 years later, still timely https://t.co/tdIpsqscmd pic.twitter.com/DBSgPkzUn7
— Wesley Lowery (@WesleyLowery) September 15, 2017
rikyrah
Hard to understand why evangelicals wd lose faith in a guy who lies a lot & bragged re committing sexual assault? https://t.co/Q7NW1N6X96
— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) September 15, 2017
Raoul
@Ohio Mom:
Yes. And the “Bustang” (daily runs between the mountains and Denver) was almost axed by — you can guess! — Republicans in Colorado. I believe it has been saved, for now.
*I assume you mean faster to implement, clearly not fast in terms of travel time. I regret that there isn’t use of the Amtrak line except for very limited day-skiing on weekends to Winter Park. But that has to do with the line being freight, and Amtrak just gets to go once per day on the west coast run.
A Ghost To Most
@Major Major Major Major: The Denver traffic is better now than the Cali traffic was 35 years ago when I lived in Sunnyvale.
sharl
No landfall is predicted at this time, with Jose expected to level out at a Category-1 (I assume the more northern colder waters will help it to chill out). The prediction is that NC’s Outer Banks will be the coastal area of closest approach before Jose turns north and east. High winds, surf, and stuff like riptides would be expected even without actual landfall.
Jose has taken (is taking) forever to make up its mind; predictions are subject to change.
SatanicPanic
@Raoul: buses are the best, I suspect the left likes to talk more about light rail either because they don’t like poor people, or they’re convinced that they can’t get everyone else on board with being on a bus with poor people.
Ruckus
@Major Major Major Major:
Think of all the places in the world that didn’t have a lot of phone coverage not all that long ago because stringing all the copper would be far too expensive. Build a few cell towers and everyone has access to a phone. Much cheaper and easier that wiring a couple million homes. It’s nice having a car but not everyone wants to or can afford not only the initial cost, but the gas, maintenance, insurance…..
Now on the other hand this idea seems, with 5 minutes of thought to have a few issues. It’s in a vacuum? So why does the thing have to be streamlined? And it has wheels? What tires/wheels will last at 700 mph?
catclub
@Another Scott:
Rather than investing in better training and benefits for soldiers. You can get a great job at Defense Contractors after retirement from Government.
Not so much from a slightly better paid, better trained Sgt.
I approve of Democrats stalling any breaking of the Sequester. They know that if it is repealed, all the increases will go to Defense.
This is two Santas competition – why let the GOP be Santa while Trump is President so that Democrats will have to be Scrooge to balance the budget when a Democrat is President.
Major Major Major Major
@Ruckus: yep, solving a no-transit issue with hyperloop instead of buses (leaving aside the fact that the original article was incorrect) is the equivalent of solving rural/developing connectivity issues with house-to-house fiber optics.
Raoul
@randy khan: One of the key differences between busses and the other options: Relative permanence (relative, in that cities across this nation were subjected to mass brainwashing/mega-marketing in the 50s to abandon streetcars, ugh).
Developers will do nice clusters of density housing, rental/condo/townhouse etc and related food/services/retail within 1/4 to 1/2 a mile of an LRT or Hyperloop stop. Bus stops do nothing for spurring higher densities and compact urban cores. People ride busses because they have to. They ride LRT because it works well.
eta: @SatanicPanic Busses work for some roles and some densities. They are not uniformly ‘best.’ And we can pooh-pooh all the snobs who won’t ride busses. But that shaming won’t get them to ride them, will it? That said, lots of suburbanites ride greyhound-style busses from Minneapolis’ far flung suburbs to downtown office jobs. Because the service is cushy, has wifi, and (fewer) POC on board. That last is shameful, but sadly kinda real.
FlipYrWhig
@Corner Stone: I like the way Snrub thinks!
TKinNC
@TaMara (HFG): Drake feathers and a “thin” voice identify the males. Male voice can be heard here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CnWG-cBOsA at about 55 seconds in. Females have a richer ‘honk’-y voice.
(Although, I did have one drake that talked like a girl many years ago.)
Your ducks are old enough that there would be daily head bobbing and duck sex in the kiddie pond if one were male.
Actually one of my young hens sometimes plays the male role – minus the pink dangly thing – we don’t judge.
catclub
@Betty:
about the same level of concussions when an airplane lands.
Another Scott
@Ruckus: There are also things like ball bearings and other mechanical joints to consider. Ball bearings like lubrication. Lubrication and vacuum don’t mix too well – especially at 700 mph under high stresses…
These are solvable problems, but they are problems that have to be addressed, and they won’t be cheap to overcome.
Lunar Rover:
The measured top speed on the moon was 11.2 MPH.
Cheers,
Scott.
Jack the Second
The Hyperloop is a billionaire’s transportation system. It gets a small number of people between two points very fast.
If you can muster the political and financial capital to build a Hyperloop, you could build a conventional (or if you want to go wild, electric) high-speed train that carries a lot more people at a respectable 200+ MPH along the same route. The three biggest reasons most US trains aren’t high speed is that they can’t go straight because they don’t have the right-of-way to build straight trains, they are ground level and have to slow down when they might be interacting with people and cars, and they stop frequently to pick up passengers. The Hyperloop is already assuming that you can get right-of-way to build a super-straight track and is already elevated. If you’re willing to do that, you can do the same thing with a conventional train and at least go a multiple of how fast you drive, even if you can’t do super-sonic.
SatanicPanic
@Raoul: Subways and light rail are useful in some circumstances, but for the cost and the ability to alter routes based on where people are, I can’t think of a better thing than buses.
rikyrah
No one told Trump his Susan Rice smear has already unraveled
09/15/17 09:20 AM
By Steve Benen
It started, oddly enough, with Donald Trump accusing Barack Obama of illegally tapping his phones ahead of the election. In time, the Republican president’s attack inexplicably shifted into an attack on former National Security Advisor Susan Rice for “unmasking” Trump associates caught up in a surveillance operation.
Trump told the New York Times in April, “I think the Susan Rice thing is a massive story. I think it’s a massive, massive story…. Yeah, it’s a bigger story than you know…. I think that it’s going to be the biggest story.”
It did not become the biggest story. In fact, it quickly became clear that the badly confused president had no idea what he was saying. And yet, there was Trump yesterday aboard Air Force One, once again telling journalists about the imagined controversy surrounding Susan Rice.
Either no one at the White House has explained the basics of this story to Trump, or the president’s aides did explain it and he didn’t understand. Either way, let’s do him a favor and set the record straight.
As Rachel explained on Wednesday’s show, a very senior member of the Emirati royal family, the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates, came to the United States in December in secret – which was a very odd break with diplomatic protocol. He didn’t notify the State Department or the White House, which in turn raised concerns among U.S. officials who were curious why.
And so, the U.S. intelligence community took note when Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahya traveled specifically to New York City and went to a meeting in Trump Tower. More specifically, the Emirati crown prince, without coordination with the State Department, decided to have a chat with Mike Flynn, Steve Bannon, and Jared Kushner during the presidential transition process.
Back in D.C., White House National Security Advisor Susan Rice received an intelligence intercept trying to figure out what the Emirati crown prince was doing in the United States as part of a visit that he explicitly did not declare with the U.S. government. And so, Rice unmasked the names so the administration would know with whom the crown prince was visiting.
Taiko
@Barbara: Thank you! For dog’s sake, WTF has happened when self-identified “progressives” trash a guy who is a true believer in trying to save the planet, and has put it all on the line to do so? And he’s succeeding as every other major carmaker is now scrambling to come up with an electric “Tesla-killer” model. Christ.
Raoul
@Another Scott:
I sort of think of the difference between flying NYC-London in the DC-6 piston-powered propliner (Pan Am had a special version that could just make it eastbound nonstop, west via Gander) and me now nonchalantly flying MSP-LHR on a 767 or A330.
It was wildly expensive in terms of purchasing power of the average person’s salary back then. It was noisy and slow. And planes crashed because systems were more vulnerable to failure. Now days, it’s cheap and people nearly never worry (or at least don’t have reason to worry) if the hull will depressurize. Or that both jets on a longhaul twin will quit mid-flight (or even ‘pause briefly’).
But we wouldn’t have literally several hundred widebodies per night shuttling to Europe now if some intrepid travelers and risk-taking businesses didn’t start DC-6 and Constellation service transatlantic just 60-some years ago. And if you’d shown a Boeing 787 to someone a bit further back in time, maybe 1930, and said millions of people would fly across the entire Pacific in them 80 years later, nonstop and often many hundreds of miles from any airports, they’d have thought we were nuts!
Corner Stone
I found the source article for the no bus Columbus factoid and this is what it actually states.
“Columbus is the second largest city in the U.S. without a extensive train or bus system connecting it to other cities, a new study finds.”
Which, in context makes a little more sense than no intercity bus system. It still boggles my mind to consider it is so thinly developed but I guess they gots their reasons.
joel hanes
@chopper:
the ring came off my pudding can!
The House of Lords, 6 May 2003
scroll down about halfway to Food Containers: Safety
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200203/ldhansrd/vo030506/text/30506-02.htm
Raoul
@germy: Yeah, I don’t offer Dubai as anything positive in terms of city design, sustainable living, or political nirvana. Never been, don’t plan to go, ‘hard pass’ as the kids say these days.
Mnemosyne
@SatanicPanic:
I like light rail because it doesn’t have to stop for stoplights and doesn’t get stuck in traffic.
If you have large numbers of people trying to get longer distances (15+ miles) in one go, it’s better to take them on light rail and then have buses to take them to their final destination.
When I was working 25 miles from home, I would have loved to take transit, but it would have required me to change buses twice and taken about 3 hours each way. So I bit the bullet and drove instead.
Ruckus
@Dave:
But bringing up those “insignificant” problems that plague a lot of cities and people is not a bad way of calling attention that making hyper leaps in technology rarely answers real problems that affect large masses in an effort to look kool to the rich folk and getting your name on a plaque somewhere while living large on investor money.
Seven hundred miles per hour is a grand idea but how about we use current technology to go 200 miles per hour over long distances. Maybe let’s see if we can follow through well enough at that speed to keep it safe and reliable before we jump off into the very unknown. Look at maglev trains. We’ve been promised them for years, there is one running carrying paying passengers. Is it worth the energy costs to go to that step? Is it worth the risk and cost to go 700 miles an hour? The Concorde was a very costly pipe dream, to go just a bit faster than what most of us have done for a few decades. And that cost, I’d bet, a lot less than trying to make an entire system that can work. We had airports and jet ways, tickets and maintenance hangers already, they didn’t have to be built.
Major Major Major Major
@Raoul: flights across the Atlantic didn’t exactly require spending billions of dollars bolting pylons to the mountains.
Another Scott
@Raoul: Good points, but remember that we have jet aircraft because of piggy-backing on an investment during a war for national survival. 707 development was (to a large extent) funded by the DoD. It wasn’t a huge technological leap to go from making bombers with a range of thousands of miles to passenger jets. Airports existed, airlines had experience moving tens or hundreds of thousands of people a year.
The Hyperloop is a different beasty. Where’s the DoD driver? There isn’t one. It’s a revolutionary approach and lots and lots of pieces have to fall into place (routes, technology, safety, financing, etc.) for it to have a chance to be a real transportation system.
It’s hard for me to believe that 200 years from now we’re still going to have people driving around in gas powered Red Barchettas, but it’s hard for me to believe that a Hyperloop is going to be around, either. We’ll see – or someone will, anyway!
Cheers,
Scott.
Mnemosyne
@SatanicPanic:
I need to get from downtown Burbank CA to downtown Los Angeles for jury duty at the federal courthouse on Hill. What should I take for the majority of the journey, the train or the bus? Metro.net will give you a trip builder.
Mike J
@Raoul:
The first flights weren’t transatlantic. ORville and Wilbur went less than the length of a 747.
Let’s see them actually build something that works that can then be improved on. They won’t have any idea what the problems will be until they’ve actually tried it, and hundreds of miles of track is a very expensive way to do R&D.
Raoul
@SatanicPanic: Just an example, of course, but, we here in downtown-adjacent Minneapolis have had a construction season from hell (three more summers to come!) while our freakin’ freeway system gets enlarged (all hail the mighty automobile!).
As a result of the diversions, one of the major arterial streets in our city, which happens to be two blocks from my condo, is a snarled, hideous mess. For months at a time. And has several key bus routes on it. Timely travel by bus is f’ked. For months this and the next three summers (summer meaning 6 month construction season, in this case, not hot weather).
Busses are fine as collectors, and for low to mid-density transit. They suck in core and dense areas.
randy khan
@Ruckus:
As I said above, I don’t know if this will happen. Still, the difference between the Concorde and a regular transatlantic flight was not as significant as it might appear – about 4 hours for Paris to D.C. versus 8 hours for a conventional flight, and the cost was well over twice as much as a conventional flight. The Hyperloop is talking about less than half an hour from New York to D.C. versus about 3 hours for the Acela today, with much more frequent departures. That’s less time than it takes me to get to work in the morning.
Major Major Major Major
@Raoul: Busses can be valuable everywhere as a supplement, since without them, people who have to get somewhere will use something even worse like personal automobiles.
Ruckus
@Raoul:
Have you ridden a modern bus recently? Or taken a light rail trip for transportation for weeks on end? I have. 27 miles in each direction. It is faster than driving a car in LA most of the time. Except for bus schedules. A lot of buses run on different schedules than the light rail here and so you sometimes have to wait a while for the last 2 or 3 miles. That’s not a failure of the vehicle, but of the system to accommodate the ridership. Once in months did we have an unruly passenger. And the bus drive called the cops. The moron got off the bus before they got there but most of the people on the bus were ready to throw him out the door anyway. One person out of thousands. I see more morons in cars than that every day.
Matt McIrvin
I think doing R&D on this is fine; presenting it as an alternative to existing rail technologies for building today is ridiculously premature. And it doesn’t solve a lot of the problems of existing high-speed rail.
Mnemosyne
@Raoul:
This. You use trains/light rail on the routes with the heaviest traffic and then use buses to move people around between and through areas of less traffic.
One of the best commutes I ever had was when I took the Big Blue Bus from my apartment in Mar Vista (near Santa Monica) to my office in Westwood. It took about the same amount of time as driving, my employer at the time subsidized it, and it was super convenient since it picked me up half a block from m apartment and dropped me off half a block from my office. I almost forgot how to drive while I was doing that.
Raoul
@Major Major Major Major: All told, I’m sure we’ve spent 100s of billions of dollars on airports alone.
Hmm, what’s this, oh a news item that says “a $14 billion Capital Improvement Program at Los. Angeles International Airport (LAX), projected to last through 2023”. That after spending $4 Bn on the 2011 improvements.
That is just one int’l gateway airport.
Matt McIrvin
…to use the airplane analogy above, it took decades to get to the modern jetliner, and we got there, but you wouldn’t sell people on the Ford tri-motor by claiming you could give them a Boeing 767.
Mnemosyne
@Major Major Major Major:
@Ruckus:
I don’t think that Raoul is dissing buses. He’s just saying that they’re not the best solution in every situation, which is what Satanic Panic was claiming. Ruckus’s trip to the VA would have been WAY more of a hassle if buses had been the only option from Pasadena.
Gin & Tonic
@randy khan: Good luck getting right of way to build a NYC-DC Hyperloop.
Raoul
@Ruckus & @Major Major Major Major:
No arguments from me. As I said above, busses are good as collectors and on less dense routes. Connect them to LRT, subway (or even dedicated BRT lines) and systems that are networked and developed will provide good, reliable service that people will want.
Alas I don’t ride transit all that much in Minneapolis, but I don’t drive all that much either. Benefit of living one mile from downtown amenities like the YWCA, Orchestra Hall, great restaurants, and I’m 0.6 miles from my main grocery, etc.
I really am a transit advocate. I’ve lived in NYC, London, but also Houston and Ft. Worth in addition to Minneapolis (ie, with and without good transit. MSP is workin’ on it!). Transit, in a mix of modes, is vital to strong and interesting and diverse cities.
Major Major Major Major
@Raoul: Yes, for a giant airport that moves (*googles*) 220,000 people a day, that’s worth it.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Major Major Major Major:
Nah, I like ’em. I just have apocalyptic fantasies…
Mnemosyne
@Raoul:
The small airport in Burbank is very European — it has heavy rail within a quarter mile that does both commuter trains and Amtrak, plus it’s on a couple of bus routes. They have their shit WAY more together than LAX, where you have to exit the train and get onto a separate bus that takes you the last few miles to the airport.
Major Major Major Major
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: I hear that.
Mnemosyne
@Raoul:
Minneapolis is apparently the most bike-friendly city in the US as well — they beat out Portland (OR) a couple of years ago.
I just got buzzed by a hummingbird, so that probably means I need to get back to work on my novel. I check out of my writing retreat today. Sigh. ?
Raoul
@Matt McIrvin: My thought is, you wouldn’t sell passengers on the value of the Ford tri-motor by claiming you could give them a Boeing 767 someday. But visionaries like Juan Trippe at Pan Am saw the future of mass passenger travel and took risks as a business leader. Maybe the loop is much more hype than anything else. I’m glad that people are looking at future options beyond cars and airplanes, and considering taking some business risks (and asking for tax dollars, too. That’s what is real about HSR, etc, too. Or the billions poured into LAX, etc).
Major Major Major Major
@Raoul: I’m taking issue with spending billions of public dollars bolting pylons to the mountains for unproven technology, not rich people taking risks.
Barbara
@Raoul: Bus ways and dedicate bus lanes make buses nearly as convenient as light rail. This is what they do in Paris and many other cities. And it’s easy to add more buses if you need them. I think underground metro is the best because it is out of sight and doesn’t bump up against traffic, but even cities with metro have bus routes.
PIGL
@Major Major Major Major: I agree about the proven tech. This hyper-loop hype smells to me like the “Thorium Power will Save THE WORLDZ” fanatics, who argue that therefore no investment into any other alternative to fossil fuels is conceivable, so environmentalists are the real terrorists. And who turn out to be funded by the Koch’s.
Ruckus
@randy khan:
How about we solve a few of the problems we already have rather than make it more convenient for a few. What do you do to get to and from your abode to the not so mass transit place? What do you do to get to and from the not so mass transit place to work? Those problems already exist, let’s solve them. It’s like our healthcare system. Do we scrap what we have to go to single payer? It isn’t practical in the least to do in one step. That’s why the old man who shouted it from the roof tops (and still does) had no plan to implement it, there isn’t one. There are lives and jobs and yes profits at stake. We could live without the profits part but the people with power in the current system would and are fighting back. And you would too.
Pie in the sky, we can do anything projects always take at least 10 times longer than projected and usually around 50 times, the more current technology gets pushed the costs go up exponentially along with the time. Yes massive force can be applied but at what cost to other projects that could make life better for a lot more people, all in the name of satisfying a few people with money? And what do you do when you spend that money and fail? Now you don’t have anything but a huge bill to pay.
Life happens in steps, one after the other. Even major breakthroughs, like measles vaccines were steps. You don’t go from leaches to open heart surgery in one step. The world and people don’t work that way.
Right now at work we are reverse engineering a piece of tooling for an airplane part. The drawings we have are 45 yrs old, as are the pieces we have. No one who worked/designed the original tooling is available, and yet we can’t just start over. The part and it’s method of manufacture has been approved, we have to work within those limits so that replacements can be made. Would it be better and easier to start over? For us, yes. For the system, no. We are analogous to the people using this new, untested system to get to work, it would be faster, and most likely better but the cost would actually be more to put that part on a plane, as every step of the process has to be approved, to ensure safety and reliability. You take out the steps and sure it’s cheaper, but it is also quite possibly more dangerous and can cost lives. You have to respect the process and the goals. In this case making your commute a lot faster, at a huge cost to a lot of people isn’t a good use of available money and time.
cope
Addendum: I failed to take the third dimension, up and down, into account. Increases or decreases in the elevation of the tube would also need to happen along vertical curves of at least the same radius as right-left changes in direction. The upshot is that to accommodate the inescapable laws of physics, any practical hyperloop tube would have to be very straight and very level as well.
Major Major Major Major
@cope: Well then it’s a good thing the route from Denver to Vail is pretty flat.
Another Scott
@cope: Presumably they’d just slow down at curves (there’s no way they can make every curve have an 18 mile (or whatever) radius). But then that drops the average speed and shortens the time to reach the top speed (and thus increases the necessary acceleration). Every real-world issue makes the project more expensive and more difficult to justify.
As expected.
After all, if it were easy it would have been done already.
Maybe putting it off-shore, under water, would make more sense. Seattle to San Diego in 2 hours, woo-hoo! No right-of-way costs either!!!1
:-/
Cheers,
Scott.
Ruckus
@Matt McIrvin:
That’s a very good analogy. We knew how to fly, we didn’t know how to build planes like the (I’m up dating your example) 777 or AB 380. The entire system of building those planes from design all the way through to them flying was beyond the concept of the 1930s. Look at the B52, it first flew in 1952 but you have to look at what happened between the Tri Motor and then to see where things could go. And the B52 is way, way out dated but still useful and used. It took all the experience to build airplanes that are big, a lot quieter, a lot cheaper to run per passenger mile, a lot more comfortable…… And yet we still look for that one answer to all the questions, for example the F35. There is no one answer for all the questions. There just aren’t boxes big enough and complex enough to put everything into one.
Ruckus
@Barbara:
Dedicated bus lanes? Socialist!
We actually have those in the San Fernando valley in LA. Far cheaper to get from blank slate to running than a light rail and the buses can peel off the dedicated line to get to an end point. They, like the meto light rail run standing room only during the not so rush hours. Part of that 27 mile route I mentioned above ran alongside the 10 freeway and during not so rush hours we would make far better time than the cars. I’ve driven the same route at the same time of day and the train/bus system was faster than a car, end to end. Every day a car was 2 hrs and the train/bus was 1 hr 30 to 1 hr 45. Plus it was cheaper than the gas. Of course I had to stand most days for the entire ride.
Bess
@Betty:
What happened when the Concorde landed? It flew at a faster speed.
randy khan
@Ruckus:
First, of course the Hyperloop is not a solution for local transit. Neither is high speed rail.
Second, I’m not sure what makes people think the Hyperloop is just “for a few.” The Acela had 3.5 million passengers in 2016 (probably split about evenly between the NY-DC and NY-BOS parts of the route, although Amtrak doesn’t say), and Amtrak’s less-speedy trains had more that 14 million passengers along the Northeast corridor (again, split among various routes, but the vast majority in the BOS-NY-WAS chunk). There are another million to two million passengers taking planes between New York and either Washington or Boston. That’s a pretty big market. Ac the company has conceived it, Hyperloop pods would leave very, very frequently, much more frequently than trains or planes, so there should be plenty of capacity.
You could do a similar calculation along a lot of other routes, too; it just happens that the northeast figures are easily available.
Bess
@nonynony:
You want moronic? Try extracting fossil fuel from beneath the Earth’s surface and burning it in order to use the energy contained. While understanding that the CO2 released from that burned fossil fuel is totally screwing up our climate. (Are we going to enjoy more 4+ foot rainstorms like Houston experienced?)
The Hyperloop:
1) Runs on electricity which means that it can run on 100% renewable electricity and add no CO2 to our atmosphere.
2) Should travel at a greater speed than commercial jet which makes it much more competitive with air travel than high speed rail. About four hours coast to coast US rather than 20 hours on HSR.
3) Should be cheaper per mile than flying. Should offer a more comfortable ride than flying (no turbulence).
The Hyperloop, if it works, offers us a very acceptable to quit a very large portion of our flying and would prevent a lot of greenhouse gas from being added to our problem.
Our best hope to quit fossil fuels is to find acceptable alternatives which cost no more. People will not object to switching technologies if they 1) are not inconvenienced and 2) the switch does not cost them money.
The Hyperloop is likely to be more convenient (leaving from city centers rather than an airport out of town) and cost less to use. If that turns out to be true then people will pick the technology which minimized GHG emissions.
Just like wind and solar electricity generation (same movement of electrons at a lower price) and electric vehicles (lower purchase price when built in large volumes and much cheaper to operate) the Hyperloop could help solve our carbon fuel problem.
Let rich people pay for the first installation. They paid for the Tesla S and X which has created the conditions necessary for Tesla to bring out the much more affordable Model 3. Rich people often pay for new technology, creating the beginnings of economies of scale which make those technologies affordable for the rest of us. Cell phones, flat screen TVs, the list is long.
Bess
@Ruckus:
The plane ticket for my first trip to india (1982) cost $1,200. That’s $3,025 in 2016 dollars. You can fly today for a bit over $900.
And we had to make multiple fueling stops. Now long distance flights like that generally require only a landing at an airline hub for redistribution of passengers.
Bess
@Gin & Tonic:
Underground. The Boring Company is already working on it. Standard tunnel boring speed is 60 feet per day (average). Musk says that Boring can operate at 14x standard. Most of the speed gain would come from much smaller diameter tunnels and operating the drilling machines 24 hours a day.
NYC to Washington DC is 200 miles – straight line. 200 miles = 1,056,000 feet.
60 feet per day = 17,600 days.
600 feet per day (10x improvement, perhaps Musk can’t achieve 14x) = 1,760 days
Ten boring machines = 176 days.
Open six entry holes. Insert one machine at each end of the tunnel and two in all other openings (one headed north and one south). Half a year and the tunnel is dug. Machines extracted and hauled to next project.
Bess
@Raoul:
But you could sell tickets on the Ford Tri-motor because it got people where they were going faster than by train or ship.
Percysowner
@Major Major Major Major:
and
@Corner Stone: We have a municipal/regional bus system. Per Wikipedia
Basically we can’t take a bus to any other city, just Columbus. There was a bus service that went from Cleveland to Columbus, but it folded. You either fly out of Columbus or you have to drive.
Bess
@cope:
Did you calculate in banking, slowing for any necessary extreme turns, and tunneling?
To take the ‘loop through the Sierras it might have to slow to 200 MPH or even less. It’s 86 miles from Placerville, CA to Carson City, NV. Or it might use a 83 mile tunnel and cross under the mountains at 700 MPH.
The ‘loop idea already includes banked turns. (“Return to your seats, please. We will be entering a banked turn in five minutes.”)
And the Boring Company is now working on greatly speeding up the time it takes to drill a tunnel and greatly lowering the cost.
Miss Bianca
@Cheryl Rofer: awww, tuxedo kitty!
Another Scott
@Bess: On your #3, I don’t see how you can say it would be cheaper than flying.
The longest Shinkhansen line in Japan is 714 km (443 miles), costs 17,350 yen $156 (including the express charge). It’s operating speed is 200 mph. I don’t see a quick listing of the minimum time the trip takes.
DC to Columbus is similar (419 miles) and similar prices (“as low as $161” right now according to Google).
There’s no way that a Hyperloop can be cheaper. 400+ miles of straight-ish right of way connecting major cities would cost a fortune.
A 47 page NTSB report from 2016 says that Musk claims the operating costs would be as low as $20/person between LA and SF. Sure, maybe. But the maximum capacity is 3,650 people per hour (compared to 12,000 per hour for high-speed rail) – or an estimated $300M/yr for paying customer revenue (assuming operation around the clock). California HSR estimated their costs at $65M/mile including land acquisition costs but excluding the costs of the trains themselves. The Hyperloop Alpha proposal doesn’t go into SF or LA, and the cost to actually do so would quickly balloon beyond the extremely optimistic initial estimates.
There’s no way a Hyperloop can be cheaper than a Shinkhansen. A Shinkhansen is just barely cheaper than flying (as you would expect – it’s slower and takes more time, but they want to grab every yen they can to minimize losses.). A Shinkansen doesn’t need extremely straight runs (it goes 200 mph not 700 mph), doesn’t run in a tunnel, doesn’t require vacuum, and doesn’t require nearly a thousand pods (one every 2 minutes) to reach its capacity goals.
Yeah, let’s see if it works in the real world on a test track, figure out the technology and materials required, but lets not get carried away with the hype just yet.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ruckus
@Bess:
How much electricity do you think it takes to run this? You don’t know? Neither does anyone else but it will take a lot. Speed is not cheap. We haven’t yet gotten to a reasonable portion of our electrical costs from renewables.
Yes the cost of air travel has come down substantially but that is due to flying/engine efficiency and bigger planes being more cost effective per passenger mile. I’m not against trying to improve ourselves but we have a tendency to think big picture and forget all the small stuff. The small stuff is what we interact with every day. Take that airplane trip. I used to drive up to the airport, park 100 yards or less from the terminal, walk in and using my pass printed at home walk right up to the gate/plane. Less than 1/2 hr. Now I have to get to the airport a minimum of 1 1/2 hr before departure, to get through security in a timely manner. So the plane is faster, my trip takes longer, and I can not take as much luggage or eat, unless I want to pay a lot more. So how much cheaper is it really? And my wages haven’t kept up so that ticket/trip is still a bigger piece of the paycheck pie. And so it goes, on and on. Now things getting more expensive has been going on for ever so that isn’t really fair because you can see that travel for example is better in some ways, but if I can’t afford the technology what difference does it make if it’s fair or not? And it isn’t like I don’t have a job and decent job skills, but we are spending money to make life better for those who can afford it, and doing shit for those who are considered disposable. And that’s bullshit. We are living in a bad time of rich oligarchy, as humans have done before and it has never ended well. We have a lot bigger problems than how to make travel between cities a lot faster by spending a shit ton of money we are told we don’t have.
Another Scott
@Bess: There’s a recent example in the DC area that shows that tunnels are problematic. People in Tyson’s Corner wanted the new Metro Silver Line (which is heading out to Dulles) to be underground. The cost (and the politics) was prohibitive to bury it.
WaPo:
Metro trains go maybe 75 mph at most? Only part of the Metro in Tyson’s would have been underground – maybe 5-10 miles? And even that – the cost and the politics – was enough to nearly kill the project.
Musk waves his hands around far too much on the practical issues in putting 700 mph trains underground, or in overhead tubes. The NTSB report above says that 3 meter tunnels would be too small, also too, and once you scale up the tubes you dramatically scale up the costs. (And the government would be involved in helping to pay for a project of this size – it always is.)
Everyone expects price over-runs on big projects, especially big projects based on new technologies. But waving one’s hands around (the way Musk does) to ignore things like land costs doesn’t make the project less expensive…
Cheers,
Scott.
Bess
The Hyperloop requires a pedestal footing every 100 meters or so. HSR requires a wide, continuous road bed as well as a fenced off safety corridor. If the ‘loop had to purchase land the cost would be only a small fraction of what a HSR track would cost.
The Hyperloop ‘flies’ over streams and road intersections (14′ min. height) whereas HSR needs bridges and elevated crossovers.
The Hyperloop could be built in places on land already used for interstate highways.
Obviously we have to wait to see if the idea works. If it does then we can develop some realistic costs. But let’s remember to calculate in the cost of climate change.
People will not take HSR long distances at 200 or even 350 MPH if they can fly at 600 MPH for about the same cost. If the Hyperloop costs the same per mile as flying I suspect people will willingly switch due to somewhat faster speed, more convenient stations, and a smoother ride.
BTW, time between pods can be as little as 30 seconds. When passenger demand may not fill that many pods the system could launch freight pods, taking large trucks off our roads.
Please distinguish between hype and recognizing potential.
Ruckus
@randy khan:
Except that more capacity is added by more “cars.” Each one of which costs what? Any vehicle that travels a that speed is going to need a lot of maintenance because the laws of physics will still apply. How much time does it take to board that small vehicle? More small vehicles take a lot more infrastructure to handle and load/unload. A train takes a lot of people in a short time because there are many doors.
Who will make sure you are strapped in properly so that an accident will not be automatically terminal? How long will that take? Will there have to be a queue of loaded vehicles at either end? What will that do for your trip speed? All of these and many, many other questions will have to be answered before the cost and speed start to look like an advantage for more than a few people. And as you said these aren’t systems for getting to and from the terminal. What does that do for your trip speed?
I just don’t see the need for the concept, when we have many other huge problems to solve in our lives than how to travel at a slightly higher speed that an airplane by building huge amounts of new infrastructure. And don’t get me wrong Tesla’s are very nice cars, but bloody expensive by anyone’s standard. Even the cheap models that are coming out are much more expensive than most people can afford. So you are thinking that this will be cheap one day, how?
Bess
@Another Scott:
Huge difference between drilling a 28′ diameter tunnel for a train and a 14′ diameter tunnel.
At least three (possibly a lot more) companies and countries are in the process of building Hyperloop systems. Musk/the Boring Company is starting to figure out ways to drill tunnels for less money. Let’s see how all this works out before we declare failure.
Even if the ‘loop cost the same per mile as passenger jet travel it would be an immense savings over pumping more fossil fuel into our atmosphere.
Gin & Tonic
@Bess: Elon? Is that you?
Bess
@Ruckus:
Damn little.
You’re moving an object (the pod) through an area with very low air resistance. The reason that we get much, much poorer gas mileage at higher speeds is due to the effort of shoving air out of our way. We fly airplanes at miles above the Earth’s surface in order to get into “thinner” air and go longer distances with the fuel they carry.
And the pod is not making contact with any surface so there is no friction loss.
Part of Musk’s design, his original white paper, is to put solar panels over the tube. They should generate more than enough power to run the ‘loop 24/365. And they would shade the tube from excessive heating.
The ‘loop terminals can be ‘downtown’ or wherever it’s most convenient for the largest number of people. We could feed to the major terminals with express high speed subways (150+ MPH) from surrounding areas (think Santa Anna to the downtown LA terminal).
Minimize the number of ‘loop routes with a hub and spoke system (LA to Houston – 2 hours) and Houston to several eastern locations (NYC, Chicago, Miami – 2 hours).
Climate change will kick all of our asses. From the person who owns essentially nothing and is living on the street in the poorest city of the world through the 0.001% wealthiest.
Concentrate on getting our use of fossil fuels reduced to about zero as rapidly as we can.
Another Scott
@Bess: There are very few places where interstate highways are ramrod straight, and places where they are are generally in the middle of nowhere. But even those spots have overpasses and the like crossing the median. There are also issues like these (from the DOT report):
I’m all for new transportation options. After 9/11 it should have been clear that our air transportation system is too vulnerable (and will become more vulnerable as the climate changes), and we need a greatly expanded rail and bus infrastructure. Maybe something like a Hyperloop can play a role in certain places, too. But the “potential” is being pushed the same way that “nuclear power will be too cheap to meter” and “the Space Shuttle will be dramatically cheaper than disposable rockets and we’ll launch as many as 50 missions a year” and so forth. It can’t live up to all this hype (and 30 seconds between pods is hype, IMHO).
We’ll see.
Cheers,
Scott.
Bess
@Ruckus:
Why? The pod will be moving through an area of very low air resistance and not making contact with any surface. There’s little vibration/friction wear. No internal combustion engines or turbines being subjected to high heat.
Imagine a pod that holds 28 people. Seven rows of four across seating (regional jet spacing).
An elevator takes the 28 passengers down to the pod platform. A pod pulls in and 28 people walk out two doors and to their right. As soon as they are off the waiting 28 people file in and sit down. If that’s too slow then add another door. Open up the whole side of the pod and have let all seven rows fill at the same time. And don’t have people sticking stuff in overhead bins.
As those 28 are boarding another elevator load is unloading the next 28.
A single tube can be supplied by multiple platforms. Several pods can be loading/unloading at the same time.
Sensor in seat detects butt. Sensor in seat belt detects belt not fastened. Failure to comply could mean a temporary or permanent loss of ability to ride the ‘loop. Early on one seat might be taken up by a ‘conductor’ until all the passenger problems are worked.
Read, watch a movie, talk to someone, nap, get some work done. What do you do now when you fly somewhere?
Many airports are not located where they are convenient for most people. The new Quito airport is a 30 minute ride from downtown. The new Bangkok airport is even worse. Hyperloop terminals can be downtown. Currently underground terminals are being built in SF and LA for high speed rail.
We need to greatly improve our ‘getting downtown’ speeds. An express subway system could do that. By putting ‘loop stations in city centers we would solve two problems at once.
The problem is fossil fuel consumption. If batteries improve from where they are now, ~250 watts/kg, to about 400 watts/kg then we can start flying with electricity rather than kerosene.
The Tesla 3 will sell for about $2k more than a Series 3 BMW and about $3.5k less than a C-Class Mercedes. And about $4k more than the average price of a new car in the US.
Not cheap, but cheap for a high performance entry level luxury car. And the Model 3 is the next stepping stone along the route to EVs becoming cheaper to manufacture and purchase than ICEVs. (Tesla may already be at manufacturing cost parity.)
I’m making zero predictions about the cost of the Hyperloop. I recognize that Musk has gotten a tremendous number of things right over the years so I have a tendency to weigh his opinions a bit more than those of most other people. I’m waiting to see a section of Hyperloop running at >500 miles per hour and then it will be time to sharpen the cost estimation pencils.
Another Scott
@Bess: Air friction in transportation is a thing, but vacuum pumps take a lot of power, and there is going to be friction in the system (unless it’s a maglev, which I haven’t seen any claims that it would be – wheels touching something at 700 mph have friction).
I see that SwissMetro is proposing an underground maglev train system with evacuated tunnels. 500 kph max speed. This looks like a slightly more realistic system (though there are still big challenges) – shorter distances (~ 100 km vs 500 miles), more train-like, etc.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Brian
The hyperloop should be called the vomit comet and doesn’t make a lot of sense – good criticism here: http://www.cahsrblog.com/2013/08/criticism-mounts-of-the-hyperloop/ and https://pedestrianobservations.com/2013/08/13/loopy-ideas-are-fine-if-youre-an-entrepreneur/
Bess
@Gin & Tonic:
No. But I wish I could play in Elon’s league.
I’m just someone who became very concerned about climate change about 20 years ago and realized that we needed new technologies to replace fossil fuel.
At the time the most usable were nuclear energy and hydrogen powered fuel cell vehicles. Wind turbines, solar panels and batteries for EVs were far too expensive to be in the running.
I realized that nuclear would increase the cost of electricity and bring the problems of more radioactive waste and a likely higher probability of nuclear meltdowns. And that it would cost a lot more per mile to drive a FCEV on clean hydrogen. And that meant a lot of public resistance to move away from oil and coal. Most likely we would not change until we were really suffering from a much warmed planet.
Over the years I’ve watched the cost of wind-electricity drop from $0.39/kWh to under $0.03/kWh and solar panels drop from $100/watt to less than $0.40/watt. EV batteries have dropped from $1,000/kWh to just over $100/kWh. I think there is little doubt that we are going to be replace fossil fuel use for electricity and ground transport with renewable energy.
The remaining unsolved problems are flight and ocean transport.
The Hyperloop could eliminate over 90% of our air travel. Worst case we’d ‘loop to Alaska and take a short hop flight to eastern Asia and then get back into a tube.
Ocean freight. No good solutions. With rising labor costs in the developing world and increased automation we could move a lot of manufacturing to “on continent” and use electrified rail/trucking from there to market. Move only raw/processed materials. Decrease ship speed which would cut fuel use. Use biofuels as much as possible.
I’m looking for solutions. And trying to spread the word when I think I’ve spotted something. We all need to be pushing things that work so that they are implemented as rapidly as possible.
We’ve got to cut fossil fuel use rapidly.
Bess
@Brian:
Yes, if one pod somehow suddenly stops (cow on the tracks) the pod immediately behind it might crash into it. But remember, the odds of a pod crashing will approach zero. There’s nothing to hit, the only thing would be if an airplane flew into the tube or something.
Remember, it these days of connectivity if a single pod deviates from its expected speed all other pods in the system will know ‘immediately’. Between sensors in pods and sensors embedded in the tube there should be a very large amount of information and a lot of redundancy.
Acceleration, stopping, turning – these are issues that have already been dealt with.
Vomit comet? Has that idiot never heard about the Concorde?
The Concorde accelerated from 0 to 225 mph in 30 seconds with no discomfort to the passengers. At that rate the Hyperloop would reach its top speed in less than two minutes.
The Concorde cruised at 2140 km/h or 1334 mph.
Ruckus
@Another Scott:
Also what about getting in and out of the tube? Because you can’t load/unload humans in a vacuum. So there has to be a terminal and some sort of airlock system and that takes time to go from atmosphere to even a moderate vacuum. What about the strength of the car required to have air pressure inside while the entire car is in a vacuum? That’s weight and cost. What if the skin of the car cracks or leaks? How much extra air does the car carry or how is it supplied? Even if the idea is sound as a technology, what about the human interaction with it. Do you want to be in an entirely blacked out tube for say even a half hour? How many people have trouble with an MRI? That tube is what 4 ft long? Yeah I can see that I’m getting in a tube with a limited air supply, riding in a vacuum for a half hour with no escape route if that becomes necessary, hoping that every car is pressure tested sufficiently to withstand the concept and stays that way for it’s lifetime….. Sounds a lot like deep sea diving without any of the safety and operating concepts that have evolved to keep people alive with rigid adherence, but just boohooing any concept that there might be a high danger quotient involved, let alone the building and operating costs being outside the concept by several orders of magnitude.
Bess
@Ruckus:
Yes, some sort of airlock system. Think a railroad siding where the pod leaves the main tube and enters a siding tube. Pod stops and doors close it off from the main tube system. The small amount of space in front of, behind, and surrounding the tube would be equalized to outside atmospheric levels. Then the forward door would open allowing the pod to enter the platform section of the station. Pod unloads/loads and pulls forward into the exit airlock.
It’s not a complete vacuum. It’s a similar air pressure to flying in a passenger jet. Similar strength engineering without the need to deal with the forces of takeoff, landing and turbulence.
Cracks or leaks means that if the leak was severe the entire tube would need to shut down and air pressure inside the tube brought up to the level of the air pressure inside that pod. Then all pods would proceed a slow speed until the damaged pod reached the next station where it could be taken out of service. Think of …
“In case of emergency, oxygen masks will drop down in front of you. Please pull the mask down toward your face and place the mask over your mouth and nose. If you are traveling with a child, please attend to yourself first, then the child. Breathe normally, adjust the headband to suit yourself.”
A minor leak might mean oxygen masks and the pod pulling off at the next station.
I would imagine there might be some supply of oxygen aboard to replenish that used by passengers during the trip. Or air exchanges could be done with tube air.
Do I want to be in an entirely blacked out tube for say even a half hour? I commonly spend hours and hours in an entirely blacked out tube when I take long flights, 12 or more hours at a stretch. Many of us sit for hours watching movies in a darkened room.
We don’t know what the idea pod length might be. It looks like the width might be that of a regional jet which allows for four across seating and an aisle. It looks like there will be a toilet for those who might need to use one during a two hour trip. (Shorter than some movies.)
What’s the escape route when you’re flying?
You could read Musk’s white paper. It’s online. He covered a bunch of this stuff a long time ago.
Bess
@Another Scott:
The original plan was for the pod to ride on a cushion of air, like an air hockey puck except the air came from inside the pod. (Tube air sucked in and compressed, then blown out through jets.) The company that is building the first test track said that the air suspension didn’t work and moved to maglev. Now that Musk is getting involved in his own test track it’s going to be interesting to see if he can make air suspension work or will also move to all maglev.
Musk originally used maglev (linear motors) to accelerate the pod, then it coasted and used air pressure for a long distance before being re-accelerated by another linear motor section.
Either way, the pod runs on wheels only at low speeds (takeoff, landing, taxiing). It’s flying the rest of the time.
A maglev train would need a much larger tunnel and that would mean a lot more air to be evacuated. I don’t know why a maglev train running in an evacuated tunnel looks more realistic. Both are basically the same thing. One just needs a much wider tunnel. And a tube for a train would be one big puppy.
Musk’s idea is to use much smaller tubes/tunnels in order to lower cost. And to fire off pods at very short intervals.
Ruckus
@Bess:
I’m not interested because it’s a white paper. He’s spit balling. That’s nice but not often very productive if not done from a perspective of what is possible but from what is imaginable. And that’s the perspective here, imagine what we could do if we ignore the money necessary, the space necessary, the infrastructure necessary, the physics necessary. Spend billions upon billions and years of time to see if this might work, or if anyone would even get in it, when we have technology and solutions that work now and we can’t get those done.
Bess
Some people throw better spitballs than do others.
Musk has proven himself to be a very good spitballer.
We should know in a few months if the general idea works. It does on a quarter mile track (tube) but due to tube length the max speed is limited. Now the test track is being extended to a mile which will allow the next higher speed test.
We have exactly zero solutions to replace long distance flight with fossil fuels.
Bess
We have technologies to replace fossil fuel use for electricity and ground transportation and they are being implemented. Not as fast as needs to happen but the rates are accelerating and costs continue to drop which will almost certainly lead to faster implementation.
Another Scott
@Bess: Ok. I’m looking at Musk’s paper now.
Pressure = 100 Pa = 0.75 torr. That looks to be roughly the pressure at 150,000 feet in altitude on Earth, as he says, so that checks out. Pretty low pressure. Airplanes can’t “fly” that high, of course. So he had a compressor to supply an air cushion, but you say that that didn’t work out (I’m not surprised – a study in the 1960s found that air bearings can work at supersonic speeds, but the compressor required was too bulky and heavy for use on a rocket sled).
He does lots of back of the envelope calculations, but when he talks about the vacuum pumps he glosses over lots of things. Like the ideal gas law.
pV = nRT
Increasing the temperature of the gas (e.g. by compressing it either with a compressor or by ramming a pod through it at 700+ mph) means that the pressure goes up linearly. The pressure going up means the vacuum pumps have to work harder. The temperature going up means that there will be more “outgassing” of whatever is heated up – meaning the pressure goes up and the pumps have to work harder. These details matter – especially if you’re operating near the speed of sound.
Smaller tunnels are cheaper to build, but reduce emergency exit space, reduce the chance of using standard shipping containers for cargo, etc., etc.
TANSTAAFL.
The Swiss are pretty good at making tunnels in mountains for trains. ;-) I don’t know if that mockup is a boondoggle or not, but it seems less risky than trying to develop everything for a new supersonic transport system from scratch – lower speeds (500 kph = 311 mph), shorter distances, demonstrated technology (maglev, electric trains). The evacuated tunnels is new, and it’s the only major leap required in their proposal. There is the issue, of course, of being able to make money at it, but if they can make money with the Jungfraujoch, then it’s not impossible.
Maglevs have been shown to work. Hyperloops haven’t.
Elon’s proposed an interesting engineering exercise.
I’m worried about climate change too, and agree that doing everything we can to get off fossil fuels is a good idea. Things like replacing kerosene with biofuels is probably a better way to address airplane emissions in the near-term, though. Electric planes are making amazing progress, but without a huge breakthrough in batteries (or fuel cells) they’re not going to be useful for mass transportation.
Interesting discussion. Thanks. Have a good weekend.
Cheers,
Scott.
Bess
I have a sad when people come up with “can’t work” problems that are so easily solved that they shouldn’t have been seen as problems at all.
Emergency exits from the pod – fore and aft. One exits into a `14′ tunnel. Wait for a pod to come to you and haul you to the next station. Or walk to a tube exit door.
“Standard” shipping containers are standard for trains and ships. Pods might need a slightly different size pod. And that would matter how? They would still fit on the back of a truck for moving between factory/warehouse and pod station.
Could we produce enough biofuel for airplanes while also feeding 9 billion people. And with climate change bringing us more frequent/severe droughts, floods and heat waves. We’re already seeing very large crop/livestock loss and extreme weather is only getting started.
Maglevs have been proven to work. But are limited in speed by running into air. Put a maglev in a lower air pressure environment and you could run it at higher speeds. (That’s the Hyperloop.)
Make the tunnel/tube smaller and the cost of construction drop. (Hyperloop.)
Elon purposed an interesting idea.
Now what we are seeing is several companies starting to build test tracks. We’re seeing a large number of university engineering departments getting involved in pod design (including propulsion systems). We’re seeing countries starting to work on building a system like the one China and Russia are developing. All that taken together tells us that a heck of a lot of engineers have looked carefully at the idea and haven’t convinced the powers that be to abandon hope. Instead we’re seeing multiple projects underway.
You can find a few papers where the author “proves” that the Hyperloop can’t work but so far I haven’t seen anyone present a convincing argument. Mostly they are based on not understanding what is being purposed. Or setting unrealistic standards for the ‘loop which are not applied to planes or trains. The one about 30 seconds not being enough to stop a second pod from piling into a pod that runs into something. That’s two pods which means several times fewer people than are lost in a plane crash. And when the engine on a train runs into something there is zero chance of the cars stopping in time.
Bess
No, a third party said that they tried Elon’s idea and it didn’t work. Maybe it doesn’t. But let’s wait to see what Elon uses in his version. He wasn’t going to get involved in building the Hyperloop but he’s now getting involved. Perhaps he sees something that others don’t see.
Something other than rapid, low cost tunneling. But tunneling may be the key. You can go through mountains and underneath really expensive real estate.
We’re early in the proof of concept. There may be a fatal flaw discovered as speeds are ramped up. But we should wait to see before declaring failure.
We found straight enough routes and the land needed for the interstate system. If we want the Hyperloop as an alternative to flying we can find (much less) land for the Hyperloop. And we can probably tunnel through things that are harder to drive around.
Wiki –
“The Gotthard Base Tunnel (GBT; German: Gotthard-Basistunnel, Italian: Galleria di base del San Gottardo, Romansh: Tunnel da basa dal Son Gottard) is a railway tunnel through the Alps in Switzerland. It opened on 1 June 2016, and full service began on 11 December 2016.[5][6] With a route length of 57.09 km (35.5 mi),[4] it is the world’s longest and deepest traffic tunnel[7][8][9] and the first flat, low-level route through the Alps.”
“Diameter of each of the single-track tubes: 8.83–9.58 m (29.0–31.4 ft)[4]”
715.2 square feet.
Diameter of Boring Company tunnel is 14 feet.
153 square feet.
That’s about 78% smaller than the single train tunnel under the Alps. A heck of a lot less soil and rocks to remove per foot of tunnel.
Another Scott
@Bess: 2017 NASA paper saying the tube has to be substantially larger, and the top speed lower, than Musk envisioned (20 page .pdf).
There’s still a huge amount of design work to be done, and it’s very unlikely that it’s going to end up being cheap.
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
Bess
@Another Scott:
From the NASA paper…
From Musk’s white paper…
The tunnels Boring Co. is planning on drilling are 14 feet in diameter.
The Nevada Hyperloop company (no connection to Musk/Tesla/SpaceX).
Perhaps a mainly passenger/small cargo container system. Containers that are moved around on six wheel rather than 18 wheel trucks.
The sort of engineering I appreciate is not “This won’t work” but “There’s a problem with that idea but we might be able to make this change….”.
Now, cheap in terms of what?
Compared to air travel? It has only to be roughly the same price to be a replacement for fossil fuel flight.
Cheaper than extreme climate change? ? ? ?
Another Scott
@Bess: We seem to be talking past each other.
In the NASA paper, they come up with a nominal tube diameter of 4 meters (13.1 feet) for a nominal speed of Mach 0.82 (624 MPH). 4 meters is the “free-air” diameter – the actual bored tunnel would have to be larger (for supports, utilities, drainage, etc.) . Musk’s design (even his “larger” one), wouldn’t work. Note that the tunnel would need to be even larger if one wanted to go faster.
Bertha – the infamous tunneling machine in Seattle – is 57 feet in diameter for a 60 foot diameter tunnel.
The issue isn’t whether tunnels of the appropriate diameter can be made, but the cost. Everything that makes the required size bigger drives up the cost.
If the Hyperloop were to be used for cargo, it almost certainly would be designed to use standard “intermodal” shipping container. It would be uneconomical to move materials in and out of different sized containers. 8 feet wide, 8’6″ high, 20 or 40 feet long (taller for the “hi-cube” versions).
“Cheap” in terms of total system costs. Drilling the tunnels, the vacuum hardware, the power requirements, etc., etc. Just like in space, mass costs money – that’s why Musk wanted to keep it small – to show that the California HSR was a waste of money compared to his idea.
Just as in a car, it’s not more efficient to go faster. The Hyperloop is not going to be an efficient mode of transportation. It’s not going to be “self-powering” the way Musk imagined (especially if one considers the amount of power required to drill the tunnels, dispose of the waste rock, etc., etc.). It’s not going to have much if any impact on climate change. Under the best of circumstances, it might help a little, but car-pooling will likely help an awful lot more.
I’d be quite happy to be wrong about the Hyperloop, and as I’ve said, as a research project it’s worthwhile. But it’s being way, way oversold.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Bess
If you’re shipping from LA to Houston and want to get it there in two hours you’ll put your goods in a ‘loop sized container. We might see ships loading ‘loop sized containers as well as “standard” containers.
We will have to wait to see if NASA got it right. NASA says “… the tube size
is coupled to the speed of the air as it passes around a pod of a given size.” Elon’s design has the air passing through the pod, not around it.
Yes, Bertha is big. And that has what to do with the discussion? Bertha is moving 2,827 cubic feet of soil/rocks with each foot she moves forward. Boring’s tunneling machine is removing 153 cubic feet. That’s 18x less soil/rock to be extracted per mile.
Of course Musk is designing for a minimum diameter. That is exactly how he intends to create a lower cost system. Faster tunneling where tunneling is needed, smaller tube which means less material and smaller pedestals, less air to remove from the tube. Smaller is the basic controlling idea.
Just like a car the less air you have to shove aside the less energy it takes to go faster. With cars we concentrate on aerodynamics, low Cd and minimal frontal area. With the ‘loop the aerodynamics of the pod are less important because there’s much less air to push aside.
From his white paper…
Oh, come on. If the ‘loop works we can start cutting back on fossil fuel for airplanes. Airplanes use 8% of the oil we consume for transportation. We need to quit using 100% of the oil we now consume for energy.
Wiki-
“Airplanes emit particles and gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2), water vapor, hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, lead and black carbon which interact among themselves and with the atmosphere.[4]”
Black carbon is a climate changer which we don’t discuss very often. And, as you can see, CO2 is not the only issue with planes.
Carpooling, self-driving cars, robotaxis, shared taxi rides, self-driving battery powered buses, high speed subways, and electrified rails are for other discussions.