China took on lots of debt to do that, and it will take a while to pay it off if ever (we can argue whether SOE debt is government debt or not). It might make for some interesting development opportunities in the future, but only an authoritarian government could divert so many resources.
I’m much more excited by Japan’s new maglev that will go from Tokyo to Nagoya by 2026 or 2028.
Hyper loop had a lot of potential to avoid the problem facing most rail projects in the states (lack of land for straight shots needed for HSR, and the government’s unwilling to use eminent domain to get that, also, I think Americans are more adverse to viaducts everywhere than the Chinese). A vaccine tube underneath would solve a lot of that.
This is about VIRGIN Hyperloop by Richard Bransons Virgin Brand conglomerate.
Not to be confused with Elon Musks Boring Company.
FTA:
> Virgin Hyperloop was founded as Hyperloop Technologies in 2014, stemming from Tesla CEO Elon Musk's idea of a high-speed passenger pod transport. It changed its name when Richard Branson joined the board of directors in 2017.
Boring company has abandoned any idea of a hyper loop a long time ago, right? Did they ever even associate with it (outside the branding of their Vegas mini tunnel)?
There are a lot of reasons standard rail in the US is cargo centric. Profit and a much easier customer service case are big ones. Also, sending cargo in a new transportation system is much easier and less lawsuit prone than people.
An old story in the US since the post office basically made airplane travel viable via postal contracts.
Glossing over the fact that almost all the railways in the US are privately owned by cargo companies which prioritize their cargo over transport. Huge reason Amtrak struggles so much
Large-diameter tube freight has, a history.[1] The USSR built a few sizable TRANSPROGRESS tube systems with diameters in the 1.5 to 2 meter range in the 1970s. Mostly for garbage disposal. There have been proposals on and off for over a century.
Pneumatic garbage disposal is in use in a very few places. Roosevelt Island in New York has had a working system since the 1980s. It works well and is well-liked. Roosevelt Island was supposed to be car-free, and lacks much of a road system, so this was a good fit.
Bummer. Musk-hyped moonshot or not, I thought Hyperloop presented an incredibly exciting vision for the future of mass transit. Even if it was always going to be a long shot, it’s disappointing to be right.
Edit: replies saying "this never could have worked" are missing the point to a pretty hysterical degree.
You don't know that. No one knows that! Unless you are from the future or are a genius-level mechanical engineer in the specific problem domain of vacuum trains (who for some reason was not already employed by Hyperloop), you cannot say that with 100% confidence.
No matter how unlikely it might have seemed to you, it could have worked! And it's a bummer when extremely-cool-but-unlikely things don't work.
It's a vision out of the 1800s [0], and one that is obviously never going to work. It's simply not possible/useful to create the necessary vacuum, and the requirement for near straight-line tracks is extraordinarily expensive.
It wasn't a vision of mass anything, except maybe delusion. The nameplate capacity of hyperloop between SF and LA was 840 passengers per hour, which is basically zero. Whatever hyperloop was, it was never "mass transit".
After watching the video of a traffic jam inside the 1-lane wide tunnel, I'm not sure I would dare to go into it. I immediately thought what would happen if a car crashed into the wall and it caught fire. Seemingly, it didn't have enough space to go around it.
Obviously there is no hyperloop system yet so we can't speak about real life stats but the idea of hyperloop is a pod that goes really fast because of the vacuum.
Change "pod" to "shipping container".
So if you can send one shipping container after another at, say, 400 mph, what exactly would be scalability problem. It would clearly be faster that rail and therefore having a higher throughput.
A lot of people seem to be confused. Elon does not have any companies working on a hyperloop. He kicked off the idea and released a white paper with some very early engineering work seemingly put together by a group of engineers working at SpaceX and Tesla[1]. He never had any plans to commercialize it himself and was releasing it as "open source" for anyone else to take up.
Several companies sprang up to pursue the concept[2]. This article is about Richard Branson's Virgin Hyperloop which itself has a very checkered past[3] and has felt pretty scamming since the beginning, long before Branson acquired the company. Not sure if the acquisition by Branson has caused them to clean up their act or what.
The only Hyperloop thing that Elon or his companies seem to do is hold a design competition for students where they compete on a short hyperloop test track at SpaceX's Hawthorn facility. If I had to guess I'd say that this is most likely a recruiting tool for SpaceX.
What about TBC and the Las Vegas plans? It's not a Hyperloop as originally explained but uses the name - and seems to be par for the course in terms of Elon proposing products that aren't exactly delivered the way they were marketed.
It's been showing up perennially as a concept since the late 18th century; periodically people get excited about it and then realise it's not very practical.
Kind of OT, or maybe not. But why didn't Musk (or anyone else) go with Maglev tech? The efficiency seems ok, and it probably doesn't matter if you do it above vs below ground, and it's deployed around the world now.
Virgin Hyperloop uses maglev. The main difference between what they're doing and everyone else, is that they put their whole track in a giant airtight pipe, and pump air out of the pipe so the train can travel with less air resistance.
> A viable technical solution is magnetic levitation; however the cost
associated with material and construction is prohibitive. An alternative to
these conventional options is an air bearing suspension. Air bearings offer
stability and extremely low drag at a feasible cost by exploiting the ambient
atmosphere in the tube.
20 miles of maglev track from the shanghai airport to the city cost 1.2 billion dollars for China to build, god knows how much it would cost Americans (NYC spent about a billion per mile on the last expansion to the subway, and that's hundred year old tech)
These are a thing (though rarely electrical; if a stretch of railway's lightly used, that won't be where you prioritise putting up overhead lines), though they've largely died out in favour of more versatile DMUs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railbus
Vacuum travel in a a tube does actually make sense. It may not be viable (yet?) but the idea is sound.
A big problem is a breach in your vacuum. Keeping the atmosphere out is expensive.
But what if where you’re building it has no atmosphere and is geologically stable or dead? Then a lot of problems go away. You don’t even need a tunnel necessarily.
Yet another reason why colonizing the Moon makes 1000x more sense than the romantic pipe dream of the red planet.
> Vacuum travel in a a tube does actually make sense. It may not be viable (yet?) but the idea is sound.
I'm not sure the idea will be viable, ever. Too many problems, not enough rewards.
For example, the problem of a vacuum tube developing a leak. The leak would start an implosion, which then propagates down both directions of the tube at mach-1 speed of sound. The implosion would resemble the continuous crushing of a soda can down the entire length of tube. The outside pressure at sea level compared to the inside (lack of) pressure is too great to be safe for passengers or cargo.
The above problem could in theory be solved using air locks spaced apart to have a chance to mitigate the destruction to a few kilometres where the leak happened. But the idea is not very feasible, the air-locked segments would be several kilometres long, enough to slow a transport capsule to a safe halt, yet long enough to get ahead of the mach-1 speed of implosion. High speed sensor networks would have to cover the the hyper-loop ad infinium.
And don't get me started on material science, in particular thermal expansion of steel. The only way to deal with thermal expansion is by using expansion joins. The problem with expansion joints, see the above part about leaks. The entire track of (above ground) tubing would have to deal with significant expansion/contraction. Like for Dallas <--> Austin the expansion would be well in excess of ~100's of ft.
Then comes the energy requirements to pull and maintain a hard vacuum in very long & wide tubes. The closest thing that comes to mind is the Large Hadron Collider, but that pulls a vacuum by cooling the narrow tube down to cryogenic temps... it's not the same. Hyper-loop would require HUGE amounts of energy to maintain the vacuum. It would be more energy put in than profit that comes out, unless of course the hyperloop is transporting some kind of high value merchandise like kilos of cocaine or whatever. The economics simply isn't there, the engineering isn't there, it's pretty much a terrible idea.
The only good argument for the Hyperloop is a logical fallacy, called "argument from authority". Put another way, the argument goes: since Elon Musk is so amazing, we can suspend our disbelief and trust the idea on the sole basis of whatever perceived accolades (the authority) Elon Musk has gained by being a billionaire entrepreneur. Sure, Elon's a cool dude, very smart, tenacious, etc... but that doesn't stop hyperloop from being a terrible idea.
People get this confused. The Boring company has nothing to do with this company called Virgin Hyperloop.
The Boring company is working on what they call a 'Loop', not a 'Hyperloop'. A Loop is just a tunnel with some form of battery electric pod inside of it. Its not a vacuum.
I'm sure at some point in the future when they have improved tunneling they would consider trying to do a vacuum tunnel but this is not what they are working on now.
I find it quite surprising that they only fired half and not all of them. How can this conceptual vacuum tube pod system that has been shown to be incredibly inefficient and prohibitively expensive still have some kind of business model?
To be honest I thought this whole idea got scrapped 5+ years ago.
They have got congress interested. It works just well enough to get them interested and funded. That it will always be prohibitively expensive is something they can hide.
Congress wants to fund the next big thing and make the US the best in the world. They don't want to hear that train technology is an almost completely solved problem and so we cannot get ahead of the rest of the world - the only thing left is buy and build the same thing as everyone else. Congress hates that idea.
[+] [-] qgin|4 years ago|reply
United States: Thinks about vacuum tubes for awhile, gives up entirely.
[+] [-] disambiguation|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iab|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seanmcdirmid|4 years ago|reply
I’m much more excited by Japan’s new maglev that will go from Tokyo to Nagoya by 2026 or 2028.
Hyper loop had a lot of potential to avoid the problem facing most rail projects in the states (lack of land for straight shots needed for HSR, and the government’s unwilling to use eminent domain to get that, also, I think Americans are more adverse to viaducts everywhere than the Chinese). A vaccine tube underneath would solve a lot of that.
[+] [-] lgrebe|4 years ago|reply
FTA:
> Virgin Hyperloop was founded as Hyperloop Technologies in 2014, stemming from Tesla CEO Elon Musk's idea of a high-speed passenger pod transport. It changed its name when Richard Branson joined the board of directors in 2017.
[+] [-] tsimionescu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] softwarebeware|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] protomyth|4 years ago|reply
An old story in the US since the post office basically made airplane travel viable via postal contracts.
[+] [-] chucksta|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daniel-cussen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|4 years ago|reply
Pneumatic garbage disposal is in use in a very few places. Roosevelt Island in New York has had a working system since the 1980s. It works well and is well-liked. Roosevelt Island was supposed to be car-free, and lacks much of a road system, so this was a good fit.
The anti-car crowd should be pushing for this.
[1] https://highways.dot.gov/public-roads/autumn-1994/tube-freig...
[+] [-] numtel|4 years ago|reply
https://www.magway.com/
[+] [-] ketzo|4 years ago|reply
Edit: replies saying "this never could have worked" are missing the point to a pretty hysterical degree.
You don't know that. No one knows that! Unless you are from the future or are a genius-level mechanical engineer in the specific problem domain of vacuum trains (who for some reason was not already employed by Hyperloop), you cannot say that with 100% confidence.
No matter how unlikely it might have seemed to you, it could have worked! And it's a bummer when extremely-cool-but-unlikely things don't work.
[+] [-] tsimionescu|4 years ago|reply
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain
[+] [-] jeffbee|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ulimn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gjs278|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] shantara|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kjksf|4 years ago|reply
Obviously there is no hyperloop system yet so we can't speak about real life stats but the idea of hyperloop is a pod that goes really fast because of the vacuum.
Change "pod" to "shipping container".
So if you can send one shipping container after another at, say, 400 mph, what exactly would be scalability problem. It would clearly be faster that rail and therefore having a higher throughput.
[+] [-] eco|4 years ago|reply
Several companies sprang up to pursue the concept[2]. This article is about Richard Branson's Virgin Hyperloop which itself has a very checkered past[3] and has felt pretty scamming since the beginning, long before Branson acquired the company. Not sure if the acquisition by Branson has caused them to clean up their act or what.
The only Hyperloop thing that Elon or his companies seem to do is hold a design competition for students where they compete on a short hyperloop test track at SpaceX's Hawthorn facility. If I had to guess I'd say that this is most likely a recruiting tool for SpaceX.
1. https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/hyperl...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop#Hyperloop_companies
3. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/former-hyperloop...
[+] [-] atdrummond|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lurchpop|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] softwarebeware|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsynnott|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] otikik|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tempest1981|4 years ago|reply
It is true that train ridership is still way down... maybe 25% of pre-Covid levels. Although they'll probably return before HyperLoop is ready.
[+] [-] caycep|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anchpop|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] panick21_|4 years ago|reply
The Musk blue paper by Musk does not.
https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/hyperl...
> A viable technical solution is magnetic levitation; however the cost associated with material and construction is prohibitive. An alternative to these conventional options is an air bearing suspension. Air bearings offer stability and extremely low drag at a feasible cost by exploiting the ambient atmosphere in the tube.
[+] [-] jazzyjackson|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thomasahle|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ykevinator2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsynnott|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shadowgovt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmyeet|4 years ago|reply
A big problem is a breach in your vacuum. Keeping the atmosphere out is expensive.
But what if where you’re building it has no atmosphere and is geologically stable or dead? Then a lot of problems go away. You don’t even need a tunnel necessarily.
Yet another reason why colonizing the Moon makes 1000x more sense than the romantic pipe dream of the red planet.
[+] [-] mstipetic|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] parasense|4 years ago|reply
I'm not sure the idea will be viable, ever. Too many problems, not enough rewards.
For example, the problem of a vacuum tube developing a leak. The leak would start an implosion, which then propagates down both directions of the tube at mach-1 speed of sound. The implosion would resemble the continuous crushing of a soda can down the entire length of tube. The outside pressure at sea level compared to the inside (lack of) pressure is too great to be safe for passengers or cargo.
The above problem could in theory be solved using air locks spaced apart to have a chance to mitigate the destruction to a few kilometres where the leak happened. But the idea is not very feasible, the air-locked segments would be several kilometres long, enough to slow a transport capsule to a safe halt, yet long enough to get ahead of the mach-1 speed of implosion. High speed sensor networks would have to cover the the hyper-loop ad infinium.
And don't get me started on material science, in particular thermal expansion of steel. The only way to deal with thermal expansion is by using expansion joins. The problem with expansion joints, see the above part about leaks. The entire track of (above ground) tubing would have to deal with significant expansion/contraction. Like for Dallas <--> Austin the expansion would be well in excess of ~100's of ft.
Then comes the energy requirements to pull and maintain a hard vacuum in very long & wide tubes. The closest thing that comes to mind is the Large Hadron Collider, but that pulls a vacuum by cooling the narrow tube down to cryogenic temps... it's not the same. Hyper-loop would require HUGE amounts of energy to maintain the vacuum. It would be more energy put in than profit that comes out, unless of course the hyperloop is transporting some kind of high value merchandise like kilos of cocaine or whatever. The economics simply isn't there, the engineering isn't there, it's pretty much a terrible idea.
The only good argument for the Hyperloop is a logical fallacy, called "argument from authority". Put another way, the argument goes: since Elon Musk is so amazing, we can suspend our disbelief and trust the idea on the sole basis of whatever perceived accolades (the authority) Elon Musk has gained by being a billionaire entrepreneur. Sure, Elon's a cool dude, very smart, tenacious, etc... but that doesn't stop hyperloop from being a terrible idea.
[+] [-] tengbretson|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] panick21_|4 years ago|reply
The Boring company is working on what they call a 'Loop', not a 'Hyperloop'. A Loop is just a tunnel with some form of battery electric pod inside of it. Its not a vacuum.
I'm sure at some point in the future when they have improved tunneling they would consider trying to do a vacuum tunnel but this is not what they are working on now.
[+] [-] x3n0ph3n3|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alfiedotwtf|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] izzydata|4 years ago|reply
To be honest I thought this whole idea got scrapped 5+ years ago.
[+] [-] bluGill|4 years ago|reply
Congress wants to fund the next big thing and make the US the best in the world. They don't want to hear that train technology is an almost completely solved problem and so we cannot get ahead of the rest of the world - the only thing left is buy and build the same thing as everyone else. Congress hates that idea.
[+] [-] yread|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dr_dshiv|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] questiondev|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevin_thibedeau|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] formvoltron|4 years ago|reply
crypto get rich quick schemes: hyperdupe? faster chicken egg laying tech: hyperkoop silly putty: hypergoop squatty potties: hyperpoop?