only 8 MPH short of the top speed of the Toyota Yaris
It’s true that the Yaris can reach astonishing speeds, but it comes at a high metabolic cost—and at great risk. A Yaris that sprints at top speed three or four times without catching its prey is likely to starve.
Well, “suffered no serious or permanent ill effects” is certainly a start when testing modes of commuter travel.
This is just embarrassing at this point. I mean, high speed trains exist in the rest of the developed world. The “Hyperloop,” should it be built, would use non-standard and overly complicated technology (i.e. more expensive to build and maintain) while carrying far fewer people. There’s this desperation to re-invent a thing that already exists, but much crappier.
Me too! My recollection was that I never really got it to form a proper seal. I don’t remember if I ever did get it to properly work - but given how pointless it was, I’m not sure it would have been memorable if it was operational.
There’s a lot of prior art for this specific idea, too. A lot:
Also to be fair: the fact that they couldn’t afford to build enough track to get up to even a half-decent speed, much less to an impressive speed, indicates something about the viability of the tech as a transportation system.
Excuse me, but when rich people do it, it’s called disruption.
So is that the same fan from the new X-Box?
I always thought it was from the Scots “yer arses”.
I don’t see any claims it’s unique. I can’t quite understand all the hate poured on this. It’ll succeed or fail based on whether it can offer something sufficiently beneficial or not. It certainly has the potential to be both significantly faster than high speed rail and significantly more efficient than flying, and that’s a good thing. If they can’t do it for any reason, then we’ve learnt something.
History is full of crappy technologies that somehow came good. Internal combustion engines are a ludicrous idea: “we’re going to create a little piston and then make explosions thousands of times a minute to push that piston and it’s going to work for at least 10,000 hours of operation with minimal maintenance”. Notwithstanding the problems ICEs have caused, they are certainly successful.
Did I miss the point where this was stated as the reason the track is “short”? I can imagine many explanations for a short track that aren’t “it was too expensive to make it longer.”
That’s what sank the Transrapid and other mag-levs. Great for dedicated lines such as an airport shuttle but for mass transport over long distances using the existing infrastructure that’s also a lot easier to build and maintain just makes sense. And the hyperloop doesn’t even have that advantage of making a good airport shuttle because its strengths only show themselves in long distance travel.
I suppose it would work as a shuttle line on very specific medium length routes. LA - Las Vegas, maybe.
I’m not sure the Shinkansen is working class, but this meme is amazing anyway.
It’s interesting tech… and it’s an utter failure. In order to succeed at what they want to do, the problem is not “can we science the shit out of it?” Anyone can science the shit out of anything with enough time and money.
The REAL problem this project faces is “can we get the right of ways to build this thing above ground, or pay for the cost of digging tunnels deep underground?”
So neither potential way of locating these loop lines are viable, which makes the Hyperloop project nothing but a very expensive tech demonstrator for… wait for it…
The transit system he plans to deploy on his martian colonies. That’s it. That’s the goal. And hey, maybe in a century, century and a half, that’s something we could possibly do, assuming we overcome all the other steep challenges of colonizing another planet.
EDIT: Ultimately, I view this as a tech demonstrator, not a viable product. If we want high speed, 200+ mph rail in this country, we could already do it at any time. Musk knows this. Musk chooses not to invest in that effort, but this.
There is a lot of bullet trains out there, being French the TGV is obviously my favourite. The TGV can go on any track, and regular trains can travel on high speed lines, it can be really useful in some situations. But it obviously slow down traffic.
But the TGV does have its own dedicated lines even if it can go onto normal tracks (which is helpful when it draws into a station or crosses over into Germany for example). The problem we have with the (German) ICE is that it is a great train but it has to share track with other passenger trains and with freight carriers so there are delays in the system and it can’t always reach its full speed in excess of 300 km/h.
Yeah, dedicated lines are obviously a requirement for a good High speed train service !
I guess my point is more against all gadgetbahns using special lines (maglev, monorails, loops, you name it) making themselves impossible to connect to the existing network and a nightmare to service and maintain.
If we assume it’s a Latin word, that puts it in the 4th declension, so the plural would be Yares (pronounced “YARR-ees”)
Technically, as the law is written, Amtrak is supposed to have priority. Functionally, the opposite is true and Amtrak even tried to get folks to make a stink about it to their reps a couple of years ago. I think it got buried in the avalanche of whatever garbage Trump was up to that week.
I’m not sure how you managed to say that with a straight face. At least here in the US, most of the “disruptive” innovations over the last couple of decades have been massive “existing industry service, but with an app and a determination to ignore regulations” money pits that are sustained by oceans of venture capital, not because they’re self-sustaining enough to justify their existence.
In an occasion because there was a lot of people going to a beach in France, but the train tracks arriving there aren’t electrified, instead of making the passengers have to change train, they decided to use a diesel locomotive. Now the line is electrified so the TGV slow down to 160 km/h on the regular tracks.
It’s easy to laugh at this, but I’m guessing most of you never travelled with ScotRail; I’ll take anything at this point.
See also Alon Levy’s demolition of Elon Musk’s original back of an envelope Hyperloop proposal.
But that’s the thing, it doesn’t. The limit on journey time has never been “how fast can we make a thing go on a track?”, and the limit on air travel efficiency was never “what’s the least amount of energy you can use to move something 1km?”. Of all the different answers to what “Hyperloop” actually is, none has been faster than a rail gun or more efficient than traveling in orbit.
In terms of the things that actually do constrain practical transport systems – investment, logistics, land use etc. – every Hyperloop-branded proposal been absurd. It’s mostly “put Teslas in a tunnel”, and even if you could run Teslas nose-to-tail at 200mph 24/7, you would struggle to move as many people as a regular train, and the structures to get in and out of it would each have the footprint of ten subway stations.
Of course, what it’s always really been about is the tunnel construction business. And that’s cool – tunneling is an albatross for infrastructure projects – but they’re only offering incremental improvement there.
The reason transport nerds get frustrated is that Looperhype presupposes we don’t already know how to do transport right (
). It’s like, “hmm, if we bulldozed that stupid oasis, we could potentially build a giant factory to produce thirst-quenching Starburst candy for just $8 a bag! We’re saved!”
