Let’s agree that every bad thing you’ve got to say about Musk is true. (And then some. I’m certainly no fan of that guy). That doesn’t really change the sad reality that the California High Speed Rail project is ridiculously over-budget and behind schedule. Currently, even if they get all the funding they want in a timely manner, they’re still projecting that the Central Valley to Silicon Valley section won’t be completed until 2031.
(For those unfamiliar with CA geography, there’s not exactly any demand for a high speed link between these areas. The system will only ever be useful if and when it connects LA with SF)
Like I said upthread, I voted for this project. I’ve ridden the Shinkansen in Japan and was impressed. But what the project is slated to deliver is a far, far cry from what was promised when the bond came up for a vote. You don’t need to judge it against any unrealistic new metrics to consider it a failure. You only need to judge it against what was promised, and what already exists elsewhere.
Because it’s pure Dunning Kruger that, by focusing on the work of a rank amateur, ignoring that those with actual knowledge of the subject totally demolished the proposal, distracts from actually doing something that might actually work. Musk reinvents a several-centuries-old idea, apparently unaware of its history, proclaims it a new invention and get kudos for “solving” mass transportation when he’s not only not solved anything, he’s seemingly totally unaware of what the issues are in transportation. What limits the speed of rail in the US is not technology, it’s essentially politics. Everyone advocating for this seems totally, willfully ignorant of that. They’re buying into an obvious delusion and ignoring the advice of actual experts.
Leaving aside that this isn’t a technology problem, new technologies prove their worth by being better - or at least different - in at least one respect, even at the rough prototype stage. (If nothing else, the earliest ICs were more compact and used a different, more compact, fuel source, for example. Their utility was obvious long before they had a fuel source that made them widely practical.) This prototype can’t even manage that - in every respect it’s worse than what exists, and scaling it up doesn’t fix any of those problems.
I may be overstating things by saying they couldn’t afford it, but cost and/or other practical considerations (e.g. not having enough space) was obviously an issue. It would be more accurate to say that they didn’t wish to expend the money required to build it long enough to be a useful demonstration. That wouldn’t be the case if the track were as cheap as was claimed. That says something about the costs and/or practical impediments against building an actually useful length of actually usable track.
There’s issues with the SF Bay Area’s “BART” system because although it’s rail, it’s non-standard in enough ways that they can’t buy the same kind of off-the-shelf parts that run other rail systems, making it extra-expensive to maintain.
If an entire system is made from a collection of unique technologies, it would quickly become very expensive, especially given the kind of high-precision, high-maintenance technologies being talked about.
Then we get to the fundamental issues with it - finding the land on which to build it. LA to LV is probably the best location, in that there’s lots of empty space between the two, assuming the LA end starts well outside the urban area, but it’s still an intractable problem, especially given the extreme requirements for the system (absolutely straight lines). Anywhere else, it’s a non-starter.
I fucking live here and get to see this bullshit all the time. That’s why I have little patience for it. It’s so Silicon Valley:
“I’m a moderately competent engineer who was successful at this one thing. I must be a genius! I can solve anything, I don’t need to learn about a subject - my smarts will make up for my ignorance. That a particular problem hasn’t been solved, despite thousands of people having worked on it for decades/centuries just means all those people were idiots, unlike me! I’m going to ignore any potential safety, regulatory or political issues - if they become impossible to ignore, I’m going to assume they’re trivially easy to overcome. If I try to understand something, and can’t, it’s obviously because it’s stupid and not worth understanding.”
Which was the a big, glaring, fatal problem with the proposal - it said, “Although our system is more complicated, and has far more exacting requirements than rail, it’ll be cheaper. Why? [waves hands] Uh, pylons! [Let us ignore the fact that pylons are more expensive, not less.]”
Well, there’s one thing you can predict - the tube would be more expensive. It still has to hold trains, and the rail they run on, but it also has a bunch of extra requirements, e.g. to hold a depressurized tube, with unforgiving standards, along with all the things that requires to function (motors to evacuate the air, power supplies to power the motors, safety systems and escape hatches in case the trains break down and you need to evacuate passengers from the death tube, etc. etc.) Musk’s whole “argument” about why it would be cheaper was just to completely ignore the actual cost of things.
Are a red herring in the mass transportation conversation. They don’t address mass transportation needs, which won’t just go away, but actually increasebecause of self-driving cars (should they ever make it to market), because self-driving cars means more cars on roads (not just with all the passengers who currently are driving but also those who can’t - such as children - in addition to cars with no passengers at all).
How would one even do that? You’d have to de pressurize the entire tube, have compartmentalization and emergency doors to shut off tube segments or have emergency air locks on the train cars that would make with matching escape air locks.
The safety hazards of having a vacuum tube going all the way from San Francisco to Los Angeles are stupendous.
Yes, the opportunity for catastrophic failures are many, and probably insurmountable. Have you ever watched those demonstrations of a ping-pong ball shooting through a piece of plywood after accelerating through an evacuated piece of PVC pipe with nothing but atmospheric pressure behind it? Pretty dang impressive.
Ever since first hearing about Hyperloop I’ve wondered how the system could safely react to even small breaches, say from an errant (or intentional) bullet.
That’s mostly true and I agree we need to improve our local mass transportation options so that people are less reliant on their cars, but the potentially increased traffic still may not be a big issue in the specific use case I brought up of families traveling between LA and SF. The majority of that trip is along the I5 corridor which seldom has heavy traffic once you get away from the city centers. And if you can do it in the middle of the night with a car that drives for you, traffic is even less.
My point is that if you want to convince people to take rail between LA and SF it will need to be faster, or cheaper, or more convenient than the alternatives. When it comes to door-to-door travel the current project is not projected to be ANY of those things, at least for me personally. Which is a real shame, because I usually travel to SF from the LA area a couple times a year and I should be the target customer.
A ton of public money is being poured into the hyperloop, often from agencies who have limited budgets and far far better uses for the money. We actually know it isn’t more efficient or faster than high speed rail, because it isn’t a new idea. There have been variations of vacuum trains tested since prior to the US civil war. Musk is a hype machine and it is draining public budgets to avoid the designs that actually work, because they aren’t ego boosting and profitable enough for VC funders. As an example, NOACA, the regional transportation planning agency for northeast Ohio spent $100,000 of its own budget and another $600,000 in grant funding from the one of the larger local nonprofits. In contrast the downtown transportation connection study, looking at reworking Cleveland’s entire bus and rail system got $250,000. It’s not like NOACA is the only MPO funding this grift.
Can you cite examples? I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I haven’t personally seen any articles describing large amounts of public funds being directed towards this and if it’s happening I’d like to know more details.
I have one in the post, the NOACA study. The north central Texas council of governments funded another study split between a few MPOs, Tampa, Columbus, Chicago, Pittsburgh and a few others all funded studies. The magic search terms are hyperloop MPO study grant. To get the full dollar value you then have to jump back a fiscal year to dig through the documents because the news stories around the studies are pretty universally garbage.
“The first living thing to go through the device was a small white rat. I still have him, in fact. As you can see, the damage was not so great as they say.”
One of the many questions that Musk pretended didn’t even exist, much less attempt to answer. It would be quite complicated and add a lot of weight, complexity and cost to the whole system. Simplest solution is the entire line grinds to a halt every time there’s a problem as everything is re-pressurized… but that still requires a bunch of tamper-proof (ha ha) hatches at regular points along the system.
But if you hit 3-4 hours worth of traffic between the outskirts of the metro area and your destination at each end, it hardly matters how quick the ride is in the middle… Not that the middle is guaranteed to be as empty as it is now, either. Autonomous vehicles will increase traffic everywhere and at all times. (Since you’re not depending on human drivers and their schedules, all sorts of traffic that currently happens during the day will happen at night to reduce loads on overburdened daytime streets, and also as part of an increase in overnight “just in time” small-scale deliveries, so there might still be some “rush hour” periods, but this traffic nightmare would be more evenly distributed across all times.) The increased need for mass transit will be true for most distances traveled. Autonomous vehicles are probably most useful as links to fill in the gaps between mass transportation options.
Granted, if that were to happen it would be awful, but the same thing applies when I’m trying to get to the center of the city where the high speed rail station presumably will be located, so just building high speed rail won’t solve that at all. Heavy investments in local public transportation may help mitigate that issue, and let’s hope that it does. But if we’ve successfully mitigated that issue then why am I taking high speed rail on my family trip to SF?
Oh, you mean that improved local transportation will remove other people’s cars from the roads and enable you to drive to San Francisco in less time than the train takes.
I wonder how long it takes, and how much energy would be required to repressurize the entire tube each time that happens? And how much emergency life support would each train have? Each train car would have to be built to pressurized aircraft standards, if not more.
Cool science fiction idea, stupid public infrastructure idea.
I think the idea is that if you want a transit system to be viable, you have to build it in such a way that it gets people from where they are to where they want to be either significantly cheaper or significantly faster than they could cover the same distance by car (ideally both).
Absolutely! I’m like 98% of people in that regard!
But in all seriousness, whether it’s the right choice for the world at large or not, in order to coax people to take the train it needs to be faster or cheaper or more convenient than the alternatives. It sounds like you’re convinced it will be faster thanks to expectations of nightmarish future traffic. You may be right about that, time will tell.
But let’s say we forget the car and look for other options. You like buses, right? Buses have the advantage of being able to have stations located in all kinds of areas including well outside of city centers, so if you take a bus you could get closer to your end-to-end points of travel. For the $80 billion the state has allocated for this rail project they could potentially buy each and every one of our 40 million residents about 17 tickets on a luxurious sleeper bus from LA to SF.
I don’t entirely discount the idea that hyperloop might make sense in some context, but I have absolutely no idea what that context would be. Certainly not any of the proposed uses. Probably not in anything like its current form. (When all is said and done, Musk probably reinvented the pneumatic tube delivery system.)
Well pneumatic tube delivery systems are quick and easy to install in warehouses stores, therefore hyperloop will be quick and easy to install. The size scales but the price and complexity magically remain the same! QED.
I this thread. It’s a (hyperloop) rollercoaster ride of great intention, total derision, history, hype, light pedantry, pox, vocabulary inanity, and drama. Really almost perfect; well done.
Given the very small size of the trains and cabins they’re talking about, it sounds there won’t even be room for luggage. I can vaguely imagine a hyperloop station during Christmas season… (To the extent that I can imagine hyperloop trains being inserted/removed from air locks every 30 seconds :-/ )
This is a problem when traveling on vacation in Europe when changing from different types of trains as part of your journey, and you wind up on a commuter train with no room for luggage. It seems like hyperloop is made in the vein of a commuter train, only much much smaller, smaller. More like the size of a private business jet, where there is absolutely no room for any in cabin luggage.
this thread. It’s a (hyperloop) rollercoaster ride of great intention, total derision, history, hype, light pedantry, pox, vocabulary inanity, and drama. Really almost perfect; well done.