Hyperloop: Why can't we believe in the big ideas?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31322_3-57598213-256/hyperloop-why-cant-we-believe-in-the-big-ideas/

by prlambert • 13 years ago

61 68 13 years ago

news.cnet.com

jerrya4• 13 years ago

Hyperloop: $6 Billion

Budget of the NSA: $10 Billion (http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/07/news/economy/nsa-surveillanc...)

Hopes and dreams of 1960s youth looking at Apollo and entering STEM fields: priceless

There are some things money still buys. For everything else there's PayPal??

netrus• 13 years ago

Thou shalt not compare values of different units (USD vs USD/a)!

jerrya4• 13 years ago

Technically you're correct, the best kind of correct.

But well, is there a pretty easily understood, common sense way to compare an yearly budget of $10B with a total cost of $6B, especially in terms of a trade off?

adventured4• 13 years ago

I prefer to use Homeland Security: $60.8b budget for 2013

tomelders• 13 years ago

I believe. Now all I need is $6billion to build this thing, and $10 billion to grease the palms of every politician between LA and San Francisco.

oakaz2• 13 years ago

Hyperloop is a big step that would take at least 20 years to try. What San Francisco needs is simpler and smaller steps to fix transportation. Here are suggestions;

1- Allow private & small mini-busses.

2- Provide the community hanging out near the bart exits in Mission better public gathering places so we don't need to smell heavy amount of pie every morning.

3- Make screens in bart and stations that show the upcoming trains, current train, route etc.

4- Ban smoking, eating, talking loudly, and leaving garbage in the trains.

5- Replace all the seats with smaller ones like all other subways have.

6- Replace shitty Subway shops with good hipster alternatives that people actually enjoy.

7- Improve ferry transportation between east bay and san francisco.

8- Establish shuttles.

gfodor2• 13 years ago

False dilemma and apples to oranges wrapped up in one comment. First, we can have people working on the hyperloop and also addressing these problems. Second, all of the things you mention have to do with intra-bay area transportation, and most of them have nothing to do with efficiency but with comfort, while the hyperloop is about efficient transport between two cities.

oakaz2• 13 years ago

I already pointed hyperloop is the big step, these are small steps that we also should make.

As I observe, nobody responsible is giving a fuck to the problems of bart. A friend I met almost threw up in the 16th bart exit since it's used as public toilet. Aren't we paying half amount of the money we make to the government? Then why can't we push the city government to fix the bart?!

setitimer5• 13 years ago

She said it herself: it's another Segway. It's a solution in search of a problem. We already have mass transit between northern and southern California: airplanes. I know, I know, this would be "better". But the existing system serves the people who need it at an adequate cost and level of service.

ArekDymalski• 13 years ago

Then why there are plans to build a conventional train line? To create new jobs?

setitimer5• 13 years ago

That's apparently the idea. But there is a reason it's being called the "Train to Nowhere". It will be yet another huge boondoggle that nobody uses and has to be subsidized for its entire lifetime.

gfodor2• 13 years ago

This is a ridiculous comment. An hour door-to-door SF to LA means of transportation for less than $100 round trip would completely alter the economic landscape of California.

setitimer5• 13 years ago

How? It's still too expensive for most people to use on a daily basis. It still requires some way to get from the train station to your final destination, which adds yet more cost. The end result is that the only people who will really use it are the same people who currently fly regularly between LA and SF, which means about 12 million people annually. Nowhere near enough ridership to support the kind of prices that are being bandied about.

Edit: more like 6 million people fly between LA and SF annually. I was thinking of the Amtrak Northeast Corridor ridership, which is about 12 million annually.

dredmorbius3• 13 years ago

Commercial heavier-than-air travel has a distinctly limited future. Perhaps 5 years, perhaps 20, but when liquid fuels are no longer cheap, it will go the way of the dodo.

The alternatives are lighter-than-air craft, where speeds of up to 130 MPH are possible in current designs, it's unlikely that we'll do much better than this. These have _vastly_ lower energy requirements, and could be feasibly powered by solar cells plus either batteries or a small hydrogen fuel reserve capacity, or perhaps wholly by hydrogen-fueled engines, as the volumetric constraints of an airship are much lower than that of a HTA craft.

Or you could offer high-speed ground travel. Conventional high-speed rail is one option, the Hyperloop would seem to be another. I suspect that conventional HSR could achieve higher throughput -- 840 passengers/hour would be about 16 x 60-passenger rail cars. HSR offers lower speeds and longer transit times (2h 38m SF-LA projected), but might also serve more end-points for a roughly equivalent door-to-door trip time, though I suspect that's pushing feasibility. Musk discusses 2 minute to 30 second headways between pods, which is ... pretty aggressive (that still puts between 5 and 24 miles between pods, but you're moving at 700 mph top speed).

Either way, planes are going to be excluded by and by.

alexhawdon• 13 years ago

Did you miss the energy usage comparisons in the paper? It was presented in a nice (if 3D -- Musk, Tufte wants a word with you.. ;) ) bar chart and everything.

For me, that's one of the most significant things about the whole project. I'm no sandal-wearing Greenpeace-type, but I am convinced that if we're to continue trying to achieve developed-world quality of life for everyone on the planet then we need to start getting much smarter and more efficient with our energy usage. One way is 'stop living the way we do', the other way is this (and other advances like it).

rapht• 13 years ago

If someone is ready to finance the $68bn needed to build that high speed "train to nowhere" that doesn't answer a problem, I really don't understand how nobody would be willing to finance $6bn (or even $12bn to correct for the optimist view of the paper) needed to build an Hyperloop-like project which, even though it may not answer an immediate problem, would give the companies participating in it a considerable edge against the rest of the world on the variety of research/technology/know-how needed to build it. That alone might be enough to actually give value to the project.

scrrr• 13 years ago

Just shows how unevenly wealth is distributed if one guy thinks about building a new transportation system between L.A. and S.F.

seferphier• 13 years ago

anyone can 'think' about building a transportation system. Even elon cannot pay for the new transport system by himself.

adventured4• 13 years ago

Musk could technically pay for it, his wealth is right around $6 to $7 billion (33m shares of Tesla worth $4.8b; $1b in SolarCity, and SpaceX is worth at least a billion to him, plausibly more), but it'd wipe him out.

There are reasonably a few individuals or groups of people in the world that can very safely spare the resources to build it (such that paying for it it wouldn't materially damage their business or ability to run their business, or otherwise tank their stock, put them in the poor house, and so on).

Bill Gates (Cascade can raise $10 billion quickly), Carlos Slim, Warren Buffett (the street already knows he's going to liquidate), the Koch brothers together could easily do it, Ellison could do it with leverage (he'd never sell that much Oracle stock in one go, and he earns enough annually in dividends to pay off the loan), and the Walton clan (but they'd be very unlikely to coordinate on such a thing).

For almost anybody else, the liquidity or leverage it would take would be overwhelming or very risky at the least.

fragsworth2• 13 years ago

If the expected value (estimated to the best of our abilities) is positive, then someone with a bit of credibility can easily create a corporation and find investors to build it. It's really that simple.

The only other way it might get built is if someone lobbies the state to fund the project, and in that case it's probably not worth it because the market didn't even want to do it. Isn't this what happened with California's new rail project?

daivd• 13 years ago

It is not quite that simple. The government will have to say yes, since this is a big infrastructure project that wants land next to existing highways. I don't know much about politics, but I do know that, sadly, the net gain for the country over time is not a weighty criterion in such decisions.

fragsworth2• 13 years ago

Getting government support for the project is part of the risk and cost analysis, and I don't believe it would amount to a very large percentage of the total cost.

PaperclipTaken• 13 years ago

I think that this article does discredit how much smartphones have accomplished. Now anybody with a modern smartphone has a decent camera. Anybody has access to full Google search results in their pocket. It's possible that soon your smartphone will be your laptop (see Ubuntu Edge, and augmented reality setups that are being developed). Smartphones may one day be able to form their own meshnet using bluetooth.

Not to say that we shouldn't move forward with hyperloop, or at least build a proof-of-concept somewhere. At the proposed price for hyperloop, you could replace all existing Amtrak transportation in America with a hyperloop and still pay about the same amount for a ticket.

To me, that's worth investing in.

setitimer5• 13 years ago

You might be able to replace some of the long-distance Amtrak lines with such a system, but over half of Amtrak's ridership is on the Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington. Those trains make stops at all the major cities (and some minor ones) along the way. This is why the "Acela Express" is high speed in theory only. In order to keep the same ridership, any new train would have to do the same thing.

ericd3• 13 years ago

You don't seem to be taking into account that a much faster and cheaper train would vastly increase the ridership between any two points. If it was $30 and half an hour to downtown LA, I would visit my brother down there every other week. As it is, we see each other every few months.

toyg2• 13 years ago

Yeah, replacing all trains is impractical in densely-populated areas that are already well-suited to classic railways, but Hyperloop would make it possible to see similar numbers riding to and from central states.

Also, I bet NYC-Washington or NYC-Boston hyperloops would pay for themselves in two weeks.

dredmorbius3• 13 years ago

I enjoy having a search engine in my pocket (though I'd prefer if it weren't Google), and the ability to haul a stack of 600 and counting articles, and a few score books, while nary putting a crease in my chinos.

But we had books and encyclopedias and telegraphs and telephones and phonographs a century ago. Just ... not as distributed, or portable.

If you were to look at the inventions and advances of the last quarter of the 19th and first quart of the 20th centuries, I suspect you'd find a few more significant items than smartphones: electric light, telephones, phonographs, radio, television (just under the wire), indoor plumbing (made possible by central heating, so your pipes wouldn't freeze), air conditioning, and even the first practical computers. Oh, and airplanes.

If you had the choice of technology since 1925 or before, I think you'd go with the latter choice.

toyg2• 13 years ago

Just ... not as distributed, or portable.

... or cheap. The greatest inventions of the XX century are the mass-market and the mass-democracy.

adventured4• 13 years ago

"But we had books and encyclopedias and telegraphs and telephones and phonographs a century ago. Just ... not as distributed, or portable."

Or as fast, or as comprehensive, or as cheap per unit of accessible data, or as connected, or as quick to improve and update, or as multi-functional, or as useful, and so on.

It's the difference between having "food" as a barbarian in 10,000 BC and having an integrated and highly advanced system of feeding an entire civilization of 300 million people. That is to say, the difference between night and day.

jfb• 13 years ago

Sulfa drugs.

jamesrcole• 13 years ago

But we had books and encyclopedias and telegraphs and telephones and phonographs a century ago. Just ... not as distributed, or portable.

Convenience is a big deal. There were books before the printing press (and if you want to argue that they weren't like printed books, then you're invalidating the premise of your argument that the books, telephones of a century ago are like the smartphone ones we have today), and all the printing press did was add a certain degree of convenience in their production, dissemination - and this was a big deal.

kken• 13 years ago

I think that this article does discredit how much smartphones have accomplished. Now anybody with a modern smartphone has a decent camera. Anybody has access to full Google search results in their pocket. It's possible that soon your smartphone will be your laptop (see Ubuntu Edge, and augmented reality setups that are being developed). Smartphones may one day be able to form their own meshnet using bluetooth.

I think the article and even you underestimate the impact of smart phones and mobile devices. There has been an incredible windfall of technologies, financed by the exponential growth of the smart phone market:

* Power saving microprocessors

* Ultra high resolution display technology

* MEMS sensors

* High power density batteries

* Many layer PCBs

* Size reduction of passive SMD components (0402 and smaller)

* High rate wireless transmission

* High fracture strengths glass

And many more I am probably forgetting.

All these technologies enable innovation in smaller markets that would otherwise not have been able to finance this incredible development.

For example Quadrocopters, cheap drones sold as toys but stuffed with incredible technology, would be multi-million secret military projects without the smart phone industry.

ronaldx• 13 years ago

It's notable that Musk uses supersonic air travel as a comparison point. Talking about LA to NY: "...I believe the economics would probably favor a supersonic plane"

With reasonable timing: it's just coming up to a decade of supersonic air travel being commercially unviable.

adventured4• 13 years ago

I think it's his all-electric jet in the back of his mind.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-08/elon-musk-just-may-...

vermontdevil2• 13 years ago

Instead of LA to SF, I would look at building from Las Vegad to Arizona or to Riverside perhaps? As a first line to start with and it's through the desert.

Just a thought. Show the skeptics what is possible.

illumen• 13 years ago

Good idea. However, there are lots more investors in the LA-SF region. This proposal is also a hack around government rules. This 'bid' is 9% the cost of the train bid, and there is already a government budget for it. The companies now have a track record of successul government bids (tesla paying back the loan, and spacex successfully sending rockets into space). SF,valley, LA types have been very supportive of tesla, and spacex - so I think they'll also be supportive of an innovative train replacement.

For these reasons I think this proposal is brilliant. It's a hack on government, business, media, and engineering all at once. As well, it's something the customers would prefer. Well played Musk.

vermontdevil2• 13 years ago

Good point. I didn't think of that. Is it even possible to bid, win and then change the parameters using different approach to the transportation method?

stonemetal• 13 years ago

This 'bid' is 9% the cost of the train bid, and there is already a government budget for it.

I am not from California so I am not familiar with the HSR project. But this doesn't seem right to me. HSR is proven and Hyperloop is experimental. Why is it plausible that the same route for both would be cheaper on the one that is going to require more engineering and V&V?

Shivetya• 13 years ago

Simple really, government is to large and intrusive that there is little to no room for private industry to implement them. Items that are easily transportable, or measured at the personal level, like phones, computers, and even cars, are still well within reach.

Some will point to Space X as violating that last line, but look at it from the perspective of that it really is only affected by one part of government. Large transportation projects like the hyperloop would require approval at so many levels and be subject to the whims of so many outside groups that it is insurmountable by private enterprise. Only government can build it because only government can ignore its own rules.

So its not a matter of that we can't think big, we can think big all we want. We just have to find frontiers where bureaucracy is not the primary obstacle.

ForrestN• 13 years ago

As well as Rand would like this story, with its normative, visionary captain of industry, its worth remembering that this line of thinking is as bankrupt as it is naive.

First of all, it would be utterly impossible for a purely private initiative to build the hyperloop as proposed. Most obviously, the unique feasibility argument here is that the government already owns highways that could bear the tube for most of the distance between SF and LA. But no serious rail line has ever or could ever be built without government help, because it would be impossible to negotiate the purchase of all the land without eminent domain.

Pragmatics aside, this is also just a very facile way of looking at things that belies, I think, a certain amount of laziness. The government isn't perfect, and sometimes bureaucracy does hinder good projects, but really the challenge for hyperloop would be garnering public support. If the proposal becomes massively popular, the government will have a huge incentive to build it. Unfortunately it's easier to complain vaguely about the government than it is to convince weary tax payers to fund a massive project using unproven technology. I'd love to see hyperloop built, but I am not desperate for other services that would be provided with the same money (better schools, for example).

Much of the reason American business thrived in the second half of the twentieth century is because of the superior infrastructure the government built. Every business in Y Combinator relies on services provided by the government and couldn't function nearly as well if Ron Paul were king. And, obviously, the government has achieved radically ambitious projects before. Have you ever been to Hoover Dam? Driven from coast to coast?

Government isnt perfect and can be frustrating, but bureaucracy is almost never the primary obstacle. It's just a convenient excuse.

JulianMorrison• 13 years ago

The solution to negotiating land purchase without eminent domain is to play "connect 4" by buying "options" - cheaper contracts that fix a price for a period of time but don't guarantee a sale. As soon as you have a connected path of options between A and B, you can exercise the options and run the line down it. You can spread the option purchases around a whole lot, so that nobody has an incentive to play awkward in return for more money, because you'd simply route around them.

tootie• 13 years ago

Government would be the slickest grease to get this problem solved quicklky as he direclty outlines in his plan. If you want to lay 1000 miles of track (or tube) through private land, you need to get about 50,000 signed up. His plan to put it alongside a highway means you only need one approval.

79523• 13 years ago

In most practical ways Hyperloop is a train. It has a fixed unchangeable route that can be blocked by a single carriage. Without a massive network this will only be of value to people who happen to want to travel that particular route. The world has a long history of new methods emerging and they often fail in the long run. In Britain we had a canal boom, then a rail boom, and most of those routes are now closed or obsolete.

It would be better to concentrate on increasing public transport in the road and air. Build a separate road network for freight and coaches. Make energy efficient airplanes that can fly short distances quietly and land on short runways. Build systems to automatically route parcels to make same day delivery possible. This would create a network that would be much more adaptable and complement what already exists.

Rail is like dial-up between a few key points that ignores existing networks that could be upgraded. Hyperloop is just a faster connection to a dysfunctional network.

moocowduckquack3• 13 years ago

Roads? Where we're going we don't need roads.

Multi-lane roads are fixed routes that can be blocked by a single lorry and frequently are. Without a massive network increase, roads are rapidly becoming of appalling value on many major routes. Everything fails in the long run, including the current road network and we need ways to build capacity with minimum land use, because land rights are often the major cost.

Also, the car hauling version integrates directly with the road network anyway so I don't know really what your network complaint is about.

Besides, all transport upgrades, including road or rail, are just a faster connection to a dysfunctional network. If we were happy that it was properly functional, we wouldn't be looking to upgrade it.

Anderkent• 13 years ago

If we were happy that it was properly functional, we wouldn't be looking to upgrade it.

That doesn't follow. You can still upgrade something that is properly functional.

79523• 13 years ago

People break down all the time, but mostly they pull over and are overtaken by the other traffic. I agree that heavy vehicles are a big problem which is why I suggested creating special provision just for them. Congestion from cars is bad for business because it blocks freight. Congestion from lorry's is bad for everyone. Imagine the benefit of removing all intercity freight from the roads?

keiferski• 13 years ago

I'm still not quite convinced that enough people care about getting from LA > SF and back again. The Hyperloop would be infinitely more useful (and might actually get done) if it were from Boston to DC (with NYC and Philly stops in between).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis

yid2• 13 years ago

The I-5 stretch is almost a straight line, spans a single state, is already very wide with a comfortable median, and sparsely populated along the way. Those things all have their advantages.

maratd• 13 years ago

The Hyperloop would be infinitely more useful (and might actually get done) if it were from Boston to DC (with NYC and Philly stops in between).

There's already a "high speed" rail system between those points. Of course, that depends on your definition of high speed.

http://www.amtrak.com/acela-express-train

Having been on that line, you're lucky when you're going 50 mph. Having a hyperloop on those points would be insane. You could live in Boston and work in NYC.

bowlofpetunias• 13 years ago

I'm pretty sure there are plenty of places in Asia and Europe, where public transport is not a dirty word, where people are already trying to figure out a way to make this happen in their backyard.

stephengillie• 13 years ago

I keep thinking about the Seattle Center Monorail, constructed for the 1962 World's Fair. Like the hyperloop, it's an elevated train, and people predicted that it would be extended to other cities and revolutionize public transportation.

It still runs, and you can ride it for a few dollars. But a bus will take you end-to-end cheaper and faster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_monorail

vonseel• 13 years ago

I don't see how someone could put Google Glass in the same category as Segway or CableCard, especially this early on. I do wish CableCards had worked out better though. As it stands now, I have an HDHomerunPrime that I'm ready I part ways with because there simply isn't enough support for CableCards in Linux.

Hyperloop: Why can't we believe in the big ideas?

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