One of the largest problem I can see is not technical. The consensus is that a "standard" Hyperloop track (between 2 cities, 300 to 800km apart) would have a ~1,500 passengers/hour max capacity. High speed rail, such as Eurostar, would be around 10,000 passengers/hour.
Even if Hyperloop managed to get built at half the price of HSR (which would already be a feat, there's zero chance they'll do it at 10% of HSR price), this makes a very thin passenger flux to deliver reasonable amounts of operational cash.
Where HSR can deliver $7M to $14M daily with $150 ticket price at peak time, Hyperloop would max out at $2M daily with $300 tickets during peak hour. And those prices would probably kill their market anyway.
And that's with an entirely new transport platform to fund with many unknowns such as metal fatigue for pods in near-vacuum at those speeds, passenger tolerance for accelerations and lateral movements etc.
Maybe the business plan for passenger planes and trains was also that hazy back then?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkansen
The newest trains have capacity for 1323 seated passengers each, plus plenty of room for standing passengers, and run 13 times an hour in each direction. These things do regularly fill to capacity, too; I've ridden them standing in the door vestibule.
https://www.japanrailpass24.com/about-japan/shinkansen/
I'm sure the Chinese system, such as the line between Shanghai and Nanjing, also has really high ridership, particularly during Chinese New Year.
To me, Hyperloop is a distraction from high speed rail... I'd love to be able to ride an efficient train from SF to LA.
As for passenger capacity, who cares? This is not Japan, where density is very high and lots of people don't have cars. What's important is demand: how many passengers are actually flying between LA and SF right now? And how does that compare to the capacity of Hyperloop? Hyperloop is being positioned as an alternative to regional air travel (and maybe later for cross-continent air travel). I'm sorry, but I seriously doubt 23,000 passengers are flying in jets from LA to SF every hour right now.
How is that remotely true? There is one Eurostar approximately every 30 minutes (looking at the departures from London [0], it seems that there are 32 Eurostar leaving London every day), and I seriously doubt one train can carry 5000 passengers (I would say about 500 passengers), so your approximation is completely off (even taking into account the fact that Eurostar can go from London, Paris and Brussels) and 1500 passengers/hour is comparable to the number of passengers the Eurostar carries in an hour.
[0] http://www.eurostar.com/uk-en/travel-information/service-inf...
Weirdly enough, the only source I found was German wikipedia on the train track (LGV Sud-Est[1]). Neither English nor French wikipedia have capacity information, and neither of the respective articles on the train itself have capacity information, even though the TGV duplex was introduced for this very reason.
"Eurostar, the high-speed passenger rail service between the UK and mainland Europe, today reported the highest ever number of passengers transported on Eurostar in one quarter with over 2.8m customers travelling between the UK and the continent in Q2 2015. This represents a year-on-year increase of 3% in passengers compared with the same period last year (2.8m 2015: 2.7m 2014)."
2.8m in a quarter = 31,000 a day. Given the trains only run for just over 14 hours a day (London departure board for tomorrow) - then that's a mean passengers per hour over the quarter during operating hours over all days in the quarter of 2,214. Note this actual passengers not capacity. If you assumed say an average load ration of perhaps 70% (over all times of day all over the quarter) then the mean capacity per hour would be 3,100. Then at some times there are more trains than others, so the peak capacity per hour is probably at least 4,000.
Add the capacity of those in.
Say 3x Eurostar, 5x southeastern hsr and 4x eurotunnel.
The new e320 trains have 900 passenger capacity (could be more with less first class, so let's call it 1000). With 12x departures per hour that's 12,000, and there would be more spare capacity left over because there wouldn't be local and express trains mixed together which kills capacity.
I think you could easily do 15k p/h on Eurostar + related infrastructure. Maybe more if you used TGV Duplex double decker trains.
In Germany and Japan on select few HSR lines trains are operating with a frequency of 2 minutes, and 800 passengers per train.
That’s 24'000 per hour.
Hyperloop One (formerly Hyperloop Tech) said in an info session last Fall that they were targeting launch intervals below 15 seconds. They also want a pod to comfortably carry a single intermodal container - 8'x8'x40'.
That space can seat around 40, which works out to 9600 passengers/hr capacity at 15 second intervals, on a single track.
The other angle to consider is that tracks very likely won't be singular. The tubes are light by infrastructure standards, you could pack two for each direction onto a route without dramatically increasing pylon costs. Add in the relatively low trip times, and in route segments with varying asymmetric demand it's feasible to switch one in four tracks' direction at midday. Eg a route into the city could easily run 3 in 1 out for mornings and 1 in 3 out for evenings.
Thanks, didn't have those figures. I used a study from a Hyperloop study group (can't find the URL) who found that the most efficient setup would be to assemble 5 pods together (total ~100-150 pax) , with 1 departure every 5 minutes so ~1500pax/hour.
Now a realistic turnover time (unload, clean+inspect, load, launch and contingency) would be 10' per pod - and this would already be pretty agressive.
So if you launch a pod at 15 seconds intervals, a station would need capacity for >40 pods. Inbound and outbound pods would need to station 3' upon arrival and pre-launch - again, super aggressive figure. Imagining we keep the whole setup on 6 tracks with a swapping device at the end of the tracks and relatively narrow 3m wide platforms, a station would be >40m wide and long, not accounting for circulations etc. Realistic figures would be 100x50m stations - or an equivalent volume if tracks are stacked instead of juxtaposed.
This amount of underground real estate would just not be found in most Europe cities, or at punitive prices, not even mentioning NYMBYism. HSR managed to take off thanks to heavy direct or indirect subsidies and by leveraging existing infrastructure (stations and many rail connections). Hyperloop won't get the same sweet deals.
I'm a Hyperloop supporter for the scifi potential in it, though I just don't get how and where it can get built in this world.
This observation fails to take into account real-world requirements of building this sort of infrastructure. Pylon costs (queue the starcraft references) are irrelevant. The relevant bit is building all the tunnels, bridges, and earthworks required to get a smooth-enough train route that is able to safely support the track, provide a safe ride at Hyperloop's projected speeds, provide a conformable ride, and do it all in cost-effective an easy to maintain technology.
In high-speed railway, track defects are measured in wavelengths of fractions of a milimeter in amplitude and periods of 6 to 10 to 50 meters. If you increase the speed, either the limit for the wavelength period increases or the amplitude limits need to be further reduced. Setting up a 200-meter track segment with a sub-milimeter tolerance limit isn't cheap.
I don't want to get from Montreal to NY in 40 minutes. Or 10.
I want to be able to live somewhere where I do not have to commute because tech has solved remote working. I don't want them to make me travel further for the same time.
For example were they to build radial hyperloop around NY it's just more of the same drudgery. Only now bigger.
Can tech solve the problem of getting a coffee with a couple of coworkers and feeling connected to them in a way that helps the technical argument two months from now?
Can tech solve the "Do I have my coworker's undivided attention or are they multitasking and ignoring me" problem?
Can tech solve the "I'm in the room with my boss and he can't ignore that I'm a human being" problem?
We are social creatures. A slack conversation isn't the same, and I don't think a VR conversation will be the same, especially with further distances. Do we say that everyone must live within 1,000 miles?
I find it rather doubtful that it will change anything for a number of reasons, including:
- governments don't even care to invest in their existing railway network, and are highly resistant in finding any justification for high-speed networks (not even very-high speed)
- the hyperloop concept is only a concept, it's disastrously expensive, based on untried technology, and highly vulnerable to a disastrous PR campaign. Keep in mind that it took a single accident to ground the whole Concorde fleet, in spite of all its history and having major backers.
- mass transit decision-makers are very conservative and highly risk-adverse. Money is spent only on tried-and-true technology. In the rare cases that it isn't, all hell breaks loose (see BART)
- no one knows what will it cost to maintain it, or its reliability.
- High-speed railway only makes sense in the small window of opportunity sandwiched between cases where air travel and car/roadway travel makes sense. That window of opportunity is located somewhere, IIRC, between travel distances between 200 and 600km. Additionally, for high-speed railway to make sense, it needs to be connected with other mass transit systems through effective multimodal transport hubs. This is very expensive and takes a lot of planning respected throughout centuries of investment in infrastructure and urban planning. The hyperloop concept fails to deliver in any of the requirements while in return bringing nothing to the table.
Let's keep things in perspective: France, Germany, and Japan already have decades of high-speed railway under their belt and are packed with success stories. Yet, the whole world in general, and the US in particular, decided not to follow them in their successful venture. These decisions are made rationally. Why would anyone suddenly invest in a high-risk concept that fails to justify itself?
Except flying is fast, safe, and cheap. Our problem is airport design and airport security. Fix those so we get on a plane in 20 minutes instead of two hours and everyone will be happy.
There's no real way I can see to improve airport design with those constraints.
You can fit maybe 4 platforms each holding 10 car trains in the space of one gate at a train station.
A380s require even more space and take even longer to deplane and board, so I don't think fewer but larger planes would work either.
EG: Atlanta airport does around 100m pax. So does Waterloo station in London. Look at the land take and size of terminals required in each of those cases.
"May" be it will work in US or EU where it is less populated, but it seems hard to scale in places like China and Japan
> Mr Musk says the cost of building the route would be in the region of $6bn (£4.1bn), an estimate most agree is extremely conservative.
I'm pretty sure that should say "extremely optimistic". Musk's estimate of $6bn is over 10x cheaper than the high speed train line cost for the same route
It seems likely that for the same amount of service as high speed rail, the hyperloop would be a lot more expensive.
> I'm pretty sure that should say "extremely optimistic".
A conservative cost estimate is essentially an optimistic cost estimate. A stronger statement might be that it is unrealistic.
Honestly, even $50Bn sounds like chump change for a project as ambitious as the Hyperloop. Nearly all large scale public infrastructure projects end up costing billions of dollars over estimated costs anyway.
$6 Billion is something that I think many civil engineers would consider to be a dubious figure, even as a first estimate. I'm sure Musk is cognizant of this.
There's also the Vactrain concept. Several variants were pursued from 1914 on, with Robert Salter of RAND writing a couple of proposals in the 1970s.
The idea's not new, has been seriously explored previously, and has been rejected or failed on technical, cost, political, practical, and economic grounds.
Some forms of local or highly-dedicated application, possibly. But for general use, no.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain
Salter, Robert M. (August 1972), The Very High Speed Transit System, RAND Corporation
https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P4874.html
Salter, Robert M. (February 1978), Trans-Planetary Subway Systems: A Burgeoning Capability, RAND Corporation
https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P6092.html
And, despite Musk's ability to prove me wrong, I'll stick with this projection for now.
1. Announce Hyperloop to the world
2. Let someone else build it with tubes
3. Go to Mars
4. Use everything people have built - and went bankrupt - in the thin atmosphere on Mars with success without expensive tubes.
Now the SpaceX plans, the Mars plans and Hyperloop come together.
The mag-lev systems could perhaps run on exposed pistes though.
For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain
Another consideration is the faster you travel the straighter your path needs to be. 4,000+MPH paths require incredibly strait designs.
The new hyperloop concept is just a fan-less capsule hovering on a MagLev track.
It’s just VacTrain over again, but more expensive and with lower capacities.
Mars
According to Musk, Hyperloop would be useful on Mars as no tubes would be needed. This is because Mars' atmosphere is about 1% the density of the Earth's.[10][45][46] For the hyperloop concept to work on Earth, low-pressure tubes are required to reduce air resistance. However, if they were to be built on Mars, the lower air resistance would allow a hyperloop to be created with no tube, only a track.[47] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop
The important point is 0.01 ATM is a long way from high vacuum. Pumps can get down to that pressure very easily and individual Pumps can cover wide sections of track.
"Hyperloop is a conceptual transport system in which passengers are loaded into pods and fired through vacuum tubes at more than 600mph (1,000km/h)....
"Pumping the air out of the tubes reduces resistance, allowing high speeds to be achieved, potentially using less energy than a train."
As with most very large scale projects, PR is the game changer. Elon Musk's backing of the concept and investment into competitive solutions for a hyperloop has created publicity and driven interest. The hyperloop doesn't need to be an innovative technological advancement to benefit society. It just needs to be safe, fast, and cost effective.
I'm not sure he's any more "automobile" than he is "rocketry" or "PayPal".
In any case Tesla sales are not going to be impacted much by rail.
Says who? I have light rail/uber/bus/cabs in my city and if I had HSR to neighboring regions I could just give up my car entirely with no anxiety.
Not a roaring success though!
I think the deal breaker is the high speeds, which require a much straighter track and much larger turn radius (410ft for a train, ~4.6 mi. for HL). That means a lot of tunneling through mountains and bulldozing expensive buildings. Land is the biggest expense in these projects.
I'm more hopeful of NASA's current work trying to reduce the sonic boom on airplanes. Flying high solves the air resistance problem, and going in a straight line isn't a problem up there.
High speed rail has the big advantage that it can use existing tracks, at slower speed, to reach the center city train stations.
And for air travel, I think suborbital flights are definitely the future.
I love trains, and use them whenever possible.
However, with static start and endpoints, and existing low-cost air infrastructure that is dynamically reroutable and equivalently fast, why spend the hundreds of billions of dollars to recreate something so fragile and limited?
Municipalities are wisely, generally in a 'wait and see' phase for the next decade, as autonomous personal transport guarantees to spur the redesign and redevelopment of entire cities and transportation infrastructure.
Here's a technical paper on the maglev system used.[2] They discovered a problem with bumps in the magnetic field at rail joints, and figured out a way to fix that.
Maybe that's the future. If you're going to have a maglev system, you may as well go all the way and ditch the air turbine propulsion.
[1] http://english.swjtu.edu.cn/public/viewNews.aspx?ID=154 [2] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40064-016-1965-3
The Hyperloop has the same problems (technology still developing, requires new, incompatible infrastructure) but it has one big advantage:
In contrast to the Transrapid, it can compete with planes regarding to speed.
What both technologies share: They require electricity, which is good. Electricity can be generated easily, possibly with thorium reactors in the future. It is hard (but possible, e.g. reduction of CO2 to methanol) to create combustible fuels for plane engines from electricity. Electric transport will likely overtake all kind of combustion engines.
Yes, you could put them underground but this will increase your costs.
Following the kinks of a 100 kph expressway is likely not feasible.
Alternatives are to slow down massively as you approach / traverse urban areas, but this further increases trip time, changes acceleration and energy needs, and reduces the already abysmally low net passenger throughput.
You'll have to arrive days ahead of time.
A terrorist would only be able to kill ~28 people at a time (1 pod), compared to >200 for a plane
But then again, someone could just plant a bomb on the outside of the tube so I guess it's moot.
1) There's very little merchandise that needs to be shipped trans-Atlantic that quickly.
2) Shipping containers are huge and heavy. Transporting a cargo-ship's worth requires a lot of energy, which translates into high expenses.
3) If shipping a cargo-ship's worth of containers, this will become an impossibly long train, nearing 70 miles long (around 18,000 containers per ship, and each container is about 20ft long)[1]
This has been the crux of the hyperloop since inception. The numbers really don't add up to making it more economical than any already existing alternative (even for transporting people). Shipping things via slow boat in a container is surprisingly not very expensive (given you've filled a container with goods, the goods value will greatly exceed your transport costs).
Now the question is what problem is this solving: you have cheap novel transport system for passenger between 2 points nobody is really interested in.
And that's the wall all the project around hyperloop are hitting. Either you need the government to step in to make it competitive for endpoint that people are currently interested in. Or you keep the original design, but you need the government to step in to ensure those uninteresting endpoints become interesting.
I hope I can Hyperloop from NY to LA some day, and if we can leverage the current high investment traffic to get that to happen, I'm all for it.
Please don't diss the community as a rhetorical device. There's no substance in that, and since you're also an esteemed commenter on HN, it's false.
I was hoping to put some red ink on the trend and maybe curtail it slightly, for what that's worth.
The only real problem is the financial viability of such a project.
Air travel is already very streamlined and inexpensive for crossing big distances and has the advantage of not requiring the infrastructure and real estate that a train needs. Just the land rights alone will quickly balloon the cost into 100s of billions for any sizable project between two major cities that people want to travel between - and until that gets figured out, this will never happen.
The recent news around a startup raising 80M is meaningless because they will waste all that money chasing tech without realizing that they will never be able to successfully lay track anywhere.
Hyperloop is very specifically aimed at medium distance routes. SF to LA, for example, where the plane has relatively little time cruising at altitude, where it can fly efficiently. If a plane is spending most it's time flying through denser aid, then it's not flying efficiently, and burns a lot of fuel on a per-mile basis relative to a longer flight. Hyperloop is specced to be more efficient than air travel at the distance it's proposed.
The only thing that matters is what people are willing to pay, and that's not much for medium distance. And for the billions it costs to install the track in the first place, you can buy several airlines and operate them for years.
