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Heaven Help Me, But I Sort of Love Elon Musk’s New Hyperloop Idea. (Well, at Least in Theory…)
The sci-fi buff and futurist in me just loves, loves, loves Elon Musk’s idea of building an underground hyperloop between Washington and New York. Heck, I would love the idea even if the vacuum tube connected LA and San Francisco or Houston and Dallas or Chicago and St. Louis. Even Dubai to Abu Dhabi.
Now since I live in the greater Washington DC area, I find the idea even cooler. I would love to be able to zip to Manhattan in 30 minutes. Plus, I would imagine, real-estate prices within driving distance of the stops would get quite a boost. And when there are hyperloops from coast to coast, time to get started on a space elevator.
But, but, but … the technology does not yet exist. The regulatory path to approval does not yet exist. The business case does not yet exist. The commitment for public financing does not yet exist. If we were a country that could build a project like this, I imagine we would already have a continent-spanning, high-speed rail network. And about the cost. Probably north of $300 billion. It is hard to see public financing on that scale to fund better transportation for the Acela corridor. (Oh, and it seems likely there would be additional stops, such as in Wilmington and Newark.) Didn’t the POTUS get elected by promising to help the left-behind communities in the Rust Belt and Appalachia? Musk’s idea for a city on Mars might be more realistic. (The Economist offers some conceptual problems as well as some boring, non-Boring Company transportation ideas.)
Then again, this is hardly the worst idea I’ve heard lately. (Using protectionism to “bring back” manufacturing jobs, travel bans, a solar border wall immediately pop to mind.) And I love that someone is trying to push forward rather than look backward. Anyway, Wired offers a pretty good take on the Musk hyperloop:
First, you have to get the OK from all the states and cities and municipalities involved…. To give you a sense of how big a deal getting everyone on board with a hyperloop would be, consider that just New York and New Jersey have struggled for over 20 years to reach an agreement to build a single tunnel under the Hudson River — a tunnel the region needs desperately…. Even if the feds could somehow take the lead on this one and ram a hyperloop through localities, it’s not clear who’s in charge. The Federal Railroad Administration, which handles high-speed rail? The Federal Highway Administration, which manages the roads? Who determines safety standards and holds the Boring Company accountable?…
And then there’s the little problem of moolah. Just updating the current Northeast corridor railroad — you know, the one run by Amtrak — to high-speed rail standards would cost an estimated $123 billion. Tunneling will be even more expensive…. Carving less than two miles of tunnel under New York for the Second Avenue Subway took $4.5 billion. Even if this hyperloop were entirely privately financed, it would take lots of zeroes…. Environmental effects can also strangle projects indefinitely. An extension of Washington, DC’s metro has been in the works since 1994, but was hamstrung by lawsuits alleging the project would destroy wetlands and other wildlife habitats…. Then there’s the little trouble of perfecting a technology that doesn’t exist yet. Hyperloop One, one of the many companies competing to build the first hyperloop, ran a successful test out in the Nevada desert last week. Just a few small problems: The track was 315 feet, the “train” a sled, and that sled reached just 70 miles per hour. (A completed hyperloop should hit 700.)
It’s a long way from here to there, even with “verbal government approval.”
Published in Economics, Technology
I meant things. Rockets. Payloads. Satellites.
Things.
Not people.
I’m not sure why I said that.*
*out loud.
I generally agree, except that costs on big projects these days are strongly dominated by regulation, not technical issues.
The Los Angeles subway, for instance, reportedly cost a billion dollars a mile. Once everyone got their beaks wet. They pretty much had to give up and switch to light rail.
To get back to the point; If private companies could build transit projects and succeed or fail financially, they would try to do so. In the current environment you need to be a rent seeker just to try anything.
I would have clicked like on this one were I sure I wasn’t one of the people you had in mind.
I’m getting sick and tired of Elon Musk’s scams. The man makes money by getting the government to subsidize toys for upper-middle-class people. How many times has the government rescued Tesla?
A 1/5th atmosphere vacuum tube that’s hundreds of miles long is a terrible idea. It’s also unnecessary. Normal high-speed rail is more than good enough for this purpose. Frankly, I don’t understand why the upper middle class is so enthused about trains anyway. They can’t even compete with airplanes for any significant distance.
Where do you think most public rail systems came from originally? Private companies. They all went bankrupt after the introduction of the automobile. This isn’t a matter of regulation; passenger rail networks are just not economically feasible in most parts of the U.S.
If an airline wants to run a line between Los Angelos and San Francisco, all it has to do is purchase the plane, rent space at the terminals and hire a crew. If a company wants to run a high-speed rail line between those two cities, it has to build hundreds of miles of track from scratch (high-speed rail requires special, higher-quality tracks), at enormous cost.
And for what? A train that will cost about the same, if not more, than flying.
IIRC, the problem with mass driver launch systems is that things burn up in the atmosphere. For it to work you’d have to run a tube ten miles up into the sky. That would both limit the acceleration and get past the densest chunk of the atmosphere.
Isn’t this just a larger version of the pneumatic tube that transmits Jonah Goldberg’s G-File from DC to NRHQ in NYC?
Fllooorrmmmmmmmmmmmmitwaunggg!
Because trains would clear the plebeian working class proles off the highways so the upper middle class can drive on them without dealing with their inferiors.
For most elites mass transit is about the masses. If you are really elite you don’t take airlines. You charter your own flight, or (better yet) have your man fly you there on your own personal jet.
Seawriter
To avoid the TSA.
If you’re really elite everybody will come to you.
You misunderstand the technology. You have to put a magnet in every envelope.
Things? Or people?
The probing fingers of the TSA could launch you into orbit, too.
Wow. Where to start?
True, but irrelevant. Musk’s magic pneumatic tube is intended as a people mover. Musk does not intend to ship coal (or even dishwashers) through this system. There is a lot less freight density with people than with goods. (Although I sometimes believe airline executives look at those old slave ship “packing” illustrations with a sort of rueful envy.)
Seawriter
Because blowing up a hyperloop train would have much greater effect than blowing up a normal train, you would have TSA security
In the fall, one of the local orchards sets up a Pumpkin Cannon, which is exactly what it sounds like. They got a big ol’ pressure cannon thingy, and you stick a pumpkin in it, and you let the pressure build up, and it fires the pumpkin way down field into a nearby pasture full of sheep. The sheep then snack on the shrapnel. (At least, the ones that don’t end up getting clonked on the head with a pumpkin.)
So I’m thinking you could set up something like that. A big ol’ high-pressure tube, . . . and you load it full of politicians, bureaucrats, and other members of the elite class, . . . and you let the pressure build up . . . and then you fire them at Washington from New York. (Or at New York from Washington.) The ones that land safely can go about their business.
This is futurism at its finest!
I can’t imagine it would cost that much to build, and it could solve all sorts of problems.
You mean like a subway?
Focusing on just people and none of the other technical challenges, I would say this is the smallest problem. The interior can be made very comfortable, and the potential economy in travel time would be enough to get most people to accept it. Assuming it is reasonably priced. After all how crazy is the idea of a tunnel under the British Channel? No less crazy and people use that all the time now that we have it.
But the technical problems seem too many and expensive to overcome to make this a practical idea at the moment.
I don’t understand why you’d use a vacuum. It’s a tube. Just have two of them with their ends connected together, and push the pods through pneumatically. No need to worry about air resistance when the air is what’s pushing the pod, after all (at least not in a closed system).
The air flow along the inner wall of the tube will have drag.
You’re proposing to not only move the train at high speed, but also a 500+ mile long column of air. Fluid mechanics wasn’t my strongest subject, but I suspect that would require a lot of energy.
At the ends you would have one heck of a spring effect by the air compressing.
One of these days I will have to do a post on p-tube disasters at Mission Control during the Shuttle era. Pro-tip boys and girls: never ship a can of Coke through a p-tube.
Seawriter
To create that vacuum, they’re going to attach Nancy Pelosi’s head at the DC end, Bill DeBlasio’s at the other.
Drew, the link I posted in fact has tubes to space. Watch the series, each episode is not too long.
We do not need to discover any new laws to make space accessable. Just lots of will and cost.
Call me crazy, but I kind of liked that Space Elevator episode of Star Trek: Voyager.
An enormous tube full of hydrogen and important people just beneath some of our most important cities. In an age of terrorism. Hmmm…
Hyperloop: Bringing all the dangers of space travel to high speed rail at only a few multiples of the cost!
I have to admit…
Sending people from city to city at 500 MPH, encased in metal tubes, through very thin air? Probably a good idea.
Now, all they need to do is figure out a way to do that with a hundred or more people at once, with luggage, without having to build those long, expensive vacuum tubes.
I know! We build the big Hyperloopish tubes, stick some sort of aerofoils on the outside, strap some engines to the aerofoils, and send them from city to city through the near-vacuum at 40,000 feet or so.
Now, all we need is a good name for it…
So this is like the capsule-in-a-tube thing that magically transports my deposit slip, checks and ball point pen to and from the teller, and provides such entertainment for me at the bank? Dang, I’d love to get to ride in one of those things. Or could I be the person who gets to push the button and make it go whoosh?
I love riding trains and loathe flying. If there were trains, and if the trains weren’t nearly as (or more) expensive as flying or driving, I’d do the train every time.
You can walk around on trains. You can go get yourself a meal in the dining car, or have a conversation. You have room to spread out a bit and take a decent nap or do some work (I saw a woman laying out a quilt on an Amtrak train once). You can look out the window and see something other than the median of I-95.
Of course, if the train is actually crowded, it’s not nearly as nice.