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Pipeline Mass Transit?
pipingguy writes "'Evacuated Tube Transport (ETT) is a new kind of transportation system that requires less than two percent of the energy of current transportation methods. It is also much safer, and can be faster. [...] Anyone can visualize 2 tubes (one for each direction) along a travel route. Air is permanently removed from the tubes; so travel takes place without friction. Pressurized passenger capsules (like a 2 - 8 person airplane cabin), travel in the tubes on thin steel wheels or on nearly frictionless Maglev. Airlocks allow access without admitting air to the tubes. Linear motors (as used on new rollercoasters) accelerate the capsules. During most of the trip the capsules coast; using no power. When the capsules slow down, linear generators recover most of the electrical energy used to accelerate the capsules.' Some CG images and drawings here, the FAQ is here." MSNBC had an article on monorails a few days ago. Don't bother making Simpsons jokes, the article has them covered already.
We could have had a reliable form of mass transit in the United States in major cities within the 20th century, if:
1) The government never funded the interstate highway project, which was a military-industrial complex endeavor that would provide ways to move troops across the country in case of invasion like the Autobahn did in WWII, but was more to serve the needs of making the automobile the main form of transportation in the US.
2) The auto and oil companies didn't conspire to rip up all the rails so the automobile could take over.
Efficient mass transportation will never happen as long as cuthroat greedy multinational corporations control the world -- and we are going to pay for it dearly when we run out of fossil fuels in 40 years.
The idea is a lot older than that:
Hugo Gernsback wrote about such a system
(between New York and Brest, France) in
his 1925 novel "Ralph 124C41+".
>;K
>;k
I think this will never see the light of day in the US.
I doubt it'll see the light of day anywhere for quite a few years. The massive, extraordinary effort to make a pressureless vacuum in a tube long enough that trains are going 300kmh just boggles the mind: We can barely dig a little tunnel under the English Channel, and we're seriously proposing vacuum tubes? We have enough trouble making little spheres as vacuum tube, much less some sort of system that's supposed to let people in and out, etc. Maintaining a vacuum at sealevel would be a massive energy sucker.
BTW: Some other people mentioned a prior New York system of pneumatic trains that used suction, basically, to pull the train forward. This was immediately pooh poohed (hehe...just had to use that phrase) by some saying it's so much different. Of course the advantage of a vacuum is that there is no wind resistance: The exact feat can be accomplished by accelerating the air in the tunnel to the same speed as the train (of course it'd be a circular system, so there wouldn't be the energy requirements of a standard wind tunnel where stationary air is pulled in and then forced out against more stationary air). Impossible? Certainly not any more impossible than magically making a multi hundred KM vacuum tube. It'd be a lot safer too.
I was going to knock you about that comment. Vaporware requires the promise of a product--and there is no chance this is close to the realistic implementation plan--so vaporware would put this in a more "advanced" state than any promise they could make.
Except--the company actually is promising this.
It's an interesting idea, but it's wrong on so many levels
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Less than it is to keep a plane in the air?
No. Say you have a train tube that's a reasonable length-- LA to San Francisco, Dallas to Houston, New York to Washington. You have to maintain a high-quality vacuum over that entire length. It's really late, so I'm not going to do the math for fear of getting it wrong and ruining my point, but the volume of such a tube would be really, really large. The surface area would also be really, really large. The likelihood that you could maintain a vacuum in such a tube is essentially zero. This is particularly true in an environment like the central California valley, where two points of land on either side of a fault line can shift as much as a foot in either direction over the course of a year or so, and that's without an earthquake.
More dangerous than flying?
Definitely. If a plane crashes, it's obviously horrible for the passengers, but the danger to bystanders is minimal. A plane crash-- one caused by failure or error, not deliberate malice-- might kill a few people on the ground, and that would be terrible. But a catastrophic failure of an evacuated tube would have the force of a medium-sized bomb, and it would be spread out all through the city, the countryside, et cetera. Thousands could be killed in a catastrophic evacuated tube failure, unless the tubes were all buried deep underground. As has already been discussed elsewhere, that idea has survivability problems of its own.
And cars are still much more dangerous.
That's a common misconception caused by the careless application of statistics. The total number of automobile fatalities per year is umpty-thousand. That sounds like a big number, even when you compare it to the total population. But when you look at the numbers another way, calculating an individual person's likelihood of being involved in a fatal automobile accident in his or her lifetime, the percentages come out very close to zero. That's why automobile liability insurance is still available, and affordable. Automotive transport is actually quite safe from an actuarial point of view.
I write in my journal
This patent is another ridiculous one. It's nothing new at all.
I can't find any reference to it online, but in the early 80s or late 70s NASA came out with a design for a trans-continental train... in a vacuum tube.
The train was to have (guess what?) two tubes, and would be driven by maglev (360 degree maglev -- on all sides of the train, keeping it centered in the tube). There was much discussion of what happened if the power went out, how it would come to a soft landing, etc.
The other idea in the design was that to save energy, most of the power used to accelerate one train would come from the power generated in decelerating the other.
The design document included the projected costs of construction ($100 billion or so, if memory serves me correctly), the speed (5000 MPH), and the projected ticket cost ($40 NYC to LA).
The train cars were designed with chairs which rotated, because half the trip would be acceleration, and half deceleration, so you'd face forwards for the first half and backwards for the second.
The trip was projected to take about 45 minutes.
I wish I could find it online, but I was very impressed with the design at the time, and remember most of the details.
Hey, has anyone read NASA's "Space Communities: A Design Study" from 1976? That's another not-well-remembered document. We're barely at stage 2 (out of 6 or so in the book) so far. The L5 space station NASA's just proposing is in there... these guys think long term (or some of 'em anyway).