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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.
Why, you ask? Not because it's not interesting and efective technology, but because we Americans don't like mass transit. We want cars. We have a *right* to cars. Look in the Bill of Rights. It's there. Or if it's not, I think it should be, so it might as well be there right next to my right to own a minigun.
Seriously, though, there are hundreds neat ideas for viable mass-transit available, but I'm stuck riding a 30 year-old, beaurocracy-lader system called BART to work everyday. That has, to put it mildly, soured my viewpoint somewhat. Until we remove the corruption that wil always accompany mass transit, we might as well forget about it.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
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.
...but will we ever see anything like it? I often wonder how many advances in large industries like transportation are blocked by large companies who would lose a lot of money by the loss of maintenance revenue a beneficial technology would cause. Consider the problem of transportation commissions and the constant struggle to maintain their piece of state or city budget. If better technologies emerge requiring less upkeep once built, and some of the money allocated to the department goes away, jobs are lost... I wonder if advances like this actually taking hold aren't just a pipe dream. (err.. pun intended)
Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes
Which, of course, is why Chicago has never had a widely-used mass transit system consisting of, say, an elevated train of some sort.
I don't see why this sort of system couldn't be used to replace an existing one. Living in the Bay Area, however, I can testify that the major problem with mass transit isn't the technology behind it, but rather the corrupt, power-hungry shills who plan and execute it. Our BART system, for example, has been in service for something like 30 years and still doesn't run to the Silicon Valley or any of the airports.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Now that articles are making pre-emptive Simpsons jokes, if they would just include "OMG FP FP FP!!" and "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of...", we could eliminate half the comments on Slashdot.
From their website "For fiscal operation, both corporate and public operation is encouraged by the non-exclusive, low cost licensing plan. The license promotes both cooperation and competition."
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Can anyone say vaporware? This sounds really cool, but look at the language they use: all benefits and no drawbacks. Can anyone trust a viewpoint like that? Plus, the website is really horribly designed, which leads me to believe they have no money and have never built one of these. I like the idea though, a lot. I'm just skeptical of these utopian idealists.
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
I belive that this was originally the idea of Tenacious D. You can hear Jack Black sing about it in the song "City Hall".
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The story is a dupe, the topic is boring, the facts weren't checked. WE GET IT!!
They say that the pods (or whatever you call them), will run on thin steel wheels, I suppose because they think that the thinner the wheels, the less friction or something, which shows that they obviously never took general college physics, because if they did, they would know that friction is not dependent on how big the contact area is.
Eagles may soar, but weasles don't get sucked into jet engines...
I think this will be _very_ difficult to establish.... not only for the aforementioned ROW considerations, but for physical reasons. A *perfect* vacuum is almost unattainable on Earth (very small capsules notwithstanding)... the energy required would be enormous to create a vacuum that is sufficient to reduce friction and drag to useful levels.... Besides, what are the occupants going to breathe? The capsules would have to be airtight... all of this seems pretty challenging and time consuming for a marginal benefit... I would like to know how much better this system is compared to straight mag-lev... _C
Bad spellers of the world untie!
Fry: Whoa!! [He sees the tube transport system and gives it a try.]
Man: Radio City Mutant Hall! [The man is sucked up into the tube]
Fry: Um. Cross Town Express? [He is sucked up into the tube] Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! [People look up from the street and stare at him. He is taken across the city, past the Statue of Liberty, underwater and finally out the other end smack into a building.]
Man: Pfft! Tourist!
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
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
Yeah, just like the old pneumatic underground made by Alfred Ely Beach, except it's not pneumatic. And it uses two single directional tubes, recycles energy, travels at 300mph, is powered by an electric motor, and runs in a vacuum. But, other than that it's exactly the same.
You'll never keep a vaccum with this.
Not with the hundreds of miles of tube.
Not with termal expansion/contraction.
Not in an active city with people building, digging holes, running infrastructure.
Not in an even remotely seismic active area (remember the earthquake in NY?).
While its a cool idea, its just that, an idea. There's no way to overcome the problems and still make it as durable and cost less than existing technology.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Note that for local transportation, the problem isn't speed but coverage. I can't realistically take public transportation to work because it would take me far too long to get to the nearest station and because trains take far too long to get to the destination (because of a lot of stops).
For local transportation, another concept makes more sense to me: Personal Rapid Transit [1], [2]. Personal Rapid Transit consists of small passenger cabins (1-3 people) that you call to the nearest station and take to the station nearest to your destination, almost like a taxi or chauffeur. And unlike evacuated tube transports, they do not require a lot of digging or construction.
And, politically, personal rapid transit seems more promising in the short term: it's something that can be done at the local level.
The idea is a lot older than that, Nostradamus wrote
C1Q3
When the litter is overturned by the whirlwind,
and faces will be covered by their cloaks,
the republic will be vexed by new people,
then whites and reds will judge in contrary ways.
which obviously foretells a terrorist attack by the Chinese on one of these systems.
The litter (to contemporary term for a carriage or capsule) is destroyed when the vacuum is lost and the air rushes in. The Republican president has to deal with the 'reds' aka the Chinese.
Mapquest says it's 2906 miles from SF to New York. That puts your average speed at about 530 MPH. I'm pretty sure the cops wouldn't be able to catch you at that rate, anyhow.
If you decide to try it out, let me know and I'll race ya.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Except without the falling and the crashing and the screaming.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
They must maintain a vacuum however the length of one tube is from city to city, so even one hole along the path destroys the vacuum. I imagine maintenance costs to prevent this and security costs to prevent malicious people putting holes in it would be high.
Another thing is suppose one of the cars gets stuck. These things are going 300-4000mph in an environment that's supposed to be virtually frictionless. How do you stop all the other "cars" behind the broken one in time?
How gradual do the turns have to be? You can't exactly make a quick right turn at 300+mph and still have a comfortable ride. Maybe there will be no turns and it will stop every time it needs to change direction.
And doesn't this kinda remind people of network switches? Computerized management of "people packets" zooming through tubes?
where do I start?
1) contact with the tube will negate the lack of friction which makes the system workable -- so the emergency hatch would need to telescope to touch the ceiling. fine.
2) piercible? ok. Spelling aside, you can make the membrane out of whatever you desire, however, it still needs to hold against 1 atmosphere. It's very difficult to do that with somethat that is piercable AND durable enough to last a while.
3) So now you've pierced the wall --- you're in dirt. Great. That solved that problem real good!
yes. this IS a problem. However, it's a problem easily solved. Just equip each car with x hours of emergency air. As soon as something goes wrong, open the evacuated tunnel to the atmosphere. Choose x so that all the cars can withstand the induced wind thus induced.
The very first underground train in New York worked exactly like this, pneumatically. Everything old is new again, eh?
;)
How exactly does this qualify as pneumatic? I think this would be "anti-pneumatic" if such a term existed...
Pneumatic implies they are using air-pressure as the driving force. Most pneumatic systems (like money tubes at some theatres and large stores) actually suck air out, and as the air at the intake of the tube rushes to fill the vacuum, it has to push the capsule. This system talks about using evacuated tubes (ie: a vacuum), so that the capsules can travel with pretty much no friction. The entire tube system is a vacuum, so there's no suck and no blow; the actual driving force would likely be electric...
This is a really cool idea. However, although I am sure the technique works, I wonder how feasable it is in Real Life. A number of reservations I have:
1. Cost. How much will it cost to put down those tubes everywhere, keep them vacuum, maintain them, etc? How much does it cost to manufacture a vehicle for this system? Is this all going to be cheaper than driving an automobile (especially in countries with lower fuel prices)?
2. Popularity. Although I don't know the situation in the rest of the world, I know that in Holland people prefer going to work by car over going there by train even if trains are cheaper, faster, more comfortable, safer, better for the environment, don't have parking problems, and allow them to do some work or socialize while traveling. For some, this goes even if the train stops just as close or even closer to work than they could part their cars.
3. Usefulness. A transportation system is only useful if it gets you where you want to go. How precise this needs to be depends on the distance traveled and the frequency of the visits to this destination. The greater the distance, and the lower the frequency, the more willing people are to use additional means of trasnportation to get to their destination. Since it would probably be impossible for this system to achieve anywhere near the granularity of the road infrastructure, it's use is probably for longer distances. There, it competes with cars, trains, and aircraft. This syste will never be able to beat the flexibility of cars, nor the speed of aircraft. Trains are higly impopular with travelers. What niche will this system occupy?
Just some thoughts...
---
Caution: breathing may be hazardous to your health.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/technology/nyundergro und/secret.html
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
For crying out loud, dude. Not every Slashdot article is an opportunity for you to bash Microsoft, okay? Cut it out.
I write in my journal
Exactly this concept of transportation has been under consideration in Switzerland for a long time under the name Swissmetro. The idea is to link the major population centers together, creating in effect a single country-wide city. The technology is ready to build the demonstration track from Geneva to Lausanne (~30 km), but so far, the government and the Federal Assembly have been unwilling to shell out the CHF 1.5 bio (about /$ 1 bio) required to do it.
Go hither for a cool simulation video or thither for technical details, or even yonder for the math.
This concept has been looked in for the last 20 years in Switzerland under the name of "Swissmetro".
A quick summary of it here.
The most complete analysis of the project I've seen here.
Basically, it's probably doable, but the major roadblock is a VERY strong political support (even in a very pro-mass transit country like switzerland), because of the massive costs to validate the faisability of it. In Switzerland, that support has not materialized in the last 20 years.
-- p a n a p i c - panoramas des alpes: Mont-Blanc, Mont-Rose, Cervin, etc...
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).
Not a bad way to do this calculation, if you don't have access to calculus and the like. Unfortunately, your answer is wrong, because the radius of the Earth is a touch under 7000 kilometers, not 13000 as you claim.
An easier way to do this would be to remember that the centripetal force required to keep an object with mass m moving in a circular orbit of radius r and speed v is just m*v^2/r. Equate that to the force of gravity at sea level and you have that:
v^2 = g*r
Just think of gravity as being the "string" that keeps the satellite in its circular path. At sea level, this works out to 8.3 km/sec or thereabouts. Incidentally, it can be shown that the minimum escape velocity is just this number multiplied by the square root of two.
Cheers,
Mouser
OK, you're all skeptical. Here's the FAQ from my investment prospectus.
I can't do the math, as I haven't the figures available. I suspect you can't do the math either, as you don't quote any figures. :-) What I can say is that I've been to a number of countries that run very efficient public transportation (I'm especially thinking of the Netherlands, and the Amsterdam trams). India, Japan, northern Europe all have at least adequate public transport systems. You don't say how far Jersey City is from your fiancee, so it's hard to say if the train cost is reasonable or not. The question to ask is how much it would cost her, considering fuel and maintenance to run a car for that same commute each month (and don't forget parking fees, of course).
Now, your crack about the middle east is low. I like driving my PERSONAL automobile. It is gas fueled, but it isn't a gas-guzzling SUV....it's a VW golf, and it gets great gas milage. I'd use an ethanol-gasoline mix if I could buy it somewhere near me.
Nice car, I'm a big fan of the Golf (my advisor runs one). While you have a point that personal transportation is more useful in general than public transport (no schedules, service to everywhere there's a road, etc.), this doesn't preclude public transport at all. Most people put a large chunk (most?) of the miles on their vehicles going to work every day, and this ratio likely increases if one works in a city one can't afford to live in (working in NYC, living in Jersey). Use public transport during the week, drive to your vacation paradise in your gas-electric hybrid on the weekend...
Public transport, when properly executed, doesn't just cut on gas usage, but also smog, noise and traffic. It puts less strain on a city's infrastructure (bridges, tunnels, parking ramps, &cet.) And it also encourages slightly more walking, which is vastly better for the population for other reasons.
Your point about Amtrak is well-taken, but I don't see it as particularly relevant. Do most roads pay for their own maintenance? Isn't that what part of a state's gas tax goes towards? Aren't there Federal highway subsidies? Toll roads may mitigate the cost of upkeep, but I hardly think they are self-sustaining. Why should public transport networks be less worthy of tax dollars? Why a different standard, especially given the health and environmental bonus?
For examples, New York has an adequate public transport network, and Washington D.C.'s is absolutely first-rate. So, it can be done, at least on an intra-city level. Most of America's public transport problems come from attitude, not because the concept is inherently unworkable.
Cheers,
The Mouser
Imagine if two of these pressurized cars collide, and their seals break. All their air would escape into the tube, and any passengers that survived the impact would suffocate in a fairly gruesome Total-Recall-like manner.
The safety section of their FAQ doesn't even address this.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Read the thread before you post...
They are talking about the fact that there will be SOME gas in the tube, not much, but it will be there.
Aerospace engineers have been doing this kind of problem in the lab for years, we call them shock tubes, you can also check google.
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
That's what people said when the first steam trains started to pick up speed.
The fact is, speed doesn't kill, acceleration kills. Especially sudden deceleration. That's why the Apollo astronauts were able to reach the Moon in just a matter of days. By going very fast.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
They have no intention of building anything, just make money for their shareholders from tha patents. And this encourages innovation? All it does is put a roadblock against someone who really wants to build it.
From their site ("company summary" page)
Our aim is to generate returns for our shareholders by acting now to acquire control of important blocks of intellectual property (patents and trade secrets) in the ETT field. We currently own the patent and trade secret rights to Evacuated Tube Transport, the first practical evacuated tube transport technology. We believe that these ultra efficient and environmentally benign systems, will become key components of numerous future worldwide transport systems. ET3.COM INC. intends to take full advantage of the generic nature of this unique technology by securing the intellectual property rights on the lion's share of all specific applications, new devices, and novel systems issuing from it. Management also believes that we are well positioned to gain control of other major intellectual property by developing new patents and trade secrets through our own internal efforts and by developing patent-exploitation agreements for the patents and trade secrets belonging to others.