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The Smog To Fog Challenge: Settling the High-Speed Rail vs. Hyperloop Debate
waderoush writes "Elon Musk thinks California should kill its $68 billion high-speed rail project and build his $7.5 billion Hyperloop instead. It's a false choice. We should pursue all promising new options for efficient mass transit, and let the chips fall where they may; if it turns out after a few years that Musk's system is truly faster and cheaper, there will still be time to pull the plug on high-speed rail. But why not make things interesting? Today Xconomy proposes a competition in the grand tradition of the Longitude Prize, the Orteig Prize, and the X Prizes: the $10 billion Smog to Fog Challenge. The money, to be donated by big corporations, would go to the first organization that delivers a live human from Los Angeles to San Francisco, over a fixed ground route, in 3 hours or less. Such a prize would incentivize both publicly and privately funded innovation in high-speed transit — and show that we haven't lost the will to think big."
What is the obsession with flinging your sack of water down a track at 300 miles per hour. In a world of diminishing cheap energy, why travel fast? You know, in many cities, the tram systems carried more people everyday than most cities now transport people in cars into the city from the suburbs.
Ding Ding!!
"conventional" high-speed rail is a proven concept in use today in many non-North American countries. Musk's idea, while based on things that are already being studies, contains a lot of unproven technology.
Even if we could do the necessary R&D in a *reasonable* amount of time, the 7+ billion price-tag is way too low.
It's a pipe dream - er, tube dream - to think this is a practical transportation solution right now or even in the near future.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Does that three hours include the TSA screening process?
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
California's high speed rail was originally going to cost $33 billion. (2008's Proposition 1A was a $10 billion bond).
5 years later, the estimate is $68 billion and it won't actually be high speed.
between hyperloop and high speed rail is a false race. YES we need fast trains to move people. What we need MORE is an electrified rail grid to move our stuff around. Most trains run off diesel. The age of cheap oil has been over for quite a while now. We need to shift our infrastructure away from fossil fuels, sector by sector. Moving ALL mass transport (cargo or live, vacuum tube or rail) to electric is of paramount importance, and it needs to start happening now, this way when oil started getting really expensive and scarce in the coming decades, we will be able to transport food and goods. What I think we should see is someone haul 100 boxcars of food from California's central valley to New York City using ONLY electrical engines, no diesel. That would be a landmark moment in history and a real beacon of hope for a future to technical civilisation.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Just build teleporters! By the time they get this hyperloop thing running in like 2020 someone will have invented teleporters and then their business model collapses.
As a test, it might be better to try this out on the LA to Las Vegas route.
This is shorter and land acquisition costs across the desert would be very low.
The route today is currently very heavily traveled so there would be a good market for passengers.
The casinos would love it and would probably fund it.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
They are both a waste of money.
It's not a fair test. Railroads could deliver that speed today if not for government regulation. Even today's high speed rail projects only get rail travel speeds up to what was normal 100 years ago. Now, if you remove all of the restrictions imposed by the government facing railroad then you level the playing field. In addition, it shouldn't be about getting 1 person there in 3 hours. What is more efficient, moving 1 or a small group of people from point a to point b in x amount of time or moving a large group of people from point a to point b?
The Concorde was very good at moving a small group of people from point a to b at a high speed, but it wasn't economically sustainable. The slower jumbo jets, because they could carry more passengers were actually more efficient. So, if your goal is to get a single person from point a to be as fast as you can, then neither high speed rail nor hyperloop are the way to go. Both would be a collosal waste of resources.
OTOH, if your goal is to move the most number of people from point a to b in a reasonably fixed period of time, then that is a different problem and would probably call for a different solution.
Basically, before throwing money at a problem, you should be sure you have defined the problem you want solved. Otherwise, you might just pay a lot of money for a solution that you don't really need.
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Big-setback-for-California-high-speed-rail-project-4739710.php
"the agency overseeing the bullet train failed to comply with the financial and environmental promises made to voters when they approved initial funding for the project five years ago."
This is true.
Nothing beats actual human interaction.
Telecommuting is such a failure.
Nobody wants their human interaction cheapened. If you ever want to build any kind of relationship (sales, groups, fucking, etc..), you actually have to meet people in real life.
Telling someone you want to telecommute is telling someone you aren't worth their time to do something expensive for them
Telecommuting is for people that want to cheapen relationships.
Also, 100% of the population needs to build relationships. It's not a salesman-only thing. You have to build relationships with your boss, your clients, your family, your friends, your neighbors, your government representatives, etc. basically anyone you want to do you good, you need to do good for them.
Only libertarian losers that believe in "freedom" think life shouldn't be about building relationships and think of life as for themselves. Nothing could be further from the truth. You have to kiss ass to those in power if you want power back.
You can find these sorts of self-absorbed losers on computer sites like Slashdot and Reddit. There is a reason geeks are considered awful people.
"conventional" high-speed rail is a proven concept in use today in many non-North American countries.
I have used high speed rail in Europe, including Germany.
It's nice but usually slower than planes.
The hyperloop has the chance to be significantly better than airplane travel, at a reduced environmental (and noise) impact compared to a train.
I am totally against the California rail project because even the current high estimates are probably 5x lower than actual cost. But if we build the hyperloop, we advance all kinds of technology and leapfrog the state of the art in ground travel.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you waste money to procure a handshake, you shouldnt be in business.
If you don't understand the true value of a real face to face handshake is at times immeasurable, you DEFINITELY should not be in business.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Google Maps reports LA-->SF at 382 mi, 5 hours 35 minutes.
He said "if it were not for CHP, I could make it in five every time".
Shaving 35 minutes off a five hour trip is really easy if you drive reasonably (i.e. non-dangerously) fast.
In fact pretty much all the time I am somewhere five-ten minutes per hour faster than the Google estimate.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Actually one of the benefits of the Hyperloop idea is that it's designed to follow the existing government-owned highway right-of-way except for in a very few places where its path winds too much to allow for the high pod speeds. This is actually an advantage shared by most elevated transport systems - since it's relatively easy to span 100 yards or more between pylons there is minimal impact at ground level which radically reduces both land acquisition and preparation costs, as well as radically reducing environmental impact in sensitive areas and the difficulty of passing through already-developed areas. A farmer is extremely unlikely to be willing to sell a strip of land to build a road that splits his farm in two, but might be far more receptive to selling a few small plots of land to build pylons on and a right-of-way through his airspace. Especially for something like the Hyperloop where the near-vacuum tube and air-bearings should make passing pods fairly quiet and invisible
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
In this debate, people have forgotten an important point that Musk made early on: In being solar powered, the system is expected to yield enough excess electricity to make it worth contributing to the grid. I'm not going to get into the debate itself, but for those of you tossing the ball back and forth, you should consider this point in your arguments, whether you think that particular claim is feasible or not.
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The largest issue I have with the hyperloop proposal is its rather pitiful capacity. At the highest rate proposed, with one cart every 30 seconds it still only transports ~3600 PAX/hr, which is about on par with a 3 lane highway and that is before mixing in the car carriers.
Musk writes in his proposal: "Assuming an average departure time of 2 minutes between capsules, a minimum of 28 passengers per capsule are required to meet 840 passengers per hour." So it's even worse than 3600PAX/hr.
Compare current flight capacity. At peak, there are 5 flights an hour from SF to LA. The most common plane on that run is a Boeing 737 with 137 seats, for 685 seats/hour. So the Hyperloop has more capacity than the current aircraft. Comparing with other tunnel systems, Eurotunnel moves about 30 trains per hour, and their trains are 400 meters long with a seating capacity of 750 on the passenger-only Eurostar trains. Hyperloop is way below those levels.
Overcapacity is a big issue for US high speed rail. It's not clear there's a market for far more passenger transport between LA and SF than is currently available.
Even at the low rate, there's a Hyperloop capsule every 2 minutes. It's not clear you could reduce that interval by much. The capsules to be at least one emergency stop distance apart, plus a safety margin. Also, the stations will need multiple tracks and airlocks, so that loading and airlock pump-down time can be overlapped for multiple trains. The system will definitely need low-speed switches (not too hard) and maybe high-speed switches (big, but buildable). Musk oversimplifies those issues.
It's amusing that the proposed location of the "San Francisco" station (p. 51) is not in or near San Francisco. It's near Musk's Tesla plant in the East Bay.
My main issue with the tube technology is that all the articles seem to assume that the tube will be straight. In the real world there are very few straight lines. Between any two distant points there will be mountains, valleys, cities, rivers, hills, houses, etc. The tube will not be straight unless you want to build it underground all the way then it becomes very expensive. Even underground there will be issues with valleys where the tube may have to be suspended. To me it is a given that the tube will have to have curves in it which brings me to the math of curves.
The acceleration of an object moving along a curve is a= v^2/r or r = v^2/a. If the object is moving at 600kph and we want to keep the acceleration to 1/2G at most the radius would be 167^2/4.9 = 5.7 km. That would mean to alter course by 45 degrees it would take 9kms. That is a very long curve. It is even worse in that the curve would have to have an in run and an out run to make the transition manageable. Remember that these curves are not just left and right. If one goes over the brow of a hill negative G's could be an issue. The human body can not handle feeling lighter very well. people get sick pretty fast.
To keep these smooth curves there will be very few places where the tube will be sitting on solid ground. Much of the time it will be under ground or suspended in the air. Both of those make construction and maintenance very expensive.
And all these straw men libertarians? Can't say that I really care what you think there. One can study actual libertarian philosophy, discussion and such. What you claim just isn't true.
For example, let's consider your second to last sentence.
Libertarianism is for people that doesn't know that it's ok to sacrifice a pawn (their taxes) to save the king (their health care), for example. They don't know that government is a giant Costco that actually benefits them in the long-run, because they see the incremental failure that is them losing tax dollars. Libertarianism really is about the "me first, then others" philosophy. It is intrinsic to their failure.
So here, there's some naive notion that government is a giant store where you get more out than you put in. Ignoring that this analogy is so broken as to be unrecognizable, where's the demonstration that you will get more out than you put in?
Last I checked the US government together with the assistance of about every developed world government has the capability to spy on every phone or internet connection in a vast part of the world. I don't want that in my shopping cart. That's what your Costco delivers. You may not have noticed, but libertarians tend to be very paranoid about this sort of thing. And I think there's great reason to be fearful of what the governments of the world will do with this power.
Then there's the problem of governments not following the rules. A lot of people get that it's bad when businesses don't follow the laws and aren't punished for it. But who's supposed to be enforcing those laws? It's not the libertarians screwing this one up, but the same government providing all those Costco benefits.
Bottom line is the same government which you trust to hold your hand and wipe your ass, you wouldn't trust with business regulation, starting wars, or tapping phone lines. You're more of a problem to yourself than libertarians ever could be.
You are looking at it in the wrong terms. The majority of individuals get more out than they put in. Those who don't are not greatly harmed because they are still rich. In fact those who get less monetary value out for their own personal use still benefit from living in a relatively content and healthy society.
You, like many people, made the mistake of trying to put a dollar value on everything. You know the price of everything and the value of nothing, as we like to say.
There is also the assumption that having private companies provide services at the request of individuals would be more efficient than having the government doing it. Apart from the difficulty of organizing certain services there is no evidence that this method would be any better. Do you have any evidence?
yet liberals couldn't give a damn about society as a whole, so long as money is being transferred from the affluent to the less affluent.
It's not about transferring wealth. It's about stopping theft.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC