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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."
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.
Indeed, in a world of increasing teleconferencing and telecommuting, you'd think the attraction of high-speed travel would be less pressing with each year that goes by.
I'm not saying that the human race is going to end up as a race of hermits plugged into virtual reality 24/7 and never leaving their homes like some science-fiction envisions, but at some point the amount of business travellers that these schemes depend on is going to fall low enough that it won't seem worthwhile.
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?
Because at the end of the day, human beings are social creatures where a handshake in person still means something in business.
Life is not for the lazy.
Especially California's high speed plan, which, at this point, is just a pay off to special interests and unions. It's neither going to be "high speed" nor actually in the cities that it is supposedly to linking. Basically, we're going to pay 68 billion dollars for a regular train system that is going to be slower and less convenient than just about anything else available now.
Yes, the actual high speed rail technology is a concept that's been done before - however, stomping over all of that privately owned land between LA and SF is a political concept that's completely infeasible at this point in time.
Although Elon Musk is using a bunch of existing technology in new ways, his plan is politically feasible - and it's not like we would just start building the Hyperloop without doing a proof-of-concept first. If it turns out that the idea doesn't scale, we'd do something else.
Indeed, in a world of increasing teleconferencing and telecommuting, you'd think the attraction of high-speed travel would be less pressing with each year that goes by.
Since 1993, the number of journeys by rail has gone up in the UK every year except 2008.
Better teleconferencing and better journey times means more business happens, which more than compensates for the people who no longer need to travel. A manufacturer likes to have their suppliers nearby. The distance "nearby" increases with better railways, and the number of potential suppliers the manufacturer is aware of increases with better telecoms.
Where to start...?
- Why should I accept what the Parent is saying if the Parent shows significant ignorance of the topic?
- Why should I give the Parent's armchair ramblings more credence than the 57-page write-up of one of the most innovative and successful entrepreneurs of recent years, which was produced with the help of some of the top engineers in the field?
- Why should I accept the Parent's arbitrary declaration that "the 7+ billion price-tag is way too low"?? (Would there be cost overruns? Almost certainly, but even at 2x the price, it's still a fraction of the projected cost of the proposed HSR line.)
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
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.
Ah, but I am. People remember other people when introduced in person. It's an extrovert thing. I doubt you would understand.
Life is not for the lazy.
It's neither going to be "high speed" nor actually in the cities that it is supposedly to linking.
To be fair, Musk's proposed Hyperloop isn't city center to city center either. The rental car or shuttle service is still required. I want to know more about many passengers the loop can carry and how much it would cost to ''terminate'' the route downtown.
It is the difference between practical and efficient mass transit and a $6 billion dollar thrill ride.
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
I tried telecommuting to Disney World, but it just wasn't the same. Your assumption that the only reason people have to travel someplace is to show up for a job, let alone one that can be done with tele* is at best a grossly invalid assumption. Just limiting the scope to business use we have at a bare minimum off the top of my head: Sales people; Field Engineers; CEOs. The list of people who cannot properly do their job by telecommuting is pretty long.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
If the technology is all ready then why doesn't he build a test track out in the desert to prove it?
Because he is busy running Tesla and SpaceX. He just proposed the idea, it is not his duty to "prove it". If it is a good idea, it should be adopted regardless of who proposed it.
Personally, I think neither HS-Rail nor Hyperloop should be built. They are both decades away, and by that time we will have self-driving electric cars. It would be far cheaper to build a streamlined self-driving bus that can do 120MPH on existing road infrastructure. It could go from LA to SF in about three hours. That is "good enough" and would be about 1% of the cost. The other 99% of the price tag for rail could be used to pay down our 14 trillion dollar debt.
Furthermore, for the 0.001% of people who truly need to be somewhere that fast, let them take their corporate jet to LA. Don't sink $70 billion to support a couple of hundred of sales people. Nobody else needs to get from LA to SF at 300 mph to see their relatives.
Dude, your virtual Disneyland still sucks; how long have you been working on it now? Even Euro Disney sucks less than your virtual Disneyland.
Fix that, and we don't even have to talk about how much your virtual Grand Canyon and Virtual Arches National Park and virtual Machu Picchu and virtual Angkor Watt and virtual Great Wall of China and virtual Tunguska site suck, because if you can make your virtual Disney unsuck, you can probably fix those other things. Eventually.
Until then, I'm throwing my sack of water in a tin can headed to the physical reality of those things.
The alternative to building California's HSR is spending $38.6 to $41.0 billion on 115 new airport gates and 4 new runways, plus $119.0 to $145.5 billion building 4,295 to 4,652 new lane-miles of highway, all just to move the same number of people as $98.1 billion spent on HSR.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
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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Doing that journey in 3 hours wouldn't even be stretching modern technology. You do, however, hit diminishing returns quite quickly. At 125mph, it's about 3 hours. To get to 2 hours, you need to go up to 191mph. To get down to 1 hour, you're up at 382mph and the Hyperloop speed makes it just over half an hour. While there's an obvious advantage to half an hour over 3 hours, there's not much difference in convenience between a 2-hour and a 3-hour journey. Even getting a 3-hour trip down to 1.5 hours isn't something that many people would be willing to pay a significant premium for, especially when you have half an hour of much slower travelling to get you to the station at each end.
If California wants to spend a lot of money on their train system, they should consider improvements to the Caltrain. It's under 80 miles of track, but getting between San Jose to San Francisco on a Sunday is painful. Upgrading 80 miles of track to support even 150mph trains and replacing the archaic rolling stock would mean that most of the valley on the Caltrain would take less time than one side of San Francisco to the other on the BART (which could also benefit from some modernisation). And if you've ever driven from one side of SF to the other, then you'll see the attraction of public transport...
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BART was the only chance, and when it wasn't extended many decades ago to encircle the Bay, the situation became irreparable.
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.
Ah, yes, the instinctive urge to bash so-called "libertarians" brings out the inner cockroach. Libertarianism has nothing to do with "building relationships," but is merely a philosophy about governance. In a libertarian society, there would be an even greater need to build relationships because you couldn't use the force of the state to insure compliance or seize resources. The mugger doesn't need to build a relationship. While much is made of self-reliance, less is discussed of the new opportunities for building relationships that would exist in a libertarian society.
There's a portion of the population that is for lack of a better word, "introspective". They don't interact well with people or easily build relationships. They aren't naturally libertarians any more than anyone else. So labeling this group as "libertarian losers" just indicates ignorance on your part.