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Hyperloop One Technology Tested Successfully In Nevada Desert
Dave Knott quotes a report from CBC.ca: Hyperloop One (formerly known as Hyperloop Technologies) conducted a successful test of its high speed transportation technology Wednesday in the desert outside Las Vegas. The seconds-long, outdoor demonstration featured what appeared to be a blip of metal gliding across a small track before disappearing into a cloud against the desert landscape. A fully operational hyperloop would whisk passengers and cargo in pods through a low pressure tube at speeds of up to 1,207 kph (750 mph). Maglev technology would levitate the pods to reduce friction in the city-to-city system, which would be fully autonomous and electric powered. A day earlier, the company had announced the closing of $80 million in financing and said it plans to conduct a full system test before the end of the year.
I'd be curious to know(I'm not doing doubt-in-the-form-of-a-question, I honestly don't know) how much freight goes by truck rather than by rail because of deficiencies in the rail network;
I've been a supply chain and logistics guy for most of my career. The answer is not much but it depends on what you want to do.
First of all, you can never get rid of the truck. The problem with trains, ships and the Hyperloop is they're lines to single points, but the freight is only useful at the point where it needs to go IE a store or warehouse or factory. You will never have a Hyperloop station at every store or warehouse or factory, so you always need a truck to deliver from the station to the destination point; this is referred to as drayage.
AIr freight is not an option. It's 100 times more expensive per lb than any other method and it's used only for specialty stuff. 98% of the worlds' goods move via containers and no plane can handle a container at all. So we'll just take the plane out.
Truck across country is beneficial because you can move a whole container fast; a truck driving from the East Coast to the west coast with a 2 man team (where one sleeps while the other drives) can move across the country in 24 to 36 hours. This is expensive, it costs around $6,000 to $10,000 per container and only used in "rush" jobs.
Rail has time constraints because you have to stick to the train schedules, adn the trains may make several stops. If time is not a factor this is ideal, as it costs around $1,500 to move a container via rail and can take about 1 to 2 weeks depending on when you can get rail booked.
Ship is best. If you're in the Midwest and shipping to the East coast, you're near the Mississippi River system and you can put a container on a barge and float it all the way to Maine if you want. It takes about 2 weeks but the cost is about $300. This is not really an option for West Coast to East Coast or back shipping because Central America is in the way, and the Panama Canal is expensive unless it's on a ship that can handle 2,000 to 5,000 containers.
The cheapest is by water, always. It's around 10% of the cost of any other form of freight, adn the bigger the ship, the lower the cost. The Panama Canal is mainly used for international freight, goods from Asia being sold in the US, but you can only get a 5,000 container ship through the Canal whereas the biggest ships are 18,000, so some freight is offloaded on the West coast and sent via rail East. All that is changing with the Canal expansion which can now take 12,000 container ships, so there is going to be a reduction in freight moving via land already.
But the truck will never go away. Rail, water, or Hyperloop, freight has to go to a station, and then it has to get from the station to it's destination. That requires a truck, period. Hyperloop will not deliver to every store or every warehouse in the world. This is called drayage and it's expensive, drayage runs around $300 to $500 per truck depending on size and what you're carrying. So Hyperloop for moving freight is actually competing iwth water transport via the canal and still has the trucks for the final point delivery, and quite frankly I don't see how they get there at all.
Constant in exponent is called polynomial (and does not grow exponentially). Both your examples have time in the exponent (not the base) and does grow exponentially. Almost everything you wrote is wrong.