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Hyperloop One Says It Can Connect Helsinki To Stockholm In Under 30 Minutes (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via The Verge: Hyperloop One released a new study today that says a hyperloop connecting Stockholm, Sweden, and Helsinki, Finland, could turn a 300-mile trip that would normally take 3.5 hours flying into a breezy 28-minute ride. How much would they need to accomplish this? Only $21 billion (19 billion euros) to build it. That price includes $3.3 billion (3 billion euros) for one of the world's largest marine tunnels through the Aland archipelago, a chain of islands in the Baltic Sea. But the company did say the total cost would be offset by the rise in property values and productivity as facilitated by the new, super-fast transit system. Homes built nearby would be worth more, freight shipments would arrive sooner, and workers traveling between the two cities would spend less time commuting and more time working. The study claims the Nordic Hyperloop would start generating a surplus after 10 years thanks to its economic benefits. As for where it expects to receive the money, Hyperloop One envisions a combination of public funds and private investment, with the study authors recommending capturing some of the value from increased property values. Hyperloop is expected to generate somewhere between $969 million (875 million euros) and $1.1 billion (1 billion euros) in ticket sales annually. "We've said that, generally speaking, a Hyperloop system can be built at 50 [percent] to 60 [percent] of the cost of high-speed rail because Hyperloop technology requires less intensive civil engineering, its levitated vehicles produce fewer maintenance issues and its electric propulsion occupies far less of the track than high-speed rail," the company says. "With Hyperloop, passengers glide most of the way above the track in a near-vacuum tube with little air resistance." A hyperloop between Sweden and Finland would take up to 12 years to complete. Hyperloop One conducted the first successful test of its high-speed transportation technology in the desert outside Las Vegas in May.
and it will be a Beautiful Tunnel
3.5 hrs flying? Something's wrong with the analysis. I put up with TSA in the US and can get from my garage to an airport slightly farther away than that (not enough to matter) in - tops - two hours. It doesn't take an hour and a half to pick up your bags and get to the city center, does it?
âoeA pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.â
-- Dr. Seuss, MD
The study claims the Nordic Hyperloop would start generating a surplus after 10 years thanks to its economic benefits.
So, it might pay for itself after 30 years (taking into account the construction will be late and over budget). And that's if nothing goes terribly wrong with the 300 mile vacuum tube with the 650 mph, multi-ton projectile hurtling through it.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
... Oh, wait. They're talking about the time the trip will take after the project is completed.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
FTS: "...workers traveling between the two cities would spend less time commuting and more time working."
If I have a chance to cut my commute time significantly, why would I spend the extra time working instead of with family and friends, or on hobbies or other leisure activities? Hell, even when I had a job in which I worked overtime without pay just because what I was working on was interesting, any time saved off my commute wouldn't have been donated to the company.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Forget about the hyperbole of the 500km rail line in Scandinavia. Just focus on that last sentence:
Hyperloop One conducted the first successful test of its high-speed transportation technology in the desert outside Las Vegas in May.
Whatever that was in May, it was not a "successful test of its high-speed transportation technology" in the sense of any kind of working prototype. Perhaps they successfully tested the ball bearings intended for use in part of the system. Maybe they were testing a design for part of the brake system. Maybe it was a battery prototype. Whatever it was, it was one very small piece of a very large and complicated system. There was no tube, no vacuum, no elevated rail, no proof of concept for anything that really marks the hyperloop.
It will not take 12 years to build the Sweden-Finland connector. It will take 12 years to finish designing and testing the concept so that we can confidently finance a 500km experiment.
I'm personally interested in the Hyperloop. I'd like to see it progress. But to succeed, we have to proceed with reason, grounded in reality. Hyperbolic claims of accomplishment won't help.
There is nothing special about being able to make a tube for rapid travel. This is 1950s technology.
The question is would that actually be economically viable, probably not until we have more automated labor options is the likely answer.
We can build one for fun, but the real use of something like this would be UNDERGROUND, not above ground and thus building it would take epic amounts of oney at today's labor rates.
Using current engineering and labor it will not be practical to use a model like this in most places. You will never get the zoning for a super high speed tunnel train. It's hard enough to zoning for normal trains. It costs billions of dollars to make just short loops in the US.
Connecting cities will not be that useful really, not for the cost. You need robotic labor to make dreams like this work... or some other form of dit cheap labor. You won't get enough transit between cities to justify such an expense and UPKEEP. The need to automate transit WITHIN the city, not outside it. 60-80% of ppl live in and right around cities. Only a tiny percentage of ppl travel from city to city regularly.
Obviously hyperloop is not really gong to compete against airplanes in MOST applications since airports are cheap and easy to build vs complex loops/tracks, so you have a pretty specific condition where this would make sense at high installation costs.
Hyperlook will make sense when we have automated mining and digging technology and we can afford to just mindlessly build stuff. For now we have to focus on building stuff that has a reasonable return. Hyperloop would almost certainly not be profitable or practical to scale up. Honestly every sci fi author has thought up the hyperloop. It's a very old idea and it's nice someone wants to try to actually do it, but that doesn't mean it's anywhere near commercially viable.
Elon is on the right track with robots that do chores. That is a HUGE super profitable market to get in early. If Elon can brand quality robots first, he'll make more money doing that then all his companies combined and taken out 100 years. Retail robots = trillion dollar market and being the first major successful brand would be a big deal. It would put Elon on top of a market with much more profit potential than MS or Apple. That doesn't mean he'd keep it, but it's a good place to be... if only for awhile.
It should be a lot easier to program robots if you have a human programming cloud to teach them. They will learn best how to do what people want if we have a people cloud. So it's ideal to get learning robots into homes where they can interact with human behavior on a regular basis that way developers can start to understand that data. Even just a Reminder Bot could be a bililon dollar invention if done well.
30 minutes in the tube -- after a couple of hours waiting in line for the cavity search security check.
But all they have only shown us a small maglev carriage so far. Try to at least improve over the maglev Shinkansen, which can demo a real train over a real track of some distance, please.
There's only one "loop" so any one mishap shuts the system down. The recovery from such a failure is NOT TRIVIAL. This is a great IDEA, but is it even nearly viable as proposed, right now?
1. Takes 12 years (estimated) to build the thing. By the time it's available for public use, its design is likely obsolete. The newer designs take precedence in investment and this system will die mid-construction.
2. It takes 30 years for RoI (return of investment). During that time (after 12 years of construction), we'd probably be hovering above ground with our own vehicles called HoverCraft using autopilot. We wouldn't give a damn about the loop.
Anything else I missed?
In other words, we want to do this and get rich of this, but in order to do it we are going to build near your homes and then tell you that your property value went up and have the state tax you more (giving that money to us). Even if you never use the damn thing and just want to live in your home without selling it, you owe us tax money so that we can pay ourselves a lot for this unproven fiasco.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
The link goes to a presentation, which is quite light on detail...
...the company did say the total cost would be offset by the rise in property values... Homes built nearby would be worth more
Property values will only rise in the immediate vicinity of the station. Properties further away may also rise in value, but it depends on accessibility - and that will almost certainly require additional transport infrastructure, which is a cost on the city.
...freight shipments would arrive sooner...
Freight and people on the same line? Pretty sure Amtrak does that in the US, and it doesn't work out very well.
...workers traveling between the two cities would spend less time commuting and more time working.
Yeah, whatever.
"We've said that, generally speaking, a Hyperloop system can be built at 50 [percent] to 60 [percent] of the cost of high-speed rail because Hyperloop technology requires less intensive civil engineering, its levitated vehicles produce fewer maintenance issues and its electric propulsion occupies far less of the track than high-speed rail," the company says
Spoken like someone who's never built anything.
I suspect it will take more than 30 minutes to connect Stockholm and Helsinki, once its connected i'm sure the trip will be quick.
...in which case we may finally verify what happens when a near sonic hyperloop car encounters a sonic flow of atmosphere going the opposite direction.
Hilarity ensues.
Anything is air droppable at least once.
Will this loopy loop idea work? Without spreading people a couple of mm thick across the pavement?
This is assuming, of course, that Helsinki and Stockholm *want* to be connected.
Higher property values, that is also higher property cost, benefits only a few: those who own a lot of property to sell. It does not benefit most people, who only buy the property they have for its utility - their house, their company office, etc. They just have to spend more of their money on something they need anyway.
You should not seek to "increase property values" and "increased property values" as a reason to do something is "to make a few people richer".
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
We got the first traffic lights in Helsinki at 1951. That was almost 40 years later than the first electric ones in the US. Gas based traffic lights were first introduced in the UK at 1868, but lasted only two month before gas explosion took them out with a couple of policemen. Traffic innovations happen usually slowly, for a good reason. Nevertheless, it would be fun to travel to Stockholm within the same time it takes to travel to the Helsinki center using a bus from 15 km away.
The problem with a roller coaster - which is what a high speed train is - is the lateral accellerations due to small imperfections in the rail/pipe that can bruise and injure the passengers.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I thought Sweden had decent rail infrastructure with the medium speed rail x-2000 train. It's better than America's rail at least.
Have any of these Silicon Valley people built actual an railway before? High speed rail track is effectively a bunch of gravel, a lot of track ties, and 2 precise, strong pieces of steel, and an overhead wire. It sounds cheap to build. In theory. High speed rail can work because it can have a high volume of people: hundreds of thousands of people a day, but tens of thousands will generally suffice. What is the capacity of this hyperloop?
Technology like that takes 20-50 year to mature from its "first successful test". That is a historic fact and things have not changed in that regards. What you find however today is a lot of failed technologies where people tried to cut that time short. It does not work.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
commercial flight time between HEL and ARN is about one hour.. not even close to the 3.5 hours claimed in tfs. http://info.flightmapper.net/r...
19 billion euros (probably closer to 30b when it's all done.. if it works) to save a half hour.
3.5H! are they flying via fscing Rome or something ?
I wonder how many people actually commute between Helsinki and Stockholm. If I had to guess, I would say less than 100. Also, people travel between these cities mainly because they like to do stuff on the boats (also tax free shopping). Like at least half the people never even leave the boat..
300 miles in 3.5 hours? That's some boat! In reality the current ferry between the cities takes about 18 hours.
see raileurope
monorail...Monorail...MONORAIL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Sure you have a bit of time to travel from stockholm center to arlanda and then from airport in finland to center of helsinki..
But a few issues with that..
- Many people traveling to/from arlanda don't live in stockholm but take the train straight to arlanda... Some do take arlanda express but that one is quite fast too. (not sure how it looks on the Finnish side..)
- Security/check-in in Arlanda is usually quite fast.. Usually takes me 15-20 minutes from dropping of my bags until being thru security.
- Flight-time between Arlanda and Helsinki is 1 hour..
- Most people today only bring hand luggage due to having to pay for checked in luggage.
So i would say that a trip between stockholm and helsinki would take around:
- 30 minutes from stockholm center to arlanda with arlanda express.
- 40 minutes before flight departs go thru security.
- 1 hour flight-time
- 10 minutes to get out of the airport to the train/taxi (?)
- 30 minutes to get to city-center of helsinki..
== 2:50h
With hyperloop, since they will never have that in the city-center, and you still have to account for boarding etc..
- 30 minutes to get to the hyperloop terminal.
- 15 minutes to get on the hyperloop.
- 30 minutes for the hyperloop.
- 15 minutes to exit the terminal (?)
- 30 minutes to get to helsinki city-center.
== 2h.
so sure.. 50 minutes difference..
This story was posted on Slashdot when Stockholm and Helsinki were asleep. It is morning here now so not many posts yet..
I don't see how it would be possible to build the tunnel for only 3.3 billion Euros, when a much shorter road or railway tunnel inside Stockholm could easily cost more than that amount. There is not a straight route through the sea from Stockholm towards Finland. Shipping lanes are already squiggly route through the archipelago where there are several nature-preserves. Either straight or following the shipping lanes, the multi-decade construction project of a Hyperloop would be very disruptive both to shipping, to nature and to the people living in the archipelago. It would likely hurt the local, if not national economy, disturb people's lives and would certainly not help property values in the affected areas.
Increased property values... that could only be a short-term benefit, to some and only if would come at no cost, and if the properties are not already overvalued.
There is a housing shortage in Stockholm and residential property values are already through the roof. They were considered high a decade ago already and conditions are not expected to change very quickly. There is a lending bubble. Increased property values is not what we need.
The most common way to travel between Stockholm and Helsinki is not by plane, but on a overnight ferry. And these already go from city-centre to city-centre. There are a couple of competing companies providing ferry service, with competition working to keep prices down.
You can bring a car on the ferry. Could you bring a car on the Hyperloop? The ferries provide dining, bars, nightclubs and accommodation at several price-points on the same ferry.
I don't see any place in the already congested city centre where a Hyperloop station could be established. There is already very expensive, deep tunnel being constructed only for commuter trains because of congestion in surface traffic between north and south.
The only place for a Hyperloop terminus would therefore have to be outside the city, with added travel time to and from the Hyperloop. And then how would that be better than the plane or the ferry?
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
and workers traveling between the two cities would spend less time commuting and more time working
All one of them? That must be daily savings of millions of dollars easily.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Not *quite* as fast, but the Shanghai maglev manages over 300mph so that gets the journey down to an hour.
In addition, you have much greater capacity and a more established platform.
From a military viewpoint this Hyperloop tunnel is trash. Sweden and Finland are allied when it comes to national defense, and the most distinguished potential attacker is Russia. Such a tunnel across the two countries in the Baltic Sea could easily be sabotage by a Kaliningrad military naval vessel. And I expect them to carry out such an attack if there ever is a major conflict in the area. Troops and military gear could quickly be shipped to and from Finland from Sweden by use of the tunnel and this is makes the tunnel a big attack goal of any adversary.
What does payback even mean when bond rates are almost zero, and even negative in some countries? You could pay people with shovels to level every hill and valley between the two cities, and provided cars saved a non-zero amount of petrol over the journey it would be an economical investment.
I'm not saying this hyperloop thing is the best thing to do, but right now any sort of infrastructure investment is better than having hordes of unemployed Europeans sitting around twiddling their thumbs because everyone in Northern Europe is fixated on collecting surpluses of fiat currency.
Why endure neighbors dogs and lawn mowers as well as dull daily transportation when you can be free like a Gypsy with mobile Internet?
30 minutes does not seem like enough time to get sufficiently drunk. Or are there other reasons people go to Finland?
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
kawasaki recently released a bike that can do pretty much the same.
I sure hope their engineers know what the temperatures can drop to up here in the north.
Yeah, the writers of the article are clueless. It does not take 3.5 hours to fly from HKI to STO.
A direct commercial flight from BRUSSELS to HELSINKI takes 2.5h. I know this from experience. The writers obviously have not done their research, as Stockholm is less than half the distance when compared to Brussels.
Get your numbers right hyperloop 1, or GTFO!
As not all Finns are yet forcibly raised in Swedish-speaking families so that they would have the correct attitudes towards the Swedish language, I can see the Ålanders seeing this as an existential threat to their idyllic Swedish-speaking islands: They would perhaps have to come into contact with Finnish-speakers from the mainland.
There need to at least be checks that you are not allowed to enter the Hyperloop without taking a language test to ensure fluency, and penalties for speaking Finnish when in transit across the islands...
If all the facts are as truthful as the ones that are obviously false, this whole presentation is a fraud and real fraud in the legal sense. Dear KPMG are all your fundraising campaigns of this caliber or have you just recently started hiring scam artists from the MLM sector?
Dammit, then you got even less time to find an excuse to go there.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I have questions about the claims here. Just how many workers commute this way? I've heard of some bad commutes in Japan and California, but the current ferry boat or plane options for Helsinki-Stockholm don't seem to be likely to have a lot of people who regularly do that. I have to ask - Couldn't some kind of bullet train maybe do this job for a lot less money? I've been to Taiwan and within the past decade they put in a fast train that goes between Taipei, the capital in the north, and Kaohsiung, the 2nd biggest city which is in the far south of Taiwan. The normal speed train or driving a car took about 6 hours to go between the cities. The fast train (not really a bullet train as it's not quite that fast) now does it in about 2 to 2.5 hours. I've ridden on this route and it's nice and comfortable. The domestic airlines complained bitterly when the fast train system was built as they knew that almost nobody would choose to fly between Taipei and Kaohsiung once the train opened, but they've had to accept it. Business people say it makes it possible to go to Taipei for meetings and they can go by train for less money and less time than by plane. Some of the trains make stops at various cities between Taipei and Kaohsiung, making it a very convenient and fast way to travel in Taiwan. I am not sure that it raised property values any but the service is very popular. Maybe something like this that gets a fast train to do the Helsinki-Stockholm run in 2 to 2.5 hours would be a better approach than the Hyperloop.
Am I the only one who thinks that the Hyperloop PR is getting a bit ahead of their actual potential?
Is it too much to ask to see a short section of Hyperloop actually built before talking about building a long section underground or the ocean?
As a child, I thought that those pneumatic tubes in the supermarket were the most awesome thing ever. (I still think that they are really cool!) And I think the hyperloop is a fantastic idea, but I would like to see concerns credibly addressed: (1) how will shifts in the tube alignment due to ground motion be addressed, (2) how will you pull a vacuum over a 1000-mile length of tubing, (3) what will it really feel like to be confined in a small windowless tube?, (4) instabilities are a big problem with aerodynamics - how much will the passenger be shaken around? (5) If there is a problem during transportation and the passenger-section of the tube gets stuck and loses pressure, the passengers will die in a vacuum right? (I know this is similar to an airplane failing, but dying underground, strapped into a dark tube seems even more unpleasant!)
My opinion is that the Hyperloop people are really doing their concept a disservice by not verifying that this concept will actually yield something usable for people at a small scale (either a short full-scale length or a sub-scale model) before proposing a huge investor-driven concept. It makes it seem like more of a boondoggle than an actual engineering concept.
Flying Stockholm to Helsinki takes 50-60 minutes, about an hour. I wonder how they got the 3.5 hour figure? Maybe if you fly to Copenhagen first, then to Helsinki.
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could turn a 300-mile trip that would normally take 3.5 hours flying into a breezy 28-minute ride
Japan's SCMaglev clocked a speed record of 375 mph in 2015. So that same 3.5 hour flight can be turned into a 1 hour trip. Yes, 28 minutes is better, but economically speaking, a nation could take the 1 hour trip instead with proven technology that already exists.
Sooner or later, maglev trains will achieve speeds over 500 mph. They'll never break the sound barrier (which is Hyperloop's promise), but, economically, they do not have to. One cannot justify the expense, at this time, to create a hyperloop to make a mere 300-mile trip in 30 minutes.
This is also why I wonder the economic sense of building one between Los Angeles and the Valley instead of building a "bullet" train that could make the trip in 1 hour. A hyperloop makes sense for transcontinental travel, to connect distances of over 1,000 miles, and in some cases, to connect sufficiently distant end-points in a country (say, making a 2k-mile trip connecting Kyushu with Hokkaido.)
Don't get me wrong. I like the idea of a hyperloop. We should push our technological capabilities. But we should also see what things make economic sense. I do not see the Hyperloop making sense for a 300-mile trip.
Obviously whoever said that this would be simpler and easier to maintain than modern high speed rail is a fucking idiot. You're trying to build a 1,000 mile long vacuum tube for the train to travel through. So in addition to having to maintain a highspeed train, you also have to maintain a massive vacuum system. Not bloody likely.
Europe has pretty good transit.
Its the United States that needs hyperloops, flying sucks (its quicker to drive from Seattle to Portland than fly thanks to how long it takes for an airport to check you in and get you onto a plane down the runway), and its a big country.
The interstate system is pretty amazing, but boring as hell to drive on, and tiring when everyone else seems to be in a impatient hurry to zoom by. I like to just cruise a long, even on a long trip speeding along saves you a few minutes, just pointless.
How do you ISIS looks at this?
Being able to move their people across Europe in minutes without anyone batting an eye?
I bet they're celebrating this.
A hyperloop on the east coast would be very popular I would think.
The cabin gets a leak and looses all it's atmosphere to the tube.
Instead dead people
"...a 300-mile trip that would normally take 3.5 hours flying..."
Even assuming 1/2 hour for take off and landing b.s., that's 100 mph. Are there any fix-winged aircraft that can even fly that slowly, or are they quoting the flight time of a helicopter? Or, perhaps an unladen African swallow?