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.

Comments

A likely story

[penguinoid]

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.

Hyperbole

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Hyperbole

[C4st13v4n14]

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.

This. I'm also very interested in the hyperloop and would like to see it become a reality. But this article....

How did they calculate a flight duration of 3.5 hours? And the distance? It's a 400 km (250 mi) journey by air. Flight duration is less than an hour (around 50 minutes depending on the wind). All of this you can easily look up. From the PDF, it looks to me as though the hyperloops will have several stops between Stockholm and Helsinki. That adds to the time. And what sort of ticket prices are we looking at? A last-minute flight leaving now with SAS costs around 70-100 USD (to put it simply as the Finns have the Euro and Swedes have the Swedish krona). Booking ahead of time can cost 50 USD and much less when there are sales and deals. Your average person making this journey will be one who probably makes it often and travels light, e.g. for business or commuting for work so the time required to drop off and pick up luggage doesn't need to be factored in. Checking in on the flight is usually done online or via an app with electronic boarding pass. Boarding starts around 20 min before departure, which is when they say you absolutely need to be at the gate by. Security (another topic Slashdotters love) in Sweden and Finland is generally more professional, respectful and streamlined than what you'd find in the US and thus doesn't take very long (but don't take my word for it, go and experience it for yourself). So let's say you arrive at the airport 30 min ahead of departure and the flight is 60 minutes, then we're talking an hour and a half for the journey at a cost of about 50 USD. That's not bad all things considered in the wide world of air travel. Note that I purposely did not factor in transportation to and from the airports because where the actual hyperloops stations will be is still a huge unknown.

Re:Is it that bad?

[Anonymous Coward]

The rail infrastructure is not maintained. The missing money is around €3 million and causes most trains to be delayed. That is the cost to fix the current state of (medium-speed) rail in Sweden (high-speed rail is not a viable option with such a low population). It is not considered cost-efficient to fix it and the government cannot find funding for it. Why we would raise €20 million for connecting Stockholm and Helsingfors is beyond me. The project to enhance the rail between Stockholm and Linköping which is deemed the most cost-effective is a project that has been planned since the 1980s and costs and estimated €2 million. So 30 years for a good, cost-effective €2 million investment. The hyperloop would cost 30 times more per year and take longer to recover the cost.

There are 644k people working in Stockholm. €19 billion is €30k per person living in the region, which is a terribly expensive investment in order to connect 2 cities (flying does not take the 3.5 hours listed in the article).

The Öresund bridge is the largest infrastructure project in Sweden to date. The €4 billion cost was shared with Denmark and the benefits to the population much greater than a hyperloop would be.

That being said, it seems to also include more interesting lines like Stockholm-ARN or Stockholm-Uppsala in a few minutes of travel which is also much cheaper to build. The problem is that the average expected revenue (ticket price) is €18 for Sweden. The normal trip would be Stockholm-ARN, a trip that they expect 22 million passangers take per year (Arlanda airport has only 20 million passengers per year, and only a few of them today take the high-speed 20-minute rail; a number that would be reduced if you could take a hyperloop to Helsinki and take the plane from their airport to Asia instead of transferring).