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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 apparently they can build it in under 30 minutes!
And we're gonna make Norway pay for it!
Yes, in a lot of cities it takes that long. But then there's also the question of what you're going to do with your car when you get to that airport or city center.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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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.
Nobody has told me why it is going to be built. Considering the sorry state of rail infrastructure in Sweden it's not really going to provide much benefits.
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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?
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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.
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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).
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.
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.
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.
More than anything, track conditions. You can run cargo over crap tracks that would piss off the passengers. Just ask anyone who ever made the mistake of riding AmTrack.
Also cargo can tolerate crappy track as it's generally time insensitive, or it would be shipped by another mode.
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