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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 we're gonna make Norway pay for it!
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.