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'Elon Musk's Hyperloop Is Doomed For the Worst Reason' (bloomberg.com)
schwit1 quotes a Bloomberg column by Virginia Postrel:
What makes Musk's Hyperloop plan seem like fantasy isn't the high-tech part. Shooting passengers along at more than 700 miles per hour seems simple -- engineers pushed 200 miles-per-hour in a test this week -- compared to building a tunnel from New York to Washington. And even digging that enormously long tunnel -- twice as long as the longest currently in existence -- seems straightforward compared to navigating the necessary regulatory approvals... The eye-rolling comes less from the technical challenges than from the bureaucratic ones.
With his premature declaration, Musk is doing public debate a favor. He's reminding us of what the barriers to ambitious projects really are: not technology, not even money, but getting permission to try. "Permits harder than technology," Musk tweeted after talking with Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti about building a tunnel network. That's true for the public sector as well as the private... SpaceX and its commercial-spaceflight competitors can experiment because Congress and President Barack Obama agreed to protect them from Federal Aviation Administration standards. usk is betting that his salesmanship will have a similar effect on the ground. He's trying to get the public so excited that the political pressures to allow the Hyperloop to go forward become irresistible. He seems to believe that he can will the permission into being. If he succeeds, he'll upend not merely intercity transit but the bureaucratic process by which things get built. That would be a true science-fiction scenario.
With his premature declaration, Musk is doing public debate a favor. He's reminding us of what the barriers to ambitious projects really are: not technology, not even money, but getting permission to try. "Permits harder than technology," Musk tweeted after talking with Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti about building a tunnel network. That's true for the public sector as well as the private... SpaceX and its commercial-spaceflight competitors can experiment because Congress and President Barack Obama agreed to protect them from Federal Aviation Administration standards. usk is betting that his salesmanship will have a similar effect on the ground. He's trying to get the public so excited that the political pressures to allow the Hyperloop to go forward become irresistible. He seems to believe that he can will the permission into being. If he succeeds, he'll upend not merely intercity transit but the bureaucratic process by which things get built. That would be a true science-fiction scenario.
God forbid there should be some oversight in building a ground level supersonic transport system.
Huh? My eyes roll for the technical challenges.
Damn straight permits are needed. Because even the biggest Elon Musk advocate would be screaming bloody murder if they found the Hyperloop would pass right through their living room, their farm, or that really scenic lake on their property.
The question is then what permits, and are they bullshit or not? Some permits exist for obscure reasons, some because some things involve other people's property, some for safety reasons, and some because people get pissy when heavy earth moving equipment shows up in their backyard.
Yes, of course before cities were built and when people were just moving into America, there weren't such problems, because there wasn't a crapload of infrastructure and settled people to object. But you can't have those times back, unless you like the idea of completely unrestrained forfeiture where you can be kicked out of your home to make room for a mall, and companies building housing that's going to sink into the ground in a decade or two.
The problem is with the regulators, not the regulations.
Bureaucrats - and politicians - of every stripe want their fingers in big projects, partly for the reflected kudos and partly for the perks. The "working lunches" at your expense to iron out some sort of "paperwork glitch", permit fees, consultancy fees, introduction fees, and the bigger the project, the stickier their fingers...
I think Musk's approach of shining a BIG spotlight on the process is to try and keep these "public servants" honest. I hope it works...
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in a world where you could put eight miles of new subway line in a major city without checking to see what's there first. But after hundreds of years of development, most without the benefit of geographic information systems, you can't be certain what kind of weird shit (or people) down there.
The author seems shocked that it'd take ten years of planning before you could start workers digging. The reality is you need to figure out the impact on water, sewer, gas, electricity, telecom, peoples basements -- and chances are none of that stuff is all on one map; a lot of it is likely not mapped at all, or mapped incorrectly. Ten years before your break ground seems very reasonable to me.
Likewise he's mortified that the Chesapeake Bay Tunnel project had to spend two years on geological and environmental impact studies before breaking ground. That's a twenty-three mile long complex of causeways and tunnels across the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, one of the most important fisheries in the country as well one of the world's busiest shipping routes. Two years of study! He calls this a "run-of-the-mill highway". Sure, anything seems easy if you no abso-frickin' nothing about engineering. Bridges and tunnels are the most prestigious projects for a civil engineer to work on because they're ridiculously complex. Just look at all the pieces of the thing. Two years of preliminary geological and environmental study to build the thing sounds outstanding.
This is just Dunning-Kruger run amok. These aren't cases of preliminary studies holding back engineering. Assessing the feasibility and impact of a project is a *major part* of civil engineering. Sure, you could start digging and hope you don't rupture a gas line, breech a high pressure water main, start a plague of rats in Manhattan's Upper East Side (average annual income $180K), damage a fishery that that brings in 290 million dollars per year, or find out the soil you're tunneling through won't support the weight above it. And then you'd be forced to stop and figure out how to fix it. In fact you'd almost inevitably be forced to stop and redesign your project.
A basic principle of engineering project management is that it's waaay cheaper to anticipate a problem than to figure out what to do about it when you're halfway done.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
But don't worry. Der Trumpenfuhrer will fix all that. He has vowed to eliminate all those terrible regulations. And when Elon Musk's hyperlloop damages your property, you''l just have to suck it up and stop being such a cry-baby liberal.
TFS:
SpaceX and its commercial-spaceflight competitors can experiment because Congress and President Barack Obama agreed to protect them from Federal Aviation Administration standards.
If anything, when the overhyped and unworkable Hyperloop goes nowhere (based on its own merits), this sounds like a pretense to spin the failure as "Thanks Trump."
* The tube would be the largest vacuum chamber in the world.
And? So it would set a record. So what? On its own, that fact is meaningless.
* Any maintenance whatsoever in the tube requires depressurization and shutting down the line.
Overstated. Some types of maintenance would require depressurization and shutting down the line. Others would not. In particular, none of the required maintenance on the vehicles that traverse the tube requires depressurizing anything but the airlock already in hourly usage anyway. You take them out of the tube, perform maintenance, and put them back. For tube maintenance, you shut down. Consider it a snow day at an airport in the northeast, or a heat wave at an airport in Phoenix, except predictable and scheduled. No big deal. (And incidentally, completely impervious to snow.)
* Vacuum seals must work repeatedly and reliably for passenger loading and unloading.
Yes. And? Is this impossible? I doubt it. Does it require some engineering work? Yes. That work can be done.
* If a vehicle dies out in the field, it's unclear how they plan to evacuate passengers from either the vehicle or the sealed, elevated steel tube.
Unclear, but any idiot can imagine adding access ports to the tube at intervals, including removable sections large enough to allow removal of a failed vehicle. It's amazing what you can do with hydraulics.
* The tube has to deal with steel expansion in the daytime. The total expected variance (for the 370-mile California route) is three football fields, so you need lots of expansion joints (unless your loading platforms and pylons are going to be incredibly mobile), all of which must also be vacuum sealed. Also keep in mind the sun hits only the top of the tube so the expansion won't be uniform.
So it will have expansion joints. A two and a half foot expansion joint every mile would do it. Since it's not a very hard vacuum, designing an adequate expansion joint is entirely possible. I would build them much less than every mile and make them quite large, and double up the design as being both an expansion joint and the aforementioned rescue access. As for uniformity of expansion, steel is a very very good thermal conductor. The difference in expansion is negligible.
* A breach in the system is likely to be catastrophic, with a torrent of air rushing in and propelling the first vehicle it hits at great speed into the next one, since there's no air cushion between the vehicles.
Ridiculous. Railroads have had rail integrity sensing for decades now. The system requires both integrity sensors and pressure sensors along its entire length anyway. It's not like there's one giant vacuum pump at the end, with only one sensor. These are both safety and operational features. A breach in the system is a nonevent. It can be detected in a matter of seconds, and the information broadcast to all capsules in danger (a steel tube is basically a wave guide, making communication dirt simple), which can automatically engage emergency braking systems, which mainly means retracting the air skid pylons and letting the capsule drop onto its wheels. The wheel bearings will be ruined and have to be replaced, but the capsule will stop safely.
* Anyone with a rifle along the impossible-to-guard 370-mile tube can cause one of those failures by penetrating the inch-thick steel.
Uhm, no. Just no. Inch-thick steel is effectively armor. Very very good armor. You can legally buy armor-penetrating large caliber rifle ammunition in the United States (because 'Murica! Fuck yeah!) and while it does put a divot into inch thick steel, it does not penetrate. At all. Plenty of video on Youtube demonstrating. That lunatic in Texas tried it with all manne
Since when does Elon Musk strike you as a crazy man who cares about profits above all else, and wants to sacrifice anything having to do with safety to better his bottom line?
The slow, careful roll-out of the self-driving mode in the Tesla should make it pretty clear that's not how this guy operates. He was working on all of that BEFORE government could get around to regulating it -- and he still managed to do a pretty responsible job of deploying the tech.
The thing all of the liberals seem to ignore, with the "Government needs to protect us all from our own foolishness!" mantra is that government itself is just made up of more people like the rest of us. Many of them with the most power and say-so are individuals who rose up the ranks inside government because they wanted only to better themselves at the expense of anyone else in their way. There's no reason to trust them with our safety any more than trusting anyone else with it!
What businesses have in their favor as motivation to do things safely is this: It's TERRIBLE for profits and the bottom line if you keep killing off your best customers.
Government agencies and regulators, by contrast, can often just say "Oops.... we screwed up. We take back our earlier promise that X was safe." They usually get to keep their jobs afterwards and families of those who died have little recourse.
Right now, I live out here in Maryland watching the whole project to add another line to the DC metro system. It's a huge undertaking that's costing taxpayers millions of dollars, just for a system that will cost users quite a bit just to ride on it afterwards as it loses money annually, as it always has. Entire blocks of successful businesses had to be shut down and moved to new locations for it, among other things. And ultimately, what do we get for it? A way to travel another 16.2 miles, total, if you happen to have a need to travel between a handful of designated stations in Prince George's County and Bethesda where it will terminate.
I can't help but think I'd be much MORE excited to see effort in digging tunnels and installing new infrastructure for something like the HyperLoop -- that promises to get people between much more distant points at far greater speed than was possible previously. The rail system in America feels woefully outdated, just like our land line copper wire phone system does today. What was once a great achievement has just stagnated since then.
Government doesn't make me feel safer at all, most of the time. Chipotle restaurant chains out here keep getting dozens of people sick and government hasn't done a damn thing to fix that yet. Meanwhile, they DO hurt small business owners like my neighbor who was trying to run his own BBQ business on weekends, serving food in front of microbreweries and at town events, etc. They pulled his permit because somebody called in to complain they saw him bringing in some food that was prepared off-site (back at his house in the kitchen), instead of preparing all of it right where he was selling it. I get why they have that rule, but practically-speaking? It was just needless harassment. The guy ran out of something and his wife was able to fix up some more for him back in the house, so he wouldn't disappoint customers who wanted it. If I trust his food enough to eat it at some event, I trust it just as much if he had to drive a mile or two back home to get it from there first.