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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.
there are too many regulations getting in the way?
Huh? My eyes roll for the technical challenges.
We should just give away all the land rights to the public lands and allow him to take any private by eminent domain. The local populace should have no recourse if its something Musk wants.
Who ever said that the hyperloop will be a tunnel from start to finish? Hyperloop works just as well above ground on concrete pylons. Going alongside highways, through farmland and even going over existing roads is perfectly possible with an elevated hyperloop.
At the end of the day hyperloop can't have any steep gradients or changes of direction. It'll be tunnels when passing through hills or mountains, and above ground when they land is low lying.
Similar to railways in that it's mixed above ground and tunnels. Only more so because changes of direction need to be minimised much more.
There will not be one long tunnel.
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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Permits for ultra-major construction project like this are very important. Really, for gawd sakes. Those "permits" are to enforce measures in silly laws like the Clean Water Act. Do you want to live in a nation where anyone with money is just allowed to do whatever they want where ever they want to? Permits are dang important.
That would be a true science-fiction scenario.
And yet that's exactly what Uber has done. Anyone looking at that business model in March of 2009 would have said that their hurdles were more regulatory than technological. Uber basically bullied its way through taxi regulations, one major city at a time.
It's a mistake to underestimate Elon Musk.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
In the last century, a short-sighted if not outright evil power broker by the name of Robert Moses, never elected to any post, directly planned the transport system of New York city and the state around it, and vastly influenced the planning of other cities.
One of Mr. Moses' nasty feats was to specify that all of the parkway bridges be built so low that it would be impossible to run trains under them, even though many were built with broad center islands.
I grew up in one of the towns under his thumb. We literally had a 100-year-old railroad system that only went to one station for 3 large communities, with 100-year-old bridges, etc. No new train construction since New York's subways in the '30's and '40's, but lots of new roads for cars.
America's cities still suffer under the dead hand of Robert Moses and people like him, who actively wiped out our railroads, never considering the problems automobiles would bring.
Elon Musk's hyperloop is not the solution for this. The speed, confinement, and vacuum are obvious problems that make it more of a bomb than a train. But conventional high-speed rail transport is the solution.
Most americans never spend time in Europe and learn about really good trains. Try Switzerland and you won't understand why people even want cars.
Bruce Perens.
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.
Regulators could have specific, written requirements and definite timetables.
They already do. The most frequent reason permits are denied are the applicants not complying with those timetables. "What do you mean I actually have to have the geological report before I get a permit to build the foundation?!?!"
And they could be limited to 2 layers at most: State and Federal
Because fuck the locals and what they want.
Your house is really, really unimportant to your state, and barely acknowledged by the Federal government. Your ability to affect your state and Federal government is basically zero. So when someone wants to level it for their infrastructure dream, you should happily accept he loss, right?
The reason cities and counties do the bulk of regulations like this is because those governments are actually responsive to their electorate. At higher levels, you can just say "fuck you" to a large swath of the electorate and still win.
Here's the vid, so everyone knows what we're talking about:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... He's made others since, but that's the first and most comprehensive. TL:DW technical challenges:
* The tube would be the largest vacuum chamber in the world.
* Any maintenance whatsoever in the tube requires depressurization and shutting down the line.
* Vacuum seals must work repeatedly and reliably for passenger loading and unloading.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* Anyone with a rifle along the impossible-to-guard 370-mile tube can cause one of those failures by penetrating the inch-thick steel.
If these crushing technical challenges have been addressed, please do give us a link, because so far it looks a lot like solar roadways or Onlive.
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."
And it's not "fuck" anyone. But someone needs to give a final yes or no on a project rather than 50 different boards and groups and courts saying "no"
By elevating the decision to a level totally unresponsive to local issues, it is fuck a lot of people.
My state was hit by a hurricane. Two counties were heavily damaged by flooding. You'd think it would be a quick, no-brainer deal to rebuild the damaged bridges and provide some funding from the state, right?
It's been two years. Still no funding. Because only one state Senate and two state Assembly districts care. The counties don't have a lot of people so statewide offices don't care. The counties are rural and poor, so the other state senators and assemblypeople don't have any economic benefit from it. Instead, it's just a loss for their constituents to pay for it.
This is for rebuilding after a natural disaster, one of the easiest things to build support for. You're now proposing the same people who can not get that done are the ones to decide whether or not your drinking water supply is destroyed because someone wants to dig through it. How would that work out? Well, this actually came up at the state level. Turns out the state is quite happy for the electric utility to dump toxic ash into the drinking water supply. It was only stopped when the locals sued the state. And if you want a smooth approval process, the locals having to resort to lawsuits is not the way to get it.
You know there are specific rules for that, right? The rules protect the property owner while allowing things to get built.
See above example about drinking water supply. Guess why the locals won the lawsuit? State decided to not follow the rules. They decided to not follow the rules because it would not hurt their re-election campaign while the large donations from the utility would help their re-election campaign.
I don't care about the specific process, but are you really arguing against an orderly, rules-based process with a definite timeline?
As I mentioned in my original reply, there already is an orderly rules-based process with a definite timeline. When the builder doesn't want to follow those rules or the timeline, they claim it's just some local politician "flexing their muscle" instead of not following the rules and process that were already in place.
That story sells quite well to people not familiar with the specific instance being discussed, and so it becomes one of those things "everybody knows".
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.