Slashdot Mirror
'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.
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.
* 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