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Colorado Taking Steps To Get Its Own Hyperloop (usatoday.com)
According to USA Today, Colorado's transportation department is looking at the possibility of a Rocky Mountain hyperloop to curb traffic woes. You could travel from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs, a distance of about 125 miles with Denver in the middle, in less than 20 minutes. From the report: After partnering with Virgin Hyperloop One, one of the companies racing to develop the super-speed technology that essentially would transport vehicles and people pods on electric skates in a big pneumatic tube, Colorado Department of Transportation officials plan to spend the next nine months crunching the numbers to determine what it might take to bring this type of transit to Colorado. Above-ground routes are cheaper to build. But Musk's Boring Co., another company testing the technology, has been focusing on hyperloop transportation in tunnels. The proposed Rocky Mountain hyperloop would be centered at Denver International Airport and stretch about 100 miles north to Cheyenne, Wyo.; about 125 miles south to Pueblo, Colo.; and about 100 miles west to Vail, Colo. It carries a hefty $24 billion price tag. State transportation officials estimated it would need an initial investment of $3 billion just to get the first 40 miles from the airport north to Greeley, Colo., completed. Why a hyperloop? State officials estimate Colorado's population will grow by nearly 50% in the next 20 years.
because it's a multi-billion dollar boondoggle they can use to line their own pockets with and when the whole thing goes bust unlike a well understood technology like passenger trains they can blame the engineers.
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so no serious person, as Obama said, can take them seriously.
Good YouTube videos on why this will never work. One rifle round or a modest dent can detonate your $60B investment and kill everyone inside instantly. Not to mention the thermal expansion issues! We have a thing called âoeairplanesâ that do this pretty well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marge_vs._the_Monorail
Why don't they build a Stargate to solve their traffic problems? I know Stargates don't exist, but neither does a hyperloop. If you're going waste money on imaginary concepts, dream big!
$24 billion is the starting price. It's likely to cost 10 times that actually. What we have in Colorado is a corrupt CDOT organization. They would siphon much of that money into other worthless projects, instead of actually widening I-25 north and south of Denver like they should have done years ago. Or building a new north south freeway east of Denver. No let's put in some untested public transportation that from direct experience few people will actually use. Dumb, wasteful, ridiculous, government boondoggles.
Anyway - they will never raise the cash. Taxpayer bill of rights will likely kill it once they put it to a public vote.
You could travel from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs, a distance of about 125 miles with Denver in the middle, in less than 20 minutes.
There was an effort in Florida to try to get light rail from Miami to Tampa. In my mind the biggest obstacle was transportation once you get to the destination. I could understand something like this between two major cities with top notch mass transit, like New York and Boston. However, I don't think Fort Collins and Colorado Springs fit the bill, same as Miami and Tampa. Tell people "we can get you from CIty A to City B and then all you have to do is rent a car when you get there" is not going to get a ton of support. It works for air travel because the cost of a rental car is usually a small fraction of the airfare. However, for an economical light rail/hyperloop setup, the rental car cost now probably exceeds the long haul transport cost.
Exactly! And they will never be able to land rockets on their tail! NASA have proven reusable space flight costs (hundreds of..) billions!!
I am however interested that the aviation industry are worried enough to pay for FUD already...
btw, you need to tune your FUD. The tunnel would recompress, not be explosive, and have little to no effect (except on efficiency of service).
Things inside the tunnel could decompress, although calling what they would do from a small hole like a rifle bullet 'explosive' is overstatement in the least.
Of course the pressure difference between what they would experience and what an airliner at altitude experiences is pretty damn small.
I suggest you are better addressing the boondoggle angle, or more to the point kicking the damn TSA out of your airports, since they are the ones destroying your particular industry.
Just wondering, is boeing or airbus paying your invoices, or are the airlines picking up the tab?
They can't even fund their existing public transportation infrastructure and public employee pensions, how could they possibly afford a hyperloop?
"Colorado Taking Steps To Get Its Own Hype-loop."
Hyperloop or no hyper loop there isn't enough water to sustain that sort of growth.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Mountain traffic Colorado is just getting crazier and crazier, it would take you 2 Hours to drive to Vail and about five coming back (not joking).
A hyper loop would help things all around. Tons of people would take it even just because of the time, much less the ease of getting back.
Both People and Cayenne would also benefit tremendously. They have a lot of tourist attractions but are just far enough away from Denver most people do not make the trip.
Hyperloop for the Rocky Mountains would make make the whole area an even closer community than it already is...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you went from Denver to Ft Collins, or Pueblo, or Colorado Springs it would likely be for an event. So you'd just take an Uber or a taxi to your final destination, just like people do with light rail today..
Or - is it a coincidence that Musk also makes self-driving cars? I think not. What if every Hyperloop terminal had a fleet of self driving cars passengers could use as taxis? The hub could be well set up for rapid charging, there would not have to be any driver.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"I'll build my own hyperloop. With blackjack! And hookers!"
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
The Hyperloop has been busted.
Given the insane numbers we see for building hyperloop, we can wonder how much a ticket will cost.
And if it is too expensive, it will not replace car
The e-470 is the highest cost toll road in the US (last I checked). Really the value isn't to get from Colorado Springs to Fort Collins (I mean, just move there if that's where you need to go!). It's really just getting better access to Denver and to DIA.
While we do have issues here with traffic but there are too many questions / issues:
- If they build above ground, the area near DIA up to Greeley is the west edge of tornado alley, what are the considerations about running it through that area? Weld county has a high volume of storms in late spring. Of course if it were in tunnels it would be safer (as far as weather is concerned) but more expensive.
- Where will it fit on the way to Vail? another thing to crowd out I-70?
- Will this violate the deal Colorado made with the company that is adding toll express lanes to the highways?
- Someone else mentioned ticket prices
- Concept is good but it is too new to know how well it will work
- Death trap? it is new so it is likely unregulated where it needs to be for safety.
- It's already expensive enough to live here, though the ones who seem to get these ideas are making good enough paychecks to not care, many of us do not. We like new technology and relaxed laws, it attracts more people that drive housing and other costs up. We need to stop at some point.
Though I think new technology is great, it should probably be tested on a smaller scale project first (IE just 2 cities not too far apart). So they can have some type of idea of what to expect from it. Denver's traffic is not as bad as other major cities, though it can suck, its nothing like Atlanta or Washington DC. Maybe invest in better routes and better access through the mountains. Even in the plains major roads between towns are limited.
But by God are they good at making infrastructure for the rich. Rich people lanes to boulder, a rich people highway to the airport, fuck highway safety, rich people get the shoulder through the mountains. All of which are deliberately priced so that the working class can't use them.
It seems like you could fiber up most of Colorado with that much cash. And that's a proven technology, unlike the hyperloop.
They have mountains. Just build a giant slide.
Maglev has been done. So far, it's clear that technologically it works, but practically the jury's out. There's a working one in China (which was not extended; when the time came for that, conventional HSR was used though at higher than "standard" speed), and there was one in England (not sure if it's still around), plus some test tracks and perhaps construction of a new line in Japan. But if reports about the Chinese line are correct, it's not very comfortable or quiet. Sure, Hyperloop by running in a partial vacuum will reduce the potential air noise, but comfort is another question and with the speed doubled or more from current lines the noise could easily return in spades. Unlike air cushion vehicles, maglevs don't "float" - they have small clearances to make the "mag" part work well, and ride hard. We'll see if Hyperloop can overcome those known issues when some actually start operating at or near the expected speeds. Until then, I would consider it a "not proven" but interesting technology for practical use.
Assuming
no cost over runs on 25 billion (ha)
CO population is 5.5 million
lets say 10% of the population uses this 50 weeks, 5 times a week (sounds high, but hey)
that works out to ~~182 per RT ticket
no problemo !!
so the answer is simple:CO invites all the undocumented immigrants to the state, offers papers if they use the hyperloop !!
Why a duck? The state flower of Colorado is the Venus Flytrap.
Monorail... monorail... monorail!
I would love to see futuristic affordable super-fast transport become a thing in my lifetime. However, I strongly suspect the whole hyperloop fad will burn out due to economic infeasibility, and a few places will get badly burned when their initial investments into implementing this ultimately go nowhere.
In the mean time we can't even get the light rail crossing software to work on the A-line already running to DIA and have flaggers at every crossing 24/7
But lets shoot a hundred people at the speed of sound through a tunnel drilled through a region with surface coal deposits and unstable surface geology. Sure.
"Hurry up Barry, get your flag ready the hyperloop is" **FWOOOOOM** "awwww sheet."
Sure, because capital costs for huge infrastructure projects like this have to be amortized over one year -- much less time than it will take to actually build, even. It's a good thing I didn't see this comment before I bought my house, because if I'd known that simple math proved it was going to cost me over $16K a month I'd never have bought it.
Colorado cannot even build a light-rail that work. They also cannot build a baggage handling system.
There's no air in Denver, the thing should be able to run without the tube.
Nullius in verba
Explains our logic at times