The cursory math on Elon Musk’s overhyped Hyperloop project doesn’t even begin to add up. Whatever Howard Stark fantasies the guy is entertaining, he needs to go back to the drawing board.
Musk’s proposal won’t actually get riders to the downtowns of Los Angeles or San Francisco. It can only carry around 10% of the capacity of the California High-Speed Rail. Additionally, it will bypass other population centers, like Bakersfield, Fresno, and San Jose.
Building a truly workable Hyperloop, if it’s feasible at all, will be significantly more expensive than Musk claims. It might even be more expensive than the California HSR project. And Musk’s proposal leaves a lot of questions unanswered.
How did he come to his construction cost estimate in the first place? Musk argues that the Hyperloop is cheaper than HSR because it’s elevated, saving on the cost of building at grade and reducing local opposition. But bridges are far more expensive than building tracks at grade. And just because the footprint is limited to a big pylon every 100 feet doesn’t mean that the environmental impact analysis process will be any easier or that the public will be any more receptive.
Other issues, like seismic stability, are simply glossed over. He claims that by elevating the Hyperloop tracks, they will be more stable than ground-running HSR. Clearly he’s unfamiliar with the Cypress Street Viaduct. That’s one reason that the California High-Speed Rail Authority insists on crossing all faults at grade.
Musk also claims that his giant steel tube will be okay with the only expansion joints at the Los Angeles and San Francisco ends. They’ll just be really big. That’s a significant engineering issue that cannot simply be ignored, at least not if Musk is in any way serious about this proposal.
He’s not. If he was, he would have immediately thought of the most obvious cost overrun source: the cost of the land to build the tube pylons on.
Consider some of the major factors for why California’s $68 billion high-speed rail system has gone over budget. In many cases, local communities have demanded extra viaducts and tunnels added to the project that weren’t strictly necessary. Other towns, meanwhile, have insisted they not be bypassed even in cases where it would be cheaper to do so. Would the Hyperloop be immune from these sorts of political pressures and tweaks?
What’s more, California’s high-speed rail project has had to grapple with the high costs of acquiring more than 1,100 parcels of land, often from farmers resistant to sell. The Hyperloop would try to minimize this problem by propping the whole system up on pylons, shrinking its footprint, but it can’t escape the land problem entirely. As Alexis Madrigal points out, Musk’s proposal seems to assume it’s possible to buy up tens of thousands of acres in California for a mere $1 billion. That’s awfully optimistic.
I hear Hyperloop, I think “Springfield monorail“.
Hunter Gathers
Ah, let up on Mr. Musk. Everybody wants to be North Haverbrook.
Mnemosyne
I kinda liked Conan O’Brian’s take on it: It will take you half an hour to get from LA to San Francisco, and only three hours to get from one end of LA to the other!
Villago Delenda Est
The guy hates the high speed rail project. So he comes up with this Lyle Langlyesque scheme.
PhoenixRising
As Molly I said about a Texas politician one time, ‘Folks, you’ll know he’s serious when he starts spending his own money’. Think that may apply.
dmsilev
I think my favorite part of Musk’s proposal was the bit where his line somehow crossed San Francisco Bay but the cost estimates were utterly silent on how exactly this would be accomplished or how much it would cost.
There were other bits of hilarity scattered through that white paper (such as the method for cooling the air that the onboard compressors are heating up: A reservoir of water, which gets flashed to steam, and said steam is stored onboard the car and vented in the station.), A budget of $10 million for pumps to keep several hundred miles of large tubes at 1 mbar is also kind of amusing. Also a lack of budgeting for R&D for this completely new transportation system.
Basically, take the cost numbers that the white paper quotes and multiply by somewhere between 10 and 100.
Anoniminous
Elevated transportation system only make sense in major urban areas.
(Granted they looked cool on science fiction magazine covers and advertising posters from the 1930s, tho’.)
Xantar
FSM protect us from NIMBY community activists. Sometimes they have a legitimate point, but a lot of the time they just seem to muck things up.
See also Offshore Wind, Massachusetts.
Violet
With the Hyperloop thing, what happens if there’s a problem with the tube? Does the whole thing shut down? If there’s a problem with a plane, the airline can bring in another plane. If there’s some problem with the tube, can any of the transport capsules go? Doesn’t it shut down the whole thing?
suzanne
HAHAHAHAHAAAA!
Like, when he says “big”, does he mean like “a mile”?
I think a giant-ass bendy straw would have more structural integrity.
mdblanche
@Anoniminous: Less cool in real life.
@Xantar: A bunch of coal power plants in places I’m too scared to visit is a small price to pay to avoid seeing some unsightly specks in the distance from my 20 room beach cottage.
PS: send more flood insurance.
The Dangerman
@Violet:
Seems to me, everyone traveling at high speed (I heard 700 mph in a vacuum) in the tube dies; this would appear to be suboptimal.
ranchandsyrup
I wonder what part of Futurama they’ll try to copy next. Morbo as a news presenter?
PeakVT
@Violet: Yes. The tube needs to be in perfect shape for the capsules to run.
As far as I can tell the whole thing is basically designed to sell Teslas, first by keeping Musk’s name in the spotlight and second by sowing more FUD around the CHSRA project.
Knockabout
And here I was hoping that like Angry Race Card Lady, Zandar was gone permanently. Alas, no such luck.
Do us a favor, go back to Elon’s Affirmative Action Camp for Shitty Bloggers and leave us alone, will you?
Warren Terra
I love trains, transit, and density generally – but I’m fairly skeptical about rail in LA, because it doesn’t have the right sort of density/transit infrastructure, and doesnt seem likely to get it. When I lived in the Boston area or when I briefly lived in Europe, train travel was great (even the slow, expensive Amtrak) because it was so easy to get to and from the station. Getting to downtown LA is a nightmare half the time, using transit to do so isn’t a serious option, and parking your car for a week is prohibitive (or a least makes flying out of ie of the cheap regional airports far more attractive). Hell, I don’t even use LAX if I can help it, because the goddam light rail doesn’t go to LAX and at my local end it terminates a mile from my house with no park-and-ride and no taxi rank. High speed rail could be a godsend, but only if we could reach the station, which seemingly no one is even talking about.
Yatsuno
@Knockabout:
Wrong blog. The KKK blog is two doors down on the right. I har their cookies suck though.
Gin & Tonic
@PeakVT: Funny, too, when you realize the most-expensive Tesla wouldn’t even make it from San Francisco to Bakersfield on one charge.
PeakVT
The Onion is on it.
Seanly
Expansion joints only at the ends? LOL.
As a bridge engineer, I welcome the work to elevate tubes, rails, whatever. My first thought on the cost was the right-of-way would blow it out of the water.
Apparently, Musk’s whitepaper poo-pooed the Rand Corp’s 1970s vaccuum train even though his is almost the exact same thing.
What was the point of this announcement?
BillinGlendaleCA
@Warren Terra: If a terminal was in Downtown LA, and that’s usually a big if in these plans, I’d have to take a city bus to the Glendale train station, take Metrolink(expensive) to Downtown and then get the HSR. I’d rather drive to Bob Hope Airport, park and take a plane.
dmsilev
@Violet: There aren’t any sidings or anything the way a regular train line would have, so yes if there’s a problem the whole line has to shut down. And if there’s a catastrophic problem, a lot of people die.
When I saw the press release I thought it was interesting. After reading the white paper and seeing some of the critiques, it’s a lot less so. As described, it’s incredibly impractical to build or operate.
VOR
Musk’s proposal serves the same purpose for high-speed rail that Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) does for light rail. PRT is commonly brought up as a supposedly superior, less expensive, and more personal alternative to mass transit light rail. The real purpose is to derail the light rail project. The fact that viable PRT systems are only now starting to come online has never stopped proponents. And I predict the fact that there is not even a prototype of Musk’s concept won’t stop people from promoting this as an alternative to proven HSR.
dmsilev
@Seanly:
That’s handwaved away by declaring that the line will use, for free, the median strip of I-5.
Violet
OT–Has anyone seen or heard from John Cole? He didn’t post at all yesterday and not yet today.
J.D. Rhoades
@Seanly:
My first thought on the cost was the right-of-way would blow it out of the water.
If I read the proposal correctly, it’ll be built next to the existing interstate highway, in its right of way. Not sure how far on either side that extends, though.
SiubhanDuinne
@Violet: He’s put up one or two rather desultory posts on FB, so he’s alive and able to manipulate the click function at least. I don’t do Twitter, but that may actually be the best place to check for signs of life.
Hungry Joe
Look, every method of transportation involves certain risks. After all, when you get in a transporter beam there’s always a chance that you’ll lose your form and end up as a big glob of goo. But does that stop us?
JPL
@Violet: Last tweet was two days ago. I was thinking about his lack of posts also. He hasn’t gone on a hiatus because he let’s us know through dozens of posts.
TaMara (BHF)
So glad all of you weren’t around and in charge of NASA during the 60’s. “You mean you’re going to send 3 guys up in a tube….on giant rockets…and you expect them to come back”
Not saying that that Musk’s idea is good, bad, feasible or not. But hell, why not dream big…maybe something totally unexpected will come out of it.
But go ahead and talk about how stupid this is…while you sit in traffic at rush hour.
MaximusNYC
I’m amazed at the tsunami of cynicism and hate this proposal is kicking up. How many nitpickers actually read the white paper? Musk freely admits it’s an “alpha” sketch of the concept. I think some of the criticism of it is accurate (esp. w/r/t right-of-way issues)… but what I don’t get is all the promiscuous attribution of malicious intent. “He’s just trying to sell Teslas! He just wants to destroy the existing California HSR project!”
This idea may not be ready for prime time, but he didn’t say it was. Musk is a smart, optimistic, technologically savvy guy who has already revolutionized 3 industries… and he’s not even 45 years old. Maybe cut the dude a bit of slack?
P.S. No, he didn’t say there would only be expansion joints at either end. Sheesh.
KG
@ranchandsyrup: isn’t Morbo just Sean Hannity without make up?
Scott Supak
Musk says he’d go down the median of the I5, for the most part. So, land acquisition would be somewhat less than for the HSR.
Jay S
When there was a Seattle proposal to extend the monorail system, there was at least as much opposition if not more for the elevated system than an at grade light rail system. It seems people didn’t want to have their views blocked, particularly without compensation in densely populated areas and placing those pylons every few hundred feet was a political nightmare. Of course the people behind it probably had even less public credibility than this genius does even if the engineering was much more solid.
roc
To be fair: he’s talking about pylons to support a far, far lighter load (compared to train bridge or freeway). He’s also talking about small-footprint chunks of land, for pillars that can be trivially worked around as opposed to a 100′ wide swath that may well split someone’s property in twain. And he’s assuming you don’t need much purchased property, because he thinks you can just use the highway median.
There’s plenty to criticize; no need to misread/misrepresent things.
I mean to start: he’s skipping the whole “actually getting into the city” part of *both* the LA and SF ends; making questionable acceleration assumptions (as in: safe/acceptable accelerations) and assuming that just because you *could* theoretically put a pylon in a highway median, that it’s a good idea/will work out *most* of the time. (And wherever it wouldn’t work, you’re talking about *miles* of adjustments to the tube track, due its speeds.)
There are many reasons he may be wrong (as hell). But that doesn’t mean he -is-. There’s more work to do, to prove it either way, than anyone’s doing for free.
Also, the whole “anti-train FUD” angle makes less sense than any of Musk’s math or assumptions. Tesla’s going to succeed or fail *looong* before any US rail project might open its doors.
ranchandsyrup
@KG: HA! I needed that laugh. It’s irresponsible not to speculate……
KG
Also, no way the rest of California buys into something that is a direct line only between LA and SF. Just won’t happen. Plus, I can’t imagine there is that much LA-SF traffic to make it feasible. And like someone mentioned above, these things don’t make a lot of sense if you don’t have other stops.
BillinGlendaleCA
@TaMara (BHF): Remember though, in the first few years, we only sent one up. Then for several years, we sent 2. When the time came to send 3, the first crew was killed in the capsule on the ground.
chopper
@KG:
“without”?
Goblue72
@roc: plus CalTrans likely owns that median. Why should they agree to this for free?
mdblanche
@KG: And Gretchen Carlson is Linda without her brain.
Mnemosyne
@Warren Terra:
I dunno, people seem to manage to get themselves to and from LAX to fly — I don’t see why getting themselves to and from a HSR terminal would be all that different. I am not a fan of flying, so I would be willing to take a 3 or even 4-hour bullet train ride to SF rather than flying.
@TaMara (BHF):
At least a few of us are in Southern California where there’s a lot of current litigation to try and kill our voter-approved high-speed rail projects, so we may be a wee bit cynical that this is yet another attempt to kill off something the voters want.
@KG:
Sure it does. There’s a HUGE amount of traffic between LA and SF.
The rail project that the airlines are afraid of is HSR between LA and Las Vegas. That thing would make its cost back within 5 years at most.
Ruckus
@Knockabout:
He was invited.
Your invitation has timed out.
Liberty60
@ranchandsyrup:
I’m guessing Slurm.
debbie
Since the Keystone pipeline is inevitable, it should also be used as part of the Hyperloop. Travelers would be handy if needed to push that tar sands sludge along in its journey.
? Martin
Land in my city averages $5M per acre. It’s at the high end, but you’ll run though that same cost in various other parts of the state. And that’s the cost for a willing seller.
And you can’t build directly over the freeways. Minimum radius for freeways is such that if you took one at the speeds quoted, you’d have the passengers pulling 3g’s. While that’s exciting and all, it’s unsuitable for mass transit. You’d need to either slow the thing down or build a larger radius turn. But the reason the turn is so tight is because it was prohibitively expensive to build a more gradual one, so that prohibitive cost would get passed onto this project.
And I’m unclear on the failure modes for this thing. If a ‘train’ is going every 30 seconds, so trains are about 6 miles apart from each other and one loses power or crashes, that gives not much time (no more than 30 seconds) to recognize the problem and brake to a stop.
But the cost of elevated light rail is about $40M per mile, ballpark. Regular paved 6 lane road would be $20M per mile. Our HSR project is estimated at around $100M per mile. Maglev is notoriously expensive for capital costs despite promises with current cost estimates between $50M and $100M per mile for elevated. No technology breakthroughs have come out in the last decade to make that notably less expensive. Operating costs are likely not that much less either.
Cost per mile for car is about $.50, including fuel, maintenance, insurance, depreciation, etc. For HSR it’s about $.30 a mile. For air travel it’s $.10 a mile. Quotes for this thing have been as low as $.02 a mile, which I think is laughable. I don’t see how they can even cover the cost of fuel (electricity) at that price.
It’s not necessarily a bad idea, but I’m missing entirely where its a clearly better idea.
SPC
@Green Line goes to perimeter of LAX with terminal shuttle. I agree with you partially, there are many areas in LA where getting downtown would be a PIA, but there is far more rail transit coverage in LA than there was 20 years ago, so some people have good access to Union Station.:
Randy P
@Violet: Wasn’t the last thing he posted something about trying to get Steve up in the cat tree?
Not sure what’s going on, but it probably involves that tree, and the fact that Cole can’t access the internet from the top of it.
Tripod
@Xantar:
You should try the public comments section in EIS documents. It’s basically Grandpa Simpson.
dmsilev
@? Martin:
The claim is that lining the upper surface of the tubes with solar panels will provide enough power to run the system (including, of course, the battery banks needed for night and cloudy-day operations).
yellowdogupdater
You are talking about someone who is arguably one of the most successful serial entrepreneur of our time. Acting as if he is some snake oil salesman.
You can focus on the land issue if you want because it’s true that any system will have to deal with that. Also, obviously the system would need to have stops along the way. He is focusing on travel time if there were no stops because as the saying goes, you sell the sizzle not the steak.
It’s not nearly as far fetched, engineering or financial, as you seem to want to believe for whatever reason.
joes527
@SPC: And exactly what would be the evacuation plan in case of a total system outage.
Several hundred miles of folks who had planned to be in their seats for 40 minutes in sealed containers inside a steel tube way up off the ground. Folks with limited mobility. Folks with medical conditions. …
The infrastructure that they would have to build to be ready to evacuate the system safely seems … daunting
? Martin
@dmsilev: Ok, that works. Adds about $1B to the project, but that’s not bad.
dmsilev
@? Martin: The white paper claims that it can be done for $210 million, already included in the $6B total. Of course, that number is suspect since his power numbers are way off.
Using the numbers in the white paper, the smaller variant has a per-capsule mass of 15,000 kg (including passengers), and a cruise velocity of about 350 m/s, meaning that ignoring all friction losses one needs to supply about 920 MJ of energy just to make the kinetic energy of the system at cruise velocity. Since at peak, the system needs to accelerate a capsule every 15 seconds (30 second spacing, in both directions), that’s system power of about 60 MW. And that’s a floor, since it assumes absolutely no friction, ignores the cost of powering the compressors and running the environmental systems of the capsules, running the pumps, etc.
By contrast, the power section of the white paper says
It’s an interesting idea, but there are so many numbers that are either fudged or outright hand-waved away that I have a lot of trouble taking the thing seriously.
Matt McIrvin
@MaximusNYC:
Why did he spend so much time specifically attacking California HSR, a project based on mature technology that is about to begin construction (but is politically controversial), by comparing it with an exotic scheme that isn’t even a prototype yet? It was as if he were trying to shut down Cape Wind by advocating substituting a city-sized powersat built by space colonists.
I don’t know about selling Teslas, but he did seem to be trying to attract attention by allying himself with opponents of HSR.
Matt McIrvin
@dmsilev: I bet Musk was counting on being able to recover most of the acceleration energy with electromagnetic braking.
dmsilev
@Matt McIrvin: Some of it, sure, but not all. And the additional power draws aren’t trivial either; his small-capsule compressor is quoted as using about 300 kW of power continuously; at peak times, 60 capsules moving simultaneously in each direction means about 35 MW of power just to run those compressors. Even assuming that there is 100% efficient regenerative braking and no drag, we’ve already blown our stated power budget by almost a factor of two.
And yes, I’m using the traffic numbers for peak times. The average load will be less, but you need to have the storage and transmission capacity to handle peak load.
pseudonymous in nc
As Alon Levy says, there’s a strand in American culture whereby rich people can go crank and be taken seriously. And there’s also a strand that’s really resistant to messy incremental change. Both strands merge here in the amount of fanboy fappery that the Muskaloop has generated — which, I suppose, could power high-speed transportation if hooked up to the grid.
? Martin
@dmsilev: @dmsilev: A 1m wide solar strip the entire length of the system would generate about 100MW and cost about $1B at current efficiencies/prices. Buying that much solar capacity would lower the price a fair bit, and I would expect someone like Musk to project both cost and efficiency based on build delay. In a few years, efficiency will be higher and cost lower. That’s not unrealistic.
And peak power needs to be higher unless he plans on moving the 5 as it has a 4500′ pass to go through, which at least 5 capsules will be climbing at all times. Maglev doesn’t work well with inclines.
Finally, the system could then only run during the day. Need to get back from SFO at 5PM on a workday in winter? Sorry, call Jet Blue. HSR will work 24/7. Yeah, it could pull from the grid those hours, but that assumes we have the excess capacity to put online when all of the other state solar is out of use as well. I’m not sure that we do.
Again, it’s not a bad idea, but I’m not seeing how it’s a better idea than HSR. There’s no fucking way he can build it for $14M a mile. For at least 15% of the route it’d need to be built almost entirely at night because the 5 is so heavily used during the day – the tradeoff for avoiding the right-of-way costs. And I have no idea how he’d handle the parts of the 5 that are already elevated. We’re stacked 3 levels high in areas as it is and those pylons aren’t designed to support mass another 20′ up – they’d need to be redone, or his system would need to be rerouted at the most expensive places to have to secure right-of-way.
Aaron
I see a lot of people did not read the proposal. Its not mag lev. its short linear motors every 70km or so, and you glide the rest of the way to the next motor. The car floats on an air hockey puck. But instead of the air coming from below, the puck is actually a ski, and the air is pumped out of the ski. And the ski is on a suspension system. And there are 28 of them around the car including presumably the top.
The failure mode considers cars at 2 minutes to 5 minute intervals and are computer controlled. If the car in front of you has a compressor failure it continues to have a compressed air supply for a gradual deceleration. skids and/or wheels would then be deployed. It would bring the car to a stop by an emergency exit portal, possible one at each pylon (didnt say in proposal) I presume that you then open the hatch which pops an airbage around the perimeter of the hatch forming a seal. Then you open an outer door and walk out onto a fire escape. Even if you are wheel chair bound the worst that could happen is you wait on the fire escape platform while the car, inside the tube burns away. The worst failue mode seems like fire in the car itself. There most dangerous thing on board the car is the Lithium battery pack. and once the structure of the car fails due to fire, the fire goes out due to the low air pressure in the tube.
Thats my hypothesis reading the proposal.
You dont need a seperate bridge over san fran bay, just suspend it from the existing bridge superstructure. Its not that heavy.
I am still curious about how the expansion joints on the tube would work but some type of interleaved metal with a sleave on the outside of the tube to prevent leaks doesnt seem crazy complicated. Also pair of electric vaccum motors on each pylon doesnt seem crazy coplicated or expensive. And look, its got a fire escape you can use for maintenance.
Off hour tickets might be pretty cheap, becouse you have to keep people moving 24 hours a day so a 3:35 am transit might be cheap, while rush hours of 8-10 am might be 100$…
Aaron
Another thought- if land is $5 million an acre (suggested above, dont know if thats true), and each pylon needs 100 square feet (a 10′ X 10′ plot) and 10% of the 25000 pylons need to purchase a land right of way for the tower footprint- that works out to $28 million dollars for rights of way for the pylons. Not much.
Even if you had to pay for 100% of the pylons- thats only 280 million. only a 5-10% bump in the project cost.
Also you might be looking at a 20′ wide or 6m wide solar cell bank along the legnth based on the 2 tubes, side by side.
Aaron
I was just reading the greatergreaterwashington blog for their criticism. Which seems deeply flawed. Initially the author argues that the cars can only run on 80 second intervals, which is still less then the proposed 2 minute standard interval but longer then the rush hour 30 second interval. He does this based on the need to come to a full stop before the next car. This assumes the car has such a catastrphic failure that it starts shedding big pieces of debri that slow down immediately.
The cars run on skis. if one of the 28 suspension skis failes, it fails at one of two points: the front connector, or the midpoint suspension mount. if it fails at the first, the suspension mount retracts it to be flush with the body. if if fails at the second, it simply drags lightly as the load is taken up by the many other skis. If there is a limited ability of the system to fail catastophically, then there is every reason to believe that any failure is ‘graceful’ in that the rest of the system in back of the failure just gently comes to a halt.
with a computer controlled systems, cars will go into braking mode with less then 1 second warning. if the worst catastrophic failure is an explosion (terrorism), in which case an additional 2 cars will hit the failure point at rush hour potentially killing all 76 people on board the three cars. multiply times two directions and the 150 people killed (worst case). while that is horrible, it is still far less then any major jet going down. less then a large bomb in times square when it is busy.
cvstoner
@Seanly:
The point is to provide a platform for Musk’s Libertarian view that steelly-eyed men of industry are far better at creating solutions than that meddling government bureaucracy. Real men of fortitude have no need for engineering studies, ecological impact studies, the laws of physics, and all that other junk. They just do it.
cvstoner
@Aaron:
There is no such thing as a “graceful failure” when your hurtling along at 800 mph in a steel tube. Any failure will be immediately catastrophic.
cvstoner
@Aaron:
The problem is not the proposal. The problem is that Musk and his cheerleaders think its stupid that the California government won’t just magically fund an idea for which there is not even a functioning prototype.
Anybody can draw up something on paper that should work in theory. But where’s the proof of concept? Where’s the test case? How much actual run time does it have so we can understand the real-world safety and engineering issues involved in scaling it out to mass transportation? There are hundreds of questions for which his proposal is incapable of answering because there is no real-world data to back it up.
Rail may not be sexy and high tech, but it has decades of engineering performance data that make it the more practical decision. We know where the thorns are. We know what the cost issues are. We know what the maintenance issues are. We know all kinds of stuff because rail has been around and doing its job of moving lots of people for a long, long time. We know nothing about Musk’s proposal except that it looks pretty on paper.
If he wants to be taken seriously, then let him seek funding for a proof of concept. Once he’s proven that it can work and we know what the pain points are, then he can go back to the California government with a more realistic proposal.
ZBIV
@cvstoner: Look. A guy with a lot of smart engineers working for him put an open source design out there to dramatically improve how high speed rail works, just because he could. Of course there are flaws, people it’s a PRELIMINARY design. Musk’s engineers would take it further, but they are busy building the best electric cars the world has ever seen and blasting people into outer freakin’ space. Lay off, hosers.
ZBIV
Look. A guy with a lot of smart engineers working for him put an open source design out there to dramatically improve how high speed rail works, just because he could. Of course there are flaws, people it’s a PRELIMINARY design. Musk’s engineers would take it further, but they are busy building the best electric cars the world has ever seen and blasting people into outer freakin’ space. Lay off, hosers.
cvstoner
@ZBIV:
He forwent the having others “lay off” when he chose to shop this as a part of a political agenda designed to reduce faith in government.
And, by the way, he’s not in the business of safely and reliably blasting thousand’s of people safely into space every day. Merely a select few under controlled conditions, where he can abort whenever he wants.
ZBIV
@cvstoner: Really? This is all part of Musk’s evil plan to destroy any and all soshulism in our gov’t? Did I miss some announcement or are you reading heavily into some statement of Musk’s? And I didn’t say he was blasting thousands into outer space. Doing that would be insanely expensive. Until we build the space elevator, anyway.
ZBIV
@cvstoner: Really? This is all part of Musk’s evil plan to destroy any and all soshulism in our gov’t? Did I miss some announcement or are you reading heavily into some statement of Musk’s? And I didn’t say he was blasting thousands into outer space. Doing that would be insanely expensive. Until we build the space elevator, anyway. Sorry if this double posts again. FYWP.
cvstoner
@ZBIV:
More like a lack of recognition of the value of a democratic government. Any time a business leader suggests that government should just get out of the way, the group of people he is referring to is one that contains you.
Like I said before, let’s see the proof of concept. Once he proves it can work cheaper, safer, and more reliably than rail, then he has the data to back up his proposal. Otherwise, I don’t think the California government is wrong with going with a more proven technology.
ZBIV
@cvstoner: Cali isn’t “wrong” to go with proven tech. In an ideal world, the Feds would pony up around 10 million or so to prove or disprove the concept. Even if it costs double, runs at half the speed, and carries half the number of people that Musk says it will, it’s still worth fleshing out. Musk is putting it out there because he doesn’t have the time or money to do it himself. I don’t think it’s meant as a statement for or against gov’t. It’s meant to be pro-innovation.
I Heart Breitbartbees
@ZBIV: Agreed. Alpha design is alpha. That said, if he starts putting his own money into it, I’m going to buy as much stock as I can afford. The vacuum tube monorail idea has been bouncing around for decades, and the problem has never been one of technology. It’s been one of money. That said, I’d much rather see a conventional, nationwide maglev monorail network instead. With that, you’re still talking about speeds in excess of 300 mph in the boring flat areas using a mature, safe technology, and with TSA insecurity checkpoints, not a significant difference in travel time between LA and NYC. Even if we were to limit the maglev monorail stations to metro areas of 1 million people or more, that would eliminate a hell of a lot of air travel and the resulting pollution.
Another Holocene Human
@Warren Terra: High speed rail could be a godsend, but only if we could reach the station, which seemingly no one is even talking about.
Huh? Plenty of discussion of LAUS on the biggest CA HSR Blog on the internet: https://www.google.com/search?q=cahsrblog&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a#bav=on.2,or.r_qf.&fp=d3cb29f8fa7df143&q=cahsrblog+laus&rls=org.mozilla:en-US%3Aofficial&safe=off
How about Ontario to LAUS, anyone? http://www.railpac.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/January-28-2013-Part-1.pdf
Oh, and there are LAUS masterplans going through alternatives analysis right now. If you live there it would probably behoove you to get involved in the public process.
Another Holocene Human
@TaMara (BHF): So glad all of you weren’t around and in charge of NASA during the 60′s. “You mean you’re going to send 3 guys up in a tube….on giant rockets…and you expect them to come back”
Right. That’s exactly how NASA developed manned moon rockets. Not building on years of proven technology. Just doing some shit that was only on paper and had never been done before. Why not. Live a little.
Okay, to be fair, this was the only working prototype of Musk’s idea: http://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/Beach_Pneumatic_Transit
Another Holocene Human
@Mnemosyne: The rail project that the airlines are afraid of is HSR between LA and Las Vegas. That thing would make its cost back within 5 years at most.
Yeah? So why don’t they invest in it if it’s such a sure winner?
RRIF application was denied by DOT because not enough skin in the game by private investors.
Looks like there will be a weekend party train coming, however.
Another Holocene Human
@ZBIV: Really? It’s worth fleshing out?
Our economy is in recession, a huge number of children experience food insecurity daily, people don’t have jobs, and economists tell us the #1 investment we can make is education to boost the economy long-term, but you want to spend money on one-off vanity projects that MOST countries usually start (and abandon, don’t forget that part) at the peak of an economic bubble.
Do you know our bridges are rated “D”? Do you know how much damage is caused to local economies when bridges fail or are closed and goods can no longer readily enter and exit the region? You may not know… ask Western Mass… for the want of a bridge many jobs were lost, many manufacturing contracts, and so on.
HSR is a great bang for the buck program, it provides mobility that didn’t exist before, it’s the economically efficient way to do so with existing technologies, and it will save energy vs air transportation once in place. It will most importantly take a lot of cars off the road and free roadways for short-term truck hauling. Hopefully it will also be a step in rail passenger enhancements statewide including separate conventional tracks for passenger rail and quid pro quo freight rail enhancement which should also be an economic boon given that rail freight is the trunk for moving goods in the US (and California’s network is kind of in sorry shape).
Or we can throw bombs at the project and be like Florida, multiple statewide referenda passed and then scuttled by “pro-bidness” governors, LESS intercity rail service than when this all started, horrid schedules yet extremely high fares, desperate people trying to get around in ULCC prop planes b/c South Florida’s traffic is so impassibly thick, highway deaths, weak economic development because average people can’t travel from place to place, weaksauce bus service which is slow and infrequent … just basically a shithole.
ZBIV
@Another Holocene Human: I’m not going to argue against any of the things you mentioned. I’ll simply point out that we could do R&D to flesh out potentially ground breaking technology instead of adding rail guns to our naval vessels. Gov’t R&D is where all the real innovation happens. It has given us this forum to argue on, for example.
Aaron
Whether or not this is an attempt to sabotage the Cali HSR, I dont know, I live in NYC and this would be a great improvement for NYC to DC, NYC to Phili, NYC to Boston, and several other destinations, so I am rooting for it.
A nationwide build out of this network could be the next generation of transportation, and combine it with shorter range electric cars, car sharing programs, and improved local public trans, and we are the future, and have leapfroged China, Japan, and Europe!
cvstoner
@ZBIV: @I Heart Breitbartbees: Agreed. Start with the proof of concept, then ramp up if it works. Personally, I think it would be nice to just have a high speed rail system faster than what Japan was doing 50 years ago. The level and quality of what constitutes high speed rail in this country is very sad.