

Elon Musk’s Hyperloop Becomes Reality as Agreements Secured in California - halfimmortal
https://transportevolved.com/2015/06/08/elon-musks-hyperloop-becomes-reality-as-agreements-secured-for-5-mile-track-in-california/

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sctb
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9606001](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9606001)

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apsec112
Sadly, none of the stuff I've seen on Hyperloop addresses the civil
engineering problems brought up by Alon Levy and others
([https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2013/08/13/loop...](https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2013/08/13/loopy-
ideas-are-fine-if-youre-an-entrepreneur/)). In short:

\- The Hyperloop paper doesn't mention how trains would cross San Francisco
Bay, or include a cost estimate for doing so. A new bridge? A new tunnel? Both
would add greatly to the $6 billion cost estimate.

\- That $6 billion estimate also assumes that elevated concrete pylons can be
built for much cheaper than any other project, with no mention of how.

\- The proposed track doesn't go to downtown LA; it ends at Sylmar, which is
still ~25 miles from downtown and even further from most of the LA area. A 30
minute ride becomes much less exciting when it takes another hour or more to
reach your real destination.

\- With the proposed 30-second headway, the system's capacity is only about
25% of a high-speed rail line, and 30 seconds still violates the crap out of
typical safety standards (you can't run trains too close together without
risking a collision if you can't brake quickly enough).

\- There are no intermediate stations; this is obviously a problem for the
Central Valley, but it makes life inconvenient for plenty of other people too.
Eg. someone in San Jose (pop. ~1 million, greater than SF's) would need to
spend an extra hour or more getting to San Francisco vs. a station in San Jose
itself.

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dragonwriter
Actually the paper answers the question of how it would cross the bay--it
wouldn't. The proposed "San Francisco" terminus is in the East Bay (IIRC,
pretty far east, as well). A significant part of the cost savings of the route
proposed as an alternative to the HSR route cones from, unlike HSR, not
actually going anywhere near the urban centers on either the SF or LA end.

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jfb
Hayward, I think. This is an interesting definition of "reality", and
hyperloop is a deeply unserious Elon Musk _Gedankenexperiment_ that's only
given column inches because of the deeply unserious nature of what passes for
journalism among the lickspittle shoeshine boys of Silicon Valley wannabes.

~~~
dragonwriter
Well, its probably not surprising that a startup ecosystem that is all about
selling longshots attracts around is peripheries, journalistic and otherwise,
people who are prone to accept longshots as much more probable than they are.

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JonFish85
Agreements secured do not a reality make. It's one of the very first steps,
now to be followed by a whole bunch more. It's a misleading headline, and I
reject the notion out of hand. Running up the "mission accomplished" poster
now is ridiculous. Before it becomes a "reality", there are some much larger
hurdles to clear. Once they overrun their budget by 2x, complete their
environmental surveys, get each town to sign off on land rights, get their
work insured, work out a deal with whatever transit unions there are along the
way and open for business for real, then you can call it a "reality".

~~~
dmfdmf
Everything revolving around Musk seems fishy to me. His Tesla and Solar
companies are harvesting government subsidies and he writes a half-baked
technical paper on hyperloop and suddenly there is money to spend on this
boondoggle too. Something just doesn't add up (like Enron or Worldcom from a
few years back) and I suspect that Musk and/or associated companies are
(willing or unwilling) fronts for the FED to directly push money into the
economy. The problem the FED has is that lowering the interest rates no longer
works to boost the economy once you are at zero and they still need/want
inflation to recover from the mortgage bust. I'd bet that there are academic
papers on how to deal with ZIRP when you need to inflate that advocate such
direct funding policies.

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codeulike
_One thing is clear: Hyperloop is here to stay — as long as these early
prototypes function according to plan_

Hmm, author might not be familiar with how prototypes work.

I think its a great idea though, hope they get somewhere with it.

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BinaryIdiot
Everything is here to stay...as long as it is here to stay! (That bothered me
too).

Reminds me of the whole "20% of the time it works every time".

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nomercy400
Such negative responses. Isn't prototyping and actually just doing it part of
innovation? I think it's great that this is being tried, and I hope that if it
become a success they will extend the existing track to other cities.

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27182818284
I was super negative when it started because I expected the initial release
that they pulled an all-nighter for (according to his Twitter feed) to have
been more than just like a sketch of an idea typed in Word.

Now that things are moving forward, my opinion has radically changed. That,
and in the meantime his car won the Consumer Report's Best Buy, SpaceX darn
near landed a rocket vertically in the ocean, and ground has been broken on
their spaceport.

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greglindahl
How did you know that all they had was in the whitepaper?

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27182818284
From Elon's tweets it certainly looked like all they had was that small
document, which was less in content than most white papers that are often
released.

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greglindahl
Ah. That's a big leap from very little data!

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27182818284
Yeah. And looking back over it now, the document is _a lot longer_ than I
remember. I think this is what biased me:
[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/366964441159438337?lang=...](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/366964441159438337?lang=en)
I remember then seeing the doc after that Tweet and thinking "You and others
worked all night on _that_?" It reminds me of that interview with Jerry
Seinfeld where he mentions the worst thing you can do is introduce a comic as
"The funniest guy in the world" because it biases the audience right before
you come out on stage.

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jusben1369
So you could build dedicated infrastructure that within 25 years might
meaningfully move people and/or goods between two points at 500 mph to 800 mph
via a single tube. Or you can move to complete self driving cars and trucks
that without the risk of human error could travel on the existing
infrastructure (in many case 2 - 5 lanes wide) at 200 - 300 mph within the
same timeframe or shorter.

I think self driving electric vehicles on the nation's roadways make the
hyperloop at best something like Amtrak today in the US. Valuable and
profitable only a few short routes/use cases.

EDIT: I do think we'll solve for 200 - 300 mph in 20 - 25 years. But insert
150 - 200 mph. The main premise is we're not going to build multi billion new
infrastructure when a "good enough" solution is organically evolving. Same
reason why we don't have high speed trains in the US.

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cp9
It's functionally impossible to drive at 250 mph for any meaningful period of
time. Drag is a gigantic problem (as james may says "it's like driving through
custard"), not to mention the fuel requirements to go that speed. One of the
bigger problems is actually tires. The veyron's tires can only last ~20
minutes at those speeds and a new set is 20 grand. If you want to go those
speeds you can't do it in the open air (unless you're actually flying) and you
certainly can't do it on rubber tires.

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butwhy
Just allow cars to drive inside the hyperloop tube.

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nolok
That's not solving the issue, which is using road instead of a rail-like
system.

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hownottowrite
_" Back in August 2013, long before Tesla..."_

Long? It's not even two years ago...

