
Hyperloop: Why can't we believe in the big ideas? - prlambert
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31322_3-57598213-256/hyperloop-why-cant-we-believe-in-the-big-ideas/
======
keiferski
I'm still not quite convinced that enough people care about getting from LA >
SF and back again. The Hyperloop would be infinitely more useful (and might
actually get done) if it were from Boston to DC (with NYC and Philly stops in
between).

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis)

~~~
maratd
> The Hyperloop would be infinitely more useful (and might actually get done)
> if it were from Boston to DC (with NYC and Philly stops in between).

There's already a "high speed" rail system between those points. Of course,
that depends on your definition of high speed.

[http://www.amtrak.com/acela-express-train](http://www.amtrak.com/acela-
express-train)

Having been on that line, you're lucky when you're going 50 mph. Having a
hyperloop on those points would be insane. You could live in Boston and work
in NYC.

------
7952
In most practical ways Hyperloop is a train. It has a fixed unchangeable route
that can be blocked by a single carriage. Without a massive network this will
only be of value to people who happen to want to travel that particular route.
The world has a long history of new methods emerging and they often fail in
the long run. In Britain we had a canal boom, then a rail boom, and most of
those routes are now closed or obsolete.

It would be better to concentrate on increasing public transport in the road
and air. Build a separate road network for freight and coaches. Make energy
efficient airplanes that can fly short distances quietly and land on short
runways. Build systems to automatically route parcels to make same day
delivery possible. This would create a network that would be much more
adaptable and complement what already exists.

Rail is like dial-up between a few key points that ignores existing networks
that could be upgraded. Hyperloop is just a faster connection to a
dysfunctional network.

~~~
moocowduckquack
Roads? Where we're going we don't need roads.

Multi-lane roads are fixed routes that can be blocked by a single lorry and
frequently are. Without a massive network increase, roads are rapidly becoming
of appalling value on many major routes. Everything fails in the long run,
including the current road network and we need ways to build capacity with
minimum land use, because land rights are often the major cost.

Also, the car hauling version integrates directly with the road network anyway
so I don't know really what your network complaint is about.

Besides, all transport upgrades, including road or rail, are just a faster
connection to a dysfunctional network. If we were happy that it was properly
functional, we wouldn't be looking to upgrade it.

~~~
7952
People break down all the time, but mostly they pull over and are overtaken by
the other traffic. I agree that heavy vehicles are a big problem which is why
I suggested creating special provision just for them. Congestion from cars is
bad for business because it blocks freight. Congestion from lorry's is bad for
everyone. Imagine the benefit of removing all intercity freight from the
roads?

~~~
moocowduckquack
Is not just breakdowns that can hold up traffic, road vehicles also crash a
lot more often than trains and congestion is harder to manage as you cannot
regulate flow in the same way.

I am not anti-roads. Roads are great, they can link everywhere really easily,
however they have issues that can be reduced by pairing them with high speed
rail and air for long distance travel and light rail in urban centers for bike
and foot passengers.

Never mind just freight, imagine removing intercity traffic from roads and
being able to visit the next town along without having to compete for the road
with the folk going 500 miles.

~~~
7952
If all the vehicles are routed and controlled centrally with automated safety
systems it could be more reliable than rail. I am not suggesting we build more
roads as they are today, rather build a network that has the advantages of
rail via automation and just happens to use new roads as a pathway.

------
oakaz
Hyperloop is a big step that would take at least 20 years to try. What San
Francisco needs is simpler and smaller steps to fix transportation. Here are
suggestions;

1- Allow private & small mini-busses.

2- Provide the community hanging out near the bart exits in Mission better
public gathering places so we don't need to smell heavy amount of pie every
morning.

3- Make screens in bart and stations that show the upcoming trains, current
train, route etc.

4- Ban smoking, eating, talking loudly, and leaving garbage in the trains.

5- Replace all the seats with smaller ones like all other subways have.

6- Replace shitty Subway shops with good hipster alternatives that people
actually enjoy.

7- Improve ferry transportation between east bay and san francisco.

8- Establish shuttles.

~~~
gfodor
False dilemma and apples to oranges wrapped up in one comment. First, we can
have people working on the hyperloop and also addressing these problems.
Second, all of the things you mention have to do with intra-bay area
transportation, and most of them have nothing to do with efficiency but with
comfort, while the hyperloop is about efficient transport between two cities.

~~~
oakaz
I already pointed hyperloop is the big step, these are small steps that we
also should make.

As I observe, nobody responsible is giving a fuck to the problems of bart. A
friend I met almost threw up in the 16th bart exit since it's used as public
toilet. Aren't we paying half amount of the money we make to the government?
Then why can't we push the city government to fix the bart?!

------
tomelders
I believe. Now all I need is $6billion to build this thing, and $10 billion to
grease the palms of every politician between LA and San Francisco.

------
vermontdevil
Instead of LA to SF, I would look at building from Las Vegad to Arizona or to
Riverside perhaps? As a first line to start with and it's through the desert.

Just a thought. Show the skeptics what is possible.

~~~
illumen
Good idea. However, there are lots more investors in the LA-SF region. This
proposal is also a hack around government rules. This 'bid' is 9% the cost of
the train bid, and there is already a government budget for it. The companies
now have a track record of successul government bids (tesla paying back the
loan, and spacex successfully sending rockets into space). SF,valley, LA types
have been very supportive of tesla, and spacex - so I think they'll also be
supportive of an innovative train replacement.

For these reasons I think this proposal is brilliant. It's a hack on
government, business, media, and engineering all at once. As well, it's
something the customers would prefer. Well played Musk.

~~~
stonemetal
_This 'bid' is 9% the cost of the train bid, and there is already a government
budget for it._

I am not from California so I am not familiar with the HSR project. But this
doesn't seem right to me. HSR is proven and Hyperloop is experimental. Why is
it plausible that the same route for both would be cheaper on the one that is
going to require more engineering and V&V?

~~~
bryanlarsen
This is discussed in detail in the hyperloop proposal, but I believe that the
biggest factor is that the hyperloop proposal mostly runs along the I5 thus
requiring much less expropriation and right of way development, and doesn't
require large fences.

------
PaperclipTaken
I think that this article does discredit how much smartphones have
accomplished. Now anybody with a modern smartphone has a decent camera.
Anybody has access to full Google search results in their pocket. It's
possible that soon your smartphone will be your laptop (see Ubuntu Edge, and
augmented reality setups that are being developed). Smartphones may one day be
able to form their own meshnet using bluetooth.

Not to say that we shouldn't move forward with hyperloop, or at least build a
proof-of-concept somewhere. At the proposed price for hyperloop, you could
replace all existing Amtrak transportation in America with a hyperloop and
still pay about the same amount for a ticket.

To me, that's worth investing in.

~~~
dredmorbius
I enjoy having a search engine in my pocket (though I'd prefer if it weren't
Google), and the ability to haul a stack of 600 and counting articles, and a
few score books, while nary putting a crease in my chinos.

But we had books and encyclopedias and telegraphs and telephones and
phonographs a century ago. Just ... not as distributed, or portable.

If you were to look at the inventions and advances of the last quarter of the
19th and first quart of the 20th centuries, I suspect you'd find a few more
significant items than smartphones: electric light, telephones, phonographs,
radio, television (just under the wire), indoor plumbing (made possible by
central heating, so your pipes wouldn't freeze), air conditioning, and even
the first practical computers. Oh, and airplanes.

If you had the choice of technology _since_ 1925 or _before_ , I think you'd
go with the latter choice.

~~~
adventured
"But we had books and encyclopedias and telegraphs and telephones and
phonographs a century ago. Just ... not as distributed, or portable."

Or as fast, or as comprehensive, or as cheap per unit of accessible data, or
as connected, or as quick to improve and update, or as multi-functional, or as
useful, and so on.

It's the difference between having "food" as a barbarian in 10,000 BC and
having an integrated and highly advanced system of feeding an entire
civilization of 300 million people. That is to say, the difference between
night and day.

~~~
dredmorbius
What had a bigger impact on the availability of information? The laptop /
tablet and Google, or Gutenberg's press?

Prior to Gutenberg, if you wanted a copy of something, it had to be _copied
out by hand_ (often with errors introduced). Copies of a great book might be
numbered in the double digits. Newspapers didn't exist. Few people were
literate, let alone possessed a library. By the 19th century you had penny
dreadfuls, mass-market novels, and literacy rates in some countries
approaching 100% (Sweden, Finland, and Estonia in particular -- England as
late as 1843 had a literacy rate of 67% among men and around 55% for women).

The marginal benefit of additional technology, as with all marginal returns
with stunningly few exceptions (Moore's law chief among them) is increasingly
low, while the _costs_ of its discovery increases in real energy terms.

------
jerrya
Hyperloop: $6 Billion

Budget of the NSA: $10 Billion
([http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/07/news/economy/nsa-
surveillanc...](http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/07/news/economy/nsa-surveillance-
cost/index.html))

Hopes and dreams of 1960s youth looking at Apollo and entering STEM fields:
priceless

There are some things money still buys. For everything else there's PayPal??

~~~
netrus
Thou shalt not compare values of different units (USD vs USD/a)!

~~~
jerrya
Technically you're correct, the best kind of correct.

But well, is there a pretty easily understood, common sense way to compare an
yearly budget of $10B with a total cost of $6B, especially in terms of a trade
off?

~~~
bjterry
It just so happens there is! (Sort of.) A one time sum can be compared with
recurring annual sums by calculating the present value of each, taking into
account prevailing interest rates. The present value of an infinite series of
annual payments is given by the perpetuity formula: PV = (annual payment) /
(interest rate). Assuming that the NSA budget won't grow, and using the
30-year treasury bond rate of 3.71%, the present value (or cost, really) of
having an NSA forever is $270B. Of course, the NSA's budget is probably
growing faster than 3.71% right now which ruins the math, since it would imply
an infinite NPV. Also, to be totally accurate you would have to calculate the
present value of the hyperloop which would be spent over some number of years.

~~~
jerrya
What might you do with your infinite series to roughly estimate the NPV in
your head without having to write anything down?

Especially when faced with certain tradeoffs, like comparing a $6B hyperloop
with an agency with an annual budget of $10B?

~~~
T-hawk
Just divide the yearly cost by the rate of interest or inflation. $10 billion
divided by 3.71% yields that $270 billion figure. Use whatever mental
shortcuts work for arithmetic in other contexts. There's no need for an actual
infinite series.

Explaining it the other way around, if you had $270 billion now, you could
fund the NSA by $10 billion per year in perpetuity based on the interest.
That's a simple calculation of $270B x 3.71%.

~~~
jerrya
Must just be me. How about:

I'll trade 7 1/2 months of the NSA annual budget for one hyperloop.

------
Shivetya
Simple really, government is to large and intrusive that there is little to no
room for private industry to implement them. Items that are easily
transportable, or measured at the personal level, like phones, computers, and
even cars, are still well within reach.

Some will point to Space X as violating that last line, but look at it from
the perspective of that it really is only affected by one part of government.
Large transportation projects like the hyperloop would require approval at so
many levels and be subject to the whims of so many outside groups that it is
insurmountable by private enterprise. Only government can build it because
only government can ignore its own rules.

So its not a matter of that we can't think big, we can think big all we want.
We just have to find frontiers where bureaucracy is not the primary obstacle.

~~~
ForrestN
As well as Rand would like this story, with its normative, visionary captain
of industry, its worth remembering that this line of thinking is as bankrupt
as it is naive.

First of all, it would be utterly impossible for a purely private initiative
to build the hyperloop as proposed. Most obviously, the unique feasibility
argument here is that the government already owns highways that could bear the
tube for most of the distance between SF and LA. But no serious rail line has
ever or could ever be built without government help, because it would be
impossible to negotiate the purchase of all the land without eminent domain.

Pragmatics aside, this is also just a very facile way of looking at things
that belies, I think, a certain amount of laziness. The government isn't
perfect, and sometimes bureaucracy does hinder good projects, but really the
challenge for hyperloop would be garnering public support. If the proposal
becomes massively popular, the government will have a huge incentive to build
it. Unfortunately it's easier to complain vaguely about the government than it
is to convince weary tax payers to fund a massive project using unproven
technology. I'd love to see hyperloop built, but I am not desperate for other
services that would be provided with the same money (better schools, for
example).

Much of the reason American business thrived in the second half of the
twentieth century is because of the superior infrastructure the government
built. Every business in Y Combinator relies on services provided by the
government and couldn't function nearly as well if Ron Paul were king. And,
obviously, the government has achieved radically ambitious projects before.
Have you ever been to Hoover Dam? Driven from coast to coast?

Government isnt perfect and can be frustrating, but bureaucracy is almost
never the primary obstacle. It's just a convenient excuse.

~~~
JulianMorrison
The solution to negotiating land purchase without eminent domain is to play
"connect 4" by buying "options" \- cheaper contracts that fix a price for a
period of time but don't guarantee a sale. As soon as you have a connected
path of options between A and B, you can exercise the options and run the line
down it. You can spread the option purchases around a whole lot, so that
nobody has an incentive to play awkward in return for more money, because
you'd simply route around them.

------
ronaldx
It's notable that Musk uses supersonic air travel as a comparison point.
Talking about LA to NY: "...I believe the economics would probably favor a
supersonic plane"

With reasonable timing: it's just coming up to a decade of supersonic air
travel being commercially unviable.

~~~
adventured
I think it's his all-electric jet in the back of his mind.

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-08/elon-musk-just-
may-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-08/elon-musk-just-may-have-to-
develop-an-electric-supersonic-jet.html)

------
fragsworth
If the expected value (estimated to the best of our abilities) is positive,
then someone with a bit of credibility can easily create a corporation and
find investors to build it. It's really that simple.

The only other way it might get built is if someone lobbies the state to fund
the project, and in that case it's probably not worth it because the market
didn't even want to do it. Isn't this what happened with California's new rail
project?

~~~
daivd
It is not quite that simple. The government will have to say yes, since this
is a big infrastructure project that wants land next to existing highways. I
don't know much about politics, but I do know that, sadly, the net gain for
the country over time is not a weighty criterion in such decisions.

~~~
fragsworth
Getting government support for the project is part of the risk and cost
analysis, and I don't believe it would amount to a very large percentage of
the total cost.

------
vonseel
I don't see how someone could put Google Glass in the same category as Segway
or CableCard, especially this early on. I do wish CableCards had worked out
better though. As it stands now, I have an HDHomerunPrime that I'm ready I
part ways with because there simply isn't enough support for CableCards in
Linux.

------
setitimer
She said it herself: it's another Segway. It's a solution in search of a
problem. We already have mass transit between northern and southern
California: airplanes. I know, I know, this would be "better". But the
existing system serves the people who need it at an adequate cost and level of
service.

~~~
gfodor
This is a ridiculous comment. An hour door-to-door SF to LA means of
transportation for less than $100 round trip would completely alter the
economic landscape of California.

~~~
setitimer
How? It's still too expensive for most people to use on a daily basis. It
still requires some way to get from the train station to your final
destination, which adds yet more cost. The end result is that the only people
who will really use it are the same people who currently fly regularly between
LA and SF, which means about 12 million people annually. Nowhere near enough
ridership to support the kind of prices that are being bandied about.

Edit: more like 6 million people fly between LA and SF annually. I was
thinking of the Amtrak Northeast Corridor ridership, which is about 12 million
annually.

~~~
ericd
The paper outlines an amortization period that shows where that price comes
from. Did you not read the paper?

~~~
setitimer
Assuming the paper's optimistic predictions are feasible, the amortized cost
per passenger of a one-way ticket is $20 plus operating costs. So, sure, the
round trip cost will hopefully be somewhere below $100, if we ignore the cost
of local transportation at either end. This is, as I said, too expensive for
most people to afford on a daily basis.

Beyond that, the paper also claims a total annual ridership of 7.4 million
people, so approximately the same ridership as currently served by air travel.
So, other than acting as a jobs program, in what way will this alter the
economic landscape of California?

~~~
milesskorpen
A $20 ticket isn't enough that many people would commute on a daily basis
(though many would), but a 40 minute trip is less than my commute to San Jose!
You could come to SF to go to Napa or visit a concert, return south to LA for
a movie premier or to hit the beaches, all as _day__trips_. How would this not
have a huge impact for both cities?

------
bowlofpetunias
I'm pretty sure there are plenty of places in Asia and Europe, where public
transport is not a dirty word, where people are already trying to figure out a
way to make this happen in their backyard.

~~~
stephengillie
I keep thinking about the Seattle Center Monorail, constructed for the 1962
World's Fair. Like the hyperloop, it's an elevated train, and people predicted
that it would be extended to other cities and revolutionize public
transportation.

It still runs, and you can ride it for a few dollars. But a bus will take you
end-to-end cheaper and faster.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_monorail](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_monorail)

------
scrrr
Just shows how unevenly wealth is distributed if one guy thinks about building
a new transportation system between L.A. and S.F.

~~~
seferphier
anyone can 'think' about building a transportation system. Even elon cannot
pay for the new transport system by himself.

~~~
adventured
Musk could technically pay for it, his wealth is right around $6 to $7 billion
(33m shares of Tesla worth $4.8b; $1b in SolarCity, and SpaceX is worth at
least a billion to him, plausibly more), but it'd wipe him out.

There are reasonably a few individuals or groups of people in the world that
can very safely spare the resources to build it (such that paying for it it
wouldn't materially damage their business or ability to run their business, or
otherwise tank their stock, put them in the poor house, and so on).

Bill Gates (Cascade can raise $10 billion quickly), Carlos Slim, Warren
Buffett (the street already knows he's going to liquidate), the Koch brothers
together could easily do it, Ellison could do it with leverage (he'd never
sell that much Oracle stock in one go, and he earns enough annually in
dividends to pay off the loan), and the Walton clan (but they'd be very
unlikely to coordinate on such a thing).

For almost anybody else, the liquidity or leverage it would take would be
overwhelming or very risky at the least.

~~~
yid
You forgot Elon's lost twin, Sergey Brin.

