
Hyperloop Freight is a Joke - Osiris30
https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2016/10/29/hyperloop-freight-is-a-joke/
======
Russell91
I always come to these hyperloop criticisms expecting to find some sort of
fatal flaw in the physics of energy efficient supersonic travel. But to my
surprise, they instead tend to be pessimists saying things like, "You'll never
get past my friends: the regulators, the government bureaucrats, and
especially the lawyers!. We will drive up your costs and make you look
foolish".

First, no one said that designing this thing in the USA means it has to be
deployed in the USA. Countries without common law legal systems get around
these unnecessary costs much easier.

Second, if these are seriously the only objections, then thank god we are
actually building this thing. I could see complaints if it were some $100
billion publicly funded project, but the fact that less than $1 billion in
private capital has already gone so far into demonstrating the technological
feasibility of such an innovative transportation mechanism is a huge win.

~~~
treelovinhippie
Pessimism seems to be the default for the HN hivemind. Would be cool if we all
just encouraged everyone working on moonshots.

~~~
mojomark
Nobody here is trying to crush dreams. The author, and many others, are simply
trying to point out that there are much better uses of time and money.

The factors (i.e. physics) underpinning the economics of freight shipping in
all forms are well understood. Can a hyperloop be built? Sure. Is it better
than existing intermodal cargo shipment infrastructure? Yes and no. It
certainly offers speed, but doomedly at the expense of economies of scale:
[https://www.usmma.edu/sites/usmma.edu/files/docs/CMA%20Paper...](https://www.usmma.edu/sites/usmma.edu/files/docs/CMA%20Paper%20Murray%201%20%282%29.pdf)

Here's a thoughtful assessment by Olaf Merk posted last month that draws the
same conclusion as the author:
[http://shippingtoday.eu/musk_maritime/](http://shippingtoday.eu/musk_maritime/)

Bottom line, if you can find enough high value bulk cargo that benefits
significantly from high speed transit to only two or three "ports", then
hyperloop is your answer. However, that's a very (perhaps nonexistent) niche
in the industry.

What we (transport engineering community) need to be expending resources on
is: a.) eliminating greenhouse gas emissions, b.) designing a system of
transport that scales with global trade demand (vice building 20K+ TEU
megaships that can only be served by a few ports and promote trucking
congestion in ports). Autonomous shipping, AI implementations in both freight
forwarding (the logistics side) and transport control systems themselves, and
applications of H2 fuel cells are technologies with great promise.

------
LordHumungous
Of course the hyperloop is a joke. Elon Musk has zero experience or training
in transportation infrastructure, but we are supposed to have faith in some
idea he farted out in a white paper, why? Because he has skillfully cultivated
his image as a "genius", and we bought it? The hyperloop was nothing more than
a (savvy) PR move to cement his image as a "visionary". That it actually got
funded only goes to show what gullible shmucks some venture capitalists are.

Edit: I worked on the LHC for several years. The challenges of maintaining a
closed vacuum pipe that spanned a mere 17 miles were vast and expensive. Musk
proposes doing it on an exponentially larger scale without addressing the
challenges and pitfalls involved. Until he does so, I cannot take him
seriously.

~~~
D_Alex
Elon Musk had zero experience building cars, yet he made Tesla happen. Perhaps
a high intellect and a good general purpose engineering training can
accomplish more than you think.

You, on the other hand, are overwhelmed by the challenge of maintaining vacuum
in a tube that spans a mere 17 miles. At the very least, you should restrain
yourself from using language like "...some idea he farted out...".

~~~
jheriko
be careful, tesla is not successful as a car company yet, and its not in good
shape to become one either.

one day it might be, and more generally i do hope that we see more progress in
the electric car world... but for now tesla only turns a profit as a car
company coupled with government incentives. even then, outside of the US (and
inside actually) their market share is tiny or zero with very little growth.
saying that it doesn't even exist is a very good approximation to reality...
if you ignore tech focused news articles and the like at least.

i wouldn't call that a success just yet... as much as we may admire the
mission.

~~~
zerooneinfinity
In terms of their mission statement which is convince people that electric
cars can be 'cool', practical and inexpensive he has succeeded much more than
you are giving him and the people at Tesla credit for.

~~~
jheriko
fair enough, but its a different metric of success. :)

------
xt00
When people talk about using high speed rail in the US and talk about how it
doesn't work, I think the problem is exemplified by how any rail system seems
to get implemented in the US. Basically what I have seen in virtually all
cities around the US that I've traveled, the train goes _close_ to downtown or
_close_ to the airport, but not actually into the actual terminal in the
airport. Or you have a fast train that drops you in some place where you have
to transfer to something else like a taxi or bus or another train. For example
as I understand it, the new high speed train in California in the SF area will
not realistically be any better than riding Caltrain. So since it likely will
cost more than Caltrain a big base of people who could be riding it everyday
to get between SF and San Jose would not be using it. And I think it stops in
like a far flung spot in San Jose probably far away from many people's jobs.
So it's like, well may as well just keep taking Caltrain!

~~~
foolfoolz
the goal of high speed rail project in California is not taking you from SF to
SJ. it's the bay area to LA area. this is not a train for within Bay Area
commuters

Caltrain with express trains works very well. sfo and oak have trains that go
into the airport. caltrains goal of electrification if it ever happens should
make SF to SJ a lot faster. trains in the Bay Area are not as bad as you make
them out to be.

personally I think high speed rail should go from Santa Clarita to gilroy or
south San Jose. once you pass up the Central Valley you can take bart or
Caltrain to your final destination

~~~
xt00
Yea I understand that the goal of the california HSR is to get you from SF to
LA in its current form, but I guess what I'm getting at is that these systems
become much more viable when they truly get you from point A to point B for
commuters extremely quickly -- ridership goes way up. If it takes you 30 mins
to get someplace that previously took an hour or more, then taking that small
transfer seems like a small burden to add onto that. So at least if part of
your trip is at very high speed that is extremely helpful, and focuses
additional density desires for people who want to move there or build houses.
For example, the Taiwan HSR can get you from Taipei downtown to Hsinchu in
around 45 mins, and its around the same distance between SF and San Jose --
50-ish miles. The baby bullet assuming you can actually catch one will take
around 1.5 hours to get from SF to San Jose. In Taipei, driving to Hsinchu vs
taking the HSR is kind of ridiculous because you hit so much traffic just
trying to get out of the city and then the toll roads along the way can be
backed up at various points.. so the result is that if you can take the HSR, a
large percentage of people do take it. BTW to get that 45 minute time between
Taipei and Hsinchu, it stops at I think 2-3 stops along the way. So, you could
have SF downtown, SFO, maybe Redwood City, Mountain View, and then San Jose. I
mean these trains can go 170 miles per hour and they only take a couple of
minutes to get up to around 130 mph, so its not like they need to have zero
stops. But I guess if a 1.5 hour commute vs. 45 min commute people don't care
too much about, then HSR is not really that useful, but I do think people
would really want that. The HSR in the SF peninsula area as far as I know will
not go much faster than any trains on that same corridor right now for a
variety of reasons. So basically what we really need is a totally new corridor
that separates grade such as elevated or underground in order to get the
speeds and safety.

------
bigger_cheese
One thing the article misses is inflexibility. One of the big disadvantages of
rail is that once the track is deployed it is very costly and difficult to
upgrade it. One thing I'd want in any "futuristic" freight hauling method
would be ease of scaling I don't think Hyperloop offers anything over rail in
this regard once track is installed you are more or less stuck with the
installed capacity forever.

A computer analogy I'd give is to think of freight handling like information
communication - the big issues are bandwidth (How much can you send/receive in
one shipment) latency (How long does it take to arrive) and throughput (How
many shipments can you handle at once).

Hyperloop addresses the latency issue but does little to nothing to address
the other two problems

From what I see working in a heavy industry which relies on bulk freight (for
import and export). Throughput (i.e Congestion) is the hot issue - we have a
rail terminal and a deep water berth (which handles capesized ships). The rail
corridor is shared and at times pretty heavily congested we use road trains
(b-double trucks) to make up for the shortfall.

~~~
toomanybeersies
> A computer analogy I'd give is to think of freight handling like information
> communication

Unsurprisingly, a lot of the theory for transport networks maps extremely well
to computer networks.

Transport is essentially a literal packet switched network. You have routers
(depots), routes (roads, rails, etc), packets (in many cases, literally
packets), MTUs (twenty foot containers, or truckloads).

Queuing theory equally applies to both as well (and a lot of other physical
applications, at university we had an exercise applying it to customer
support).

~~~
bigger_cheese
Anecdotally one of my Engineering lecturers at university was an expert on
human logistics. (i.e the physical queuing of people) I remember talking to
her about a project she was working on with a large retail chain advising them
on how to funnel people through store checkouts more efficiently.

------
Animats
Vactrains might work out. There's nothing wrong with maglev in an evacuated
tube. A system where the thing runs on open track until it gets out of the
city and can switch to a vacuum tube might work. Then you can get someplace
useful. Most of the "hyperloop" proposals, including the MIT demo, are really
maglev vactrains.

If you're already a maglev, a tube doesn't add much. Japan's maglev has
already reached 600 Km/h. The Shanghai/Transrapid maglev routinely runs at 431
Km/h, and has hit 500 in tests. At those speeds, SF-LA is about an hour. But
the track cost is very high.

That's not stopping JR Tokai. The Tokyo to Nagoya maglev line has been under
construction for two years now. They're taking the most direct route to get
the fastest transit time. There are mountain ranges in the way. They're going
straight through them. 90% in tunnel. Completion in 2027. Cost comparable to
Twitter's peak market cap. Public support for this is so high that JR is being
pushed to build the next section, Nagoya to Osaka, sooner.

With enough money...

~~~
nickparker
Hypothetically, the vacuum tube gives you energy efficiency.

Drag power is proportional to the cube of velocity, so drag energy losses over
a fixed distance are proportional to the square.

In an ideal world you're paying a fixed cost per unit time to pump the tube
down then you shove as much stuff as you can through it at transsonic speed,
catch it all with regenerative brakes at the other end, and pay an energy per
kg payload cost lower than electric road vehicles.

Of course in practice that fixed cost may turn out astronomically high, but
that's the idea.

~~~
misnome
Presumably with all existing systems it has been much, much more cost
effective to be aerodynamic rather than building/maintaining/decompressing the
worlds largest vacuum tube

------
Turing_Machine
_an expert in logistics asked “why do we need to move cargo at 500 mph?“. The
problem is one of face._

I guess the 18,000 packages per hour that arrive at ANC by jet must also be a
matter of "face"?

What does this even mean?

Edit for clarity: The FedEx terminal at Ted Stevens Anchorage International
Airport can handle 13,400 packages per hour. The UPS terminal there handles
about 5,000 packages per hour. Virtually all of these packages arrive from
Asia on jets traveling hundreds of miles per hour (as opposed to the
alternative, container ships, which are cheaper, but much slower).

That's because Anchorage is the major airport that's closest to being on a
great circle route between North America and Asia. Most of the packages clear
customs in Anchorage, and are then fed into the FedEx and UPS systems for
further distribution throughout North America.

Clearly there is a _very large_ market for moving cargo at 500 miles per hour.
Frankly, I have a hard time believing that an "expert in logistics" would make
such a statement.

~~~
mcguire
Tokyo to Anchorage is roughly 5500km, vs. 600km for LA to San Francisco.

Alternatively, how much cargo does FedEx or UPS fly along the California
coast?

------
xt00
I had thought the concept for hyper loop was that the infrastructure cost
would be cheaper because it is a tube that does not require power or rails.

But it does seem like saying instead of two rails that allow for deviations
both horizontally and vertically and the vehicle stays on top, then now we
need a really nicely round tube with a different set of requirements that must
be maintained over hundreds or thousands of miles.

I guess if hyperloop teams are still in the phase of proving stuff out and
they need money then the money they will get will still probably be tiny
compared to what it would cost to actually build a real full blown system when
you factor in all of the costs of buying land and permits and construction
companies.

------
jfoutz
Side effects, side effects, side effects.

Hyperloop may be an unmitigated disaster. But the effort has clear benefits.

An innovative solution to shifting loads would be immediately useful to air
freight, and probably trucking and shipping.

Some solution to the sudden loss of vacuum would be useful in everything from
oil pipelines to freeway traffic. Turning the wall of air into a smooth
gradient in seconds is perhaps impossible, but even a partial solution would
create a whole host of companies to take advantage of the new technique.

New materials developed for the pylons, and techniques for manufacturing those
pylons are likely broadly applicable. Bridges are of course an obvious
example.

Does every flaw with the hyperloop require science fiction? Or is it just out
of reach?

It seems like the Department of Transportation should provide a whole bunch of
grad students money to answer the questions, rather than private investors,
because those problems sound very big and very risky to me. But if they think
they can do it, why not go for it?

------
salimmadjd
Of all the hyped up startups out there. I'm personally most bullish on the
promise of the Hyperloop. Really Hyperloop One since they're the only one
making actual progress.

The article makes some decent sounding criticism on the issue of last mile
being the limiting factor. But it all reminds me of what I heard before
regarding fast internet connectivity (the issue of the last mile), or why
would people need personal computers. The problem with criticizing anything
that can impact the future, is that we just don't know how it'll impact it.

I do know that anytime transportation or means of connecting goods or people
has been changed, it has had tremendous impact in economy and how the world
works.

Do we need to ship cargo at 500 MPH? With today's thinking, maybe no. But I do
know by building and experimenting with Hyperloop not only we might just
transform the world, in the process will probably make other accidental
discoveries as an added bonus.

~~~
foota
Seems like this is something a company like Amazon could be interested in, for
the long tail of products it might be more cost effective to be able to ship
via hyperloop vs building more capacity.

------
spectrum1234
I wish this was readable but this guy comes off as extremely arrogant. It was
a white paper for godsakes!!

Is there an app that ensures I never read anything by this guy again? What is
his name so I can avoid in the future?

I'm not saying Hyperloop is perfect...its the tone of this jerk.

~~~
mcguire
[https://hyperloop-one.com](https://hyperloop-one.com)

$141M funding.

------
meric
Put all the passengers on the hyper loop, build a freight-only rail beneath
the hyper loop, which can be more efficient because it no longer needs to
consider passenger requirements with regards to noise, width, height, or even
atmosphere in tunnels.

------
mangeletti
Why not, instead of using an almost-vacuum and a separate means of propulsion,
create a stream of air similar to that of bank tubes and just use that for
propulsion?

Fans inside of the tube would pull air in the direction of travel, and it
could be circulated or pumped in from / out to the outside at the ends. At the
end of the tubes a main fan system would be the primary work horse, creating
vacuum forces on the arrival end and pushing forces on the departure end.

In the last mile, the fan system could shut down and use the pressure to help
stop the vehicle and even store some of the pressure to help start the system
in the opposite direction later (i.e., regenerative breaking).

~~~
kinofcain
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beach_Pneumatic_Transit](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beach_Pneumatic_Transit)

Among other things it's more efficient to send electricity than to send air.

~~~
mangeletti
I don't mean as a means to maximize efficiency, but to avoid a lot of the
problems (e.g., the risks of a vacuum, the cost of engineering one, etc.).

~~~
kinofcain
Instead of the air resistance of a train-sized object (about a quarter mile
long) you'd have air resistance equivalent to a train 300 miles long (think of
the tunnel as an inside out train). It's inefficient by several orders of
magnitude.

~~~
mangeletti
Ah, I see what you mean :/

EDIT:

Wait, if the walls were made to be near frictionless, then the aggregate
energy, minus what's lost to hear from turbulence, would be used for motion,
right?

~~~
brandmeyer
Air has viscosity. Even for extremely smooth surfaces, you would expect the
flow to be fully turbulent over such a distance.

~~~
mangeletti
What I mean is that the energy wouldn't be lost. The turbulence wouldn't
result in a net loss of energy, except that which was lost as heat through the
walls (a 1cm layer of vacuum would insulate against that).

Am I thinking if this wrong?

~~~
brandmeyer
Totally wrong. All of that turbulence goes into heat, which must be sunk
through the walls (or something else), and is therefore lost. "Fully turbulent
flow" is a reference to the transition away from (low-friction) laminar flow.
Flow gets to be fully turbulent by experiencing high internal fluid friction
due to its own viscosity. Air's viscosity is low relative to water, but it
still isn't zero. 500 mph flow through a big long tube is extremely lossy.

------
yellowapple
"This is actually worse for freight than for passengers, which is why the
speed limits on curves are lower for freight trains than for passenger trains"

I'm 91% sure that this is less to do with freight specifically and more to do
with the amount of weight involved and how it's distributed in each car. Then
again, I'm no expert on freight trains.

------
johnm1019
The author spends the first 2 paragraphs discussing how existing rail and
pylon technology wouldn't work for the hyperloop. I find this to be short
sighted as it seems entirely reasonable to use different "rail" and "pylon"
designs for the hyperloop. Surely engineers might come up with a different
solution for a different problem?

------
almost_usual
At this point Hyperloop would have to support Intermodal freight transport to
even have a chance. The technical limitations of container ships or the
containers themselves would need to be considered. Hard to be beat taking a
container off a ship and dropping it right onto a train car.

------
m0llusk
Freight networks are critical and hyperloop has a claim to high efficiency
transport. This might not work out as hoped but it is most certainly not a
joke.

------
codingdave
I'm never quite trusting of any article that starts by linking to their own
previous article, with a tone of "I told you so."

------
Tade0
Here's an idea: Ditch the vacuum and instead put a mixture of 80% helium and
20% oxygen at half sea level pressure. This way you'll get a breathable
atmosphere that is five times less dense than air and causes as much less
drag. Imagine Teslas hurtling 155mph through these tunnels using only as much
energy as if they were traveling at 85mph.

~~~
cmrx64
Where do you get all that helium?

~~~
Tade0
I don't know, maybe from the 175 million cubic meters produced annually? For a
300km, two lane stretch you'd require around 7.5mln cubic meters - sure,
that's a lot, but it's not an impossible amount.

~~~
D_Alex
Helium, for the time being, is a non-renewable resource, and there are
concerns of a helium shortage for important applications like cryogenics. It
is probably not a good idea to use helium as you suggested.

------
ant6n
What I find annoying about this "hyperloop" hype is that it's just a rehash of
the concept of a vactrain, but because Musk wrote it is suddenly genius and
visionary
([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain)).

------
Glyptodon
Are all the hyperloop proposals really for a single tube instead of a bank of
tubes?

------
Balgair
Every time I see the HyperRail stuff, I just get this little song monoloop'd
into my head. It's so strange. Anyone else have that too?

EDIT: I found the song!:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDOI0cq6GZM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDOI0cq6GZM)

------
jheriko
i still think there is a much bigger problem in simply getting the thing
through the red tape necessary too... even if it was useful, it would be a
real struggle to be allowed to operate at all imo...

------
desireco42
I would totally comment on this article if I could read it. Contrast is
terrible and not even per usual design guidelines, as background is white.

------
DannyBee
Yawn. Freight has much bigger problems, like, in the US you have the Jones
act, which essentially means freight from foreign countries gets bulk broken
at a small number of ports instead of more directly moved to the ports it
should go to. See, e.g.,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920#Ef...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920#Effects)

------
kordless
What's a joke is "journalists" making blaming comments about a company they'd
unlikely be fit to work at.

