
Hyperloop costs and challenges undermine pinned hopes - Poobuh
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42730916
======
Animats
How's the Dubai to Abu Dhabi Hyperloop coming? That's the ideal situation.
Flat route across desert. Government cooperation. Parties willing to pay for
an expensive luxury system. If that doesn't work out, nothing will.

~~~
janekm
Temperature differential of day/night cycles there would be a bit of a
nightmare though.

~~~
xellisx
"But we are going to put it underground to deal with that!"

~~~
Animats
That's not the plan. Here's the promotional video for the Dubai project.[1]

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fu-6IDp3Fo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fu-6IDp3Fo)

~~~
xellisx
Well, I'm sure they might change plans. IIRC, the hyper loop videos in the
beginning showed it to be all above ground.

Of course I have serious doubts that this would be a good means of
transportation.

~~~
Animats
Real tunnels are much more complicated than pretty pictures of tunnels. Many
tunnels have to hold up what's above them; they're really long arch bridges.
Brunel's Thames tunnel looks like one.[1] Modern tunnels are usually round
tubes, but structurally still arches.

Water is a big problem. On a good day, the New York City subway system pumps
out 13 million gallons. There are bad days. Many cities are near sea or river
level, so plan on a lot of pumping for urban tunnels. Water during
construction has been the cause of many tunneling disasters. Some of Japan's
longer tunnels hit underground rivers. Tunneling in soft wet soil is mostly
about keeping water out.

Tunnels which carry large numbers of people need extensive rescue facilities.
Usually, there are two tunnels, with cross-connections and emergency access
points. Fire suppression and smoke control systems are needed. Eurotunnel has
had five fires, three of them major, despite elaborate fire control systems
and much advance preparation for emergencies.

The various Hyperloop documents gloss over all of these real-world issues.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Tunnel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Tunnel)

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paulsutter
There are many reasons Elon’s hyperloop will be in a tunnel, including safety,
travel within the city center, and surprisingly much easier approvals.
Utilities drill tunnels all the time, and so far for The Boring Company,
getting approvals has been a matter of filing for a utility approval. There’s
just so much less contention underground.

Yes cost is an challenge, but so much easier to focus on one problem rather
than to be faced with many, like an above ground hyperloop would have.

“Without tunnels we’ll be in traffic hell forever” -Elon

~~~
jcranmer
> There’s just so much less contention underground.

Except for all the utility conduits (only half of which are actually marked),
gas pipes, steam pipes, water pipes, sewage pipes, forgotten tunnels (remember
the Chicago flood?), subway tunnels, basements, foundations, and pilings.
Sure, you could avoid a lot of that by going very deep, but you still have
problems with ventilation and access shafts to deep tunnels.

> “Without tunnels we’ll be in traffic hell forever” -Elon

The way to fix traffic hell is to accept that, if you live in a large city,
space is at a premium, and your single-occupancy vehicle takes up 20 times the
space as standing on a train.

~~~
quotemstr
People obviously prefer SOVs to standing on trains. Why not give people what
they want if we can develop technology to do it?

The entire conversation surrounding city planning, whether the specific topic
is transportation, zoning, or utilities, has take on a weird ascetic
moralizing tone, where the subtext is that the modes of existence people
choose for themselves is somehow "bad", that we need to accept limits, and
that the accommodations and compromises consequently made are good for us.

I don't share that mindset. To borrow an old phrase, better living through
technology really is possible.

~~~
maxander
There is no realistic apportioning of resources, or set of plausible new
technologies, that will give safe and effective cars the >7 billion people on
this planet in the next century. At least not without drastic downsides. Cars
work great for the wealthy, and are tolerated by the less-wealthy for lack of
better options, but are not in any circumstances an egalitarian option. (And,
btw, that's likely why you feel like the arguments against cars have an
"ascetic moralizing tone"\- use of single-person cars is a taken-for-granted
habit into which is built deep inequality.)

~~~
quotemstr
I don't think you're right about car technology scaling, but let's suppose
you're right. Why it would follow from cars being infeasible for seven billion
people that the citizens of a rich first-world country should have their car
use discouraged?

Radical egalitarianism is an intensely political position, and city planners
shouldn't be pushing it on the population at large by artificially
discouraging certain modes of transportation. They should focus on the
preferences of the populations they actually serve, not on some Utopian ideal.

~~~
jcranmer
I personally have no problems with people taking their SOVs into the cities,
but you do have to acknowledge that taking up excessive space obligates you to
have to pay extra costs for taking up that space. In practice, many people who
want to commute via SOV often take great umbrage anytime a city takes steps to
make them pay the true cost of that decision.

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djsumdog
It's important to note that evacuated tubes aren't a new idea. The Hyperloop
is a re-branding of Evacuated Tube Transport (ETT) that came about in the ..
80s? I think? I wonder if Musk is licensing the patents from that company or
if the Hyperloop division has patented their own tech as being entirely
different somehow.

Edit: Looks like Musk did negotiate with the ET3 people back in 2013

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ET3_Global_Alliance#2008–prese...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ET3_Global_Alliance#2008–present)

~~~
curtis
Hyperloop is a variation on the Vactrain [1], a concept that goes back a long
time. The thing that made Hyperloop different was the notion that you didn't
need a hard vacuum in the tube -- the air in a Hyperloop tube will be really
thin, but it will be there. The other thing notable about Musk's original
proposal was that the cars would float on air bearings rather than a maglev
track. I think most if not all of the current experimental Hyperloop systems
are using maglev technology because it works better than the air bearings
would. If Hyperloop systems adopt hard vacuum in the tubes, then I think you
can make the case that Hyperloop is not new, it's just re-branded Vactrain. In
reality, I don't know that this distinction will make any big difference.

I personally think we will ultimately see some functional passenger-carrying
Hyperloop systems, but I don't know that they will be any more successful than
maglev has been to date. I don't think we will see any systems using a hard
vacuum (the classic Vactrain), because hard vacuums are, well, really hard to
do.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain)

~~~
Banthum
I'm curious, what's the definition of hard vacuum?

Obviously there will be a few nitrogen molecules bouncing around in there so
it seems there must be some arbitrary cutoff.

~~~
telchar
I worked with electron microscopes back in the day, for that I would say 10^-6
atmospheres. But it probably depends somewhat on your application, I don't
think there is a solid definition.

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Red_Tarsius
British scientist Philip E. Mason ( _thunderfoot_ ) made several skeptical
videos on Hyperloop.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNFesa01llk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNFesa01llk)
I highly recommend his whole _Busted!_ series.

~~~
dnautics
thunderfoot's analysis forgets, among other things, that the force of pressure
scales with r^2 and mass with r^3

~~~
totalZero
Building a mechanical system isn't the same thing as writing an algorithm. You
can determine ahead of time r and p for all uses, and m has a pretty
manageable upper bound too. Asymptotic considerations are not always relevant.
They do have real utility in academic work, where a designer of a proof of
concept ought to show that the applicable cases of his idea are workable. But
that's not really the situation here.

More importantly, maximum velocity is not likely to be a strong function of
mass, which is relevant only to acceleration and friction.
Acceleration/deceleration can be assisted by other means, and bearing
designers can adopt very effective solutions from other means of transit.

~~~
dnautics
I'm specifically referring to why the demonstration of a ball bearing
puncturing a glass tube does not scale catastrophically at larger sizes.

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skywhopper
What will the actual humans-per-hour throughput of a practical hyperloop
implementation? My understanding is that although the technology may work,
it's unlikely to be economically feasible given the actual realistic capacity.
How is this superior to high-speed trains?

~~~
mindFilet
Even if it’s respectably higher than anything existing, it can only source
passengers from hub origins and drop them at hub destinations, leaving last-
mile problems yet to be solved. Spokes will be needed at destination hubs,
that allow for individualized selective destinations for the last mile.

Meanwhile if a city needs 3/4 of it’s workforce through the door by 9AM,
congestion at each hub still occurs, and rush hours aren’t actually
alleviated, only spread around. Hub stations will be the same horrible kind of
place train stations, bus stations and airports are, unless a new
conceptualization of origin sourcing and destination arrival is brought to the
table.

The only new aspect that a hyperloop adds to the equation, to change the game
is that, theoretiacally, longer distances can be negotiated, permitting any
given urban center to import from greater distances than before, and urban
residents can interchange between hubs without 500MPH aviation.

Of course, for those promises to hold true, tubes must be cut, and track laid
within them. Every mile of interconnection adds compelling power to the
principle of the concept. Individual point-to-point connections are
meaningless, if there are not many points connected, and the distances aren’t
longer than was previously realistic.

~~~
Robotbeat
Hyperloop ultimately is about a way to bring the advantages of high altitude
jet travel to much shorter regional hops, essentially bringing the
stratosphere down to sea level. It's not really about mass transit within a
city. Don't need 500mph for that.

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zeristor
I first read about Vactrains in the Usborne Book of the Future of the
seventies, which credited Dr Robert Salter, although the idea goes back a fair
bit further.

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

Elon's idea seems to be to make it quite a bit smaller, and to have the tubes
above ground, which does make it more feasible.

Is his association more to do with branding?

------
almostApatriot1
Would it be economically feasible to use the hyperloop to transport just goods
and not people, similar to a pipeline vs train transport? I always see it
referenced in connection to human travel, but it seems like safety is one of
the biggest issues.

~~~
mr_toad
What’s unsafe about it? Seems a lot safer than a plane.

~~~
icebraining
There's potential issues with earthquakes and terrorism, both of which are
less likely to affect planes, since they travel 10k from the ground.
(Terrorism still obviously affects airplanes, but with Hyperloop you not only
have to secure the stations, but the whole track too).

~~~
colejohnson66
> with Hyperloop you not only have to secure the stations, but the whole track
> too

I hear this argument a lot, and it personally doesn’t make sense to me. Trains
tracks in the middle of nowhere have functioned for two centuries.

~~~
Someone
And trains have been attacked for at least 150 years or so (westerns, Lawrence
of Arabia,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo–Haifa_train_bombings_194...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo–Haifa_train_bombings_1948)),
just like stage coaches got attacked for centuries before.

On the other hand, technological progress means planes nowadays also can be
attacked while in air, using rockets
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17))
or (not quite yet, I think), drones.

Planes have an advantage for the defense that it is easier for them to
randomly change routes.

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zeristor
Does anyone have any idea what happens if a capsule breaks down in a tube.
Crawling along an evacuated vacuum tube for scores of km doesn't sound
enticing. After all lifts breakdown now, and they don't go that far.

~~~
jandrese
Kind of like asking what happens if an aircraft breaks down during flight.
It's very bad, so lots of engineering has to go into making sure it never
happens.

Also, I agree with the article:

> launch a commercial operation by 2021

is an insanely optimistic goal.

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SubiculumCode
The article didn't seem to really discuss any limitation other than the
general and unspecific incredulity of the authors.

~~~
cwillu
Exactly. He quotes engineer after engineer saying "we've already proven it's
feasible" (and not a single one opposing!), and follows each quote with
something like "bringing him back to reality, I asked him...".

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tommoor
As a Brit that moved to SF, this kind of thinking is precisely the reason why.

