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  #21  
Old Posted Aug 13, 2013, 7:13 PM
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Originally Posted by Wooster View Post
Besides the obvious technological challenges - I see a basic problem with this technology being capacity. They're talking about capsules of 6 people - how frequently could you feasibly and safely load and launch these capsules into the tube? What kind of maximum capacity could you have per hour? The good thing about trains is they have a high capacity.
Each capsule is actually 28 passengers (840 passengers per hour on a 2 minute departure interval).
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  #22  
Old Posted Aug 13, 2013, 7:20 PM
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6 Billion dollars all the way from LA-SF? How much did we pay for the airport tunnel? West LRT? Maybe the Alberta version could be extended to Ft Mac to bring supplies in as well? Though, I guess if this proved viable the oil sands would be inherently less valuable.

If his numbers ($20/person) are even underestimated by 10x, it still makes sense. Who wouldn't pay $200 to be in San Fran in 20 minutes from LA?
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  #23  
Old Posted Aug 13, 2013, 8:00 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Wooster View Post
Besides the obvious technological challenges - I see a basic problem with this technology being capacity. They're talking about capsules of 6 people - how frequently could you feasibly and safely load and launch these capsules into the tube? What kind of maximum capacity could you have per hour? The good thing about trains is they have a high capacity.
On another forum I was reading, they said each capsule held 28 people. It was discussed that the capsules could be loaded and queued up to be sent off every 1-2 minutes. Even at 3 minutes, that's 20 capsules or 560 people per hour... Sounds like a lot of people

Edit - Bigtime beat me to it on the capsule capacity.
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  #24  
Old Posted Aug 13, 2013, 8:11 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Wooster View Post
Besides the obvious technological challenges - I see a basic problem with this technology being capacity. They're talking about capsules of 6 people - how frequently could you feasibly and safely load and launch these capsules into the tube? What kind of maximum capacity could you have per hour? The good thing about trains is they have a high capacity.
His paper says 28 people per capsule/pod, with (I think) a departure frequency for each pod of between every 30 seconds (peak transit) and every 2 minutes on the LA-SF route.

I think 30 seconds sounds wildly optimistic, but what do I know?

HT
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  #25  
Old Posted Aug 13, 2013, 10:04 PM
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Originally Posted by Bigtime View Post
In the document released yesterday Musk is estimating a passenger only version to cost about $6B USD. So I guess a ballpark for YYC-YEG would probably be around $3.5B USD or so.

Where does that compare to estimates of the HSR options?

The huge thing about this (if it works as advertised) is just how little energy is used per trip versus all other transport methods. It would be a big deal for a province like AB to invest in technology like this.
If it were guaranteed to be that price, and as good as they say, then ya. Do it. Cool idea, but still really far from existing.
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  #26  
Old Posted Aug 13, 2013, 10:22 PM
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Also Calgary is +300m higher than Edmonton. It sounds like this would need to have very little gradient to work, perhaps why it is discussed between 2 coastal cities.
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  #27  
Old Posted Aug 13, 2013, 10:23 PM
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Didn't even think of the gradient thing, yet another difference here I'm sure that Musk and his people could solve pretty quick.
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  #28  
Old Posted Aug 13, 2013, 10:28 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bigtime View Post
In the document released yesterday Musk is estimating a passenger only version to cost about $6B USD. So I guess a ballpark for YYC-YEG would probably be around $3.5B USD or so.
The construction mafia isn't nearly as bad in California, so if their longer track is $6B, I'd say our shorter one would be 50% more than that. You know I'm right.
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  #29  
Old Posted Aug 13, 2013, 10:31 PM
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Originally Posted by simster3 View Post
Also Calgary is +300m higher than Edmonton. It sounds like this would need to have very little gradient to work, perhaps why it is discussed between 2 coastal cities.
I doubt a 0.1% average grade would make any difference.
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  #30  
Old Posted Aug 13, 2013, 10:49 PM
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Originally Posted by suburbia View Post
The construction mafia isn't nearly as bad in California, so if their longer track is $6B, I'd say our shorter one would be 50% more than that. You know I'm right.
Haha, well played!
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  #31  
Old Posted Aug 14, 2013, 7:25 AM
Allan83 Allan83 is offline
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An interesting side note is that Musk’s mother is from Regina, and he spent some summers as kid in Regina and on a relative’s farm near Swift Current. He also went to Queen’s for a couple of years. I’m not sure if this would make him more interested in getting involved in a project here, but it’s an interesting connection to the area. I believe this technology exists only on paper at this point, however, so I expect that we’re a long way away from any large scale project being built.
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  #32  
Old Posted Aug 14, 2013, 5:21 PM
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Originally Posted by You Need A Thneed View Post
I doubt a 0.1% average grade would make any difference.
Also, take a closer look at Google Earth and see the route he proposed for California...plenty of grade there through some areas. That's what the accelerators in the tube are there to help with.
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  #33  
Old Posted Aug 14, 2013, 5:48 PM
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I think the biggest problem with this (and HSR too for that matter) is that Calgary and Edmonton are both cities that are much better traveled by Car. What's the point in getting to the city faster if you can't do anything once you get there? Let's take these hypothetical billions and put them in our local transit, first.
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  #34  
Old Posted Aug 14, 2013, 6:33 PM
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Perhaps someone should let Elon know that conventional HSR can also be elevated and on pylons.

Pie in the sky.

And how do passengers even get out of the pod in an emergency in the tube if the doors have to swing out and up like shown? I guess they could use sliding doors to solve that. I'm too busy with other things at the moment so I'll let that idea float around out there and be open source for others to develop.
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  #35  
Old Posted Aug 14, 2013, 6:43 PM
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Originally Posted by sim View Post
Perhaps someone should let Elon know that conventional HSR can also be elevated and on pylons.

Pie in the sky.

And how do passengers even get out of the pod in an emergency in the tube if the doors have to swing out and up like shown? I guess they could use sliding doors to solve that. I'm too busy with other things at the moment so I'll let that idea float around out there and be open source for others to develop.
I think the difference is the weight, size, and cost of the pylons.
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  #36  
Old Posted Aug 14, 2013, 6:49 PM
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Probably the best critique of the Hyperloop that I have read so far ...

(DC Streetsblog)

Loopy Ideas Are Fine if You're an Entrepreneur

Quote:
Thus we get Hyperloop, a loopy intercity rail transit idea proposed by Tesla Motors’ Elon Musk, an entrepreneur who hopes to make a living some day building cars. And thus a fair amount of the media coverage is analysis-free summary of what Tesla already said.

[ ... ]

My specific problems are that Hyperloop a) made up the cost projections, b) has awful passenger comfort, c) has very little capacity, and d) lies about energy consumption of conventional HSR. All of these come from Musk’s complex in which he must reinvent everything and ignore prior work done in the field; these also raise doubts about the systems safety that he claims is impeccable.

[ ... ]

Speaking of vertical acceleration, this gets no comment at all in the Hyperloop proposal. At 1,220 km/h, it is very hard to climb grades, which would require very tall viaducts and deep tunnels under mountains. Climbing grades is easy, but vertical acceleration is such that the vertical curve radius has to be very large. A lateral acceleration of 0.67 m/s^2 would impose a minimum vertical curve radius of 170 km, versus 15 km at 360 km/h HSR speed. Changing the grade from flat to 2% would take 3.4 km, and changing back would take the same, so for climbing small hills, the effective average grade is very low (it takes 6.8 km to climb 68 meters).

[ ... ]

It’s possible to discover something new, but people who do almost always realize the context of the discovery. If Musk really found a way to build viaducts for $5 million per kilometer, this is a huge thing for civil engineering in general and he should announce this in the most general context of urban transportation, rather than the niche of intercity transportation. If Musk has experiments showing that it’s possible to have sharper turns or faster deceleration than claimed by Transrapid, then he’s made a major discovery in aviation and should announce it as such. That he thinks it just applies to his project suggests he doesn’t really have any real improvement.

[ ... ]

The more interesting possibility, which I am inclined toward, is that this is not fraud, or not primarily fraud. Musk is the sort of person who thinks he can wend his way from starting online companies to building cars and selling them without dealerships. I have not seen a single defense of the technical details of the proposal except for one Facebook comment that claims, doubly erroneously, that the high lateral acceleration is no problem because the tubes can be canted. Everyone, including the Facebook comment, instead gushes about Musk personally. The thinking is that he’s rich, so he must always have something interesting to say; he can’t be a huckster when venturing outside his field. It would be unthinkable to treat people as professionals in their own fields, who take years to make a successful sideways move and who need to be extremely careful not to make elementary mistakes. The superheros of American media coverage would instantly collapse, relegated to a specialized role while mere mortals take over most functions.

[ ... ]

people all over the Internet, including in comments below, defend the low cost projections on the grounds that the system is lighter and thinner than your average train. The proposal itself also defends the low tunneling costs on those same grounds. To see to what extent Musk takes his own idea seriously, compare the two proposals: the first for a passenger-only tube, and the second for a larger tube capable of carrying both passengers and vehicles. On PDF-pp. 25-26, the proposal states that the passenger-only tube would have an internal diameter of 2.23 meters and the passenger-plus-vehicle tube would have an internal diameter of 3.3 meters, 47% more. Despite that, the tunneling costs on PDF-p. 28 are $600 and $700 million, a difference of just 17%.

The same is true of the “but the Hyperloop capsule is lighter than a train” argument for lower pylon construction costs. Together with the differences in tube thickness posited on PDF-p. 27, 20-23 mm versus 23-25, there is 60% more tube lining in the passenger-plus-vehicle version, but the tube and pylons are projected to cost just 24% more. In this larger version, the twin tube has 0.025*3.3*pi*2 = 0.5 cubic meters of steel per meter of length, weighing about 4 tons. This ranges from a bit less than twice to a bit more than twice the weight of a train. To say nothing of the pylons’ need to support their own considerable weight, which is larger than for HSR due to the need for taller viaducts coming from the constrained ability to change grade. They are far more obtrusive than trees and telephone poles, contra the claims of minimal obtrusiveness and disruption.
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  #37  
Old Posted Aug 14, 2013, 8:00 PM
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I'm a little disappointed in the credibility people here are giving this ridiculous napkin sketch of a hoax. Over on business boards or programmer websites, where people don't know the nuts and bolts of infrastructure, I'm less surprised, but here?

In addition to Alon Levy's post that sitchensis linked to, there's this one:

Quote:
So what's going on here? This proposal is so off base it feels as if it was put together during a weekend of drinking.

Is Elon Musk broadcasting an incredible display of optimistic naivete, or is there a much more sinister goal here?

If you follow transit projects, you'll know that a VERY common strategy of opponents is to say they support your idea, just not your implementation.

"Oh we LOVE the idea of transit between x and y. We just don't like that it's expensive and unsightly light rail, we will TOTALLY support the BRT project that is cheaper, can be built faster, and is better for riders!' .....and will not receive popular support, thus killing the project at the ballot box

You see the opposite as well in areas that are more pro-transit ."Oh we LOVE the idea of transit between x and y. We just don't like that it's ground-running light-rail , we will TOTALLY support underground subway that is safer and faster!" ....and will be so expensive the project will be cancelled before the first shovel hits the ground

The goal isn't to build a better system. It's to destroy the process by presenting a false choice.
- Stop and Move
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  #38  
Old Posted Aug 14, 2013, 8:44 PM
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Originally Posted by J-D View Post
I think the difference is the weight, size, and cost of the pylons.
Ahhh, so he was gonna just drop them from a helicopter right on the mark in an upright position.

I suspect he'd find that difference to be very, very small if not in the opposite direction once he actually goes into having to actually account for everything. Slippage to allow for thermal expansion? He's gonna allow for thermal expansion along 560 km? Ah, so movable stations?

There is a good 150 years of construction knowledge, engineering, design and research and development behind railways and at least 50 to 60 specifically dealing with HSR.

Of course he doesn't have to start from scratch, but give me a break. Yup, it'll only cost like 6 billion. Yup, you can tunnel for $31 million/km. F service tunnels! My rough back of napkin calculation would lead to about 3/4 - 1 billion for the raw steel alone for the tube - one direction.

Perhaps he's assuming free labour?

The point is the document has very very minimal technical detail, and the devil here is undoubtedly in the details. It's a step beyond, "hey, let's put a tube on some post thingys and shoot things through it."

I'm with the previous couple posts^^
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  #39  
Old Posted Aug 14, 2013, 10:54 PM
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Originally Posted by J-D View Post
I think the biggest problem with this (and HSR too for that matter) is that Calgary and Edmonton are both cities that are much better traveled by Car. What's the point in getting to the city faster if you can't do anything once you get there? Let's take these hypothetical billions and put them in our local transit, first.
This is more or less the conclusion that was reached when HSR discussions came up a few years back, and I have to say I agree. A few thousand people might use HSR daily, but for the same price we could build the entire NCSELRT which would be used by 50-100k people, save time in congestion costs to another 200k people, and add millions of dollars to affected property values.

The best thing to do is to protect a ROW for HSR (or whatever technology) until transit modal share and population increase. One day I look forward to it!
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  #40  
Old Posted Aug 14, 2013, 11:05 PM
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Originally Posted by J-D View Post
I think the biggest problem with this (and HSR too for that matter) is that Calgary and Edmonton are both cities that are much better traveled by Car. What's the point in getting to the city faster if you can't do anything once you get there? Let's take these hypothetical billions and put them in our local transit, first.
As opposed to LA??

I mean, I don't disagree with your point, but...
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