Alberta government gives green light to Calgary-Edmonton Hyperloop project
theglobeandmail.com
theglobeandmail.com
“Toronto-based startup TransPod has signed a memorandum of understanding with the government to study the potential of a high-speed hyperloop system and help it attract investors.”
And let’s translate that from polite Canadian PR speak: this will never, ever, ever happen, but it sounds nice, so we’ll put it out there.
We barely made Presto cards work.
For non-Canadians: the “we must buy Canadian” (or to be fully cynical “we must buy Quebecois”) has not gone super well for our transit needs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexity_Outlook_(Toronto_stree...
Here's what this is competing with:
Driving from Edmonton to Calgary, downtown to downtown, takes about 3 hours. My car can do a round trip on a single tank of gas with enough left over to do a little running around. The cost is about $60 in fuel, an unknown amount of wear-and-tear on the car, and three hours of time. I've done this trip with four people, so that works out $25/person assuming $40 worth of wear-and-tear on the car. The depreciation and insurance costs are not a factor here since those happen regardless.
If you don't own a car, but have a driver's license, you can pick up a Communauto (our version of ZipCar/Car2Go/etc) and drive it down there. This would probably cost less than $100, and Communauto includes fuel, insurance, and maintenance, but the cars in their fleet aren't necessarily ones that I'd choose for a road trip.
The flight from Edmonton to Calgary takes about 45 minutes from takeoff to landing. You need to arrive at the airport 1.5-2 hours before takeoff. Plus you need to get to the airport at the start of your trip and to your destination at the end. The cost is between $100 and $300 depending on how far you plan ahead, plus three hours of time.
There is currently no passenger rail service between Edmonton and Calgary.
There is bus service between the two cities. Red Arrow runs between Edmonton and Calgary and isn't too bad. You still have to get to the bus terminal at the start and your destination at the end, but the terminals may be in walking distance if you're going downtown to downtown. The cost is $172 plus three hours of time.
To work, this needs to find the sweet spot of taking less time than driving, being less of an annoyance than air travel, and priced right to make up for its own set of shortcomings. $25 per person plus three hours is a really tough price to beat.
If the tube works downtown to downtown in 45 minutes, people will pay $80 a ticket no problem.
Honestly the bigger problem is that Edmonton/Calgary 'downtown' is still 'nowhere' ... you need a car when you get there, it ain't Paris or Munich.
What Calgary/Edmonton needs is a fast train that connects to other, more local fast trains and commuters and light rail.
Not sure how far along they are in construction though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransPod
As other commentors have noted, this is a pre-pre-pre announcement. They're not even talking about breaking ground for another 5 years.
Still unlikely.
While it's still unlikely a full hyperloop line will be built, this agreement does goose the odds upwards slightly at little public cost, provided precautions are put in place to ensure the company building the test line does actually pay for its removal if the full line is not built.
Depending on regulations (similar to preflight security), this could be a 1 hour trip. If you need to also take a taxi to and from the hyperloop, you're not looking at much time savings. IMO the real value of these options is that you can do something else in the mean time. You can read, you can make calls, you can sleep.
Also: Obligatory monorail comment for hyper loop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDOI0cq6GZM
I agree this is not the most sensible locale to test this. There used to be frequent VIA rail service between the two cities (I remember taking it as a kid, at least as far as Innisfail to visit my grandpa) and I believe that's gone, due to lack of demand.
The cities are close enough that driving isn't terrible.
Now, it does have rather flat and easy to deal with topography, so there's that.
Toronto to Montreal / Ottawa, that's a route where high speed rail is desperately needed. Even more so if it was extended to come from Detroit and/or Buffalo.
If we're sticking with Alberta, maybe Edmonton to Fort McMurray, to get oil workers to/from the north. That's a crappy drive, and long.
It was downvoted already before I got here, but I personally loathe "obligatory simpsons/xkcd/etc" and "does/did anyone else <irrelevant thing>?" meme noise comments in article discussion threads. Probably others dislike it too and consider it an "etiquette violation", as you put it.
>Not sure why you're getting downvoted, downvoting isn't for disagreement, it's for etiquette violations, etc.
Whence do you draw this justification for upvoting and downvoting?
> I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.
Other comments say 3 hours and 3-4 hours which is much more in line with my experience. Of course, it depends heavily on where you start, where you finish, time of day, and so on.
So from, say, South Edmonton Commons (IKEA) to the Calgary's airport, you're looking at only a 2.5 hour drive according to Google Maps.
Even if you could do the hyperloop in 1/2 hour, as others have pointed out you'd still have: ticket booths, security, boarding time / line-ups, acceleration and deceleration time.
You can already get from YEG to YYC by airplane in under an hour. But we all know it makes little sense because of all the inefficiencies at airports. I don't see how the hyperloop would be that different.
The real problem with international borders is often related to customs checks, and Amtrak would rather prefer putting the customs checks in Toronto (/Montreal) and sealing the train through Canada to the US border. If the US and Canada were to enter in a customs union, that issue would go away, but I don't see that happening for decades.
(There's another interesting route, which is Chicago-Toronto; this is viable in a no-customs-hassle world because Chicago-Detroit is viable HSR by itself, ditto for Windsor-Toronto, so the only extra piece you need is Detroit-Windsor under the Detroit River).
Sure, it being an international link adds hassle, but it would create a stronger connection to a Global Hub instead of a regional one.
This way, Musk saves face by not failing publically.
If the idea fails, he can just say "It was in your hands, I left the idea with you!"
Pretty clever exploit...
Go to boringcompany.com to see what they're currently up to + they've had competition for university teams to develop the skate that you're vehicle would be accelerated by in the Hyperloop.
Elon has the engineering team, along with himself, from SpaceX to reference and understand the physics of the tunnel transportation systems they are developing.
Many things are wrong with the hyperloop or loop proposals. The first is that they are unproven and wildly off cost estimate. Elon musk waived off hyperloop costs by declaring that they can be built along pylons on existing highways. But that's absurd, as existing highways are built to the standard of 70-80 mph, and for the proposed speeds of 400-500 mph, the curvatures of the road, and the twists and the turns are completely different. Hence, land acquisition costs do not go away. The same thing applies to boring company's loop. If you are going to zip at 150mph, the curvatures are steep, and any common tunnel will slow it down.
I watched a few videos doing a more thorough analysis. If you're interested, I'll try to find and share them.
The Boring Company is moving forward at a good pace, including still doing competitions for last 4 years at universities for teams to create the best skate that will be used to accelerate vehicles in the Hyperloop.
This is nonesense. Being an "Engineer" doesn't automatically make you capable of engineering anything.
Engineering rockets is a very different discipline from engineering tunnels in earth and rock. I'd be surprised if anything other than very basic physics applied to both problems.
And... let's not kid ourselves. Musk is not engineering anything at any of his companies.
And you're right the engineering is similar but different, the real additional value comes from the CEO then making the right organizational calls - which he can do because of his engineering and prior experiencing starting and scaling companies.
You simply disbelieving Musk is an engineer is you getting in the way of yourself.
Upon realizing this idea was literally impossible to achieve - he stepped away. That was to protect himself from a very public failure.
I remember this striking me suddenly, shortly after I moved out from the Midwest. I was sitting on a patio, idly tracing the cracks with my eyes, when a question sort of bubbled up: where did they come from? The ground never freezes.
Then it hit me: in this case, they came from 1989.
Now, in the heart of February with black ice everywhere, that's maybe a different story. But not sure more lanes would help.