Hyperloop One to shut down
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
So, its purpose is done now and it can retire gracefully.
Or am I being too cynical?
I think he was pretty vocal about the high speed rail project not being great, and it not a great way to spend tax payers dollars. Can you point to where he said he wanted it cancelled to sell more cars?
And my question stands. How many cars will be taken off the roads when the high speed rail is complete? Even better, would be to share the numbers with timeline of each phase.
From what I read, the first phase of the high speed rail was not due to open until 2030, and be just 275 km. It does not sound like an existential threat to Tesla.
I know musk is a divisive character, and is much derided in HN, but it seems to me a lot of the stuff on the internet and press that people attribute to him don't stand up to much scrutiny. It would be good if we could hold ourselves to a higher standard on HN.
See previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32892396
"Musk reportedly told his biographer, Ashlee Vance, that the Hyperloop proposal was motivated by “his hatred for California’s proposed high-speed rail system,” which he felt would be too slow, outdated and expensive. “With any luck, the high-speed rail would be canceled,” Vance wrote."
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/elon-m...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/15/elon-musk...
When he admitted he built a staged rail company to subvert public high speed rail and encourage more sales of his cars, it strikes directly at the heart of his "mission" and "values" that are so adored by the auto & tech industries.
The goal of the project is to go where people want to go. The CAHSR project took in a lot of feedback as well as local political involvement to get to its alignment. Because of this process, it hits many major population centers and destinations throughout the state. It eventually will connect all three major metro areas (SD, LA, SF) as well as the capital city (Sacramento). Once complete the HSR will be the fastest door-to-door mode of inter-city transit for many of these destinations.
There are no concrete plans to do anything related to Phase 2 since the active scope was narrowed, so the SD and Sacramento connections are really wishful thinking at this point; the Authority still says that planning is happening on Phase 2, but lists no Phase 2 related progress (even planning) in their annual reports and similarly has no Phase 2 related progress goals in those reports.
Its an SF to Anaheim project.
https://www.travelchinaguide.com/china-trains/high-speed/rai...
US is now cursed by their own success. Eisenhower jump started the highway to connect all of US as the largest transport infrastructure project. We have been riding the success of that for a massive economy. We are on the plateauing side of that S curve.
cursed because we spent a ton of money and got into debt with trillions spent for wars without much to show.
Now we don’t have to money, nor the will to invest in the next S curve infrastructure project.
Meanwhile China is pumping out infrastructure at speed of thought.
"U.S. Debt: Visualizing the $31.4 Trillion Owed in 2023" - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/us-debt-31-4-trillion-ow...
The so-called Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) credibly posits that because the U.S. borrows in its own currency (dollars), it can simply "print money" as needed — as long as the U.S. economy has sufficient unused productive capacity to absorb the resulting increase in demand. [0]
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/06/business/economy/modern-m...
Also we’re under-taxing bajillionaires and politically-active but tax-exempt megachurches.
And we have forgotten the rational can-do optimistic spirit of problem solving via hard work, (the ideal of) objective thinking, and the hunger for adopting ideas from anywhere.
A lot of this is the result of power centralization in our social and political sphere's. Winner take all dynamics are so immediately and decisively rewarding, that long term, collaborative and independent thinking have become self-defeating (for the political and socially powerful).
Technology can solve many problems. Unfortunately, that can include shifting the price of growing problems into the future and onto the powerless. Enshittification of the whole planet and human condition.
It isn't technology's fault, and if/when society gets shocked into organizing better, we are going to need every technological edge we have accumulated to turn things around.
I different version of hype applies in a different way. With the systems destroying themselves through compounding "compromises" to get political allies. It's a Vox video, so high level but not a bad intro[0]. Tldr: easy to derail (pun intended) any political project, and the bigger the project the easier it is to derail.
That 500K should be enough to build 1/4 of a bathroom: https://slate.com/business/2022/10/san-francisco-toilet-mill...
planes are faster, have flexible routing, and cheaper upfront cost sure
the rest is simply not true. how do planes have "flexible capacity"? how do trains not have flexible capacity? wtf?
> how are trains not a proven technology???
The US currently has nothing that would be considered high speed rail by the rest of the world. It could be built here, but it would cost billions and take decades. Hofstadter's law strongly applies to major infrastructure projects in the US. "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law."
> how do planes have "flexible capacity"? how do trains not have flexible capacity?
Planes can be put in service or redistributed to serve a certain route in hours. Extra train engines and train cars cannot be moved nearly as easily.
The train I take every day to work has 12 cars in rush hour, and 4 cars off-peak, sometime 6 cars in the middle of the day, or 10 cars just after rush hour. They put extra trains in rush hour, have trains in standby is case of a breakdown of other trains, and they even introduce special trains dedicated for events (football games, big concerts, sports event). How is this "not flexible" ?
The only valid point is that the US forgot how to efficiently build huge infrastructure projects. But it is not an impossible thing to solve. Sent some experts to France, Spain and ask them how to manage high-speed project within reasonable costs. France is building the Grand Paris Express (a lot of tunneling, more than 200km of tracks) for a reasonable cost, and is now reusing tunnel boring machines to build another project in Toulouse.
Also, boarding a train is so much more comfortable and convenient than boarding a plane (no security check, at least in Europe, wide seats, no emergency tutorial, ...). Also the train drops me right in the city center.
I would argue that up to 500 km of distance, high speed train is the best option, then it becomes debatable.
When the tracks don't exist (i.e. in the US) there are billions of dollars of carbon cost (moving earth, concrete, steel) to building new track.
Orlando to Atlanta will have sold more than airplane 310'000 seats in December 2023. At 250g per km per passenger, we get to 54'250 tCO2 emitted on this route alone in December. You can see that laying 700km of high-speed tracks that will last more than 30 years before renovation will emit as much as one to four months of flight emissions on the busiest US airplane route.
You can argue about the specifics of this back of the envelope calculation, but flying emit orders of magnitude more tCO2 than any form of transport (on short haul) that even building a whole new high-speed rail route is worth it after a few years of exploitation. Obviously you are not going to convert 100% of passengers to rail, especially in the beginning with spotty transport coverage, but focusing on busy airplane routes (< 1000km) and building high-speed rail is worth it in the medium-long term.
[1] https://uic.org/IMG/pdf/carbon_footprint_of_railway_infrastr...
The high speed rail line from LA to San Francisco (~380 miles) was estimated to cost $128 billion. The Orlando to Atlanta route is longer (~440 miles), but lets pretend it could be built for the same cost.
A one-way plane ticket from Orlando to Atlanta is about $100. For $128 billion you could buy 1.28 billion plane tickets. It looks like ~3 million people current fly between Orlando and Atlanta each year.
For the cost of building a new high speed rail line, you could fly everyone for the next 426 years. It's not hard to imagine that the fuel expended during construction of the high-speed rail line would be greater than the fuel consumed by all the planes flying between those cities for decades.
Also, the California is the most expensive high speed rail project in the world. The US simply does not have the expertise anymore to build effienctly big infrastructure project. In comparison, Spain is building highspeed rail for 17.7m€ per km (also Spain has a lot of mountains), while the rest of European countries build at 45.5m€ per km. This makes this 700km line more like 12.4 billions € to 31.9 billions €. So 50 to 89 years worth of plane tickets.
I agree, still expensive, but then by the same logic you should stop investing in highway expansion, because they are super expensive and always prove ineffective at reducing congestion. The US has proven in the past they are able to make big projects. Why admit defeat and try to keep the status quo?
And even before that a huge numbers of highway built made no fucking sense and were a negative for the economy. And state DoT are literally just highway building departments with a fetish for destroying cities.
You are not riding the plate of the S curve, continued investment in that nonsense is an active negative.
> Now we don’t have to money, nor the will to invest in the next S curve infrastructure project.
How about this. Stop spendign such an mind blowing amount of money on highways and other roads, and instead invested in financially smart things like walking, bike, buses and trains.
Dense urban areas are obviously different, but most of the US was purpose-built for cars and roads.
But it still might be worthwhile to find policies that at least help to steer things in the right direction without being failures themselves. Easier said than done, obviously.
For one thing, I think a lot of American suburbs could be way more bike friendly if people just had a safe path to ride in. We are talking a half a lane worth of pavement.
Another thing is that this isn’t all or nothing. Still owning and perhaps needing a car but reducing the number of trips per week is a win.
Look at pictures of European countries that used to use their central squares as parking lots. It can be done.
Change certainly won’t happen via defeatism.
Cycle paths can be added at a step by step basis and keeping some gaps isn't an issue and if some paths aren't used much initially there isn't a big problem. Also sometime a single line painted on the road is enough for a start.
If businesses settle in dezoned area they need to attract an audience quickly, but the will be less attractive than the hyperstore or mall for car drivers and depend on a bunch of other businesses in walkable distance. Financing the period till it works can be tough and will cycle through a few businesses till a working mixture is established.
And even then: In the car centric land usage, distances are too far quickly for quickly walking over to the bakery for fetching bread for breakfast, 15 minutes as a guidance for reaching everyday shops, doctor offices, a bar, ... density has to be increased. But people won't give up their yards.
I have seldom seen this solution get respected by cars.
It is better than nothing, but it is a weak start, when the goal is save cycling.
My point is: if you live in a place where a lot of drivers behave like selfish idiots to other drivers, bikers, and pedestrians, then a lot of bikers will behave like selfish idiots too.
I don’t have a solution, but I just wanted to add the data point because I hate most bikers with about the same intensity I hate most drivers. As a pedestrian, both groups ignore me and put me at risk every single f-word day.
Enforce actual bike lanes and ensure people biking following the laws and rules of the road and we'd be a lot better off. But letting people too dumb to wear helmets* or to understand why they need to be in a bike lane and not on a sidewalk onto the sidewalk with zero consequence? Absolutely not.
* I do not even remotely care about the anti-helmet arguments. I’m sure you’re a cyclist who has done all the research and proof as to why if you’re good and paying attention a helmet is unnecessary or even bad. Fine. Most people on bikes and most people in cars aren’t you. Wear a helmet!
The problem is the disparity of speed between travelers, same as for a highway. Pedestrians appear suddenly or don't know about your sudden appearance or intended motions, and pain or injury results.
Anyway, it would be nice if they built some nice, protected bike lanes, but they'd have to remove lanes from the cars to do that.
I'll... try to be more assertive, I guess we'll see how that works out.
You should rent one of the Docomo red rental bikes and ride it around some, and then you can see what it's like being one of the cyclists. The last thing you want as a cyclist is pedestrians who make unpredictable movements as you're passing. Also remember, pedestrians here have the absolute right-of-way, and cyclists are pretty much always at fault if there's a collision.
I've also seen bicyclists trying to make their way through crowds riding a bike where there is barely room for people to walk.
Not to mention cars won't see you so they will turn into or pull out of driveways, or fail to stop for you as you're trying to cross a road.
They even put a bike lane in on the road at my parent's house. Again, there's a perfectly usable trail/sidewalk right alongside the road that's far, far from busy, and the bike lane is also used for parking. I'm not going to swerve in and out of the road when there's a place that's 100% safe to bike down.
Hell, for that matter - laws be damned, I bike down the left side of the road here. I want to see a car that's not paying attention to me coming, where I'll at least have a chance to react. Again, it's not like a city where you're sometimes in the flow of traffic. The cars are going 40mph when I'm going maybe 15mph?
The reality is that cars are freedom and still superior from a continence and comfort standpoint. Americans are insanely privileged to have cheap, powerful cars.
Ask any Amazon driver; they much prefer peeing in bottles in the comfort of their own delivery trucks vs on trains.
If you have them when other people don't, yes. The problem is that by the time this is no longer true, you likely have a large sunk cost fallacy and political leaders firmly committed to the model and will struggle to realize that all of the time in traffic, countless deaths, and lowered quality of life for everyone around are in fact not actually inevitable.
Another thing: you can have both (ie: Europe). You use public transit to get to places and you use your car when you need space for luggage or taking the family.
For the last 15 years I've lived in various places around the world, and for all of them a private car is the most frustrating, least enabling method of transport available. Finding parking is a nightmare, traffic is a nightmare, having to concentrate on the idiots around me is a nightmare, not being able to drink when I go out is a nightmare, dealing with the mechanical problems of the vehicle itself is a nightmare, dealing with the bureaucracy of owning a car is a nightmare. This isn't what freedom looks like.
Most freeing? Riding a motorbike in Phnom Penh. Berlin's 5 different public transport systems. Walking everywhere in Bristol (UK). Mexico City's excellent underground.
I was curious so I just checked, and the number of cars is just shy of the number of people of driving age, even in the bicycle paradise of the Netherlands.
But that’s also because they have to be multigenerational to afford a SFH these days.
Lots of the peoples car needs would probably be covered by some form of car sharing but this is something car manufacturers hate and it has been always quite expensive. Maybe that will change.
New driver licenses are rapidly dropping in europe. Lets see whats gonna happen but i think Netherlands/Flanders are for sure important pioneers to get inspired from.
> I was curious so I just checked, and the number of cars is just shy of the number of people of driving age, even in the bicycle paradise of the Netherlands.
This might sound like a high amount of ownership, but if you compare it to some other countries then it’s not that bad (or impressive if that’s how you look at it).
The Netherlands has 588 cars per 100k inhabitants v. 908 in the US as an example[0].
If you go down the rabbit hole and look at the sources for these numbers, you’ll find that in the US only 8% of households don’t own a car[1] v. 26% of households in the Netherlands[2].
37.1% has two cars in the US and 21.9% has three or more in the US[1] v. 21% and 6% respectively in the Netherlands[2]
I think it’s safe to say that there’s less cars on the road in the Netherlands and thus less of that nightmare scenario that is described in GP.
That said, plenty of drivers in the Netherlands (not having the frame of reference of more busy countries) consider the Netherlands having “nightmares” for drivers. In particular when it comes to parking, where the main complaint is the price of parking and the lack of parking close to a destination.
Personally I don’t consider it a nightmare but a blessing that a lot of Dutch downtown areas force parking on the outer edge, leaving the shopping areas as pedestrian only areas. But that doesn’t mean that other people with other interests don’t consider it a nightmare.
Whenever, in the very rare instance, a city or town here in the US tries to marginally move towards such a situation, people start dusting off their pitchforks.
Just the other day I saw someone losing their shit on Threads because someone suggested that it would combat sedentary lifestyle somewhat if you’d have to walk 10 minutes from where you’d park every once in a while.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_...
1: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2023-car-ownership-statistics...
2: https://www.kimnet.nl/binaries/kimnet/documenten/publicaties... in Dutch
Sleeping-car-dads-under-newspaper was a common thing to see when I was there 25 years ago...
You are not allowed to run a small business out of your house in US, so i dont think you have any freedom.
Private jets are freedom. like actual freedom.
Are they not?
The BART Police Department's reports for 2022 show the following numbers for Part 1 UCR Crimes: Homicide: 3 Rape: 4 Robbery: 156 Aggravated Assault: 81 Burglary (Structural): 17 Larceny & Auto Burglary: 783 Auto Theft: 136 Arson: 10 Property Crime Subtotal: 946 Total: 1,190
Anyway, assuming there are hundreds of train cars and thousands of passengers a day, the chance of getting robbed on any one of them, using your stats, is less than 0.001%. Seems pretty safe to me.
This is why I'm too scared to take my car with me when I ride the subway.
Until we put shops very close to homes, end the huge big-box retailer’s death grip on everyone’s spending habits, and learn to live leaner, European style public transport will never work.
We put shopping centers far away from homes, and we put homes all over the effing place, making public transport effectively impossible to get right for even a small percentage of the population.
I agree with rest of the comment, but I feel that connection between walkability and population density is misunderstood. It's not "we need XXX people/sq. mile in US to have walkability", it's "allowing walkability and building corresponding infrastructure leads to increase in local density in places where people want to live".
The solution to this problem as has been shown by most other civilized countries on this planet is trains, yet in the land of rugged individualism and capitalism, it's somehow not viable.
The difficult part was getting a sense of direction because there aren't really any obvious landmarks to look out for when wandering through wide-scale suburban sprawl. It's like the availability of GPS has just allowed this kind of sprawl to become even more labyrinthine because nobody needs to bother with street names or directions any more.
I'm not sure how it was in the 80s, but these days people just use Google Maps to navigate to wherever they're going.
Maybe the most offensive thing about public transport to an American is that it cannot really be profitable by itself. Infrastructure rarely is but it is still worth investing in for the downstream effect.
https://vividmaps.com/railroads-in-america/
You say that every other method of travel is more expensive…but that doesn’t really pass the sniff test, does it?
The Big Dig in Boston adjusted for inflation cost more than New York City’s “world’s most expensive stretch of subway.” The California high speed rail project, also notoriously expensive, is in the same ballpark.
We just assume trains cost more money because we put the blindfolds on for highways. Voters salivate over highway expansions because they loathe being stuck in traffic, while the reality is that this style of building induces demand while more transit options make driving better.
I often think about how thousands of American businesses pay for short-hop commercial flights between destinations like New York and Pittsburgh where a proper high speed train could cover that distance in about 2 hours including stops. How much money are we paying employees to show up at the airport 90 minutes early and put their laptops away for takeoff and landing when they could spend the whole train ride productive?
I know my company will pay for a checked bag as a travel expense. How much money is wasted on putting bags in airplane holds? It must be billions!
Car ownership has huge personal costs (car purchase, operation, depreciation, maintenance), collective costs paid by taxes (maintenance of roads, etc), and societal costs that nobody really pays for (excess deaths from crashes, pollution, opportunity costs).
I’d like to know which method of travel besides cars costs an average of $5,000 per person per year on a personal spending basis before even starting to put tax money toward road maintenance. That number balloons to $10,000 if you buy cars new.
Which country’s train system kills 30,000 people annually? Which train system emits more pollution per passenger mile than a car?
If cars are the cheapest way to get around, explain why the poorest countries have the lowest car ownership. Shouldn’t they all be jumping on cars and highways if it’s so cost efficient? Maybe all those people getting on trains in Mumbai should head down to their local Tri-County Ford dealer!
https://northeastmaglev.com/2023/04/06/the-status-of-high-sp...
We can be cynical and say this project is falling behind but it’s embarrassing that the richest country in the world has no such infrastructure plan and no presently operating high speed train that exceeds 150 mph.
You’d think that some of the larger metro areas would be connected with such a service in the world’s wealthiest nation.
America’s largest metro area is in a concentrated urban area that is continuously developed from Massachusetts to Washington DC with no rural area in between. But the best you get there is a train service that sometimes reaches 150 mph and only saves a sliver of time compared to a conventional train.
The second most wealthy nation has more high speed rail miles than the rest of the world combined. You’d think that the wealthiest country would at least be in the top 10 list.
India's getting close: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/lucknow/every-hour-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
If it burned natural gas it probably wouldn’t even be that polluting and it would rock hard.
Acela takes 3h44m from Boston to New York. Not much faster than the scheduled buses (4h15m) and comparable to driving the distance in your own car (3h55m if you stick to the speed limits)
I'd much rather take rail relative to the alternatives even if it takes longer and maybe costs more (especially leaving aside parking). And many others do as well even if it would be faster to drive.
And generally Manhattan is pretty walkable once you're there.
York to London is 215m and 2 hours, along a line that’s nearly 200 years old. Paris ti Lyon is 290 miles and takes 2 hours on a 40 year old track.
[1] https://www.sncf-connect.com/app/en-en/home/shop/results/out...
Those things are true, but like, jeez, the price. I for one don't even mind Amtrak's slow speed on its own, but not when it's more expensive than faster options!
So you have self driving cars, which will probably improve traffic flow, but it's fundamentally limited by geometry. If people takes more car trips, this will reverse some if not all the benefit of self driving cars.
I suspect the actual technology within the tube was never Musk's initial concern. Similar to his other industrial endeavors, I think the calculus with Hyperloop had more to do with the economics of being able to manufacture pylons and tube segments offsite for quick assembly onsite, leveraging factory production and avoiding as much as possible site-specific costs such as land grading. And presumably he had in mind repurposing SpaceX technology for welding rocket bodies. Given a cost-effective way to build and put these tubes into place, and some ballpark figures on their characteristics--e.g. how much of a pressure difference they could reliably keep without inflating production costs--figuring out how to actually use them was just an engineering problem, which he then took a first crack at to satisfy himself the overall concept might be feasible.
In my imagination these tunnels are, like, 200' down. Like mole people.
The German rail network is in shambles - but compared to how some American freight rail looks like, even that is more like Japan's excellent railways... I've seen far too many examples like [1] for my liking on youtube. This kind of shit would actually land you jail time here if you as a responsible person would let a train run there. Or this legit, on-camera derailment [2] - no way the train would be allowed to just continue to move on, it would get a full-blown investigation and those responsible for the dereliction probably a criminal trial for endangering rail traffic [3].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X2A2f6E5DI
Making the system move faster translates directly to additional capacity. More capacity translates to more revenue. Think about it this way—if you increase the speed that a train moves by 10%, then you can make 10% more trips with the same system, in the same amount of time. You can keep doing this until profit you get from the additional capacity results is wiped out by the losses caused by accidents.
The largest rail freight company in the US has operating revenue of something like $25 billion, with margins around 50%. The recent derailment in Ohio cost an estimated $1 billion. By that math, you could increase the speed until every 4% speed increase would result in 1 derailment per year of that scale, or some combination of smaller derailments.
There are about 3 derailments per day in the US. (Note that this is a much lower figure than it was 20 or 50 years ago.)
They are systematically devaluing vital infrastructure to increase short term profit and have done the bare minimum of investment. Systematically devaluing vital infrastructure in the country.
For the US not to treat the railroads as a strategic infrastructure is borderline insane.
There are a huge amount of accidents that have to do with bad infrastructure maintenance and bad signaling.
> if you operate the trains that way.
Yes, if you have badly maintained infrastructure and you run badly maintained trains on it, its gone cause issue.
Everything else is freight. All the old passenger rail was converted (or abandoned/removed) long ago.
What the US destroyed most of were local, municipal rail lines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
I think it is using overhead wires.
As any emergency worker will tell you, the problem with batteries compared to ICE engines is that if the battery is on fire it doesn't just stop once you extinguish it. You need to keep at it until it has cooled down sufficiently to prevent spontaneous reignition and that takes a while. Plus the entire time it burns it generates large amounts of toxic fumes.
Compare that to an electric line that just needs to transmit electricity and just stops if you shut it off. Yeah, ozone accumulation is a problem but so is heat so you'll need some venting anyway (plus you probably want the air in the tunnels to be breathable because we're humans after all).
I'm... not convinced it scales well, cost-wise!
> Small electric vehicles
why not just use pneumatics? It's a proven technology used in sufficiently large facilities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube#Contemporary_us...
If I were to invest into something today it would be medium size (about a tall van size) autonomous containers that can drive at night within city limits and drop off small reusable containers at delivery points such as apartment buildings. Case in point: Luxer One is a fairly common setup in SF today, the next step would be to stop delivering individual packages and, instead, deliver daily boxes for the whole building.
I'm actually looking forward to future me being able to ride my motorcycle around a freight-train's worth of semi-automated cargo-haulers on interstates that are mostly devoid of vacationing families.
Once while I living in eastern Wyoming we had an "80 car" pileup, probably more like 60 cars but one tank truck caught fire:
https://www.facebook.com/118611954828240/photos/update-on-i-...
To my knowledge it has never serviced freight, only transit.
I aim to keep calling it the Bus tunnel—even though the transit authorities are keen on changing it—and I hope fellow Seattlites keep the name alive just for the pure quirkiness of the concept.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Seattle_Transit_Tunne...
Go through the Bus tunnel and Ride the SLUT.[1]
[1] South Lake Union Transit. I presume all the paraphernalia around 'ride the slut' is semi-official at best.
Less now that I've moved out of premiere on line, but still
Tunnels probably only make sense in cities, not wide open rural spaces.
Maybe people would get used to it. I don’t know.
I was only thinking of freight really since it doesn’t matter.
For rest, over ground or above ground is preferred.
Things I can think of: it is slow, so you burn through a lot of wages. To compare with road building the only major road I can think of, built in my lifetime, was the M40. It is 90 miles long and took 4 years to build but I don’t know what the cost was. The channel tunnel is much smaller than a freeway — two train tunnels and an escape tunnel in between. It is 30 miles long, took 6 years to build, for £9bn at the time.
Tunnelling also must require a lot of energy. What it probably doesn’t lean heavily into, in terms of cost, is either compulsory purchasing of the majority of the route or the political consultation and planning process. Those were both a huge deal when building a motorway through the Oxfordshire countryside.
This doesn’t require a discussion to figure out. You just have to mentally walk through the process and do some back of the envelope math.
Designing a high capacity train station or highway exit in the middle of a city is quite expensive.
It's impossible to make the case for thousands of miles of underground tunnels that will add no benefit (what happens when something goes wrong? you can't simply overtake when something inevitably goes wrong (three train derailments per day in the US), it's underground so it's hard to access / fix problems etc etc.
It's a foolish, expensive idea, when the US struggles to take care of it's own railway systems.
Less issues if there’s little down there to begin with. Although personally I don’t see why America can’t just build a train like a normal country.
I’m still left wondering though, in the open countryside, what the complexity (and cost) comparison is between laying down a mile of freeway and boring out a mile of tunnel. It feels like tunnelling is hard and complicated, but so too is making millions of magic coloured tiles that are all connected to each other so we can see each others cats and, very rarely, make phone calls.
Its super common in Australia for railways to shut down due to warping of the rails from heat.
- no impact on environment, birds, bugs, animals, trees, etc...
- can use surface land for other things
- no weather exposure
It requires tons of concrete, which causes lots of CO2.
Also might require ground water control, which might impact lakes etc. nearby.
Tunnels often are still beneficial, but it's not like there is no impact.
Edit: Actually, I can't count. Only a few hundred thousand pounds. That's still probably a bunch of zeppelinworths though.
Design the Zeppelin for literal tons of ballast, trade out sandbags/dirtbags for product or waste on docking, andaybe add an aerodynamic shield if you don't care about speed as much
We already sacrifice significant speed for boats, but I grant they're several orders of magnitude better at balancing buoyancy with cargo given they flot in the water rather than atmosphere
For example, "centipede" nominally means 100 feet, though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centipede says "Despite the name, no centipede has exactly 100 pairs of legs; number of legs ranges from 15 pairs to 191 pairs, always an odd number."
Centibillionaire is the obvious extension of centimillionaire, and "centimillionaire" has been around for a long time. https://archive.org/details/per_chicago-daily-tribune_the-ch... shows a use in 1883, explicitly referencing $100,000,000 of Vanderbilt capital.
(A Google Books search finds two other uses of centimillionaire in the 1800s.)
Another old word using centi- to mean 100 is "centimillennium", for 100 thousand years. Here is an 1882 use: https://archive.org/details/loverinschartoft00love/page/36/m... and Wiktionary adds several more recent uses at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/centimillennium .
I thought of this idea when I was 14 and immediately dismissed it- long before this guy came along and claimed it was such a "great idea." Why did I dismiss it?
Terrorism. In the best case, all you'd need to do is punch a hole in the side of the tubes, and any train would hit a wall of air at supersonic speeds. In the worst case, it would derail catastrophically when it hit my hole if it were big enough.
It's a terrible idea for so many reasons.
Being intelligent yet humble isn't mutually exclusive, but I see a lot of elitism in that 'oh I have this concept which must be totally novel and I'm gonna implement it now' with engineering at large before we all start laughing at their inevitable failures from things they could have learned in the past. Crypto is cool, even cryptocurrency. 99.9% of people in the space though have no idea what they're doing with it. I still think it could be useful for voting and/or DNS for distributed consensus, the cryptocurrency aspect could be improved and already is a better backend imo than our batched out wire transfers with traditional banking (but it lags well behind credit cards or cash for point of sale transactions), and hell merkel trees are supremely useful already for supply chain or ex version control, but the hype and path of crypto currencies is an embarrassment in light of history.
Recent examples:
- mastodon and the fediverse in relation to the threads backlash
- cryptocurrency markets and the desire for regulation for when things go wrong (someone stole my coinz! My smart contract was exploited! My exchange was hacked! Fraud!)... Like it was speed running what the Netherlands+UK+us faced over 400 years in a period of 4 years
- any libertarian when they start to run their own government (sorry grandpa)
Which, in the US, typically have been heavily monopolized and poorly regulated and existing regulations poorly enforced. The history here is pretty extensive, actually, and often forgotten, because rail has significantly lost it's power.
So, we keep trying to make better roads, it frees up space for individual travel, it prioritizes commerce, and roads seem better fitted to a Democratic society than what rail ends up being here.
I still haven't seen the math to prove ground effect aircraft are less efficient than cargo ships, but I suppose it's true or it would've been done already.
I just invented trains again didnt I? Whatever you do, you always end up with trains
Apparently not, I suppose is your point.
One example of many is the weird conversations he was having about sonic velocity robots and "lights out dreadnaught" sort of auto factories, which just about every other automaker has been trying on and off since the 80s, and has worked out that it doesn't work. So Tesla's modern lines, after quite a bit of fooling around with that sort of rubbish, look just like everyone else's lines, because as soon as you have humans in the loop for the things robots can't do well, you may as well run the line at human speeds.
It's 2023. I'd like to buy a car, TV, phone, or computer that isn't, by default, "slurping as much behavioral data as it thinks it can possibly get away with, routed out whatever connection it can find, to be sold to others who want to influence my thinking." It's hard to find.
Any one of these would have cemented him as a premier industrialist.
In the end, there's legions of Internet commenters who complain about Elon Musk in between complaining about their bosses or complain about Google and Facebook or what have you. And then there's this guy doing things successfully.
The Silicon Valley attitude that I love is that when someone tells you "that's not going to work", you just go ahead and do it if you have conviction. After all, you're only sacrificing your own self.
Yes, we've ruined astronomy with a ton of LEO satellites, but we've got some internet in exchange (I'm rural, I have it, I'm quite honestly not impressed with what it delivers for how much I pay, and how inconsistent it is - on some days, it's quite good, on other days it's more or less dialup grade).
And we'll see how that lift capacity works. Everyone will continue insisting that Kessler Syndrome Won't Possibly Happen until about a year after it's happened, at which point, welp. It was fun while it lasted!
I've done computer security a bit too long, I think.
Who? And how did they mainstream EVs more than Tesla? Fisker was in the market early, but didn’t mainstream EVs. GM was in way early, but probably held the market back.
Making EV mainstream is about more then a big company throwing a few batteries into an existing car platform. It was about shifting perceptions, starting a public conversation and making people actual demand EVs. And making EV profitable.
> and the price drop in lithium was obvious to everyone who was paying attention at the time.
Ah that's why Tesla is such a small an insignificant company now, because everybody else knew everything. Brilliant logic.
> It would have happened one way or another.
That is literally what Musk has said for 20 years. Its gone happen anyway, Tesla is about making it happen faster. And his building of the Roaster, Model S were clearly huge steps. Building the Gigafactory Nevada was a huge signal, and lead to a huge amount of investment all threw the supply chains, and lots of companies thinking bigger. The biggest European battery maker is people who helped build Giga Nevada and then went and started a new battery company in Europe.
The Model 3 reaching profitability was a absolutely huge signal in the automotive industry. Tesla building it with 20%+ margin was a literal bomb in the industry. Until that point it was almost universally believed that high volume EV were just not gone be possible. After that pretty much all car companies accelerated their EV strategies.
> Yes, we've ruined astronomy
How this nonsense claim gets repeated over and over again is just beyond me. Anybody who still argues this is just willfully ignorant at this point.
> I'm quite honestly not impressed with what it delivers
And more then 2 million people disagree with you and that number is growing.
> Everyone will continue insisting that Kessler Syndrome
The inherent permission in your worldview is just sad and depressing. Everything bad must happen even when most experts agree it wont happen.
This is exactly why the stated goal of Tesla is to accelerate the advent of electric cars - in other words, make it happen a lot sooner than it otherwise would have.
I personally think making internet available to people who don't have it is far more important than people who do have home internet complaining about their view of the stars during their camping trip.
China and others have done far, far more to contribute to space junk than SpaceX has.
Tesla absolutely was and still is. They dominate the market.
> on other days it's more or less dialup grade
You’ve either got bad hardware or you’ve never used dialup. Even in congestion on the RV product (lower priority than residential) I’ve only seen down to 20mbps. That’s 400x dialup.
> I'm quite honestly not impressed with what it delivers for how much I pay
Please cancel! I could use the capacity when I’m out in the boondocks.
> Everyone will continue insisting that Kessler Syndrome Won't Possibly Happen until about a year after it's happened, at which point, welp. It was fun while it lasted!
LEO natural decay means a royal fuckup locks out <10 years.
If you have any actual meaningful analysis to add on why these constellations are Kessler risks, please notify the space force! Everyone involved seems to think it’s not a problem so you should probably correct them.
SpaceX disrupted the space launch industry, which had not advanced at all since the 1970s. SpaceX really just picked up and ran with the idea of vertical landing reusable rockets, which was not new. Werner von Braun was exploring it for Saturn V back in the 60s, and Lockheed finally did it at prototype scale with the DC-X in the 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv9n9Casp1o (You can see at the end that the DC-X even does the same "hover slam" maneuver as Falcon 9 to land with maximum propellant efficiency.)
Tesla was similar. Auto manufacture itself isn't moribund, but old school auto makers always hated EVs and resisted doing anything serious with them. Tesla's rise was a classic exploitation of the innovators' dilemma by calling them on this and forcing their hand. Now that some are embracing EVs, Tesla is facing increasingly stiff competition but has at least carved out a brand.
Musk has not been particularly successful competing in less moribund industries. The Boring Company is kind of a flop. Neuralink seems questionable so far, to say the least. The Hyperloop, even if it worked, wouldn't be competitive at all with high speed rail on cost. It'd be faster and in theory more energy efficient but nowhere near enough to compensate for the added capital cost or complexity.
Now if Musk had created, say, a rail transport division of Tesla he could have absolutely disrupted rail transport which is another fairly sluggish moribund industry. Imagine modern unmanned trains (FSD on rails is WAY easier than on roads) with batteries to allow them to span un-powered sections of track and recharge on sections with third rail or overhead catenary wires. But that would have been a threat to the car market. Innovators' dilemma anyone?
My point is that Musk isn't superman... he just picked industries that were ripe for disruption and built teams that executed well enough to succeed.
Of his companies SpaceX is by far the most impressive in its own right. What Tesla did could have been done much much better by a "legacy" car maker if they'd been willing to disrupt their ICE business. Nissan actually beat Tesla to market with an affordable mass market electric (the Leaf) but didn't put as much heart into it. The result was okay but not nearly as cool as what Tesla did, especially in Tesla's glory days. (I own a Leaf and have no complaints, but it's not sexy.)
like with Tesla they're ahead of other companies in multiple ways, but still behind in some aspects as well.
And it's fine to not trust prevailing wisdom, but when you don't even bother trying to learn from them because "they're dumb dinosaur companies that don't even know code" (which has utterly nothing to do with reality), re-learning the same lessons yourself isn't some amazing foresight. It's simply a stupid waste of resources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car#Early_development...
A bomb would be a serious threat, the shockwave from both the explosion and rapid decompression, but I believe it can be mitagated. Bombs are bad for pretty much everything anyways.
The other problem is if the walls don't break but the pipe crumples. But this is more likely to have a self-sealing effect, and with enough overbuilding, it shouldn't cause a chain reaction.
I don't believe in hyperloop, but I think catastrophic implosions are rather low in the list of reasons why it won't happen. It doesn't even make it at the top of safety related reasons.
I have yet to see a convincing simulation of how a would be hyperloop would behave of one were to poke a hole in it. And by convincing situations, I mean one with an appropriate model, that is a very long tube engineered to hold a vacuum.
An then you can downvote this post too, a good explanation is well worth a few karma points :)
of course cost is something we can also make good estimates of.
The simplest reason seems to be that he expected it not to work, at least with current technology.
He also talks about a supersonic electrical passenger jet from time to time, but he says he don't have the time to do that either.
He successfully made investors waste hundreds of millions into these hyperloop startups, which are like real life parody of high-tech scam startups.
On the other hand, one must be quite illiterate scientifically to buy into Musks grand sci-fi projects. Should only work on 5 years old. But you don’t have to believe, you just have to pretend and take these easy millions from rich but dumb VCs.
You mean like the world's first reusable rocket, the only private company to sent astronauts to the ISS, the world's biggest rocket, or mass producing EVs?
Yeah, you're right, it's good he stuck to the easy stuff!
That is why all of the companies doing it switched to maglev. And we know the issues with maglev.
A partial vacuum would be trivial to achieve and you could by all means use mag lev + partial vacuum in a tube.
Yeah works great.
I hear they are gone install on in Hoboken soon.
The tech already works even without a partial vacuum. But a partial vacuum would be all the better.
No, the tech is not fine. There are really serious, showstopper issues with it. Issues that were known way back in the early 1900s and there is still no feasible way to overcome them.
Look there are mag lev trains in Japan that run on superconductors. By all means you can put that tech in a tube and call it a hyperloop. Absolutely feasible.
Mag lev works: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCMaglev
Nothing in the idea of a hyperloop precludes the use of a maglev propulsion system. The partial vacuum wouldn't even be necessary but might help with efficiency. Partial vacuums are just air pumps.
Maglevs are great. Why not build one of those instead?
The point wasn’t to work. The point was to kill/delay CAHSR.
Can't think of why a car company owner/CEO would want to do that...
I think the idea was wrong and wouldn't actually work. But the assertion that its simply exactly the same isn't the case.
That said, even if an idea is old, that doesn't mean a new take isn't warranted. They considered rocket re-usability in the 1960 and tried in the 1970. EV are 100+ years old.
He didn’t intend to build it.
*paraphrasing from memory from the last time I had this argument and found an interview from the time
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket#Pendulum_rocket_falla...
The other misconception here is the assumption that the entire length needs to be maintained at 100 Pa. This is not necessary. Having a pressure gradient is fine because it isn't going fast near the terminals anyway.
In other words, the misconception is yours.
Of course, reversed stupidity is not intelligence, this isn't evidence that hyperloop is good, just a suggestion to choose a better source for your arguments.
If you don't have an atmosphere, the near vacuum conditions are free
You need robots to dig tunnels if you want sizeable bases. Figuring that out on earth just gives you a headstart.
What should transit look like on the moon? On Mars? Can you use those tunnels? What will be different with lower gravity?
This is the most charitable interpretation I can make, fwiw
To make more confusing, Boring calls its cars in tunnels product Loop.
They also just announced the massive expansion to include the whole strip
https://interestingengineering.com/culture/vegas-loop-the-bo...
[1] “He admitted to his biographer that the reason the Hyperloop was announced—even though he had no intention of pursuing it—was to try to disrupt the California high-speed rail project” -- https://gizmodo.com/silicon-valleys-transportation-failures-...
Can we build it? Yes. The issue is mostly that we have so much process that delays building and scope creep for what does get built.
My God as if ideating on alternatives is enough to kill a project! What world is this? have you ever built anything?
California's "high speed" rail was still going to take 5 or 6 hours for the SF to LA route. No better than driving! Musk was correct to propose something different.
It's been 15 years since that project was proposed and we're no closer to a true high speed rail between those two cities!
Obviously he has gotten some things right, which is a good thing. But Musk has an extraordinary track record of being wrong about a lot of things. That, by itself, is not a problem - you lose, you learn, you fix, you win. The problem is that Musk aggressively attacks public policy with his aggressive wrongness:
- Don't invest in surface public transit, we're so close to full self-driving cars and then traffic will be solved! - Don't invest in subway systems, we're gonna build better tunnels for self driving cars! - Don't invest in high speed rail, we could build a hyperloop for much lower cost and it would be 3x faster! - Don't dive in there to save those kids dying in the flooded tunnel, that's dangerous! Trust me, I'm gonna build a submarine that can get them out!
As far as I'm concerned, Musk can be wrong all he wants, but stop fucking with the world's decisions if you're gonna insist on being wrong all the time.
I mentioned it in the first place because him being right about something like this is peculiar, not because it's typical.
You do need a good business model and a solid technical foundation. Hyperloop needs a lot of technical work still. Arguably this was also true of SpaceX in the early days, but Elon (and the team he assembled) could execute before running out of runway.
I still think Hyperloop is worth working on, but it needs a lot of funding. The Boring Company will get to it eventually, because something like Hyperloop is required for the Mars colony.
Anybody that is trying to sell you on Mars colonization is selling you a children's cartoon, not a serious project.
Surely if there is anywhere in our solar system we have a chance of successfully colonizing, Mars is it.
It seems like the obvious first step. Where would you recommend?
And for second steps you'd probably want someplace that is more useful in resources, like some of Jupiter's moons. Mars is probably the last place you'd want to go.
Then again, we don't know how to build a colony on Mars any better than we can build a colony on an oil rig platform in the ocean, or build a colony in LEO. Even our colonies on Antarctica - Esperanza Base and Villa Las Estrellas - aren't able to grow their own food.
In any case, Mars is a better colonization target than both Mercury and Io.
Resource extraction does not require colonization. We have robots.
You think that a floating base in the upper reaches of the Venusian atmosphere is a good first step? No being able to make trips to the surface would limit human involvement to the floating base, so scientific exploration would be very limited. The complexity makes it much more challenging to become self sufficient.
How would you propose making a return trip? Or is it a one way mission?
As for Jupiter's moons. They are so much further away than Mars, are all much lower in gravity, and much colder temperatures than mars.
Our own moon and mars are much better candidates for humans to visit, and attempt permanent bases and perhaps colonies.
There's an incredible amount of scientific understanding to be achieved over the next few decades using unmanned probes in the solar system including mars. After that we'll see. We are barely capable of manned spaceflight at all, don't even have a proof of concept of a self-contained ecosystem that can be isolated for years at a time. We are simply not politically and scientifically sophisticated enough to attempt this on the scale of decades. Leave it for the future.
Are you talking about human race, spreading out from our cradle in Africa thousands of years ago? Or more recent colonization? Or more recent examples of one group of people subjugating another pre-existing habitat of a land?
Because you know there are not people or animals on Mars right?
Also, we can actually get there. This Mars colony is in the realm of fantasy, when we don't have a means of getting astronauts there without dying of cosmic-ray cancer on the way. In contrast we've put a man on the moon. Multiple men. We know we can do it, which decreases the necessary scope dramatically.
I don't see a good reason to set up a colony in the first place, but the least-bad option is very clearly the moon.
> a catapult and a few days travel
We don't have catapult technology that would work on the moon without solving significant technological challenges. I don't think engineering challenges should hold us back (it's half the fun of these missions), but you cannot use "we don't have the tech" as an argument against mars, and handwave it away for the moon.
> The moon. It's closer, it has pre-made internal cavities,
Mars has lavatubes as well.
> we don't have a means of getting astronauts there without dying of cosmic-ray cancer on the way
People will not die of cancer of cancer in the way. It is likely there is an increased risk to developing cancer, it's not crazy. Some estimates put it at a 20% increase. Hardly a death sentence your post makes it out to be.
> Also, we can actually get there.
Energetically, Mars is not that much further away from us than the moon. It has a thin atmosphere that allows for aerobreaking, and is a useful resource once landed.
> In contrast we've put a man on the moon.
We've put a lot of robots on Mars as well. We've actually got more recent experience landing things on Mars than on the moon, especially large things.
No one is talking about landing humans on Mars without first refining a lot of technology, without being able to reliably land craft with literally tonnes of equipment.
Personally, I'm excited about both prospects, and I'm excited that SpaceX is finally developing the reusable heavy lift capability that we should have had years ago, but for whatever reason people stopped persuing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_lava_tube
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/18417/how-big-is-t...
It's no wonder NASA came up with the absolute craziest solution -- a wicked fast heat shield burn descent, followed by a wicked fast parachute descent, followed by an absurdly complicated and risky 'sky crane' procedure to shave off the rest of the velocity using thrusters.
A thin atmosphere provides an additional option over the alternative of zero atmosphere. Zero atmosphere means you rely entirely on propulsion to slow your arrival, which is inherently expensive. I can agree that a thicker atmosphere would be easier, but a thin atmosphere is better than none.
> absurdly complicated and risky 'sky crane'
The skycrane was entirely related to not wanting to stir up huge dust plumes around the lander.
What does The Boring Company have to do with Hyperloop?
I am not an expert, but seems like building a Maglev track on Mars with its low-pressure atmosphere would be far easier than on Earth. Taking into consideration how far we are from the first manned flight to Mars, this sounds more like wishful thinking than a serious proposition.
It's a fun, futuristic idea, but just falls down when you start to think about the problems. Sure, they could be solved if we were willing to spend hundreds of times as much per kilometer as we do for high-speed rail (which is already really expensive), but that's not practical in the real world.
In the USA, with NEPA - and especially California which also has CEQA - the permitting for any kind of project is super expensive. A lot of design decisions in the Hyperloop paper are for avoiding CEQA constraints.
That's because it wasn't intended to be a solution, it was intended to kill the high speed rail in California.
https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1571628269555826688?lan...
What's the biggest threat to the USA?
This isn't unique to rail, either - if a Hyperloop was built, it'd be NIMBYed just as badly.
With 40,000kms of high speed rail [1] (by far the most in the world), China must then have very few electric vehicles.
In reality they are the world leader. [2]
[1] https://www.statista.com/topics/7534/high-speed-rail-in-chin...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-17/how-china...
https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews/news-wire/china-buil...
https://sfstandard.com/2023/10/27/san-francisco-downtown-rai...
You comment reduced a complex issue to an elementary word problem in math.
It tells you enough: Europe, more specifically Germany, builds HSR for about 40 million euros a kilometer [1].
This project here is 8 billion dollars for about 3.2km, or about 2.500 million dollars a kilometer - that is three orders of magnitude more expensive than Germany.
[1] https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article171431132/Die-Beule-in...
This is exactly the kind of thing I was suspecting was by misleading by the original number. "America can't build affordable high-speed rail" suggests that that their is same lacking capability in engineering. "Land costs make building in dense areas unprofitable" is a completely different story.
Plus, it is digging a tunnel for the tracks.
The reason doesn't matter - the end result does, namedly that America is incapable for a multitude of reasons (lack of political support, NIMBYs, excessive land value, unions ridiculous even to a union-loving European, lack of experience in planning and construction of such projects) to build high-speed rail.
Therefore, you're right. It will cost tens of billions once maintenance is included. As a comparison for how much benefit will be gained, presently 12000 people board transit at the 4th and King station every day.
I suppose it's my fault for having underestimated the total cost of this section of CA HSR. But perhaps you can link some of your analyses that include these various numbers for other projects and then we can put together one such analysis in these comments together.
Else, maybe if the new runway interferes with existing infrastructure and retrofits are needed, it could make sense too.
You could make Highspeed rail FREE and I'm not sure I would take it. I might. Maybe.
As soon as it costs what gas costs to get to LA from SF ($100 round trip max, so usually $50-33 a person), there is NOOOO way I am ever taking it. Heck, I still need a way to get around once I get there.. so how would the train ever really work for anyone? Now I'm renting a car or taking Uber? Why wouldn't I just take my own car I like. And take more items without lugging them on a train. Without traveling to the train. Without paying parking at the station. Who is this train for?
If I'm driving and need to stop to use the bathroom, eat something, or so on I'm setting myself back time-wise. Plus I have to stay sitting down the whole time and have to stay focused on the road for hours.
If I take the train, I can get up, stretch my legs, grab some food, and I'll still get there at exactly the same time I would have otherwise. I can watch a movie on the way, or pull out my laptop to work on a side project if I want, or play some video games.
I'll take the train over driving any day.
But I usually want to have a car. So I'll be driving until it really doesn't make sense for me.
Most people I know spend crazy money for a car, if you compare to how little they could spend. Thus it seems many people are ok shelling out thousands of dollars a year for a cooler or more comfortable car. I have a feeling if high speed rail costs the same as taking their car, they are for sure going to take their car.
Even free can be more expensive than driving.
With some 383 miles between San Francisco and Los Angeles that's $287 one-way or $575 round-trip. You'll need to add parking fees on top of that.
For some people it's totally worth it to bring their own car. That's also why some people drive over flying.
But there are also many people who would gladly take a free high-speed train service between those cities, just like there are many who currently fly.
For that matter, I've flown into San Francisco for work and not needed a personal vehicle at all.
And that includes overall age depreciation which I wouldn't count, because most people that consider taking high speed rail would have a car anyway that's already depreciating.
For example, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38234972 you said you have a 2001 Chevy Silverado short bed regular cab 4x4 truck. That's going to have higher fuel costs than a Honda Civic.
Even if you leave out depreciation - and low-mileage vehicles have a higher resale value than high-mileage ones so I don't think you can do that - you've still got to include maintenance and insurance, both of which depend on miles traveled.
Most people don't run their cars up to 200K. I certainly haven't, and have no idea what work needs to be done to get it there.
For a used 2018 Honda Civic LX 4D with MSRP $20,700.00 driven 10K/year, AAA's online calculator, available from that page, estimates:
Total Driving Cost
Per Year $9,050.20
Per Mile $0.91
5-year Total $45,251.00
Costs Breakdown
Cost per year 5-year Total
Fuel $1,649.60 $8,248.00
MaintRepair $2,212.20 $11,061.00
Depreciation $2,115.60 $10,578.00
Insurance $1,890.00 $9,450.00
Fees & Taxes $546.20 $2,731.00
Finance Charges $636.60 $3,183.00
You can also see how they estimate MaintRepair will cost more than fuel, highlighting how fuel cost isn't the only important thing to think about.
It does not cost $9k a year to drive a used Honda Civic.
Also, I don't take my Silverado to LA unless I want to for fun. I usually take my Chevy Volt. I'm never taking a train unless maybe I'm going down there to buy a vehicle and drive or ride it back.
My GF teaches in a popular silicon valley suburb where the average parent makes $300k+ and the kids are either insane, depressed, autistic, sociopaths, or 4 years behind on their reading and math levels.
It's also bad math to say the only cost to driving 383 miles is the fuel.
If you would believe talldatethrow's math, you should get a job driving your car for a CA state job. You would get reimbursed $0.625 /mile for something which costs you no more than $100/383 miles = $0.26/mile.
The extra $0.37/mile at 30 mph is an extra $10/hour of income.
I don't think the government is really that generous, do you?
And I assure you, I know many people that get paid miles for using their personal car for work, and flat out consider it a source of income because of how favorably it is paid out.
As I wrote, I chose a used car.
As I wrote, I have no idea what expenses are needed to get a car to 200K miles, and it hardly matters for this discussion, does it?, as very few people do that.
The point of showing the breakdown was to highlight that maintenance for the car you showed was more than the fuel cost, which is why your original estimate, based only on fuel cost, did not reflect the true price of driving a car that distance.
I do know that it's unwise to consider only gas money as the cost to get somewhere. There's a reason GSA mileage reimbursement is $0.67/mile and California's is $0.625 /mile.
You show your math for why your numbers are correct.
And remember, you can't look at the cost for a car which reached 200K miles and assume that's the normal cost, because it excludes all Hondas which were scrapped before then, eg, because any damage or repairs needed were not economically worthwhile.
> I usually take my Chevy Volt.
You have at least two cars, neither of which is a Honda Civic? Did you pick a Civic because you knew it was an outlier of some sort?
You have plenty of money - enough to afford at least two cars. Of course a free high-speed rail trip would do little to change your mind; you aren't affected by costs in the several hundred dollar range.
Okay, so AAA's calculator is insane. Got better numbers?
https://caredge.com/honda/maintenance says "Honda maintenance costs an average of $428 per year" but also shows the estimated annual costs exceed $428 after the 4th year, and reaches $1660 after 12 years, saying "Honda models average around $7,827 for maintenance and repair costs during their first 10 years of service." or $782/year, which is 1/3rd that of AAA.
For a 5 year old Civic, it estimates maintenance costs across the next 5 years as 601+752+1057+1178+1291 = $4,879 which is about $976/year or 10 cents per mile.
Is that more reasonable? It still shows that your estimate of max $.26/mile for fuel should be $.36/mile for fuel+maintenance.
And for some reason you don't want to include depreciation, even though mileage certainly affects warranty coverage, insurance coverage, and resale value.
Consider that Edmund's estimates a 2019 Volt Hatchback LT 4dr Hatchback to cost over $2,000 in maintenance and repairs in its 5th year. https://www.edmunds.com/chevrolet/volt/2019/cost-to-own/ (Also $2,000 for 2017 at https://www.edmunds.com/chevrolet/volt/2017/cost-to-own/ .) There's a jump in costs at the 5th year, I'm thinking because it assumes 15,000 miles per year, which means the the limited warranty and powertrain warranty have both run out by the 60,000 miles reached the 4th year.
Did you pay for your Volt in cash or did you finance? Was it new? What model year is it? How long do you plan to keep it? How often do you drive LA to San Francisco vs. your total mileage? How typical is your cost compared to others with the same model car?
All of these affect your true cost of driving beyond simple fuel costs.
Look, I totally get how you might prefer driving one of your cars to go to LA. But if you are going to justify it based on cost rather than personal preference you need to include the full cost, which is more complicated than just the price of fuel.
Heck, I saw a post last night about getting dropped off at LAX. It was taking hours to get close to the airport so they got out of their car and walked the last mile or two to the airport with their luggage. I just can't imagine the scale of what would need to change to accommodate cars.
If out of pocket cost and having your car are the two things you value, do you never plan on flying? The out of pocket cost is often comparable and even with security, it's faster. It's also nice to be able to not have to focus on the road for hours.
It was taking hours to get close to the airport so they got out of their car and walked the last mile or two to the airport with their luggage.
It's not "Musk" who's responsible for that.
Edit: link.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-11/new-cost...
Probably deserves as much recognition as the original Dropbox thread, but for different reasons.
Is anyone building autonomous medium size containers today (about van-sized)? Basically a container without a cabin, fairly slow moving, very conservative in terms of traffic, that can drive at night within city limits and drop off reusable smaller containers with packages for entire apartment complexes? This seems to me like a reasonable solution for where we are headed in terms of buying everything online. Many apartment buildings in SF already have Luxer One systems, now we need to start delivering packages in bulk daily (or N-times per week), instead of making individual trips.
Instead of this vehicle having to deal with unloading dozens of small packages at each destination. Just a way to optimize delivery further.
> sound like a miserable thing to unleash on the streets, even at night
It's about finding the right balance. At night streets are mostly empty (e.g. 2-5am). What we have now is not optimized at all - hundreds of Amazon trucks moving through the city during the day.
If you are going to do smaller containers, what makes sense is one that fits a standard pallet. Then it can used for deliveries between businesses. Probably don't need a box but smart dolly. Then can use existing trucks and vans.
Finally, why automate it? The delivery services could send a van with a large box containing packages. Most packages are small so a tote would work. I'm sort of surprised they don't do this already,
It wouldn't make as much sense to batch deliver to single-family houses, but apartments—and in some cases gated communities—could process a dropped-off container every morning.
When I look into what goes into managing an apartment building, I notice that there are many similar jobs they do regularly. E.g. taking out large containers with trash at a specific time. This could be a similar process: pick up a container, move it to Luxer One, and plug it into the system. With further Luxer One optimization, it would be possible to automate the task of scanning and notifying tenants. So the added job for humans would be just to wheel in the container, plug it into Luxer One and then take the empty container out before the next delivery.
> How many places get enough packages to need a box?
My guess is all apartment buildings (perhaps 50+ apartments).
> Finally, why automate it? The delivery services could send a van with a large box containing packages
Because we are already on this path. Why add even more congestion during the day to accommodate the rapidly expanding delivery industry, when we could batch deliver at night? I agree, that MVP could rely on human-driven vans, but ideally that would also be automated.
If I recall it’s a composite (stack) of nearly 100 photos.
my goal was to show an industrial startup in one image.
BTW, I signed a 10-year NDA and I’m guessing their employees probably did too. I got to see a lot of stuff behind the curtain.
Such a shame…
[0] https://www.instagram.com/p/BMiyAIdhCJn/?igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA...
Only once you have those, does adding a vacuum and accelerating make sense. I think Musk believed this as well, which is why he floated the idea of Hyperloop (pun intended) but bankrolled the Boring Company. I think another 10 years of tunneling improvements, and the hyperloop part may make sense to try.
That's why the Boring Company hasn't made any progress on this grand vision - they seemed to set out by assuming there were easy wins to be had (seemingly not consulting any actual experts in the field), and then there just... weren't... Basically the only thing they have been able to do is to make smaller tunnels that lack any kind of emergency egress - which is kind of important in real mass transit systems where people would rather be able to get out if there was a fire.