Elon Musk's Hyperloop super train

peter grimes said:

Sorry, man. I was too abrupt.

I had heard of a proposal for tiered short - length landing towers that could be embedded in cities. It was fanciful, though, in that it was proposing filling NYC skies sith a thousand-fold increase in air traffic, when we're already rubbing up against safety margins in the air tourism sector.

No, personal air transport is not very revolutionary, it's basically scaling up an existing inefficient mode.

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You don't need a new landing strips; there are a ton of small utility airports all over the place. It's only as inefficient as the fuel makes it. More efficient fuels or power sources mean more efficient travel. At some point though, there is going to be a tipping point as the US leans more and more heavily on car transportation and highways where if a big enough chunck of people fly, you're actually being more efficient by relieving congestion on the roads and all of the fuel waste and localized pollution that comes with that.

And you can't discount the fact that an increase in personal air transportation can happen largely devoid of direct government intervention. If the market makes it possible, it's very likely to happen.

Winner said:

Personal air travel still has a pretty large giggle factor. Unless we find out how to pack micro-fusion reactors or similar magic in something the size of a car trunk, I doubt it will ever happen.

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Do you think that the leaps we're taking in fuel sciences (hydgrogen fuel cells, polymer fuel cells, solar panels, etc) and power storage (batteries, etc) going on right now won't apply to airplanes as well?

A right purty video report on the 'hyperloop':
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kA4ME6pKeP4

hobbsyoyo said:

Do you think that the leaps we're taking in fuel sciences (hydgrogen fuel cells, polymer fuel cells, solar panels, etc) and power storage (batteries, etc) going on right now won't apply to airplanes as well?

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Sure, but so do laws of physics, right? How many more times energy intensive is it to transport one person by air in an aeroplane the size of a car (which, for convenience, would probably have to be capable of VTOL) as opposed to terrestrial modes of transport?

As for hydrogen, it sucks as fuel for cars, and it will suck doubly as fuel for aeroplanes (super low density, cryogenic, combustion with air produces nasty NOx). Batteries may become more efficient in the future, but I doubt we're anywhere close to electric airplanes which travel at reasonable speeds to reasonable distances, can take off from a helipad the size of a standard parking place, can carry reasonable cargo, etc. etc.

I may be too conservative and unimaginative, but I just don't see it until we somehow crack the problem of cheap and plentiful energy from concentrated sources (e.g. some magical miniaturized fusion reactors). Since we're facing an urgent energy crisis in the coming decades, I think air travel in general will go down the drain and terrestrial mass transit systems will undergo a renaissance.

Fair points.

Winner said:

Personal air travel still has a pretty large giggle factor. Unless we find out how to pack micro-fusion reactors or similar magic in something the size of a car trunk, I doubt it will ever happen.

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Meh, the real giggle factor is the control problem. Both individual vehicular control and air traffic control. It'd be mayhem.

I believe the private sector could pull this off much better than government. If government got involved it wouldn't run as efficiently, likely cost exponential more, and wouldn't get completed for decades.

Private sector > Government

Self-driving stuff is the future of personal transportation, not personal air travel. Although, it would be nice for everyone, really, if people used public transportation, but as that's complete garbage here in America I sadly don't see that occurring.
(As an aside, even more hilarious is how a couple of mid-20th century SF writers thought that the helicopter of all things would replace the automobile.)

Cryptic_Snow said:

I believe the private sector could pull this off much better than government. If government got involved it wouldn't run as efficiently, likely cost exponential more, and wouldn't get completed for decades.

Private sector > Government

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Not necessarily. 19th century American railroads, for instance, were infamously inefficient, thanks to (and mostly due to) complete lassiez-feire (I can never spell that right) policies on behalf of the government. This, of course, is different, but the point still stands.

SouthernKing said:

Self-driving stuff is the future of personal transportation, not personal air travel. Although, it would be nice for everyone, really, if people used public transportation, but as that's complete garbage here in America I sadly don't see that occurring.

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It will, once petrol is 5-10 times more expensive than today.

It is INSANE for a person to use his/her car alone. Yes, I've said it. When I ride into town on my bicycle, I sometimes observe the cars on the road to my left. Like 70% of them have only a single person inside. Meaning, they're dragging 10-20 times their body mass along, expending energy to accelerate/decelerate and move all this mass. That's completely idiotic; how many people would walk at all if it involved carrying a huge backpack with just 1x their body weight?

Mass transit is, when expressed in terms of energy per person per distance travelled, usually far more efficient than cars or (gods forbid) aeroplanes. At the very least, people should use cars only when they fill them up to their full capacity (4-5 people) and/or they need to transport heavy baggage.

But people will "rediscover" all these common sense things once they can't afford to drive to work due to expensive fuel.

Winner said:

That's completely idiotic; how many people would walk at all if it involved carrying a huge backpack with just 1x their body weight?

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Cars have these cool engines that make their weight irrelevant!!

VRWCAgent said:

Cars have these cool engines that make their weight irrelevant!!

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And they are powered by freedom, got it

I, for one, completely agree with everything you say Winner.

The other major issue (for suburban Americans at least) is that public transport infrastructure in America, especially outside the ten or so largest cities, is complete crap. I'll use Pittsburgh, where I currently live, as an example. Other than my local school buses, there is absolutely zero public transportation in my suburb. Yes, there is a metro system, but it has only one line with maybe a dozen stations (which isn't remotely useful to even a quarter of the population) and its budget has been continuously slashed from even before the recession. Same with the buses here; they exist but aren't really efficient or useful to that many people, and also have budget issues. You really have no choice but to drive (or in rare cases walk or bike or something), and that has to change. It's at least a good sign that fewer people are living in suburbs than a few decades ago.
(Sorry if that was too rant-like, but it's true)

VRWCAgent said:

Cars have these cool engines that make their weight irrelevant!!

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Internal combustion engines have been around since the 1870s. I think they're too ubiquitous to be cool

peter grimes said:

I think what I like best about this scheme is the way it fundamentally changes the approach to traditional transport challenges.

It's not a train, but it connects fixed points. It's easily integrated into larger hub-and-spoke networks, similar to air transit. If done properly, it can reach right into downtown areas with 5 minute frequency - mirroring the convenience of automobiles.

Are there any other recent ideas that are similarly feasible and distinct?

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I'm not sold on the idea that this is at all feasible yet. There seems to be all sorts of assumptions being made about construction and operating costs that don't sound like they'll actually pan out.

VRWCAgent said:

Cars have these cool engines that make their weight irrelevant!!

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Well, not irrelevant, but they certainly allow the nigh-magical transition from muscle power to using fossil fuels. Fossil fuels have given us such amazing leverage in creating a better world; we can (almost literally) turn a liquid into human progress.

The issue becomes when we consume the non-renewable in ways that don't lead to either progress or human well-being. That's when the weight matters.

SouthernKing said:

I, for one, completely agree with everything you say Winner.

The other major issue (for suburban Americans at least) is that public transport infrastructure in America, especially outside the ten or so largest cities, is complete crap. I'll use Pittsburgh, where I currently live, as an example. Other than my local school buses, there is absolutely zero public transportation in my suburb. Yes, there is a metro system, but it has only one line with maybe a dozen stations (which isn't remotely useful to even a quarter of the population) and its budget has been continuously slashed from even before the recession. Same with the buses here; they exist but aren't really efficient or useful to that many people, and also have budget issues. You really have no choice but to drive (or in rare cases walk or bike or something), and that has to change. It's at least a good sign that fewer people are living in suburbs than a few decades ago.
(Sorry if that was too rant-like, but it's true)

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Yeah, that's obviously going to change. Also, suburbia is living on borrowed time.

Still, although I understand what the situation is in many parts of America, it is surreal to me as a European - even while I come from the "poorer" part of Europe. The city where I live, Brno, has a public transportation system consisting of trams, buses, trolleybuses and trains, all integrated with the regional transport network. For a horrendous price of roughly $250 for a one-year ticket ($125 for students under 26, which I sadly am not), I can get anywhere in the city in about an hour at most. Normally, a trip to the centre by tram takes about 25 minutes from where I live (in the suburb). Trams and buses go every 5-15 minutes, depending on the time of the day. During night-time, there are special night bus lines which go every hour or so.

People constantly complain when the prices of tickets go up or the timetables change, but compared to actually paying for petrol, parking places, and other related costs of using a car, it's still cheap and convenient. I don't even have a driving licence, because I simply do not need a car at all.

Winner said:

And they are powered by freedom, got it

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Dodge would certainly agree with you.