[manigandham]

This technology has been around for over a century. Remove wheel friction and air pressure as the primary barriers to speed with the pinnacle being maglev in a full vacuum (something that was proposed for 5000mph trains crossing the ocean on the seabed at one point). The Hyperloop concept has relaxed these constraints by allowing for some atmosphere, which also greatly reduces the top speed, but fundamentally it's the same thing. And it's all perfectly possible given enough engineering.

The only real problem is the financial viability of such a project.

Air travel is already very streamlined and inexpensive for crossing big distances and has the advantage of not requiring the infrastructure and real estate that a train needs. Just the land rights alone will quickly balloon the cost into 100s of billions for any sizable project between two major cities that people want to travel between - and until that gets figured out, this will never happen.

The recent news around a startup raising 80M is meaningless because they will waste all that money chasing tech without realizing that they will never be able to successfully lay track anywhere.

[kbenson]

> Air travel is already very streamlined and inexpensive for crossing big distances and has the advantage of not requiring the infrastructure and real estate that a train needs.

Hyperloop is very specifically aimed at medium distance routes. SF to LA, for example, where the plane has relatively little time cruising at altitude, where it can fly efficiently. If a plane is spending most it's time flying through denser aid, then it's not flying efficiently, and burns a lot of fuel on a per-mile basis relative to a longer flight. Hyperloop is specced to be more efficient than air travel at the distance it's proposed.

[manigandham]

Efficient != cheaper.

The only thing that matters is what people are willing to pay, and that's not much for medium distance. And for the billions it costs to install the track in the first place, you can buy several airlines and operate them for years.

[curun1r]

Cheaper != better.

It's important to look at the hyperloop in the context in which it was proposed. This is California and environmental aspects need to be taken into account. Airlines are a major source of CO2 and California wants a more environmentally friendly solution. There is a proposed high-speed rail project with a $10B initial estimate that's sure to at least double by the time the project is complete. The high-speed rail project is only high-speed compared to existing rail since the max speed will be around 200 mph.

It's into this environment that Musk proposed the Hyperloop. On paper, it's better than the high-speed rail in every way. Cheaper, faster and with less pollution. The "more airplanes" alternative may be cheaper and probably faster (with the TSA is doing its best keep air travel slow) but fails horribly on the CO2 emissions front.

[dragonwriter]

> It's important to look at the hyperloop in the context in which it was proposed.

I don't think it really is, because the proposal was a comically unserious one designed to generate interest in the underlying technology. The route proposed in the paper as a supposed alternative to HSR which has termini outside of the immediate area of the population centers which it notionally connects would never be useful and will never get built.

OTOH, the interest the technology has drawn from that splashy initial PR campaign means enough people are working to develop it that that, if anything like it is viable, one or more commercially-viable variants will likely be ready for Musk's Mars colonies.

> On paper, it's better than the high-speed rail in every way. Cheaper, faster and with less pollution.

Its only "cheaper" because the proposal both made unrealistic assumptions about real estate costs and avoided much of the real estate costs by not terminating any place with useful transit access to the population centers at either terminus.

Unlike HSR, which not only terminates near the population centers, but includes as part of the same project improvements in the local connecting transit systems.

The proposed Hyperloop route was the high-tech version of a bridge-to-nowhere.

[stcredzero]

Its only "cheaper" because the proposal both made unrealistic assumptions about real estate costs and avoided much of the real estate costs by not terminating any place with useful transit access to the population centers at either terminus.

It's supposed to be an alternative to a short airplane flight, so the latter assumption isn't so bad.

[dragonwriter]

> > Its only "cheaper" because the proposal both made unrealistic assumptions about real estate costs and avoided much of the real estate costs by not terminating any place with useful transit access to the population centers at either terminus.

> It's supposed to be an alternative to a short airplane flight, so the latter assumption isn't so bad.

It was pitched as an alternative to the actual HSR proposal, which both connects the population centers and includes connecting improvements on both ends to regional transit. So, yes, as an alternative to HSR, it was comically unserious.

(Even as an alternative to air travel, its still comically unserious for the same reason -- while the major airports are farther from the population centers than the proposed HSR termini are, they are much closer than the termini for hyperloop that were proposed, and do have significant transit connections into the population center and the surrounding region, so terminating in place without either that proximity to where people would want to come from and go and without including the cost of transit improvements to make the termini useful in the cost of the proposal is ludicrous.)

[manigandham]

What does "better" mean?

Outside of governmental regulations, the market is what determines progress and there isn't much push by consumers for environmental impacts. They just want cheap and reliable transit. Price also wins over speed (and it's been show things like wifi have a greater effect on travel comfort than speed).

Unless you cut down the travel time significantly, it just doesn't matter. And at those speeds there are more engineering, operational and logistical costs that increase the ticket price so the value is reduced further. I also don't see how the engineering for a pioneering vactrain concept will somehow be cheaper than existing understood infrastructure.

Unless you can charge $50 and get from LA to SF in 30 mins while building the entire thing for just a few billion, this won't work.

[curun1r]

> the market is what determines progress and there isn't much push by consumers for environmental impacts.

That's only because externalities haven't been included in the pricing. What about the $14t that it will take to relocate people displaced by rising oceans? The repair costs from the increasingly-common severe weather events? There are real costs of climate change that aren't being accounted for and will have to be paid by future generations.

[manigandham]

Sure, by future generations. Do you think we're suddenly going to start pricing in the externalities of the whole world for train tickets?

The market won't do this, it's human behavior.

[mentos]

I think the difference maker here could be Elon Musk. He has the force of will to make believers out of all of the obstacles (technological and political) in the way.