[jasonkolb]

The shit talking about this is disappointing to me. Isn't this the route of crazy idea that moves us into the future? It's not supposed to be easy. You think people would put their livelihood and reputation on the line for something that they think is a sham?

Seriously, if this mentality were pervasive we would not be having this conversation on the internet or driving cars to knowledge work jobs, we would be riding horses to the field.

I love the nerve and ambition it takes to try something that seems impossible, these are the people moving the world forward.

Edit: words

[jandrese]

Being a realist I have to be skeptical about the idea of building miles of vacuum tube through earthquake country.

It still smells like one of those crazy Sci-Fi ideas that crashes and burns when people do the math and discover that they'll need to charge $10,000 a ticket and be at 100% capacity for decades before they break even.

The cost estimates I have seen for constructing the tubes are hilarious lowballs thus far. It's definitely not going to be cheaper than high speed rail per mile, especially when you're talking about California (land of NIMBY).

[mozumder]

Indeed. High-speed rail would be cheaper when using the same cost estimates, if land was cheap like out in the country.

But then you have to build transit into dense cities, where a single building that you have to go through might cost $1 billion.

And then you realize why infrastructure is so expensive when you actually figure out the real costs.

[Reedx]

Perhaps, but by all accounts Elon is a pretty smart engineer and has ready access to smarter engineers. Not to mention those actually working on it. It just seems unlikely to me that none of them accounted for something so obvious? Certainly they did and felt it was a solvable problem.

If nothing else, if it increases expectations people have about transit then that's good. The currently planned California "high-speed" rail is pretty underwhelming.

[cozzyd]

I have heard, but don't know whether or not to take seriously, the argument that the proposal is designed to derail CAHSR in order to sell more cars. If that's the case, it seems to be working.

What part of CAHSR do you find underwhelming (other that it will take too long to build?). I disagree with some of the routing decisions (I think it should go SJ ->SF -> Oakland -> Central Valley -> LA ), but what would conceivably make it better?

[takno]

My main issue with the whole thing is that it is immediately used as an excuse to do down and prevent real engineering that can actually happen in the next 30 years like HSR. Blue sky thinking is good, but you can't sit back doing nothing and using unlikely predictions about the future to sneeringly criticize real things with real budgets that people can really do today

[rhino369]

If the project was so great Musk would be leading it, not giving it away to the public.

The original whitepaper included absurd assumptions related to cost.

Even if the CA highspeed rail is underwhelming, it's already under construction. Nobody is going to pay for a competitor project because you'd split the market.

[pbreit]

The cost estimates are coming from the same person/group that has built cars and rockets.

Skepticism is fine but doesn't warrant calling off the project at this point.

[mozumder]

The guy leading this project is someone that willfully changed his name so it has at least two "bros" in it.

That's enough to call it off.

[dragontamer]

There is no serious hyperloop project. Just pie-in-the-sky projections from someone who isn't really that serious about pursuing it.

If Elon Musk seriously cared about the Hyperloop project, his FEA simulations would have looked better than the crap I pulled in an optional class from college. His "proposal" was the most modest of sketches, and should be treated with only the same amount of rigor that Elon put into it.

[MaysonL]

You think people would put their livelihood and reputation on the line for something that they think is a sham?

Pets.com. South Sea Bubble. Tulip mania. et omnium cetera.

It may work, but that's not the way to bet, right now. (Unless you've done a lot more math on it than I have, or, like the VCs and angels backing it, you're getting really good odds).

[notahacker]

Also its proponent notably didn't commit to involvement in the project, despite being comfortable juggling multiple other projects. I don't think that means he's not keen on the idea, but I do think it means he knows its risk/reward ratio is vastly worse than other ambitious projects he's involved with, especially if he's judged on the ability to hit the rather... optimistic metrics in his original paper.

[Grishnakh]

You have to remember, you're in America (I'm assuming, since this story is about something in America). This isn't the country you might think it is.

You might be thinking this is the country that put men on the Moon. That's incorrect. That country is in the past, and no longer exists; most of the people involved in that are dead.

This country couldn't put men on the Moon right now, with far better technology than existed back then, if its survival depended on it. This is a country that doesn't do anything big any more, it just sits back and says "that can't be done", and "that'll never work". This country says these things even while other countries like China actually go out and do them.

These people are probably right: this fancy new ideas never will work, here. Instead, they'll be taken overseas somewhere where people there will make them work. And we'll continue to sit around here, telling ourselves "no way, that'll never work, it's not feasible, etc." while our economy stagnates more and more.

[MaysonL]

Note that it took eight years to put the first men on the moon for a short stay. It's quite likely that within the next eight years there will be men on the moon, maybe even to establish a base.

[Grishnakh]

Where did you get that crazy idea? There's no action at all in the US government and NASA to pursue such a plan, and they'd need to be starting this far ahead to actually do that. If you're talking about China, that's a possibility, but we're not China, I'm talking about the US here and how it's unable to accomplish such projects any more.

[MaysonL]

Who said US government or NASA was going to be involved?

[blackflame7000]

His whole comment is about the American spirit. Get with it Mayson

[knieveltech]

To clarify you claim our economy is stagnating predominantly due to a lack of innovation?

[Grishnakh]

No, it's stagnating because of a growing income inequality and a hollowing-out of the middle class. Innovation isn't enough to fix this, and eventually it's going to bite us in the ass. But infrastructure is also important for the economy, and US infrastructure is in a shambles and getting worse. Big infrastructure projects (which actually work) are desperately needed, especially ones which make transport more efficient and less polluting. I'm not entirely sold Hyperloop is really the answer BTW, I think SkyTran would be a lot more useful overall and a lot more technically feasible not to mention cheap to build, but I see the same naysaying for any new transportation technology that comes along.

[Reedx]

"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."

[noobermin]

Half an hour in a tube is better than 4 hours of flying with wifi (including the security and delays in an airport)...not to mention the cost.

[acomjean]

I optimistic. I'm hoping its the new thing garners excitement and political good will and someone builds one. It works and spreads.

In the US the shifting of the populace to the left after the long period of "we need smaller government, get government out of the way" (see Bernie Sanders).

As someone in a small Northeast City that can't seem to extend a trolley based subway line 3 miles, and commuting time here is stupid... I'm a little worried, plus I"m not sure I'd like to ride it..

[mozumder]

It's not an impossible idea. It's just a really bad idea.

There are far more efficient ways of transporting people at high speeds and lower costs than this.

What are the advantages here? It's more expensive than high-speed rail, for example.

[pbreit]

SF to LA in 30 minutes for $20? Seems advantageous to me.

[cozzyd]

This thing barely has more capacity per day than a few trains. If it really was $20, the induced demand would kill it.

[pbreit]

I don't understand your capacity comment. The original doc estimated 850 per hour on the average (sufficient to accommodate current demand) with room to grow.

[cozzyd]

850 / hour sounds wildly optimistic for something that can carry only 28 passengers in a pod, but even at face value, that's peanuts compared to what trains can do (especially since travel isn't evenly spread over 24 hours). Trains can easily reach 20-25 times that capacity.

Anyway, it's silly to consider current demand. The demand currently is capped by the time / expense/ inconvenience it takes to get from one place to another. If it really took half an hour, people would start using it to commute, go out for dinner in other city, etc, and one would need to meet demands similar to rapid transit lines. BART can move 25,000 people / hour (and it's full during peak demand). Hyperloop would need similar demand.