China: Builds 40,000 miles of high speed rail in 12 years <a href="https://twitter.com/xiaoyewen/status/1494588071483875333" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/xiaoyewen/status/1494588071483875333</a><p>United States: Thinks about vacuum tubes for awhile, gives up entirely.
This is about VIRGIN Hyperloop by Richard Bransons Virgin Brand conglomerate.
Not to be confused with Elon Musks Boring Company.<p>FTA:<p>> Virgin Hyperloop was founded as Hyperloop Technologies in 2014, stemming from Tesla CEO Elon Musk's idea of a high-speed passenger pod transport. It changed its name when Richard Branson joined the board of directors in 2017.
There are a lot of reasons standard rail in the US is cargo centric. Profit and a much easier customer service case are big ones. Also, sending cargo in a new transportation system is much easier and less lawsuit prone than people.<p>An old story in the US since the post office basically made airplane travel viable via postal contracts.
Large-diameter tube freight has, a history.[1] The USSR built a few sizable TRANSPROGRESS tube systems with diameters in the 1.5 to 2 meter range in the 1970s. Mostly for garbage disposal. There have been proposals on and off for over a century.<p>Pneumatic garbage disposal is in use in a very few places. Roosevelt Island in New York has had a working system since the 1980s. It works well and is well-liked. Roosevelt Island was supposed to be car-free, and lacks much of a road system, so this was a good fit.<p>The anti-car crowd should be pushing for this.<p>[1] <a href="https://highways.dot.gov/public-roads/autumn-1994/tube-freight-transportation" rel="nofollow">https://highways.dot.gov/public-roads/autumn-1994/tube-freig...</a>
Bummer. Musk-hyped moonshot or not, I thought Hyperloop presented an incredibly exciting vision for the future of mass transit. Even if it was always going to be a long shot, it’s disappointing to be right.<p>Edit: replies saying "this never could have worked" are missing the point to a pretty hysterical degree.<p>You don't know that. No one knows that! Unless you are from the future or are a genius-level mechanical engineer in the specific problem domain of vacuum trains (who for some reason was not already employed by Hyperloop), you cannot say that with 100% confidence.<p>No matter how unlikely it might have seemed to you, it <i>could</i> have worked! And it's a bummer when extremely-cool-but-unlikely things don't work.
A lot of people seem to be confused. Elon does not have any companies working on a hyperloop. He kicked off the idea and released a white paper with some very early engineering work seemingly put together by a group of engineers working at SpaceX and Tesla[1]. He never had any plans to commercialize it himself and was releasing it as "open source" for anyone else to take up.<p>Several companies sprang up to pursue the concept[2]. This article is about Richard Branson's Virgin Hyperloop which itself has a very checkered past[3] and has felt pretty scamming since the beginning, long before Branson acquired the company. Not sure if the acquisition by Branson has caused them to clean up their act or what.<p>The only Hyperloop thing that Elon or his companies seem to do is hold a design competition for students where they compete on a short hyperloop test track at SpaceX's Hawthorn facility. If I had to guess I'd say that this is most likely a recruiting tool for SpaceX.<p>1. <a href="https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/hyperloop-alpha.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/hyperl...</a><p>2. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop#Hyperloop_companies" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop#Hyperloop_companies</a><p>3. <a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/former-hyperloop-one-cto-describes-mismanagement-and-harassment-in-new-lawsuit/" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/former-hyperloop...</a>
> The company is now "changing direction" due to ... and "all the changes due to Covid"<p>It <i>is</i> true that train ridership is still way down... maybe 25% of pre-Covid levels. Although they'll probably return before HyperLoop is ready.
Kind of OT, or maybe not. But why didn't Musk (or anyone else) go with Maglev tech? The efficiency seems ok, and it probably doesn't matter if you do it above vs below ground, and it's deployed around the world now.
Vacuum travel in a a tube does actually make sense. It may not be viable (yet?) but the idea is sound.<p>A big problem is a breach in your vacuum. Keeping the atmosphere out is expensive.<p>But what if where you’re building it has no atmosphere and is geologically stable or dead? Then a lot of problems go away. You don’t even need a tunnel necessarily.<p>Yet another reason why colonizing the Moon makes 1000x more sense than the romantic pipe dream of the red planet.
I find it quite surprising that they only fired half and not all of them. How can this conceptual vacuum tube pod system that has been shown to be incredibly inefficient and prohibitively expensive still have some kind of business model?<p>To be honest I thought this whole idea got scrapped 5+ years ago.
Perhaps sending Burritos would be more profitable:<p><a href="https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm" rel="nofollow">https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...</a>
I have a theory: I think it was a hedge against politicians potentially investing in public transport. If some brave politician comes along, doesn't need money from car manufacturers and decides to build public transport infrastructure, it will be a big financial drag on the US car market. A second Trump term could have gone that way: <a href="https://time.com/4247162/donald-trump-trains-infrastructure/" rel="nofollow">https://time.com/4247162/donald-trump-trains-infrastructure/</a>.<p>If you were also one of the leading railway makers, it would protect you from such a thing because you could make money from government contracts to make trains instead. In the coming elections, it is very unlikely that Trump is coming back nor is the Democratic party going to win any elections at least in the next 6 years so railway isn't happening... hence this move.
Whenever Richard Branson invest in something you know its basically a terrible idea.<p>This company adopted the Hyperloop because it allowed the to get funding based Musk name but then instantly went away from everything that Musk suggested would be needed to make the concept viable.<p>What Musk actually published can still be read here:<p><a href="https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/hyperloop-alpha.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/hyperl...</a><p>Musk really only thought Hyperloop made sense between two really very high density urban centers such as SF and LA. For the majority of transportation between cities super-sonic electric powered flight was his preferred solution.
Boring Company seems clearly focused on hyperloops as the long-term goal.<p>They determined that construction of tunnels would be orders of magnitude faster on approvals than above-ground construction.<p>With that approach, tunneling construction is the key technological block. With SpaceX and Tesla's know-how, the actual construction of a hyperloop is rather de-risked.<p>By keeping laser-focused on tunneling tech, they build the muscle around the regulatory process, get cities and states to trust them, and show operational competence in operations.<p>Once they do a intra-state system in a friendly regulatory environment (FL/TX, ala Austin -> San Antonio or Tampa -> Orlando), they'll built a corporate machine that's tunneling dozens of underground highways across the country.<p>At that point, building new tunnels as a hyperloop will be a reasonable mid-term goal.<p>Loop 2020's -> Hyperloop 2030's