Most reviews of Elon Musk‘s hyperloop plan focus on technical questions. Will it cost as little as he estimates? Could it move as fast as he projects? Could the system work at all?
None of these are the real problem with the hyperloop. The real problem is how an infrastructure-heavy, point-to-point system can possibly compete with personal vehicles that can go just about anywhere–the United States has more than 4 million miles of public roads–or with an airline system that requires very little infrastructure and can serve far more destinations than the hyperloop.
Musk promises the hyperloop will be fast. But fast is meaningless if it doesn’t go where you want to go. Musk estimates that people travel about 6 million trips a year between the San Francisco and Los Angeles urban areas, where he wants to build his first hyperloop line. But these urban areas are not points: they are huge, each covering thousands of square miles of land.
Airlines deal with these large areas through multiple airports. The Los Angeles area has five commercial airports and San Francisco three. The hyperloop would only have one station in each region, making it inconvenient for the vast majority of people.
Moreover, airplanes from these airports can reach hundreds of other airports across the country and around the world. Even if Musk’s optimistic cost estimates are valid (and remember, the first cost estimate for California high-speed rail was about $10 billion, less than a tenth of the current estimate), the hyperloop would require billions of dollars spent on more infrastructure to add any new city.
Musk admits that hyperloops would not be competitive with air travel over long distances, so there is no chance for there ever being a coast-to-coast hyperloop or a truly national hyperloop system. This greatly limits its utility.
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Musk hopes that the hyperloop’s speed advantage will make up for the lack of convenient stations. But airplanes have a speed advantage over driving, yet the average American travels three times as many intercity miles on the highway as in the air. Similarly, the 268-mph Shanghai Maglev runs mostly empty because it doesn’t go where people want to go. Cars have a huge convenience advantage, going from where you are to exactly where you want to go when you want to go there.
Our highway system is already built, and–unlike various high-speed rail projects–it was largely paid for by users out of gas taxes, tolls, or other user fees. Any new roads we build connect seamlessly with the existing system without the addition of expensive new technologies.
Moreover, new vehicle technologies will greatly increase highway capacities so we won’t need to build a lot more. Adaptive cruise control promises to relieve up to half the congestion on the limited-access freeways that carry a third of our highway travel. Adaptive traffic signals promise to relieve congestion on the unlimited-access arterials and collectors that support another third of road travel. In the long run, self-driving cars will dramatically increase all road capacities because computers have much faster reflexes than humans, and most congestion is due to slow human reflexes.
Musk sees the hyperloop as an alternative to high-speed rail. But that’s like comparing a Missouri fox trotter with a Tennessee walking horse: one might be a little faster or a little more elegant than the other, but neither is a viable option for everyday transportation today.
Despite the hype written about high-speed trains in Asia and Europe, they have mainly served to attract passengers from low-speed trains, not get people out of their cars or airplanes. Just about every country that has built high-speed trains has nevertheless seen rail’s share of passenger travel decline as more people drive or fly.
Musk is welcome to spend his own or other private investors’ money chasing this dream. But the truth is that, whether it is high-speed rail, maglev, or the hyperloop, point-to-point mass transit that requires a lot of new infrastructure simply makes no sense.
I want to say it could work with meaningful connections to other modes at each node, but I certainly don’t think Hyperloop can compete with personal autos. I chalk this one up to “believe it when I see it.” At this point I’d rather ride on MegaBus than a supersonic tube.
Wouldn’t the Hyperloop and any other high capital transportation system require TSA security and have the same delays as an airport?
Where would the terminus points of Hyperloop be? The easiest place is where there already are traveler services already available — airports and train stations. But if you are going to terminate there, why not just fly or take the train?
Sandy Teal asks, “Wouldn’t the Hyperloop and any other high capital transportation system require TSA security and have the same delays as an airport?”
I’m sure it would, because without some kind of security screening it would be too tempting for a jihadist to set off a bomb enroute, killing all on board and damaging the system.
The high rollers, to whom time is money, are attracted to airplanes that can avoid security, e.g. corporate jets and that new business model, the all-you-can-fly airline exemplified by Surf Air http://www.surfair.com/ .
The rest of us will just avoid airports, high-speed rail or hyperloop hassles and just drive or stay home.
Feeder buses could solve that problem. Airports aren’t free they require large quantities of valuable urban land and the infrastructure is also very expensive.
The ultimate problem with this system is the same as any other mass transit system. The people that support it wont use it themselves, the people that need it cant afford it and the people that can afford it have no use for it. It’s like rock, paper, scissors.
Drawing out my earlier comment a little further, what is the TSA plan for the proposed California high speed rail? Would it be low-level security like Amtrak/Acela or high level security and delays like an airport? Have they said?
If they haven’t already said differently, I would think that the only high speed rail in the US would end up having airport-type TSA security, and similar delays to worry about.
Stone, Parker, et al. have already published a similar idea, and it beats dealing with the airline companies.
I agree that the inherent limitations of point-to-point mass transit may doom the Hyperloop to irrelevance, as they already have the California HSR. Nevertheless, I think that Elon Musk has done us a service. He began by laying out the criteria he thinks any SF / LA public transport proposal should meet if we are really going to get excited about it and spend really large amounts of public money: it should be SIGNIFICANTLY faster and/or cheaper and/or more environmentally friendly than current alternatives, otherwise why spend all that money? He went on to point out that the California HSR plan fails to meet those criteria, so he takes the next logical step, responding to the implied question put to all critics (if you don’t like our plan, what’s your idea?) with a compelling picture, a fairly honest admission that he hasn’t thought everything through, and an open invitation to poke holes in the concept. The resulting debate has shed some light on the California HSR plan’s glaring inadequacies, and hopefully will help deflate the assumption that HSR is the future of transportation.
Similarly, I agree with you that the technologies and solutions you mentioned (adaptive cruise control and traffic signals, self-driving cars, improved security procedures at airports, especially when combined with incremental improvements in the energy efficiency of cars, buses, and planes) can have a much greater impact on travel times and environmental costs, sooner, with less investment and with more flexibility than either the HSR or Hyperloop. What would really be great is to somehow combine those incremental improvements into a compelling future vision (graphs, charts, and scifi sketches included) that responds to the issues being raised by the pro-planning community. Anti-planning with the tools of planning.
Interesting that the Antiplanner’s list of “new vehicle technologies that will greatly increase highway capacity” did not include the only technology that remotely rivals Musk’s: Dual-Mode (DM). Car meets guideway.
Here’s how it works. Self-driving car travels existing roads to elevated guideway ( running along RoW of freeway), zips along the guideway (at 100+ mph) to an exit, then returns to conventional road to its destination. For intercity, such as Frisco-LA, because it is steel wheel on steel rail (but also because vehicles mate and platoon and have very low cd) our vehicle could easily travel at 300-plus mph. One lane of DM could equal the capacity of 20 lanes of freeway. All using existing technology and coming in at a fraction of Hyperloop.
My question: The Antiplanner is quite aware of this technology. Why does he never mention it? Because it uses (shudder) a rail?
HSR does not need TSA-style security, and such security is not used on any HSR running anywhere on earth. The reason for this is that HSR is not vulnerable to attacks on the inside. Even if someone brought a backpack bomb onto the train, it would not be able to derail the train, and it wouldn’t even kill that many people compared to a bus, subway car, or any other crowded place. HSR seating is similar to business-class seats on a plane, very large and plush. Much of the shrapnel would be mitigated and a backpack bomb would only kill a few people. HSR, however, is vulnerable from the outside, as someone could blow up a bridge or the tracks just before a train arrived. Maglev HSR is even safer in this respect, as the trains are half-buried in the tracks and even more difficult to derail. In both cases, security and monitoring are necessary, but not TSA pat-downs.
Hyperloop, in contrast, would need TSA security, as Musk admits, due to the higher speeds and extremely tight tolerances. A bomb in a hyperloop car would kill everyone in that car and likely the two behind it if Musk tried to ram a car through every thirty seconds, as Musk is targeting.