Bangalore and Hyperloop

I read Elon Musk's hyperloop while "accepting' a LinkedIn request yesterday. For a Bangalorean this idea seems outlandish and far-fetched. As a tax-paying citizen forced to use just 40-50% of any decent & big road (its just 20-30% on indecent and smaller roads) because of year-round (decade-round?!) digging by various government and private bodies, the idea of a hyperloop which can take upto 10 years (in US) which means 7 in Japan and 5 in China and easily upto 30 in India and 50 in Bangalore has sort of numbed all my senses. Unable to write any further, I share the original post below.

Hyperloop

So, the news is out—in a 57-page pdf that will take some time to digest. Elon Musk revealed the Hyperloop to the world, and it's a gift: an open-source plan that anyone can build... if they have several billions to spare and the ability to loop around the bureaucracy likely to bedevil such a project. It’s great that he’s open-sourcing it, but it’s his support, not the idea itself, that gives the Hyperloop credibility right now.

To be sure, if one person or group goes for it, they'll be crazy not to get Elon as an advisor (at the very least), and that alone would keep most other parties from even trying.

As for the specifics, the Hyperloop runs above the ground—well above the ground—on a track supported by posts that will roughly follow the route of Interstate 5 between San Francisco and Los Angeles. (That highway looks straight on a map, but it is actually pretty curvy near both Los Angeles and San Francisco, exactly where land prices are highest and neighbors most likely to object, either for money or on principle.) The posts are designed like any modern building in California, says Musk... to be earthquake-resistant. If there’s a really big one, he adds, we’ll have more problems than just a broken Hyperloop. Fair enough.

But Hyperloop will still need (unfortunately) a huge amount of security, both for passenger screening and from errant intruders. It’s not that there will be that many people in the system at any one time, but it will be a tempting target.

To be candid, I’m a bit underwhelmed. Musk's contribution to the successes at Paypal, Tesla and SpaceX were not just his ideas; each of these is a company he and others built from an idea up—but not without a lot of struggle, smarts and energy.

As I said earlier, the Hyperloop business model is different from that of airlines, because the marginal cost of carrying people will be very low for a system that uses a tunnel at anything near capacity. (Of course, the actual capital cost would be huge.) Rush-hour prices are likely to be very high, though competitive with airlines, while off-peak rides could be priced like a bus or even lower. Six-person pods every half minute... that's a lot of traffic! (720 people per hour, though that, like many other details, could change.

He envisions LA to San Francisco as the base case, though on the call he mused about doing a smaller, demonstration system himself. But the essence of this system is precisely in its scale—its ability to fundamentally change the the dynamics of transportation between San Francisco and LA. A demo won't demonstrate much.

However, the real question for the Hyperloop is its advantage over alternatives. The use of tunnels would allow people to travel from city center to city center easily (after a 10-year-or-more period of disruptive city-center construction)... but you could get an almost equivalent benefit at significantly lower cost per city simply by extending the mass transit system to include the airports, as is finally happening in many US cities – San Francisco, sort of; Boston; Atlanta; Chicago; Washington DC; and a few more (as well as many around the world). The issue is less being in the city center, which isn't really walking distance from most of any serious city, but being integrated with the mass transit system. Within Western Europe, where they have done this in most large cities, people rarely fly any more; the train is simpler.

Yes, it's not that I wouldn't like to zip from New York to LA in half an hour, reliably, but that this seems a bit ill-timed from a public perception perspective at a moment when Skype and Google hangouts and the like are reducing our need for travel. But if they ever do build it, it will certainly get used. The operating costs (in energy and money) will be a trifle compared to the capital required. All aboard!