But wasn't the ambition to go much faster than a train? I thought this was about reaching speeds of airplanes...
If we are at speeds around or below 200 mph when the pods are full, SF - LA would still take a couple of hours. A French wheeled TGV could have done that 35 years ago. A Japanese wheeled Shinkansen could have done that even before. A Japanese or Chinese maglev version of the last 1-2 decades could easily beat that. And that's without being stuck in a dumb tube. By the time the hyperloop becomes a reality, if ever, there will be tens of thousands of miles of high speed rails around the world.
The hyperloop is a sizeable amount of current hype and a future loop with pods that barely match yesterday's high speed trains. These high speed trains, engineering wonders that actually exist, don't receive any attention in press. I'd say that the hyperloop has been remarkably good at sucking the air out of the room.
The Wright Flyer was slower than a contemporary ship, let alone a train, yet this technology quickly became the fastest transportation available.
Hyperloop is supposed to average about 600MPH and hit a top speed of 760MPH. Now, that's a far-off estimate of something totally unproven and could be way off, but if you're going to compare it to alternatives you need to compare what it will become, not what it currently is. You might disagree on what it could become (I have no idea how much of the supposed specs are feasible and how much is just wishful thinking, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if it couldn't achieve its goals) but you can't just look at some first-try barely-works prototype and assume that's the end state.
The Wright Flyer was far cheaper than the Hyperloop will be to develop, and airplanes had uses beyond just transporting people (namely military, which meant government-subsidized development).
Your comment makes sense, when applied to the first commercial deployment. Which is years out at best and nobody knows what it would really look like. This stuff right now is not even a prototype, it's barely a proof of concept. Complaining about the specs is on essentially the same level as taking a wind-tunnel model of an airliner and saying that it's not big enough to fit any people.
On very few select tracks – the Shinkansen could drive 500 km/h, but is still limited to 320 because of a lack of suitable high-speed tracks. Same goes for the TGV, and the Germans don't even bother with trains faster than 250 km/h.
Speaking of which, Germany sold their maglev technology to Japan and China in the first place because there was nowhere to put it at all. With Germany's winding railroad network it's impossible to reach speeds high enough to justify maglev.
400 km/h sustained, over tracks longer than 400km, would already be a massive improvement over the status quo.
Assuming, of course, the Hyperloop will be able to build a sufficient rail/tube network.
Given that assumption, existing trains could also sustain something in the vicinity of 400 km/h by your own words.
Germany rebuilt and supplemented some of its railroad network for the ICE, at enormous cost (e.g. Wikipedia says the 250 km from Hannover to Berlin cost around 2.5 billion EUR, not adjusting for inflation). Of course that's nothing compared to rebuilding an entire transit network from scratch. I'm not sure any western country has even attempted to do that post-WW2, I guess China's recent investment into high speed rail is the closest modern example.
Another interesting point of comparison with existing rail networks aside from average speed is efficiency. A well utilised high speed train is more efficient than a car, but it still uses a heck of a lot of energy (with corresponding emissions, somewhere). Given the reductions in drag, I'd assume -- hope -- that a Hyperloop train will use less energy per passenger kilometer than existing trains.
Maybe the hyperloop can do sharper turns at high speed, and probably next generation of the pods or the loop allows for higher speed in general. But that the winner of the first attempts promises 396 km/h and not the +1,000 km/h we heard about before, does deflate the whole idea.
This essentially removes the requirement of flat land from the equation.
Also, remember that the hyperloop is really much more geared towards the American need: large cities are separated by much greater distances than Europe, meaning that a faster and cheaper per kilometer solution is needed than high speed rail.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_railway_line#/media...
There is a huge project upgrading existing railway tracks throughout Germany to make it possible getting from Berlin to Munich in under 4h by 2017.
So selected, in fact, that the DB is currently procuring over 300 ICEs limited to 250 km/h, and a grand total of 17 (with an option of up to two more!) that peak at 320 km/h.
I'll call myself lucky if the train manages 180 km/h on my usual routes.
They are not a replacement for those trains running fast services (with legs with 300 km/h in them).
Meanwhile, the more ubiquitous current 280 km/h models are scheduled to be replaced with a more economical 250 km/h one – and they won't even reach 200 km/h on most tracks.
ICx / ICE 4 are meant to replace the IC/EC trains first (which are slower than ICx) and later ICE 1 and 2. It seems that their slightly lower top speed shouldn't matter because of improved ac-/deceleration and relatively frequent stops (every ~70km). ICE 3 would do the 300km/h bits with longer distances. That seems like a good idea to me.
I'd like to ask on a source for your claim that ICE 3 "are scheduled to be reduced even further." The series 407 trains are just being rolled out.
Also, by definition most tracks will always be slow because there are many local / less-used tracks where such speeds simply don't make sense. Most long-distance tracks are pretty fast, and lots of upgrades are being built or in planning. I find your point misleading.
Could that be a positive feature, though?
It seems that in America, and particularly in CA where they're currently arguing heatedly about light rail, there are interests that have captured the industry - it's impossible to construct and operate these conventional technologies for anything short of insane amounts of money.
Perhaps it's possible to sidestep all the rent-protecting regulations, etc., by making the conversation about a technology whose regulation has not been thoroughly captured.
Hyperloop is a heavy rail competition and the one planned in California is a disaster on many fronts, it is pure political in need and desire and hasn't got a viable economic case.
The only reason I would see to support a hyperloop is that if it is commercial driven and supported. We don't need more of the same, we need a real game changer that shows true potential to replace other long distance forms of transport.
With regards to rail, for all the belly aching about the US not having a large number of people traveling by that means you need to realize that the US by far makes up for this with the freight that moves this way. Also for a much longer time the US had a much cheaper and easier transport by plane than Europe has but even now that is ramped up and continuing to do so.
We are not even at the prototype stage. This is still the design stage, and of only a single design to boot. Do not expect 110 m/s to be the maximum speed limit of this technology. We're just barely getting started.
The potential to go much, much faster is still there.
From the lift to drag ratio(14) and cruising speed provided(110 m/s), we can compare it's performance to other forms of transportation(neglecting air drag) using the Von Karmen Gabrielli diagram[0]. Using the inverse of the L/D ratio as the specific tractive power and using the updated Von Karmen Gabrielli diagram in [1], we find that performance is expected to be a bit better than that of a commercial plane.
This is pretty promising. Although power required for stabilization and overcoming air drag should be taken into account.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n%E2%80%93G... [1]http://www.ingenia.org.uk/Content/ingenia/issues/issue22/Imp...