Very much agreed, lots of FUD for a technology that's only now being prototyped. Would the author rather technologists not get excited by interesting possible solutions to long-standing problems?

You can make this argument on any new transformative tech, but in the case of the Hyperloop, there's actually no new transformative tech as of yet. It's merely science fiction, which is the point of the article: it's more fun to talk about science fiction and less fun to maintain and improve the solutions we already have.

If we take two lines (one rail and one hyperloop) and compare the number of people that can be transported in an hour, then we can judge if multiple 12 person pods can transport more/less than trains over the same period. I suspect that pods might have a pretty good shot at winning.

I would want to see such throughput numbers scaled to cost.

(because if one or the other wins by spending 10x, well, duh)

Oh, absolutely, cost is a huge factor. I’m sure Californians are well aware of the cost of a rail project these days.

I do hope part of the cos analysis is likely rent / housing costs paid by the commuters as a result of the build. I tend to think an extended range from higher speeds would decrease total housing costs but I too would want to see figures.

I bet trains win bigly for servicing bedroom communities. A stop is just a stop.

Maybe, but a stop that can be twice as far away while taking the same commute time will probably yield lower housing costs since the amount of housing in an acceptable commute area is going to be much larger.

I was thinking about the amount of infrastructure needed to service the whole project corridor.

Of course it isn't clear how the hyperloop would work in practice, but I doubt a station would be less footprint than a train stop. And running the services simultaneously is probably harder with small shuttles than with a train that just stops at each station. Likely faster, but a lot more complicated.

https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_attachments/h...:

"Sealed capsules carrying 28 passengers each that travel along the interior of the tube depart on average every 2 minutes from Los Angeles or San Francisco (up to every 30 seconds during peak usage hours)"

So, that's 28/pod, not 12. At 30 second intervals, that would be 56 passengers/minute or 3360/hour.

For trains, we have (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_capacity#Route_capacitie...):

"Tram and light rail systems have in theory very high route capacities, but in practice route capacities of 12 trains per hour is a practical upper limit. For High Speed Rail a route capacity of up to 18 trains per hour may be possible. The Punggol metro line in Singapore uses a moving block system to achieve a headway of 90 seconds, so the route capacity is 40 trains per hour."

So, let's take 12 trains an hour. Then, each one would have to carry 280 passengers to be on par with the maximum mentioned by Musk. That's ballpark what https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R160_(New_York_City_Subway_car... delivers, but about a third of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground_2009_Stock.

So, I think an optimistic view would say you need two hyperloop tubes to get capacity of a single subway rail line (optimistic because it rounds down train capacity, and accepts Musk's claim of 120 pods/hour)

High-speed train may be different, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNCF_TGV_Sud-Est has a capacity of 350, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acela_Express#First-generation... about 300, both ballpark the top of Musk's claim.

On the other hand, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_Class_374, used on Eurostar, has 900 seats. So, I guess TGV and Acela use multiple carriages in a single train. That, again, would mean you need two hyperloop tubes for one train.

>You could have made the same arguments about smartphones 10 years ago

That true, but the lesson from that is that no criticism of speculative sci-fi projects is allowed anymore or what?

Besides, smartphones didn't come from nothing. Prototypes and similar things had been around since the 90s. And they are arguably a much easier problem than infrastructure.

> That true, but the lesson from that is that no criticism of speculative sci-fi projects is allowed anymore or what?

No, but maybe the lesson is, people should chill a bit with criticism. It's easy to armchair-criticize anything, but the west has serious problems with infrastructure projects right now. Shooting down any attempt at doing something large-scale is counterproductive to the growth and survival of our society.

You have more than one pod?

Do you link them physically, do you have enough braking distances, or do you, as musk suggests, run pods that are separate close enough that in case of a disaster all pods will crash?

I believe they have gaps and the original design had safety stops, breaks, and wheeled propulsion to get you to safety

The issue is the required gap to slow down from those speeds.

You might want to take a look at the train crash in Emden at the Transrapid facility.

A maglev train crashed into a maintenance vehicle at a speed of 500km/h because it takes too long to slow down.

The required gaps to operate a maglev system efficiently would end up with one capsule every 10 seconds - which means it can carry less passengers than a lane of highway.

The only way to get more capacity is by running actual trains.

"I am still not clear how a pod that can carry max 12 people can compete with trains that can carry hundreds."

Max persons per trip seems a metric of little relevance, if a pod is much faster and can make many more trips within the same time period. In any case, that would point to how the pod could compete: carry just as many people each day, but each person would reach his/her destination much faster than if they used the train. (Wouldn't even need to carry as many people, if each person were motivated to pay more to reach destination in much shorter time.)

High-speed trains are dispatched around one train per hour between major city pairs, with similar or higher frequency for local trains on the same line. Even if you ignore the low-speed alternatives, you'd have to dispatch pods in the region of one per minute to achieve the same passenger throughput.

Well, there's the real problem with Hyperloop. It's not really feasible to operate switches more frequently than 45-second headways, even on conventional rail. Modern approaches generally have a capacity of 30 trains per hour, which means the same approach can service a dozen different routes. In Hyperloop, you would have to build a different approach for each of those routes, which requires duplicating the most expensive part of the infrastructure.

> High-speed trains are dispatched around one train per hour between major city pairs,

Depends on what you mean by high speed.

Currently high speed in the US means the speed that the British HST achieved in the early '70s, about 200kph. The airport train in Norway (Drammen to Gardermoen) can do that where the track and traffic allows and runs every 20 minutes.

And you are right about local trains, last time I was in Bonn (about 15 years ago) there was a train leaving the station every two minutes (not to the same destination of course).

> High-speed trains are dispatched around one train per hour between major city pairs,

Which seems in itself to be a huge problem.

If Hyperloop can dispatch pods at shorter intervals, then high speed transit becomes a lot more user friendly. For the same reasons buses that run every half an hour are not the solution to mass transit, but put buses out that run every 5 or 10 minutes and the usefulness shoots way up.