Comments by "robheusd" (@robheusd) on "Is the Hyperloop Really the Future of Transportation?" video.

  1. That is trivial of course, but the problem runs different as compared to trains. Between trains there is more distance, so one train can slow down, take a branch line and stops at a station waiting for the next train to overhaul and then continue. The same scenario is not possible or at least many times more difficult to implement with hyperloop. Nobody thus far has even thought about how to implement a realistic switch/branch system in hyperloop. With switches/branches, you can say goodbye to a hyperloop network and long distance traveling, since you would have to make a stop at every station OR have to built a number of tubes that goes up quadratric with the amounts of stations!
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  2. People who think that hyperloop will become the future of transportation, have to think twice. The maglev was also thought as being the future of transportation, but except an isolated line in Shanghai, the maglev never was built anywhere. Why is that? It has to do with the economics of public transport. And it has to do with the average journey time. It does not matter how fast the transport system can go, it matters how much travel time reduction this gives for an average journey (which in most cases don't start or stop at the hyperloop station), so you have to include the time of slow transport for reaching a station, and the time it takes to board a hyperloop train. If you include that, the average travel time for journeys don't go down that much, and for some journeys, the hyperloop would not be a reduction of travel time at all. A hyperloop does not offer network possibiity, you can't have branching lines, or services (a slower service stopping at all stations in between, and a faster one that only stops at major stations) utilizing the same line, like a rail network can. Outside of isolated use-cases, the hyperloop is never gonna be a replacement for public transport. The chinese know. They have already the largest highspeed rail network in the world, and will soon connect the rest of the world to highspeed rail.
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  3. So far, only the chinese are building a realistic transportation system, that already connects the main parts of china, but in the near future will extend all across asia and maybe even into europe. The hyperloop system won't work. It is impossible to built switches into a hyperloop network, and due to safety and comfort reason, neither you can travel long distances (jouney times longer then 30-45 minutes), so all you have would be connections between point A and B. If you need an extra station between point A and B, that is impossible. You would have to built a seperate line. Since the hyperloop (also due to high building costs) can't have much stations, that means that the time you have to spent using slow transport to reach a station of the hyperloop system, and then reach final destination goes up. That becomes a problem because then for many journeys, the total time of your journey isn't that fast anymore, and because of that, for many journeys it does not significantly reduce travel time to make it worth. Besides, boarding a hyperloop will be much more time consuming as boarding a train, due to all the safety issues when traveling in vacuum. The experience with the maglev rail system, once thought to be the future of public long distance transport, shows that the economics of such transport systems are limiting it's usability. The same applies to hyperloop. It might be an alternative for cargo transport, but not for human trafic (not as a public network, only applicable to some isolated use cases).
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  4. There are lots of technical problems to overcome before we can built it, and comfort and safety issues will drive up the price of implementation. Although we do not know yet at what price hyperloop can be built, we do know some economic drawbacks of the implementation. 1. Tube diameter. The larger size tube diameter will drive up the price of building extensively as the surface area of the tube will go up quadratic. Which will drive implementations to use a very small tube diameter, not allowing for standing up. How long could a travel last when not allowing people to go walk and use toilet? And for medical emergencies? 2. Inter connectivity of a network. Hyperloop is different then railways. If you have a railway line, you can add an intermediate station, and allow some trains to stop there and some to pass, without the need of doubling the rail way for the whole stretch as you can implement a branch line near the station. There is no known way to do that for hyperloop without eitther having drastic effects on the travel (all trains must stop at the station or can pass it only slowly) or without excessively expansive technology to have a switch in a vacuum tube. 3. A fair calculation of the performance of a public network is to calculate it on the total amount time saved for all journeys that use the network expressed in terms of the economic costs to built and maintain it, It can fairly easily be demonstrated that an alternative public network, while not going as fast as hyperloop, can perform better as hyperloop. The primary reason for that is that a hyperloop network would be less dense, and thus increases average travel distance to the nearest station. Of course, we can only make estimates of this when knowing the economic costs of building hyperloop and known where it is going to built. For the same reason all plans to built maglev have almost never been realized. The maglev rail system did not proof to be better performing as other alternatives.
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