* Text/Spades with long sword
April 26 news, on Sunday, local time in the United States, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted that its tunneling company The Boring Company (also known as "Boring Company") will try to build a "hyperloop transportation system" in the next few years - this is a concept that Musk proposed as early as the entrepreneurial era. In his vision, the transport system would be suitable for commuters as well as transport cargo, weather-free, collision-free, and twice as fast as an airplane.
“...... From a known physical point of view, this is the fastest way to get from one city center to another (less than 3200 kilometers). Musk wrote in a tweet.
Musk believes that the hyperloop will consist of two parts: a sealed vacuum pipe, and a pod in which it moves at high speed through maglev technology, which he describes as a "hybrid of a Concorde and an orbiter."
The reason why Musk has been advocating the "hyperloop" proposal is because the rail project in the United States is really unsatisfactory. In this "automobile country" across the ocean, except for Amtrak,000,000-kilometer-per-hour tracks in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the speed limit of the rail network in other regions is mostly within 110 miles (about 177 kilometers), while in China, high-speed rail with a speed of 250 kilometers or even 3 or 400 kilometers per hour is very common.
Previously, when Obama was president, he once had a fondness for high-speed rail projects. In his 2013 "Strategic Plan for High-Speed Rail," he said he would increase investment in high-speed rail projects through government investment, policy preferences, bond issuance, and private funding, vowing to "let 80 percent of Americans sit on high-speed rail.", and that current President Joe Biden also allocated $1.5 billion from a bailout plan earlier last year to support U.S. rail construction.
However, progress on high-speed rail projects in the United States remains slow.
A typical example is the California high-speed rail project, which has been the object of strong support in the government's high-speed rail plan since 1996, as early as 2010, the Obama administration allocated $3.5 billion in federal funds to it, and its first phase of construction budget has exceeded $77 billion so far; however, even with government assistance, the California high-speed rail plan has been postponed until 2019 to complete a small part, that is, 191 kilometers. This is too far away from the original plan of 1200 kilometers.
Unfinished California High Speed Rail
Why can't the U.S. high-speed rail project advance as quickly as the mainland? There are probably three reasons for this.
First of all, the privatization of land and houses in the United States is extremely common, and privatization of land will lead to difficulties in land acquisition, which makes the state government have to spend a lot of time and energy to deal with land ownership issues, which is naturally more difficult.
The second and most important point is the issue of construction costs. Previously, the World Bank has calculated that the cost of building high-speed rail in China is 100 million to 125 million yuan / km, while the construction cost of high-speed rail in California is 52 million US dollars (about 339 million yuan) / km, which is three times higher than China, which does not include land, rolling stock and interest during the construction period. With such high costs, it's no wonder Musk derided it as "the world's slowest but most expensive high-speed rail."
The third point is necessity – a reason previously used by the Republican-led opposition to question the high-speed rail project. Opponents argue that since the United States has more than 20,000 general airports, more than 250 million (and still growing) cars, and a well-developed highway system, is it really necessary for high-speed rails to continue to be built? In addition, even if the high-speed rail is built, whether its fare is attractive or not, and whether it can compete with airplanes and cars in terms of speed and convenience, it is still unknown.
Because of this, Musk has hyped up his hyperloop project everywhere, believing that it can replace the slow and antiquated construction plan of the Us high-speed rail. However, whether hyperloop is more economical than ordinary high-speed rail is still a question mark.
The first problem hyperloop faces is technology. Although the current maglev technology has been relatively mature, it is still unable to meet the power required for the hyperloop linear traction technology; on the other hand, the hyperloop sealed vacuum pipe is extremely demanding for construction, and James Powell, the co-proposer of the concept of superconducting magnetic levitation, has warned that the hyperloop needs to maintain the track error within a fairly small value, and needs to maintain a state close to vacuum, which is still quite difficult for the current technology.
"The whole system is extremely fragile, and even if one point fails, it can lead to disaster." Powell said.
Technological instability also creates other problems for hyperloop, such as huge costs. Previously, Richard Branson's funded Virgin Hyperloop One had calculated the cost of the planned Missouri Hyperloop project and concluded that it was $40 million per mile, which is obviously no more economical than a regular high-speed rail project.
Just last month, Musk's "Boring Company" announced the completion of a $675 million Series C funding round, which has led to a valuation of nearly $5.7 billion, but the funds are still stretched thin for the construction of hyperloop. Even Musk himself has reluctantly admitted that the hyperloop project connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles is estimated to cost about $70 billion, and may even cost more than $100 billion, and when completed, it may not be more popular than airplanes.
At present, the attitude of the United States to the hyperloop project is still ambiguous. In March 2019, former U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao planned to set up a "non-traditional emergency technical committee" in Austin to provide a regulatory framework for high-tech projects such as hyperloop and driverless cars. But after three years, the committee still hasn't done much.
In this way, Musk's hyperloop dream will probably remain a dream for a long time to come.
*Image courtesy of Yandex