Tag: transportation

Hyperloop

Because of this tiny little paragraph, the hyperloop is far less compelling:

Safety and security are paramount, and so security checks will still be made in a similar fashion as TSA does for the airport.

Security theater brings the 30min SF – LA back up to 90min, at which point you might as well fly.
2016-09-03: Some progress.

The first hyperloop could open as soon as 2018. The company has announced plans to build an 8km operational hyperloop in Quay Valley, a proposed new urban development in Kings County, California. “We start construction this year, We are not building a test track in the middle of nowhere. We are building a full-scale hyperloop in a city that will have 10M people riding on it.” The Quay Valley hyperloop is projected to cost between $100B and $150M. How will they pay for it? “The money is not really an issue. The moment we pull the trigger, the money will be there.” Gresta was similarly offhand, saying that HTT has “several offers on the table” from investors. In addition to their time, he pointed out, some volunteers have also invested money. 1 German company has committed $1.7M.

2017-08-28: Hyperloop reached 324km/h

2019-04-19 Progress:

The report lays out, often in meticulous detail, what Musk and his company plan for their East Coast mass transit system. If completed, the privately funded Loop would carry passengers between downtown Baltimore and Washington through twin 56 km tunnels 20m below the surface. Battery-powered “autonomous electric vehicles,” or AEVs, would shoot passengers at speeds up to 240 kmh, completing the trip in 15 minutes. 70 ventilation shafts, housed in nondescript brown huts built on the surface of the route, would help passengers breathe—and serve as emergency exits. Fares would be “comparable to public transportation”.

2019-09-11: report from a Hyperloop conference:

Shortly after arriving at the Global Hyperloop Conference, Brad Swartzwelter looked me in the eye and issued himself a challenge. “If I haven’t convinced you by the end of this conference that Hyperloop is the most glorious transportation opportunity of our time, then I’ve failed.” A vast network of pods traveling in reduced air pressure tubes at upwards of 1100km per hour. He holds court on the subject with self-assuredness, because he has been holding this court, and repeating these words, perhaps longer than any other living person.

123km underwater tunnel

This is some cool megaengineering: a 123km tunnel to cut travel time from 8h to 1h.

Deep beneath the Bohai Sea, Chinese engineers may soon begin boring the longest submarine tunnel on the planet. At an estimated 123km long, it would surpass the combined length of world’s 2 longest underwater tunnels—Japan’s Seikan Tunnel and the Channel Tunnel between the UK and France. To connect the bustling northern ports of Dalian and Yantai, the engineers will have to tunnel through 2 fault zones that have caused a slew of deadly earthquakes in the last century. And the project will cost a whopping $42.4B, nearly 3x as expensive as Boston’s Big Dig.

The drive between Dalian and Yantai takes around 8 hours. The Bohai Tunnel would shorten that to 1 hour. The State Council will begin reviewing the completed blueprint for the tunnel as early as next week.

The Bohai Strait tunnel would be 123km long, 90km of it under water. This would exceed the combined lengths of the 2 longest undersea tunnels on Earth, the Seikan Tunnel and the Channel tunnel. The project is estimated to cost $41n. Passenger vehicles would be loaded onto rail carriages and transported at up to 250km/h, shortening driving time between Dalian and Yantai to ~40 minutes. Currently ferries between the 2 cities, which are ~170km apart, require 8 hours to make a single trip. The investment was projected to break even within 12 years.

Can the FTC Save Uber?

taxi commissions are one of the greatest evils in transportation.

In 1984, the Federal Trade Commission released a report that explained why taxis could charge customers exorbitant prices for dismal service. The simple reason: lack of competition in the market. The culprit: local governments. City agencies that regulate cabs, generally called taxi commissions, were deliberately protecting from competition the very companies they were supposed to police.

Speed

wow.

He was going 96 km an hour when the car’s speed dial jammed. Lecerf tried to brake. Instead of slowing, though, the car sped up — with each tap on the brake leading to more acceleration. Eventually, the car reached a speed of 200 km / h — and then remained stuck there. For an hour. Lecerf, frantic, called the police from his car — and they sent an escort that The Guardian describes as “a platoon of police cars” to help him navigate a highway full of fellow cars and get them to swerve out of the way of the speeding car.

The Physical Internet

they gloss over the crucial bit, the peering agreements. standardizing containers is obvious and already well underway with shipping containers and pallets, but peering is pretty much nowhere, and much trickier in the physical world, where all routes are not the same.

The Physical Internet – a concept in which goods are handled, stored and transported in a shared network of manufacturers, retailers and the transportation industry – would benefit the US economy and significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. If 25% of the US supply chain operated with such an interconnected system, profits for participating firms would increase by $100B, CO2 emissions from road-based freight would decrease by at least 33% and consumers would pay less for goods.

Drone delivery

Matternet is using drones to leapfrog transportation networks around the world with UAV.

2013-12-01: Weirdly, they had humans in the distribution center, and you have to live within a 30 min flight of the kind of suburban wasteland that would have a amazon distribution center, but still.

2016-12-15: Amazon Prime Air soon expanding to 10s of customers

Amazon Prime Air is a delivery system from Amazon designed to safely get packages to customers in 30 minutes or less using drones. Amazon had their first commercial delivery on December 7, 2016

2019-07-25: UPS drones

If UPS gets its way, it’ll be known for vehicles other than its famous brown vans. The delivery giant is working to become the first commercial entity authorized by the Federal Aviation Administration to use autonomous delivery drones without any of the current restrictions that have governed the aerial testing it has done to date.

2020-04-28: While this is not at scale, it probably wouldn’t have happened for years due to inertia.

UPS and CVS are partnering up to deliver medications via drone. Deliveries will take place from a single CVS in Florida to The Villages, a nearby retirement community and the largest in the US, with over 135k residents.

2020-05-08: unclear why they limit speed to 100 km/h.

Getting medicine to remote parts of Africa isn’t easy. Drones change everything. Flying at 100km/h, they can cut a treacherous 4-hour road journey to just 30 minutes. Drones delivered 5500 units of blood to Rwandan regional hospitals over a 12-month period. It led to a reduction in maternal deaths. Fewer cases of malaria-induced anaemia. Rwanda is leading the way.

2022-02-25: Zipline is another drone delivery company. Very unclear if or why they’re further ahead than others. I suspect they’re the company alluded to in the Rwanda piece above. It appears that this is still a very nascent market. It is very telling that it is only being used for medical deliveries in essentially unregulated countries. All of these startups have less than $10m revenue.

2022-03-28: This video goes into some detail why drone delivery hasn’t taken off yet: Difficult terrain, cost advantage has eroded.

2023-03-19: Zipline tries again in the US with a more accurate drone

The new service is based on its P2 Zip drone, an autonomous winged aircraft that has the ability to hover in the sky above its destination. It sends the package down in a self-propelled droid capable of pinpointing its landing to an area as small as a patio table. “This new delivery experience works for a tiny backyard, a small patio, a stoop, or a small courtyard of a building”
Most other projects are in a beta stage, although Wing recently claimed it can now deliver 1000 packages a day in the select areas where it is operating, and has ambitions of increasing that into the millions over the next 18 months.