Flutterby™! : Hyperloop

Elon Musk and crowd are pitching us on the Hyperloop. We could snark, like @YApplebaum did: "This is either Elon Musk's Hyperloop, or Alfred Ely Beach's 1867 Pneumatic Railway. I get confused.", or we could run some numbers.

Much of the handwaving that happens in the PDF uses the tiny diameter of the vehicles as the selling point. Lines like "The small diameter of the Hyperloop tube should keep tunneling costs to a far more reasonable level than traditional automotive and rail tunnels." are easy ways to say "your objections are invalid because you're making an apples to oranges comparison" when we pull out the easy numbers.

Which is the only way one can keep a straight face reading statements like "Tunneling cost estimations are estimated at $50 million per mile."

So, what's smaller? Well, this sounds a lot like a gas pipeline. Huh. The Underground Construction Magazine 2012 Pipeline Construction Report says that they're running $200K-300K/inch-mile for pipes in the 24" to 36" range, so let's assume that scales, and we get $17.6M to $26.4M/mile.

But that's for trench buried pipeline, we have to put this in the air, so let's look at prices for infrastructure in the air... looks like $2.6M-4M per mile (PDF), with five pylons per mile. The Hyperloop PDF claims 100' spacing, so 10x denser. But they're shorter. So I suspect we're looking at $13M-20M per mile additional.

So I'm looking at, call it $20M-45M/mile, they're claiming a bit under $16M (cost of tube only)/mile. Oooookay. And this thing's gonna power itself with photovoltaic cells on the top of the tube...

These prices also don't include the "Linear accelerators".

And that includes the aforementioned "Tunneling cost estimations are estimated at $50 million per mile ($31 million per km)" for 15.2 miles of the 382 or so that we're talking about less. But let's drill into that tunnelling price a bit: What other prices can we compare to? Devil's Slide... naw, that's a car tunnel, we have to throw that out, but there's a proposed Delta water tunnel. $23B for 35 miles, $657M/mile. Man, I'd like to know what their tunnelling technology is.

I suspect that, like most rail projects, this is going to result in some horrendously huge consulting/construction fees paid to contractors, with the public stuck with some huge debt defaults. Even if it doesn't get built.

And I'd let North Haverbrook build it first...