New transportation technologies

Transportation topics in KC
flyingember
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Re: New transportation technologies

Post by flyingember »

that motorcycle car has potential for cities with a zipcar type of service

Fuel efficiency is going to eventually require one-person vehicles that someone can use a standard car drivers license with
the vision of all driverless cars holding 5 people is a fantasy given changing demographics.

For the average single person living car-less, but needing to get to that appointment across town, this would be perfect
pash
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Re: New transportation technologies

Post by pash »

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pash
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Re: New transportation technologies

Post by pash »

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AJoD
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Re: New transportation technologies

Post by AJoD »

Is this any different than the maglev that has been talked about on this forum for years? I mean, except that it's now being talked about by Elon Musk.
earthling
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Re: New transportation technologies

Post by earthling »

^It works sort of like those tubes in drive up bank tellers if I understand right, except powered by the car - much cheaper to deploy and especially maintain than maglev. It's just a concept but this really looks like something to pour some research into. And I like his open source/no patents approach that should encourage a much larger community to participate and may result in more rapid development. He needs to structure terms that limit proprietary offshoots if not already in place. That is, companies who use the tech contribute back to it, like how Linux works.
pash
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Re: New transportation technologies

Post by pash »

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aknowledgeableperson
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Re: New transportation technologies

Post by aknowledgeableperson »

This week's Economist has an article on self-driving cars, part of a series on the auto industry. The writer argues that automation could come on quickly:
Just came across an article that speculated the self driving car could be common by 2020. Couple that with an electric powered vehicle I wonder how those two items would affect commutes.
Seven years from now a person could get into his or her own electric powered, self-driven vehicle and go to grooming oneself, reading the news on a computer, making business calls, etc. Interesting.
flyingember
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Re: New transportation technologies

Post by flyingember »

aknowledgeableperson wrote:
This week's Economist has an article on self-driving cars, part of a series on the auto industry. The writer argues that automation could come on quickly:
Seven years from now a person could get into his or her own electric powered, self-driven vehicle and go to grooming oneself, reading the news on a computer, making business calls, etc. Interesting.
not remotely possible for decades. self driving cars will still require an operator to watch the road around.

it's not that vehicle but that's it's going to take time to get enough people to go driverless. it's all about the other vehicles on the road to worry about, obstacles and such. a computer is faster but the driver will still have the human touch. maybe 4-5 generations in they can go truely driverless.
aknowledgeableperson
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Re: New transportation technologies

Post by aknowledgeableperson »

it's all about the other vehicles on the road to worry about, obstacles and such. a computer is faster but the driver will still have the human touch
Google is already there, cars on the road self-driving. One example, from Wiki:
On March 28, 2012, Google posted a YouTube video showing Steve Mahan, a Morgan Hill California resident, being taken on a ride in its self-driving Toyota Prius. In the video, Mahan states "Ninety-five percent of my vision is gone, I'm well past legally blind". In the description of the YouTube video, it is noted that the carefully programmed route takes him from his home to a drive-through restaurant, then to the dry cleaning shop, and finally back home.
plus
In August 2012, the team announced that they have completed over 300,000 autonomous-driving miles (500 000 km) accident-free, typically have about a dozen cars on the road at any given time
pash
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Re: New transportation technologies

Post by pash »

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flyingember
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Re: New transportation technologies

Post by flyingember »

pash wrote:I guarantee you that there will be a significant number of driverless cars on the roads within ten years.
I'm sure someone guaranteed the same thing 10 years ago.
flyingember
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Re: New transportation technologies

Post by flyingember »

pash wrote:Yeah, the Hyperloop is more like an airplane in a tube than a train. It's really not much like a train at all, except that it can only travel a fixed route—there are no rails, and the vehicles are small and travel independently, not in a, well, train.

Musk indicated yesterday that he will probably pursue a proof of concept, so this could turn into something real at some point. Of course, even if the technology works as intended, it's the political and financial considerations that dominate huge infrastructure projects. But having somebody of Musk's stature advance a project like this could really help push intercity transit beyond its rather staid state.
as followup to this, apparently they failed to do the math. it's not feasible with their design.
pash
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Re: New transportation technologies

Post by pash »

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flyingember
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Re: New transportation technologies

Post by flyingember »

pash wrote:
flyingember wrote:I'm sure someone guaranteed the same thing 10 years ago.
I rather doubt it. Inside of a decade ago, in the first DARPA Grand Challenge, nobody had a vehicle that could even navigate across 150 miles of desert. Now the technology is essentially ready. There will be need for refinements, yes, but the only serious impediments keeping autonomous cars off the roads are legal, not technological.
flyingember wrote:as followup to this, apparently they failed to do the math. it's not feasible with their design.
Care to expand? There is no design, but until I hear more than a message-board one-liner, I'm apt to believe that a bunch of engineers who can dock a spacecraft with the International Space Station can at least get the back-of-the-envelop calculations right on their plane-in-a-tube concept.
start here

http://jalopnik.com/a-physicist-explain ... 1123562141

then look at his supposed cost. who builds a brand new path for 400 miles, using untested technology, and expects it to cost *less* than proven technology. I bet the real number would be $400-600 billion just for the earthquake protection aspect. this is a system that needs to be nearly completely straight and during an earthquake can't move and send people to their death at multiple-hundreds MPH.
pash
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Re: New transportation technologies

Post by pash »

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phuqueue
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Re: New transportation technologies

Post by phuqueue »

I don't doubt that the Hyperloop's engineering challenges could ultimately be overcome, but when he says it could be built for $10 billion I'm gonna need a little more than just his success on other completely unrelated projects based on decades-old technology. I don't know exactly what flyingember meant by "not feasible with their design," which is sort of ambiguous but does sound like an assertion that it's technically unsound, but I'm at least inclined to believe that it's not financially feasible at the price tag he's discussed, and the fact that he hasn't published more than the broad strokes of the idea doesn't especially compel me to assume that "technical competence" will suffice to get it done.
pash
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Re: New transportation technologies

Post by pash »

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flyingember
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Re: New transportation technologies

Post by flyingember »

phuqueue wrote:I don't doubt that the Hyperloop's engineering challenges could ultimately be overcome, but when he says it could be built for $10 billion I'm gonna need a little more than just his success on other completely unrelated projects based on decades-old technology. I don't know exactly what flyingember meant by "not feasible with their design," which is sort of ambiguous but does sound like an assertion that it's technically unsound, but I'm at least inclined to believe that it's not financially feasible at the price tag he's discussed, and the fact that he hasn't published more than the broad strokes of the idea doesn't especially compel me to assume that "technical competence" will suffice to get it done.
think of it this way.

they expect to create a 400 mile long tube with a near vacumm in it. this means they need an air-tight seal the whole length. oh, and it has to stay nearly perfectly straight. if we think a train track is straight, this will be crazy perfect.
but this will be running through southern california in summer.
so maybe they come up with some special kind of floating expansion joint that's air tight. this joint will need to sit on a pylon that's spaced every 100 feet (their design). you can't have this joint in the air because that causes a stress point where every vehicle is going to push down on at, just like how when you bike over a wooden bridge it shakes a little. and the tolerances are way tighter to make a 400-mile closed system keep working properly than a biking bridge

so when the metal tube expands in the heat where does it go? it moves outwards, lengthening the tube.

400 miles is 2112000 feet or 25344000 inches

if the system moves a single inch even every 200 feet that's 10560 inches of movement or 880 feet. that's a little over a 10th of a mile. that's doable to work with for station design but that moves the tubes over the entire length, 1 inch adds up and thousands of tubes will have their ends pushed outwards, or worse, slightly buckled in the middle.

it's why all the best crazy tube designs go the really expensive route of burying the tubes and let the earth handle the temperature control which it does well
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phuqueue
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Re: New transportation technologies

Post by phuqueue »

Well I thought pash could stand to be a little more critical and a little less "these guys are smart so if they say it'll work, I'm sure it'll work," but that said, I too have a difficult time believing that all of these guys overlooked something as basic as thermal expansion. But who knows, maybe they did.
flyingember
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Re: New transportation technologies

Post by flyingember »

phuqueue wrote:Well I thought pash could stand to be a little more critical and a little less "these guys are smart so if they say it'll work, I'm sure it'll work," but that said, I too have a difficult time believing that all of these guys overlooked something as basic as thermal expansion. But who knows, maybe they did.
the claim was the math was -really- early stages.
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