The Franking Privilege

A Heuristic for Getting Rid of Stuff

If I didn’t already own this, would I buy it at a garage sale?

Fraud, Waste and Abuse

Any discussion of runaway government spending is likely to conclude with a bromide calling on elected officials to crack down on fraud, waste and abuse.

The unfortunate reality is that one person’s fraud, waste or abuse is typically another person’s livelihood. That person is often unlikely to see the way that they make a living as fraudulent, wasteful or abusive.

Thus even transparently bad ideas like Medicare Advantage become fixtures of our system, because eliminating them would cost a small number of people a great deal of money, while perpetuating them merely costs a large number of people a small amount of money.

That diffusion of responsibility means that those types of programs are likely to be the rule, not the exception.

My Personal Speculation on the Hyperloop

Since everyone’s doing it, I feel like I need to put in my own two cents’ worth of speculation on Elon Musk’s enigmatic “Hyperloop” proposal.

Jacques Matthei conveniently lists what Musk has said about the proposal so far:

• Cheaper than high speed rail
• ground based
• it leaves when you arrive
• no rails required
• It will revolutionize the transportation industry
• It is not an evacuated tunnel

Matthei posits that there might be an implicit XOR between “evacuated” and “tunnel”, and concludes that perhaps it is a tunnel, but one that is not evacuated. Most of what he concludes sounds plausible, but I don’t believe the proposal could be a tunnel in the traditional sense.

But first, there are a couple of additional tidbits that Musk lists as attributes of an “ideal transportation system” in a PandoDaily interview:

• Immune to weather
• Does not require acquisition of right-of-way
• Incapable of crashing

And about the Hyperloop more specifically:

• Costs about $6 billion to go from Los Angeles to San Francisco
• Self-powered by solar energy
• Has a way of storing energy for nighttime operation

The weather immunity aspect pretty much implies that the Hyperloop vehicles travel inside some kind of enclosed guideway. But the idea that the guideway might be buried underground doesn’t pass a basic back-of-the-envelope arithmetic test.

Absent some kind of breakthrough in tunnel boring cost-efficiency, one would burn through all $6 billion after only about 75 miles (assuming a cost of $80 million per mile of twin-bore tunnel), leaving nothing for vehicles or propulsion. And solar panels don’t work underground. So that leaves a ground-level or elevated system.

But to avoid having to acquire new rights of way, it would have to piggyback on existing transportation corridors, or avoid private property entirely and be sea or air-based (which could well be even more costly than a terrestrial tunnel, and doesn’t meet the “ground based” requirement).

An interesting tidbit in the aforementioned PandoDaily chat is that immediately before launching into his Hyperloop pitch, Musk describes the idea of installing prefabricated box beams over the center divider of a freeway to expand capacity. I don’t think the timing there is coincidental.

I think Matthei gets most aspects of the system correct: it consists of a loop of air traveling at supersonic speeds through a tube that travels from one city to the next and back.

But I think that rather than an underground tunnel, the system would be built with a series of prefabricated sections installed over the center divider of a freeway. The sections would come pre-installed with PV panels (or perhaps some kind of solar thermal system) that would power the system in a distributed fashion.

Now normally freeways are a pretty lousy location for high-speed rail. For one, they tend to be some distance from walkable population centers. Secondly, high-speed rail requires much greater turning radii and much gentler grades than are common on freeways.

But a system that is twice as fast as flying could get away with the station being some distance from downtown (see: almost every major airport in the entire world), and a system that isn’t rail-based would be limited only by the G forces passengers find acceptable with regard to hills and curves.

It also happens that the vast majority of the stretch of freeway between San Francisco and Los Angeles is extremely straight and incredibly flat (curve radii between Bakersfield and the Livermore area are all around 15km judging by a casual look at Google Maps).

(At the hilly, curvy ends of the trip (both of which traverse mountain ranges) there would have to be some concessions made. Either the guideway would have to travel underground, or leave the existing right of way, or slow down considerably, and likely a combination of all three.)

One major difficulty would be managing the friction between supersonic air and the tunnel walls. But with the “fuel” for solar power being effectively free, it might mostly turn into a problem of managing heat and noise.

That also leaves the question of how energy storage is accomplished. It’s possible that the momentum of the air in the system is enough to keep it operating overnight, or there may be other ways to inject momentum into the system when the sun is shining (see Ben Tilly’s “plungers”) to keep it moving all night long.

So I believe Jacques is correct in saying that the system is not evacuated, and also in saying that it’s a tunnel, but the implication that the tunnel would be underground is false. Instead I think it would be built primarily as an elevated system along the existing I-5 through the Central Valley.