It's not anywhere close to self-funding a real public transport system.
How do they expect to make money as a private enterprise if these are the numbers they propose?
Public transportation is supposed to lose money, not make it, hence the "public" part. It's paid for by tax dollars, because it is impossible for private companies to make money from it.
Even the private rail systems around the world are largely subsidized pubicly during construction, with only operations being privatized.
Prior to the destruction of North American light rail systems, a process accelerated by US auto companies (which bought urban rail cos only to then neglect them) public transit companies were entirely private and often entirely capitalized with profits and private investment. Many streetcars used to profitably have two people working on them: one driver and one toll collector.
This was possible because cities weren't as developed as they are now. Property was cheap back then.
These days, the major expense of building a mass transit system is just buying property. And in cities, these properties are going to be already developed.
Right now, there are individual buildings in US cities that cost over $1billion, so grade-separated ground rail is not going to happen for cheap. That only leaves tunneling, which also isn't cheap.
If you read further down the page it says this Dodger loop will be their first test track, to replace a previously proposed test track in Sepulveda. It's not meant to make money, it's to prove it works. The money will be made in future systems.
One important property of a test track is that, if things don’t work out as intended, you can take it down for indefinite periods for upgrades or even take it down forever. Test tracks don’t have SLAs.
⇒ what Tesla describes here is not a test track, or at least shouldn’t be.
> Public transportation is supposed to lose money, not make it, hence the "public" part. It's paid for by tax dollars, because it is impossible for private companies to make money from it.
What? No! Public as in "open to the public". At least in the German equivalent "Öffentlicher Nahverkehr" thats exactly what it says ("öffentlich" = "open to the public").
Systems like the MTR[0] also show that it is indeed possible to have a public transportation system that is directly profitable at scale.
In the US, "public transportation" means "transportation system owned by the public". This is opposed to "private transportation", which is owned by private entities.
All tranport systems are available for use by the general public.
Also, the MTR infrastructure is government subsidized.
They aren't proposing these numbers with any more context than the article, (This is a pilot running alongside existing infrastructure) so I'm really unsure about what you are asking?
I'm saying the numbers are so astronomically off that there is no viable path to profit without public subsidy, for any theoretical future system, big or small.
Their path to profit is the Chicago airport loop, which is proposed to cost a fair bit more and have much more consistent ridership. This is a pilot project, a technology tester.
There is some disagreement among experts that this project is ever a path to profit, given that the projected construction cost is ridiculously low.[1]
If this one works, they can do similar projects in places where they can build, own and charge for huge parking garages. Build parking in cheap location, then provide a way for people to get to the location they actually want to br (downtown, stadiums/event centers, airports). If that still makes sense when we have self riding cars - I don't know (probably only for the most high density destinations).
From the looks of it they want to test this system and if it proves to be a viable method of transportation, they will present this to governments and construct it for them. They don't have to run it. They can just make it and sell it.
Die size is ridiculous, causing such high prices due to exponential costs associated with die size. It seems like an opening for AMD to use their EPYC Infinity Fabric interconnect for their next-gen GPUs in multi-chip modules with smaller dies.
Die prices rise exponentially with area if your product requires a flawless die. But in architectures where bad subsections can get mapped out, such as GPUs and multicore CPUs, the price rise is not exponential.
Climatic and geographic familiarity is a big thing. My ancestors left the Russian Steppes and ended up in Kansas, by all accounts a much nicer place. They left anyway, and homesteaded in an area of Canada that is quite similar to the terrain they'd left behind in the old country.
They skipped over a lot of good farm land, and ended up in Northern Alberta for no discernible reason other than they knew how to deal with it. The problems made sense to their skill sets, and they did very well.
As the other person said, familial support is darned important, which is why my family went to Kansas in the first place. They had relatives there. It was recent enough that my grandmother has gone there to visit her cousins over the years.
I imagine that successful hunter-gatherer groups colonised over the next hill, or a days walk or two down the river. Probably someone could model that to narrow down prospective digs. I know that the land between the confluence of two rivers was a common place for groups to meet up.
I guess my family also provides a modern example of far colonising. The way they bridged the Atlantic was by sending a few young men ahead to scout out new potential homelands. I suspect that they used this as a sort of social control, and to add a useful function to the young men who were disruptive agents in their society.
In a hunter-gather society, this tactic would be better than straight banishment or death. "Climb that mountain pass and see if there is good land on the other side. Prove the land by staying over summer, and come back in the fall with skins and dried berries".
It´s also possible that then as now, the idea of spending summer away from parental control was an excellent motivator for the younger members of the tribe to find new digs.
To be fair, "parental control" back then was so much looser than anything we could conceive today. Any family would have had a minimum of 3 or 4 children, and they would have been put to work at ages as early as 8, possibly becoming a tribe peer shortly after. There was probably control at tribe level, but parents were likely busy surviving.
We also keep talking about this in terms of rejection (being banned, escaping parents etc), but it might well be that they were simply pushed by a reckless sense of exploration, curiosity, and personal ambition. Their world was endlessly new: what is beyond that hill? What is beyond that river? I'll find out, and if it's good, I'll make it mine. After all I'm a teenager, I obviously cannot die.
>
We also keep talking about this in terms of rejection (being banned, escaping parents etc), but it might well be that they were simply pushed by a reckless sense of exploration, curiosity, and personal ambition. Their world was endlessly new: what is beyond that hill? What is beyond that river? I'll find out, and if it's good, I'll make it mine. After all I'm a teenager, I obviously cannot die.
Right on. There are a lot of instincts humans show in developed society that work great in a hunter-gatherer society, including this one. See also:
Environmental familiarity can be a huge thing. It's something we don't really notice with our mix of technology and associated wide-ranging logistics.
I've got a little taste of it myself. I casually hiked and camped in the Northern Rockies for years. I didn't realize how many small bits of specific knowledge I'd picked up until recently moving to the midwest and doing some camping here. Different woods, that burn differerently. Damper conditions in general that make for all kinds of different prep. My knowledge of what is safe to eat (and what is not) went from fairly extensive to almost nothing. Different geography and climate that changes what you want in a campsite and what sort of site you are likely to find. A thousand little things that each make a difference.
With only stone age kit and knowledge base, moving out of your "home range" would have doubtless been quite challenging.
> They skipped over a lot of good farm land, and ended up in Northern Alberta for no discernible reason other than they knew how to deal with it.
I'd had that phenomena explained to me in University as a result of the feudal states (serfdom was only officially abolished in 1861) that the Russian people left to come to North America - back home those trees would have been the lord's property, but here it could be theirs - so even though there was better arable land even in southern Alberta (assuming you could deal with the fact that the land in basically a desert), they traveled where there were "valuable" resources they wouldn't have had access to in the old country.
Agreed, though they were not serfs in the case of my family/ethnic group. Rather, they were Germans(and some others) who colonized southern Russia, and were called the Volga Germans. In other ways you are correct: their lives and property were tightly constrained.
I’m just guessing, but community and social support networks are vital for survival and to retain access to potential mates. You don’t deliberately distance yourself from that without a really good reason. Also the nice you have built experience with the terrain, shelter, food, water and material resources of a region why give all that up? Even nomadic cultures have a range and set of routes and locations they know and visit.
Suddenly changing climactic zone is also probably difficult as the different climate, flora and fauna might require very different sets of skills.
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond has its fair share of critics, but one thing I feel it does well is introduce to the general populace the ways of thinking around questions like this. In the case of migration, one of the factors that slowed it down so much is the lack of properly 'domestic' peoples that actually had a population surplus. If you're a hunter-gatherer tribe that has reached an equilibrium between children born and people dying, and your hunting grounds provide the resources you need to sustain that equilibrium, there is little reason to go looking elsewhere (migrate).
You have to approach it with the knowledge and motivation of those people.
First off, you don't know where you're going, at all. You have never been more than 20-30 miles from your home base, and neither has anyone out of the 30-40 people you know.
The world is dangerous, there are lions and bears and worse everywhere, let alone the unknown things that you probably believe in. Camping out in the open is incredible dangerous. You much prefer to stick to places you know and have feel safe in.
You have to think about why you're moving. There are two major reasons for going anywhere.
First, something dangerous has come. A pack of wolves that like to eat people [0], a forest fire, a food shortage, another group of humans (not all bad, now you have some trade, but this was probably also a major danger with fighting for territory/reproduction). This drives you just far enough away to escape the danger, and there's always a chance you'll come back to the familiar territory when the danger has passed.
Secondly, your group has grown and has started acting like two groups. This new group will probably only move next door. There will still be familial bonds and cooperation. Add in that the population isn't growing all that fast and this is very slow movement.
You have to think how and what you're moving. You do not have a backpack. You have a bunch of baskets and maybe a couple of (literal dead animal) bladders of water. You can only take what you can carry, if the wheel had been invented it probably can't get over the terrain you're on. You need to stick to freshwater, so you can go down a river, and maybe chance along the coast hoping to get to another river a day or so away. Your group consists of babies that need carrying, children that need protecting, old people that know stuff but are slow, and more mouths to feed than you would like. Also bear in mind you were walking on game trails no human had ever walked on in bare feet/crap shoes at best. You also need to make fire (or take it with you) every night.
Finding a rive will basically stop any travel, they are a great place to fish/hunt and have accessible water. So actually coming across a usable river is likely to slow your advance by a couple of decades/centuries at the least.
Long story short, going anywhere more than a day away in pre-history was scary, dangerous and very very hard, and moving next door was a lot easier.
Game (and other biota) tend to distribute latitudinally, along uniform climate zones, far more than longitudinally, across them.
Bison have a daily range of about 2 mi. (3.2 km). This would give a seasonal range (over 90 days) of only 200 miles (320km) or so , and likely far less.
In the UK there is no strip club culture like there is in the US. The only people who go in them in the UK are slimy old men. It is not something even remotely acceptable, and I would think less of anyone going to one here.
"What do you do after-hours at conferences in Vegas?" Probably gamble, not everything is different.
"So, how come he didn't get fired? Was he critical to project success at all?" We don't have on-demand firing. It has to be a process, and you have to have a justifiable reason, and process.
> So, in tech, do people not go to strip clubs anymore?
Worked in the industry for the last 15 years or so (in Ireland). Never heard of this. I'd think it'd be a HR matter if someone suggested it in most decent companies.
> You cherry picked and forgot the first line which puts the rest in context.
How uncharitable of you to write that. I didn't "forget" it. It wasn't relevant to my point. The first line was specific to this situation, but the final two I quoted represent a very universal and timeless position.
In fact, ancient Athens suffered greatly when "silence the voices of the enemies of democracy" became the dominant position in their society:
You're "point" was a snarky off the cuff one-liner.
Universal and Timeless position is a stretch. It is not black and white, it is grey and the first line in OPs comment put context to that grey.
While it would be lovely to have a democracy with an educated rational electorate resilent to hateful demagogues and other threats to the stability of that democracy, we are not there. In that situation you can let it fester or reduce the impact.
Yes it can be abused and we have to be careful. But we are in a Paradox of Tolerance situation.
OK I get that booster reuse cuts down costs, but the fact is the 2nd stage is still not reused, which limits the economic benefits needed to open new markets. We get a 50% reduction in costs, instead of the 95% reduction in costs.
You can get a 50% reduction in costs just by going to India for launch..
Is SpaceX going for 2nd stage reuse at all? That's going to be a lot harder than booster stage reuse, since you're returning to land at orbital velocity.
And then there's the whole issue of increasing reliability of the 1st stage for reuse hundreds (or thousands) of times needed for new business models...
The first stage represents about 75% of the cost of the vehicle, not 50%. This represents the actual cost of the metal on the launchpad, but not the services around the rocket, including launch control costs, etc.
You can't take a rocket to India and you can't manufacturer that rocket in India (Skilset, US based corporation, ITAR) so you can't achieve your savings that way.
Even Russia - which is using a very old tried and true rocket design - can't match prices at this point. In addition, the budget cuts in Russia have resulted in a massive reduction in reliability, which has blown up their insurance cost recently.
In terms of second stage re-usability, they are looking at that for FalconX, and it's designed in at the start for BFR. Landing something from a second stage is as difficult comparatively vis-a-vis landing the first stage, as landing the first stage was compared to the suborbital hops that Blue Origin is doing.
The latest SpaceX idea (judging by Elon's tweets) appear to be some sort of Ballute based approach.
The first stage re-use should be good for 10 flights without a overhaul, with a complete tear-down on flight 10.
"You can't take a rocket to India and you can't manufacturer that rocket in India (Skilset, US based corporation, ITAR) so you can't achieve your savings that way."
Out of curiosity -- can they _fly_ a rocket to India (maybe have a booster return to India instead of a drone ship ? Too far/out of the way ?
That may not help much since stage 2 would still have to be shipped around, which is probably not cost effective, and there might be other regulations that make it infeasible to launch anywhere but in the USA.
"Is SpaceX going for 2nd stage reuse at all? That's going to be a lot harder"
Yes, they are (and yes, it will be): "SpaceX also continues to study the feasibility of returning and reusing the second stage of the Falcon 9, and Musk said he’s confident it can be done. The question is what “mass penalty” will have to be paid, primarily in terms of the fuel needed to slow the second stage down so that it can make a controlled descent back through Earth's atmosphere.
"Still, Musk believes the Falcon 9 will get to full reusability. In terms of the rocket’s overall cost, the first stage accounts for 60 percent, the upper stage 20 percent, the fairing 10 percent, and the remainder are costs associated with the launch itself (fuel costs are between $300,000 and $500,000), Musk said."
The answer is, this is Falcon 9's final form. You can get it in single or triple core variants.
All new work is now on BFR, which will have 2nd stage reusability, orbital refueling, better economics etc. I think you're also underestimating how far this Falcon will get them - their timelines suggest that this is what they'll use to launch their global internet satellite network, not BFR.
Basically the answer to all of those is SpaceX's next gen BFR rocket. It is scaled up significantly which makes second stage reuse practical. The challenge with a rocket the size of the Falcon 9 is that added significant fixed mass to the second stage (heat shielding, parachutes, etc.) will significantly Affect payload mass / performance.
By going to a much larger class of rocket, those concessions for re-use become a smaller fraction of the total stage 2 mass.
The BFS (spaceship, i.e. second stage) is supposedly going to have enough performance to make orbit on its own as an SSTO, with a tiny payload. It probably won’t ever be used that way, though.
You need supplies to keep those humans alive for a week, and a huge amount of fuel to boost the ship into a moon-intersecting orbit. Not a tiny payload by any means.
To get other BFSes up there with enough fuel to transfer a useful amount would require them to use the first stage booster instead of just being SSTO.
Really there's no point to doing an SSTO launch in practice since the BFR first stage will in theory be just as reusable (if not more so) than the BFS second stage. Using the first stage booster greatly improves payload to orbit and has relatively low marginal cost once you've built and tested the whole system.
For a single launch, sure.
What happens if there are regular launches?
Logistically, to me it seems that it would be a great idea to have a refueling station in orbit which is supplied by BFR cargo ships ..say.. once a month.
Launching a BFR for each launch of BFS would require a lot of transportation and duplicated effort.
Is this intuition wrong?
The plan is that the BFR lands back at the launch pad in the same cradle it launched from which would reduce operational complexity.
The fuel for your station has to get there somehow, and so does the station itself. The BFS-tanker ships would need to be launched with a BFR booster to bring up a meaningful amount of fuel, and there are going to be way more of those than there will be BFS-crew launches (ignoring the Earth-to-Earth transportation segment, where a centralized fuel station wouldn't make sense since each route will take a very different orbital path).
SSTO-ing the BFS-crew would require another BFR booster-plus-cargo launch anyway to replace the fuel and cargo you could have carried up in the BFS if you had launched it on the BFR booster to begin with.
The only angle that makes sense to me for doing a BFS-crew SSTO with minimal payload would be if it is deemed to be less risky for loss-of-crew. In that case you could have a BFS-tanker already on orbit and fully loaded by multiple BFR-plus-tanker launches, ready to rendevous with the BFS-crew ship after it reaches orbit on fumes.
I think that is unlikely though since such a launch might leave the BFS-crew without the fuel margin required to divert or de-orbit and land propulsively without refuelling.
Once your payload exceeds the SSTO capability of a single BFS launch, you save effort by doing a two-stage launch. The two-stage launch is more complex and difficult, but the added capacity is far greater.
For intuition, consider moving to a new house. What’s better, renting a tiny car with room for one suitcase, or renting a big truck? The car is cheaper and easier to drive, but unless all of your stuff fits in one suitcase, the truck is going to be much cheaper and easier for this task.
There is already a plan for a tanker version of the BFS, since as you note it wouldn’t be efficient to refuel with another crewed craft. I don’t see what the station helps with, though. That’s just extra mass to launch.
Managing logistics?
A series of BFR launches to station some fuel in orbit seems like a better choice than having to launch a fuel tanker BFR each time.
Why? I don’t see the advantage. It would make sense if one BFR tanker could launch enough fuel for multiple missions, which you’d then want to store somewhere, but that’s not the case.
Orbit isn't just one thing. The plane changes (some of the most expensive types of burns) involved to get to the same orbit as a tanker and then to the target orbit would vastly outway any potential benefits.
How do they expect to make money as a private enterprise if these are the numbers they propose?
Public transportation is supposed to lose money, not make it, hence the "public" part. It's paid for by tax dollars, because it is impossible for private companies to make money from it.
Even the private rail systems around the world are largely subsidized pubicly during construction, with only operations being privatized.