The Hyperloop or something similar is, in my opinion, the right solution for the specific case of high traffic city pairs that are less than about 1500 km or 900 miles apart. Around that inflection point, I suspect that supersonic air travel ends up being faster and cheaper. With a high enough altitude and the right geometry, the sonic boom noise on the ground would be no louder than current airliners, so that isn’t a showstopper. Also, a quiet supersonic plane immediately solves every long distance city pair without the need for a vast new worldwide infrastructure.
Tag Archives: infrastructure
Forgotten by the Future, Some Take the Internet Into Their Own Hands
The next step, after raising half a million pounds from shareholders, is to convince Lancastrians to pony up about fifty dollars a month for internet service. (Those who invest £1500 or more can get a year’s free service, a tax credit of 30%, and the option to sell the entire investment back in 2016 at full value.) This isn’t AOL dial-up: customers will have access to a blazing fast 1 gigabit connection, something that many city-dwellers, myself included, would covet.
The Tunnels of NYC’s East Side Access Project
A huge public works project is currently under construction in New York City, connecting Long Island to Manhattan’s East Side. Deep underground, rail tunnels are extending from Sunnyside, Queens, to a new Long Island Rail Road terminal being excavated beneath Grand Central Terminal. Construction began in 2007, with an estimated cost of $6.3 billion and completion date of 2013. Since then, the cost estimate has been raised to $8.4 billion, and the completion date moved back to 2019. When finished, the line will accommodate 24 trains per hour at peak traffic, cutting down on commute times from Long Island, and opening up access to John F. Kennedy International Airport from Manhattan’s East Side. Collected here are images of the progress to date, deep beneath Queens and Manhattan.
via The Tunnels of NYC’s East Side Access Project – In Focus – The Atlantic.
World’s longest high-speed rail line opens connecting Beijing with southern China
The opening of the new line brings the total distance covered by China’s high-speed railway system to more than 9,300 km (5,800 miles) — about half its 2015 target of 18,000 km.
Open Compute Project
We started a project at Facebook a little over a year ago with a pretty big goal: to build one of the most efficient computing infrastructures at the lowest possible cost. We decided to honor our hacker roots and challenge convention by custom designing and building our software, servers and data centers from the ground up – and then share these technologies as they evolve.
via Open Compute Project – Hacking Conventional Computing Infrastructure.
Google to start hanging Internet cables today in KCK
The BPU is owned by the Unified Government of Wyandotte County, which penned the original agreement that secured the Google Fiber project — something more than 1,100 American communities actively lobbied for — for Kansas City, Kan.
That agreement had made the unusual stipulation that Google would be able to hang its wires, for free, in the upper part of the utility poles typically reserved for electrical lines. Utility companies sometimes attach their own communication cables on that part of the poles, but rarely allow third parties access to the space.
via Google to start hanging Internet cables today in KCK – KansasCity.com.