22 ms·

For those who think it's because of geography / hyperloop is better technology anyways / any other red herring besides Brezhnevian political stagnation: It's n

by serhei 9y ago

For those who think it's because of geography / hyperloop is better technology anyways / any other red herring besides Brezhnevian political stagnation: It's not completely implausible that, 30 years from now, most of Europe and Asia are connected by hyperloops while the US has built nothing and Internet commentators are arguing that hyperloop is old news compared to yet-unproven teleportation technology, and anyways the population density of the US doesn't support hyperloops.

mozumder 9y ago
What's good about Hyperloop? It's more expensive compared to rail. HSR is more of a more efficient airplane - spacious & can walk around & get a drink.
- serhei 9y ago
  I'm actually very skeptical about Hyperloop, but it seemed a good way of getting my point across. USA doesn't build stuff not because of technological viability but purely for political reasons.
  - hyperbovine 9y ago
    "purely" is pretty strong. I give you the population density of Earth per ㎢: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_density#/media/File:World_population_density_1994_-_with_equator.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_density#/media/File... (Or if you prefer something more recent, have a look at: http://www.newgeography.com/content/002808-world-urban-areas-population-and-density-a-2012-update http://www.newgeography.com/content/002808-world-urban-areas...) Pretty obvious which areas are ripe for HSR. Except for the mid-Atlantic corridor and arguably coastal California, nothing in the US really is. It's the same thing when people go abroad then come back and complain how backwards cell phone service is here. People really don't appreciate how underpopulated the U.S. is relative to the rest of the world. (Conversely, it's also why we could accommodate practically an unlimited # of refugees compared to Europe, if we really cared to.)
    - taurath 9y ago
      I'm sorry but the density argument doesn't cut it. It's 30-100x as expensive to build rail through dense areas as it would be through farmland like I5. Most of the in between places are crazily cheaper.
      - jjeaff 9y ago
        It's not about cost. Long rails aren't that expensive. The problem is that a train running through Texas is useless unless you want to get to a specific city that the tracks actually pass through. Anywhere else could be hours of driving from the station and there isn't any infrastructure for that. A 4 hour cab/Uber ride is way too expensive. Even a train that drops you off in the middle of Los Angeles could leave you many hours from the actual place in Los Angeles you want to be.
        jlarocco 9y ago
        So basically the reason we don't bother with more HSR is because all of our large cities are unplanned sprawling messes and the rest of our transportation infrastructure is almost just as bad as our HSR.
        mixmastamyk 9y ago
        LA is not such a great example anymore because metro/metrolink/flyaway + uber can take you anywhere you want to go from Union Station these days cheaply, sometimes quickly.
        jjeaff 9y ago
        I wouldn't say cheaply or even that easily. If I have to get off a train (whatever that cost), catch a fly-away bus ($8 both ways), then get an uber ($50+ just to Burbank 12m away), it's going to be very expensive and very slow assuming the stars don't align perfectly.
        akg_67 9y ago
        > The problem is that a train running through Texas is useless unless you want to get to a specific city that the tracks actually pass through. This argument ignores the new and existing population clusters that form and grow along a transportation link. You only have to look at interstate highway system and how new population clusters formed and existing clusters grew along the links once interstate hwy were built. Just reviewing the I-35, I-10 in Texas will show you that. Same can be seen with local subways and light rails systems. The clusters near stations grow faster than rest of the city.
- CydeWeys 9y ago
  Assuming that Hyperloop works at scale, what's good about it is the sheer speed, vastly eclipsing that of current high-speed rail. It could, theoretically, replace all existing flights between same-landmass cities with faster, cheaper, more fuel-efficient transport. Of course, the technology itself is still way more unproven than that of high-speed rail, but that is its promise at least.
- usaphp 9y ago
  I think the great thing that might have come out of hyper loop is new solutions to problems that were never existed before. Like with any never built before project there would have been a ton of cool new little innovations that would never been possible otherwise but would naturally come along the way during hyperloop assembly. To start thinking outside the box you should start doing something that nobody else tried to do before.
- gumby 9y ago
  > HSR is more of a more efficient airplane - spacious & can walk around & get a drink. Much as I love HSR and curse its absence when in the USA the economics are not quite as clear. Air routes are more flexible than rail routes. Of course that flexibility isn't necessarily desired by all; the stations on a rail network provide hysteresis which can keep otherwise unprofitable cities alive and even vibrant. New York beat out Boston because the Hudson was more navigable than the Charles, Boston Harbor's benefits notwithstanding. Chicago grew because it was at a confluence (literally!) of cheap transshipment points near farmland. Both cities do well even though their original reasons for existing are lost (neither are major freight hubs but have a lot of other transit links). And rail, even underground rail, can be abandoned.
  - pikzen 9y ago
    > Air routes are more flexible than rail routes. Except for having to build an, uh, entire airport.
    - gumby 9y ago
      Very much true, but doesn't get at my point. In fact airports can be / often are built far from urban areas where land is cheaper and space is available not just for the runways and terminals but parking, cargo etc. While you want rail terminals to be in densely connected locations which are more expensive and more difficult to network to. But my point is that you can relatively easily fly from one airport to many others. For example, the under-construction California HSR goes from LA through Bakersfield in the Central Valley up to SF and then Sacramento. If Fresno in the Central Valley grew, you could expand its commuter airport and then it would be directly linked by air to Burbank, San Jose, San Franciso etc as well as points outside the state. While the cost of adding an HSR terminal in Fresno could be large, especially if the rail doesn't run nearby (as it happens a terminal appears to be planned in Fresno, but the point remains). I'm still a big supporter of HSR but I recognize the trade offs.
    - valuearb 9y ago
      Building an airport is only about 100 times cheaper than building a rail line.
- nine_k 9y ago
  The principal advantage of a train before airplane for me is that boarding a plane is a hour or so, while boarding a train is 5–10 minutes. Also, you can have a train much closer to the city (or right in the middle of it) than an airport. If hyperloop loses these advantages, I'd bet on airplanes.
  - trophycase 9y ago
    Don't forget that on a plane you're literally packed like sardines and can only get up and move maybe once or twice. Flying is pretty miserable tbh.
narrator 9y ago
The reason high speed rail doesn't happen is the same reason commuter rail doesn't happen. Rich people do not want poor people to be able to easily come to their neighborhoods. The whole suburban architecture of the U.S is specifically constructed to maintain this inaccessibility. The whole trend began in the 60s with "white flight" in cities like Detroit after race riots and has only intensified since.
- graycat 9y ago
  There are several reasons more passenger rail doesn't happen. Generally the passenger rail proposals are illegal because they fail some now 100+ year old laws on cost/benefit analysis originally enacted to throttle bankrupting the US from building water projects to make the deserts bloom when the US had lots of blooming land not in deserts. If you own some desert and can talk the Federal Government into a big water project to make the desert bloom, then you can get rich, but the US could go broke doing that. Well, continually, any honest cost/benefit analysis dooms any Federal subsidies for passenger rail. There was a big example in Baltimore: They built a subway. Big subsidies. The system was done but not quite carrying passengers yet. I went to a lecture on the economics. The cost/benefit solution, even counting the construction cost as $0.00? Sure: Brick up the openings of the subway and just f'get about it. Why? No way could ticket prices pay even for routine operating costs.
  - roywiggins 9y ago
    This neglects positive externalities, doesn't it? The NY Metro is economically vital but can't recoup its operating expenses from ticket sales, so it relies on taxes (and, unfortunately, a lot of debt). Nobody would say the MTA is exactly a model of a functioning subway system but there's no principle that says a subway can't be funded with taxes and tickets in combination.
    - neltnerb 9y ago
      Seems to me that the benefit to non-riders is simply that the cars those riders would be using aren't on the roads that they are using.
zionic 9y ago
Installing "high speed" rail that's less than 200mph in the US today is like installing 6MB copper DSL and calling it a win. Notice developing economies are going wireless/fiber and skipping the "legacy" generation, the US should be doing the same with MagLev/hyperloop. The issue is we spend our money policing the world/blowing up countries then paying to rebuild them. If we weren't so hell-bent on global hegemony we could spend more on infrastructure at home.
- noir_lord 9y ago
  The really stupid part is that US military spending is so disproportionate you could do both. A 25% cut in the US military would leave around 165bn for infrastructure and they'd still be spending more than the next 4 countries.
  - WillPostForFood 9y ago
    $165 billion is about 4% of federal spending, so if people think it is so important they could cut everything except defense and easily come up with the money.
    - muhfuhkuh 9y ago
      But if we cut military, they'd then be much more fiscally responsible and not have to admit that they'd "lost" trillions of dollars that they can't account for every, oh, decade or so. http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/23/politics/us-army-audit-accounting-errors/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/23/politics/us-army-audit-account...
      - adventured 9y ago
        They did not in fact admit they "lost" trillions. It's a fair criticism of their mediocre accounting, however they did not lose trillions of dollars, nor are trillions of dollars unaccounted for. That part isn't even actually being disputed by that ignorant CNN article. Trillions of dollars have not been properly audited, which is not the same as that entire sum simply being magically missing. That article is rehashing the same bogus premise that has been thrown around for decades. Here's how it works: https://www.metabunk.org/debunked-8-5-trillion-missing-from-the-pentagon.t3173/ https://www.metabunk.org/debunked-8-5-trillion-missing-from-... https://davidlandy.net/no-the-pentagon-didnt-lose-8-5-trillion/ https://davidlandy.net/no-the-pentagon-didnt-lose-8-5-trilli... Basically: within $N trillion in spending, there is a combination of non-audits and accounting irregularities, so therefore CNN throws up a click-bait article claiming the entire amount of spending is unaccounted for. Pretty idiotic when you consider the sums being claimed vs the known expenditures in question. The premise is: every dollar that wasn't audited was stolen; logically, even if one were to assume theft (etc) happened, it's likely to be a dramatically smaller sum of the whole.
tptacek 9y ago
I'm not sure I understand how you're managing to dismiss geography here. Can you explain why you think it doesn't matter? The biggest cities in the US are, with the exception of the Eastern Seaboard where we already have usable rail and California where they're building it now, simply very far apart. Even with the best available rail technology, trips between them would take over 12 hours by rail.
- venomsnake 9y ago
  Best rail technology (maglev) is 430 km/h (maglev). 12 hours is comparable in time with the same flight distance when you factor getting to the airport, boarding, taxi, security theater and congested airports.
- kashkhan 9y ago
  vancouver seattle portland sacramento sf fresno la san diego is a perfectly workable corridor. at 200mph SF to LA would be a 2 hour ride, perfectly competitive with air if done right.
  - valuearb 9y ago
    Airplanes work now and are paid for by their passengers. High speed trains would take immense investments and would have to be subsidized till the end of time. They'd only be competitive in travel times for under 200 mile trips, and that only because we don't impose the same security requirements on trains as planes, which is ludicrous given the have the exact same risks. After the first terrorist takes out a high speed train and kills hundreds of passengers and possibly hundreds of others (depending upon where the 200 MPH 500 Ton train tumbles through) there will be TSA security lines on train travel to match plane travel. Lastly it's far easier to scale up with planes. You can't add more trains to one high speed track if another train is already on it heading towards you at high speed.
    - kashkhan 9y ago
      I don't know where you get that >200mi is infeasible. shanghai - beijing HST is 819 miles/5 hours @ 220 mph with stops and carries 130 million a year and is insensitive to weather unlike planes. its not easier to scale up planes. Have you tried building a new 777 capable airport in SF or LA lately?
franciscop 9y ago
Some friends of mine who won the Design and Propulsion prizes at the Hyperloop competition ( http://hyperloopupv.com/ http://hyperloopupv.com/ ) from Spain are talking with some mid-eastern countries to make it a reality. European engineers building the Hyperloop in Asia. It might not be so far fetched as it seems.
Animats 9y ago
Hyperloop is a joke. Japan's maglev is a reality. Japan is building a maglev line from Tokyo to Nagoya. The first 42km section is running right now. 500km/hour. 600km/hour in tests. Train sets have been delivered. Stations are under construction. Tunnels are being bored. Opening 2027.
- TulliusCicero 9y ago
  Isn't it, like, super expensive though? Also as an aside. Japan is this weird example of a country with a good education system, hard workers, excellent infrastructure, and yet a totally stagnant economy. I mean I understand a lot of the reasons, but it's still weird.
  - devoply 9y ago
    That's the thing buses and trains are more expensive than driving because of sunk costs of owning a car and at the same time they are not usually as efficient to use, i.e. add another 1/2 to your trip time. Time is something in very short supply. So you can build all the bus routes and trains you want, that does not mean anyone actually wants to use them. Then there is whole boredom of riding transportation rather than actually driving. All these people harp about public transportation, etc, but really given the choice does anyone actually prefer public transportation over cars if the roads can accommodate them. I don't think so.
    - robin_reala 9y ago
      Yes? I’d absolutely rather spend time on a train than a car. It’s faster, takes me right into the centre of the town I’m going to, I don’t have to worry about finding a parking space and I can get some work done on the way (or just read a book). Why would you want to drive?
      - zionic 9y ago
        What? Trains are worse than buses, in that they taken you further from where you want to go in a slower manner that you still have to uber to your actual destination from.
sandworm101 9y ago
You think the US is bad? Take a look at Canada. We aren't even speculating about highspeed rail. Ottawa-Toronto might be possible, but have a look at what Vancouver-Calgary would entail. Vancouver-Ottawa would probably mean laying more highspeed rail than China's entire network.
- greeneggs 9y ago
  Vancouver to Ottawa is maybe 4500 km. China has 20,000 km of high-speed train lines, and is planning another 15,000 km by 2025. http://www.economist.com/news/china/21714383-and-theres-lot-more-come-it-waste-money-china-has-built-worlds-largest http://www.economist.com/news/china/21714383-and-theres-lot-...
- leemailll 9y ago
  Do you know how big china is?
perseusprime11 9y ago
It almost feels like our politicians secretly are determined to make U.S into a third world country. Bad transportation, bad education, bad healthcare, bad governance. System is built to prevent basic progress. Even the rich states like California, NY, NJ have major transportation issues. Will it be a surprise to anyone if we end up at the bottom in 10 years from now. Sure we have Google, Microsoft and Apple but can't evn get to office on time, can't afford good healthcare.

by serhei 9y ago

mozumder 9y ago

What's good about Hyperloop? It's more expensive compared to rail. HSR is more of a more efficient airplane - spacious & can walk around & get a drink.

serhei 9y ago
I'm actually very skeptical about Hyperloop, but it seemed a good way of getting my point across. USA doesn't build stuff not because of technological viability but purely for political reasons.
- hyperbovine 9y ago
  "purely" is pretty strong. I give you the population density of Earth per ㎢: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_density#/media/File:World_population_density_1994_-_with_equator.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_density#/media/File... (Or if you prefer something more recent, have a look at: http://www.newgeography.com/content/002808-world-urban-areas-population-and-density-a-2012-update http://www.newgeography.com/content/002808-world-urban-areas...) Pretty obvious which areas are ripe for HSR. Except for the mid-Atlantic corridor and arguably coastal California, nothing in the US really is. It's the same thing when people go abroad then come back and complain how backwards cell phone service is here. People really don't appreciate how underpopulated the U.S. is relative to the rest of the world. (Conversely, it's also why we could accommodate practically an unlimited # of refugees compared to Europe, if we really cared to.)
  - taurath 9y ago
    I'm sorry but the density argument doesn't cut it. It's 30-100x as expensive to build rail through dense areas as it would be through farmland like I5. Most of the in between places are crazily cheaper.
    - jjeaff 9y ago
      It's not about cost. Long rails aren't that expensive. The problem is that a train running through Texas is useless unless you want to get to a specific city that the tracks actually pass through. Anywhere else could be hours of driving from the station and there isn't any infrastructure for that. A 4 hour cab/Uber ride is way too expensive. Even a train that drops you off in the middle of Los Angeles could leave you many hours from the actual place in Los Angeles you want to be.
      - jlarocco 9y ago
        So basically the reason we don't bother with more HSR is because all of our large cities are unplanned sprawling messes and the rest of our transportation infrastructure is almost just as bad as our HSR.
      - mixmastamyk 9y ago
        LA is not such a great example anymore because metro/metrolink/flyaway + uber can take you anywhere you want to go from Union Station these days cheaply, sometimes quickly.
        jjeaff 9y ago
        I wouldn't say cheaply or even that easily. If I have to get off a train (whatever that cost), catch a fly-away bus ($8 both ways), then get an uber ($50+ just to Burbank 12m away), it's going to be very expensive and very slow assuming the stars don't align perfectly.
      - akg_67 9y ago
        > The problem is that a train running through Texas is useless unless you want to get to a specific city that the tracks actually pass through. This argument ignores the new and existing population clusters that form and grow along a transportation link. You only have to look at interstate highway system and how new population clusters formed and existing clusters grew along the links once interstate hwy were built. Just reviewing the I-35, I-10 in Texas will show you that. Same can be seen with local subways and light rails systems. The clusters near stations grow faster than rest of the city.
CydeWeys 9y ago
Assuming that Hyperloop works at scale, what's good about it is the sheer speed, vastly eclipsing that of current high-speed rail. It could, theoretically, replace all existing flights between same-landmass cities with faster, cheaper, more fuel-efficient transport. Of course, the technology itself is still way more unproven than that of high-speed rail, but that is its promise at least.
usaphp 9y ago
I think the great thing that might have come out of hyper loop is new solutions to problems that were never existed before. Like with any never built before project there would have been a ton of cool new little innovations that would never been possible otherwise but would naturally come along the way during hyperloop assembly. To start thinking outside the box you should start doing something that nobody else tried to do before.
gumby 9y ago
> HSR is more of a more efficient airplane - spacious & can walk around & get a drink. Much as I love HSR and curse its absence when in the USA the economics are not quite as clear. Air routes are more flexible than rail routes. Of course that flexibility isn't necessarily desired by all; the stations on a rail network provide hysteresis which can keep otherwise unprofitable cities alive and even vibrant. New York beat out Boston because the Hudson was more navigable than the Charles, Boston Harbor's benefits notwithstanding. Chicago grew because it was at a confluence (literally!) of cheap transshipment points near farmland. Both cities do well even though their original reasons for existing are lost (neither are major freight hubs but have a lot of other transit links). And rail, even underground rail, can be abandoned.
- pikzen 9y ago
  > Air routes are more flexible than rail routes. Except for having to build an, uh, entire airport.
  - gumby 9y ago
    Very much true, but doesn't get at my point. In fact airports can be / often are built far from urban areas where land is cheaper and space is available not just for the runways and terminals but parking, cargo etc. While you want rail terminals to be in densely connected locations which are more expensive and more difficult to network to. But my point is that you can relatively easily fly from one airport to many others. For example, the under-construction California HSR goes from LA through Bakersfield in the Central Valley up to SF and then Sacramento. If Fresno in the Central Valley grew, you could expand its commuter airport and then it would be directly linked by air to Burbank, San Jose, San Franciso etc as well as points outside the state. While the cost of adding an HSR terminal in Fresno could be large, especially if the rail doesn't run nearby (as it happens a terminal appears to be planned in Fresno, but the point remains). I'm still a big supporter of HSR but I recognize the trade offs.
  - valuearb 9y ago
    Building an airport is only about 100 times cheaper than building a rail line.
nine_k 9y ago
The principal advantage of a train before airplane for me is that boarding a plane is a hour or so, while boarding a train is 5–10 minutes. Also, you can have a train much closer to the city (or right in the middle of it) than an airport. If hyperloop loses these advantages, I'd bet on airplanes.
- trophycase 9y ago
  Don't forget that on a plane you're literally packed like sardines and can only get up and move maybe once or twice. Flying is pretty miserable tbh.

narrator 9y ago

The reason high speed rail doesn't happen is the same reason commuter rail doesn't happen. Rich people do not want poor people to be able to easily come to their neighborhoods. The whole suburban architecture of the U.S is specifically constructed to maintain this inaccessibility. The whole trend began in the 60s with "white flight" in cities like Detroit after race riots and has only intensified since.

graycat 9y ago
There are several reasons more passenger rail doesn't happen. Generally the passenger rail proposals are illegal because they fail some now 100+ year old laws on cost/benefit analysis originally enacted to throttle bankrupting the US from building water projects to make the deserts bloom when the US had lots of blooming land not in deserts. If you own some desert and can talk the Federal Government into a big water project to make the desert bloom, then you can get rich, but the US could go broke doing that. Well, continually, any honest cost/benefit analysis dooms any Federal subsidies for passenger rail. There was a big example in Baltimore: They built a subway. Big subsidies. The system was done but not quite carrying passengers yet. I went to a lecture on the economics. The cost/benefit solution, even counting the construction cost as $0.00? Sure: Brick up the openings of the subway and just f'get about it. Why? No way could ticket prices pay even for routine operating costs.
- roywiggins 9y ago
  This neglects positive externalities, doesn't it? The NY Metro is economically vital but can't recoup its operating expenses from ticket sales, so it relies on taxes (and, unfortunately, a lot of debt). Nobody would say the MTA is exactly a model of a functioning subway system but there's no principle that says a subway can't be funded with taxes and tickets in combination.
  - neltnerb 9y ago
    Seems to me that the benefit to non-riders is simply that the cars those riders would be using aren't on the roads that they are using.

zionic 9y ago

Installing "high speed" rail that's less than 200mph in the US today is like installing 6MB copper DSL and calling it a win. Notice developing economies are going wireless/fiber and skipping the "legacy" generation, the US should be doing the same with MagLev/hyperloop. The issue is we spend our money policing the world/blowing up countries then paying to rebuild them. If we weren't so hell-bent on global hegemony we could spend more on infrastructure at home.

noir_lord 9y ago
The really stupid part is that US military spending is so disproportionate you could do both. A 25% cut in the US military would leave around 165bn for infrastructure and they'd still be spending more than the next 4 countries.
- WillPostForFood 9y ago
  $165 billion is about 4% of federal spending, so if people think it is so important they could cut everything except defense and easily come up with the money.
  - muhfuhkuh 9y ago
    But if we cut military, they'd then be much more fiscally responsible and not have to admit that they'd "lost" trillions of dollars that they can't account for every, oh, decade or so. http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/23/politics/us-army-audit-accounting-errors/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/23/politics/us-army-audit-account...
    - adventured 9y ago
      They did not in fact admit they "lost" trillions. It's a fair criticism of their mediocre accounting, however they did not lose trillions of dollars, nor are trillions of dollars unaccounted for. That part isn't even actually being disputed by that ignorant CNN article. Trillions of dollars have not been properly audited, which is not the same as that entire sum simply being magically missing. That article is rehashing the same bogus premise that has been thrown around for decades. Here's how it works: https://www.metabunk.org/debunked-8-5-trillion-missing-from-the-pentagon.t3173/ https://www.metabunk.org/debunked-8-5-trillion-missing-from-... https://davidlandy.net/no-the-pentagon-didnt-lose-8-5-trillion/ https://davidlandy.net/no-the-pentagon-didnt-lose-8-5-trilli... Basically: within $N trillion in spending, there is a combination of non-audits and accounting irregularities, so therefore CNN throws up a click-bait article claiming the entire amount of spending is unaccounted for. Pretty idiotic when you consider the sums being claimed vs the known expenditures in question. The premise is: every dollar that wasn't audited was stolen; logically, even if one were to assume theft (etc) happened, it's likely to be a dramatically smaller sum of the whole.

tptacek 9y ago

I'm not sure I understand how you're managing to dismiss geography here. Can you explain why you think it doesn't matter? The biggest cities in the US are, with the exception of the Eastern Seaboard where we already have usable rail and California where they're building it now, simply very far apart. Even with the best available rail technology, trips between them would take over 12 hours by rail.

venomsnake 9y ago
Best rail technology (maglev) is 430 km/h (maglev). 12 hours is comparable in time with the same flight distance when you factor getting to the airport, boarding, taxi, security theater and congested airports.
kashkhan 9y ago
vancouver seattle portland sacramento sf fresno la san diego is a perfectly workable corridor. at 200mph SF to LA would be a 2 hour ride, perfectly competitive with air if done right.
- valuearb 9y ago
  Airplanes work now and are paid for by their passengers. High speed trains would take immense investments and would have to be subsidized till the end of time. They'd only be competitive in travel times for under 200 mile trips, and that only because we don't impose the same security requirements on trains as planes, which is ludicrous given the have the exact same risks. After the first terrorist takes out a high speed train and kills hundreds of passengers and possibly hundreds of others (depending upon where the 200 MPH 500 Ton train tumbles through) there will be TSA security lines on train travel to match plane travel. Lastly it's far easier to scale up with planes. You can't add more trains to one high speed track if another train is already on it heading towards you at high speed.
  - kashkhan 9y ago
    I don't know where you get that >200mi is infeasible. shanghai - beijing HST is 819 miles/5 hours @ 220 mph with stops and carries 130 million a year and is insensitive to weather unlike planes. its not easier to scale up planes. Have you tried building a new 777 capable airport in SF or LA lately?

franciscop 9y ago

Some friends of mine who won the Design and Propulsion prizes at the Hyperloop competition ( http://hyperloopupv.com/ http://hyperloopupv.com/ ) from Spain are talking with some mid-eastern countries to make it a reality. European engineers building the Hyperloop in Asia. It might not be so far fetched as it seems.

Animats 9y ago

Hyperloop is a joke. Japan's maglev is a reality. Japan is building a maglev line from Tokyo to Nagoya. The first 42km section is running right now. 500km/hour. 600km/hour in tests. Train sets have been delivered. Stations are under construction. Tunnels are being bored. Opening 2027.

TulliusCicero 9y ago
Isn't it, like, super expensive though? Also as an aside. Japan is this weird example of a country with a good education system, hard workers, excellent infrastructure, and yet a totally stagnant economy. I mean I understand a lot of the reasons, but it's still weird.
- devoply 9y ago
  That's the thing buses and trains are more expensive than driving because of sunk costs of owning a car and at the same time they are not usually as efficient to use, i.e. add another 1/2 to your trip time. Time is something in very short supply. So you can build all the bus routes and trains you want, that does not mean anyone actually wants to use them. Then there is whole boredom of riding transportation rather than actually driving. All these people harp about public transportation, etc, but really given the choice does anyone actually prefer public transportation over cars if the roads can accommodate them. I don't think so.
  - robin_reala 9y ago
    Yes? I’d absolutely rather spend time on a train than a car. It’s faster, takes me right into the centre of the town I’m going to, I don’t have to worry about finding a parking space and I can get some work done on the way (or just read a book). Why would you want to drive?
    - zionic 9y ago
      What? Trains are worse than buses, in that they taken you further from where you want to go in a slower manner that you still have to uber to your actual destination from.

sandworm101 9y ago

You think the US is bad? Take a look at Canada. We aren't even speculating about highspeed rail. Ottawa-Toronto might be possible, but have a look at what Vancouver-Calgary would entail. Vancouver-Ottawa would probably mean laying more highspeed rail than China's entire network.

greeneggs 9y ago
Vancouver to Ottawa is maybe 4500 km. China has 20,000 km of high-speed train lines, and is planning another 15,000 km by 2025. http://www.economist.com/news/china/21714383-and-theres-lot-more-come-it-waste-money-china-has-built-worlds-largest http://www.economist.com/news/china/21714383-and-theres-lot-...
leemailll 9y ago
Do you know how big china is?

perseusprime11 9y ago

It almost feels like our politicians secretly are determined to make U.S into a third world country. Bad transportation, bad education, bad healthcare, bad governance. System is built to prevent basic progress. Even the rich states like California, NY, NJ have major transportation issues. Will it be a surprise to anyone if we end up at the bottom in 10 years from now. Sure we have Google, Microsoft and Apple but can't evn get to office on time, can't afford good healthcare.