Several comments in this thread almost appear to be constructed to prove the author right in how the debate derails. It's not much of my concern, but still I co

Several comments in this thread almost appear to be constructed to prove the author right in how the debate derails. It's not much of my concern, but still I couldn't help to notice something that felt like an unusual occurrence here on HN, or maybe I'm simply seeing ghosts. I am rather tired to be honest! Anyway, my flawed observation: Some sort of deadlock where instead of discussing how to improve the situation, the discourse get stuck in debating which is the correct reason for not doing anything, instead of trying to come up with improvements? Several times arguments are made that a non existent technology will make current investment pointless in the future, so no investment should be made now. Isn't that the argument implied by the title of the article? Obviously, it could be true that future inventions would make it pointless, but that certainly is not something you can calculate/know off the cuff, if it's even worth speculating about. Building a high speed rail network take long enough time that all those possible avenues can probably be explored in excruciating detail before the first shovel hits the dirt a decade from now if everything moves quickly. People are sceptical towards hyperloop, which is understandable in many ways. But what if it would work? Wouldn't it be worth investing quite a lot of money simply to figure out if it could work? Obviously it could potentially only solve a very specific part of the transportation puzzle, but one that could have quite some positive effects. Positioning cars and aircraft as more-or-less the only viable ways of communication for the foreseeable future sounds like an awfully odd position to me, even for a very sparsely populated country. While, the correct solution might not be high-speed rail, some variation of it it could still be the best solution in several instances. Maybe someone would come up with something like a tethered electrical ground effect aircraft/train which could take advantage of the sparse population if they knew there were money to be made. Instead of massive resistance and cartloads of red tape ?