17 ms·

Just as a thought experiment, could the promotion of these "hyperloop" projects be a clever political ploy to misdirect/divert attention and prevent a viable hi

by daemin 9y ago

Just as a thought experiment, could the promotion of these "hyperloop" projects be a clever political ploy to misdirect/divert attention and prevent a viable high speed rail network from being built? Elon's main business is electric cars and (one of) Branson's is airlines. So a reasonable competitor to both is fast and cheap(er) public transport along a major travel corridor in the USA. This means that by promoting this alternative to high speed rail as faster, cheaper, better, they are undermining public support for a real project, which could mean its end.

0898 9y ago
Branson's also in railways – Virgin Trains.
- daemin 9y ago
  I think Branson gets into almost everything, like a bigger form of an Angel investor. In that regard it makes sense to use the brand and money to make many small seed stage investments.
trose 9y ago
Interesting idea. In Denver, they're partnering with our regional transportation district to evaluate a hyperloop system here. Unfortunately RTD has been completely incompetent with existing rail programs to date so there isn't much confidence in their ability to pull this off. Could potentially be designed to fail.
- monocasa 9y ago
  Yeah, Denver being chosen just convinced me that this whole thing is pump and dump cash grab. CDOT has this thing for "public/private partnerships" which are just thinly veiled schemes siphoning off taxpayer money. The whole US36 debacle proved to me that they aren't capable of negotiating a good deal on the part of the taxpayers.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    What whole thing? The Denver partnership was made by Hyperloop One, which is just one of the companies trying to build it, and is not affiliated with Elon Musk.
    - monocasa 9y ago
      Sure, 'the whole thing' being Hyperloop One in this case.
rando444 9y ago
It's a good thought experiment, and not without precedent.. however the main problem holding high-speed rail back in the United States is that freight trains have priority over passenger trains. Without changing this, high-speed rail in the US will never be a reality without building an entirely separate rail network.
- daemin 9y ago
  Isn't that because the freight companies are the ones that actually built, own, and operate the tracks? If Amtrak or another passenger company owned the tracks, their trains would get priority.
  - pstuart 9y ago
    On land gifted to them by the government.
    - mseebach 9y ago
      Given the key function railroads had in opening up the west, I think you'll struggle to argue that that was even close to a bad deal. Indeed, that, if anything, is exactly the kind of investments that a government should be making.
      - dnautics 9y ago
        nongovernment investments tend to be more sustainable, because they are driven by observed demand, instead of cronyism or politics. This was one of the few railways to survive the great railway crash, it's still operated today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Northern_Railway_(U.S.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Northern_Railway_(U.S.)
        jychang 9y ago
        > This was one of the few railways to survive the great railway crash The government well made its money back before the great railway crash. Let's say the Internet suffers a crash in a few decades. Few would argue that any previous investment into the Internet was not worth it.
goialoq 9y ago
or they see that trains are the future and they want to own those trains.
mc32 9y ago
Why would Elon have sparked the idea in the fist place, then? It wasn't entirely novel, but he gave the idea legitimacy beyond the normal fantastic imaginary future one is wont to see from time to time. So I don't think this was an attempt to head the tech off at the pass or some alternate reality like that. I think it was genuine and continues to be.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
jaredhansen 9y ago
Of all the problems facing construction of "viable high speed rail" in the US (they already exist in many other places), I don't think Hyperloop competition is among ... the top 50. Practically anything could be "a clever political ploy", but where's the evidence for this? Any in the absence of such evidence, why speculate? Just as a thought experiment, could HN user daemin's comments be part of a clever ploy to invent a fake persona to distract from a SECRET AGENDA? ;)
- Brakenshire 9y ago
  We're just building a new major high speed line in the UK, and you'd be surprised how often you hear people say that it shouldn't be built because the technology will be superseded by the hyperloop, or autonomous cars, or whichever. It's one of the major talking points, even if it isn't one of the major blocks.
  - karmapolic 9y ago
    its things like these which make it seem like a clever ploy. However cool a technology hyperloop seems like. it is nothing more than a research project with a great marketing stunt.
  - mseebach 9y ago
    Meh. The imminency of "Major New Technology Just Around The Corner" has always been a favourite argument for the anti-progress crowd. EDIT to add: Before Hyperloop, it was Maglev. And frankly, a significantly better argument against HS2 is that it's an impossibly expensive boondoggle.
    - Brakenshire 9y ago
      > a significantly better argument against HS2 is that it's an impossibly expensive boondoggle. Nah, it connects most of England's largest cities, and will be 2/3rds of the network which will connect all of the cities of the North of England into something approaching a single labour market. Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester, Birmingham will be all be within 30-50 minutes of each other, with London within an hour and a half, with trains running between destinations 2 or 3 times an hour. The value of that is enormous.
drawnwren 9y ago
More likely, it's Elon worrying about how to colonize Mars than anything else.
jankotek 9y ago
There is some public support for high speed trains? Hyperloop at least started a discussion. Once it fails, there might be some actual public support.
- mercutio2 9y ago
  There is tons of support for high speed rail. California's voters passed a bond initiative to fund one stage of it. Whether voters would vote to raise taxes to fully fund it is another question, but voting for $9 billion in bonds cannot be interpreted as anything other than public support for high speed rail. Just because there are significant interests that oppose high speed rail at every turn doesn't mean there isn't public support.
microcolonel 9y ago
I think it would be a good idea to make sure the California "high speed" rail program is never funded. It is a terrible idea. As it stands, it would be as slow as conventional rail, redundant with AmTrak, and the most expensive rail line ever built. It would be absolutely devastating for the government's relationship with at least tens of thousands of land owners, hundreds of thousands of home owners, who would see depreciation or outright loss of use of their land (which may hold sentimental or historic value not accounted for, or impossible to account for, in eminent domain assessments).
- mhermher 9y ago
  It's not redundant with amtrak. There's no way to get from LA to SD on passenger rail without transferring through busses.
  - mhermher 9y ago
    That should be SF, not SD.
  - k_sh 9y ago
    The Coastal Starlight runs from Union Station in DTLA to Jack London Square in Oakland. From there, it's a quick walk to BART to get into San Francisco - no bus required. That being said, the trip takes 13 hours and some change, depending where in SF you're trying to go - which would be blown out of the water by HSR.
    - mhermher 9y ago
      That must be new. That wasn't available as of like we years ago or so.
      - ac29 9y ago
        That rail route has ran continuously since 1971: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coast_Starlight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coast_Starlight. The transbay tube connecting Oakland to San Francisco via BART opened in 1974.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Tiktaalik 9y ago
Of course it is. Organizations that benefit from road infrastructure expansion actively work to discredit and defund government transit initiatives. Historically there is the example of 1920s era GM funding initiatives to convert tram lines into bus lines, which required further investment in road networks, which benefited their private car ownership business as transit was defunded and discredited.
Twirrim 9y ago
All Branson has left is a partial holding of Virgin Atlantic on the flying business side of things. Virgin is in the train business, and has 100% holdings there, so if anything he has more business interest in seeing high speed rail come about.
- caf 9y ago
  They also have a small stake in Virgin Australia (not that this in any way contradicts your point).
tdb7893 9y ago
High speed rail already was not going to happen in the US for large political and practical reasons. Having a master plan to kill American rail travel just sounds like a waste of time
jgamman 9y ago
Transpower in nz used this argument to drastically cut its maintenance budget in the 90s using "distributed generation will strand the assets" type reasoning. Nz suffered the consequences. Who pays taxes and who booked imaginary accounting profits is left as an exercise for the reader. So yeah, it's not obviously wrong as a concern.
ellyagg 9y ago
Musk literally wants to colonize Mars in his lifetime. Do you think that claim is a clever strategy too? Why is the hyperloop where people draw the line at credulity?
vidarh 9y ago
Highly unlikely. Branson's Virgin Group owns only 20% of Virgin Atlantic (don't let yourself be mislead by the Virgin name appearing all over the place - Virgin tends to start businesses, sell all or part of them when the opportunities are right, but continue to lease the name out to the buyers; the Virgin brand appears on dozens of companies with little to no Virgin Group ownership). In 2016, Virgin Atlantic's revenue was less than 3bn GBP, with Virgin Group's "share" of that, just 600 million GBP (yes, I know it doesn't make sense to count it that directly; if looking at operating income instead, Virgin Atlantic's operating income in 2016 was ca. 150mn GBP), while Virgin Group's revenue was 20 billion pounds. So Branson's airline interests are relatively minor in the grand scheme of things. And Virgin Atlantic would not face much competition from high speed rail (the clue is in the name - Virgin Atlantic might in fact very well benefit from a high speed rail network if it meant the ability to offer customers faster/easier access to more of the US with fewer US destinations which would make it easier for them to compete with airlines with more comprehensive route networks). Virgin Group also wholly owns a UK train operator - if they saw "regular" high speed rail as a good business opportunity in the US, odds are higher they'd invest in it than try to stop it.
- daemin 9y ago
  As I replied to an earlier sibling comment, Richard Branson tends to invest and distribute the Virgin name to a lot of companies, like a bigger angel investor that also helps with branding and marketing. Also a lot of them end up going nowhere, much like with other Angel investing.
  - vidarh 9y ago
    But that is different to what I replied to, which was the question of whether he'd have a vested interest in trying to stop high speed rail.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
How about we stop letting politics destroy our future? Accusing someone of political reasons is a sure-fire way of derailing public discussion on a topic.
greglindahl 9y ago
That's not a "thought experiment", that's a "conspiracy theory".

by daemin 9y ago

0898 9y ago

Branson's also in railways – Virgin Trains.

daemin 9y ago
I think Branson gets into almost everything, like a bigger form of an Angel investor. In that regard it makes sense to use the brand and money to make many small seed stage investments.

trose 9y ago

Interesting idea. In Denver, they're partnering with our regional transportation district to evaluate a hyperloop system here. Unfortunately RTD has been completely incompetent with existing rail programs to date so there isn't much confidence in their ability to pull this off. Could potentially be designed to fail.

monocasa 9y ago
Yeah, Denver being chosen just convinced me that this whole thing is pump and dump cash grab. CDOT has this thing for "public/private partnerships" which are just thinly veiled schemes siphoning off taxpayer money. The whole US36 debacle proved to me that they aren't capable of negotiating a good deal on the part of the taxpayers.
- icebraining 9y ago
  What whole thing? The Denver partnership was made by Hyperloop One, which is just one of the companies trying to build it, and is not affiliated with Elon Musk.
  - monocasa 9y ago
    Sure, 'the whole thing' being Hyperloop One in this case.

rando444 9y ago

It's a good thought experiment, and not without precedent.. however the main problem holding high-speed rail back in the United States is that freight trains have priority over passenger trains. Without changing this, high-speed rail in the US will never be a reality without building an entirely separate rail network.

daemin 9y ago
Isn't that because the freight companies are the ones that actually built, own, and operate the tracks? If Amtrak or another passenger company owned the tracks, their trains would get priority.
- pstuart 9y ago
  On land gifted to them by the government.
  - mseebach 9y ago
    Given the key function railroads had in opening up the west, I think you'll struggle to argue that that was even close to a bad deal. Indeed, that, if anything, is exactly the kind of investments that a government should be making.
    - dnautics 9y ago
      nongovernment investments tend to be more sustainable, because they are driven by observed demand, instead of cronyism or politics. This was one of the few railways to survive the great railway crash, it's still operated today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Northern_Railway_(U.S.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Northern_Railway_(U.S.)
      - jychang 9y ago
        > This was one of the few railways to survive the great railway crash The government well made its money back before the great railway crash. Let's say the Internet suffers a crash in a few decades. Few would argue that any previous investment into the Internet was not worth it.

goialoq 9y ago

or they see that trains are the future and they want to own those trains.

mc32 9y ago

Why would Elon have sparked the idea in the fist place, then? It wasn't entirely novel, but he gave the idea legitimacy beyond the normal fantastic imaginary future one is wont to see from time to time. So I don't think this was an attempt to head the tech off at the pass or some alternate reality like that. I think it was genuine and continues to be.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

jaredhansen 9y ago

Of all the problems facing construction of "viable high speed rail" in the US (they already exist in many other places), I don't think Hyperloop competition is among ... the top 50. Practically anything could be "a clever political ploy", but where's the evidence for this? Any in the absence of such evidence, why speculate? Just as a thought experiment, could HN user daemin's comments be part of a clever ploy to invent a fake persona to distract from a SECRET AGENDA? ;)

Brakenshire 9y ago
We're just building a new major high speed line in the UK, and you'd be surprised how often you hear people say that it shouldn't be built because the technology will be superseded by the hyperloop, or autonomous cars, or whichever. It's one of the major talking points, even if it isn't one of the major blocks.
- karmapolic 9y ago
  its things like these which make it seem like a clever ploy. However cool a technology hyperloop seems like. it is nothing more than a research project with a great marketing stunt.
- mseebach 9y ago
  Meh. The imminency of "Major New Technology Just Around The Corner" has always been a favourite argument for the anti-progress crowd. EDIT to add: Before Hyperloop, it was Maglev. And frankly, a significantly better argument against HS2 is that it's an impossibly expensive boondoggle.
  - Brakenshire 9y ago
    > a significantly better argument against HS2 is that it's an impossibly expensive boondoggle. Nah, it connects most of England's largest cities, and will be 2/3rds of the network which will connect all of the cities of the North of England into something approaching a single labour market. Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester, Birmingham will be all be within 30-50 minutes of each other, with London within an hour and a half, with trains running between destinations 2 or 3 times an hour. The value of that is enormous.

drawnwren 9y ago

More likely, it's Elon worrying about how to colonize Mars than anything else.

jankotek 9y ago

There is some public support for high speed trains? Hyperloop at least started a discussion. Once it fails, there might be some actual public support.

mercutio2 9y ago
There is tons of support for high speed rail. California's voters passed a bond initiative to fund one stage of it. Whether voters would vote to raise taxes to fully fund it is another question, but voting for $9 billion in bonds cannot be interpreted as anything other than public support for high speed rail. Just because there are significant interests that oppose high speed rail at every turn doesn't mean there isn't public support.

microcolonel 9y ago

I think it would be a good idea to make sure the California "high speed" rail program is never funded. It is a terrible idea. As it stands, it would be as slow as conventional rail, redundant with AmTrak, and the most expensive rail line ever built. It would be absolutely devastating for the government's relationship with at least tens of thousands of land owners, hundreds of thousands of home owners, who would see depreciation or outright loss of use of their land (which may hold sentimental or historic value not accounted for, or impossible to account for, in eminent domain assessments).

mhermher 9y ago
It's not redundant with amtrak. There's no way to get from LA to SD on passenger rail without transferring through busses.
- mhermher 9y ago
  That should be SF, not SD.
- k_sh 9y ago
  The Coastal Starlight runs from Union Station in DTLA to Jack London Square in Oakland. From there, it's a quick walk to BART to get into San Francisco - no bus required. That being said, the trip takes 13 hours and some change, depending where in SF you're trying to go - which would be blown out of the water by HSR.
  - mhermher 9y ago
    That must be new. That wasn't available as of like we years ago or so.
    - ac29 9y ago
      That rail route has ran continuously since 1971: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coast_Starlight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coast_Starlight. The transbay tube connecting Oakland to San Francisco via BART opened in 1974.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Tiktaalik 9y ago

Of course it is. Organizations that benefit from road infrastructure expansion actively work to discredit and defund government transit initiatives. Historically there is the example of 1920s era GM funding initiatives to convert tram lines into bus lines, which required further investment in road networks, which benefited their private car ownership business as transit was defunded and discredited.

Twirrim 9y ago

All Branson has left is a partial holding of Virgin Atlantic on the flying business side of things. Virgin is in the train business, and has 100% holdings there, so if anything he has more business interest in seeing high speed rail come about.

caf 9y ago
They also have a small stake in Virgin Australia (not that this in any way contradicts your point).

tdb7893 9y ago

High speed rail already was not going to happen in the US for large political and practical reasons. Having a master plan to kill American rail travel just sounds like a waste of time

jgamman 9y ago

Transpower in nz used this argument to drastically cut its maintenance budget in the 90s using "distributed generation will strand the assets" type reasoning. Nz suffered the consequences. Who pays taxes and who booked imaginary accounting profits is left as an exercise for the reader. So yeah, it's not obviously wrong as a concern.

ellyagg 9y ago

Musk literally wants to colonize Mars in his lifetime. Do you think that claim is a clever strategy too? Why is the hyperloop where people draw the line at credulity?

vidarh 9y ago

Highly unlikely. Branson's Virgin Group owns only 20% of Virgin Atlantic (don't let yourself be mislead by the Virgin name appearing all over the place - Virgin tends to start businesses, sell all or part of them when the opportunities are right, but continue to lease the name out to the buyers; the Virgin brand appears on dozens of companies with little to no Virgin Group ownership). In 2016, Virgin Atlantic's revenue was less than 3bn GBP, with Virgin Group's "share" of that, just 600 million GBP (yes, I know it doesn't make sense to count it that directly; if looking at operating income instead, Virgin Atlantic's operating income in 2016 was ca. 150mn GBP), while Virgin Group's revenue was 20 billion pounds. So Branson's airline interests are relatively minor in the grand scheme of things. And Virgin Atlantic would not face much competition from high speed rail (the clue is in the name - Virgin Atlantic might in fact very well benefit from a high speed rail network if it meant the ability to offer customers faster/easier access to more of the US with fewer US destinations which would make it easier for them to compete with airlines with more comprehensive route networks). Virgin Group also wholly owns a UK train operator - if they saw "regular" high speed rail as a good business opportunity in the US, odds are higher they'd invest in it than try to stop it.

daemin 9y ago
As I replied to an earlier sibling comment, Richard Branson tends to invest and distribute the Virgin name to a lot of companies, like a bigger angel investor that also helps with branding and marketing. Also a lot of them end up going nowhere, much like with other Angel investing.
- vidarh 9y ago
  But that is different to what I replied to, which was the question of whether he'd have a vested interest in trying to stop high speed rail.

TeMPOraL 9y ago

How about we stop letting politics destroy our future? Accusing someone of political reasons is a sure-fire way of derailing public discussion on a topic.

greglindahl 9y ago

That's not a "thought experiment", that's a "conspiracy theory".