3 ms·

It's not worth working on - the problems with it are insurmountable at any reasonable cost and verifying that could have been worked out just with engineering a

It's not worth working on - the problems with it are insurmountable at any reasonable cost and verifying that could have been worked out just with engineering analysis and simulations... It's a fun, futuristic idea, but just falls down when you start to think about the problems. Sure, they could be solved if we were willing to spend hundreds of times as much per kilometer as we do for high-speed rail (which is already really expensive), but that's not practical in the real world.

diebeforei485 3y ago
In countries with functioning permitting systems, HSR planning and construction works well. Famously, SNCF said Morocco is less dysfunctional than California. In the USA, with NEPA - and especially California which also has CEQA - the permitting for any kind of project is super expensive. A lot of design decisions in the Hyperloop paper are for avoiding CEQA constraints.