Hyperloop was invented to try to kill light rail. It succeeded at killing Maryland's new venture and Illinois'. Neither were built because Hyperloop promised bullshit. Elon hates public transport.
Elon's main thing is selling cars, of course he actively opposes whatever would let people not buy a car.
He says the only public transit he would support is individual capsules running in a tunnel.
Essentially literal echo chambers where you never have to interact with anyone who might expand your horizons.
He didn't even invent it.
guy who sells cars spreads FUD about competition to cars
The mistake is thinking Elon is a moron screwing everything up on accident. He isn’t. He’s an Afrikaner white supremacist Nazi who is causing all this damage on purpose.
Starlink and SpaceX should be nationalized before he gets a chance to weaponize those companies against the western world as well.
He literally came up with the hyperloop because he was afraid of a high speed rail hurting Tesla sales.
I have a feeling the boards will try to maneuver him out before he gets too stupid with Starlink and/or SpaceX, but maybe not...
Giant infrastructure projects are a weakness of democracies. It's tough to get everyone to agree and pay for huge projects that take long term vision and planning.
Or you could call it a strength because it's stable and can't be changed too fast by one guy with a short term bad idea.
Mainly in the US, though. The automobile lobby successfully undermined many attempts at mass transit infrastructure. And the existing rail network is privatized into oblivion.
Roosevelt showed that there is a way of tackling infrastructure in the US. Only his approach has a minute slither of what can be framed to be socialist, so it'll never happen again..
see NEOM
It's an unbelievably stupid idea that's really going to happen. The prince of Saudi Arabia knows that their oil economy is going to wither away soon, so he's trying to make SA appealing to people with money and have them move there. How? By building a city that's a line 160 km (110 mi) long and 200 m (660 ft) wide...in the middle of fucking nowhere. The whole idea is based on technology that we don't have and is just terrible city planning. Look into it to get a laugh.
Did you completely ignore the US highway system built in the 50s, that created a car dependant infrastructure?
Ain't that the truth. The UKs HS2 project has just collapsed. Was supposed to a big Y shaped "network" linking London (and Europe) to Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and a laughably out the way part of the East Midlands, with a new high capacity rail link.
Now it's been whittled away to just "I suppose we can link London to Birmingham then", and only then because they'd already started work on it.
I always suspected the second part would be cancelled because we never do anything that might benefit the North.
Got to be honest, after 3 years of working from home, I'd rather have faster internet than faster trains. Shame there's no timetable for that either...
I think it has more to do with the lack of democracy, especially in the US. I guarantee you could get 100 regular Joes in a room to come up with a high speed rail project. You could never get that to happen with politicians at the mercy of the ruling class.
German train network? US Highways?
Lack of education is a weakness.
You can do it through democracies. Taiwan has two sets of high speed rail systems.
Are they expensive to maintain? Absolutely. In fact they bankrupted 2+ companies until the government decided to step in and foot part of the bill. But then again, if the government isn't willing to pay for basic infrastructure, what are taxes for?
(Also as a tangent, the Taiwan high speed rail bentos are to die for. I had it 5+ years back and I still remember it. Super cheap meal in a disposable bamboo lunch box. Usually there are 1-2 choices per day. I had chicken thighs, pickled veggies, steamed pumpkin, and half a marinated tea egg. The bottom half of the lunch box was filled with rice. 10/10 would eat at a busy train station during rush hour again)
How do you explain the highways scarring every major north American city that isn't named Vancouver? How do you explain the billions of dollars spent on highway expansions every year? Rail isn't hard it just doesn't benefit the right people.
This is misleadingly reductionist. California high speed rail has made consistant progess in that time. That progress has been slower than ourslowest expectations. It demonstrates the void of expertise the US has in rail megaprojects. However, that expertise is being built, slowly and painfully. Its still forward progress for a nation which tore up half its rail overthe last 50 years.
America invented rail megaprojects.
America still has the largest rail network by far. It's well more than twice the size of China's.
The only interesting note is that it's almost all freight compared to other nations' use of passenger rail.
Hehehehe
With 0.92% of electrified rail it's a joke to say that NGL. Absolute numbers are meaningless.
You have to see it into perspective per area then you'll get to feel how dense and therefore useful the rail network actually is. Because what good is a rail network if you can't reach your desired location.
And then you'll see that swiss, Germany and Luxembourg for example end up with less than 10 square km per km of rail while the usa has around 40.
Okay, but the comment implied America doesn't have the expertise to build a passenger network when it actually doesn't have the political willpower. It has the expertise to spare, but no one in power actually cares.
That still is not correct.
Planning a high speed high throughput flexible passenger rail network is a whole different beast than laying non-electrified single track lines in a straight line through the middle of nowhere that basically only serves the occasional 2miles long freight train.
The parameters are vastly different and almost incomparable. And America has decidedly no expertise left in the former.
Thats true. And then America stopped. And then the people who had actual on-the-ground experiance died of old age. Its really another effect of the slow tragedy that is the auto industry
China has the advantage of not having to care about the citizens' desires in regards to be relocated to make the rail possible.
They also provide apartments to live in permanently for those displaced in the development.
Meanwhile, the US has not built high speed rail and has tent cities.
In the case of national infrastructure, China wins hands down.
Although it's kind of ridiculous to compare California with an entire country...
Honestly not that ridiculous of a comparison considering California's size and GDP, we could be doing a lot better
I don't think America gives any shits either. They let the world's most useless CEO dictate their future
Kelo v. City of New London. That's all you need to know about the US' "care" for citizens' desires as far as eminent domain is concerned.
It's much easier to build rail in places that weren't designed around cars. Even in rural China people live in condos and apartments with parks between. This helps with NIMBYism and combined with the already large amount of green space left in Chinese cities such systems can be built with the only real concern being the engineering itself. But China is also in a good position for that, as their workforce is incredibly well educated with more engineering talent than they can even fully employ domestically. All that PLUS the political will of a single party state meant it was a very different situation than California.
And that's before you even consider ridership, where even the best possible SF to LA route would still pretty much require you to get a car or taxi once you get to LA (because LA was basically torn down and redesigned for cars).
Ya all looking at this like it's a conspiracy. It's just a guy looking to sell more cars. Shame on anyone who thought it's a real thing.
China wants unity, even in places where it doesn't make economic sense.
edit: 100% downvotes are coming from people that don't know the situation. The CCP wants fast travel to major population centers even when the rail line isn't profitable.
Isn't that a good thing? sounds like the rail is being run as a public utility rather than a business. And its still likely profitable if you average the cost over all the lines.
I never said it was a good/bad thing. I'm saying the Chinese gov. isn't as concerned with profit. Which explains the difference between California and China
It makes economic sense but not financial sense. Railways are almost always profitable once considering second and third order effects.
It's the same story with Amtrak, so I'm not sure why people are so confused. Amtrak loses money on every train that's not the NEC.
Musk has the weirdest relationship with trains.
Its a lot easier when you have slave labor and don't care about the enviroment or human lives
It unquestionably is but it sounds like you're implying that high speed rail is some sort of utopian megaproject and not a solved problem of basic, reliable and effective infrastructure that is a great bang for your buck in every country that builds it.
I understand what this comment is trying to say, but I doubt US is very big on caring about environment. Remind me, how many fracking projects?
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