![]() In reality, an all-elevated system is a bug rather than a feature. By building it on pylons, you can almost entirely avoid the need to buy land by following alongside the mostly very straight California Interstate 5 highway, with only minor deviations when the highway makes a sharp turn. ![]() a railway track are that it can be built above the ground on pylons and it can be built in prefabricated sections that are dropped in place and joined with an orbital seam welder. Even several billion is a low number when compared with several tens of billion proposed for the track of the California rail project. The pods and linear motors are relatively minor expenses compared to the tube itself – several hundred million dollars at most, compared with several billion dollars for the tube. Hundreds of years of incrementally-built expertise in bridge building is brushed aside with the following passage: The worst is the cost of the civil infrastructure, the dominant term in any major transportation project’s cost. On Wikipedia, it would get hammered with “citation needed” and “avoid weasel words.” Instead, we get “it is expected” and “targeted” language. It’s fine if Musk thinks he can build certain structures for lower cost than is normal, or achieve better safety, but he should at least mention how. There are no references for anything they’re beneath the entrepreneur’s dignity. There is no systematic attempt at figuring out standard practices for cost, or earthquake safety (about which the report is full of FUD about the risks of a “ground-based system”). There is a crossing of the San Francisco Bay, but there’s no mention of the high cost of bridging over or tunneling under the Bay – we’re supposed to take it on faith the unit cost is the same as along the I-5 corridor in the Central Valley. The LA end is really Sylmar, at the edge of the LA Basin with additional access time and security checks, this is no faster than conventional HSR doing the trip in 2:40. In practice, both the costs and the running times are full of magic asterisks. In principle, Hyperloop is supposed to get people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in half an hour, running in a tube with near-vacuum at speeds topping at 1,220 km/h. All of these come from Musk’s complex in which he must reinvent everything and ignore prior work done in the field these also raise doubts about the systems safety that he claims is impeccable. My specific problems are that Hyperloop a) made up the cost projections, b) has awful passenger comfort, c) has very little capacity, and d) lies about energy consumption of conventional HSR. For better prior criticism, see James Sinclair’s post and Clem Tillier’s comment on California HSR Blog. But none has pressed Musk or Tesla about the inconsistencies in his proposal, which far exceed the obvious questions about the proposed $6 billion price tag (compare $53 billion in today’s money for California HSR). ![]() Some media channels are more nuanced, sometimes even critical the Wall Street Journal deserves especial credit, but Wonkblog also has a second, mildly critical post. And thus a fair amount of the media coverage is analysis-free summary of what Tesla already said: see stenography by ABC, Forbes, the Washington Post’s Wonkblog, and even BusinessWeek (which added that critics deal with “limited information”). Thus we get Hyperloop, a loopy intercity rail transit idea proposed by Tesla Motors’ Elon Musk, an entrepreneur who hopes to make a living some day building cars. He doesn’t need to provide references or evidence – even supposedly scientific science fiction falls into this trope, in which the hero gets ideas from his gut, is always right, and never needs to do experiments. The people who are already doing the same thing are peons and their opinions are to be discounted, since they are biased and he never is. If he cares about something, it’s important if he says something can be done, it can. He (and it’s invariably he) is omnicompetent, and people who question him and laugh at his outlandish ideas will invariably fail and end up working for him. There is a belief within American media that a successful person can succeed at anything.
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