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by Grishnakh
3690 days ago
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It's not a distraction, it's a better alternative. HSR is too slow and too expensive. As for passenger capacity, who cares? This is not Japan, where density is very high and lots of people don't have cars. What's important is demand: how many passengers are actually flying between LA and SF right now? And how does that compare to the capacity of Hyperloop? Hyperloop is being positioned as an alternative to regional air travel (and maybe later for cross-continent air travel). I'm sorry, but I seriously doubt 23,000 passengers are flying in jets from LA to SF every hour right now. |
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HSRs main justification is reducing the increase in long-range intrastate auto trips.
Also, whether an air travel or auto trip replacement, the hyperloop paper relied for its low cost on a route that doesn't have the transit connections to either where people are from or where they are trying to go be useful, whereas HSR both connects population centers and includes investments in improving connecting regional transit around the termini (and other stations). Hyperloop aims for a much smaller goal than HSR, and even at that has an alignment which makes it useless for the goal.