[jandrese]

Being a realist I have to be skeptical about the idea of building miles of vacuum tube through earthquake country.

It still smells like one of those crazy Sci-Fi ideas that crashes and burns when people do the math and discover that they'll need to charge $10,000 a ticket and be at 100% capacity for decades before they break even.

The cost estimates I have seen for constructing the tubes are hilarious lowballs thus far. It's definitely not going to be cheaper than high speed rail per mile, especially when you're talking about California (land of NIMBY).

[mozumder]

Indeed. High-speed rail would be cheaper when using the same cost estimates, if land was cheap like out in the country.

But then you have to build transit into dense cities, where a single building that you have to go through might cost $1 billion.

And then you realize why infrastructure is so expensive when you actually figure out the real costs.

[Reedx]

Perhaps, but by all accounts Elon is a pretty smart engineer and has ready access to smarter engineers. Not to mention those actually working on it. It just seems unlikely to me that none of them accounted for something so obvious? Certainly they did and felt it was a solvable problem.

If nothing else, if it increases expectations people have about transit then that's good. The currently planned California "high-speed" rail is pretty underwhelming.

[cozzyd]

I have heard, but don't know whether or not to take seriously, the argument that the proposal is designed to derail CAHSR in order to sell more cars. If that's the case, it seems to be working.

What part of CAHSR do you find underwhelming (other that it will take too long to build?). I disagree with some of the routing decisions (I think it should go SJ ->SF -> Oakland -> Central Valley -> LA ), but what would conceivably make it better?

[takno]

My main issue with the whole thing is that it is immediately used as an excuse to do down and prevent real engineering that can actually happen in the next 30 years like HSR. Blue sky thinking is good, but you can't sit back doing nothing and using unlikely predictions about the future to sneeringly criticize real things with real budgets that people can really do today

[rhino369]

If the project was so great Musk would be leading it, not giving it away to the public.

The original whitepaper included absurd assumptions related to cost.

Even if the CA highspeed rail is underwhelming, it's already under construction. Nobody is going to pay for a competitor project because you'd split the market.

[pbreit]

The cost estimates are coming from the same person/group that has built cars and rockets.

Skepticism is fine but doesn't warrant calling off the project at this point.

[mozumder]

The guy leading this project is someone that willfully changed his name so it has at least two "bros" in it.

That's enough to call it off.

[dragontamer]

There is no serious hyperloop project. Just pie-in-the-sky projections from someone who isn't really that serious about pursuing it.

If Elon Musk seriously cared about the Hyperloop project, his FEA simulations would have looked better than the crap I pulled in an optional class from college. His "proposal" was the most modest of sketches, and should be treated with only the same amount of rigor that Elon put into it.