[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.