[setitimer]

She said it herself: it's another Segway. It's a solution in search of a problem. We already have mass transit between northern and southern California: airplanes. I know, I know, this would be "better". But the existing system serves the people who need it at an adequate cost and level of service.

[gfodor]

This is a ridiculous comment. An hour door-to-door SF to LA means of transportation for less than $100 round trip would completely alter the economic landscape of California.

[setitimer]

How? It's still too expensive for most people to use on a daily basis. It still requires some way to get from the train station to your final destination, which adds yet more cost. The end result is that the only people who will really use it are the same people who currently fly regularly between LA and SF, which means about 12 million people annually. Nowhere near enough ridership to support the kind of prices that are being bandied about.

Edit: more like 6 million people fly between LA and SF annually. I was thinking of the Amtrak Northeast Corridor ridership, which is about 12 million annually.

[waterlesscloud]

No, that's not what it means.

If it was that cheap and fast I'd think nothing at all about travelling between the cities a couple times a month. Not daily, but far more frequently than I do now. I wouldn't be the only one.

[ericd]

The paper outlines an amortization period that shows where that price comes from. Did you not read the paper?

[setitimer]

Assuming the paper's optimistic predictions are feasible, the amortized cost per passenger of a one-way ticket is $20 plus operating costs. So, sure, the round trip cost will hopefully be somewhere below $100, if we ignore the cost of local transportation at either end. This is, as I said, too expensive for most people to afford on a daily basis.

Beyond that, the paper also claims a total annual ridership of 7.4 million people, so approximately the same ridership as currently served by air travel. So, other than acting as a jobs program, in what way will this alter the economic landscape of California?

[milesskorpen]

A $20 ticket isn't enough that many people would commute on a daily basis (though many would), but a 40 minute trip is less than my commute to San Jose! You could come to SF to go to Napa or visit a concert, return south to LA for a movie premier or to hit the beaches, all as _day__trips_. How would this not have a huge impact for both cities?

[ericd]

I'm not arguing that it'll be used on a daily basis.

Given how fuel dominates the cost of operating an airline, I'd say that something that is net neutral in terms of energy usage should be able to compare quite favorably in terms of marginal operating cost. I think that that $100 each way figure is very conservative in terms of what it would cost to transport a person.

I'd say the ridership assumptions are very conservative, the experience described is so much better than flying that I would guess that ridership will increase quite a lot. I would visit LA many times as frequently as I do now. It should also cannibalize car traffic quite a lot.

As far as economy goes, this would make intercity business much easier, decrease congestion of the freeways, save many man-years of time that would be otherwise spent in airports or driving, and it would be generally more efficient.

[lambda]

Why do you think this would need to be viable to use on a daily basis to be viable? There are probably enough people who need to have a meeting once a week or once a month in another city, or who want to visit for a weekend, or who want to get to a medical specialist in the other location, to make it work out.

[dredmorbius]

Commercial heavier-than-air travel has a distinctly limited future. Perhaps 5 years, perhaps 20, but when liquid fuels are no longer cheap, it will go the way of the dodo.

The alternatives are lighter-than-air craft, where speeds of up to 130 MPH are possible in current designs, it's unlikely that we'll do much better than this. These have _vastly_ lower energy requirements, and could be feasibly powered by solar cells plus either batteries or a small hydrogen fuel reserve capacity, or perhaps wholly by hydrogen-fueled engines, as the volumetric constraints of an airship are much lower than that of a HTA craft.

Or you could offer high-speed ground travel. Conventional high-speed rail is one option, the Hyperloop would seem to be another. I suspect that conventional HSR could achieve higher throughput -- 840 passengers/hour would be about 16 x 60-passenger rail cars. HSR offers lower speeds and longer transit times (2h 38m SF-LA projected), but might also serve more end-points for a roughly equivalent door-to-door trip time, though I suspect that's pushing feasibility. Musk discusses 2 minute to 30 second headways between pods, which is ... pretty aggressive (that still puts between 5 and 24 miles between pods, but you're moving at 700 mph top speed).

Either way, planes are going to be excluded by and by.

[rapht]

If someone is ready to finance the $68bn needed to build that high speed "train to nowhere" that doesn't answer a problem, I really don't understand how nobody would be willing to finance $6bn (or even $12bn to correct for the optimist view of the paper) needed to build an Hyperloop-like project which, even though it may not answer an immediate problem, would give the companies participating in it a considerable edge against the rest of the world on the variety of research/technology/know-how needed to build it. That alone might be enough to actually give value to the project.

[alexhawdon]

Did you miss the energy usage comparisons in the paper? It was presented in a nice (if 3D -- Musk, Tufte wants a word with you.. ;) ) bar chart and everything.

For me, that's one of the most significant things about the whole project. I'm no sandal-wearing Greenpeace-type, but I am convinced that if we're to continue trying to achieve developed-world quality of life for everyone on the planet then we need to start getting much smarter and more efficient with our energy usage. One way is 'stop living the way we do', the other way is this (and other advances like it).

[ArekDymalski]

Then why there are plans to build a conventional train line? To create new jobs?

[setitimer]

That's apparently the idea. But there is a reason it's being called the "Train to Nowhere". It will be yet another huge boondoggle that nobody uses and has to be subsidized for its entire lifetime.