Practically anything could be "a clever political ploy", but where's the evidence for this? Any in the absence of such evidence, why speculate?
Just as a thought experiment, could HN user daemin's comments be part of a clever ploy to invent a fake persona to distract from a SECRET AGENDA? ;)
EDIT to add: Before Hyperloop, it was Maglev.
And frankly, a significantly better argument against HS2 is that it's an impossibly expensive boondoggle.
Nah, it connects most of England's largest cities, and will be 2/3rds of the network which will connect all of the cities of the North of England into something approaching a single labour market. Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester, Birmingham will be all be within 30-50 minutes of each other, with London within an hour and a half, with trains running between destinations 2 or 3 times an hour. The value of that is enormous.
https://www.railengineer.uk/2014/01/03/the-capacity-benefits...
http://www.citymetric.com/transport/hs2-isnt-about-north-eng...
The idea that it will turn a load of separate cities into one big city is basically fantasy, as i understand it - this is about HS3, but the analysis is much the same:
http://www.citymetric.com/transport/crossrail-north-really-b...
And yes, i do get all my information from CityMetric, since you ask. It's basically Buzzfeed for transport policy, i love it.
And yes, I realise the XC trains around Birmingham (inc. to Newcastle) are frequently overcrowded, but there's a comparatively cheap solution to this: buy more trains.
That should mean strengthening a region around Birmingham, faster links connecting the Leeds - Sheffield - Manchester triangle + tack on Liverpool, and a wide orbital around London improving connections between the towns around London that now are reduced to feeder/sleeper towns. There are towns around London that has decent direct rail tracks, but where the fastest rail route is a 2x-3x longer journey in to a London terminal and back out again. Actually run direct trains, and you suddenly have new viable commuter regions that bypass the centre.
Only after that should we think about making the links between these centres faster.
The problem of course is that many of these will need to be run at substantial losses for years before enough companies etc. will move/get established to change transport patterns, and it's so much easier to justify building more expensive routes where there is existing overcrowding.
Never mind that doing so just attracts more people.
Not taking a side here, but it doesn't seem useful make fun of the parent comment for what, on its face, seems to me as a pretty apt comment.
These two gentlemen stand to gain from the failure of mass long distance transit. So, why are they spearheading any kind of Hyperloop project? It's a valid question, and the suggestion about their motive is not farfetched for a couple of successful business magnates.
I mean, Musk's initial announcement regarding the hyperloop was about how California high speed rail shouldn't be built. These are the first lines of his blogpost announcing the hyperloop[1]:
> When the California “high speed” rail was approved, I was quite disappointed, as I know many others were too.
We can debate Musk's motivation, but the fact remains that the hyperloop is being used to argue against high speed rail construction, and has been since it was first announced.
If that were the case it would be one hell of a troll, set up an account for many years just for this one incident!
Even Reason Foundation (which is as biased as it gets - it's funded by Koch brothers and ideological critic of almost any government investment) claim SF to LA times will be 3:30 to 4:40, which is faster than any train today.
I think air travel for short to medium flights will fall off. By the time I leave my house and get to someplace that is 8 hours by car it would take 5 hours to check in and check out and you still need to rent a car.
Now, other than traffic, I agree. When deciding whether to drive somewhere or take the train, my second factor is whether or not I feel like actually driving a car. That answer is usually no, so I'm very excited about driverless cars.
And while you're right that this will probably drive up demand, it achieves something else too: Availability of extensive route information. Now imagine a shared system for such cars to negotiate routing, and such cars can know which routes will be less congested, and can know which cares it is most effective to re-route because of where they're going.
E.g. there's a chokehold near me for Southbound traffic that it's tremendously beneficial to bypass if you're heading South-East, because you can take back-roads with lower speed limits but that are shorter, and that will end up being much faster when the chokehold is congested. Which it "always" is between certain hours. But if you're going South West, it's better to suffer through it.
With vehicles able to negotiate route information, vehicles going South East could be automatically re-routed when there's congestion, resulting in average speed improving for everyone.
In fact, you could even imagine a system where cars autonomously negotiate a fee for other cars to let it get in front (so you could e.g. pay a 30% premium for urgent trips and have the car company spend, say 25% to buy its way in front of others on congested routes).
This may not entirely solve the problem, but it can make congestion more about total throughput than maximizing throughput on a small number of routes.
End-to-end route information also opens the door for services to mediate multi-step routes with e.g. cars feeding public transport much more efficiently (e.g. in my case I live almost exactly halfway between two major rail stations, with two more small ones not much further away. I almost always opt for the largest of the four because it's at a central junction that gives me the best option for almost every destination so I rarely need to think about it, and it also means I know exactly how long it takes me to get there.
But if I can tell an app where I want to go, and get told to either go to the bus stop or wait for a car, get taken to whichever station is the best option and told which track/train to take, and get picked up by a car on the other end, there might be substantial time savings and often a better shot at a seat. The only thing stopping me from "shopping around" like that today is that it's extremely inconvenient.
Again combine that with pervasive end-to-end route information, and you can make it even better by ensuring not too many people get routed onto each train if two options are relatively equal and one is less loaded.
People would take HSR even if it took the same time as driving. They would likely take it if it took an extra 20%, as the time has more utility to them when used for a train ride. That it's actually faster than driving just makes it more attractive.
We've already criss-crossed uncountable acres of historic, sentimental (what?? really??) land with roads, both local the state/federal highway system. HSR would be so much better use of land than roads, for moving a lot of people quickly and comfortably. Not at all redundant with Amtrak.
Happily, the California project is funded and is already underway, and I think there's one or two others being talked about/planned.
They'd put a highway right through where the black folk live, and who cares? Well, all the people in that neighborhood care, but they're poor minorities--they have no political power, no ability to push back.
If you want to start talking about land being taken from people, don't fucking start with farmers in rural California and HSR, start with the inner city neighborhoods the highway system destroyed.
Never funded? It's already under construction[1]. Although it's likely pre-pre-pre-construction, as they grade items and fix obstacles for the actual railway construction, which I doubt will happen within a decade, if ever.
They're building the bridges right now, that's not exactly pre-pre-pre-construction.
That being said, the trip takes 13 hours and some change, depending where in SF you're trying to go - which would be blown out of the water by HSR.
It is fun if you enjoy trains though! Take it if you have the time.
But yes - absolutely terrible from a commuter perspective.
CDOT has this thing for "public/private partnerships" which are just thinly veiled schemes siphoning off taxpayer money. The whole US36 debacle proved to me that they aren't capable of negotiating a good deal on the part of the taxpayers.
Without changing this, high-speed rail in the US will never be a reality without building an entirely separate rail network.
Indeed, that, if anything, is exactly the kind of investments that a government should be making.
The government well made its money back before the great railway crash.
Let's say the Internet suffers a crash in a few decades. Few would argue that any previous investment into the Internet was not worth it.
AFAIK, passenger trains have priority. However, if the passenger company rents a specific timeslot from the railway and isn't on time, it isn't surprising if there is traffic along the way.
And high speed trains usually require dedicated tracks to operate at full speed anyways.
http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/Amtrak-has-priority-ov...
I've experienced these delays many times riding the California Zephyr, and the conductors always say something about the freight trains having priority. According to the article this is because Amtrak is persistently ceding priority, despite federal regulations prioritizing passenger trains.
edit: According to the WaPo article linked by jey in this thread, this ended up overturned in federal court, so I guess as of 2017, freight does have priority over passenger trains in the U.S.
Branson's Virgin Group owns only 20% of Virgin Atlantic (don't let yourself be mislead by the Virgin name appearing all over the place - Virgin tends to start businesses, sell all or part of them when the opportunities are right, but continue to lease the name out to the buyers; the Virgin brand appears on dozens of companies with little to no Virgin Group ownership).
In 2016, Virgin Atlantic's revenue was less than 3bn GBP, with Virgin Group's "share" of that, just 600 million GBP (yes, I know it doesn't make sense to count it that directly; if looking at operating income instead, Virgin Atlantic's operating income in 2016 was ca. 150mn GBP), while Virgin Group's revenue was 20 billion pounds. So Branson's airline interests are relatively minor in the grand scheme of things.
And Virgin Atlantic would not face much competition from high speed rail (the clue is in the name - Virgin Atlantic might in fact very well benefit from a high speed rail network if it meant the ability to offer customers faster/easier access to more of the US with fewer US destinations which would make it easier for them to compete with airlines with more comprehensive route networks).
Virgin Group also wholly owns a UK train operator - if they saw "regular" high speed rail as a good business opportunity in the US, odds are higher they'd invest in it than try to stop it.
Also a lot of them end up going nowhere, much like with other Angel investing.
It wasn't entirely novel, but he gave the idea legitimacy beyond the normal fantastic imaginary future one is wont to see from time to time.
So I don't think this was an attempt to head the tech off at the pass or some alternate reality like that.
I think it was genuine and continues to be.
Historically there is the example of 1920s era GM funding initiatives to convert tram lines into bus lines, which required further investment in road networks, which benefited their private car ownership business as transit was defunded and discredited.
Hyperloop at least started a discussion. Once it fails, there might be some actual public support.
Just because there are significant interests that oppose high speed rail at every turn doesn't mean there isn't public support.
Elon's main business is electric cars and (one of) Branson's is airlines. So a reasonable competitor to both is fast and cheap(er) public transport along a major travel corridor in the USA.
This means that by promoting this alternative to high speed rail as faster, cheaper, better, they are undermining public support for a real project, which could mean its end.