Influential people and money people and politicians are all going to read this and say Sounds great. Elon Musk? I'm listening. 7 Billion? Go on. And scientists are going to chime in, and universities, and people always forget the global reactions. Momentum.
I'm going to keep my faith that this idea has legs.
he is in bed with gov employees unions (the unions are primary driving force behind 200-300K/year gov employees pensions (http://www.mercurynews.com/salaries/pensions) with retirement age of 55, CA is something like $200B deep in that hole), and especially with prison guard union - of course huge prison population resulting from "toughness on crime" may not be viewed as government waste by some.
Building a bridge or high-speed rail to nowhere - just a [large] peanut in that picture.
200-300K/year (and higher) pensions are pretty much entirely executives who weren't union members, it has nothing to do with unions.
e.g., the #1 highest: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/dec/27/opinion/la-oe-cole-v...
"Denson also earned $407,908 in total wages in 2011, according to city data, making him the highest paid city worker in 2011. Of this sum, $212,738 consisted of "cash out" pay, which accounts for such factors as vacations, holidays and unused sick pay. His regular salary was $195,169."
All defined benefit pensions -- whether set by union contract or not -- use these kind of formulas. But the high pensions are not the product of the formula alone -- even if you work long enough at one of the formulas to get near (or over) 100%, you still aren't going to get 200-300K per year pension unless you have a last/highest/(average of last three)/etc. years salary (which ever is the base for the particular formula you have) high enough to push the pension that high.
Surprisingly enough, almost no rank-and-file workers have that kind of salary. The people with 200K and higher pensions are mostly people that are retiring from executive positions.
what if the prison guard union got in on the contract to have the prisoners build the hyperloop?
Of course he's with the government employees unions, he has to live with them every day.
>>> Of course he's with the government employees unions, he has to live with them every day.
Having to work with them and being in bed with them is not the same thing. Though many politicians fail to see the difference, it is a known problem.
Politicians aren't all afraid to take risks, especially when they believe a particular policy they like will live on and be remembered.
Our former governor Jesse Ventura overcame incredible resistance and media scorn to get our first light rail line built. Almost all casual observers thought major health care reform was impossible in Washington. These things actually happened.
The key to passing a good policy is to reduce the risk. Politicians love projects where someone else was the guinea pig for them and/or someone else pays for studies and prototypes. Usually, they look for other units of government that have done something very similar with great success.
If I wanted to get Hyperloop to pass, I would first aim to table discussions on high speed rail for the proposed route. You would find allies among politicians who don't want to spend any money on transit, usually to appease highway contractors.
Secondly, I would immediately aim to seek R&D money for a high-profile demonstration project with plenty of funding for a study to project potential costs and impacts. This effort should even begin before the high speed rail bidding is tabled. I would leverage the demonstration results in the media and build a grassroots and lobbying organization around support for a Hyperloop.
Finally, I would seek advice from experts to craft a model bill with appropriate requirements for the bidding process.
http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/California_Proposition...
In fact, some of the highest resistance to the high-speed rail project that would run from L.A. to the Bay Area comes from Angelenos, according to new data released over the weekend by the USC Dornsife / Los Angeles Times Poll:
About 56 percent of would-be voters in L.A. County would say no to the train if allowed to vote on it again; 37 percent would be in favor. In San Francisco the train would win 47-45.
About 66 percent of Central Valley voters were opposed to the train, which would run through their farm region.
Statewide, if a re-vote on the train were allowed, 59 percent of would-be voters would say no; only 33 percent would give reaffirm it.
About 55 percent of statewide voters said they'd be down for a re-vote.
The article later goes on to state:
The biggest problem for this train is timing -- California is facing another crushing budget deficit and a stalling economic recovery. Dan Schnur, director of the poll:
Californians aren't necessarily against the idea of high-speed rail. But they don't want to spend all that money right now, and they don't trust the state to make the trains run on time.[1] http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2012/06/california_bullet...
> If you don't want to be searched at the train station, you have the freedom to not ride the train.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-23677205
I'm sure there some contingency has been thought of, unfortunately it's just the world we live in these days :(
Most likely safer than a train.
I responded to concern over the Hyperloop shutting down for hours whilst the damage is repaired.
And, if someone fired a few pot shots into a taxing A380 at LAX, I have to imagine that the whole place would be shut down for a few hours.
As mhandley noted, Hyperloop might be more susceptible, as the concern is more like your airplane flying an inch off the ground and hitting a stationary large brick.
...which reminds me of an old analogy: Back when large-capacity (ooh! 10MB!) hard drives were becoming common, I recall hearing the comparison that the read head was akin to a 747 traveling Mach 3 just 1 inch off the ground. Perhaps Elon wondered how this might work in real life, and so came up with Hyperloop.
Of course, if any damage occurred on the ground, this would be a non-issue entirely as the aircraft wouldn't be pressurized at all.
Remember a big part of TSA isn't to protect the people on the planes, but to protect other people from the planes themselves. It's pretty hard to weaponize a vehicle that's stuck inside a tube or on rails.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/magazine/14Train-t.html?pa...
407/km² England
256/km² UK
93/km² California
32/km² USABut building one across the coastal part of California? Or across the NE United States? Why yes, that does make sense, and why yes, it is warranted by the densities in those areas. The fact that the U.S. also owns Alaska doesn't really matter. No one is arguing Alaska needs a high-speed rail network.
Build fast trains connecting all the red areas:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ae/Californi...
Repeat for suitable other areas across the U.S.
The California coastal cities (and connecting areas) are still pretty sparse, comparatively. And the marquee High Speed Rail project takes a big inland detour to the smaller interior cities, for political reasons. If ever finished, that will hurt its price/time attractiveness compared to flying.
You'll notice that Elon Musk's plan for the Hyperloop includes an option for shooting automobiles through the tubes. That's because the mass transit within the cities on that coast is shit.
Inter-city mass transit only makes sense once you've solved intra-city mass transit. Unless you really, really love hanging out within a few city blocks of an inter-city train station, you need to have a convenient, desirable mass transit system waiting for you in the city you're going to. If you're linking Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and DC, you're liking the best mass transit system in America with four other pretty good transit systems. Cutting Boston to DC from 6.5 hours to 90 minutes is definitely worth doing.
As someone who uses only mass transit, I think that's untrue.
Even in Oklahoma City, where only ~1% of people commute via mass transit, there are still thousands of people who can live happily without a car because mass transit serves them fine. That does not mean that Oklahoma City has a great transit system.
http://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2012/07/10/north...
I wonder. It's easier to find low cost airfares to Las Vegas than other cities. A conduit to Las Vegas from the populated west coast might be interesting to some.
And here you can travel from most parts of Melbourne to most parts of Sydney with just two train changes. One at a Melbourne hub to the interstate trains and one at Sydney to the local system.
Even so, we feel our train systems suck too.
Unless you can take a train into the center of Australia, in which case I apologize.
The only hope would be that the anti-rail side could point to the growth of projections as either incompetence or out of control budgeting, which could both sway the vote. But I think if you go back to 2008 and say, "This will cost $100 billion," the vote would be the same.
Edit: correction from dragonwriter, via wikipedia [1]:
"The cost of the initial San Francisco-to-Anaheim segment was originally estimated by the CHSRA to be $33 billion (2008) / $35.2 billion (2013), but a revised business plan released in November 2011 by the CHSRA put the cost at $65.4 billion (2010) / $68.9 billion (2013) / $98.5 billion (YOE). The latest plan has revised the costs down to $53.4 billion (2011) / $54.5 billion (2013) / $68.4 billion (YOE)."
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail#Fund...
you should check cost of highways in Moscow - $300M/mile. Hint - it isn't about terrain :)
Though it's somewhat difficult to separate out the 42km of new tunnels (expensive) and a whole bunch of new stations (expensive) including a whole bunch of revamped ones in the centre of London (very expensive).
Another factor at play is that TGV lines are purpose built for high-speed traffic (curve radius, climb rate, ...) while for example in Germany they are mostly shared. That makes the single TGV track cheaper, but you still ahve to built another track for lets say freight. If want another track, that is.
But the cool thing ist that TGV don't stop at every single village that happens to be the hometown of some polititian.
But the U.S. delegates decision-making to agencies and courts in a way that this doesn't happen. California might take input for a long time before deciding on its plan, but its final plan is still not final. Anyone can sue it for many different reasons. Maybe it violates the federal Clean Air Act, maybe it violates property rights, maybe something else. The decision is never final until every challenge to an agency or court is decided, which massively adds to uncertainty and costs.
$6.4 trillion in total government expenditures.
Largest welfare and entitlement programs.
Nearly 15% U6 unemployment. Collapsing labor force. Falling real incomes. 15% on food stamps. Massive fiscal mismanagement in every respect. Endless QE just to fund the government. 0% interest rates just to reach 1% GDP growth. Healthcare is clearly moving toward a completely socialized approach over time and completely away from any free market solution. Taxes are extremely high, between federal and state; typically higher than supposedly socialist European countries. America also has more economic regulations on the books than any other country (and that's rapidly expanding). The largest land owner in America is the government, by a drastic margin. Half of all mortgages are held by the government. And on and on.
Doesn't get any more old European Socialist than what America is today. It would be fiscally impossible to go any further.
We'll try.
And as I said in above comment, the $9.95 billion was for the initial bond issuance. The estimate on the ballot was $40 billion versus the current estimate of between $98.5 billion and $118 billion.
The estimate from the current Business Plan is $68.4 billion, not "between $98.5 and $118 billion."
How about large scale funding of science and technology is an "engine of innovation", whatever that term means.
On top of that, the government used to take such risks in unproven technologies, underlined by tolerating the non-trivial odds of spectacular lethal failure...but that was decades ago. Now it can't even make a bus door without plastering eighteen warning signs around it [1].
Exploratory spending is great when you have money to spare. We don't. Now we have to rely on Elon Musk et al to pursue outlier projects - and they only reason they can is because of the big literal payoff if it works.
[1] - Have you counted 'em? I have. 18.
If California ditches its HSR plans for hyperloop today and ends up with a 700 km/h line running in 30 years' time, busiest lines in Japan and China will have been upgraded to maglev or another 500+ km/h technology and they would have had 300+ km/h technology for the interim 30 years. Meanwhile California would have had what, driverless car trains on freeways going 200 km/h 5 years from now?
... which closed a few years ago :(
The Republicans haven't yet adapted to the people of the State taking away their ability to roadblock budgets from the minority, which is a crutch they'd come to rely on to avoid dealing with the difficulty of trying to build a minimum winning coalition in CA while at the same time toeing the line of the national party.
I'd be surprised though if they haven't started returning to being an effective opposition by the 2014 elections.
Not to mention safety. Nobody is going to just trust Musk to say it's safe. There will be a decade of trials to test it before it even gets green light approval for a small practically useable section.
magic response: "of course we may be wrong, we'll look into this immediately." and then they decide to build it.
likely answer: praise, perhaps even an evaluation, then disregard as unrealistic a year from now.
why would "big government" ignore this idea? fairly simple: risky and unproven, for a politician, in a career where risk is not related to upside; and probably more important is the ability to control $70bn in spending to private citizens and contractors - far more valuable to their careers (leading to donations and influence) than spending a smaller amount (a mere $7bn) on fewer contractors. For the most part, the hyperloop contractors would not be the same guys who have been donating to politicians for the past decade in support of the train.
so yes, big government and the natural corruption of a large budget (donations->spending with favored constituents) will likely lead to the status quo - a ludicrously overpriced train.
as far as political repercussions, california is not a two party state any more, so there's no one to capitalize on the idiocy of the folks in power. i guess, we reap what we sow.