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Re:Elon Musk’s Hyperloop Becomes Reality as Agreements Secur... by Turing_Machine on Monday June 08, 2015 @10:11AM (#9679145)
Looking at the French high speed rail system (which is the one we seem to hear the most about in the United States), the longest link I see is 106 km. Los Angeles to San Francisco is 544 km.

New York to Los Angeles is about 4,000 km. London to Moscow is only 2,500 km.

Edit: the point here is that Europeans, in general, have no conception of the distances involved in the U.S. transportation network. Passenger rail (high speed or otherwise) works well for relatively short distances in relatively densely populated regions. The trouble is that we don't have very many of those regions.

Edit 2: so you're moderating down arithmetic now? Awesome.

Re:Elon Musk’s Hyperloop Becomes Reality as Agreements Secur... by mikeash on Monday June 08, 2015 @10:43AM (#9679363)
I'm moderating down seriously misinformed posting.

I'm not sure what's worse, that you seriously think the longest high speed rail link in France is 106km, or that you think London to Moscow is reasonably compared to New York to Los Angeles. Why would you start from a city that's nowhere near the edge of the continent in question? The NYC->LA analog would be something like Lisbon to Moscow which, guess what! Is almost exactly the same distance.

Re:Elon Musk’s Hyperloop Becomes Reality as Agreements Secur... by seszett on Monday June 08, 2015 @10:37AM (#9679323)
Where are you looking for these data? The longest link in France is probably Brussels-Montpellier, which is about 850 km. Paris-Nice might be longer than that, though it's very slow after Marseille.

There used to be a slow Quimper-Vintimille journey that was more than 1000 km, but it's been significantly shortened since then.

Your numbers show you have no conception of the distances involved in Europe. Thinking that the longest train link in France, a country that's 1000 km wide and 1000 km high, is 100 km long is completely ridiculous.

Re:Elon Musk’s Hyperloop Becomes Reality as Agreements Secur... by IanCal on Monday June 08, 2015 @10:50AM (#9679413)
> Thinking that the longest train link in France, a country that's 1000 km wide and 1000 km high, is 100 km long is completely ridiculous.

They do specifically mention "high speed" train lines.

Re:Elon Musk’s Hyperloop Becomes Reality as Agreements Secur... by seszett on Monday June 08, 2015 @10:55AM (#9679449)
Well I'm talking about high speed train lines, I only included Quimper-Vintimille for comparison.

Even if you somehow counted only >300km/h as high-speed, then the LGV Est is a bit more than 300 km long and rated at 320 km/h. I suspect a 100 km-long high-speed line would not even be competitive against cars, except maybe in dense urban areas where car traffic is often slow.

Re:Elon Musk’s Hyperloop Becomes Reality as Agreements Secur... by mikeash on Monday June 08, 2015 @10:52AM (#9679430)
So what? France has an extensive high-speed rail network which even a cursory glance would reveal if one wasn't already aware.
Re:Elon Musk’s Hyperloop Becomes Reality as Agreements Secur... by IanCal on Monday June 08, 2015 @11:01AM (#9679509)
People seemed to be talking rather angrily at each other without actually reading what they said.

> So what?

Call me old fashioned, but I think it's worth responding to what's actually been said.

Re:Elon Musk’s Hyperloop Becomes Reality as Agreements Secur... by mikeash on Monday June 08, 2015 @11:07AM (#9679548)
What was said up there was that the longest high-speed rail link in France is 106km long. This is obviously absurd and wrong, which even the most cursory investigation would reveal.

What did I fail to read, exactly? Is it that seszett didn't explicitly specify "high speed" in that one sentence? As I said in my reply, so what? The overall point, that the 106km figure is ridiculous, stands regardless.

Re:Elon Musk’s Hyperloop Becomes Reality as Agreements Secur... by edu on Monday June 08, 2015 @10:46AM (#9679379)
You can also already do Madrid - Paris by high speed train, in 6:25. Which is 1270km.

http://www.renfe.com/viajeros/larga_distancia/productos/AVEF... (spanish)

Re:Elon Musk’s Hyperloop Becomes Reality as Agreements Secur... by gutnor on Monday June 08, 2015 @10:50AM (#9679415)
Not exactly sure why the downvotes, but I guess maybe it has to do about offtopic comparisons.

Hyperloop is designed for medium distances transportation like between 300 and 1000. Over that, it probably make no sense against air travel.

So Europe is kind of the perfect place for hyperloop, and probably the reason why its traditional tech competitor, the high speed train, is successful. That's also the reason of my comment - if hyperloop can deliver cheaper, faster to build and plain faster connection for medium distance travel that could revolutionize transport in Europe even more than for the US.

EDIT: as another reader has noted, I missed the "106" km link. I suppose you mean 1060 or something ?

Re:Elon Musk’s Hyperloop Becomes Reality as Agreements Secur... by Cthulhu_ on Monday June 08, 2015 @10:53AM (#9679441)
Would the Russian Trans-Siberian line compare? Almost 10.000 kilometers in length, takes eight days to complete it (because it's got branches, isn't a high-speed rail, etc). Longest train line is Kiev - Vladivostok at 11.000 kilometers.

I'd say nobody has any conception of distances involved in the really big countries.