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The Smog To Fog Challenge: Settling the High-Speed Rail vs. Hyperloop Debate
waderoush writes "Elon Musk thinks California should kill its $68 billion high-speed rail project and build his $7.5 billion Hyperloop instead. It's a false choice. We should pursue all promising new options for efficient mass transit, and let the chips fall where they may; if it turns out after a few years that Musk's system is truly faster and cheaper, there will still be time to pull the plug on high-speed rail. But why not make things interesting? Today Xconomy proposes a competition in the grand tradition of the Longitude Prize, the Orteig Prize, and the X Prizes: the $10 billion Smog to Fog Challenge. The money, to be donated by big corporations, would go to the first organization that delivers a live human from Los Angeles to San Francisco, over a fixed ground route, in 3 hours or less. Such a prize would incentivize both publicly and privately funded innovation in high-speed transit — and show that we haven't lost the will to think big."
Indeed, in a world of increasing teleconferencing and telecommuting, you'd think the attraction of high-speed travel would be less pressing with each year that goes by.
Since 1993, the number of journeys by rail has gone up in the UK every year except 2008.
Better teleconferencing and better journey times means more business happens, which more than compensates for the people who no longer need to travel. A manufacturer likes to have their suppliers nearby. The distance "nearby" increases with better railways, and the number of potential suppliers the manufacturer is aware of increases with better telecoms.
Where to start...?
- Why should I accept what the Parent is saying if the Parent shows significant ignorance of the topic?
- Why should I give the Parent's armchair ramblings more credence than the 57-page write-up of one of the most innovative and successful entrepreneurs of recent years, which was produced with the help of some of the top engineers in the field?
- Why should I accept the Parent's arbitrary declaration that "the 7+ billion price-tag is way too low"?? (Would there be cost overruns? Almost certainly, but even at 2x the price, it's still a fraction of the projected cost of the proposed HSR line.)
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
It's neither going to be "high speed" nor actually in the cities that it is supposedly to linking.
To be fair, Musk's proposed Hyperloop isn't city center to city center either. The rental car or shuttle service is still required. I want to know more about many passengers the loop can carry and how much it would cost to ''terminate'' the route downtown.
It is the difference between practical and efficient mass transit and a $6 billion dollar thrill ride.
If the technology is all ready then why doesn't he build a test track out in the desert to prove it?
Because he is busy running Tesla and SpaceX. He just proposed the idea, it is not his duty to "prove it". If it is a good idea, it should be adopted regardless of who proposed it.
Personally, I think neither HS-Rail nor Hyperloop should be built. They are both decades away, and by that time we will have self-driving electric cars. It would be far cheaper to build a streamlined self-driving bus that can do 120MPH on existing road infrastructure. It could go from LA to SF in about three hours. That is "good enough" and would be about 1% of the cost. The other 99% of the price tag for rail could be used to pay down our 14 trillion dollar debt.
BART was the only chance, and when it wasn't extended many decades ago to encircle the Bay, the situation became irreparable.