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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.