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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."
between hyperloop and high speed rail is a false race. YES we need fast trains to move people. What we need MORE is an electrified rail grid to move our stuff around. Most trains run off diesel. The age of cheap oil has been over for quite a while now. We need to shift our infrastructure away from fossil fuels, sector by sector. Moving ALL mass transport (cargo or live, vacuum tube or rail) to electric is of paramount importance, and it needs to start happening now, this way when oil started getting really expensive and scarce in the coming decades, we will be able to transport food and goods. What I think we should see is someone haul 100 boxcars of food from California's central valley to New York City using ONLY electrical engines, no diesel. That would be a landmark moment in history and a real beacon of hope for a future to technical civilisation.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Because at the end of the day, human beings are social creatures where a handshake in person still means something in business.
Life is not for the lazy.
Especially California's high speed plan, which, at this point, is just a pay off to special interests and unions. It's neither going to be "high speed" nor actually in the cities that it is supposedly to linking. Basically, we're going to pay 68 billion dollars for a regular train system that is going to be slower and less convenient than just about anything else available now.
Yes, the actual high speed rail technology is a concept that's been done before - however, stomping over all of that privately owned land between LA and SF is a political concept that's completely infeasible at this point in time.
Although Elon Musk is using a bunch of existing technology in new ways, his plan is politically feasible - and it's not like we would just start building the Hyperloop without doing a proof-of-concept first. If it turns out that the idea doesn't scale, we'd do something else.
If you waste money to procure a handshake, you shouldnt be in business.
If you don't understand the true value of a real face to face handshake is at times immeasurable, you DEFINITELY should not be in business.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I tried telecommuting to Disney World, but it just wasn't the same. Your assumption that the only reason people have to travel someplace is to show up for a job, let alone one that can be done with tele* is at best a grossly invalid assumption. Just limiting the scope to business use we have at a bare minimum off the top of my head: Sales people; Field Engineers; CEOs. The list of people who cannot properly do their job by telecommuting is pretty long.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
The alternative to building California's HSR is spending $38.6 to $41.0 billion on 115 new airport gates and 4 new runways, plus $119.0 to $145.5 billion building 4,295 to 4,652 new lane-miles of highway, all just to move the same number of people as $98.1 billion spent on HSR.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.