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'Elon Musk's Hyperloop Is Doomed For the Worst Reason' (bloomberg.com)
schwit1 quotes a Bloomberg column by Virginia Postrel:
What makes Musk's Hyperloop plan seem like fantasy isn't the high-tech part. Shooting passengers along at more than 700 miles per hour seems simple -- engineers pushed 200 miles-per-hour in a test this week -- compared to building a tunnel from New York to Washington. And even digging that enormously long tunnel -- twice as long as the longest currently in existence -- seems straightforward compared to navigating the necessary regulatory approvals... The eye-rolling comes less from the technical challenges than from the bureaucratic ones.
With his premature declaration, Musk is doing public debate a favor. He's reminding us of what the barriers to ambitious projects really are: not technology, not even money, but getting permission to try. "Permits harder than technology," Musk tweeted after talking with Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti about building a tunnel network. That's true for the public sector as well as the private... SpaceX and its commercial-spaceflight competitors can experiment because Congress and President Barack Obama agreed to protect them from Federal Aviation Administration standards. usk is betting that his salesmanship will have a similar effect on the ground. He's trying to get the public so excited that the political pressures to allow the Hyperloop to go forward become irresistible. He seems to believe that he can will the permission into being. If he succeeds, he'll upend not merely intercity transit but the bureaucratic process by which things get built. That would be a true science-fiction scenario.
With his premature declaration, Musk is doing public debate a favor. He's reminding us of what the barriers to ambitious projects really are: not technology, not even money, but getting permission to try. "Permits harder than technology," Musk tweeted after talking with Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti about building a tunnel network. That's true for the public sector as well as the private... SpaceX and its commercial-spaceflight competitors can experiment because Congress and President Barack Obama agreed to protect them from Federal Aviation Administration standards. usk is betting that his salesmanship will have a similar effect on the ground. He's trying to get the public so excited that the political pressures to allow the Hyperloop to go forward become irresistible. He seems to believe that he can will the permission into being. If he succeeds, he'll upend not merely intercity transit but the bureaucratic process by which things get built. That would be a true science-fiction scenario.
In the last century, a short-sighted if not outright evil power broker by the name of Robert Moses, never elected to any post, directly planned the transport system of New York city and the state around it, and vastly influenced the planning of other cities.
One of Mr. Moses' nasty feats was to specify that all of the parkway bridges be built so low that it would be impossible to run trains under them, even though many were built with broad center islands.
I grew up in one of the towns under his thumb. We literally had a 100-year-old railroad system that only went to one station for 3 large communities, with 100-year-old bridges, etc. No new train construction since New York's subways in the '30's and '40's, but lots of new roads for cars.
America's cities still suffer under the dead hand of Robert Moses and people like him, who actively wiped out our railroads, never considering the problems automobiles would bring.
Elon Musk's hyperloop is not the solution for this. The speed, confinement, and vacuum are obvious problems that make it more of a bomb than a train. But conventional high-speed rail transport is the solution.
Most americans never spend time in Europe and learn about really good trains. Try Switzerland and you won't understand why people even want cars.
Bruce Perens.
And that is just it. Europe and Asia have high-speed rail systems. They were really expensive. Don't you think alternatives were not looked at? Oh, wait, they were, for example the Transrapid. Turns out the alternatives are not commercially viable and are technologically problematic.
My take here is the Musk has some inkling that he will fail on the tech side and is preparing a smokescreen. And, I have to admit, it is an excellent smokescreen as getting the permits needed here may well be infeasible as well.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Why would you want to build another hoover dam today? California produces more than twice the power from the hoover dam from wind. 96 people died in the construction of the hoover dam.
It's almost as if technology changes adjust the cost/benefit of various projects, obsoleting once acceptable ideas.
To bring it back to the article: Digging vast tunnels under major metropolitan areas like LA, New York and DC without any oversight is ridiculous.
They didn't have wind turbines back when it was built. Why don't you use period-appropriate arguments. We are talking about regulatory hurdles preventing the creation of infrastructure which people complain about almost non-stop. My point is that we might be preventing the building of better infrastructure today because we are afraid of the environmental costs. What about the loss of benefit to society?
Why would you build another Hoover Dam if 96 people died building it? Because it's quite likely 150 people would die producing the same energy from wind.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...
If the goal is safe energy production in the USA then nuclear is at the top. Next comes, by a wide margin, solar and hydro. In fourth comes wind.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.