Comment by sgtfrankieboy
3 years ago
Hyperloop is crap, just go with highspeed trains. They get the job done in city corridors.
But you can't have a train stop in front of your house... Nor can you build massive tubes everywhere in place of cheap roads.
Walking, Bikes, Busses, Metros, Trains, Cars, Planes. They all have a place in how we transport, right now the distribution between them is just out of whack.
For anything except sparsely populated rural areas, a train gets you to the city/town, and a mix of public transport + e-bike/e-scooter gets you to your final destination. This is potentially quicker, and much much more efficient than lugging 2-ton capsules around and needing hundreds of thousands of square km of land to keep the things parked 95% of the time.
Hyperloop is still cool because you could have really fast transit over large areas. Mass transit across cities is still quite slow. High speed trains are fine but just not fast enough. Imagine a large city where you could get from one side to the other in only a few minutes.
Musk coined Hyperloop as a distraction to high speed rail. He wanted people to buy Teslas instead of thinking about high speed rail in California. A lot of people fell for his con.
It is a shame that other partial vacuum systems are not being developed. They seem like a useful concept, fast, less air resistance means less energy use. Surely a technology you'd want to have in a future city.
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I gather that you never used public transport in Tokyo.
If you chose to build a train with only two stops, yes you could get from one side to the other in only a few minutes. That would have its downsides, like the station not being near your destination, which is why it's rarely done. You would also need a very straight track, which means lots of space for points (places where trains separate from the route onto platforms). This constraint is also shared by Hyperloop.
Tunnels might now be cheaper to build than roads just because of land rights. It's very difficult/impossible to acquire the property rights to build a new roads/rail lines nowadays.