Hyperloop 2

I came across another article today blasting the idea of hyperloop and doing so with terrible arguments. It was honestly painful to read. The article, if you can call it that, was written in a way that I can only call screaming at the reader, absolutely certain in itself that it was right. After getting past that, the article essentially came down to because high speed rail exists elsewhere in the world, that America should have only rail and get rid of as many cars as possible, and that Americans are either greedy, lazy, inefficient, or more likely, all three, because they don’t already have high speed rail, and that they should just fix that and be like the more enlightened Europeans and Asians with the electrified rail and dense cities.

If the California High-speed rail project is any indication, the cost overruns of building a national rail network will be enormous. The US Interstate Highway System measures in at 48,440 miles of road. The California rail project is intended to be a total of 800 miles when finished about 13 years from now in 2033, at an estimate cost of $77 billion ($96 million a mile). If the interstates were all replaced with high speed rail, the cost would be $4.6 trillion. That would still ignore massive swaths of the country.

Doing a direct comparison between high speed rail based on over two centuries of development and a 3-year-old prototype hyperloop test bed is obviously going to favor the rail. The hyperloop idea was pitched in a serious manner 7 years ago, though the idea has been in science function for quite some time. For steam-powered rail, the first full-scale steam engine was built in 1804 and traveled at an average speed on 2.4 miles per hour. Four years later, the speed of rail reached 15 miles per hour. Hyperloop’s first test with people reached 100 miles per hour.

Now, they are certainly entitled to their opinion and a platform to broadcast it to the world. However, more people will will take your opinion more seriously if you don’t insult them and their intelligence when you disagree. My brain cells were screaming in pain at that article. And it was completely unnecessary. Every technology, hyperloop included, has valid drawbacks to it. How will it affect society? Will it help or hurt local economies? How will it affect urban sprawl? Logistics networks? Jobs like long-haul trucking?

I think the people working on hyperloop are doing just fine.

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