What I don't fully understand is how this is any better than conventional HSR. What are the advantages? Cost, but that remains to be seen. Absolute speed, which yes, but where are the time estimates from Hayward to the Transbay Terminal in SF, and from Sylmar to Union Station in LA?
This whole thing reads to me as purest wind.
EDIT: At least on a conventional train, I can ride from somewhere that's not at one of the endpoints to somewhere else that isn't; and, of course, I can go to the bathroom.
It's interesting how, in terms of door-to-door transit time, the extreme speed of the Musk plan is a liability; it basically ensures the system can't connect city centers.
I read a post last week that compared the situation to the Shinkansen, which was an expensive political show project until they figured out how to get it to population centers.
The Shinkansen has transported more than 10 billion passengers. I'd love to have a few more expensive political show projects like that.
If your point is they started off with areas they still needed to work out like connection to population centers, then I think you're on the wrong site: every startup we discuss pivots in one way or another to overcome challenges, that's an accepted part of developing something useful. If you don't try you're never going to get to a point when you can find a solution to problems you don't know exist yet.
If there was a hyperloop between the edges of SF and LA, how many minutes do you think it would take before someone worked out how to get passengers the short distance from the station to the city center?
You missed my point, which wasn't that Shinkansen was bad. It's like you read up to the first command and stopped.
On your other point: how much incentive is there to get people from SF to Mountain View faster? HUGE incentive, is the answer to that question. What's the answer right now? 101 and 280, or a long slow train ride.
Aaron Patzer went into quite a bit of detail a year or two ago with a commuter medium speed Maglev concept. He since ditched it to focus on self driving cars because he felt they were more viable.
There's a fairly sizable difference in agility between a small web startup and a massive, political infrastructure projects. Approaching the latter as if the lessons learned from the former can be naïvely applied is, well, naïve. Move fast break things is cool and all when the stakes are low; when the stakes are high it is irresponsible at best.
EDIT: Also, a Hyperloop that terminated where the PDF proposes just wouldn't -- and probably shouldn't -- get built.
"Also, a Hyperloop that terminated where the PDF proposes just wouldn't -- and probably shouldn't -- get built."
I'm sure we'll see it in built in China in a few years time then. No doubt it will be plagued with problems, maybe a few deaths. It'll be labeled a white elephant for a few years. But in 25 years time when everyone in China is zipping about at over 1000km/h and people in SF and stuck in traffic shouting about the good old days and refusing to build anything new because good isn't perfect, you'll be lamenting the lack.
I know it's sometimes easy to forget, but technology is not now and has not ever been destiny. Certainly a better people mover will get built, because it's a problem that isn't anywhere near a local maximum. Maybe something like the Hyperloop will be the solution to some small subset of the people moving problem. Maybe the Chinese will take this baton and run with it.
But I doubt it. And in any event, the idea that we should build a toy project because it offers some improvements to some parts of a current problem for some small number of people is a perfectly defensible one -- on Hacker News. As an actual spending cash sort of idea, it's fairy tale nonsense. You can see how seriously Musk takes it by how serious the proposal actually is w/r/t nuts and bolts -- not at all.
Cars don't have bathrooms -- that is correct. However, cars can take unscheduled stops without triggering an emergency response.
And pitching this fluff as SF -> LA without tackling the last mile -- perhaps the hardest part -- is all a reasonable person needs to know to know it's just waffle.
This whole thing reads to me as purest wind.
EDIT: At least on a conventional train, I can ride from somewhere that's not at one of the endpoints to somewhere else that isn't; and, of course, I can go to the bathroom.