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Comment by mozumder | Hacker News Reader

What's good about Hyperloop? It's more expensive compared to rail.

HSR is more of a more efficient airplane - spacious & can walk around & get a drink.

I'm actually very skeptical about Hyperloop, but it seemed a good way of getting my point across. USA doesn't build stuff not because of technological viability but purely for political reasons.

"purely" is pretty strong. I give you the population density of Earth per ㎢:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_density#/media/File...

(Or if you prefer something more recent, have a look at: http://www.newgeography.com/content/002808-world-urban-areas...)

Pretty obvious which areas are ripe for HSR. Except for the mid-Atlantic corridor and arguably coastal California, nothing in the US really is.

It's the same thing when people go abroad then come back and complain how backwards cell phone service is here. People really don't appreciate how underpopulated the U.S. is relative to the rest of the world. (Conversely, it's also why we could accommodate practically an unlimited # of refugees compared to Europe, if we really cared to.)

I'm sorry but the density argument doesn't cut it. It's 30-100x as expensive to build rail through dense areas as it would be through farmland like I5. Most of the in between places are crazily cheaper.

It's not about cost. Long rails aren't that expensive. The problem is that a train running through Texas is useless unless you want to get to a specific city that the tracks actually pass through. Anywhere else could be hours of driving from the station and there isn't any infrastructure for that. A 4 hour cab/Uber ride is way too expensive.

Even a train that drops you off in the middle of Los Angeles could leave you many hours from the actual place in Los Angeles you want to be.

> The problem is that a train running through Texas is useless unless you want to get to a specific city that the tracks actually pass through.

This argument ignores the new and existing population clusters that form and grow along a transportation link. You only have to look at interstate highway system and how new population clusters formed and existing clusters grew along the links once interstate hwy were built. Just reviewing the I-35, I-10 in Texas will show you that. Same can be seen with local subways and light rails systems. The clusters near stations grow faster than rest of the city.

So basically the reason we don't bother with more HSR is because all of our large cities are unplanned sprawling messes and the rest of our transportation infrastructure is almost just as bad as our HSR.

LA is not such a great example anymore because metro/metrolink/flyaway + uber can take you anywhere you want to go from Union Station these days cheaply, sometimes quickly.

I wouldn't say cheaply or even that easily. If I have to get off a train (whatever that cost), catch a fly-away bus ($8 both ways), then get an uber ($50+ just to Burbank 12m away), it's going to be very expensive and very slow assuming the stars don't align perfectly.

We already have an antique low speed rail network that covers most of the US population centers. That makes it even cheaper to upgrade to high speed rail, since most of the land has been bought.

Also, when people in the US say "high speed rail", they usually seem to mean 180mph. That does not qualify as high speed rail overseas.

Upgrading the current low speed system to medium speed 180mph rail would mean that taking the train would actually be faster than driving (and for short air routes, faster than airport+flying).

My guess is that many existing routes would then become financially viable.

Many of the existing freight rail corridors are twisty and not designed in a way that works for high-speed rail at all (unless you buy land anyways to straighten out the more extreme curves) [1]. They might work for conventional passenger rail if you could get the freight railroads to play nice and do better maintenance on the tracks.

[1]: typical example -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_Curve_(Pennsylvania)

[2]: For a detailed example of what's possible & what isn't with existing corridors, you can look at this independent engineer's study of how to upgrade a rail route through Northern California: http://zierke.com/shasta_route/

Unfortunately majority of existing rail lines and nearby lands are owned by freight rail companies. So repurposing them for HSR or passenger transport is an uphill battle. The areas where freight rail lines are shared with passenger traffic, freight gets priority making passenger trains unreliable, excessive delays and unattractive.

Expense is only half of the problem. The other half is utility. There is virtually zero utility for building high-speed rail through the central US.

Zero utility? Chicago, Minneapolis, Toronto, and Detroit are are among the most populated and most economically powerful cities in North America. Connecting them and other cities on and around the great lakes with high speed rail would provide massive economic opportunity.

If US wants to revitalize mid-America, it has to build HSR through mid-America. The history of interstate highway system is good primer on it. Otherwise mid-America will empty out with time.

Shouldn't it? Why would anyone who isn't a farmer actually want to live there?

I disagree with you. Keeping mid-America populated is in long term interest of US. Mid-America is one of the most fertile landmass in the world. To farm this land, you need farmers and farm-hands. The farmers/farmhands need a support structure/community that is currently degrading as people move towards costs. Farmers are at the bottom of the totem pole in spouse selection and family formation. Nobody wants to move where farmers are and geographic area beyond reasonable driving distance inaccessible to farming communities. This leads to incest and inbreeding and all other ills that isolated communities experience. One solution, beyond farming automation, is to widen the geographical area accessible to farmers and their support structure. HSR can easily double or triple the distance covered currently by roads. HSR will bring distant communities in mid-America together.

People aren't moving out of the midwest because there aren't trains. They're moving out because there is no culture, limited natural recreation, etc. Trains aren't going to keep them there, and the low population density means the idea makes even less sense.

One event is rarely a driving force of change, it is always confluence of events that cause change. Lack of train is not root cause, it is a part of potential solutions to what ails the region. US would never had westward migration if population density was the driving force for movement. You want to populate an area, make it accessible and attractive.

> You want to populate an area, make it accessible and attractive.

You mean "start a gold rush".

Still, the areas of the USA as dense as Europe should have the same HSR networks that Europe has.

Nobody is traveling from Paris to Rome by high speed train, flying is cheaper and faster. But Paris to Lyon, Lyon to Milan and Milan to Rome, train wins. Why not in the USA?

This is exactly the point that keeps getting overlooked. Traveling from DC to Philly, or Philly to NYC, should take 45 minutes or an hour, the same way traveling from Beijing to Tianjin or Shanghai to Hangzhou takes 45 minutes or an hour. HSR isn't for connecting regions to one another. Air already does that well. HSR is for drawing cities within a region closer to one another.

The distance between major cities (the US has more than 50 cities with at least a million people alone) in many parts of the US is the distance between Paris and Rome, and they are pretty evenly distributed across the continent so you need mesh connectivity. In dense corridors that are closer together, they do use trains. The western half of the US is also extremely mountainous, which makes it a little more challenging to install a HSR mesh with many links approaching a thousand kilometers even though that is where some of the country's biggest cities are. Most of those links will never be economically justifiable given the amount of traffic that goes over them.

Because of the distances involved, air travel is much more economical in much of the US. Almost all of my trips to random cities in the US are at least a thousand kilometers; I think there is only one major city within a thousand kilometers, and that is connected by rail which people use.

I don't think that argument holds water when it comes to rail.

High density population centers separated by low density farmland and open space should be nearly ideal for high speed rail. There are huge swaths of land where there's nothing to tear down, there are fewer property owners to deal with, and there are usually fewer obstacles to route around.

> HSR is more of a more efficient airplane - spacious & can walk around & get a drink.

Much as I love HSR and curse its absence when in the USA the economics are not quite as clear. Air routes are more flexible than rail routes.

Of course that flexibility isn't necessarily desired by all; the stations on a rail network provide hysteresis which can keep otherwise unprofitable cities alive and even vibrant. New York beat out Boston because the Hudson was more navigable than the Charles, Boston Harbor's benefits notwithstanding. Chicago grew because it was at a confluence (literally!) of cheap transshipment points near farmland. Both cities do well even though their original reasons for existing are lost (neither are major freight hubs but have a lot of other transit links).

And rail, even underground rail, can be abandoned.

> Air routes are more flexible than rail routes.

Except for having to build an, uh, entire airport.

Very much true, but doesn't get at my point.

In fact airports can be / often are built far from urban areas where land is cheaper and space is available not just for the runways and terminals but parking, cargo etc. While you want rail terminals to be in densely connected locations which are more expensive and more difficult to network to.

But my point is that you can relatively easily fly from one airport to many others. For example, the under-construction California HSR goes from LA through Bakersfield in the Central Valley up to SF and then Sacramento. If Fresno in the Central Valley grew, you could expand its commuter airport and then it would be directly linked by air to Burbank, San Jose, San Franciso etc as well as points outside the state. While the cost of adding an HSR terminal in Fresno could be large, especially if the rail doesn't run nearby (as it happens a terminal appears to be planned in Fresno, but the point remains).

I'm still a big supporter of HSR but I recognize the trade offs.

Building an airport is only about 100 times cheaper than building a rail line.

Assuming that Hyperloop works at scale, what's good about it is the sheer speed, vastly eclipsing that of current high-speed rail. It could, theoretically, replace all existing flights between same-landmass cities with faster, cheaper, more fuel-efficient transport.

Of course, the technology itself is still way more unproven than that of high-speed rail, but that is its promise at least.

The principal advantage of a train before airplane for me is that boarding a plane is a hour or so, while boarding a train is 5–10 minutes. Also, you can have a train much closer to the city (or right in the middle of it) than an airport. If hyperloop loses these advantages, I'd bet on airplanes.

Don't forget that on a plane you're literally packed like sardines and can only get up and move maybe once or twice. Flying is pretty miserable tbh.

I think the great thing that might have come out of hyper loop is new solutions to problems that were never existed before. Like with any never built before project there would have been a ton of cool new little innovations that would never been possible otherwise but would naturally come along the way during hyperloop assembly. To start thinking outside the box you should start doing something that nobody else tried to do before.

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