In many HN publications the label "In USA" is applicable, the equivalent of "In mice" for many medical studies :)
Imagine being able to destroy the idea of constructing rail in a few paragraphs of a tiny blog and then choosing to work on hyperloop, which has all the problems mentioned about rail but also throws in creating and maintaining a vacuum pipe in addition.
Hyperloop is a marketing project which is based on the assumption that a few PR drones can be lowder than anyone with any cursory knowledge on transportation engineering.
The same goes for the boring company, where the company tries very hard to pretend they invented digging holes in the ground while using COTS tunnelers.
The article says much less about rail at 200kph (125mph). Which might serve to replace airplanes. Especially once CO2 externalities are priced in.
Top speed means close to nothing, and it's one of the reason why the definition of high speed rail is not tied to top speed.
Great Britain has a notorious high speed railway corridor whose top speed is only around 160mph, and the reason is that the railway line was designed with the express purpose of preserving a cruise speed close to the top speed of the trains available at the time.
It's absurd to talk about high speed railway if it was a drag race. The main challenge in high speed railway is making it possible for high speed trains to actually travel at speeds that high-speed trains can already reach. Lines need to overcome constraints imposed by speed, geography and infrastructure costs, and tradeoffs often lead solutions to not match optimal layouts to reach top speeds.
Also, whenever a train needs to serve an intermediate station, they need to spend a great deal of time decelerating, stop at the station to serve passengers, and accelerate again. Sometimes it's feasible for infrastructure operators to spend money on a sideline to skip that station, but on some cases that's simply not realistic. Take for example Paris-Amsterdam and Paris-Cologne, which have to pass through Brussels and where the bulk of the train trip is spent passing through the inner city of Brussels alone where the top speed is 20km/h.
That's like claiming they rode taxis a lot and has owned a car, and somehow that makes them an authority on public transportation.
As to the expertise, he seems unseasoned but in command of a lot of facts. Which is why I think the conclusion is wrong despite the post being interesting and informative. Unfortunately, my fellow rail enthusiasts think I’m against them because I read the article and ignored the headline and first and last few sentences. :)