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Comment by TOMDM | Hacker News Reader

Hyperloop wasn't a failure at all, it did exactly what it was meant to; kill off attempts to get more railway projects started in California.

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This take on the Hyperloop thing is totally trumped-up.

There is no evidence it was meant to kill off new railway projects, nor any evidence that it did.

Elon was just paraphrased in a book about how he thought the particular California HSR project was a boondoggle (a view shared by many) and he published an idea for how to do it better.

Hyperloop wasn't an idea for "how to do it better" because Hyperloop cannot do "it" at all. The nameplate capacity of Hyperloop, granting all of Musk's fantasy parameters, is in the low thousands of passengers per day. High speed rail can land a thousand people every minute.

Whether you think the idea is good is irrelevant to my point.

I don't agree. The whole Hyperloop thing was not an alternative implementation it was a pitch for a completely different society altogether. Instead of moving everyone in California at a reasonable price, let's have a giant infrastructure that is at least as large and disruptive as rail but only serves a tiny slice of the ultra-rich, everyone else has to take a car.

It wasn't "how to do it better" it was an attempt to reframe the entire question of whether medium-distance mass transportation should exist.

I don’t know where you’re getting this from. The idea has nothing to do with only serving “a tiny slice of the ultra rich”. You’re adding all this dramatic extra stuff about society and reframing.

Isn't there a pretty solid argument to be made that hyperloop (and especially what Boring Company is actually building) is so dumb that it shouldn't seriously be treated as a good faith solution and other motivations should be considered?

Nit pick: About Japan's busiest high-speed rail line (Tokaido Shinkansen), Wiki says:

    At peak times, the line carries up to 16 trains per hour in each direction with 16 cars each (1,323-seat capacity and occasionally additional standing passengers) with a minimum headway of three minutes between trains.

Not exactly "a thousand people every minute", but I agree with the jist of your post. High speed rail has orders of magnitude higher capacity.

Well, the "high speed" part is largely irrelevant to the throughput. In the next 15 minutes, 25 trains will arrive at Zürich HB.

Excellent point. Shinjuku station in Tokyo is the busiest train station in the world by passengers, and it does not have high speed rail ("shinkansen").

Elon had explicitly stated in interviews himself the Hyperloops intentions stated above

No he didn’t, but most people think he did!

Here's an interview from the time. It doesn't support your claim. I don't know of others.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_OffnEl-kQA

As far as I know, the origin of this claim comes from

https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1167410460125097990/pho...

California does a fine job killing railway projects all by itself. It doesn't need Elon Musk.

Mind sharing your evidence that that was Hyperloop's intended effect?

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