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Comment by KerrAvon | Hacker News Reader

There is technology for fast rapid mass transit: high-speed rail. Technology was never the issue here. Political will to fund, approve right-of-way, and build it was always the problem, and Musk never even tried to address that part.

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When folks suggest a new "changes everything" way to go fast, always remember that we used to run NY to Chicago at 120 MPH on steam power and bolted rails.

You're basically crossing a continental divide on that route and the time is similar to what it was a 100 years ago--which is about 10x what flying takes. (And costs a lot more today than flying.)

Maybe someone should just buy up some lines and run steam at 120 MPH again.

If it burned natural gas it probably wouldn’t even be that polluting and it would rock hard.

there's a research institute in minnesota that is improving the efficiency of steam engines and manufacturing wood "biocoal" (charcoal) for fuel.

https://csrail.org/

That link only works as http for me, not https. Interesting project though.

Huh, HTTPS works at home and work for me.

This is the cyberpunk dystopian future I signed up for :P

I mean, we can now do that run at Mach 0.9 in 400 ton aluminum behemoths for the price of a nice dinner, so you know, things have changed

Your nice dinner and my nice dinner must be pretty different :P I was of course speaking to rail travel, which yeah, is not much cheaper anymore, and far less time efficient.

Hyperloop would have been built on pylons, theoretically mitigating the impact of a line cutting across farms or cities, which in the case of CAHSR has caused immeasurable political problems.

I suspect the actual technology within the tube was never Musk's initial concern. Similar to his other industrial endeavors, I think the calculus with Hyperloop had more to do with the economics of being able to manufacture pylons and tube segments offsite for quick assembly onsite, leveraging factory production and avoiding as much as possible site-specific costs such as land grading. And presumably he had in mind repurposing SpaceX technology for welding rocket bodies. Given a cost-effective way to build and put these tubes into place, and some ballpark figures on their characteristics--e.g. how much of a pressure difference they could reliably keep without inflating production costs--figuring out how to actually use them was just an engineering problem, which he then took a first crack at to satisfy himself the overall concept might be feasible.

It’s a very expensive and very fragile piece of infrastructure that would be hard to maintain in the best of circumstances. It would be easily sabotaged by those seeking to do harm which would make it even more egregiously expensive to defend.

High speed rail is often built along viaducts too - and it's expensive. There's no way it's cheaper to build a vacuum chamber on pylons than some rails...

In a country with long distances, a well-developed interstate highway system, and a well-developed air transport system. There is a decent rail system in the Northeast and between some other city pairs. But there isn't and shouldn't be the political will to develop rail transport options that don't outcompete those other options especially with electric/autonomous driving becoming an increasing option over the coming decades.

Why would electric car improve our traffic situation? They're just more efficient than ICE cars. Maybe it will lead to smaller vehicles, but we could have used motorcycles instead.

So you have self driving cars, which will probably improve traffic flow, but it's fundamentally limited by geometry. If people takes more car trips, this will reverse some if not all the benefit of self driving cars.

Traffic issues are mostly intra-city--not inter-city. I'm not sure anyone is really arguing against commuter rail (however bad it is in many cities). But about inter-city rail in many locations.

Traffic issue is clogging up my suburban neighborhood during rush hour. So I think of it as distinction without a difference.

That is almost all traffic from your city

I live in the Northeast, what "decent rail system" are you talking about?

Acela takes 3h44m from Boston to New York. Not much faster than the scheduled buses (4h15m) and comparable to driving the distance in your own car (3h55m if you stick to the speed limits)

I hate driving into Manhattan.

I'd much rather take rail relative to the alternatives even if it takes longer and maybe costs more (especially leaving aside parking). And many others do as well even if it would be faster to drive.

And generally Manhattan is pretty walkable once you're there.

Boston to NY is 215m, it should take at most 90 minutes by modern train, 2 hours by century old lines.

York to London is 215m and 2 hours, along a line that’s nearly 200 years old. Paris ti Lyon is 290 miles and takes 2 hours on a 40 year old track.

What is the typical charge for those? I remember traveling around Italy by rail pretty cheaply.

SNCF prices vary a lot of when you book. You can see [1] that prices in the next week vary from 29 to 85 euros (I think you can get even cheaper booking further in advance)

[1] https://www.sncf-connect.com/app/en-en/home/shop/results/out...

If we could just get rid of that pesky Connecticut in the way

That is interstate commerence, amtrak as a federal agency could win any fight if they tried. But that needs leadership that cares (congress)

You're missing the fine print. It's like $200 for a ticket if you want to take it at any reasonably competitive time, like a Friday at 5pm. It's basically a system for the 1% of wealthy super commuters.

Yeah, I feel like nobody talks about the price of Amtrak enough. For some reason the conversation is almost always on its speed or that we don't have enough lines.

Those things are true, but like, jeez, the price. I for one don't even mind Amtrak's slow speed on its own, but not when it's more expensive than faster options!

I agree with you; but that is a low bar for qualifying Acela as a decent system.

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