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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

As I recall Musk stated publicly that the only reason he pushed Hyperloop was to derail the California High Speed Rail initiative. In that regard it was somewhat successful.

[1] “He admitted to his biographer that the reason the Hyperloop was announced—even though he had no intention of pursuing it—was to try to disrupt the California high-speed rail project” -- https://gizmodo.com/silicon-valleys-transportation-failures-...

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That might have been his intent but it appears California didn't need the help in failing to produce high speed rail in a timely manner at anywhere near the estimated cost.

The high speed rail authority is not only tasked with building and operating the final high speed rail route but also has had to deal with land use politics of dozens of jurisdictions along the alignment. HSR has no at-grade crossings which means everywhere along the route that it crosses a road there needs to be an overpass or underpass. In the central valley where most construction has been happening that's at least one every mile for about 150 miles. They also had had to do multi-year environmental impact studies (because California law requires it for any major change from the status quo) which have to be incredibly thorough because people can just appeal any part of the project for any arbitrary "environmental" reasons such as "the overhead wires alter my view of [something, usually nothing]" if they can claim that it wasn't considered in the study.

Can we build it? Yes. The issue is mostly that we have so much process that delays building and scope creep for what does get built.

To "disrupt" it in that context was meant in the startup vocabulary, it means to improve some existing thing. The high speed rail project in CA is a testament to the dysfunctionality of that state when it comes to building infrastructure.

Not true. See the author: https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1571628269555826688?lan...

That's literally just hearsay in a tweet thread. The high speed rail project was never cancelled and certainly not because of any hypothetical hyperloops. Very convenient scape goat for California's terrible government though. Hyperloop was a brief headline generating concept. If that's enough to derail a $70 billion dollar project then the project was always doomed.

My God as if ideating on alternatives is enough to kill a project! What world is this? have you ever built anything?

California's "high speed" rail was still going to take 5 or 6 hours for the SF to LA route. No better than driving! Musk was correct to propose something different.

It's been 15 years since that project was proposed and we're no closer to a true high speed rail between those two cities!

I read through a bit of that thread+screenshots, and from what I can gather Paris never actually interacted with Elon, and is basing his retelling on an uncharitable interpretation of someone else’s account.

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