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Comment by hyperbovine | Hacker News Reader

You said it yourself, nobody lives in the midwest. By contrast, LA-SF is the second on third busiest passenger air route in the world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_busiest_passenger_air...). Moving all those people by plane is hugely expensive and inefficient, and the 5 cannot handle any more car traffic. By some accounts, this is the biggest unsolved public transportation problem in America.

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That is news to the residents of Chicago, Minneapolis, Columbus, Milwaukee, Louisville, OKC, Nashville, Memphis, Detroit, and Indianapolis, which are some of the largest cities in the country.

Also: moving people by plane is probably more efficient than by high speed rail.

Freight boast some positively incredible efficiencies, so I'm assuming high speed rail simply loses it by holding the pedal to the metal the whole way, so to speak?

It's a cool comparison to me: you can either slam the accelerator/brakes for the duration of a trip or you can fight about 7 miles of head. Both are so extreme I don't really have much of an intuition on it, but I think it'd be fun to find out.

The total population of all of those cities barely exceeds the number of people who fly between LA and SF each year. Really.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+population+of+chi...

That is a weird apples-oranges comparison, because the total population of those cities is also a multiple of the combined population of LA and SF. CHI-MSP is the 6th busiest route in the US (LA-SF is the 2nd). Do you think the combined air passenger stats for the cities I just listed would be lower than that of LA-SF?

If you add up the trips that people take between all of those cities then sure, eventually you can make that number as large as you like. But that problem is not solvable by mass transit--you need O(k^2) direct links to get everybody efficiently between any pair of k cities. Meanwhile, here in California, we've got a graph with two nodes, one edge, 8 million people on one end, and about 32 million on the other. Which problem seems more straightforward to you?

That's not the argument you made. You said "nobody lives in the Midwest". Clearly that's not true. Meanwhile, a single midwestern city pair is the 6th busiest air route in the US.

This is my final comment in this thread. Yes, I was obviously being facetious, although having burned by the internet's ability to pick up on that in the past, I should have known better. Perhaps a better way to put it would be that in terms of population density (which is what really matters when we're talking about mass transit) the middle of the country loses out to either coast by a considerable margin. (Sorry.) I can't think of a simpler way to put it than the map on p. 24 of this PDF (http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/reports/c2010sr-01.pdf). You're looking for clusters of dark-blue squares arranged on a line. I see two (three if you count Milwaukee-Chicago but at 100mi. people will just drive.) One of them has a well-developed rail, bus, and highway infrastructure, and the other does not. End of argument.

The distance between Chicago and STL or Chicago and Indy is lower than the distance between SF and LA, which is about the same as the distance between Chicago and MSP. Lines of blue? The route between Chicago and MSP would be fed by MKE and Madison. I literally have no idea what this map has to say about rail or how it supports your argument.

Even though you have declared the preceding comment your last on the thread, I will do you the courtesy of replying if you choose to reply to this comment.

Just a note on city populations: the only reasonable way to compare different regions (on just about any metric) is (at the very least) at the level of the MSA. The Chicago MSA's population alone is a number larger than the total you've reached.

In terms of energy usage, transporting people by plane is not that efficient compared to alternatives:

http://adl.stanford.edu/aa260/Lecture_Notes_files/transport_...

I think you hit the nail on the head.

LA-SF is the busiest air route in North America, and it's one of the busiest air routes globally regardless of how it's ranked. On the number of seats flown per month it ranks comparatively low (number 18), meaning there's a bottle-neck being demonstrated. Either driving is too viable an option, or the airports can't handle extra flights.

The US is also notorious for having poor passenger rail. Seoul-Jeju carries a lot more passengers, a couple million, but they already have high speed rail, which makes the run in a time comparable to a flight. So being able to shave a half-hour off a commute isn't going to be commercially viable when implementing an entirely new infrastructure and design. Many routes out of Tokyo carry comparable numbers to LA-SF, but again Japan also has high speed rail - I think the time saving on the Tokyo-Okinawa (1500km distance) would be the only one capable of competing against high speed rail, but Japan is highly populated so likely not suited for massive and unproven new infrastructure projects.

The next option is in Brazil, is a slightly shorter route, but the issue being the economy is less likely to be able to support such a project, and the risk of corruption and embezzlement there could tank the entire project with cost overruns.

There's really no other credible short distance option in North America. New York to Florida (Miami 5.5mil + Orlando 3.7mil) would be a credible option, NY-Miami is a 2,000km run, passes by Orlando at the 1,750km mark, and the ticket price is almost triple that of the LA-SF run.

So if LA-SF isn't an option it's "Go Big or Go Home". Crossing states would be a big issue. So we're likely going to see this proven small scale on commuter routes in and out of big cities.

The bigger problem with the Tokyo-Okinawa route as a hyperloop candidate is that Okinawa is an island far away from the main islands of Japan (kind of like Hawaii). Not a great candidate for land-based transportation.

Well, actually that's not a massive problem. The spans between the individual islands isn't huge. The longest bridge in the world is 164km long and built for high speed rail.

The issue is Japan is earthquake prone, and big bridges in tsunami areas is probably a bad idea.

Yeah I'm thinking more like connect some of the major cities. Maybe Denver to Chicago to Austin? I'm not an expert on the geography between those places though. I'm just spitballing. The Hyperloop doesn't really make stops. Its designed for long distance end to end trips.

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