201–210 of 322 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regular property tax works fine. Montreal recaptures the increase as values rise through transfer taxes and ocassional reassesments.
Transfer taxes are avoided by the wealthy. See London and NYC. An LLC purchased property. From that point the LLC is bought/sold/merged and the assets never change ownership
Earlier quoted context omitted.
High speed rail is also a bit of a red herring. In dense areas you’re not actually going to go fast! “Normal” trains would work fine and be helpful. TGV and Shinkansen go really far! But what makes people in France or Japan take the train a lot is much more around local trains that are just going at normal speeds.
I think the counterpoint in the US is that most cities are very far apart and there is practically nothing in between. Obviously places like the northeast corridor or the Bay Area are much more dense. But even a route from SF->Seattle is mostly traveling through non-dense areas. That gets even better across the west and Midwest
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1) Kaa-ching! You can't just bury it as a gas tube. It has to be suspended in a tunnel to allow for ground movement compensation etc. 2) Kaa-ching! Both upfront and ongoing. 3) Kaa-ching! There is reason materials such as Invar are not found in railways, and cost is only one of them. 4) There is no precedent to using vacuum seals at that scale (or maintaining vacuum in that sort of volume). Elon Musk just says "let i…
Downvoted because of sarcasm? Honestly want to know, because it's all true, whether you like it or not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regular property tax works fine. Montreal recaptures the increase as values rise through transfer taxes and ocassional reassesments.
Transfer taxes are avoided by the wealthy. See London and NYC. An LLC purchased property. From that point the LLC is bought/sold/merged and the assets never change ownership
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a number of metrics where it's clearly better. Scheduling and routing. Not waiting 10-30 minutes for the next train depending on time of day. Not stopping anywhere but your destination. No connections or changeovers. Personal space. Privacy, safety. Regardless of how you personally feel about this factor, it matters enough to some people to significantly impact usage. Those factors may or may not be enough…
Waiting 10-30 minutes for a train isn't a technological consequence of rail transportation, it's a symptom of a catastrophically inept transit agency. What's stopping, say, Caltrain, from running trains at peak frequency all day? Incompetent leadership. They have the trains (which spend all day sitting idle _at_ terminus platforms), the have the crew (who also sit idle during the day), they have the capacity to run m…
But that only solves the waiting-for-a-train problem. Regional train line still have trouble keeping up with expressways because of the time needed slow down, wait, and then accelerate up to speed at each station. Lighter rolling stock can make this a little bit better, but not dramatically; BART has always used relatively light EMUs and it still can only average around 55 km/h. Even the most fanciful of Caltrain upgrades would have a top speed of 180 km/h, which means they'd really be lucky to average 100 km/h on a train making every stop between San Jose and San Fransisco. Express trains would be slightly better (perhaps using the HSR trains to do SJSF nonstop in ~30 minutes) but that could only cover a subset of trips. For most trips, if you can avoid terrible traffic, driving will remain faster.
> “Mostly this would be for freight,” says Mark Patton, who oversees transport plans for the Columbus region. Paul Judge, who runs a thriving plastics manufacturer, Axium, in the city, says he would welcome it if it meant he could run a big factory, cheaply, in one spot and ship his billions of units of shampoo bottles, hand-sanitisers and the like to markets in the region. This makes zero sense to me. Surely, there…
Let’s think it out (as in: add your thoughts). If it’s for goods, you don’t need a human size pod. You can scale pods to a size that represents goods that make sense to transport quickly. Obviously you want benefits that come from standardisation, like containers give you. Fully automated transport between all major cities for anything less than a metre diameter? I think that looks like the future. Mail, Amazon, fres…
First, very little freight is latency sensitive. The vast majority of cargo is cost sensitive, which is why most bulk goods coming from abroad arrive via cargo ship rather than airplane. There are a ton of companies that’ll accept days or weeks of delay to reduce overall cost; so a loop must compete with rail freight and semi trucks on cost.
Theoretically a cargo hyper loop network could compete with domestic air freight, but I find the idea that air freight alone could cover the cost of a hyper loop network hard to buy. This is doubly true when you consider the fact that air freight shares costs with commercial passenger travel, both in terms of infrastructure and vehicle development.
Second, they’re already working on automating existing railroads. There’s no particular reason why a hyper loop is necessary to automate a train, and we’re already seeing some of the very long haul train routes in Australia being automated. This comes with the benefit of much lower development time and cost, since it allows for the reuse of the most expensive bit of infrastructure: the rails themselves.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> He has never attempted to make any money from it, That's a blatant lie. https://www.engadget.com/2019-07-25-elon-musk-raises-120-mil... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-boring-company-fundraisin... .
Maybe you should learn the basics about a topic before trying to argue about it. The Boring company fund raiser is not based any promises about Hyperloop.
It's pretty clear that Hyperloop is part of the scam.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Its important to not that GM, Ford and Fiat-Chrysler received far, far, far more resources in the 2008-2012 timeframe and most of that has unlike Tesla not been payed back Most has not been paid back? What figures are you using for this? My understanding is that the bailout was ~$80bn, but the final cost to the government was approximately $9bn. When people complain about Tesla being taxpayer funded, they're genera…
I have not researched this in many years but not all that money has been payed back by Ford, GM and so on. Just recently Ford moved back another payback claiming Corona as an excuse. I assume the majority has been payed back but I have not followed this in exact detail. However the point stands that Tesla has not received the majority of government help. > When people complain about Tesla being taxpayer funded, they'…
It's a bit of a bummer to say something of the form: I think they mean X, which is still wrong because Y. Only to be downvoted and have multiple responses explaining that X is wrong because Y.
I don't disagree with anything you wrote in either comment (with the exception of the bailout payback thing, which I do believe you overstated).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The problems with building this have nothing to do with technology but with right-of-way, investment, and politics. If those factors were solved, we'd already have high-speed rail in places where Hyperloop has been proposed. The fact that we don't says that Hyperloop is unlikely to be feasible as well. I disagree with your conclusion. Hyperloop technology is so lucrative that it might galvanize America to update its…
> - 2-3x speed of bullet trains. Can change the way we perceive geographic distance. > - Cost isn't as much of a concern because a national hyperloop network would create a lot more value than a bullet train equivalent. High speed brings with it some pretty severe problems. The most well-known is curve geometry: curve radii scale with the square of velocity. Transition track (how long the "S" of a S bend needs to be)…
For example: There are 7 Shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka tomorrow between 9am and 9:30am. That would mean 13 - 14 trains per hour.