Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hyperloop One to shut down

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 490 posts

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#461

Post by panick21_ »

klodolph wrote: post #310
Daz1 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes no sense. One derailment erases any profit that would be gained from ignoring safety.

You have to understand how profits in the rail sector work. Making the system move faster translates directly to additional capacity. More capacity translates to more revenue. Think about it this way—if you increase the speed that a train moves by 10%, then you can make 10% more trips with the same system, in the same amount of time. You can keep doing this until profit you get from the additional capacity results is…

Yeah and I'm sure they are paying for all the police, firefighter, cleanup and all the other issues caused. And they don't have to really pay for delay on Amtrak lines either.

They are systematically devaluing vital infrastructure to increase short term profit and have done the bare minimum of investment. Systematically devaluing vital infrastructure in the country.

For the US not to treat the railroads as a strategic infrastructure is borderline insane.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#462

Post by panick21_ »

nojvek wrote: post #394

Meanwhile China has built 42,000km (26,100 miles) of high speed rail. https://www.travelchinaguide.com/china-trains/high-speed/rai... US is now cursed by their own success. Eisenhower jump started the highway to connect all of US as the largest transport infrastructure project. We have been riding the success of that for a massive economy. We are on the plateauing side of that S curve. cursed because we spent a ton o…

The reality is that the highway project has gone to far. It has been institutionalized with a gigantic lobby behind it. The highway are done, and have been for decades.

And even before that a huge numbers of highway built made no fucking sense and were a negative for the economy. And state DoT are literally just highway building departments with a fetish for destroying cities.

You are not riding the plate of the S curve, continued investment in that nonsense is an active negative.

> Now we don’t have to money, nor the will to invest in the next S curve infrastructure project.

How about this. Stop spendign such an mind blowing amount of money on highways and other roads, and instead invested in financially smart things like walking, bike, buses and trains.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#463

Post by int_19h »

jokteur wrote: post #444
xnx wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good questions. > how are trains not a proven technology??? The US currently has nothing that would be considered high speed rail by the rest of the world. It could be built here, but it would cost billions and take decades. Hofstadter's law strongly applies to major infrastructure projects in the US. "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law." > how do planes have "fle…

Exactly the same thing with trains. I live in Switzerland, and they are adapting the capacity of the trains route by route, and to the time of the day. The train I take every day to work has 12 cars in rush hour, and 4 cars off-peak, sometime 6 cars in the middle of the day, or 10 cars just after rush hour. They put extra trains in rush hour, have trains in standby is case of a breakdown of other trains, and they eve…

It's not a technical issue with the costs in US; it's a political issue. On one hand, any construction project gets mired in massive amounts of red tape even when things go well. And then you have all the people who see public transit and similar projects as a threat to their neighborhood's "character" (i.e. who gets to live there), and who have mastered the art of using said red tape for their advantage.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#464

Post by int_19h »

awill88 wrote: post #419
sonicanatidae wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right. It's not about how much money is available. It's always about the choices of where they spend it and those choices rarely benefit the citizens, somewhat ironically.

It’s not even just about choices, it’s about consensus and we’ve forgotten how to see a win from a partial loss. We no longer know compromise at a federal level

Not just federal. Federal is where things are most obviously broken, but the same is going on all the way down to the bottom, just slower. I live in a town of ~8k and local politics (over local issues!) is insanely partisan in a way it wasn't even 10 years ago.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#465

Post by dougmwne »

mrkeen wrote: post #417
coolspot wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we have generations of people trained to think that … transit systems are full of criminals Are they not? The BART Police Department's reports for 2022 show the following numbers for Part 1 UCR Crimes: Homicide: 3 Rape: 4 Robbery: 156 Aggravated Assault: 81 Burglary (Structural): 17 Larceny & Auto Burglary: 783 Auto Theft: 136 Arson: 10 Property Crime Subtotal: 946 Total: 1,190

>Auto Burglary: 783 Auto Theft: 136 This is why I'm too scared to take my car with me when I ride the subway.

They literally do take their car with them when they ride. Lots of BART stations have huge parking decks because they service areas that are not walkable or dense so you “Park & Ride” to get into the city.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#466

Post by thegrim000 »

pohl wrote: post #408
belter wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the debt is now due? "U.S. Debt: Visualizing the $31.4 Trillion Owed in 2023" - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/us-debt-31-4-trillion-ow...

A few years ago we had an opportunity to borrow at a negative interest rate. Should have leaned into that opportunity. Also we’re under-taxing bajillionaires and politically-active but tax-exempt megachurches.

If the government sent out a hit team to forcefully rob every single last penny of net worth every US billionaire has, what impact would that income have on the national debt? I'm pretty sure it'd be extremely negligible.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#467

Post by xnx »

jokteur wrote: post #443
xnx wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trains on existing tracks are very efficient at moving weight. When the tracks don't exist (i.e. in the US) there are billions of dollars of carbon cost (moving earth, concrete, steel) to building new track.

This study [1] cites a 80 to 280 tCO2 per km of new high speed track laid (it includes bridges, tunnels, ...). Lets lay 700km of new high speed tracks (Orlando to Atlanta). So 700km of high speed track is 56'000 tCO2 to 196'000 tCO2. Orlando to Atlanta will have sold more than airplane 310'000 seats in December 2023. At 250g per km per passenger, we get to 54'250 tCO2 emitted on this route alone in December. You can…

Thanks for referencing some data. Unfortunately, on page 10 it looks like they are specifically excluding the impact of constructing rail lines ("construction infrastructure").

The high speed rail line from LA to San Francisco (~380 miles) was estimated to cost $128 billion. The Orlando to Atlanta route is longer (~440 miles), but lets pretend it could be built for the same cost.

A one-way plane ticket from Orlando to Atlanta is about $100. For $128 billion you could buy 1.28 billion plane tickets. It looks like ~3 million people current fly between Orlando and Atlanta each year.

For the cost of building a new high speed rail line, you could fly everyone for the next 426 years. It's not hard to imagine that the fuel expended during construction of the high-speed rail line would be greater than the fuel consumed by all the planes flying between those cities for decades.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#468

Post by Eisenstein »

thegrim000 wrote: post #466
pohl wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years ago we had an opportunity to borrow at a negative interest rate. Should have leaned into that opportunity. Also we’re under-taxing bajillionaires and politically-active but tax-exempt megachurches.

If the government sent out a hit team to forcefully rob every single last penny of net worth every US billionaire has, what impact would that income have on the national debt? I'm pretty sure it'd be extremely negligible.

'Tax the billionaires' is a red herring. Nobody should use that or engage with it. The issue is that they exist in the first place.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#469

Post by JambalayaJim »

Neikius wrote: post #392
dougmwne wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve slowly lost my innocence when it comes to public transportation in the US. At this point I can see that 95% of the country is absolutely locked into low-density single occupancy transportation at least till we invent sky cars. We have trillions in sunk cost that covers nearly every road, every home and every business in America. We will never, ever be Europe.

You think Europe does not have roads covering everyone? This is the sunk cost fallacy at it's finest. Maybe the most offensive thing about public transport to an American is that it cannot really be profitable by itself. Infrastructure rarely is but it is still worth investing in for the downstream effect.

Transit is also worth investing in for the downstream effect.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#470

Post by godelski »

Eisenstein wrote: post #396
nojvek wrote: post #394

Meanwhile China has built 42,000km (26,100 miles) of high speed rail. https://www.travelchinaguide.com/china-trains/high-speed/rai... US is now cursed by their own success. Eisenhower jump started the highway to connect all of US as the largest transport infrastructure project. We have been riding the success of that for a massive economy. We are on the plateauing side of that S curve. cursed because we spent a ton o…

Why do people say 'we don't have the money' for stuff like infrastructure? We never have a problem finding the 'trillions of dollars for wars'. It seems there is only ever a problem coming up with funds these days when it is to invest in things that help our own citizens (outside of just throwing money at them).

Why even mention wars? We have the money for Hyperloops, Solar Freaking Roadways, Boring Company, and so much more... you know... terrible ideas that clearly won't work, don't even pass a sniff test, but we throw millions or sometimes billions at. I'm totally okay with pushing the bounds of what we can do as humans, and even encourage it. But running on hype is not a sustainable system and arguably fraudulent (I believe it is). The Bloomberg article sure makes Hyperloop look like it is...

I different version of hype applies in a different way. With the systems destroying themselves through compounding "compromises" to get political allies. It's a Vox video, so high level but not a bad intro[0]. Tldr: easy to derail (pun intended) any political project, and the bigger the project the easier it is to derail.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0dSm_ClcSw

Post reply on HN