I'm not from the area, so I don't know how such a ballot works but for voters who didn't have Musk-level engineering knowledge, was the choice the status quo of not fast trains and spending on fast trains?
Well, fast trains or no new trains. It is still technically possible to get on BART in San Francisco and get off from a train in Los Angeles. You wouldn't choose to do this -- nobody would choose to do this [1] -- but it is possible.
I see, fair enough, cheers for pointing that out. I'm in the UK and we're pretty well connected by rail, I wasn't expecting the alternative to be that ridiculous, just normal slower trains.
I don't know why the parent got downcoted. US rail freight is the envy of the world. You didn't get the European passenger rail experience without some trade offs. Here's a briefing on the subject from the Economist.
Australia is the same, here passenger rail between major cities is mostly something old person take as a scenic route. Often it is actually more expensive than flying.
A logical outcome of the combination of private companies owning the railways and the government's willingness to build a lot of road capacity for passenger use.
Considering that most rivers go from the north to the south and the big distances (compared to, say, Japan or Europe), that's logic. Also explains the role of air travel.
But this comparison is wrong and meaningless. Certainly no one would build a high-speed, dense train network across, say, Nevada.
But building one across the coastal part of California? Or across the NE United States? Why yes, that does make sense, and why yes, it is warranted by the densities in those areas. The fact that the U.S. also owns Alaska doesn't really matter. No one is arguing Alaska needs a high-speed rail network.
I can believe that's a good plan for the US NE corridor... which already has usable (but improvable) Amtrak.
The California coastal cities (and connecting areas) are still pretty sparse, comparatively. And the marquee High Speed Rail project takes a big inland detour to the smaller interior cities, for political reasons. If ever finished, that will hurt its price/time attractiveness compared to flying.
The US NE corridor is arguably the only place it makes sense to build a high speed train network.
You'll notice that Elon Musk's plan for the Hyperloop includes an option for shooting automobiles through the tubes. That's because the mass transit within the cities on that coast is shit.
Inter-city mass transit only makes sense once you've solved intra-city mass transit. Unless you really, really love hanging out within a few city blocks of an inter-city train station, you need to have a convenient, desirable mass transit system waiting for you in the city you're going to. If you're linking Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and DC, you're liking the best mass transit system in America with four other pretty good transit systems. Cutting Boston to DC from 6.5 hours to 90 minutes is definitely worth doing.
I was going to make a flippant comment about "Congratulations on living in San Francisco!", but hilariously, there's a better chance you live in Los Angeles (lower ridership percentage, but significantly higher population).
Even in Oklahoma City, where only ~1% of people commute via mass transit, there are still thousands of people who can live happily without a car because mass transit serves them fine. That does not mean that Oklahoma City has a great transit system.
I live in Oakland, have lived in San Francisco for a long time, frequently work in LA, and have lived in London, Amsterdam and Barcelona as well, so I feel I've had exposure to a good variety of transit systems in order to form my opinion.
> Certainly no one would build a high-speed, dense train network across, say, Nevada.
I wonder. It's easier to find low cost airfares to Las Vegas than other cities. A conduit to Las Vegas from the populated west coast might be interesting to some.
And here you can travel from most parts of Melbourne to most parts of Sydney with just two train changes. One at a Melbourne hub to the interstate trains and one at Sydney to the local system.
Yes, our high speed rail process is currently on a ridiculous timescale, something like 50 years out. If something isn't slated for major construction works within a single term of government you can pretty much assume it will never happen in its current form.
Whilst our train service in the UK is a mess (and it really is), I suppose at least we have a mess that we can moan about rather than "buy a car, hippy".
I've actually done this, but in the reverse direction and because I missed my flight (asked hotel in Burbank to take me to the airport and they brought me to the Burbank airport instead of LAX.) Since it was a redeye, I just slept most of the long trip.
IIRC, the choice was between no trains and a train. I think a lot of people voted for it so they had a cheaper alternative than planes and a less time/effort intensive alternative than driving.
I wonder what the security checkpoints would be like on the HyperLoop if it ever got built? They are saying capsules could depart 30 seconds apart. Imagine is there was an attack in on of them, with several others travelling at high speed just behind.
If they turn off the compressor there's a giant air cushion in front of them and the capsule no longer has air bearings. It probably lands on wheels and can then engage the breaks. A small capsule has low inertia as well.
Unfortunately the passengers inside still have high inertia. It doesn't matter if the capsule stops without damage if all the people inside are crushed by G-forces.
This is covered in some detail in the proposal. The capsules will be able to stop in the event of an emergency without hitting capsules in front or crushing passengers.
This system would seem very weak to criminals / terrorists / whatever firing bullets at it. It would be exceptionally difficult to track where the shot/s came from, and it would cause serious pressure problems.
Even if the pressure problems could be countered, a bullet hole is likely to leave a pretty ragged profile on the inside of the steel tube. The specification calls for the air bearing skis to ride 0.5 to 1.3mm off the tunnel wall. They'd need to be pretty robust to take hitting the ragged edge of a bullet hole at 700mph.
I think that a bullet hole in the type of tube that supports this much weight is unlikely. Oil pipeline tubes would typically be thinner (less weight to support) and the concept of a bullet piercing those tubes is unlikely.
I wonder - could you line the high-speed part of the tube with half an inch of soft wax or something similar? Then any dents or imperfections caused by bullets would rapidly be smoothed out again, and the damage to the skis would be minimized by vaporizing the wax you hit.
Aircraft sitting on the tarmac doesn't have to take off if it has been shot at. In the process of taking off could be more of a problem, I suppose. On the other hand, at least airports are a relatively small area to keep secure.
Airplanes leak so much air that a couple more half-inch holes would not affect overall integrity. Most control systems are implemented with redundancy, so taking out a control point would just failover to a backup. Occupants aside, there little such damage could do to an airplane; noting the occupants, worst case is a couple casualties, not loss of everyone on board. And, of course, you could simply choose to not take off.
As mhandley noted, Hyperloop might be more susceptible, as the concern is more like your airplane flying an inch off the ground and hitting a stationary large brick.
...which reminds me of an old analogy: Back when large-capacity (ooh! 10MB!) hard drives were becoming common, I recall hearing the comparison that the read head was akin to a 747 traveling Mach 3 just 1 inch off the ground. Perhaps Elon wondered how this might work in real life, and so came up with Hyperloop.
Aircraft are actually supposed to leak air. In non-bleedless aircraft, the engine compressors pressurize air to be used in the A/C unit, which then sends all the pressurized air throughout the cabin. To prevent excess pressure buildup, valves are opened partially most of the flight with a veinlike network of tubes venting air to the exterior of the aircraft.
Of course, if any damage occurred on the ground, this would be a non-issue entirely as the aircraft wouldn't be pressurized at all.
The Shanghai maglev has no security at all... or at least not last time I went on it. Neither do any of the European HSR systems I've been on.
Remember a big part of TSA isn't to protect the people on the planes, but to protect other people from the planes themselves. It's pretty hard to weaponize a vehicle that's stuck inside a tube or on rails.
