Shout out to everyone at CES right now, seeing first hand how ridiculous the Boring company Hyperloop tunnel is.
Go to Los Reyes restaurant in the Sunnydale neighborhood of San Francisco. Order some delicious food. I recommend Pupusas! 👌🏿 Wait a few hours. Use their restroom. Flush. Wash your hands!
You are now using a much better engineered tunnel, built by the same boring machine!
He bought a second hand sewer tunneling robot and built that nonsense.
You know the rules. Every time someone says "Hyperloop" I bring up the Shanghai Maglev.
EU folk aren't impressed by the Shanghai Maglev but for US folk I assure you that this footage is not sped up, and that is not a low flying aircraft. Trains really do run that fast outside of the US and have for some time.
We could be SF to LA in comfort in an hour and a half, but we're playing. Philly to NYC in 30 minutes, but we prefer traffic.
If you think the Shanghai Maglev is expensive, ask anyone that's ever worked on a real civil engineering project to estimate the cost of building and maintaining a tunnel at near complete vacuum for hundreds of miles. When they laugh at you, say "No I'm serious, this is how Hyperloop is supposed to work"🤡
Don't talk to me about 600 mph Hyperloops running in an absolute vacuum. That's silly. I'm going to ask you about what happens the first time a train pops.
@mekkaokereke why?
with the massive reach he already had, it was always going to take a major event.
i'm thankful twitter was able to finally accomplish it.
@Daveography "Under your seat, you will find a space suit! 👨🏼🚀 In the unlikely event of an emergency, please calmly don your space suit in the 0.08 seconds before explosive decompression removes the air from your lungs. Then simply exit the car, and proceed along the non-existing service tunnel to the closest pressure exchange chamber.
We know you that have a choice in public transportation, so thank you for choosing the absolute worst possible design!"
@cate I get it!
The future I want for me, is the present that you live in!
@cate @mekkaokereke > but… it only goes to one place
… China has 25,000 miles of high-speed rail, though? It’s not quite as fast as the maglev, but it’s plenty fast as is.
@BruceMirken It took California 24 years to replaced the Eastern Bay Bridge which had a span which was damaged in the 1989 Earthquake.
There was a documentary "A Suspense Story: The Bridge So Far The Bridge So Far" released in 2006 discussing the corruption involved in that public works project, long before the new Bay Bridge was completed.
Contrast with: MN Interstate 35W Bridge Collapse in 2007. A new bridge opened in < a year.
@byterhymer @BruceMirken @freeformz @mekkaokereke
If the bay bridge had fallen down catastrophically, it would have been replaced within several weeks or months. Instead, one section was damaged and repaired. So it was usable, but known to be unsafe.
So it was needed, but people had aspirations, ideas, aesthetic dreams…
@freeformz @mekkaokereke Seattle voted for light rail or something like it several times over the past 30 years, and the various governments kept deciding they were going to do something else instead.
It's been pretty frustrating. We DO have light rail though, finally.
@damianaswan Livermore has been paying taxes for a BART expansion for over four decades and still doesn't have it. ;-/
The corruption runs deep.
@freeformz @mekkaokereke Honestly? I’d settle for trains that:
I mean, yeah, high-speed would be great, but my humble desire for “merely adequate” is still out-of-reach.
@freeformz
Probably not viable. Distance like Copenhagen-Naples, which will be done in 5-10 years, but population is just much denser in West Europe.
https://i.redd.it/kdi05qrq65o31.png
The EU line crosses the Baltic and Alps, but US West Coast has mountains, tricky geology and earthquakes. There are political reasons why California HS rail fails, but either way the Vancouver extension is dubious. Also, how do people get to the stations?
Most people do not prefer traffic, but there elements that prefer gas and diesel sales. Because profit, and keeping poor people poor.
@mekkaokereke It would be nice to have high speed rail in this country like they do in China and Europe, but reliable unglamorous medium-speed rail would be a really good start.
Caltrain's maximum speed of 79 mph would be fast enough to be useful, if only the trains ran more often and if there were better connections to buses and BART. We should be able to have good public transportation even without rocket science.
Have enjoyed the Maglev many times. Great technology. At least it was over a decade ago when I used to travel in China a lot.
Seems to me they were far ahead of the curve.
@ewen No, that's the curve. Maglev patents go back to 1902. Rail developments were underway in the 1960s, with the first ones taking passengers in the 1970s.
Everyone else is just way behind the curve. ;-/
I lived in Strasbourg, France for two years. The TGV could get me to Paris in two and a half hours at about 250-300kph. In comfort.
@mekkaokereke Well, California voters did approve a high speed rail between NorCal and SoCal in 2008: Proposition 1A 9.95 billion in bonds to create 800 miles of train network.
Lamentably, it continues to be litigated against by vested monied interests.
I will be amazed if it is ever completed and I can ride on it before I die.
@mekkaokereke
543 km SFO-LAX, at USD$1.3B/30kM is USD$25.53B. And that's probably using domestic Chinese labor rates, what's the scaling factor there?
No tunnels that I see on the SM route as best as I can tell. Hug cost adder.
CaHSR is ballpark $90B for SJC-Anaheim, which will be great when it's finished. Getting to DTLA or 4th & King will be large adders.
But I look forward to high-speed rail options.
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