high speed rail go brrr

Hyperloop was invented to try to kill light rail. It succeeded at killing Maryland's new venture and Illinois'. Neither were built because Hyperloop promised bullshit. Elon hates public transport.
- Elon's main thing is selling cars, of course he actively opposes whatever would let people not buy a car.
  
  He says the only public transit he would support is individual capsules running in a tunnel.
  Essentially literal echo chambers where you never have to interact with anyone who might expand your horizons.
- He didn't even invent it.
- guy who sells cars spreads FUD about competition to cars
- Wait, what did Hyperloop kill in MD? It looks like the proposed route was from DC to Baltimore underneath MD 295 – we already have Amtrak and MARC serving that corridor.
- Hyperloop is against high speed rail, which is for transport between cities.
  Light rail is nicer trams so meant for transport within cities.
- It's worth pointing out that a pneumatic railway was not invented by him, we already tried 150 years ago and couldn't get it to scale up then either.
  Remember the tunnel in Ghost Busters 2?
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beach_Pneumatic_Transit
- I think you’re giving the guy too much credit for being conniving. Is there actual evidence?
  
  He admitted it to the person writing his memoirs iirc

The mistake is thinking Elon is a moron screwing everything up on accident. He isn’t. He’s an Afrikaner white supremacist Nazi who is causing all this damage on purpose.
Starlink and SpaceX should be nationalized before he gets a chance to weaponize those companies against the western world as well.
- He literally came up with the hyperloop because he was afraid of a high speed rail hurting Tesla sales.
  
  People who buy Teslas don't want to take public transportation
  
  Ye, Fuck that Guy! ( fuck Eelon Mux)
- I have a feeling the boards will try to maneuver him out before he gets too stupid with Starlink and/or SpaceX, but maybe not...
  
  Musk is great for bringing in that sweet venture capital, and and Starlink (and thus SpaceX) are running a pretty major defecit. They need venture capital to operate, so they won't work him out publically. Internally, I'm pretty sure they're happy he's busy destroying Twitter.
- Since when is he an Afrikaner? I doubt he can even speak a full sentence of Afrikaans. It's slightly offensive that you just used an entire demographic group as an insult.
  
  Since he was born in South Africa and got his education there.
  They speak more Afrikaans in South Africa than English.
  
  The Musks are of Anglo-Canadian, English, Swiss, and Afrikaner descent His family owned a sapphire mine in South Africa during apartheid. That's where his money came from.
  
  Chill bro , they're not dissing Africans, they're dissing Eelon Mux Yo!
- I do believe he’s a moron screwing Twitter up by ~~accident~~ incompetence.

Giant infrastructure projects are a weakness of democracies. It's tough to get everyone to agree and pay for huge projects that take long term vision and planning.
Or you could call it a strength because it's stable and can't be changed too fast by one guy with a short term bad idea.
- Mainly in the US, though. The automobile lobby successfully undermined many attempts at mass transit infrastructure. And the existing rail network is privatized into oblivion.
  Roosevelt showed that there is a way of tackling infrastructure in the US. Only his approach has a minute slither of what can be framed to be socialist, so it'll never happen again..
  
  minute slither
  snek president
- see NEOM
  It's an unbelievably stupid idea that's really going to happen. The prince of Saudi Arabia knows that their oil economy is going to wither away soon, so he's trying to make SA appealing to people with money and have them move there. How? By building a city that's a line 160 km (110 mi) long and 200 m (660 ft) wide...in the middle of fucking nowhere. The whole idea is based on technology that we don't have and is just terrible city planning. Look into it to get a laugh.
  
  Hahaha yes you're right. This is an example of ill-advised big infrastructure.
  
  At least the rail line serving it can be a rail line
  
  Pronounced "neeeeeee...... yyoooommmm"
- Did you completely ignore the US highway system built in the 50s, that created a car dependant infrastructure?
  
  Highways were constructed in regions with sparse populations or in urban areas with little political power (primarily black and Latino neighborhoods). Basically, areas where democracy didn't have to function because there was no democratic power to block it. Whereas nowadays, with higher levels of democracy (unequivocally good) and local control (more of a mixed bag), massive infrastructure projects are harder to accomplish. Plus, the 50s had the benefit of a booming postwar economy and the national cohesion (at least among enfranchised Americans).
  
  Cool and what has been done lately? Infrastructure seems to just be crumbling cause nobody wants to pay to fix anything.
- Ain't that the truth. The UKs HS2 project has just collapsed. Was supposed to a big Y shaped "network" linking London (and Europe) to Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and a laughably out the way part of the East Midlands, with a new high capacity rail link.
  Now it's been whittled away to just "I suppose we can link London to Birmingham then", and only then because they'd already started work on it.
  I always suspected the second part would be cancelled because we never do anything that might benefit the North.
  Got to be honest, after 3 years of working from home, I'd rather have faster internet than faster trains. Shame there's no timetable for that either...
  
  I bet they managed to spend all the money that was allotted despite not actually getting anything much built though. They are fucking pros at "spending" money on stuff that either never materialises, or ends up requiring double the amount of money initially quoted to actually end up in a finished state. There should be so many more investigations into where all the public money is going in these kinds of situations.
- I think it has more to do with the lack of democracy, especially in the US. I guarantee you could get 100 regular Joes in a room to come up with a high speed rail project. You could never get that to happen with politicians at the mercy of the ruling class.
- You can do it through democracies. Taiwan has two sets of high speed rail systems.
  Are they expensive to maintain? Absolutely. In fact they bankrupted 2+ companies until the government decided to step in and foot part of the bill. But then again, if the government isn't willing to pay for basic infrastructure, what are taxes for?
  (Also as a tangent, the Taiwan high speed rail bentos are to die for. I had it 5+ years back and I still remember it. Super cheap meal in a disposable bamboo lunch box. Usually there are 1-2 choices per day. I had chicken thighs, pickled veggies, steamed pumpkin, and half a marinated tea egg. The bottom half of the lunch box was filled with rice. 10/10 would eat at a busy train station during rush hour again)
  
  I go to China for business fairly often and there is this one area where the government decided a new subway line should be installed, so I watched it get built over several trips. The property owners in the way were, as far as I understand it, booted off the land but compensated. And boom. A year later the subway line was done and hooked up to the rest of the existing subway infrastructure with completed stations, entries/exits, and even retail shops in the stations. It blew my mind.
  The city definitely needed the subway line, but I was amazed at the efficiency. In my American home town that idea's been debated for decades and is yet to be finished because at first it was getting voted against and then finally after the public supported and approved it, the NIMBY experience began and it took a decade of land use planning to choose the route. If it actually runs efficiently before the 2020's are finished I'll be impressed.
  
  You can do it through democracies
  Other examples with well known high speed rail might be Japan, or many EU countries
  Meanwhile here in the US, we have Acela, which is higher speed than we have before, is continually (very slowly) improving, so it may eventually become high speed rail
  
  No one is saying that you can't do it, just that it's a lot more difficult and contentious and time consuming.
  Has no one on Lemmy ever taken an intro political science course? This is really basic stuff.
- German train network? US Highways?
  Lack of education is a weakness.
- How do you explain the highways scarring every major north American city that isn't named Vancouver? How do you explain the billions of dollars spent on highway expansions every year? Rail isn't hard it just doesn't benefit the right people.
- Giant infrastructure projects are a weakness of democracies.
  What about the high-speed networks in France, Japan, Spain and Germany?
  
  France is smaller than Texas. Every nation you mention was not a democracy during most of their rail construction. It is vastly easier to engage in large construction projects in authoritarian states because you don't have to care about a voting populace.
- Id argue that people have no concept of how much money we waste arguing about what to do and how to do it.
  In my city they wanted to cut down 10 huge and really old trees in a park in the center of town. They were constantly clogging the drains, tearing up footpaths with their roots, clogging the drains with their roots, dropped big fucking branches during storms and a few other minor issues. Sure they were pretty and allCutting down the trees, fixing the sidewalks and all was estimated at half a million. Well once they stalled on the project because of the protests and the money spent answering legal challenges from well meaning hippies, hiring security and fencing them off so nobody could climb up one and chain themselves there then finally got the trees cut down the city spent 3.1 million.
  
  Couldn't you guys have just... Trimmed the roots?
  
  Did you replace the trees with concrete?
- What exactly do you think the Interstate project was?
  
  The Interstate system was sold as a means to allow rapid military deployment. This allowed tapping of infinite defense resources to make it happen.
- It's not about the democracy it's the fact that the "democratically elected" officials prefer to funnel taxpayer money towards fascists.

This is misleadingly reductionist. California high speed rail has made consistant progess in that time. That progress has been slower than ourslowest expectations. It demonstrates the void of expertise the US has in rail megaprojects. However, that expertise is being built, slowly and painfully. Its still forward progress for a nation which tore up half its rail overthe last 50 years.
- America invented rail megaprojects.
  America still has the largest rail network by far. It's well more than twice the size of China's.
  The only interesting note is that it's almost all freight compared to other nations' use of passenger rail.
  
  Hehehehe
  With 0.92% of electrified rail it's a joke to say that NGL. Absolute numbers are meaningless.
  You have to see it into perspective per area then you'll get to feel how dense and therefore useful the rail network actually is. Because what good is a rail network if you can't reach your desired location.
  And then you'll see that swiss, Germany and Luxembourg for example end up with less than 10 square km per km of rail while the usa has around 40.
  
  Thats true. And then America stopped. And then the people who had actual on-the-ground experiance died of old age. Its really another effect of the slow tragedy that is the auto industry
  
  Yeah, but who BUILT our rail system?
- Misleadingly reductionist is what /c/memes should be renamed to.
- Indeed. We're fixing the great car mistake at a glacialy slow pace
- Yep. All while getting resistance the entire way in spite of the fact that the US regularly funds without question the expansion of highways and building of interstates. Slowly but surely there does seem to be a growing appetite for rail transit throughout the nation and it is possible for more upgraded corridors to be built and if the US can keep momentum up the lessons learned in california can be applied in building rail elswherre
- California HSR expansion is going to get cancelled the moment the minimum viable route finishes, they're going to lose the ROW and the expertise, then 10 years later the next leg will get approved.
  This is what happens to transit projects in America, so there's no reason to expect anything different for rail.
- What evidence is there for you to assert that expertise is being built?

It's much easier to build rail in places that weren't designed around cars. Even in rural China people live in condos and apartments with parks between. This helps with NIMBYism and combined with the already large amount of green space left in Chinese cities such systems can be built with the only real concern being the engineering itself. But China is also in a good position for that, as their workforce is incredibly well educated with more engineering talent than they can even fully employ domestically. All that PLUS the political will of a single party state meant it was a very different situation than California.
And that's before you even consider ridership, where even the best possible SF to LA route would still pretty much require you to get a car or taxi once you get to LA (because LA was basically torn down and redesigned for cars).
- In LA it is supposed to end at Union Station, which amazing access to commuter rail, a metro system, which admitly is small, but still can take you to a lot of places, bus rapid transit and it is right next to downtown. Obviously it is not comparable to NY, London or Paris, which are of a similar size, but you should be able to go to a lot of intressting places, without needing a car once you arrive in LA.
- LA is slowly working on good rail transit. You can already get to Union station (where CA HSR will stop) from just about everywhere served by the rail and busway network
- Another good practice china makes is building transit before/at the same time as expanding urban areas, making sure that even new developments are transit oriented
- I finally found one in the wild!
  
  If you’re gonna call someone a name, go ahead and say it
  
  One what?

China has the advantage of not having to care about the citizens' desires in regards to be relocated to make the rail possible.
- I don't think America gives any shits either. They let the world's most useless CEO dictate their future
- Kelo v. City of New London. That's all you need to know about the US' "care" for citizens' desires as far as eminent domain is concerned.
  
  The US still has things like reelection to consider with these things. China doesnt. And if someone speaks up against the government they just get arrested
- They also provide apartments to live in permanently for those displaced in the development.
  Meanwhile, the US has not built high speed rail and has tent cities.
  In the case of national infrastructure, China wins hands down.
  Although it's kind of ridiculous to compare California with an entire country...
  
  Honestly not that ridiculous of a comparison considering California's size and GDP, we could be doing a lot better
- Spain wants to have a little chat with you

Ya all looking at this like it's a conspiracy. It's just a guy looking to sell more cars. Shame on anyone who thought it's a real thing.
- I'm looking at China like this-

China wants unity, even in places where it doesn't make economic sense.
edit: 100% downvotes are coming from people that don't know the situation. The CCP wants fast travel to major population centers even when the rail line isn't profitable.
- Isn't that a good thing? sounds like the rail is being run as a public utility rather than a business. And its still likely profitable if you average the cost over all the lines.
  
  I never said it was a good/bad thing. I'm saying the Chinese gov. isn't as concerned with profit. Which explains the difference between California and China
- It makes economic sense but not financial sense. Railways are almost always profitable once considering second and third order effects.
  It's the same story with Amtrak, so I'm not sure why people are so confused. Amtrak loses money on every train that's not the NEC.
- Are they siding with the hunter or the emissary this time?
- did you mean to say utility instead of unity?

Musk has the weirdest relationship with trains.
- Maybe too close to Trans, he don't like them either.

Its a lot easier when you have slave labor and don't care about the enviroment or human lives
- It unquestionably is but it sounds like you're implying that high speed rail is some sort of utopian megaproject and not a solved problem of basic, reliable and effective infrastructure that is a great bang for your buck in every country that builds it.
  
  I mean we actually own land in the US where it’s not owned by a person in the same sense in China. So it’s easier for the government to cease it and do whatever it wants with it
- I understand what this comment is trying to say, but I doubt US is very big on caring about environment. Remind me, how many fracking projects?
  
  Remind me of land owner rights in China
- Spain has the lowest cost per kilometer in the world when it comes to building High Speed train (14.5 million €/km) and they care for the environment and don't have slave labour. Rather, they have very strong unions.
- It's also a lot easier when you cut costs and all the rails will be unused in a few years due to poor construction materials.
  Tofu Dreg construction and corruption is very real in China.
- Like in Spain with much smaller economy and almost 4 thousand km - admittedly they started back in the 1990s I think.
- So… like the Musk-man does anyway?
- If that's all it takes why doesn't California have it?
  
  Because they don't have slave labor and they care about the enviroment and human lives. Were you paying attention at all?

- You’re allowed to swear on the internet. You won’t get in trouble for it.
  
  Excuse me sir this is a Christian TF2 server
  
  And not allowed to not swear?

https://www.eurasiantimes.com/a-whopping-900b-debt-chinas-once-profitable-high-speed-railways/?amp
It'd be good to have high speed rail but not at any cost.
Queue tankies going crazy to defend the absurd cost...
- Less than 9x the cost of California HSR or the UK's HS2. With that money, California HSR aims to build 840km and HS2 aims to build 230km. China, with 42000km, built 50x the rail of California HSR and 180x the rail of HS2 and is delivering economic and social mobility benefits today.
  Either way, infrastructure doesn't need to be profitable at a first-order level to be profitable to the country as a whole. The increase in economic mobility, social mobility, consumer spending, travel, and logistical efficiencies typically have returns that far exceed that of fares: in typical North American transit systems, although they operate at a loss on paper, it's estimated that each dollar put into transit returns $4-$5 in economic returns.
  
  Going to guess the workers in CA are paid slightly better...
- Then let's talk about Spanish HVT (AVE), shall we?
  
  No. Lets not do whataboutism.

LOL 🤣
comparing CCP China to California...
Noice 👍👌
- What's your point? What is the GDP of California? The population density of the Bay area? California not having any high speed rail is straight up embarrassing. Same thing applies to the eastern corridors in both the states and Canada.
  
  Canada is opting for HFR and claims that the harsh weather and at-grade crossings makes HSR impractical in the near future. It's not the best excuse, but at least VIA's new trains top out at around 200kmh.
- Maybe compare California with Spain (4000 km of high speed rails).
  
  I like that better... Spain probably has a full democracy to boot...
- No, it's authoritarianism vs democracy. It's a very well-known concept in political science that authoritarian regimes can make decisions and execute on them far faster than democracies. The problem is that autocratic decision making ultimately creates instability by implementing policies and decisions that don't have a broad base of stakeholder support. Why should any citizen support a decision that was made without their input or consent?
  
  If you know anything about China, you'll know it barely reflects communism. It's largely structured around capitalist goals and the government reflects more of a corporate structure than anything.

Wouldn't high speed rail go bzzz, instead?

- I mean, to some small degree, yes, since you're sharing the planet with them.

- Your rage go grrr
  
  Ok.. shit.. lol... It's rare that a meta style joke like this makes me laugh but you got me.
  It was fuckin funny..
  Thanks
- Agreed. High speed rail goes fwhiiiiiiiiiiip, not brrrrrrrrr.

I mean it’s different in about every aspect. Each county and city law has to be followed and land bought and fought about. Yes Elon maybhave halted but the project was so grossly under priced and the delays with Covid.
Not excusing but let’s see the clear differences
E: I’m not defending hyperloop or Musk in anyway. I’m saying it’s ridiculous to compare California and China where communist party controls every aspect of life. Surprisingly, California isn’t communist China, where here governments differ and laws are different and labor isn’t the same. Also local governments can fight back and have in multiple counties with law suits, along with budget changes.
This is really fucking obtuse take and should compare the US as a whole, especially when Obama wanted more rails. But surprisingly law suits and lobbyists challenged it hell
- Hyperloop is vaporware. It was a highly inpractical sci-fi concept when it was dreamt up first a literal century ago and nothing has changed about the laws of physics since then.
  
  Vaporwave doesn't mean what you think it means.
  
  California high speed rail is an actual project which has actually been building actual rail since 2008. It is the only rail megaproject active in the United States. It has many challenges, none of them physics, some of which were mad worse by Musk's bullshit.
  Asking for an actual comparison between the circumstances of the Chinese high speed rail network and the circumstances of the California High Speed Rail project is valid.
  This response reflects poorly
- Spain: 2 different parties ruling the state, with other more local parties on the mix. Starting on 1989. 4000 km up until now.
  It's not because China is a dictatorship. It's because California (and the US) doesn't give a shit.