Not so friendly reminder that musk specifically came up with, and pushed, for hyperloop knowing that it would never be made, as an effort to stop the development of highspeed rail in America and shift all political discussions of it because “something better is around the corner”:
As I’ve written in my book, Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it. Several years ago, Musk said that public transit was “a pain in the ass” where you were surrounded by strangers, including possible serial killers, to justify his opposition.
Also: 2024 update, the total length of China’s high-speed rail tracks has now reached well over 45,000 km, or 28,000 miles, by the end of 2023.
They are additionally five years ahead of schedule and expect to double the total number within ten years. And, before someone inevitably complains about “how expensive it is”, they are turning over a net-profit of over $600M USD a year.
To nitpick, does that imply that it’s being both funded and constructed by government employees? Or is the funding public, but the companies that are supposed to be performing the work private? Because that’s how the telco industry works, and well… we all know how that went.
There really doesn’t exist a government workforce large enough to do the construction. But it’s bid out to construction firms directly overseen by the government, so there’s no big potential for just diverting funds like in the case of telecoms. Construction is all these companies do. There’s nowhere else to shift the money to. They have deliberables and metrics to meet.
Of course the potential for fraud exists but it’s no bigger risk than a project with solely government employees.
This is accurate. On the private sector side it’s the same. One of the things driving up costs is that the private sector doesn’t have a company big enough to do this job, so Cali HSR is sub-contractors all the way down. Every private company contacted by the government has to be vetted and then there’s the paper work on contacts and those contacts need to be enforced by yet more people who need yet more contracts.
How China built so much so fast was that the PRC national government founded a handful of big companies (read: state-backed monopolies) to sort everything out and build it. Lots less overhead when one entity basically runs the whole show. China HSR is corporate vertical integration combined with centralized state planning on a scale that is only rivaled by other things the Chinese government has done before or that other nations have done however over longer periods of time (like the US’s Eisenhower Interstate Highway System… asperational national project on an immense scale and it took half a century because it was delegated to fifty states to plan and flesh out).
Sure but they had secured funding. California has to do it piecemeal as funding is available.
Yep. So too did the Interstate system. There needs to be a federal backed program, with dollar matching at the state and local level just like the interstate highway system.
Agreed. This is such a huge project for a single state to do alone.
Just watch, Brightline West will complete on time and people will bitch about how CAHSR is moving so slowly… as if CAHSR isn’t tied up with other vital projects like the CalTrain modernization/electrification, hundreds upon hundreds of grade separations, almost a dosen stations being built from scratch, infrastructure improvements all throughout the Central Valley, etc, etc, the list goes on for miles. Meanwhile, BWHSR has the task of eating up a mostly flat ROW that’s already cleared and build like three stations max. There’s no comparing them to one another and yet idiots will… same with Texas Central.
Army Corps of Engineers would be big enough I presume.
Maybe some joint projects with the Navy SeaBees.
That’s federal.