It's a race to the bottom with these 'not-trains'.
Seriously, just build trains.
[T]he hyperloop pods “can travel at the speed of aircraft.” Which is true, in the sense that commercial aircraft [...] do sometimes travel at 100 miles per hour, on the ground, for seconds at a time, during takeoff or landing, when they are going only a fraction as fast as they’re capable of going.
lmao
I love how the entire train-adjacent world is so profoundly exhausted and fed up with the hyperloop that the articles and videos produced are all the equivalent of shouting "TRAINS ALREADY EXIST YOU FUCKS" to what is essentially the void, because all those same articles and videos already acknowledge that the reason why the hyperloop is so popular is exactly the reason why they'll never build trains.
This article is emitting real :amerikkka: energy.
If it doesn’t require a messianic assbrain with a Steve Jobs cosplay fantasy pitching some sleepy billionaire or venture capital firm on the possibility of cornering the market on a brand-new technology that will conquer the world, then it will not get done. If it merely delivers a profound benefit to the common good rather than the promise of extravagant enrichment to a shrinking class of hyper-powered parasites, then it simply cannot exist.
Haha, I know, I didn't even know this shit existed, but I certainly didn't expect this power from a sports website.
The fact that they named it "virgin hyperloop" for us is just :chef's kiss:
They haven't called it a train anywhere on their website. Good news though, these pods can carry 'up to' 28 people, and the whole thing can 'potentially' be powered by solar power (they haven't confirmed they will though).
Honestly, vacuum tubes are the dumbest shit ever.
Is that the scent of freshly baked "gadgetbahn"? mmm delicious and soo wasteful, what a decadent delight for a crumbling empire.
I love a good gadgetbahn though. Wuppertal Schweberbahn is my train waifu.
What exactly is the upside of these things for state and local governments? Like why do they spend money on them instead of actual high speed rail? Surely they don't think it's going to turn a profit? Is it just because it's a shiny new toy they lose sight of the shortcomings?
They can say they did something for public transport while effectively only weakening it in the long run to benefit the car culture
This is the best takedown of a not-train since fucking Roz did that whole episode on Elon's loop.
Yep! Also cohost of Well There's Your Problem and recently guest on TF
I love trains as much as the next guy, but it's like a quarter mile. fucking bike it. or just walk.
Hyperloop always seemed to me like just another way of adding just another tired system to transportation. I just assume the hyperloop is trying to appeal to richer people. Even then, it seems to fail at that since there are better/faster methods to get where you want, and I'm not sure the rich would trade speed over the exclusiveness (as it seems?) that the hyperloop is trying to appeal. It just sucks, like, I really, truly don't get how so many people wee onboard with this and cities inventing in it/allowing it to be built. idk if I'm missing something, but how is this thing gets as much hype and publicity as it does just blows me away. Also I love how they "invited" a bunch of college students to compete over creating the best design, they outsourced the design, which is really funny for how much people point to elon's bullshit as capitalism is cool and good
Well maglev is better than conventional high speed rail in every aspect, so in principle it should be welcomed. This weird truncated thing is certainly not the way to do it though.
Vacuum tubes are inherently costly and dangerous though. They've been a solution looking for a problem since the late 1800s.
Depending on how you do it and what terrain we're talking about it could be a safer and certainly much more environmentally friendly solution to air travel. But inherently maglev doesn't require vacuum tunnels (or any tunnels - it has a steeper rate of climbing than conventional rail and is an inherently all weather mode of transportation) to work, in fact all previous and current maglev implementations don't use tunnels and look indistinguishable from classic rail to an outside observer.
As to the vacuum tunnel tech - we will need it eventually, and better sooner than later, for phasing out dirty and wasteful rocket launches and substituting them with mass drivers. So international efforts at both maglev and mass driver R&D should cross-pollinate each other.
