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This is an excellent article. Didn’t have an opinion before but now I think HSR is bullshit. Because physics. By similar analysis, I think hyperloops are bs as well though perhaps slightly less so because the load wear aspect is missing.
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Article arguing that high speed rail is economically unviable caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/10/11/why
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The other pro-airplane take is simply that HSR requires consensus-layer changes to L1 whereas airplanes are mostly L2 with relatively lighter L1 work required (pushing to change FAA and a few other regs), and doing things at L2 is 10x easier.
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Replying to @Noahpinion
My heterodox take on US transit is that if infrastructure problems are too hard to solve, the transit of the future is airplanes, and we should just make airplanes better by (i) making them zero-carbon, and (ii) improving comfort by greatly cutting down airport security
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This is an incorrect analysis of the current problem. We don’t need rails to move people between SF and LA. We need rails to allow people to settle further out of the cities. Take a look at Tokyo. Airplanes solve none of it.
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Not incorrect, just scoped smaller than you like. You’re coupling in problem of settlement patterns of sprawl vs. density, and commuting vs virtual work. If you want to do that I could call it incorrect and expand scope again and pose a boil-the-ocean world optimization problem.
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This is not a scope issue. This is fundamental misunderstanding of transportation vehicles. From around the world we can see that healthiest cities are small enclaves of walkable and bikeable areas connected by efficient transportation.
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Scoping out the right chunk is a matter of taste and heuristic judgment. I think settlement and transport should be solved separately and the coupling allowed to emerge and evolve over time. Both at once is too big to solve well.
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For eg. Baby Bullets in Caltrain corridor shrank smaller suburbs like Redwood City and grew larger ones like Palo Alto. Very hard to model/anticipate/design for that level of effects or higher. The more levels of the stack you try to design the more complex the couplings.
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