Conversation

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.
Quote Tweet
Article arguing that high speed rail is economically unviable caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/10/11/why
Image
21
56
Replying to
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.
Quote Tweet
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
13
35
Replying to and
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.
2
5
Replying to and
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.
2
2
Replying to and
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.
1
Replying to and
Bay Area is the perfect example. Caltrain allowed for the whole area to be developed. It doesn’t matter it Redwood City or Palo Alto are dominant. They are BTW very comparable by size.
Replying to and
They are intertwined. One has to pick which they are going to address but they pull on each other. From China we know that ghosts towns happen when little transportation is built to them. Not enough to build the cities. Thus transportation holds the key.