Estimates for transportation on (always corrupt) liberal cities ALWAYS forecast profits.
Oh, and the earth is heating, too.
Sounds like Amtrak; a world class boondoggle.
Until the BIG MONEY is fighting to invest in it, more than likely a losing proposition.
Same as stadiums....if all that profitable the Trumps and Bloombergs and Gates etal would be fighting each other to build them AND reap the profits the cities say they will make.
At least with Amazon building in New York or Arlington VA, the local government will get a huge chunk of their ‘investment’ back from the property and wage taxes, plus all spent in the neighborhoods and housing etc.
Estimate more like $100 Billion.
Peddling light rail to corrupt local politicians worked. This is the guaranteed more-of-the-same.
This is what they always say.
Not one of the projects pays for itself. NOT ONE!
Further, they’ll project an overall project cost of 10-20% on the dollar.
You won’t find out what you’re really paying for it for decades.
Don’t worry, you can always steal gas tax dollars to help pay for it, then create toll booths to make the middle-class suckers pay for it all over again.
LMAO!
Since rush hour is different in CA, we could have CA loan their fantastic high sppeed rail to the Rust Belt while CA is still asleep. People in CA will never know its gone.
What could possibly go wrong? Ask California.
you know what , if they’re going to build this thing with private financing I say more power to them. It either works or fails depending on what the public wants. But I don’t want any of my tax money spent on this thing.
That’s “Highly profitable?” I think not.
$40 billion, huh ? Betcha it would cost closer to $500-750 billion by the time the real costs figured in (payoffs to the usual suspects).
Here’s a little bit of reality. Rail time between Chicago and Cleveland is about 7 hours. Freight schedules are 3-7 DAYS, due to loading, switching, scheduling, and unloading. It sound like cutting the transit time by 80% won’t actually cut the freight shipping time by much.
Great, if it’s supposed to be so highly profitable they won’t need one red cent of taxpayer money......right? I’ll believe this fairy tale when the project is 100% privately funded with a contract requirement prohibits and city/state/federal funding.
Why is air travel popular and profitable.
The equipment is not limited in the path it can travel.
The most efficient travel does not have very much path restriction on the equipment. It can go this way or that.
The least efficient passenger ground transporation is trains or anything like them that must travel a dedicated path.
The most efficient is the road-highway system that has the least path restrictions, so a route may use any number of alternate paths from point A to point B, and thus where stops can be made or can be avoided as unnecessary may be chosen, as well as selecting for all sorts of variables.
The one advantage trains have over trucks is the total heavy payload possibilities, for freight, on very long haul routes. That was total tonnage, not speed, is the advantage.
I have not seen the rationale for how hyperloop systems change the transportation equations. I think the backers simply avoid what is already known about the limitations of fixed-path ground (or underground) transport. For passenger travel they require sufficient population density living along the fixed path and with demand within that population for going along that path. That has so far only been present in the U.S. on the Northeast Corridor path between Boston, through New York, Phildelphia, Baltimore to Washington D.C. It is maybe the one profitable long distance passenger train corridor in the U.S.
The Pittsburgh-Cleveland-Chicago population (and population density) is many times smaller than that on the Northeast corrider, and yet the hyperloop promoters expect a form of transport likely to be more expensive than that on the Northeast corrider today is going to be financially supported by the demands of the Pittsburg-Cleveland-Chicago population. I seriously doubt it.
The flying car is likely to be in use before hyperloop trains come up from underground.