03/28/2024

Editorial: Hyperloop Is Running Circles Around California’s ‘High Speed’ Rail Boondoggle

Just five years ago, Elon Musk proposed his breakthrough “hyperloop” transportation idea, and there is already talk of building it in major urban areas. Over those same five years, California’s government-funded high-speed rail project has seen nothing but cost overruns and delays.

When Musk announced his futuristic hyperloop idea — a mass transit system in which passengers would travel in pods going hundreds of miles an hour inside vacuum tubes — in 2013, he blasted California’s high-speed rail project. “The train in question would be both slower, more expensive and less safe by two orders of magnitude than flying,” he wrote, “so why would anyone use it?”

View Article