Shocking news! In an incredible breakthrough for American mass-transit engineering, the transportation technology company Virgin Hyperloop this past weekend successfully moved two people 500 meters across the barren Las Vegas desert at a top speed of just over 100 mph, setting a new world record for the absolute most pitiful thing anyone not named Elon Musk has ever tried to pass off as high-speed rail.
Virgin Hyperloop, an American company despite the Richard Branson branding, proposes to use a combination of magnetic levitation, or magleva decades-old technology that has been in commercial operation moving real trains filled with real people in, for example, Shanghai, China, at speeds up to 268 miles per hour, for 17 goddamn yearsand vactrain, a concept design for an enclosed, artificially evacuated tunnel where air resistance may be as low as in the upper parts of Earths atmosphere, theoretically allowing for much higher top speeds at much lower levels of energy consumption. It is so goddamn embarrassing to type this. Frances electric TGV system has been in regular commercial operation for nearly 40 years; in April of 2007 one of its trains hit 357 miles per hour in a test.
CNNs article about this event paraphrases a Virgin Hyperloop executive claiming that the hyperloop pods can travel at the speed of aircraft. Which is true, in the sense that commercial aircraft with dozens if not hundreds of people aboard 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 theyre capable of going. It is also true in the sense that, strictly speaking, a paper airplane is a form of aircraft, and you can really whip some of those suckers across a room. A more accurate but perhaps less flattering claim would be that my Honda Odyssey can travel at the fastest speed Virgin Hyperloop has yet attained, and with four times as many people riding in it.
Hell, for that matter, as a Twitter user helpfully pointed out, a freaking steam locomotive hit 126 miles per hour in England, 82 years ago, in 1938.
Yeah, but, when its done, itll go 600 miles per hour, youre whining, and itll have 25 to 30 people in a pod! When exactly will that be? France opened the TGV in 1981. Japans oldest high-speed line debuted in 19641964!and was better and faster then than Amtraks Acela trains go now. Shanghais maglev train has been operable since John Kerry was campaigning to unseat George W. Bush as president. Measure speed by the number of riders the respective services will have moved by, say, 2050. Measure it in carbon emissions. By the year 2020, the best-funded and most sophisticated high-speed rail developer in the United States moved two (2) people 500 meters.
The United States is generations behind much of the rest of the wealthy, industrialized world in this area. For all but a very narrow corridor along the East Coast serviced by the weak half-a-loaf shit that passes for high-speed rail in this country, the best an American commuter can hope for in intercity rail options are crappy and ancient diesel Amtrak trains that top out at around 80 miles per hour. Most American cities simply are not serviced by any intercity rail network at all. The U.S.s shameful mass-transit situationand thus its shameful dependence on personal vehicles, and all the downstream bad shit that comes from thatcould be improved a zillion percent by just aiming for the level of railroad sophistication French people considered normal before the median 2020 French person was old enough to ride a bicycle. And here are these Professor Frinkass Hyperloop dinguses, dumping resources beyond counting into inventing some shit that already exists when for a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time they could just purchase or at the very least copy what is already working just fine even in backward-ass doofus countries like freaking Italy. It wouldnt need test tracks! It wouldnt need years of iteration and development! They already did all that shit, all over the rest of the world! ... But who could make it happen? Broke-dick, systematically impoverished municipalities, lashed to budget-balancing like a cinderblock tied to their feet? Close your eyes and try to imagine how a sane and obviously good decision like Just import the TGV and run it between the big American cities instead of spending years and fortunes inventing maglev from scratch for no reason could get made in these United States. Imagine whod make it, and what their goals would be, and where the money would come from. It simply cant get made on those terms. It cant get made at all. No level of American society even has a mechanism for that anymore. If it doesnt 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.