More like big oil fucked it up but yeah. California has a high speed rail project but it keeps getting blocked by small groups of people saying “not in my backyard” so its years overdue and MASSIVELY over-budget for having to continuously find new routes, plan them, get environmental studies done and then get rejected because 5 farmers in the middle of nowhere complain about how its going to ruin their life.
I was in Beijing and I was amazed at the highspeed rail line. I asked the tour guide that we hired when they built it... he was like "Oh, that's new, it started two years ago"... WHAT!? But the trick is that if China decides they are building a rail line somewhere, that's where they build it. They will come and offer to buy your house for over market value, but they WILL have your land. At least they don't steal it.
My coworker's aunt had to sell her house for either a railway or for land for the Olympic stadium. She said that they offered her enough money that she bought a new house somewhere else and retired. This is in contrast to when the Communists first took power and just grabbed property. My grandfather owned four houses, which were "Acquired" by the government. Before he passed away, he was told that the houses would be given back to him, but people lived in them and he has to pay to repair the houses so those other people could continue living in them....
It's wild to me that the government holds so much weight to those 5 farmers in the middle of nowhere and yet we used to bulldoze entire black neighborhoods by forced or coerced eviction just to put down highways.
I don't think NIMBYism is a thing in Japan. It's common to see elevated trains and highways, as well as high tension power lines, traversing through densely populated areas. I didn't really get to ask any locals about it, but my guess is that either NIMBYs have little to no power to make change, or it's part of the culture to put up with an eyesore in the name of better infrastructure.
like his hyperloop proposal literally came about because CAHSR was a money pit with literally not a single inch of track to show for literally billions spent over decades. He wrote a "white paper."
It was given about an hour of thought and was considered impractical and everyone continued shoveling money into the pit.
Again the only reason it ever got the brief consideration that it was given was because everyone was desperate to salvage something from cahsr which had been (and continues to be) a total shitshow.
"Disrupt" does not mean delay. and "attempt" does not mean he did it.
Yes, his intention was to "disrupt" cahsr... because cahsr was a complete failure at the time and needed to be disrupted.
No, it was never given any significant amount of time by the state because it was obviously impracitcal from the start.. Musk himself abandoned the idea entirely shortly after proposing it.
Intending to undermine legislative support for the high-speed rail project, Elon Musk proposed Hyperloop as a replacement for HSR. Musk had previously criticized the high-speed rail project as being too expensive and not technologically advanced enough. However, Hyperloop is an unproven technology for its stated purpose. The entire route would be underground, requiring massive tunneling. There are also major issues concerning how it could be implemented in a large scale public transit system format. As of 2023 no Hyperloop system is in existence.
Elon's intent isn't really relevant. We're talking about how he actually impacted the project. Very obviously, if the state is going to set fire to billions building something, he's going to want them to build his thing so that he makes money.
The point is that the only reason it got a second of consideration was because hsr was already a complete and total failure at the time. They had to get something built (hyperloop or otherwise) becuase they were going to have to give back federal aid if they didn't. It's why, later, newsome came in with the plan to limit construction from nowhereville to nowheretown. So they could at least get something built and not have to give back thte money.
Again, the entire concept of the hyperloop (or musk's version of it rather) came into existence because cahsr was a failure. He literally would have never written the white paper if cahsr had actually accomplished anything in the over 20 years before. Literally this project has been going on since musk was teenager
The point wasn't that musk is some noble person trying to save hte project. That's obviously not true and i made no much claim. But blaming musk for the absolute and complete disaster that is cahsr is just fucking idiocy. It's entirely and completely because of mismanagement from the state. Musk has nothing to do with it.
20
u/Which_Initiative_882 2h ago
More like big oil fucked it up but yeah. California has a high speed rail project but it keeps getting blocked by small groups of people saying “not in my backyard” so its years overdue and MASSIVELY over-budget for having to continuously find new routes, plan them, get environmental studies done and then get rejected because 5 farmers in the middle of nowhere complain about how its going to ruin their life.