art_suckz wrote:Honestly, *nobody* has experience with operations that involve flying jets on magnetic rails inside of a vacuum-sealed tube.
It's political willpower/obstruction and public perception that stalls our projects... not the ability to implement a technology.
It's not a political willpower thing. We spend vast sums on transportation projects (like literally 5-10x comparable projects in Western Europe) that take way longer to complete and are typically poorly designed (for example, mezzanines and super deep stations that add tons to travel times for no reason. Or just the ability to build functioning elevators and escalators. Or putting streetcars in *mixed-traffic* lol. Or just look at DART lol. Or the epic fail of CaHSR.).
Sure, nobody has the specific experience with hyperloop (though Japan with high-speed maglev is close). But when you consistently fail at related, globally standard technology, with clear, documented best practices, why do you think they'll succeed on the frontier?
More broadly, a transportation project is more than just the the core locomotive tech. Of course we could easily dig a hole in the desert and build a subway line, or lay a couple of miles of track and run a high-speed train on it. Likewise with hyperloop. But the delivery of the technology as part of a real transportation project seems to be out of our grasp.