this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2026
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China and Japan seem to have figured this shit out. How come the largest economy in the world can't? Pissed about with Elon and his Hyperloop which would be too expensive for any regular person (extreme maintenance costs) and can't move as many people (very limited size). And it didn't even work! Meanwhile elsewhere the train wasn't being reinvented, but improved, and it's actually functional.
Also, you can have high speed transit between two major stations, then take local transit to your specific destination. That's what central stations are supposed to be for.
Musk has openly admitted he propped Hyperloop for the sole purpose of stopping California to build a high speed train. He never intended to deliver anything.
Which is some real cartoon villain shit
This is one of those moments when I mentally ask "how the fuck is that even legal" but then I remember who writes the rules.
And Elon has not produced a single workable anything, but sucked up billions in subsidies.
Yeahhh but chicago is several large cities away from new york so thats why im saying they would need a stop for each of them. You can of course have commuter trains that skip some of those and others that serve the less used ones of course, and shuttles as well but you also have to consider that chicago and ny are 1100kms away from each other in a straight line while tokyo and kyoto are 370kms from each other in a straight line for example and those are 2 hours by train(and i looked from the train stations which are not in the center of the city tho you could argue they are somewhat but these metropolitan areas are so large that they have multiple city centers) so that means if you just multiply it up you would get that the chicago-ny line would be a six hour journey. This is, of course, probably not correct. Im just trying to show how you cant just draw a straight line between two places and say "Train!". Tho of course you also have to calculate with the fact that the us is much richer than both china and japan but once again that just complicates things again.
Never forget what they took from us. They being the promoters of the ny-chicago electric air line railroad. Also if it were built and the right of way stayed intact we could absolutely build a maglev that could go center to center in 3 hours.
Nobody even considers that a problem for airplanes.
Plains fly over the obstacles? Thats kinda the point? Also i may have underestimated the amount of people flying in the us cause in europe one flight a day is completely normal for destinations at this distance. Of course if thousands of people want to move between these two locations each day a regular shuttle could make sense but you cant just ignore the distance, 2.5 hourse is a very very best case scenario. Planes can also fly boutta 1000kmh but that doesnt mean a place 1000kms away takes 1 hour, 1.5 to 2 hours is completely normal for a journey like that without accounting for all the flight related hassles. Of course thats a huge upside of trains but you cant just freely apply train to everything. This is very likely a place where a highspeed rail connection would make sense but nothing is ideal instantly. Not to talk about how these cities would have to improve their own public transit to be able to connect to a wider network efficiently.
Literally nobody ever thought we shouldn't make a direct flight route from Chicago to New York because there's other cities people might want to stop at. It's similarly absurd problem to imagine for trains.
Having to plan connecting flights is a thing.
Of course, we don't just not make direct flights between major cities because other cities are in between.
planes missing connections is rare and the airlines provide some degree of compensation, Amtrak has no such reputation.
Hyperloop is incredibly stupid on the face of it for so many reasons, the two largest of which IMO actually being that it would be incredibly unsafe as escape would be impossible in case of an incident and that it's literally physically impossible, as the material tolerances required are incompatible with the temperature shifts that happen everywhere on account of weather and seasons.