The article is not really addressing the technical merits of the hyperloop, but rather focuses on the PR behind it and why we're inherently drawn to it. The cool sci-fi project.

>Then, the author continues with more material errors. The hyperloop/tunnel combo apparently "requires a hard reboot" of the modern city. No it does not. The whole point is that it is tunnels underneath the modern city.

One of the advantage of bullet trains in Europe is that they get to reuse the existing infrastructure in cities. That lets them reach the city centers without having to invest an ungodly amount of money laying new tracks or digging tunnels.

They're also "backwards-compatible" to a certain extent, for instance in France it's not rare to have bullet trains to have seasonal destinations, for instance in the Alps during winter. Often there's no high-speed track all the way to those rather remote cities so they just go as close as possible and then use the old tracks at a lower speed so that you don't have to change.

Clearly hyperloop requires a brand new infrastructure. I don't see ho digging tunnels changes anything, it's not like it's cheap.

>Getting around existing commitments of surface land is the whole point of tunelling!

Digging tunnels is cheaper than buying land rights? That surprises me. How we talking specifically about the LA city center here? Because I can't imagine building a tunnel between LA and SF would be exactly cheap.

>As far as I was able to read, not a single mention that Musk has been able to take two or three other previously considered impossible tasks and bring them to completion.

Musk has been extremely successful and managed to bring his vision to reality and sell it to people. I'm not a Musk hater at all, but I don't think it's reasonable to say that he did the "impossible". There were space rockets and electric cars before him. He pushed the concept further, managed to do things other couldn't but I don't think anybody reasonable would've said that what he did was impossible.

Furthermore his hyperloop paper looked more like a high school science project or maybe preliminary work for a sci-fi book than a very practical design. He hand-waves on a ton of stuff and seems extremely optimistic with the cost and the risks involved.

>Call me a fanboy if you will

Okay.

>The fact that we've lost faith in humanity's ability to improve things by taking on large, ambitious projects, even if some, even if most, will fail, saddens me every day.

That's a bit overly dramatic. Take the Eurostar tunnel between the UK and France, take the Millau viaduct, take the LHC, take the ISS... People and government can invest in large projects. It's risk we don't like. Hyperloop still looks a lot like a moonshot and I don't see why public money should fund his R&D. If he really thinks the hyperloop is viable (he seems to) then he should explain much better and in much greater details what he wants to do exactly. And especially how he comes up with his extremely optimistic figures.

The "Musk stamp of approval" shouldn't be sufficient to pour millions, if not billions of tax dollars in a highly experimental and unproven technology when we're not even certain that said technology would actually solve the problems we're facing.