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sketerpot comments on [LINK] Hyperloop officially announced — predictions, anyone? - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: malcolmocean 12 August 2013 09:30PM

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Comment author: sketerpot 13 August 2013 03:19:29AM 8 points [-]

An interesting bit about the economics of it:

By building it on pylons, you can almost entirely avoid the need to buy land by following alongside the mostly very straight California Interstate 5 highway, with only minor deviations when the highway makes a sharp turn.

The pylons are the single biggest cost, but by building it this way, they can avoid almost all the expense and delays that come from buying land and trying to get a right-of-way -- they can just use one that already exists. Upon hearing this, the cost estimates no longer sound too good to be true.

Comment author: Protagoras 13 August 2013 09:14:38PM 2 points [-]

This is one of the places where I'm skeptical; I anticipate a lot of people would have issues with this thing passing overhead, and I have my doubts that they could be overridden, at least without some expensive legal wrangling. I admit I'm not quite clear on how rights for things like power lines work; I realize that those do get built, despite there no doubt being plenty of people who would happily oppose that if they could, but these tubes would be substantially larger than power lines, and I expect the opposition would scale up similarly.

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