Did you catch the release of billionaire Elon Musk’s plan for high speed transit in the corridor between San Francisco and Los Angeles? Here’s how an article in Wired described it:
Load yourself into an enormous shotgun shell and shoot yourself 400 miles (640 km) across the state at 800 mph (1300 kph). It sounds crazy, but Musk swears it will work. And if he doesn’t build it, someone else will.
Musk’s proposal to revolutionize mass transit is called the Hyperloop. It would transport passengers in individual aluminum pods powered by turbines and solar energy in above-ground tubes, cost $6-10 billion (£3.9-6.5 billion) to build, and make the trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 35 minutes. Oh, and a ticket will run you around $20 (£13).
Musk’s white paper describing the technology can be found here.
Gizmodo also provided a pretty good summary.
What caught my eye was the potential price, which Musk projected would run between $6 billion and $10 billion. At the low end of the range, that would be only slightly more expensive than Honolulu’s planned rail system, which is now expected to cost something over $5 billion. For that price, Honolulu is going to get 20 miles of rail. Musk’s proposal would begin with a 520 mile system linking Northern and Southern California.
Of course, this is currently just engineering speculation, but it still provides quite an interesting perspective on the projected cost of Honolulu’s rail, with a design dating back in many key respects to the rail proposed during early years of Mayor Frank Fasi’s reign at city hall.
Meanwhile, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is scheduled to hear oral arguments Thursday in the the lawsuit challenging the rail project, Honolulutraffic.com v. FTA.
According to the 9th Circuit website:
Thu. August 15, 2:00 p.m.
Courtroom 1, 3rd Floor
Before: SCHROEDER, REINHARDT, HURWITZ, CJJ
According to the courts website, an audio recording of the session should be posted and available for listening by noon on Friday.
Attorney Robert Thomas, who writes the Inverse Condemnation blog, will be at the 9th Circuit for the oral arguments, and I would recommend checking his blog late tomorrow afternoon or early evening for an analysis.
In the meantime, here’s a preview.
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http://www.inversecondemnation.com/inversecondemnation/2013/08/9th-circuit-oral-arguments-in-honolulu-rail-appeal.html
…. a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit heard oral arguments in the federal environmental challenge to Honolulu’s multi-billion-dollar heavy rail project. The panel, comprised of Judges Stephen Reinhardt and Andrew Hurwitz, and Senior Judge Mary Schroeder, was “hot,” and for the most part kept firing questions at the three advocates over the course of the nearly hour-long arguments. As we noted in our initial post-argument report, the panel spent the overwhelming majority of its time on the jurisdictional issue….
And although we cautioned that it’s hard to predict the outcome of an appeal based on the questions judges ask at oral argument, we threw caution to the wind and surmised that the appeal had a good chance of being dismissed for lack of appellate jurisdiction, with perhaps Judge Schroeder dissenting.
What drove us to that conclusion was not only the amount of time the court spent on the jurisdictional questions, but the fact that whenever one of the advocates attempted to shift away to the substantive issues of whether the EIS was adequate, the judges’ questions seemed to dwindle, and they eventually circled back to the jurisdictional issue. To us, this indicated the question on the judges’ minds was whether there was a final, appealable decision by the District Court. We concluded that at least two of them were not convinced there was.