When Elon Musk first proposed the hyperloop–a transportation tube between Los Angeles and San Francisco–the Antiplanner panned the idea saying that it would cost a lot more than Musk claimed, that passengers would be reluctant to be accelerated to high speeds in a windowless capsule, and that a point-to-point technology wouldn’t be able to compete with the door-to-door convenience of the automobile. Recently, New York magazine has published an article confirming the first point and possibly the second.
In “A Kink in the Hyperloop,” writer Benjamin Wallace recounts efforts by venture capitalists to put together a company called Hyperloop One that would build and operate the hyperloop. Most of the article deals with personal frictions between the various players, but a telling statement near the end of the article blows up the entire idea: “The projected cost-per-mile has gone from 6 percent to 60 percent of that of California High Speed Rail.”
Musk’s original cost projection for a San Francisco-to-Los Angeles line was $7.5 billion. If costs have increased ten times, the current projection must be $75 billion.
