I thought the point was solving traffic. Not making money. Even the headline contradicts itself.
The important thing is that it’s making $75 million a year, not that it’s profitable or that it’s efficient.
The .com “Revenue is value” bullshit has persisted and it sucks.
We shouldn’t even bother to compare, the loop thing in Las Vegas is not a transport system, it’s an amusement ride.
Jesus fucking Christ… I always knew this thing was dumb, but I was trying to think of similarly sized trains for a good comparison. I live near Atlanta. Our local airport Hartsfield-Jackson is the busiest airport by passenger count. There is a train called the Plane Train that connects the terminals together. According to that page it has 2.8 miles of track which is similar to the LVCC Loop’s 2.2. The Plane Train carried “more than 250,000 people per day” (article from 2018, btw). The LVCC Loop has “demonstrated peak capacity of over 4,500 passengers per hour, and over 32,000 passengers per day.” The Plane Train uses 11 four-car trains during peak hours. The LVCC Loop uses 70 cars. Even if you wanted to make a weird comparison and say “but it’s not 88 cars” that wouldn’t make up for the 7.8x capacity of the Plane Train lol. Plus, each car is driven by a human. The trains are autonomous. I assume there may be someone monitoring it from some control area, but still.
PLUS! It’s not like The Plane Train is some crazy high tech solution! It was first made in 1980. I remember in pre 9/11 days riding it to the terminal to see off family members as they left for flights. Not much has changed about it. People don’t get on it and think “wow this is so cool.” It just works!
Elon Musk could not beat a simple train system in an airport built in the 1980s.
Yeah but how much revenue does the plane train make? /s
Also I haven’t really looked into this Vegas Loop thing until now, and the tweet was right, it only connects a convention center and a hotel LOL
Last I heard too the cars aren’t autonomous in the tunnel either. They’re driven by real people. The “hyperloop” idea was actually to try and kill the high speed rail project in Cali. Elon is a piece of shit and tried to tank our train, which has helped to extend the project further and increase scrutiny of it.
The worst part about it is the hyper loop is an objectively cool idea, impractical but fucking sweet, that definitely didn’t originate from Elon. He only jumped on it to try and divert cash from highspeed rail and even then it just evolved into lol put cars in a tunnel I own.
Not a cool idea, it’s a retarded idea, unless we are saying making something super expensive and very impractical is cool, in which case, it’s cool I guess, like a Bugatti Veyron, just even stupider for it to exist while there are children starving in the world.
Good point I was wrong, I forgot it’s impossible to spend money on more than one thing at a a time.
There is spending money and utter waste of money, the hyperloop as a concept is fucking idiotic, it’s trains but worse in every conceivable way other than from the standpoint of one individual trying to get fast from one point to another, and much more expensive
![[image] Sometimes it feels like folks in US would build anything but efficient transit 🤦](https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/9fee6912-22f8-44a0-b34c-75dd59e25f54.png){kind=link}