Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel(businessinsider.com) |
Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel(businessinsider.com) |
They determined that construction of tunnels would be orders of magnitude faster on approvals than above-ground construction.
With that approach, tunneling construction is the key technological block. With SpaceX and Tesla's know-how, the actual construction of a hyperloop is rather de-risked.
By keeping laser-focused on tunneling tech, they build the muscle around the regulatory process, get cities and states to trust them, and show operational competence in operations.
Once they do a intra-state system in a friendly regulatory environment (FL/TX, ala Austin -> San Antonio or Tampa -> Orlando), they'll built a corporate machine that's tunneling dozens of underground highways across the country.
At that point, building new tunnels as a hyperloop will be a reasonable mid-term goal.
Loop 2020's -> Hyperloop 2030's
United States: Thinks about vacuum tubes for awhile, gives up entirely.
I’m much more excited by Japan’s new maglev that will go from Tokyo to Nagoya by 2026 or 2028.
Hyper loop had a lot of potential to avoid the problem facing most rail projects in the states (lack of land for straight shots needed for HSR, and the government’s unwilling to use eminent domain to get that, also, I think Americans are more adverse to viaducts everywhere than the Chinese). A vaccine tube underneath would solve a lot of that.
FTA:
> Virgin Hyperloop was founded as Hyperloop Technologies in 2014, stemming from Tesla CEO Elon Musk's idea of a high-speed passenger pod transport. It changed its name when Richard Branson joined the board of directors in 2017.
Yes, because they no longer plan to use the original design proposed by Musk (pods in vacuum in tubes installed on the ground).
No because long term they still plan to do hyper loop but the latest iteration of the idea is electric cars driving really fast in under-pressurized underground tunnel.
See https://www.boringcompany.com/hyperloop
That being said, Boring Company is still in very early stages.
They made significant progress (built Las Vegas tunnel and are in building more of it; created prufrock-1 i.e. v1 of boring machine designed by Boring Company).
The hyperloop is something they want to do and most likely can do. The limiting factor is more permitting and politics (for example: they had a deal to do a long tunnel in Chicago with one mayor and then the next mayor said it's stupid and scrapped it).
Probably at some point Boring company would like to be able to make tunnels long enough that it would make sense to with something more high speed then a normal EV can do. But that is not their focus.
Yes: https://www.boringcompany.com/hyperloop
No because it's a different system than what Musk originally proposed. Virgin Hyperloop was building Musk's original idea.
What Boring Company calls a hyperloop now is a long-distance tunnel, possibly under partial vacuum, with electric cars driving really fast (600+ miles per hour).
An old story in the US since the post office basically made airplane travel viable via postal contracts.
Pneumatic garbage disposal is in use in a very few places. Roosevelt Island in New York has had a working system since the 1980s. It works well and is well-liked. Roosevelt Island was supposed to be car-free, and lacks much of a road system, so this was a good fit.
The anti-car crowd should be pushing for this.
[1] https://highways.dot.gov/public-roads/autumn-1994/tube-freig...
Edit: replies saying "this never could have worked" are missing the point to a pretty hysterical degree.
You don't know that. No one knows that! Unless you are from the future or are a genius-level mechanical engineer in the specific problem domain of vacuum trains (who for some reason was not already employed by Hyperloop), you cannot say that with 100% confidence.
No matter how unlikely it might have seemed to you, it could have worked! And it's a bummer when extremely-cool-but-unlikely things don't work.
Obviously there is no hyperloop system yet so we can't speak about real life stats but the idea of hyperloop is a pod that goes really fast because of the vacuum.
Change "pod" to "shipping container".
So if you can send one shipping container after another at, say, 400 mph, what exactly would be scalability problem. It would clearly be faster that rail and therefore having a higher throughput.
The entire system is designed for sending containers one by one in pods, so its throughput is not at all impressive compared to the trains with several tens of railcars.
Not to mention the technical difficulties of reliably maintaining vacuum in hundreds of kilometers of the tunnel. And don’t forget that a single broken seal anywhere on the whole track would bring the whole system to a halt, and would require significant safety intervals between the poss.
As for the speed - the hyperloop’s main advantage - there is relatively little cargo in the world for which shipping time makes a critical difference between 100 km/h train and 2000 km/h hypothetical hyperloop. Reliability, throughout and an established network are much more important, hence why the bulk of world’s shipping is done slowly and reliably by sea.
Several companies sprang up to pursue the concept[2]. This article is about Richard Branson's Virgin Hyperloop which itself has a very checkered past[3] and has felt pretty scamming since the beginning, long before Branson acquired the company. Not sure if the acquisition by Branson has caused them to clean up their act or what.
The only Hyperloop thing that Elon or his companies seem to do is hold a design competition for students where they compete on a short hyperloop test track at SpaceX's Hawthorn facility. If I had to guess I'd say that this is most likely a recruiting tool for SpaceX.
1. https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/hyperl...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop#Hyperloop_companies
3. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/former-hyperloop...
Now google Tesla's battery fire and imagine it happens inside that tunnel.
Those tunnels are death traps.
It is true that train ridership is still way down... maybe 25% of pre-Covid levels. Although they'll probably return before HyperLoop is ready.
The Musk blue paper by Musk does not.
https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/hyperl...
> A viable technical solution is magnetic levitation; however the cost associated with material and construction is prohibitive. An alternative to these conventional options is an air bearing suspension. Air bearings offer stability and extremely low drag at a feasible cost by exploiting the ambient atmosphere in the tube.
The Shanghai maglev is kind of a pink elephant, it doesn’t even go to downtown Shanghai. I took it once for the novelty l, but a cab is much better time wise and about the same price.
A big problem is a breach in your vacuum. Keeping the atmosphere out is expensive.
But what if where you’re building it has no atmosphere and is geologically stable or dead? Then a lot of problems go away. You don’t even need a tunnel necessarily.
Yet another reason why colonizing the Moon makes 1000x more sense than the romantic pipe dream of the red planet.
The Boring company is working on what they call a 'Loop', not a 'Hyperloop'. A Loop is just a tunnel with some form of battery electric pod inside of it. Its not a vacuum.
I'm sure at some point in the future when they have improved tunneling they would consider trying to do a vacuum tunnel but this is not what they are working on now.
To be honest I thought this whole idea got scrapped 5+ years ago.
Congress wants to fund the next big thing and make the US the best in the world. They don't want to hear that train technology is an almost completely solved problem and so we cannot get ahead of the rest of the world - the only thing left is buy and build the same thing as everyone else. Congress hates that idea.
crypto get rich quick schemes: hyperdupe? faster chicken egg laying tech: hyperkoop silly putty: hypergoop squatty potties: hyperpoop?
https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...
If you were also one of the leading railway makers, it would protect you from such a thing because you could make money from government contracts to make trains instead. In the coming elections, it is very unlikely that Trump is coming back nor is the Democratic party going to win any elections at least in the next 6 years so railway isn't happening... hence this move.
This makes literally 0 sense.
This company adopted the Hyperloop because it allowed the to get funding based Musk name but then instantly went away from everything that Musk suggested would be needed to make the concept viable.
What Musk actually published can still be read here:
https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/hyperl...
Musk really only thought Hyperloop made sense between two really very high density urban centers such as SF and LA. For the majority of transportation between cities super-sonic electric powered flight was his preferred solution.
The huge trip-duration and arrival-time uncertainty due to the shared rail, and having to defer to cargo trains, is what sinks it, for me. They can vary by large double digit percentages of the nominal time, at which point they're usually much slower than just driving.
I love how relaxing and comfortable they are and not having the security circus and dealing with crowded, distant-from-the-city airports, but not at nearly-air-travel prices and a 25-75% time premium over driving.
I'm sure they would be more than happy to prioritize Amtrak trains over their cargo customers if they are suitably compensated for the trouble.
If Amtrak isn't willing or able to compensate them for it... Then clearly it's not that important.
Here we see a company that will end up building its own infrastructure deciding cargo is a better business opportunity than passenger. I think there was a certain amount of inevitability given the economics.
I'm not sure the idea will be viable, ever. Too many problems, not enough rewards.
For example, the problem of a vacuum tube developing a leak. The leak would start an implosion, which then propagates down both directions of the tube at mach-1 speed of sound. The implosion would resemble the continuous crushing of a soda can down the entire length of tube. The outside pressure at sea level compared to the inside (lack of) pressure is too great to be safe for passengers or cargo.
The above problem could in theory be solved using air locks spaced apart to have a chance to mitigate the destruction to a few kilometres where the leak happened. But the idea is not very feasible, the air-locked segments would be several kilometres long, enough to slow a transport capsule to a safe halt, yet long enough to get ahead of the mach-1 speed of implosion. High speed sensor networks would have to cover the the hyper-loop ad infinium.
And don't get me started on material science, in particular thermal expansion of steel. The only way to deal with thermal expansion is by using expansion joins. The problem with expansion joints, see the above part about leaks. The entire track of (above ground) tubing would have to deal with significant expansion/contraction. Like for Dallas <--> Austin the expansion would be well in excess of ~100's of ft.
Then comes the energy requirements to pull and maintain a hard vacuum in very long & wide tubes. The closest thing that comes to mind is the Large Hadron Collider, but that pulls a vacuum by cooling the narrow tube down to cryogenic temps... it's not the same. Hyper-loop would require HUGE amounts of energy to maintain the vacuum. It would be more energy put in than profit that comes out, unless of course the hyperloop is transporting some kind of high value merchandise like kilos of cocaine or whatever. The economics simply isn't there, the engineering isn't there, it's pretty much a terrible idea.
The only good argument for the Hyperloop is a logical fallacy, called "argument from authority". Put another way, the argument goes: since Elon Musk is so amazing, we can suspend our disbelief and trust the idea on the sole basis of whatever perceived accolades (the authority) Elon Musk has gained by being a billionaire entrepreneur. Sure, Elon's a cool dude, very smart, tenacious, etc... but that doesn't stop hyperloop from being a terrible idea.
Depends on the materials, but most materials have very different characteristics and won't implode. Leaks are seen in modern vacuum systems all the time, and implosions are rare. I've personally caused a leak in a vacuum system when I disconnected the vacuum hose from the pump - air rushed into the hose and no implosion!
> in particular thermal expansion of steel. The only way to deal with thermal expansion is by using expansion joins
After some thought (I've been thinking about them for a while), there are two solutions: first go far underground where the temperature is stable year round. Put the tube inside something that you do careful HVAC in to ensure there is no temperature changes. Both make the whole system even more insanely expensive than what it already is. I have zero confidence in expansion joints unless we replace them yearly which means the whole is even more insanely expensive.
Throw enough money at it and I think engineers can solve the engineering problems. However nothing changes the fact that it is insanely expensive no matter how you look at it.
The real problem isn't engineering though, the real problem is political: you can't get enough money to build the thing, and if you even try you will discover that nobody will let you build it in their backyard.
This is a science fiction trope with no basis in reality. The pressure differential is one atmosphere to zero atmospheres which is functionally equivalent to one atmosphere to two atmospheres or what you get from diving 10 meters into the ocean.
The Apollo LEM had a shell that was pretty equivalent to aluminum foil in places. One atmosphere to zero atmospheres is the sort of thing you can plug up with duct tape.
The expense is what kills it. The other problems are solvable with money, but there is no way getting around all the material needed to build it.
High-speed rail is slower than a plane, sure, but it's way faster than a car.
You dont need to shave off 4 hours of 8hrs journey, what most logistics channels need is predictability and at as low cost as possible.
If you can save 1/2 shipping costs of you TVs at cost of 1-2 extra days of transportation, you will pick that option (with exception of perishables).
Thats how the logistics channels work. High predictability ensures you can schedule work, space, and send-off without fuss. That's why rail is the best for the task. So company saves money because solution is cheap and because there are no (or minimal) backlogs due to some failure in transport.
Its the definition of KISS. It works, predictable and cheap.
As Musk said 'Its that simple'. It boggles my mind anyone would be crazy enough to pick hyper-loop as cargo solution - a what 10 years old vaporware with no working anything but CGI.
You're not entirely wrong however. There is effectively one atmosphere differential at sea level, but framing the difference that way is at worst intellectual dishonest, or at best a rather naive understanding. In actual reality there is a very long tube, and all the surface area is under pressure. In metric is 10,000 kg per square meter, multiplied by all the square meters down the length of tube. Of course this simplified understanding ignores the weight of the transport capsule inside, which causes a momentary higher differential. And, the hyperloop won't work at sea level, as others have pointed out, it would have to be underground to avoid thermal expansion issues... meaning higher pressure.
I doubt that they can get their costs lower than airplanes. They need to buy land all the way from point A to point B, vs only at airports. Airplanes also run at a partial vacuum (30000 feet) by nature. As such it is hard to see anyone using them instead of something else. Where speed counts airplanes are faster, where speed doesn't count ships and slow trains in air are a cheaper.
The proper answer to your question requires information you're not going to get by asking HN, it's like asking how much time we should spend investigating fusion power. It completely depends on what leads people have, how promising the those leads look, how many "hard steps" are ahead of us, the benefit if we made it past them, etc.
The advantage of fusion is that this radioactivity is short lived compared to uranium - decades instead of centuries or millennia. However, this also means that you have to stay much farther away from it, as it's much more radioactive than a piece of uranium which you can typically hold in your hand without any ill effects (just don't hold it under your pillow for a few years).
There is also this https://www.railfreight.com/railfreight/2021/01/05/new-claim... Supposedly, don't know if it's in regular operation, or has been a publicity stunt.
> Railroad corporations operated under charters received from the states, [...] These charters usually vested the railroad with a public mission and some pub- lic responsibility. Railroads were chartered to carry passengers and freight, for which they were incidentally permitted to charge fares.
> AMTRAK has not, during its brief existence, attempted to operate its own trains with its own personnel, but has instead chosen to rely upon contracts with the railroads. The result has been the immediate freeing of railroads from the passenger deficit. AMTRAK has also created a type of cost-plus subsidy, with no incentive to the operating railroad to improve services or control costs. The results are generally what one would expect.
https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
I've heard it said Amtrak was designed to fail so that freight would have no competition. It seems to me this is the case, since anytime Amtrak tries to expand (or even re-establish service as in Mobile-New Orleans), the freight companies immediately go to court to prevent being forced to share their infrastructure.
Amtrak makes almost all of its money on the Northeast Corridor which it then basically throws away in the rest of the country.
When humans are on a train speed counts and they are willing to pay extra for it. When freight is on a train they can save money by going slower.
Look at some Swiss alpine tunnels or the underwater Channel tunnel if you want to see advanced tunnel boring technology.
Edit: to give exact numbers: boring for LVCC Loop started on November 15 2019, and the tunnels opened to the public in April 2021, 1.5 years later for 1.7 miles (2.7km) of tunnel. In contrast, boring for the Channel tunnel started in June 1988, and the tunnels were opened to freight trains in June 1994 - 6 years for 50 km (31 miles) of much larger undersea tunnels, which allow transport up to 160km/h in real use (200 km/h being the highest designed speed). That's 5.2 miles per year, versus TBC's 1.1 miles per year, comparing like with like.
And if its so amazingly expensive as you claim, why was the only commercial competitor 2x as expensive?
The investment for the kind of things like the Channel tunnel or the Base tunnel in Switzerland are 100x that of a Boring company tunnel. Those are incredibly expensive dedicated machines, years of planning beforehand.
Boring company is trying to innovate on small tunnel machines and make them more operationally efficient. Moving to electric powered drills, vertical launch and other practical improvements. Those kinds of things you could actually operate and launch in a lot a lot of places.
The amount of hate that get thrown because a company wants to improve a technology is just incredible. So we shouldn't try to improve some machine because potentially in another country they already some technology? Apparently the commercial machines that TBC bought to start with clearly didn't have many of those features they wanted on a machine of the size they wanted. So clearly the technology didn't actually exist.
So I guess that means the US will also never do Li-Ion battery as Koreans already have better technology. So why try to innovate. SpaceX doing Falcon 1, why Arianespace already has Vega. What's the point?
As long as the company is not somehow using massive government funds and they have paying costumers, what is the problem?
So was the Channel tunnel. It takes quite a bit of time after physically digging the tunnel until you can actually open it to the public.
> And if its so amazingly expensive as you claim, why was the only commercial competitor 2x as expensive?
Perhaps because other tunnels left space for potentially saving someone from the tunnel in case of an emergency?
Hopefully this never comes to pass, but it seems very hard to believe there is any chance to escape in case of a tunnel fire.
> The amount of hate that get thrown because a company wants to improve a technology is just incredible.
It's the other way around. They're just a tunnel boring company, but are constantly being hailed as some futuristic transportation solution. They're particularly a company that seems to bet on reducing costs (all the way down to European levels as far as I understand, American tunnel boring prices are apparently hugely inflated) beyond anything else, such as comfort, speed and most importantly safety.
Let's say you want to go from SF to Seattle, a distance of about 800 miles. If you had a typical high-speed maglev train (250 mph), the trip would take about 3 hours. On an airplane, the actual transit would take a little under 2 hours, so if you get to the airport an hour early that's 3 hours total. (Personally I never show up to the airport more than 20 minutes early for domestic flights.) So for any trip longer than that, airplanes beat even high-speed maglev trains on speed. Of course there are factors besides raw speed to consider, like comfort and cost, but speed is an important one.
The bigger your country is, the more the fixed-cost of airline security is amortized over the distance traveled. If you don't have to travel very far, trains make sense. In Japan the population density is 10x higher than in the US, so trips tend to be much shorter. In the US, which is very spread out comparatively speaking, planes are much more compelling. So US trains need to either be really fast, or really cheap and comfortable, to be worth it.
The fastest maglev trains can go quite a bit faster than 250mph, by the way. For example Japan is constructing its "L0 series" which will have a top speed of around 375mph, and at this point you do compete with planes. Building one of these seems a lot more realistic than anything Hyperloop, but it's not like these superfast maglevs are anything conventional either, so I don't see the harm in experimenting with fun tech like vacuum-sealing the train.
Electric planes will not only be much cheaper to they will also be much more quiet and thus can potentially be operate in more places closer to where people need.
A major investment into a that technology seem a far better bet then trains at this point.
It's impossible for electric planes to be cheaper than electric rail - everything about a plane is harder to achieve, the size will be smaller (since it also needs to lift off the ground, not just drive), safety is a much bigger concern (leading to much more time for boarding procedures). The only advantage air travel has is that it doesn't require real-estate.
Instead, electric planes still need decades of engineering work, and what we know for sure is that they will be less efficient than kerosene planes, as there is no type of battery even plausible today that could achieve anywhere near the energy density of gasoline (in Wh/kg, not Wh/l as is sometimes shown).
As it stands right now US passenger rail is total joke compared to the rest of the developed world. Slower, less reliable, more expensive. Air resistance in the US is the same as everywhere else, so that isn’t the limit factor.
https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/hyperl...
> Another extreme is the approach, advocated by Rand and ET3, of drawing a hard or near hard vacuum in the tube and then using an electromagnetic suspension. The problem with this approach is that it is incredibly hard to maintain a near vacuum in a room, let alone 700 miles (round trip) of large tube with dozens of station gateways and thousands of pods entering and exiting every day.
> All it takes is one leaky seal or a small crack somewhere in the hundreds of miles of tube and the whole system stops working. However, a low pressure (vs. almost no pressure) system set to a level where standard commercial pumps could easily overcome an air leak and the transport pods could handle variable air density would be inherently robust. Unfortunately, this means that there is a non-trivial amount of air in the tube and leads us straight into another problem.
Basically, the only energy efficiency can come from the seals, since those essentially allow you to store the energy spent to move the air out of the way of the train ahead of time. Otherwise, whether you move the air by pushing the train through it, or move the air by pumping it out in front of the train, the total energy expenditure will be similar.
And again, the problem of maintaining even a somewhat low pressure in a hundreds of kilometers long above ground tube with no airlocks is well outside our current engineering capacity.
You speak pretty confidently about that, can you actually show any of that?
It also depends on how high the utilization of the tunnel is.
Who says there are no airlocks?
The proposal has been simulated by both SpaceX and Tesla, I don't think they made some basic mistakes about it being impossible to sustain a low pressure tube.
Then you are not comparing tunnel boring machines anymore. And even so, its a totally different type of project on a totally different type of scale with totally different classes of machines.
> Perhaps because other tunnels left space for potentially saving someone from the tunnel in case of an emergency?
A tunnel of that length simply doesn't need a emergency escape. The route is small enough that it is far below the required length for emergency escape.Emergency escapes are not magic.
Do you also want emergency escapes in a 20m tunnel? How about 100m? How many emergency escapes do you as a tunnel safety specialist recommend. And why is the official regulation about that so wrong? Can you show me the research paper that you are basing those conclusion on?
> Hopefully this never comes to pass, but it seems very hard to believe there is any chance to escape in case of a tunnel fire.
Nonsense. Each pod has its own power, propulsion and air filtration system. Its not like a subway that if it stands still everything stands still. If for some unknown reasons there is a pod with a fire. Then all the other pods on either side of the fire will just drive away from the fire.
Even if you are stuck in a pod, its unlikely the fire would jump from one to the next car and the pod air filtration system would mean you could be fine for hours even if for some reason you couldn't simply drive away.
> It's the other way around. They're just a tunnel boring company, but are constantly being hailed as some futuristic transportation solution.
They literally are doing an end-to-end integrated system. They want to build their own boring machines and offer full transportation solutions. Its LITERALLY both. No matter if you like it or not.
> They're particularly a company that seems to bet on reducing costs (all the way down to European levels as far as I understand, American tunnel boring prices are apparently hugely inflated)
If European companies have such magical power in tunnel boring, why don't they bid on contracts in the US?
> beyond anything else, such as comfort, speed and most importantly safety.
So an EV motor on a pod can not possible be fast more comfortable then a rail based system? That is just nonsense assertion. Its never the engine that limit the speed on any such systems.
And you have provide literally no evidence other then your assertions about safety. Yes, in longer tunnels emergency exists will have to exists of course and they will follow those regulation when the build longer tunnels.
And the pod based systems has many advantages in terms of safety.
While EV can take fire, a battery fire really only happens at high speed collisions and even then mostly the fire is pretty slow to develop. Lots of high speed BEV crashes allow the occupant to leave the car before the fire actually starts to really go.
And such crashes are incredibly unlikely as tunnels are 1-direction only. Fire in BEV are far more likely from side impacts. If one pod breaks hard and another pod crashes into it, they will both have large crumble zones.
And even if you think further, next generation batteries and BEV architectures will be considerable safer. Switching to much safer LFP base pods is a certainty. And even then there is significant safety improvements in the form of next generation separators in the pipeline.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE..., Annex I, 2.3.6:
In any event, in new tunnels, emergency exits shall be provided where the traffic volume is higher than 2,000 vehicles per lane.
1.3.1:
Where ‘traffic volume’ is mentioned in this Annex, it refers to the annual average daily traffic through a tunnel per lane. For the purpose of determining the traffic volume, each motor vehicle shall be counted as one unit.
https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-boring-co-lvcc-loop-capa...:
the LVCC Loop did meet its capacity goal of 4,400 conference attendees per hour during a demonstration event in May
2.3.8:
Where emergency exits are provided, the distance between two emergency exits shall not exceed 500 metres.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boring_Company#Convention_...:
Boring of the first tunnel, 4,475 feet (1,364 m) long
⇒ if that tunnel had been built in the EU, I think it would have needed emergency exits.
(Searched for US regulations, too, without success. I expect them to be less stringent)
there is a reason that train is so short https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_speed_record#/media/Fi... - in the wheeled train the vibrational modes induced at those speeds and the resulting forces will tear the train apart.
>the overhead wire contact
well, batteries on the train would solve that. That one thing in HyperLoop Musk got right.
Batteries will never have the energy density to solve that. Just basic physics. Even diesel fuel isn't really good enough
Infrastructure cost? New railway projects are notoriously expensive, but so are new airports.
Per unit cost? Train locomotives and carriages are far cheaper than planes.
Operating cost? Trains are far cheaper over time than planes. Their maintenance is far less intensive, they can run on just about anything, and they last for many decades without issue
Many regions where it would not make sense economically to connect high speed trains can be connected with electric plains. For many regions you simply don't need more then a small number flights.
Trains make sense when you need transport very large numbers of people.
Airplanes can be dynamically allocated where needed much easier.
And the simply fact is, despite massively subsidized rail infrastructure, even current planes are the cheaper option. Electric trains will require far less maintenance and will use electricity.
Legally speaking building a train line across developed region is an absolute nightmare. It takes a very long time, often isn't successful at all and the project takes so long that financing interest is a killer.
Comparatively a really quite electric plane is easy, far easier then current planes.
The far faster speed of planes is preferable to most people. Sure there are super fast trains, but those are really only viable on a incredibly small set of routes.
