If the California high speed rail project is completed (or even makes progress) it will likely stifle any similar projects for decades. Competing against government projects is hard enough because the goverment has the incentive (from voters, contractors, workers, unions) to "succeed" regardless of costs and has access to vast resources thru taxation as well as control of the rules of the game (laws, regulation). Project with high fixed cost such as this would be impossible because of the huge financial risks. Once the government establishes its presence it will either be uneconomic (Amtrak) or illegal (US Post Office) to compete.
> If the California high speed rail project is completed (or even makes progress) it will likely stifle any similar projects for decades.
Building railroads (road networks, etc.) over non-trivial spans of land is practically impossible without active government support. Even if California doesn't build HSR, private efforts without government involvement would be pretty much impossible.
Agreed ANY project will require government support. I just don't see many governments supporting competing projects. So if CA HSR gets built competing projects, such as Hyperloop, are unlikely to get the required government support. Make sense?
> I just don't see many governments supporting competing projects. So if CA HSR gets built competing projects, such as Hyperloop, are unlikely to get the required government support.
Given how long it takes to build large scale infrastructure, and given that Hyperloop is still at a primitive stage as technology (the fact that the paper just released calls, as a next step, for reduced-scale testing to demonstrate the physics, whereas HSR is a widely-used, well-established technology with multiple vendors), its more of a long-term successor to HSR than a concurrent competitor.
OTOH, its true that HSR being built would reduce the problems that provide the incentives to build Hyperloop.
"its true that HSR being built would reduce the problems that provide the incentives to build Hyperloop."
not true at all, since, it would be too expensive to run at volume to help any significant amount of traffic and too expensive for most actual real-world commuters to use (they would just fly at that expense). It would reduce one problem: obtaining a right-of-way, by virtue of making it impossible.
