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Comment by nickik | Hacker News Reader

For people that have no personal stake to say 'if we invest in this tech it would be better', well that's what people said about rockets and EV as well.

I can't count how many times people in the last 10 years wanted the government to go all in on hydrogen or whatever.

The Boring company is mainly about in city transport, not city to city transport, so its simply a different problem.

And there is a reason why commercial railroads are no longer effective, literally nowhere are they effective. Elon Musk is not magic, he picks the technology that he thinks can be commercially effective.

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China and Europe might disagree with you evaluation of rail roads being ineffective.

All European countries pay massive amounts of money for their high speed rail. The prices costumers reflect do not cover the cost.

Of course we can make some of the same assumptions about highways.

If there was actual competition between these systems we might have a more accurate picture.

But private highways do actually seem to be profitable in some countries.

China invest untold billions in that system, and I don't know enough to say if this is defensible on commercial bases.

> The prices costumers reflect do not cover the cost.

Yeah right, let's see if this assertion is true (keep in mind that all infra cost are budgeted into annual revenue). Numbers from 2019 which was not a great year for french companies (2020 was worse, but for everyone):

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200228005403/en/SNC...

So, -300m in 2019, with strikes costing 600m (so a net positive of 300m if not for the yellow vest and strikes). -300m for an EBITDA fo 5+bn, i'd consider that you assertion "The prices costumers reflect do not cover the cost" is false, and rail is profitable. High-speed rail even more so.

But i'd agree that some rails are not sustainable and are only still kept thanks to the profitable ones. But the Paris-Marseille or Paris-Bordeaux are definitly profitable.

> And there is a reason why commercial railroads are no longer effective, literally nowhere are they effective. Elon Musk is not magic, he picks the technology that he thinks can be commercially effective.

Railroads have a 50% profit margin, and account for 43% of all intercity shipping in the United States. I don’t know why you would call them commercially ineffective.

This thing is a car in a tunnel. It can’t even compete with a single subway car.

I think GP meant commercially ineffective for moving passengers.

For freight, railroads are the best possible.

But it is no ineffective thought.

Quite a few high-speed railroads are insanely profitable for SNCF in France (Paris-Strasbourg, Paris-Marseille, Paris-Lille), some of them are less profitable, or even run a deficit, but the SNCF budget is balanced every year since 2012 (was, pre-pandemic)

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