Comments by "Fredinno" (@innosam123) on "Elon Musk Cancels Tunnels Projects!" video.

We know for a fact that he hasn’t. Which explains too much.
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@mattbrown292 Intercity? Sure. That goes out the window for urban transit though. American cities are more than dense enough to support LRT/Light Metro/Subway. We know, because despite the lines often being horribly designed (usually to save money), LRT is reasonably successful in the US. The issue with US transit is that people take it less seriously than roads for... partially political reasons. Buses, which are a necessity for high transit use (allowing people to actually go to and from the train stops from the suburbs), are seeing their budgets cut for financial reasons. They’re not profitable, but neither is the water system. Or road network. But transit is expected to be profitable...
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@mattbrown292 Well, there IS brightline... And my comment was about inner city transit. Intercity is a bit iffy outside those than connect sister cities in the same megaregion. Still a lot of opportunity there, but not universally across the US. It IS true that HSR rarely makes money across the world. Almost all HSR systems that are private or can at least cover their operating expenses had their construction heavily subsidized by the government. Including Japan’s.
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@lkrnpk TBF, Starliner is honestly a better designed capsule than the Dragon 2 in every way- largely because it was a clean sheet design not designed solely to minimize cost (and to use a landing procedure that was scrapped). Starliner is larger, it can actually land on land, it’s reusable (interestingly, the crewed Dragon v2 is not being reused), and it’s more flexible& future-proof. Also, arguably safer, since it doesn’t have the abort system permanently strapped to the sides (a liability if something like Apollo 13 occurs, as it would be an instant game over.) Boeing can design good stuff, it’s the penny-pinchers at the top that are the problem.
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