The hyperloop is always greener from the other side of the stroad
I like Cleveland. Much like the other overlooked cities along the Great Lakes, it has amazing potential. Cleveland has inflicted a lot of self-harm over the past 70 years chasing after growth—just look at all those parking lots—in a model that only made it poorer and more fragile. This is not a revelation. The smart people there largely get this now.
If there is a prototype city for the Strong Towns approach, it is Cleveland. For the next three or more decades, the city needs to focus on making better use of existing investments. To rebuild their wealth, they need to shift from expansion of infrastructure systems to aggressively maintaining what they have.
Growth investments should be of the venture capital variety, using small, neighborhood-focused tactical projects inspired by the urgent struggles of their residents. Thickening up their neighborhoods by improving walking, biking, and local transit while modernizing their regulations to allow for by-right incremental development, filling in parking lots and other gaps with structures, should be the economic development obsession.
Again, I believe that the smart people there get this.
In America, the most difficult thing about a lifestyle shift to exercise and healthy living is that we are constantly surrounded by sugary snacks. And as humans, we’re wired to want sugar snacks. To crave them, despite what our rational selves tell us.
The local government version of the sugar snack is the large, transformative project. And in that regard, Elon Musk is the Willy Wonka of our time, peddling transportation snacks we just can’t resist. The latest is the hyperloop, and earnest and prudent Cleveland is jonesing for a sugar high.
I could go through the propaganda piece….er…feasibility study that suggests the benefits the hyperloop justify the $30 billion cost, but why? We’ve done that so many times for projects that were financially insane, but made far more sense than this one. We all know what we’re looking at here. This is the next dream, as sure as malls, fast food, suburban subdivisions, and the like were once the dream.
The most authentic thing I’ve heard about this particular project comes at the 0:41 second mark of the (non-embeddable) video on the project website.
“The exciting thing about hyperloop’s project is that it is fundable, both by Wall Street and by the USDOT and state DOTs across America.”
Yes, for those who traffic in the megaproject, this does open a whole new product line in what seemed to be a dying industry. Very exciting, indeed.
I’ll give you three quick things about this proposal that should tell you all you need to know.
First, there is nothing in this feasibility study that considers land use or value capture. The way you pay for a $30 billion project is to improve the land around the station by $600 billion. This underlying flaw of all highway funding is the incorrect assumption that mobility in and of itself is a good where more is always better. This feasibility study takes all the flaws of the economics of highway building and embeds them in this new technology.
Second, the crazy math they employ to financially justify the project includes tolling existing roadways as a way to shift people out of their automobiles while simultaneously using high automobile congestion and rising future gas prices to provide a base level of demand for the model. This is incoherent. If we’re going to toll roads as a way to shift demand, why wait for hyperloop? Oh yeah, because they are never going to do that.
Finally, the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority has an annual budget of $300 million. Over the next five years, they are hoping for an additional $600 million for capital investments, things like maintaining facilities and equipment. RTA provides over 50 million rides per year, which is 10x what the hyperloop is optimistically projected to provide. They do this with an annual budget that is 1% of the hyperloop construction.
Don’t be distracted, Cleveland. Do the real work—serve your people—and true prosperity will follow.
Top image from Cleveland.com, reposted from public document.
Waterways today are engineered systems that are more orderly than natural rivers, but they are increasingly dumb.