One year ago I wondered if “the Manchester Center Food Hall was Really Coming?” I recently took a stroll around the mall to see if we could get an answer to that question. I have some good news and bad news.
The good news: Some work is being done.
The bad news: The pace at which the work is being done indicates that there is a single person working on his weekends to complete it. At the current pace, we will all be dead before that person is done.
Background: In May 2015 a company announced a renovation of Manchester Center. A year later, nothing had happened. In September 2016, the Bee reported that work was beginning and phase 1 would be done by Spring 2017. Click to read more!
That was fast. Last April, Amtrak California decided to try something new – an early morning train from Fresno to Sacramento, timed to arrive for the start of the business day. The return train was scheduled for the early evening. The idea was to make it possible for people in the Central Valley to use Amtrak to attend a meeting or conference in the capital. However, this was not an expansion of service. Instead, cities south of Fresno lost one of their trains. The reasoning being that no one was going to board a train in Bakersfield at 3am. I talked about this change in service in November of 2017.Click to read more!
While not the focus of this blog, I’ve talked a few times about air service from Fresno Air Terminal (FAT). A couple of years ago, I compared air service in Fresno to a group of peer cities, which confirmed that Fresno is under-served.
One big question has been: what destination is missing from Fresno? United answered that question in part last year by adding trial service to Chicago on an Embraer 175 operated by Skywest. This route was somewhat noticeable because it became one of the longest flights in the US operated by a small regional jet. Well, the test proved successful, and United will again operate flights to Chicago in 2019, but this time with a full-sized plane (A319). However, service will still be summer-only. In 2017, United also increased their service to Fresno by upgrading San Francisco to a mainline jet. Click to read more!
Time sure does fly. It was just over five years ago – August 2013 – when Elon Musk released his Hyperloop “white paper,” setting the imaginations of the tech world on fire. 2018 was all about his new razzle dazzle proposal – the Boring Company – but I thought it was time to take a look back at the original Hyperloop hype and the progress since then.
As a reminder, here is what that paper proposed:
A new high speed mode of transport is desired between Los Angeles and San Francisco; however, the proposed California High Speed Rail (HSR) does not reduce current trip times or reduce costs relative to existing modes of transport. This preliminary design study proposes a new mode of high speed transport that reduces both the travel time and travel cost between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
The total trip time is approximately half an hour, with capsules departing as often as every 30 seconds from each terminal and carrying 28 people each. This gives a total of 7.4 million people each way that can be transported each year on Hyperloop. The total cost of Hyperloop in this analysis is under $6 billion USD.
At the time, I pointed out that the half-baked plan appeared to be just an attempt to delay the HSR project in favor of a future silver bullet. The reason for that conclusion is that the paper made an effort to downplay the HSR project while misrepresenting what the Hyperloop was promising. The biggest red flag was that the proposal didn’t actually go into San Francisco or Los Angeles, which is where the biggest expense would be. Other folks, like Alon, took issue with some of the engineering promises.
Looking back through the document, five years later, I am a bit surprised to find that the claims are less hyperbolic than what I remembered. Misleading, yes, but not outrageous. A reason I am a bit surprised is because Elon Musk’s behavior has deteriorated significantly since then. From a USA Today article:
After reading Musk’s 57-page proposal, Sam Jaffe, senior research analyst at clean technology firm Navigant Research, was impressed with Musk’s willingness to release the report with “excruciating detail” and openly invite criticism. “What he’s done is amazing. He wrote it and said, ‘Criticize this,'” Jaffe says. “And it’s worthy of being criticized.” USA Today
That willingness to debate in the public space didn’t last long. In 2018, any criticism was met with cries of “fake news” and “pedophile” by Musk.
Too funny.
Of course, Hyperloop has existed as more than just a paper, as it spurred the creation of an entire industry of hype. It’s through interviews, press releases, and “demonstrations” where the more ludicrous claims emerged. I still chuckle at the render of the Hyperloop next to the Golden Gate Bridge, where apparently the concept of boats larger than kayaks was not known.
At first, much of the hype was based around the idea that Musk could do no wrong, and the government couldn’t do anything right.
“I expect [Musk] will prove, once again that the private sector (and not the government) should be handing public transportation,” Draper told me yesterday after the Hyperloop announcement. “He is smart to go after inefficient government publicworks.”
For years, government has been a nuisance to Elon Musk. It’s slowed him down. It’s required him to spend his valuable time lobbying his Twitter followers for support in the New York legislature instead of building rockets. It’s required him to explain his mind-bending technical innovations to grayhairs in Congress as if he were speaking to schoolchildren. Over and over, the public sector has convinced Musk that it is hopelessly lost when it comes to matters of innovation, and that anything truly revolutionary must spring from the ambitions of the privatesector.Click to read more!
