Falling short even of some critics’ expectations, California’s beleaguered high-speed rail was dealt another blow to its credibility as the state’s biggest and most ambitious infrastructure project, with news emerging that the federal government signed off on a massive reschedule that would push back construction by four additional years. 

“The first segment of California’s first-in-the-nation bullet-train project, currently scheduled for completion in 2018, will not be done until the end of 2022, according to a contract revision the Obama administration quietly approved,” Politico reported. “That initial 119-mile segment through the relatively flat and empty Central Valley was considered the easiest-to-build stretch of a planned $64 billion line, which is eventually supposed to zip passengers between San Francisco and Los Angeles in under three hours. So the four-year delay is sure to spark new doubts about whether the state’s — and perhaps the nation’s — most controversial and expensive infrastructure project will ever reach its destination.”

Positive spin

But the bullet train’s stalwart supporters had reason to spin the stretched-out timetable as an act of clemency and commitment by the federal government. “The extension came through modification of a $2.5-billion grant that originally required completion of a segment of rail structures from Madera to Shafter by 2017,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

“The changes also allow the Department of Transportation to extend a cash advance to the state, which potentially means the California High-Speed Rail Authority can continue spending long after the original deadline that was set in 2009 under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.”

Lisa Marie Alley waving away entirely claims that the new schedule ought to be seen as a setback. “The misconception that this amendment somehow delays California’s high-speed rail project is completely false,” she said. 

Mounting criticism

In addition to vested local and statewide interests saddled with the burdens imposed by train construction, the train’s national critics have lined up against the project for political and economic reasons. “Everyone is intrigued by new technology, and certainly we should do all we can to encourage the capital formation that breeds innovation,” wrote National Review’s John Fund. “But building high-speed rail may be all about fighting the last war, given that the first Shinkansen was launched more than 50 years ago in Japan and is clearly not a technology of the future.”

A successful new test by a team working on Elon Musk’s Hyperloop vacuum-train concept has fueled concerns that California’s rail could be obsolescent before it is even finished. Hyperloop One Chief Executive Rob Lloyd has suggested “the most likely scenario to bring a hyperloop to California would be one that ships goods from the docks in Long Beach and San Pedro to warehouses in the Inland Empire,” the Los Angeles Times reported separately. “Almost any other major California project would require overcoming mountainous terrain and securing expensive real estate along farmlands and urban corridors. Both issues have slowed the state’s high-speed rail effort.”

Pointing the finger

Well aware of the adverse reaction awaiting the news, transportation bureaucrats tried to get out ahead of the backlash by fingering rail critics themselves. “State and federal officials downplayed the shift in the timetable, saying it partly reflected more ambitious plans for the Central Valley work, and in any case merely ratified construction realities on the ground,” as Politico noted. “Federal Railroad Administration officials assigned much of the blame for the lags to the project’s vociferous critics, who have tied it up with a tangle of lawsuits, administrative challenges, and other red tape.”

“They complained that the opponents, especially Central Valley farmers and other not-in-my-back-yard landowners, have gotten far more traction against the railway than they would have against a highway, reflecting a cultural and political bias in favor of traditional asphalt infrastructure.”

After surviving a major lawsuit, the bullet train will still be coming fully online years later than anticipated. “California’s high-speed train has just been delayed by three more years,” Gizmodo noted. “The first leg of the state’s high-speed rail is now set to finish by 2025, not 2022 as planned. This could mean that Hyperloop — the Golden State’s other, even more futuristic transit plan — could beat the bullet train to the station.”

Delays arose as a result of the dizzying challenge of navigating Los Angeles County’s mountains, which ring the city of L.A.’s basin. “The high-speed rail authority thought it could do it by 2022, but now they admit it will likely take three years longer,” The Verge observed. “The mountainous passage outside L.A. won’t be built until the end of the schedule, while the San Francisco leg of the project will be built first.”

Day in court

The train recently prevailed in Sacramento County Superior Court, where a judge “ruled that the allegations in the suit were ‘not ripe for review,’ finding that opponents of the project offered no evidence that the state rail authority would not comply at some point with the restrictions as it continues to plan the project,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, one of the leading companies dedicated to taking SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s revolutionary brainchild off the drawing board and into reality, went public with news of its plans to break ground this year. “Construction is set to begin in the second quarter of 2016,” Entrepreneur noted.

In an interview with CNBC, HTT COO Bibop Gresta framed the details in ambitious new terms. “We are announcing the filing of the first building permit to Kings County to the building of the first full-scale hyperloop, not a test track,” he said. “In 36 months we will have the first passenger in the first full-scale hyperloop.”

Ben Cooke, a spokesman for the company, supplied some additional details separately. HTT, he indicated, “hopes to do geological surveys and map out the track in the next six months, then start building. The plan is to use a hyperloop to whisk residents around a proposed development called Quay Valley, south of Kettleman City. Preliminary estimates based on construction bids are that the hyperloop’s cost will be between $100 million and $170 million,” noted Southern California Public Radio.

Rival locations

Gresta made clear, however, that Californians won’t be able to cue up for travel up and down the state quite so soon, CNBC reported, noting that the completed track HTT plans to build won’t stretch between cities. “Gresta said that a full-scale city to city hyperloop could be a reality within five years, but said it will most likely not be in the U.S.,” the network added.

In an interview with a separate network, Gresta raised more eyebrows by suggesting that Russia could be among the first countries to bankroll a hyperloop that does reach from city to city. “Hyperloop Technologies is in talks with a Russian investor to finance the possible building of a new kind of transport, the company’s COO told RT at the World Economic Forum in Davos,” RT reported. “It is likely the government will also be keen on the idea, he believes.”

Speaking about HTT’s current negotiations, Gresta told RT, “We’re talking with a Russian private investor to basically have the first route in Russia, and we’re analyzing different possible solutions between different cities. You can connect Moscow and St. Petersburg in 35 minutes.”

Three ways forward

But HTT, which isn’t alone in the race to develop the hyperloop, made waves at Davos while another company rolled out development news of its own. According to SpaceX itself, Aecom, a global infrastructure firm, will construct “a one-mile track at SpaceX headquarters near Los Angeles International Airport,” as SCPR reported. “If all goes well, by summer’s end, the track will host prototype capsules that emerge from a design competition this weekend at Texas A&M University. The prototype pods would be half the size of the system that Musk envisioned and would not carry people.”

Michael Burke, Aecom chairman and CEO, released a statement portraying the company’s foray into hyperloop construction as a natural next step. Aecom, he said, “has designed and built some of the world’s most impressive transportation systems, so we appreciate how the development of a functioning Hyperloop with SpaceX can dramatically expand the ways people move across cities, countries and continents.”

A third firm has already forged ahead with a similar test track across the California border in North Las Vegas, “Hyperloop Technologies Inc. says that track will be used to develop ways to propel capsules,” SCPR observed. “The company plans to build a second, full-scale loop to test a prototype, spokeswoman Meredith Kendall said.”

“Facing criticism from opponents for the lack of private investors lining up to finance the $68 billion project, the rail authority asked private firms to respond to a list of questions on how to reduce costs, speed up construction and attract more private-sector investment for a segment from Merced to Burbank, which is scheduled to start operating in 2022,” ABC News reported.

Political challenges

Although the interest has not fundamentally altered the political calculus or the political controversy surrounding the embattled scheme, it has given fans of the bullet train some evidence that it could be more than a sinkhole for public funds.

But the Rail Authority has struggled to convince Californians in many communities that the upheaval promised by the train’s construction and operation are worth the added services. In preparation for a public forum on the so-called Peninsula segment of the line, running through Silicon Valley, the Authority said “it is planning to blend high-speed trains with Caltrain from San Francisco to San Jose to minimize the disruption to local communities,” according to the San Jose Mercury News.

The China connection

California has become something of a proving ground for high-speed rail, with interest running high among some of the most powerful companies and countries in the world.

Elon Musk’s hyperloop design for ultra-fast vacuum-powered mass transit has spawned a test track that will parallel a stretch of the same I-5 freeway intended to guide the state-funded bullet train Gov. Brown has long supported.

And China, one of the biggest international players in high-speed rail, has done its best to become a key player in California’s deployment of the technology. Among the 35 respondents to the Rail Authority’s solicitation for private funds was a group called the Chinese High Speed Rail Delivery Team, the AP reported. Additionally, the Chinese government’s railway conglomerate aced out rival Japan for the state’s other major rail project, the XpressWest train that would connect Las Vegas to Los Angeles commuters willing to take a modest trek to its westerly terminus.

Both moves have taken shape as part of a broader effort by China to establish a big tech-driven infrastructure footprint in the West. “Electric cars from Faraday Future, a project linked to Chinese tech conglomerate Leshi Internet Information and Technology, could roll off a production line in North Las Vegas,” the Las Vegas Sun reported, “if a rumored tax incentive passes a special session of the Legislature that Gov. Brian Sandoval may call. “Sandoval also plans to embark on a trade mission to China in October, to visit Xi’an, Nanjiang, Shanghai and Beijing with governors of other Western states to drum up business in clean technology, taking advantage of the country’s recently announced cap-and-trade program to limit carbon emissions.”

In the meantime, China has kept its eye on the level of interest surrounding the state’s high speed rail endeavor. Reporting on Morales’s reaction to the responses, Shanghai Daily noted that “[a] few of them expressed their interest in helping build the whole Initial Operating Segment (IOS) […] in a package including the civil works, track, infrastructure, stations and rolling stock. But more of them are focusing on one or a few elements, Morales said.”

As the latest model of Musk’s Tesla automobile scored the highest-ever rating given by Consumer Reports (99 out of 100) his even more revolutionary Hyperloop concept gained new respect, with one firm closing key deals that could bring established global expertise to bear on the Hyperloop’s demanding requirements.

Construction heavyweights

The Los Angeles-based Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, or HTT, recently announced a significant new agreement with Oerlikon Leybold Vacuum and with engineering goliath Aecom. The three companies agreed “to begin construction on a full-scale Hyperloop prototype running alongside Interstate 5 through five miles of Quay Valley in the San Joaquin Valley of California,” as the International Business Times reported. Despite stubborn skepticism around the ultimate feasibility of Musk’s Hyperloop concept, “HTT’s new partnership with Oerlikon and Aecom (which is involved with the rail tunnel being constructed beneath the streets of London), publicly traded companies with a responsibility to shareholders, is validation that Musk’s blueprints could eventually pay off,” IBT noted.

Adding to Aecom’s expertise with massive construction projects, the Oerlikon partnership sent a strong signal that investors and tech watchers ought to take Hyperloop much more seriously. “Oerlikon has been in the vacuum business for more than a century, and has worked on projects like the large hadron collider at CERN,” Wired observed.

Although energy and cost were substantial hurdles to success, according to Oerlikon business development chief Carl Brockmeyer, the most surreal aspect of Hyperloop — the sheer creation of a vaccuum-sealed shuttle track hundreds of miles long — ranked relatively low on the list of challenges. “I don’t think the construction hurdles are significant compared to other technologies that are already out there,” he told Wired. “From a technical point of view, it’s not a challenge. We are used to much higher and harsher applications.”

Still, said Brockmeyer, “you will be surprised” by how low the energy requirements could be, relatively speaking. “In fact, he says the energy could be generated by the solar panels and wind turbines” that HTT chief Dirk Ahlborn has decided to set up in Quay Valley — the planned community paralleling California’s Interstate 5 highway, alongside which a closely-watched Hyperloop test track will be constructed.

The race for design

Hyperloop still has not settled on a specific design for the “pods” that will carry passengers inside the vacuum train. But with a Musk-sponsored contest around the bend, researchers — especially in academia — are gearing up to the task. Universities including Purdue and Texas A&M were set to introduce courses on Hyperloop design and engineering, with the University of Illinois and other schools assembling teams to vie for victory in Elon Musk’s SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition, according to Gizmodo.

“The competition, which is slated for June 2016, is aimed at university students and will enable selected applicants to try out their pod design on a one-mile Hyperloop test track that will be built adjacent to the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California,” Business Insider reported when Musk announced the event this June. Finalists will be selected by committee and announced at the start of next year, at the so-called Design Weekend hosted by Texas A&M itself.

According to the detailed rules laid down by SpaceX, pods must weigh in under 11,000 pounds and measure under 14 feet long, Popular Science reported. “Among the other requirements, they also have to have brakes, communications, telemetry, and it is recommended that the pods levitate.” the SpaceX rules state that, while any “mechanism(s) for levitation is up to the entrant and is not actually required,” vehicles with wheels “(e.g. an ‘electric car in a vacuum’) can compete, but are unlikely to win prizes.”

According to Navigant Research and CBS News, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies — an entity that picked up independently where Musk left off with the idea — “has inked a deal with landowners in central California to build the world’s first Hyperloop test track.” Beginning in 2016, HTT would oversee construction of five miles of track along I-5, where, once completed, test speeds will be kept to around 200 miles per hours — less than a third of the top rate of travel envisioned by Musk.

Outlays for the fully-completed Hyperloop would likely come in far under the budget for California’s high-speed rail project, even with cost overruns:

The 5-mile test track is estimated to cost about $100 million, which Hyperloop Transportation Technologies hopes to pay for with its initial public offering (IPO) later this year, according to Navigant’s blog. Assuming building costs remain the same, a 400-mile (644 km) track between Los Angeles and San Francisco would cost about $8 billion (not including development costs), experts estimate. This price tag is still far less than that for California’s planned high-speed rail project, which could cost $67.6 billion, according to the California High-Speed Rail Authority.

Multiple teams

Crowded beach

Snapchat, L.A.’s highest-valued startup, has typified the transformation. Undergoing another round of expansion, the social video company has Venice residents concerned there just isn’t enough room for all comers — or the neighborhood’s longtime population of more downbeat creatives. “Snapchat Chief Executive Evan Spiegel, who grew up in Los Angeles and attended Stanford University, said he chose Southern California to escape both corporate and Silicon Valley culture,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

But with Snapchat and other big companies snapping up real estate along Silicon Beach, some of the largest have already set their sights further south. “Google recently announced that it would expand its Southern California operations beyond Venice,” the Times noted, “to a massive new office park in Playa Vista with nine times more space.”

Playa Vista, a planned community once dominated by the Hughes Aircraft company, has welcomed the move. According to the Daily Breeze, “Google purchased a 12-acre plot of land in December for $120 million, and is rumored to have its eye on the 300,000-square-foot hangar that used to house the Spruce Goose, Howard Hughes’ infamous plane that boasts a record wingspan.” This summer, Yahoo’s 400 employees based out of Santa Monica will be shifted into new Playa Vista office space as well.

The sense of opportunity has extended as far south as Long Beach. Mayor Robert Garcia told the Times that his vision of a “Silicon Valley of the south” is “kind of a state of mind. It means Long Beach 3.0. It means being a city that embraces open data and embraces innovation.”

Multiple hubs

The Westside’s beachy coastline hasn’t been the only part of Los Angeles to attract top-rank tech attention. Firms have begun moving downtown, lured by lower rents and a new air of exclusivity. (Soho House reportedly signed paperwork to set up its second L.A. location in an Arts District building.) The growing list of tech-centric companies downtown now includes Hyperloop Technologies, the startup created to realize Elon Musk’s vision of an ultra-fast transportation system that would far exceed the capabilities of the high-speed rail embraced by Gov. Jerry Brown.

According to the LA Weekly, John Zanetos, senior vice president of CBRE Group Inc., took care of the leasing process for Hyperloop. “Downtown is the new, gritty, cool place,” he said — “a lot cheaper than Santa Monica or Venice.”

Local officials have warmed to the prospect of tech money and prestige anchoring downtown’s rapid development, even if it has meant giving a fair shake to projects that strike a sharp contrast with some of Gov. Brown’s favored policies. “Any idea that can get you from San Francisco to Los Angeles faster than it takes to get from downtown to Hollywood during rush hour is worth pursuing,” City Council member Jose Huizar told the Weekly, although he called Hyperloop’s plan “light-years ahead of most.”

Growth with limits

Despite the sky’s-the-limit attitude and booming real estate prices, however, some critics caution that the original Silicon Valley still maintains unmatched structural advantages.

As futurist and urban theorist Joel Kotkin argued recently, Silicon Valley’s appeal “to young companies was painfully evident in the decision this year by Oculus, a promising virtual reality firm, to move from Irvine to be close to its corporate buyer, Facebook, taking its top designers and executives to Menlo Park. It takes stubborn executives, like Snapchat’s co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, to say no to the moguls of Menlo Park and stay here in the Southland.”

Ultimately, however, tech’s future in and around Los Angeles may well be assured by the Southland’s ace in the hole — its climate and style of living. As the Associated Press reported, not only moguls have gravitated toward L.A.’s priciest mansions; mere millionaires looking to shell out comparatively less than the Bay Area’s tech titans have discovered their dollar can go much further in Silicon Beach than in Silicon Valley.

Beyond federal and state efforts, California’s tech titans have upped the ante with momentous new investments that promise to revolutionize electricity production.

For years, solar power has been touted by advocates as a major future source of “alternative energy.” Most recently, fresh off promising Californians a measure of federal drought relief, U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell debuted Desert Sunlight. It’s a new 4,000-acre solar energy “farm” in the hot and dry outer reaches of of Riverside County and one of the largest such projects in the world.

But as the Los Angeles Times reported, the farm “opens at time of uncertainty for future utility-scale solar development in California, which has been slowing in recent years as federal assistance begins to disappear and investor interest fades.”

Meanwhile, Silicon Valley has turned its attention to solar power. Despite the prospect of a 20 percent drop in federal investment tax credits, tech entrepreneurs have taken steps to scale solar power use in a way that promises almost immediate results.

First Solar

USA Today reported First Solar received nearly $1.5 billion in federal loan guarantees to build out Desert Sunlight. But now priorities are shifting.

According to Market Watch, First Solar just inked a huge new deal to supply power to tech behemoth Apple Inc.:

“Apple committed $848 million for clean energy from First Solar’s California Flats Solar Project in Monterey County, Calif. Apple will receive electricity from 130 megawatts (MW)AC of the solar project under a 25-year power purchase agreement (PPA), the largest agreement in the industry to provide clean energy to a commercial end user.”

Although Apple CEO Tim Cook heartened environmentalists by casting the decision as a blow against climate change, it was ultimately driven by a simple imperative: making a good business bet.

“By 2016,” Mother Jones noted, “solar is projected to be as cheap or cheaper than electricity from the conventional grid in every state except three.”

In a substantial irony, Silicon Valley observers pointed out solar power has benefited greatly from rising costs for traditional energy, which California’s emissions law drives upward. As the Silicon Valley Business Journal observed:

“Chris Shea, who heads up the Silicon Valley territory for Livermore-based installer Solar Universe, a SolarCity competitor, said the industry has had a tailwind thanks to rising rates for conventional power. ‘Going green is a secondary benefit of the whole thing,’ he said. ‘Ultimately, it’s, “How do I get my cost of living down?” We’ve seen, since we started, almost a doubling of electrical cost that PG&E charges even to their lowest tier,’ said Shea, who employs about 20 out of his Santa Clara office.”

Solving the storage problem

SolarCity, one of the most important players in the industry, also recently figured into a massive new technological twist on alternative energy. Although state and federal regulators had pushed Americans to buy zero-emission cars, the technology faced a simple problem: battery life often didn’t measure up to what drivers’ hopes.

Now developments in car batteries are spreading to other areas of life that use batteries.

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk has partnered with SolarCity with an eye toward revolutionizing storage capacity — a challenge to the landscape dominated by public utilities. SolarCity, run by Musk’s cousin Lyndon Rive, has begun to install Tesla batteries.

And The Verge reported Musk and Rive have gone public with their big plans to scale stored solar energy well beyond cars:

“Musk and Rive mentioned that every SolarCity unit would come with battery storage within five to ten years, and that the systems would supply power at a lower cost than natural gas. Those batteries will come from the [Tesla] gigafactory, currently being built in Nevada. Once the factory comes online, the strong demand for energy storage will allow it to immediately ramp up production and achieve economies of scale. Tesla CTO JB Straubel (who has said that he “might love batteries more than cars”) says that the market for stationary batteries “can scale faster than automotive” and that a full 30 percent of the gigafactory will be dedicated to them.”

California officials, The Verge pointed out, have set out a policy goal of 1.3 gigawatts of storage by 2020.

The way things are turning out, it may be the private sector, not government-subsidized projects, that charges the electric future.

But now, Dirk Ahlborn, the head of his own California startup, has stepped forward to seize the initiative on making Musk’s super-fast trainlike vehicle a reality.

In a surprise for those outside the Silicon Valley bubble, Ahlborn recently announced  his JumpStartFund has the wherewithal to take Hyperloop off the drawing board and into reality. “I have almost no doubt that once we are finished, once we know how we are going to build and it makes economical sense, that we will get the funds,” he told Wired magazine.

Ahlborn predicts the effort will cost $16 billion and 10 years’ time, assuming a technical feasibility review planned for next year doesn’t reveal any insurmountable hurdles. In the meantime, JumpStartFund has “created the sub-company Hyperloop Transportation Technologies Inc. to develop the system,” relying on crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, and an improvised “collective” of engineers to move the ball forward, according to The Guardian.

Some 100 experts drawn from Boeing, NASA and Musk’s own SpaceX have been enlisted by JumpStartFund — and have already produced a 76-page memorandum laying out their vision for how the project can proceed.

Remarkably, JumpStartFund’s collective has “expanded on Musk’s concept and now envisions a huge interconnected Hyperloop system, spanning coast to coast and linking many of the U.S.’s major cities,” as Quartz reported.

Uncertain expectations

Back in August 2013, when Musk first revealed the Hyperloop concept, critics immediately dismissed its real-world applicability. Not only did supporters of California’s current high-speed rail project find reason for skepticism; analysts worried Musk had simply underestimated practical challenges like overheating, despite ballparking the cost of Hyperloop at somewhere around $10 billion.

Nevertheless, Musk’s track record of innovation attracted serious attention to the idea. Unlike a traditional train, Hyperloop would “send passengers hurtling through low-pressure tubes in ultra sleek pods at speeds of up to 800 miles per hour,” as CalWatchdog.com previously reported. “At that clip, a trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco would take a mere half hour. That’s two hours and eight minutes faster than California’s bullet train promises to make the 432-mile jaunt.”

Provocatively enough, from the very beginning, Musk envisioned California as Hyperloop’s home.

All told, the scheme created near-perfect conditions for a storm of media interest. Hyperloop was controversial without being outrageous, farfetched without being ridiculous, and — theoretically — competitive with one of California’s biggest and most fiercely challenged infrastructure projects in history.

But without direct funding and dedicated personnel, Hyperloop couldn’t begin the complex research and development that would lead to its construction. As media interest moved on, and Musk broke new ground with Tesla and other marquee projects, public expectations around Hyperloop moved to the back burner.

Privately, however, Hyperloop remained relevant to the kinds of people it would need to move forward.

A welcome surprise

For now, the Hyperloop team’s sky’s-the-limit approach has yet to attract the political rancor associated with California’s high-speed rail endeavor, which has benefited from the unswerving devotion of Gov. Jerry Brown.

As research advances, however, attention from policymakers and activists will likely become inevitable. The costs associated with the project — borne by private investors, not public funds — could prove enough to renew argument about the future of Brown’s bullet train.

As CNBC revealed, the Hyperloop team “estimates that the cost of the system would be $20 million to $45 million a mile, as contrast from what it says are costs of up to $200 million a mile for a conventional mass transportation system.”

He’s earned street cred — as in Wall Street — from co-founding the company that grew into PayPal; co-founding Tesla Motors, the most successful electric car start-up company; and founding SpaceX, to which NASA has outsourced future trips to the International Space Station.

On Monday, Musk shared his much-hyped plan for a so-called “Hyperloop,” a high-speed transportation system that would be a visionary alternative to California’s planned high-speed rail system.

The Los Angeles billionaire offered a hint of its design this past Thursday during a Google Hangout with British billionaire Richard Branson, founder and chairman of Virgin Group. (Branson also is bullish on commercial space.)

The Hyperloop “involves a tube,” said Musk, confirming some online speculation, “but not a vacuum tube,” like those that used to be seen pre-ATM at bank drive-throughs.

What Musk has in mind, he said, is a “fifth mode” of transport “after planes, trains, cars and boats.”

That fifth mode would send passengers hurtling through low-pressure tubes in ultra sleek pods at speeds of up to 800 miles per hour. At that clip, a trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco would take a mere half hour. That’s two hours and eight minutes faster than California’s bullet train promises to make the 432-mile jaunt.

Hyperloop vs. high-speed rail

And the Hyperloop would have other advantages over the state’s vaunted high-speed rail system.

It could never crash, like the high-speed train that went off the rails in Santiago de Compostel, Spain last month, killing 79 passengers. It would be self-powered, using solar energy, which would save a fortune in electricity costs. And the ticket price for that L.A. to San Francisco excursion would be considerable lower than the $81 projected for the planned bullet train.

Perhaps the most appealing feature of Musk’s Hyperloop — at least where California taxpayers are concerned — is that it would cost nowhere near the whopping $68 billion it will cost to build the state’s high-speed rail line.

Moreover, with the backing of a proven entrepreneur like Musk, the Hyperloop could attract the billions of dollars in private investment that the state’s proposed bullet train promised, but has failed to deliver.

If there is one big reason not to get overly enthusiastic about Musk’s proposed “Hyperloop” it’s that Musk, the visionary, says he’s too busy with Tesla and SpaceX to undertake yet another Big Hairy Audacious Project.

So, on Monday, he unveiled his design for the Hyperloop, answered a few questions, then busted a move.

But that was all good. Musk doesn’t have to be the guy who actually builds the Hyperloop. There are a number of extant companies that could conceivably make that happen. And Musk could help finance the project by making a few calls to billionaire pals like Branson.