Tad Friend, the excellent California correspondent for the New Yorker, mercifully liberated from having to profile Ben Stiller’s narcissism, provides his two cents on Elon Musk’s Hyperloop plans. Here’s the glass-half-empty part:

“The bad news is that there’s no conceivable way that the system would cost just six billion dollars, or that one-way tickets would cost twenty dollars. Overpromise disease is endemic to Silicon Valley, but Musk has an aggravated case. When I wrote a profile of him, in 2009, he told me that a third-generation Tesla would be selling for less than thirty thousand dollars in 2014, the same year that he expected SpaceX’s Falcon 9 to begin ferrying tourists around the moon. Well, no and hell no. More worrisomely, he promised that you could start driving the Model S in western California ‘at breakfast and be halfway across the country by dinnertime.’ Musk is a lot better at math than I am, but he eventually acknowledged that by ‘dinnertime’ he really meant ‘the following morning’s breakfast’—if, again, you didn’t stop to go to the bathroom.

 Additional bad news is that California’s politicians are skeptical of the Hyperloop, as they’ve already committed to their own relatively slow high-speed rail system, now projected to be finished in 2029. And that no community in San Francisco or Los Angeles would want giant tubes running through it. And that, from the evidence of Musk’s own route map, he hasn’t figured out how to get the Hyperloop across the San Francisco Bay or any closer to downtown Los Angeles than about an hour north of it—which kind of kills the whole point. Also, earthquakes! The suggested route more or less parallels the San Andreas Fault. (Musk says that his flexible tube joints and dampered pylons would enable the system to absorb seismic shocks. But the worst place to be in an earthquake would be ripping along at barely-subsonic speeds twenty feet above the ground—in a system attached to it. Disaster-film auteurs are surely already storyboarding the money shot of Hyperloop pods disgorging onto a teeming freeway at seven hundred miles an hour.)

Finally, of course, no one knows if the thing would actually work.”