Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets, but until then urban centers are going to become increasingly dense and we’ll need people-moving mass transportation.

In a Conversation essay, Roberto Palacin argues the future of rail travel isn’t magnetic levitation or the Hyperloop but something very similar to high-speed trains of today. (It should be noted he doesn’t address how the perfecting of driverless vehicles would impact rail.) An excerpt about why the the writer feels the Hyperloop is not the next big thing:

Hyperloop is an elegant idea: travelling seamlessly at 1,220kph (that’s right, 760mph – just under the speed of sound) in gracefully designed pods that arrive as often as every 30 seconds is very appealing. The concept is based around very straight tubes with a partial vacuum applied under the pods. These pods have an electric compressor fan on their nose which actively transfers high-pressure air from the front to the rear, creating an air cushion once a linear electric motor has launched the pod. All this would be battery and solar powered.

Technically it’s a challenging design, although if someone can make it happen it’s the man who proposed the idea, Elon Musk, the man behind SpaceX and Tesla. However, Hyperloop is not rail travel. It is, as Musk puts it, a fifth mode of transport (after trains, cars, boats and planes). It’s designed to link Los Angeles to San Francisco; cities hundreds of miles apart that can be connected in an almost straight line over a relative flat landscape. This simply isn’t an option in much of the world.

Ultimately, if Hyperloop happens at all it will be a stand-alone system. It’s no substitute for rail.•