From Karen Weise’s Businessweek article about the inevitable gamesmanship between Elon Musk (with his Hyperloop) and the California High-Speed Rail Authority (and its bullet train):

“The contrast between Musk’s futuristic option for bridging Los Angeles and the Bay Area, and the much-delayed, over-budget, fast train that the state already has in the works, couldn’t have seemed starker or more striking. And that’s the point. Musk deliberately hopes his Hyperloop will disrupt current plans for the $68 billion railroad. ‘I don’t think we should do the high-speed rail thing,’ Musk told reporters. ‘It’s basically going to be California’s Amtrak,’ he said. He didn’t mean that as a compliment.

The California High-Speed Rail Authority was not amused. Chairman Dan Richard told the San Francisco Chronicle that while the Hyperloop sounds ‘great,’ it won’t be competition anytime soon: ‘It’s sort of like me saying, ‘Don’t buy a Tesla, because the Jetsons’ flying car is right around the corner.”

Richard said Musk greatly underestimates the costs of the Hyperloop, not to mention how hard it is to secure funding for mass transit and convince neighbors and environmentalists that such a system won’t be harmful. ‘While we have a lot of respect for his inventiveness, I think we could tell him a few things about the realities of building in California,’ Richard said.

Hyperloop might just be a drawing, and a far-fetched one at that, but as Southern California Public Radio points out, it’s already working in one regard—by reminding residents that California’s existing bullet train plan has plenty of shortfalls.“