Six billion dollars. That was the entire budget Elon Musk put on the Hyperloop in twenty thirteen — Los Angeles to San Francisco, thirty-five minutes, pods in tubes. The Washingtonian ran the post-mortem earlier this year and the real cost would have been an order of magnitude higher. Ten times, minimum. That gap between the rendering and the invoice is basically the whole history of weird transit.
Daniel's prompt this week picks up where the absurd power tools left off. He wants ten examples of micromobility and mass transit systems that never got off the ground, wants us to flag which ones were transparently ridiculous, and underneath that he's asking the real question — why do humans keep falling for absurd ways of moving around the planet. So let's start with the one everybody's heard of, and work our way down to the ones that should have stayed on the drawing board.
Before we get to Hyperloop, let's define the territory, because Daniel's question spans two very different things. Micromobility is the scooter and pod end — personal transit, one or two people, last-mile stuff. Mass transit is trains, tubes, elevated systems, things that move thousands. And the failure mode is almost always the same shape: a beautiful rendering, a plausible physics story, and a business model that never closes.
The Hyperloop white paper had a map with a dotted line and a pod that looked like a suppository. And the physics story was, well, we already know how to move things through tubes. Banks do it with pneumatic capsules. What if the capsule was a train and the tube was four hundred miles long?
And the business model was six billion dollars, which anyone who's ever built a tunnel could have told you was fantasy. The Washingtonian piece from February is brutal on this. The cost estimate was off by an order of magnitude, the passenger version was never built, and the only thing that ever got tested was a five hundred meter test track in the Nevada desert. The Boring Company pivoted to cars in tunnels, which is just a road with extra steps and worse ventilation.
A road you have to dig. That's the part that always gets me. The Hyperloop pitch was essentially, what if we solved the problem of building trains by building the most expensive tunnel in human history and then putting a train in it that can't stop anywhere except the ends?
And that's the thing Daniel's asking us to sort. Which of these were transparently ridiculous, which were good ideas killed by politics or money, and which were just cons. Let me propose a taxonomy so we're not flailing. Bucket one: good ideas killed by politics or money. Bucket two: engineering that works but economics that don't. Bucket three: transparently ridiculous from day one.
Hyperloop goes in bucket three, but with an asterisk. It wasn't ridiculous because the physics were impossible — you can move things through low-pressure tubes, that's real. It was ridiculous because the cost estimate was off by a factor of ten and nobody involved seemed to care. The gap between the white paper and the test track is where the con lives.
The con is the wrong word for Musk specifically. I think he believed it, or believed enough of it. But the mechanism of failure is the same as a con: you sell the rendering, not the engineering. You sell the thirty-five minutes, not the seismic retrofitting of four hundred miles of tube through the San Andreas fault zone.
The San Andreas point is actually the one that should have killed it on day one. You're proposing a vacuum tube across one of the most geologically active regions in North America. One earthquake and your pod is a bullet in a cracked barrel.
So that's the anchor. Now the Victorians were doing this a century earlier, and they were arguably better at it. Joseph Paxton, eighteen fifty-five. The man who designed the Crystal Palace. He proposed the Great Victorian Way — a ten mile glass-covered elevated arcade encircling central London, with an inner railway, shops, promenades. A covered city street that was also transit. Beautiful idea.
Paxton was essentially proposing a shopping mall with a train running through it, a hundred and fifty years before the shopping mall existed. And the glass technology was the same stuff he'd just used on the Crystal Palace, so it wasn't fantasy. He could have built it.
He could have, and Parliament looked at it seriously. The cost killed it, and the fact that the Underground was already being dug. The Metropolitan Railway opened in eighteen sixty-three, eight years after Paxton's proposal. So London chose the tunnel under the street over the glass arcade above it, and honestly, given what the Underground became, that was probably right. But Paxton goes in bucket one — good idea, wrong economics, wrong moment.
The image of it though. A ten mile glass ring around London with a train running through the middle of a shopping arcade. That's the future the Victorians thought they were going to get. Instead they got the Circle Line and a Pret A Manger at every station.
The Circle Line is basically Paxton's route, just underground and without the glass roof. So the idea survived, the form didn't.
Next one, and this is the one that makes me angry. The Narita Shinkansen. Japan builds a high-speed rail network in the sixties and seventies, the Shinkansen, the bullet train, and then they build their new international airport at Narita, forty miles outside Tokyo. And they planned a Shinkansen line to connect the two. Straightforward, obvious, the kind of thing Japan does better than anyone.
And it never got built. Land acquisition battles with farmers and residents dragged on for decades. The project was formally abandoned in the nineteen eighties. Narita remains one of the least conveniently located major airports in the developed world. You land and you're on a regular train for an hour, or a bus, or a taxi that costs more than your flight from Seoul.
This is bucket one with a vengeance. The engineering was trivial — Japan had already built hundreds of miles of Shinkansen. The politics was impossible. A handful of farmers who didn't want to sell their land held up a national infrastructure project for a generation. And the result is that Tokyo has one of the world's great airports, Haneda, right in the city, and one of the world's worst-located airports, Narita, out in the rice paddies.
The Narita land battles are their own whole story. There were protests, there were barricades, there were farmers chaining themselves to trees. It got ugly. And the Shinkansen link was the collateral damage. So that's bucket one, good idea, killed by politics.
Now we slide into bucket three. The Sinclair C5, nineteen eighty-five. Sir Clive Sinclair, the man who gave Britain the ZX Spectrum home computer, decides he's going to reinvent personal transport. What he comes up with is an electric tricycle you sit in, like a recumbent go-kart with a plastic shell. Pedal-assisted, top speed fifteen miles an hour, range about twenty miles.
And it was too low to be seen by drivers. That's the detail that kills me. The thing was lower than a car's door handle. A lorry driver literally could not see you. It was too slow for roads and too wide for cycle paths. Sinclair lost millions, and the C5 became a national punchline in about three weeks.
This is the purest example of a brilliant electronics mind misreading the physical world. Sinclair understood circuit boards. He did not understand what it feels like to be at eye level with a car's exhaust pipe while a white van is merging into your lane.
The C5 is transparently ridiculous, but it's also kind of touching. Sinclair believed he was going to put Britain on electric power. He wanted every household to have one. And he built it, and it worked, and it was terrifying. The gap between the idea and the experience is the whole story.
The Segway is the American version of the same mistake, but with better marketing. Dean Kamen, two thousand one, the self-balancing scooter that was going to redesign cities. He told Time magazine it would be bigger than the internet. It cost five thousand dollars, it was banned from sidewalks in most places because it was too fast to be a pedestrian and too slow to be a vehicle, and it became a punchline.
And this is the misconception Daniel's prompt is poking at. The Segway was not a technological failure. The thing worked beautifully. The gyroscopes, the self-balancing, the acceleration — it was impressive engineering. It solved a problem nobody had. That's the failure pattern. Nobody was sitting at home thinking, I wish I could stand up and move at walking speed without walking.
The Segway was a solution in search of a problem, and the problem it found was mall security guards. That's its legacy. It's the vehicle of the man with a Bluetooth earpiece and a polo shirt, patrolling the food court. Kamen wanted to redesign cities and he got Paul Blart.
Paul Blart was the Segway's cultural tombstone. The company was sold, the product line discontinued in twenty twenty.
If the Segway was a solution in search of a problem, the next one was a solution in search of a planet. The moving walkway at the nineteen hundred Paris Exposition. The Rue de l'Avenir, the street of the future. A three-speed moving walkway that carried visitors past dioramas. You stepped on at walking speed, moved across to the middle platform at double walking speed, then to the outer platform at triple walking speed.
And it worked. People loved it. It carried millions of visitors during the fair. And then it was dismantled and never built again. The technology was fine, the use case was a world's fair.
That's bucket two. Engineering that works but economics that don't. A moving walkway is great for moving crowds through an exhibition hall or an airport terminal. It's not a transit system. You can't build a city around a conveyor belt, because the moment it breaks, everyone's just standing on a very expensive floor.
And the three-speed thing was clever. The handoff between platforms was the hard part, and they solved it with a series of handrails moving at different speeds. Paris nineteen hundred was the peak of human optimism about moving walkways, and we've been declining ever since. Now they're just the thing you stand on in airports to get to your gate forty seconds faster.
The Aerocar, nineteen forty-nine. Moulton Taylor, an engineer who looked at a car and a plane and thought, what if one vehicle was both. And he built it. A car with detachable wings and a propeller. You drove to the airfield, bolted on the wings, and flew away.
And it actually flew. The Aerocar was certified, it worked, it was a real flying car. But the transition time between modes was so long that it was faster to just drive. By the time you'd driven to the airfield, unloaded the wings, bolted them on, done your preflight checks, you could have been halfway to your destination in a normal car.
And the FAA never figured out how to certify it properly. Is it a car? Is it a plane? Who's allowed to drive it, who's allowed to fly it, what happens when it breaks down on the highway with wings attached? The regulatory question was harder than the engineering question.
The Aerocar is the flying car in its purest form. The thing everyone says they want and nobody actually needs. Every generation reinvents it, every generation discovers the same problem: a vehicle that's mediocre at two jobs is worse than two vehicles that are each good at one.
The flying car is a fantasy about not having to choose. You don't want a car or a plane, you want both, and you want the transition to be free. And physics says no.
The Bennie Railplane, nineteen thirty. George Bennie, Scottish engineer, proposes a propeller-driven railcar that hangs from an overhead rail above existing train tracks. It hit a hundred and twenty miles an hour in tests. A monorail with a propeller, essentially.
This one's bucket two, maybe bucket one. The engineering worked. Bennie built a test track near Glasgow, demonstrated the thing, got it up to a hundred and twenty. The idea was that passenger traffic would go on the overhead rail, freight would stay on the ground rails. It was clever — a way to add passenger capacity without laying new track.
And the Depression killed it. Bennie went bankrupt, the test track was dismantled for scrap during the Second World War. But the concept wasn't ridiculous. It was a propeller-driven monorail, which sounds absurd, but the physics worked. It was just too weird for its time, and the timing was catastrophic.
A hundred and twenty miles an hour in nineteen thirty, hanging from a rail with a propeller on the front. That's faster than most trains today. The man was ahead of his time and the economy was behind it.
Now we get to the one that makes me angry. Firefly, a UK startup from the twenty tens. They promised to retrofit diesel buses into electric hybrids using a flywheel. The bus would capture braking energy in a spinning flywheel and release it on acceleration. Great idea, actually — flywheel energy storage is real, it's used in Formula One.
But the company raised millions from investors and collapsed in twenty seventeen after failing to deliver. The flywheel never worked at bus scale, the retrofits never shipped, and the money vanished. A reminder that green doesn't mean works.
This is bucket three, but the con version. Firefly wasn't a beautiful rendering, it was a plausible engineering story attached to a real technology, and the gap between the flywheel in a Formula One car and a flywheel in a double-decker bus turned out to be enormous. The investors learned the difference between a prototype and a product.
The flywheel bus is the greenwashing version of the Hyperloop. The pitch is, we're saving the planet, so don't ask too many questions about the engineering. And the questions that did get asked, eventually, were the ones that killed it.
And that brings us to the last one, which is really the second act of the first one. Hyperloop One, later Virgin Hyperloop, twenty fourteen to twenty twenty-three. The most-funded Hyperloop attempt, hundreds of millions of dollars, a test track in Nevada, a pod that hit two hundred forty miles an hour in a vacuum tube.
And then it quietly shut down in twenty twenty-three without securing a single passenger contract. The assets were sold off. The dream died with a whimper, not a bang. No city ever signed up to have a vacuum tube built through its suburbs.
Virgin Hyperloop is the cleanest example of the difference between a test track and a transit system. The test track worked. The pod went fast. The vacuum held. And then someone asked, okay, where do we build the first real one, and the answer was nowhere, because the cost per mile was astronomical and the safety questions were unanswerable.
What happens when the vacuum fails? What happens when there's a fire in the tube? What happens when an earthquake cracks the tube? Every answer was either we don't know or it'll be very expensive. And transit systems need answers, not renderings.
So that's the ten. Hyperloop, Great Victorian Way, Narita Shinkansen, Sinclair C5, Segway, the Paris moving walkway, the Aerocar, the Bennie Railplane, Firefly, and Virgin Hyperloop. And the pattern across all ten is what Daniel was actually asking about.
The pattern is that the transparently ridiculous ones, the C5 and the Segway, failed because they misread human behavior. They assumed people would accept being invisible to traffic or standing up to move at walking speed. The clever ones, Paxton and Bennie, failed because they misread the economics. And the frauds, Firefly and Virgin Hyperloop, failed because they misread the difference between a rendering and a business.
And the reason humans keep falling for these is that the rendering is always beautiful. The glass arcade, the pod in the tube, the car with wings. We're attracted to the image of effortless motion, and we're willing to overlook the fact that real transit is mostly about land acquisition, maintenance schedules, and fare collection.
Real transit is boring. That's the problem. A bus lane is boring. A vacuum tube is exciting. And excitement raises money, and boring builds systems, and the two almost never meet.
The Washingtonian piece on Hyperloop makes this point better than anything else I've read. Musk sold the thirty-five minutes and the six billion dollars, and nobody asked about the three hundred miles of tube, the land rights, the seismic retrofitting, the emergency egress, the maintenance access. The boring list is what kills the exciting rendering.
And the boring list is the same for every one of these. Paxton needed ten miles of glass roof maintained forever. Bennie needed a whole new regulatory category for propeller-driven monorails. The Aerocar needed the FAA and the DMV to agree on what it was. The boring list is where transit goes to die.
So the answer to Daniel's question, why do humans keep getting attracted to absurd ways of moving around the planet, is that we're attracted to the image of motion without friction. The pod whooshes through the tube, the car sprouts wings, the walkway carries you past the dioramas. And friction is the whole job. Transit is the business of managing friction, and the renderings never show it.
The renderings never show the wheelchair ramp. That's my test. If the rendering doesn't show the wheelchair ramp, it's not a transit system, it's a fantasy.
That's a good test. The wheelchair ramp is the symbol of everything unglamorous about transit. The accessibility requirements, the safety codes, the maintenance access, the fare gates. The stuff that makes it real.
The stuff that makes it expensive. The wheelchair ramp is why the Hyperloop was never going to cost six billion dollars. You can't put a wheelchair ramp in a vacuum tube.
You can, but it's a whole thing. It's an airlock, it's a level boarding system, it's evacuation procedures. The wheelchair ramp is the boring list made concrete.
The taxonomy holds. Bucket one, good ideas killed by politics or money: Paxton, Narita, maybe Bennie. Bucket two, engineering that works but economics that don't: the Paris walkway, the Aerocar. Bucket three, transparently ridiculous: the C5, the Segway, Hyperloop, Firefly, Virgin Hyperloop.
The boundary between bucket two and bucket three is where the interesting arguments happen. The Segway worked, the Aerocar flew, the Bennie Railplane hit a hundred and twenty miles an hour. The engineering wasn't the problem. The problem was that nobody asked what the thing was for.
The Segway was for a world where walking is too slow and driving is too much trouble and the distance is exactly half a mile. That world exists, it's called an airport terminal, and it already has moving walkways.
The Aerocar was for a world where you need to fly somewhere but you also need a car when you get there and you can't rent one. That world existed in nineteen fifty. It doesn't exist now.
The Bennie Railplane was for a world where you need more passenger capacity but you can't lay new track. That world existed in nineteen thirty. It still exists, actually, but the solution now is just longer trains and better signaling.
Which is the other thing these schemes always miss. The boring solution usually works. Longer trains, better buses, dedicated lanes. The unglamorous stuff that doesn't need a rendering.
The boring solution doesn't raise money. That's the whole story of venture capital in transit. You can't pitch a bus lane to a venture capitalist. You can pitch a vacuum tube.
Hilbert: The Segway wasn't ridiculous.
Wait.
Hilbert: I rode one in two thousand three at a trade show in Chicago. It was magical. You lean forward and it just goes. You lean back and it stops. It felt like the floor was moving and you were standing still. The best vehicle I've ever operated.
I'm not saying it didn't work. I'm saying it solved a problem nobody had.
Hilbert: That's the part I want to correct. It didn't solve a problem nobody had. It solved a problem that only existed in Dean Kamen's imagination. He looked at cities and saw people walking, and he thought, that's inefficient, I can fix that. And he built a machine that fixes it. The machine is perfect. The premise is wrong.
What's the difference between a problem nobody has and a problem that only exists in one man's imagination?
Hilbert: The difference is that a problem nobody has is just a gap in the market. A problem that only exists in one man's imagination is a fantasy. Kamen imagined a world where everyone glides silently through the streets on self-balancing scooters. That world doesn't exist because people like walking. They like sitting. They like driving. They don't want to stand up and lean.
The Segway was a solution to the problem of walking, and walking isn't a problem.
Hilbert: Walking is the most successful transportation technology in human history. It's never broken down, it works in all weather, it requires no infrastructure, and it's free. Kamen was trying to disrupt walking. That's like trying to disrupt breathing.
And you bought one.
Hilbert: In twenty twenty, at the bankruptcy auction. I paid eight hundred dollars for a Segway that retailed for five thousand. It's in my garage. I ride it to the mailbox. It's the only vehicle I've ever owned that has never once broken down.
You ride a Segway to your mailbox.
Hilbert: It's about a hundred feet. It's the perfect distance for a Segway. That's the thing — the Segway is good at distances between fifty and five hundred feet. That's it. That's the whole use case. And it's a real use case, it's just very small.
The mailbox run.
Hilbert: The mailbox run, the warehouse floor, the airport concourse, the mall patrol. The Segway found its niche, it's just that the niche is about one percent of what Kamen promised.
Which is the same shape as the Hyperloop, just at a different scale. The technology works, the niche is real, but the gap between the niche and the promise is where the money goes to die.
Hilbert: I spent eighteen months in nineteen ninety-four designing a docking mechanism for a personal rapid transit pod system. The pods never existed. The company was trying to sell a city on the idea of little automated cars running on elevated rails, and the city was, well, it rhymes with Schmincinnati. We built a full-scale mockup of the pod, I designed the docking mechanism, it worked in the mockup, and then the city council looked at the cost per mile and said no.
You've been adjacent to this your whole life.
Hilbert: The docking mechanism is still in my garage, next to the Segway. It's a beautiful piece of machining. It docks with nothing.
The docking mechanism that docks with nothing is the perfect monument to this entire category.
Hilbert: The thing I learned in Schmincinnati is that the rendering gets you in the room, and the cost per mile gets you out of it. Every transit scheme dies at the cost per mile. The Hyperloop died at the cost per mile. The pod system died at the cost per mile. The Segway died at the cost per rider, which is the same number wearing a different hat.
The open question Daniel leaves us with is whether we're getting any better at telling the difference between a Paxton and a Hyperloop One. And I don't think we are. The renderings are better now. The physics stories are more plausible. The money is bigger.
Climate pressure is going to make it worse. Cities are getting denser, emissions targets are getting tighter, and the pressure to find a magic solution is going to produce more of these schemes, not fewer. The question is whether anyone asks about the wheelchair ramp before the check clears.
If you've got a favorite absurd transit scheme we missed, or you actually rode a Segway and want to defend it, leave us a review and tell us about it. We read them.
Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for keeping the show on the rails, even when the rails are imaginary.
This has been My Weird Prompts, the human AI collaboration podcast.
We'll be back soon.
