California Redditors hope to make the Hyperloop a reality

Billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk unveiled a futuristic transportation system called the Hyperloop on Monday.

Within hours, users of the social news website Reddit started a campaign to make the Hyperloop a reality in California.

Musk was inspired to develop the Hyperloop concept because of his disappointment in California’s planned high-speed rail system. “How could it be that the home of Silicon Valley and JPL – doing incredible things like indexing all the world’s knowledge and putting rovers on Mars – would build a bullet train that is both one of the most expensive per mile and one of the slowest in the world?” he said Monday.

Funding for California’s high-speed rail system was approved by voters in 2008. But the project has faced numerous obstacles. It is now expected to cost about $68 billion to build and not even be completed until 2029.

Redditors at the “HyperloopCAProp” subreddit hope to use the same process that launched the high-speed rail project to begin construction on the Hyperloop. Thanks to California’s proposition system, voters could axe the high-speed rail and fund the Hyperloop instead.

Whether the campaign to make the Hyperloop a reality will get off the ground remains to be seen. If the Hyperloop advocates formulate a proposition, they will need to gather more than 500,000 signatures to get on the state ballot — a significant hurdle.

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