The Hyperloop

            How we get around is constantly changing and evolving.  We do this based on many things such as what is faster, more environmentally friendly, or just easier to use.  The latest big thing in transportation has been the autonomous car and the companies who have been working on these cars have been receiving a large amount of media attention.  There is another form of proposed transportation that is being worked on and has recently taken a large step forward in its progress, the Hyperloop.  

            The Hyperloop is an idea that was proposed by Elon Musk in 2013 that would essentially put people into tubes and shoot them through low pressure tunnels at speeds up to 760 mph.  The idea is very radical and seems to be a long way away but there are now plans in place to start building a test track within the next few weeks.  The track will be built in California and will be a five mile track.  The track will eventually be incorporated into a city that is going to be designed to be self-sustaining. 

            There is also a competition, of which the track in California is unrelated, slated to begin in January of 2016 in Texas to put different designs against each other and attempts to create the best possible design.  The competition has four different criteria which are being judged:

•  “Final Design and Construction"
• “Safety and Reliability”
• “Performance in Operations”
• “Performance in Flight”

The competition will select a few designs to build full scale prototypes of which will be grouped into two categories, pods with wheels and pods without wheels.  There will also be a competition for less well funded groups where “mini-pods” will compete with non-full size pods.  Two winners will then be named, one for each category of the competition. 

            Unfortunately, even once this form of transportation is finalized and is ready to be used, it most likely still won’t be in the United States for a while afterword as the infrastructure is not set up well for it and it would cost a very large amount of money in order to set up a working infrastructure to make the project feasible.  It would likely be used in Europe first as they are more well suited for this type of system.  The COO of the company developing the track in California said that there were other countries that were better suited to have the system put in place and that there would also be less issues with the bureaucracy of getting the project completed.

            This new mode of transportation could be extremely revolutionary if it is successfully completed and implemented as a system of mass transport then it could completely change transportation.  People could work muck farther from home and the cultures from different cities and even countries would be passed along between people and places much more frequently.  The Hyperloop could also help to reduce the number of cars on the road by allowing a fast and easy form of “public” transportation to be available to people.

Source:

http://www.popsci.com/construction-on-hyperloop-test-track-to-start-soon-in-california