Virtually everyone in Central Oregon knows the drudgery of driving to Portland and back, sometimes on the same day. Soccer, lacrosse, shopping or a business meeting, it’s 3 1/2 to 4 hours of hard driving. Imagine driving to a station just outside of Bend city limits, parking your car and 20 minutes later you’re just outside the Portland city limits and a short Uber ride or TriMet ride to downtown. To make that time, you’ll have to be cruising close to the sound barrier, about 760 miles per hour. Welcome to Hyperloop.

What is Hyperloop?

Another brainstorm from the mind of Elon Musk, the Hyperloop transportation system is a sealed low-pressure tube using linear electric motors and glides on a cushion of air created by using air bearings. Thanks to lower air resistance inside the tube from lower pressure, Musk stated the system could attain very high speeds just under the sound barrier of 767 mph and theoretically could reach speeds of 4,000 to 5,000 mph while using little energy.

Musk envisions Hyperloops connecting cities and towns — and not necessarily for metro transit. The advantage of Hyperloop is the time saved over distance, but it’s mostly realized with long distances due to acceleration/deceleration issues with short hauls.

Musk first mentioned the concept in an interview in 2012 at Pando Monthly and, like many of his ideas, became reality. He said, “it’s a cross between a Concorde, a railgun and an air hockey table.” Tesla and SpaceX jointly proposed the initial design concept, Hyperloop Alpha, and open-sourced it to the world to encourage others to create their own Hyperloop designs.

Virgin Hyperloop One is leading

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies took on the challenge. After a large investment by Sir Richard Branson, HTT was renamed Virgin Hyperloop One and vastly expanded its development efforts.

Virgin successfully completed test runs with passengers on board in early November 2020. Virgin’s version uses magnetic levitation , similar to Disney’s monorail system, through a similar low-pressure tunnel and so far has achieved a top speed of 248 mph. As with any new technology, they will continue to tweak the design to eventually attain 760 mph.

Where is it being deployed?

The race is on, and India looks like it will have the first operational Hyperloop. Virgin Hyperloop received a contract in July 2019 to construct a 124.27 -mile Hyperloop route between Mumbai and Pune, reducing the commute time from 3.5 hours to 35 minutes. This is considered the first Hyperloop “public works” project in the world.

A feasibility study was completed in 2018 for a 250 -mile route across the state from Kansas City, Missouri, through Columbia and ending in St. Louis. Commute time would be cut from 3.75 hours to under 30 minutes. Virtually the entire route is on state-owned land along a near-straight shot beside a highway connecting the three cities. The estimated cost is between 30 to 40 million dollars per mile, totaling over 7 billion dollars.

What would a ride cost?

Sir Richard Branson says the cost to ride a Hyperloop transit system would be comparable to a high-speed rail ticket. For a comparison, let’s look at the high-speed train approved in September 2020 by the Federal Railroad Administration for a 240 mile route between Dallas and Houston. The ticket price is estimated to be from $60 to $200, depending on class of service and other factors. This would cut commute time from 3.5 hours to 90 minutes. The top speed is around 200 mph, roughly 26% of Hyperloop’s projected 760 mph. The project was proposed by Texas Central Railroad, which expects construction to start in mid-2021.

System automation using AI

To manage passenger or payload Hyperloop vehicles , known as pods, a sophisticated routing management system utilizing artificial intelligence needs to be deployed. For example, pods would be auto-routed to their destination, and several pods going to the same destination could auto-arrange themselves into a tightly-packed convoy to take advantage of slip-stream efficiencies. If two tubes cross, the AI can easily manage the pods crossing into each other’s paths by increasing or decreasing speed and pod spacing. Extremely fast sensors controlled by AI throughout the tube network would identify issues and resolve them near-instantaneously.

The proposed West Coast Hyperloop

As part of Elon Musk’s white paper on Hyperloops, he initially proposed a route between the Los Angeles area (Sylmar, California) and the San Francisco bay area (Hayward, California), a distance of 337 miles, or about 6 hours by car. Musk predicted the commute would take less than 30 minutes. There is currently no activity on actualizing this route, but it would be a game-changer for these two huge economic zones and could drastically reduce traffic on the I-5 corridor and thereby extend its use for decades without more lanes being added.

Bottomline

Hyperloop is still in its initial deployment stage and won’t be fully realized for years. However, it’s like witnessing the release of the first truly mass-produced electric automobile. I believe Hyperloop’s technical capabilities will grow along a similar exponential curve as the Tesla Model 3 and Model Y. The idea of riding a Hyperloop from Portland to New York in less time than it takes to drive from Bend to Portland sounds crazy. Nowadays, reality is not that far from crazy.

Find Out More

bit.ly/wiki-Hyperloop; bit.ly/Wiki-Texas-High-Speed-Train; bit.ly/B1M-Hyperloop-Explained; bit.ly/VirginHyperloop; bit.ly/Tesla-Hyperloop-Alpha; bit.ly/FinExpress-India-Hyperloop; bit.ly/Wiki-Missouri-Hyperloop; bit.ly/Virgin-Hyperloop-1st-Passengers; bit.ly/BIM-Inside-Hyperloop