In 2013 inventor/industrialist Elon Musk had an idea. We now know it as Hyperloop. His extraordinary notion was that a new system of transportation could be created that would be preferable to trains, planes and automobiles — faster and greener.
Hyperloop is not a bullet train, as some suppose. It is much faster. In fact, it is faster than a jet.
Hyperloop is a pod in a tube that could move as fast as the speed of sound — 767.269 miles per hour.
Hyperloop’s cars will be levitated above a track using magnets, and then pushed along using electric propulsion in a low-pressure tube.
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Travel time from San Francisco to Los Angeles at 760 miles-per-hour would be 35 minutes. From Toledo to Chicago, it would take 28 minutes.
Sounds like an episode of The Jetsons, you say. Or perhaps, if you are claustrophobic, The Twilight Zone.
But this is real.
Mr. Musk did not have time to pursue this particular vision, so he wrote up a 58 page prospectus and left it to others. Now three different enterprises, plus a host of academic engineers and engineering students, are locked in a race to see who can realize Hyperloop first.
Two huge pluses:
● Building the pods and rails will, say the Hyperloop conceptualizers, cost less than high-speed rail tracks.
● The system would be solar powered. It would generate no pollution.
So this is not science fiction, or a pipe dream (pun intended). It is a fantastic dream, but a very practical one.
In late July, Hyperloop One successfully ran a sort of go-cart down the track of one of its pods in fully integrated mode and at full speed. Founder Josh Giegel, a Pittsburgh-area native, called it a “Kitty Hawk moment.” Now, in the Nevada desert the company is testing a pod.
The Kitty Hawk moment was followed, just days ago, by the announcement of 10 Hyperloop route finalists — city to city. Four of these announced routes — victors from a competition of hundreds — are in the United States. They are: Dallas to Houston; Chicago to Columbus to Pittsburgh; Miami to Orlando, Fla.; Cheyenne to Denver to Pueblo, Colo.
Hyperloop would not only revolutionize travel and transportation, but it would revitalize American cities — tying midsize cities to each other and to larger cities. It could put a Buffalo or a Toledo back on the national industrial map, where both cities were 100 years ago. It could connect a city like Hartford to Boston and New York as it was connected, in publishing, 100 years ago.
Hyperloop would get you from Pittsburgh to Chicago in half an hour. The math is similar for San Francisco to L.A. Imagine being linked in a matter of minutes from Toledo to Indianapolis to Kansas City.
The significance of Hyperloop for American cities, particularly midsize ones, is incalculable. A person could go from Toronto to Montreal in 27 minutes — effectively uniting 25 percent of the Canadian population.
But to connect cities, Hyperloop needs the support of cities. It needs rights-of-way and public works dollars.
And it needs imagination, as well as big bucks. Six of the finalists are in other countries, including Edinburgh to London. The first Hyperloop will likely be built in Saudi Arabia.
So where was Toledo in this competition? Did we even know it was going on? Columbus did. The Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission submitted a proposal on behalf of Columbus.
Pittsburgh’s leaders knew about Hyperloop. The city competed and won finalist status.
No city in America is going to recover, never mind progress, with downtown development and beautification alone, as important as those things are. To progress, we need to be a trade center again, for that we must be a transportation hub, and a place where people can live economically and quietly while having easy access to work, and fun, in a city hundreds of miles away.
Hyperloop could be Toledo’s great hope. To have a future, we must embrace the future.
First Published September 19, 2017, 10:51 a.m.
