The Hyperloop May Disrupt More Than Just Travel

the

hyperloop

it is very likely that you have already heard the name this is the

hyperloop

system can take people hundreds of miles and minutes the hyperloop a series of tubes that would transport people in Pods at ultra high speeds over long distances this is a New and remarkable form of transportation that can take people from one city to another in an instant 29 minutes from New York to DC 30 minutes from Los Angeles to San Francisco For years we've been seeing these futuristic utopian depictions of some cross between a spaceship and a monorail. but lately the Hyperloop is becoming much

more

real.

Yes, it was surreal to even be sitting inside a Hyperloop and even

more

incredible to be like riding around a track in something that was nothing more than a crazy idea six years before it was everywhere. The world has been developing and testing the technology needed to propel passengers to speeds of over 1,000 kilometers per hour, but for many speed is

just

the first step in unlocking the full transformative effects of a new mode of transportation, fast it is. what we simply give Of course, in the world of Hyperloop it is the network effects that really provide the benefit and open up a completely different scale of economic opportunities.

We have planes, trains, cars and ships to move around the Earth, but what if there was a fifth way? have a name for it name it's called hyperloop the hyperloop hyperloop yes in 2013, while riding high on the growing success of Tesla and SpaceX, entrepreneur Elon Musk published a white paper outlining the basic framework of the technology he called hyperloop, the basic idea. It goes something like this: a tube reduces the air pressure to an almost vacuum-like environment. A Hyperloop pod is then suspended in the tube, usually by magnetic levitation, and then the entire pod can be propelled forward because there are no traditional sources of friction like air resistance or rolling friction that would push back against the Pod, the Hyperloop was able to move at incredibly high speeds and do so quite efficiently despite its futuristic name;

However, the general concept behind the Hyperloop is quite old; in fact, it was New York City's first attempt at creating underground public transportation. The system in the 1870s was based on a similar principle, the pneumatic transit system was short-lived, however, only extending one block and maxing out at a fairly leisurely 10 miles per hour, while Elon would make some century improvements. XXI to this concept and would give it a very modern style. name of the century, he wouldn't end up pursuing the technology itself and would instead choose to focus his efforts on something a little deeper, literally digging the necessary tunnels through his boring company, he would need another billionaire industrialist to dabble in space flight, no , wait, not that one.

Yes, that's the one that happened after Richard Branson made a big investment in the Hyperloop company and it would be renamed Virgin Hyperloop, but we have always tried as a company to demonstrate that this technology could work, that it could be made safe, and that ultimately , it is something that will happen in the next two years, not in the next 20 years. Josh Geigel is the co-founder and CEO of Virgin Hyperloop. He sends his tech startup story. He has seen the project grow from a garage to a full-scale outdoor testing facility. of Las Vegas, so we started building the first type of Hyperloop system in 2016.

We've done a lot of work on a 500 test that we've done over the last five years and what we realized we had to do is take that technology proves which can be commercial, so reduce costs, improve efficiency, improve performance, but the key is that you know that it is actually making it accessible and safe for people to be able to do it Josh together with the head of experience of Virgin passengers, Sarah Lucian. I bravely volunteered to take the maiden voyage. What she and I realized was that we were the first two people sitting in a Hyper Loop.

The only type of people who have passed through this environment are those who wear space suits and there we are, as always. clothes because of the system the safety of what we designed three two one launch and then once we started going you felt a little bit of acceleration we accelerated a little bit harder than we would in a commercial it would be like a sports car, yes we got to about 108 miles per hour on that test and it's a short run it's about 500 yards or so and it stopped the test was only about 20 seconds long and covered only a quarter mile at

just

over 100 miles per hour Now, it's a long way from a really working Hyperloop, but in terms of optics, it's a crucial step for the future of financing.

The number one question we got from investors or project proponents or just people in general was: Is a Hyperloop safe and what better way to prove that something is safe than? Getting people involved in it, investors and governments who would likely bear some of the costs of building an unproven technology, is not an easy task. First of all, there is the question of security. Most people don't know how an airplane works, but it's still understandable. They get on a plane because they know it's faster than driving and, most importantly, they've probably gotten off one before they've seen anyone get off one before, so what we set out to do was prove that Hyperloop Could Be sure with two normal people, not astronauts, not adrenaline junkies, not test pilots, or anything like that, two normal people getting on a Hyperloop and then, most importantly, those two people getting off, but beyond the worries of Assuredly, building Hyperloops will certainly require significant capital investment by the estimate.

An approximate figure of 60 million dollars per kilometer of track, so a road from San Francisco to Los Angeles, for example, will probably have a price tag of more than 10 billion dollars and before big governments are willing to To bear those costs, investors who are funding Hyperloop development need to accept it as a long-term mix of investors who invest in technology and infrastructure and who are used to short returns because you're developing applications or something. You know, those are not the investors who are really excited about Hyperloop. What you start to see is people who are looking at the platform technologies, so this idea that because this smartphone existed, Uber could exist, so they're like the Vanderbilts of this century and that's the part where which you will get many more no.

Yes, but there are people who have the ability and strength to endure to see the revolutionary platform. Those are the people we are looking for and since we did that passenger test there has been a lot of interest. That's really, oh, this is a lot sooner than I thought, imagining the ripple effects of what the Hyperloop could achieve, although it's quite challenging at this stage of development, it's fast, yes, but for point-to-point

travel

, Traditional maglev trains can also move quite quickly. Outside of China, South Korea and Japan, even these have not seen much adoption elsewhere due to high costs and questionable profitability.

The Shanghai line in China, for example, loses about $100 million each year. Hyperloop companies, however, believe they can offer something different to traditional rail. lines, my name is Alan James and, as far as I know, I am the only person on the planet who has written a government-level business case for a 300kmh conventional high-speed train, a 500kmh maglev train and a 1000kmh foreign hyperloop. It's fundamentally about moving people from where they are to where they want to go when they want to make those trips and they do it in much smaller numbers, so capsule designs for Hyperloop range from 12 to 28 seats.

In general, why are they small? An example of this is the strategic East-West route that crosses the north of England from Liverpool to Manchester and Leeds, so arriving by train from Liverpool via Manchester to Leeds today is just under two hours and will probably take you two hours driving too. in average traffic conditions the net result is that those three city regions remain three separate entities Liverpool Manchester Leeds there is very little traffic between those urban areas Hyperloop absolutely changes that from zero Liverpool to Manchester is a five or six minute journey from Manchester to Leeds is also a five or six minute journey, what it effectively does is create a single city super economy.

In this Vision, the Hyperloop acts a little more like a highway where the pods have fixed destinations and don't need to stop along the way, meaning you can

travel

on a Hyperloop network from, say, Liverpool to Leeds, while the Pod behind If you travel from Liverpool to Manchester and that Metro Hyperloop network is connected to other networks from the same location, you can travel from Liverpool to Paris or from Liverpool to Amsterdam, all without making a single stop for passengers. for business for leisure which is completely transformative for high value freight and logistics it is equally transformative but critically if you create a Hyperloop network at scale you start to generate hugely significant carbon savings also a multi-region Hyperloop network could become a replacement for both distances short passenger and cargo flights and traditional ground transportation, which are major carbon producers.

A Hyperloop-connected distribution center, perhaps at an airport predominantly used for international air travel, replacing perhaps 10 12 15 distributed road hubs. A lot of polluting and inefficient truck transportation is needed. off the roads, which in itself means that the roads gain additional capacity. Hyperloops will still need to use electricity to move the capsules and maintain the near-empty environment in the tube. Proponents of the technology believe this can be done by using renewable sources, including a combination of solar panels. and battery technology that could be used throughout the Hyperloop itself, but even with all the time multipliers and carbon emissions savings that a Hyperloop network can provide for the investment.

The capital required to build such a network becomes even more daunting economically and politically. Spending billions on day one commit means how we do it gradually. A company in the Netherlands is working to develop that technology and perhaps most importantly, the International Coalition needed to make the Hyperloop network a reality, so here we are at Europe's first large-scale high school. test facility where we can now test each conceptual Hyperloop technology. This is Tim Hauter, co-founder and CEO of Heart Hyperloop based in the city of Delft and although this test tube may not look as big as others, inside it is a key technology to create. the entrance and exit ramp type infrastructure of a Hyperloop network that is a lane change, that is something that we can already test here.

In fact, you can see here that the track diverges from one track to two, making it possible to eventually split the high club. track in two sections and in that sense a complete high-speed network can be created but in the end it will allow travel, for example, across an entire continent. I think in Europe, for example, you can now travel with a subway in a city with the same ease. The good thing about this magnetic levitation system that we have developed is that there are absolutely no moving components on the track, so, For example, if you have to change lanes, all you do is the tube basically splits and remains static.

The tracks also divide and each time the vehicle enters a switch, it is pulled to the right with its magnets or to the left with its magnets. Changing rails on traditional railway requires physical movement of the rail, even modern maglev tracks use Rail Changing Techniques to transfer trains from one track to another and this is a very crucial element because this is what limits the capacity and in the end the usefulness of the real Network because the moment a track changes means that at that moment you are creating an unsafe environment for the trains behind it, so you need a lot of space between trains within a hyper because you don't have moving components on the road, all the vehicles can be much closer to each other, you can achieve high frequency and basically your vehicles move and merge in and out of the network much like a highway For now, although Hart's physical tests have been limited by the size of his tube because the test track is only 30 meters long, they have not tested this lane change at speeds above 20 kilometers per hour, however, the company is working to builda new test site where it plans to increase that test speed to 300 kilometers per hour.

We are now in a phase where we have tested most of the important technologies in the test facilities that we already have and we have also demonstrated the viability and feasibility of a network if we look at all the subsystems that make it up, most of them They are proven systems that have already been demonstrated in laboratory conditions, so I don't really think that the technology itself will be the biggest challenge because for all Hyperloop companies, building a Hyperloop system requires more than just a good product, we are talking Of the security aspects, we are talking about the integration into the environment that We are talking about the social aspects, do people feel comfortable traveling in such a system?

So it's about all these different aspects and the complexity really is getting all the different stakeholders relevant and that you need to contribute to bringing this to the market to achieve them. all following the same roadmap to help build this coalition of public and private interest in the development of Hyperloop. In 2018 we partnered with other Hyperlib companies from Europe and Canada. The goal was to define, establish and standardize the framework for regulating Hyperloop systems at this time. Working with all the Hyperloop developers together to establish the first, let's say a structure to start writing standards, one of the most important goals of Heart is interoperability, which is essentially ensuring that different systems can communicate with each other.

Interoperability is very important because what we want to achieve. It's actually having this seamless travel experience, so you don't want to end up, for example, going from Madrid to Paris and then change because you need to use a different technology to get to, for example, Amsterdam. The idea is that as companies across Europe create the first commercial Hyperloop tracks between individual cities they will one day be able to all connect to a larger network. Everyone who believes that Hyperloop is a future transportation system also realizes that it is necessary to have this network because that is where Hyperloop thrives.

It's definitely not something you can do on your own or as a single company, so you have to do it with a lot of other companies, you need to have governments. I think, in that sense, the biggest challenge we have encountered is to really bring together all the necessary parties to take the necessary steps in development and commercial implementation, the next foreign plan is to build a test facility at the European Hyperloop Center. open that will include a 2.6 kilometer test track and the company hopes to test travel speeds. There, at speeds of up to 700 kilometers per hour, Virgin Hyperloop is also racing to build the first commercial Hyperloop route with projects in various states of development in India, Saudi Arabia and the United States.

The company recently announced plans to build a Hyperloop certification center in West Virginia, which will include a six-mile-long test track that will demonstrate that the technology here will be crucial if Hyperloop networks can find a home among infrastructure investments. that the Biden administration hopes to do. I think the idea that there are multiple Hyperloop companies is a redeeming aspect for business people. I want to see something happen, so it's good to have several people moving forward. I was surprised when Josh and Sarah wrote the Pod, two or three major media outlets used the phrase now we have a new mode of transportation, and even though all that technology had existed before those two humans wrote it, yes, it was time in which those two human beings traveled that short distance through the tube, but in the popular imagination the Hyperloop became a mode of transportation.

The metaphor I use with my team is that you know Wright. The brothers were the first, but neither of us flies for Wright Brothers Airlines anymore. If you don't continue to innovate, you won't be around, so we will continue to be at the forefront of construction in 2013. Elon had an idea. I think the difference now in 2021 is that some brilliant engineers have spent real time polishing the details and I expect the next three to five years to be decisive.