Notes From Underground

As cities become more crowded, loops and hyperloops offer a solution for rapid transportation of passengers and freight.

- Matthew Flynn

Cars on the highways and byways in and around the world’s largest cities are often bumper-to-bumper any time of day. More than just a major frustration to commuters, this problem impacts the supply chain, specifically one of its trickiest and most costly aspects – last mile delivery.

As a result, some of the wealthiest and most innovative companies on the planet have been looking for solutions to congestion problems. So far, the answer appears (at least partially) to lie underground, where some of these companies plan on digging a series of tunnels for hyperloops that shoot people and cargo through cities at hundreds of miles per hour.

STRANGE LOOPS

The idea for a hyperloop was born of Elon Musk’s frustration over California’s $68 billion High-Speed Rail project, which he deemed too costly and not forward-thinking enough for a state that is “the home of Silicon Valley and JPL (NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory).” In the white paper explaining his plan, Musk described the need for a new form of mass transportation that is “safer, faster, lower cost, more convenient, immune to weather, sustainably self-powering, resistant to earthquakes, (and) not disruptive to those along the route.”

Although hyperloops bear some things in common with railways and subways, they use electromagnetic suspension and vacuum tubes, along with an air compressor on the autonomous pods (in Musk’s original idea) to move the pods through the tube on a cushion of air — similar to a puck moving across an air hockey table. Running electrically, and with solar panels on the tube where it’s above ground, hyperloops offer a form of transportation and shipping that is faster and more sustainable than other forms of ground transportation.

THE BORING COMPANY