The polished promotional video for what’s being promoted as the world’s first Hyperloop route, between Chicago and Cleveland, features a rough-voiced narrator extolling the no-nonsense virtues of the midwest. Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) claims that within three to five years it can build a 340-mile corridor of vacuum-sealed tubes on pylons for shooting passengers in pods as fast as 760 mph, reducing the journey to less than 30 minutes.
The Hyperloop craze launched in 2013, when tech guru Elon Musk introduced and named the concept. (Musk is currently vying to build the O’Hare Express route using a similar scheme he called a “high-speed Loop.”) A few different companies are currently trying to pioneer the Hyperloop, and several different corridors are being brainstormed around the country. In late February another company, Virgin Hyperloop One, joined forces with the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission for another Buckeye State route, this one linking Columbus to Chicago and Pittsburgh.
For example, in 2013 transit analyst and mathematician Alon Levy took apart Elon Musk’s white paper for a Hyperloop from San Francisco to LA. He noted that Musk’s estimates for engineering and land acquisition costs were about a tenth of market rates. Moreover, Levy said, Musk failed to fully account for the g-forces that supersonic ground transportation would have on the human body, which would result in a terrifying “barf ride.” The press release for the Chicago-Cleveland project promises that customer comfort would be maintained through “methods of limiting the force felt by passengers during the critical acceleration braking phases.”
Harnish noted that, in order to maintain a cost advantage over rail, the Hyperloop pods will need to be much less roomy than a train car. Moreover, they won’t have windows, and passengers will need to stay strapped in their seats for the duration of the trip. “That doesn’t seem like a very attractive way to travel. And what if you need to use the restroom?”
