Feasibility study gets green light, but there’s still a long way ahead
Elon Musk didn't invent the idea of a high-speed electric train in a tube, but his modern Hyperloop vision gets closer to fruition
Hyperloop Transportation Technologies is not one of Elon Musk's companies, but it's the first to reach an agreement with the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency (NOACA) and Illinois' Department of Transportation (IDOT) to begin a feasibility study for a hyperloop connection in the region.
HTT is an American research company, the result of several engineering teams putting resources together and receiving funding through crowdsourcing. Its main goal: to create America's first functioning Hyperloop connection. And the first region to benefit would be the Great Lakes – 27 million people in total.
Having bipartisan support in Ohio's legislature and receiving support from Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, HTT managed to form a regional consortium to promote the hyperloop and enable the first commercial application of this technology.
The end result would be a high-speed underground train system able to carry 164,000 passengers daily. Hyperloop capsules would be 100 feet (30 m) long, 2.7 meters in diameter, and carry 28-40 passengers at very high speeds (around 630 mph or 1,000 km/h).
The first step would be to connect Cleveland and Chicago through a 313-long mile tube with a capacity of 54,720 people per day, for a 28-minute journey, with capsules departing less than one minute one after another. That's way faster than the plane connection (4h 30, including time lost in the airport), a car trip (5. 25 h) or a normal train (7 hrs).
The other good news is the HTT has begun construction on a Hyperloop passenger transport capsule to be delivered in early 2018. As HTT signed agreements with several other parties too (the governments of Slovakia and Andhra Pradesh, India, as well as local authorities in Toulouse, France), there are signs we may be nearer the first commercial hyperloop line than we think.
Things are moving fast, as they should be, in 2018! Elon Musk (even if he's not personally involved with the HTT) could not be prouder!
READ MORE: How Elon Musk's boring idea could work and save the planet