Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla Motors and SolarCity, has responded to California's plan to create a nearly $100 billion high-speed rail corridor between San Francisco and Los Angeles by publishing a plan to create high-speed transportation between the cities for one-tenth the cost and besting the time by hours. In an open-source posting on the SpaceX website, Musk encourages anyone to use his idea and build the Hyperloop, or to offer suggestions for improvement, adjustment or refinement. The Hyperloop works using a low-pressure air tunnel installed above ground (picture the love child of the Monorail at Disney and the pneumatic tube communication system used at your local bank drive-up window) through which capsules carrying passengers - and potentially cargo - travel at speeds up to 700 miles per hour. This would limit the trip from San Fran to LA to about 30 minutes plus a couple of station stops along the way. This beats plane travel by an hour (not including the saved time going through security and waiting to board), and Musk predicts the ticket price could come in at around $20 each way, about twenty percent of even the best fare one could get.
Musk has already begun to hear from skeptics about the plan, which for the guy who founded one of the most disruptive car companies in the last fifty years probably means very little. Having read a few, I have to note that there appears to be more than a bit of knocking the king off his pedestal going on. Musk admits that the plan could likely be tweaked, and offered it up open-source for precisely that reason...well that and running or co-running four entrepreneurial ventures already takes up just a bit of his time. Also, reading the plan, I was struck by his plain-spoken language available to almost anyone to read and understand at least the concept. In addition, he acknowledges the limitations of the concept for trips over the distance between SF and LA, that it would likely not best supersonic air travel in any of the relevant metrics. It appears to me that Musk has given more than a cursory effort into the concept, and has hit upon if not a perfect idea, at least one that merits some consideration. What I do not get is the immediate dismissal of the concept as underwhelming or quixotic. Nor do I think Musk's reputation will get damaged in any way because of it. Newton spent many hours trying to turn lead into gold (which no one would want these days as it would further devalue gold), and Bohr spent years trying to refute or defend (depending on your point of view) the concept of mind controlling matter as part of quantum physics. Comparatively, postulating that travel across states can happen more cost effectively in a low-resistance tunnel powered by solar radiation seems positively sane.
As intriguing as attacking or defending Musk might be, I want to focus on the potential his idea has for changing the way we perceive location, and for changing the conversation about energy and transportation. If we look at the miles per energy input of various forms of transportation, we see:
Walking - 336 Btu/mile
Bicycling - 168 Btu/mile
Electric car - 1,237 Btu/mile
High mpg diesel car - 2,200 Btu/mile (55 mpg)
Passenger plane - 2,000-3,000 Btu/mile
Passenger train - 2,400 Btu/mile
Ship - 8,500-9,000 Btu/mile
Low mpg gasoline truck - 9,000 Btu/mile (13 mpg)
At about 7.4 million passengers each way for 350 miles each way, the total passenger miles equals about 5.18 billion per year. At an average power draw of 21 MW over the course of a year, that gives us a total energy draw of around 630 billion Btu per year, resulting in a net of about 120 Btu/mile...besting bicycle travel! Even with the overall production efficiency of the system running under 25%, the efficiency of the travel is impossible to beat. Add to this, a solar panel system that generates twice as much energy as the system need, and you have a combination fuel-free travel system and local energy generator for transit-oriented development around the stations.
I talk frequently about a low-entropy economy: one where we focus less on the inherent efficiency of the system as a means to lowering fuel consumption, and more on meeting the service need that energy delivers within the framework of the naturally available energy to the system. Even if Musk is off by a factor of two (and right now that looks unlikely), the system would still work within the available natural energy...making Hyperloop the only net-zero form of transportation (even for walking we need food transported to us).
It is okay to challenge creative thinkers...they usually welcome it as a way to make their ideas better. But we need to focus more on ways to implement the idea or best it. We need a major sea change in our approach to transportation, and the cascading effects on our way of life. Elon Musk might have hit on a concept that will revolutionize our approach to urban development and the way in which we connect with people...and like he says in his design description, until someone invents the transporter, we need a better way.
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