Tag Archives: hyperloop

Philadelphia to Pittsburgh hyperloop

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The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission is apparently studying the idea of a hyperloop that could theoretically make the trip from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh in half an hour. Initially they are looking just at freight. The larger context is that the Pennsylvania Turnpike has the right of way, is not doing well financially, charging trucks to carry freight is the core of their business, and they are worried about some killer app coming along. Good for somebody at a dinosaur organization like this to have a little bit of vision and actually get a real study funded.

Of course, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are not really connected in a socioeconomic sense other than being part of an anachronistic and mostly irrelevant political entity. Philadelphia is part of the Boston to DC metro corridor, and Pittsburgh is somewhat isolated but part of a loosely defined region that might include Cleveland, Cincinnati, even Chicago and Detroit if there were really good rail links in place. Put a really fast rail link in place between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and now you could buy a super cheap fixer up house in Pittsburgh and commute to your job in New York or Chicago.

Chicago Hyperloop

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The Chicago Tribune has a video of how the Hyperloop will supposedly get people from the (Chicago) Loop to O’hare airport in 12 minutes. The City’s press release says the project will be funded entirely by private investors. The construction timeline? It will be “finalized during the process”. I’m a little skeptical, but winning a competitive bid process for a major city does suggest the Hyperloop is more than a pipedream. It almost makes me want to move to a U.S. city that is willing to plan for the future, which in this case means catching up to modern world class cities that have efficient rail links from their downtowns to their airports.

the Hyper-tunnel

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Amid all the talk of the Hyperloop, I have figured that the technology would be limited by the fact that digging tunnels is hard and expensive. It turns out, I somehow missed that Elon Musk has thrown his energy into tunneling technology too. I’m a little skeptical, but he certainly has a track record of success. I think he knows how to hire smart engineers to figure out the practical details, which is what engineers are good at, and then inject his companies with a heavy dose of big picture creative thinking and risk tolerance, which is what engineers are bad at.

Serial entrepreneur Elon Musk says his ambitious tunnel-boring endeavor, aptly named The Boring Company, has officially started digging underneath Los Angeles. Musk announced the news on Twitter, where he said “Godot,” the Samuel Beckett-inspired name of the company’s tunnel boring machine, had completed the the first segment of a tunnel in the Southern California metropolis. Prior to today, it was unclear how long it would take Musk to convince the city to allow him to move the experimental effort beyond the SpaceX parking lot in Hawthorne.