Team HYPED in Edinburgh, with Adam Anyszewski, managing director, seated second from right. Photo: courtesy of HYPED
Having kicked off in May 2016, the global challenge sponsored by Hyperloop One ignited vast interest — 2,600 teams registered — with routes selected in five countries, and with entrants from places as di- verse as China, Israel, Estonia, and Spain. In terms of the challenge, the U.S. leads the pack, and is joined by other Top 10 economies such as Canada, the U.K., and India. Since the global challenge, a number of public-private coalitions have emerged supporting hyperloop. Most recently, the Kansas City-to- St. Louis route, developed after the global challenge concluded, has started a feasibility study. Virgin Hyperloop One, Black & Veatch, and the University of Missouri System are partnering to analyze the techni- cal alignment as well as the potential economic impact and benefits of integrating hyperloop into the I-70 corridor connecting Kansas City, Columbia, and St. Louis. It seems as if a tipping point has either been reached or will soon be reached. “I see a yearning for new transportation,” Sengupta said. While hyperloop is no doubt groundbreaking, engineers at the com- pany are not necessarily looking to reinvent the wheel. As the system’s standards are being developed, hyperloop is fact-finding in other in- dustries — aviation, rail, spacecraft, and autonomous vehicles — to find pre-existing standards that can be applied to hyperloop. The end goal, Sengupta said, is to create an international standard. Bullish on the development of the technology, Sengupta said hyperloop could be ready within five years. Funding to implement hyperloop, predictably, could take much longer. If and when a system were ever funded, it would likely have to be through a public-private partnership (P3), in which the private sector takes the investment risk in return for the reward.
“That’s the way you do it,” she said. In regard to cost, the figures are hard to nail down. A hyperloop system has never been built, so there’s no real benchmark. Musk’s original estimates for a proposed route from Los Angeles to San Francisco — $6 billion for a passenger system — were universally panned as too low. Looking at what has already been built, or what is in the process of being built, it’s certain the price tag for domestic hyperloop, which could utilize both elevated tracks and bored tunnels, would be nothing short of galactic. The bullet train in California, for example, is currently projected to cost about $64 billion. In Seattle, a 1.7-mile tunnel beneath downtown cost around $3.2 billion. And in New York, a new tunnel under the Hudson River could cost as much as $11.1 billion, according to a story published last year in The New York Times.
Alon Levy, a mathematician and full-time transit journalist based in Paris, has followed hyperloop since Musk’s whitepaper was released in 2013. A critic of the cost estimate then, Levy has yet to relinquish his view that hyperloop is just too expensive. Backed by an encyclopedic knowledge of advanced transit systems around the world, Levy said hyperloop is probably going to be built over a span of 50 to 100 years, with a country’s ability to afford and maintain infrastructure growing over decades, similar to how traditional rail systems were developed in the U.S. and across the world.
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