Community Corner

Patch Asks: Would You Ride a 'Hyperloop' System to San Francisco?

The system would consist of pods traveling through tubes to your destination.

Have you ever noticed the tubes at some banks or Price Clubs wherein cashiers put money into canisters that then go into tubes and get wooshed away? A similar system (sort of) was proposed as a high speed travel system between Los Angeles and San Francisco Monday. 

Saying a planned California high-speed rail system is overly expensive and too slow, SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk on Monday unveiled a "hyperloop system" which he claimed would cut the travel time between Los Angeles and San Francisco to 35 minutes using pods in a tube system.

According to a 57-page proposal, a Hyperloop system would have pods carrying 28 passengers each, with capsules departing roughly every two minutes, or as often as every 30 seconds during peak hours. The capsules would be limited to a maximum speed of 760 mph. The steel tube system would be covered with solar arrays to power the system.

"Short of figuring out real teleportation, which would of course be awesome—someone please do this— the only option for super-fast travel is to build a tube over or under the ground that contains a special environment,'' Musk wrote in the proposal.

Musk walks through some of the technical problems with the system, such as maintaining a "hard or near-hard vacuum in the tube'' while using electromagnetic suspension of the pods. But he said the right combination of technology would result in a tube system that requires less space than a high-speed train and can be built both above and below ground, with above-ground sections built on pylons making the system more earthquake-safe.

He conceded that building the tube system would cost several billion dollars, along with "several hundred million'' more to build the pods, but even those numbers are low "when compared with the several tens of billions proposed for the track of the California rail project''—which is estimated at about $68.4 billion.

So Patch wants to know, once deemed safe, would you consider riding in a tube to the City by the Bay? Would you support funding of such a project? Let us know in the comments section.

—City News Service contributed to this post.


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