Talk to Elon Musk about his idea for the Hyperloop, a sealed tube transport idea capable of taking someone from downtown San Francisco to Los Angeles in 30 minutes. He calls it a "5th mode of transportation'. "What you want is something that never crashes, at least twice as fast as a plane, solar powered and leaves when you arrive, so there is no waiting for a specific departure time". Musk's friends claim he's had a Hyperloop technological breakthrough over the summer. "I'd like to talk to the governor and president about it because the $60 billion bullet train they're proposing in California would be the slowest bullet train in the world at the highest cost per mile. They're going for records in all the wrong ways.” The cost of the SF-LA Hyperloop would be in the $6 billion range, he says.
Considering that Edmonton to Calgary is only 298km compared to SF to LA at 613km, one could imagine that a Hyperloop between the biggest cities in Alberta would take less than 20 minutes, perhaps even 15 minutes. That's half the time of my commute to work within the Calgary metropolitan area.
[The picture is not the Hyperloop. Elon is very secretive about how it would work or what it would look like]
1 comment:
High speed rail is a concept from the 50's. Hyperloop could be a much better fit for the Edmonton-Calgary corridor. And with a friendlier regulatory environment Alberta could get it built here quicker than California. After all, what's one more pipeline, more or less in Alberta?
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