In case you weren't paying attention to the news during August, a futuristic idea for a new mode of travel enjoyed a few minutes of fame last month when electric car and space travel pioneer Elon Musk rolled out his idea for the Hyperloop, a system that could offer surface travel at Mach 0.99, or up to 760 mph.
Musk, the founder and CEO of private space-flight firm SpaceX and the co-founder of Tesla Motors, said he designed the system to improve on the idea of high-speed rail, which he regards as too slow and expensive to build.
But he has no plans to build it himself. Should anyone else take up the idea, the Hyperloop could offer Basin-to-Bay travel times of about 35 minutes, propelling pressurized 28-passenger vehicles through a sealed tube from which most of the air has been removed to eliminate resistance. The vehicle would ride on a thin cushion of air, thereby eliminating friction.
Musk, who also co-founded PayPal, has had more success thinking outside the box than most people achieve from thinking inside it, so it would be unwise to write this off as a nutty idea.
But the documents he posted on the Web about his concept make it clear why this mode of travel could work only for short distances. The vehicles would be barely four-and-a-half-feet wide. Passengers would sit two abreast, and each would enter and exit directly to the outside. There would be no aisle, and no rest room. Once you sit down, you're there for the duration.
We all know that today's transport technologies have pretty much reached their practical limits for speed. The foreseeable future will be all about incremental gains in efficiency unless we get some breakthrough technologies.
The hyperloop may hold great promise for such a breakthrough, but in terms of passenger comfort, this initial design is a step backward and, in our view, trades so much for speed as to make it uninviting, which is the one thing travel should not be.