The Boring Company Just Mapped Its D.C.-Baltimore Hyperloop-Ready Route

Inverse.com

The Boring Company unveiled further details about its proposed “loop” route between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., on Thursday, a high-speed underground transit project that is designed to meet the requirements for hyperloop. Elon Musk’s venture — which has used a curious funding model of flamethrowers and hats — plans to fully fund the 35-mile tunnel that will initially move pods at speeds of between 125 and 150 mph.

The proposal is the latest under the company that wants to revolutionize the exciting world of tunnel boring. The parallel, twin underground tunnels will sit at least 30 feet deep. The project is expected to take between 12 and 20 months depending on machine speed, with the construction of four machine “launch pits” taking around four weeks. The only other surface penetrations will come from ventilation shafts and emergency exits (around 20 but no more than 70, between 12 and 24 feet diameter) and stations “the size of a few parking spaces” and “widely distributed in a network,” built on private land with local government input on location. Autonomous electric skates will transport either a single passenger vehicle or a pod of between eight to 16 passengers, with pedestrians and cyclists prioritized over cars.

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Hyperloop — no longer just a pipe dream for Columbus?

Dispatch.com

Five months after winning an international challenge from Virgin Hyperloop One, the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission is ready to announce “the first step” of the proposed project in a “major announcement.”

In September 2017, MORPC’s proposal to link Pittsburgh, Columbus and Chicago via high-speed transportation was chosen as one of 10 winners around the globe by Hyperloop One, a division of the Virgin Group. English business magnate and Virgin Group founder Richard Branson is the Hyperloop One chairman.

In a release at the time, Hyperloop One said the 10 winners qualify for “meaningful business and engineering resources and work closely with each of the winning teams/routes to determine their commercial viability.”

The other winning routes, which represent Canada, India, Mexico, the United Kingdom and the United States, are Toronto-Montreal in Canada, Bengaluru-Chennai and Mumbai-Chennai in India, Edinburgh-London and Glasgow-Liverpool in the United Kingdom, Mexico City-Guadalajara in Mexico and Cheyenne-Denver-Pueblo, Dallas-Laredo-Houston and Miami-Orlando in the U.S.

Now, according to Thea Walsh, MORPC’s director of transportation systems and funding, the organization is ready for a “major announcement” that will involve “the first step we’ll be taking with Hyperloop One” sometime during the week of Feb. 19.

Though Walsh and MORPC spokeswoman Bernice Cage said they could not provide any information on what that announcement would entail, Walsh said the concept is feeling more real than ever after MORPC officials took a trip last month to visit Hyperloop One’s first working concept, called DevLoop, in Nevada.

“I used to say decades on something like this,” Walsh said. “But transportation planning is moving so much faster than it used to. Things that are taking decades are now taking years.”

Lear Jet In Trouble Over NJ Lands Safely At Stewart Airport

Southwest Dutchess Daily Voice

A Lear jet that had problems with the nose landing gear diverted safely from New Jersey to Stewart Airport in Orange County late Thursday morning, authorities said.

The troubled jet landed just before noon at the public/military airport nearly 57 miles north of Teterboro, the Port Authority’s Joseph Pentangelo told Daily Voice.

Hasbrouck Heights firefighters and Port Authority responders were at Teterboro Airport as the jet, with five people aboard, began circling to burn off fuel around 10:30 a.m., Pentangelo said.

The decision was made soon after to head to Stewart, where, as pilot Joseph Bar-Nadav explained, “the runways are at least twice as long as the ones at Teterboro and would make landing an aircraft with gear issues much safer.

“The long runways afford the pilot lots of room to get low and slow and then gently land on the runway surface without landing gear and leave enough room to slide as long as it needs,” Bar-Nadav said.

Many officials in New York State Government have joined in proposing a Hyperloop between Stewart Airport and New York City. Any questions on Stewart Hyperloop, Contact Ken Kinlock

Multi-Vehicle Crash Snarls Traffic On Gov. Mario M. Cuomo Bridge

TARRYTOWN, N.Y. (CBSNewYork) — Traffic is starting to move again after a chain reaction crash on the Gov. Mario M. Cuomo Bridge closed the span in both directions, leaving drivers stranded for hours.

Two northbound lanes and two southbound lanes on the bridge are now open, but drivers should still expect delays and are being urged to seek alternate routes.

What are alternate routes?????

Lets consider the HYPERLOOP between Stewart International Airport (and beyond)

Perhaps we should also be considering extending the proposed HYPERLOOP from NY City to Stewart Airport to Bradley (and maybe Albany, Capital of New York State and even more)

Any questions on Stewart Hyperloop, Contact Ken KinlockKen Kinlock

Snow leads to some cancellations, delays at Bradley Airport

The snow has canceled or delayed some flights at Bradley International Airport Wednesday morning.

The airport says that while they are open, some airlines have already started to adjust their schedules. As of Wednesday morning, 30% of arriving and departing flights have been cancelled. There are also a number of delays.

Perhaps we should also be considering extending the proposed HYPERLOOP from NY City to Stewart Airport to Bradley (and maybe Albany, Capital of New York State and even more)

Any questions on Stewart Hyperloop, Contact Ken KinlockKen Kinlock

High-Tech Hyperloop

STL News

St. Louis, MO (STL.News) Missouri may soon be one of eleven U.S. states to see the installation of the Hyperloop One, the newest high-tech and high-speed transportation system.

The transportation system, first proposed by Tesla founder, Elon Musk, is the first of it’s kind. Now, founder of the Virgin empire, Richard Branson, is proposing the Hyperloop One. According to the official website, Hyperloops One’s mission is to “reinvent transportation to eliminate the barriers of time and distance and unlock vast economic opportunities [and]… to have operational systems by 2021 that validate our ability to design, finance and build a safe, revolutionary transportation technology that scales”.

Hyperloop One is a modern mode of transportation that will move individuals quickly and safely from their origin to their destination. Hyperloop One states, “ Passengers or cargo are loaded into the Hyperloop vehicle and accelerate gradually via electric propulsion through a low-pressure tube. The vehicle floats above the track using magnetic levitation and glides at airline speeds for long distances due to ultra-low aerodynamic drag. Hyperloop One systems will be built on columns or tunneled below ground to avoid dangerous grade crossings and wildlife. It’s fully autonomous and enclosed, eliminating pilot error and weather hazards. It’s safe and clean, with no direct carbon emissions”. It is estimated that the top speed of the Hyperloop can reach up to 700 mph.

What does this mean for Missouri? The proposed Hyperloop will serve roughly 5 million people and connect the states three major cities, St. Louis, Columbia, and Kansas City. The transportation system would follow I-70 and cut down travel time drastically. For reference, it takes approximately four hours to get from St. Louis to Kansas City. With the Hyperloop, individuals could travel 3-4 times faster between the three cities, in just under a half an hour.

Although Missouri’s terrain is not perfectly flat, the land still serves as a great landscape for the transportation system, as there are no high-speed competing systems.

Despite the Hyperloop One being in just the beginning stages of discussion, the agreement to look into the potential cost and societal impact is the first step to a faster future for transportation in Missouri.

* * * * * * * * * *

I hope Musk and Branson are soon announcing a Hyperloop connecting Stewart International Airport with downtown New York City. Only 66 miles! But when the three other NY Airports close like might happen today with snow storm, passengers must take a THREE HOUR bus ride to City. Any questions on Stewart Hyperloop, Contact Ken KinlockKen Kinlock

Hyperloop coming? Northern Ohio?

Why not the Hyperloop for northern Ohio?

U.S. Rep Marcy Kaptur (D., Toledo), whose district includes West Cleveland, has signed onto a letter asking President Donald Trump to include $20 million in next year’s budget to study the Hyperloop.

She is one of three Cleveland-area congressmen joining the effort to promote research of the futuristic concept here in Ohio.

The Hyperloop is a giant pneumatic tube that would transport capsules carrying people at speeds up to 760 mph — theoretically making possible a half-hour commute from Cleveland to Chicago for only $20. That is according to the letter signed by Miss Kaptur and eight other congressmen.

There was no mention of it stopping to pick up riders in Toledo. At 760 mph, the Hyperloop would still be accelerating by the time Martin Luther King Jr. Plaza loomed into view.

The benefits of the Hyperloop are many, including low environmental impact, and energy savings. It would also greatly reduce the stress of commuting.

The money requested by Miss Kaptur would be used for transportation research, which is something the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency — Cleveland’s version of the Toledo Metropolitan Area Council of Governments — is involved in.

There would be no bonus for Toledo if the Hyperloop came to Cleveland. But a large chunk of Ohio would benefit.

A futuristic Hyperloop system may be coming to 3 unlikely cities

Business Insider

An upcoming study will determine the feasibility of a Hyperloop system in Missouri that would connect St. Louis, Columbia, and Kansas City.

The study would be conducted by a combination of public and private organizations, including Virgin Hyperloop One.

Hyperloop is a high-speed transportation system in the early stages of development that would allow passengers to travel in pods through tubes at speeds exceeding 500 mph.

Most proposals for the high-speed Hyperloop transportation system have focused on big cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, DC. But an upcoming study will determine the feasibility of a Hyperloop system in Missouri that would connect St. Louis, Columbia, and Kansas City.

The study will examine the technical alignment and potential economic benefits of the Hyperloop system, and will be conducted by a combination of public and private organizations, including Black & Veatch, the University of Missouri System, and Virgin Hyperloop One. The proposed 240-mile route could allow passengers to travel between Kansas City and St. Louis in less than 30 minutes.

Virgin Group invested in Hyperloop One in October 2017. The startup has successfully tested its Hyperloop system twice on a 500-meter track in Nevada. It reached a top speed of 192 mph during the tests.

Hyperloop is a high-speed transportation system that was first proposed by Elon Musk in a 2013 white paper. While the system is still in the early stages of development, it could one day allow passengers to travel in pods through tubes at speeds exceeding 500 mph.

Musk’s Boring Company is attempting to create the tunnel infrastructure that could make Hyperloop possible, but it has faced resistance from local governments. Two of Musk’s other companies, SpaceX and Tesla, tested a Hyperloop pod in 2015 that reached a top speed of 220 mph, which is the fasted recorded time to date.

The hype around Hyperloop

BBC News

Does the technology behind the much-vaunted new transport system Hyperloop really stand up to scrutiny?

Hyperloop’s technology in question
Anything that Elon Musk says is taken very seriously given his track record in defying sceptics who thought he would never build a sporty electric car or a reusable rocket. So when he floated the idea of the Hyperloop, a high speed transport system in a vacuum tube, various companies leapt into action.

In Davos this week, a company called Hyperloop Transportation Technologies promised that it would be announcing its first commercial track this year. But the project which seems to have got furthest is Virgin Hyperloop One, which has built a 500m test track in Nevada.

On Tech Tent we hear from Virgin Hyperloop’s Anita Sengupta who tells us that everything is on track for the first commercial operation in 2021 – and from Gareth Dennis, a railway engineer.

“The fundamental laws of physics are the same for Hyperloop as for high-speed rail,” says Mr Dennis, a design engineer working for the Arcadis consultancy.

He explains that the faster a train goes, the shallower any curve in the track has to be.

“For high-speed rail, the curves have to be 10km long, and that’s only at 200mph to 250mph. Hyperloop’s going to be hurtling along at 700mph so the track will almost have to be dead straight.”

He believes that means that in countries with plenty of built-up areas this will mean putting the Hyperloop in tunnels, a prohibitively expensive business. He also has concerns about the process of switching pods between different tunnels as they approach a station.

But his biggest doubt is about the capacity of any Hyperloop line in comparison with something like the UK’s HS2 high-speed rail project: “They are going to have to have as many as 400 pods departing every hour, which requires a huge amount of infrastructure.

“I just don’t think that is going to be economically or environmentally viable in the near future.”

Hyperloop’s backers say the engineering challenges are different from those on high-speed rail and cannot be compared.

They believe that big ideas need bold thinkers – but finding governments and investors with the courage to push the button on this kind of project could prove the ultimate challenge.

The Tor-Mon Hyperloop

Buffalo Rising

Envisions eventually connecting Buffalo and Niagara Falls.

In September of 2017 the ‘Toronto to Montreal route’ was chosen as a winner of the Hyperloop One Global Challenge. The AECOM Canada team proposal beat out hundreds of other submissions for what could some day be one of the most ecologically and technologically significant transportation projects of all time (read more here). 10 teams were chosen as winners in the Hyperloop One Global Challenge, with routes encompassing the United States, the United Kingdom, Mexico, India, and Canada. According to Hyperloop One, the company would “…commit meaningful business and engineering resources and work closely with each of the winning teams/routes to determine their commercial viability.

It is interesting to note that Hyperloop One has named Buffalo as one of the cities that would, most likely benefit from the Tor-Mon route, as additional US extension routes would only be a matter of time. Buffalo/The Falls would be highly considered as an entry point into the US.

According to Hyperloop One, a route between metropolitan areas of Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal would encompass the fourth most populous area in North America. It is namely for that reason, the route has been named as one of the winners in the Hyperloop One competition. AECOM Canada’s proposal was selected out of the 2600 teams that submitted entries.

Can you imagine traveling at 700 MPH in a ‘vactrain’? It’s a heck of a lot better than sitting in hours of traffic every day (if you’re working in Toronto), that’s for sure. Currently, there are 450,000 vehicles within city limits on Highway 401 in Toronto on any given day, and those numbers are still increasing. Not only would people ditch their cars to take the clean and efficient Hyperloop One to work, a trip from Montreal to Toronto would be reduced from 5 hours to 39 minutes. It’s also cheaper than other high speed modes of transportation, including travel by plane. Just think about that for a minute.

Incredibly, this futuristic mode of transportation is 100% emissions-free. The Tor-Mon route would also service one of the largest bio-clusters in the world – the Québec-Ontario Life Sciences Corridor. For years, cities such as Toronto and Montreal have been researching high speed train options as the solution to the transportation problems that they face. There have been roadblocks along the way, including issues with land acquisition. If these governments are to retrain their focus on the Hyperloop One option, thus creating the nucleus of a true mega-region, then Buffalo’s future would certainly shine a lot brighter in the realm of transportation potential.