Everybody knows that most means of transportation aren't exactly great for the environment, and worst of all are the legions of gasoline-powered personal cars that millions of Americans use every day. Each private vehicle produces an incredible amount of emissions, and unfortunately for the average American there isn’t much of an alternative. Walking or biking takes too long; airplane trips are very expensive and inefficient for anything other than very long trips; and public transportation is ineffectual at best and nonexistent at worst.
However, last year a new possible alternate mode of travel was announced. Elon Musk, a champion of technology, and his band of merry men have stepped up to the plate and are hard at work to create the Hyperloop, an incredibly high speed train of sorts that is powered by compressed air and pneumatic tubes.
In May of this year, a one mile test track was built just north of Las Vegas, and it was there that the very first real life tests of the previously hypothetical Hyperloop technology were performed.
In order to encourage the development of this technology and the production of tracks around the world, Hyperloop One- the company which started all of this- has made the technology completely open-source, allowing anyone who desires to take the ideas and develop them further.
Hyperloop One itself will continue to work on their own projects, of course. Their ultimate goal is to create publicly available transportation between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, a distance of over 200 miles, by the year 2020.
Only months after the initial tests in Nevada, three companies based in
California have already begun to build separate test tracks, their prospective
first step into building large tracks throughout the state.
The eventual hope is that these companies will build larger Hyperloop
tracks, connecting major cities. Such a track connecting the 400-mile distance
from Los Angeles to San Francisco would manage what is usually a six hour drive
for the typical driver in only half an hour, and would be vastly more
efficient.
Likewise, Hyperloop Transportation Tech, another company dedicated to this newest form of transportation, has already made an agreement with the government of Slovakia to create over 400 miles of Hyperloop track, connecting four major Eastern European cities. This track will connect the Slovakian city of Košice, Vienna, the capital of Austria, and Budapest, the capital of Hungary, to Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. The hope is that this will provide easy and cheap transportation between the four cities, and is estimated to cut the previous 8 hour travel time to only 43 minutes.
That’s more than 11 times the previous travel speed, and instead of using petroleum-powered trains, or even the far less efficient personal vehicles, this is hopefully going to be accomplished entirely with solar power.
The Minister of Economy of Slovakia, Vazil Hudak, made an open statement in which he expressed that the implementation of Hyperloop throughout Europe would “cut distance substantially and network cities in unprecedented ways. A transportation system of this kind would redefine the concept of commuting and boost cross-border cooperation in Europe.”
