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Hyperloop companies form international consortium

2023-02-14T19:11:00-05:00

A consortium of seven international hyperloop companies has formed a new entity called the Hyperloop Association, the group recently announced. The organization was begun in December and expects a royal decree to follow shortly announcing it as a legal entity.

The Association says it will be based in Brussels in order to work with European Union commissioners and the EU's Agency for Railways to "advance the progress and facilitate the widespread implementation of the innovative transportation system across Europe and globally."

The news comes after years of collaborations between various participating hyperloop companies and architecture firms on infrastructure and transportation design.

BIG, for example, designed the XP-2 pods as well as passenger portals for Hyperloop One. Zaha Hadid Architects worked with Hyperloop Italia to develop station designs and strategies for urban and rural impleme...

Virgin Hyperloop to build $500 million test site in West Virginia

2020-10-12T15:06:00-04:00

Virgin Hyperloop One announced its plan to build a $500 million certification center to advance its vision of the future of high-speed transportation in West Virginia. The state will serve as a locus for testing, developing, and validating the technology that underpins the still-theoretical hyperloop system.

In a statement, Richard Branson's company Virgin Hyperloop expressed hope that the new West Virginia Hyperloop Certification Center, combined with unusual bipartisan political momentum, "will pave the way for the certification of hyperloop systems in the US and around the world — the first step towards commercial projects."

Rendering of the planned Hyperloop Certification Center in West Virginia. Image: Virgin Hyperloop.

Elon Musk starts digging for the Hyperloop in D.C.; Richard Branson plans to bring it to India first

2018-02-22T15:47:00-05:00

Elon Musk’s tunnel-boring project has received more vague government approval for its equally vague plans to build an underground hyperloop between New York and Washington, DC. Last week, Washington, DC’s Department of Transportation issued a preliminary permit to Musk’s Boring Company to start digging at an abandoned lot in the northeast section of the city, according to The Washington Post.

The extend of the building permit for Musk's The Boring Company is still vague though and currently limited to an empty parking lot at 53 New York Avenue NE next to a Mc Donald's. As the Washington Post reports: "The District’s Department of Transportation is figuring out what other permits the Boring Company would need to cut under city roads and other public spaces."

Hold on to your pants.

Meanwhile in India, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, and now also Chairman of Virgin Hyperloop One, is spearheading efforts to connect Mumbai with Pune via magnetically levitated pod travel within the next five to seven years, cut down travel time from several hours to 25 minutes, and make the nation with its population of 1.3 billion people home of the first operating Hyperloop line.

Closer look: FR-EE's Hyperloop One Mexico City-Guadalajara route proposal

2017-09-18T19:43:00-04:00

Out of over 2,600 entries, a multi-disciplinary consortium led by Fernando Romero / FR-EE was recently announced as one of the 10 winning teams in the Hyperloop One Global Challenge with the proposal “Mexloop”, the 330-mile Mexico-Guadalajara route. The Mexloop project builds on Mexico's ambitious $600 billion public works investment under the National Infrastructure Program.

Rendering © FR-EE.

The team submitted concepts for Mexloop's inter-modal station designs and locations, route infrastructure, public space, the pods, and logistics. Aiming to alleviate traffic in one of the world's most congested cities, Mexloop will connect Central Mexico’s major population, cultural, industrial, and manufacturing centers into one new ‘Megalopolis’ of 42 million people that is projected to grow to 60 million by 2050, the Mexloop team describes.

Image © FR-EE.

The Mexloop corridor will reduce travel time between Mexico City and Guadalajara to 38 minutes, at a spe...

From Chicago to Pittsburgh in 47 minutes: Hyperloop One Global Challenge announces 10 winning teams & routes in North America, Europe, South Asia

2017-09-15T15:21:00-04:00

Hyperloop One just announced the winners of its global challenge, unveiling ten teams from five countries with their proposals of the strongest routes for future Hyperloop connections. As a next step, the company plans to work with the teams and expert business and engineering partners to determine technical feasibility and commercial viability.

Architecture & engineering giant AECOM was announced in a supporting function in a newly formed public-private partnership between Hyperloop One and the Colorado Department of Transportation to launch a feasibility study in Colorado examining transportation demand, economic benefits, proposed routes, regulatory environments as well as alignment with overall CDOT high-speed travel, rail and freight plans.

The ten winning route proposals (listed below) connect 53 urban centers and impact nearly 150 million people in Canada, India, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the company says.

United States: Chicago-Columbus-Pittsburgh
4...

Work on Europe's first hyperloop test facility in Delft has been completed

2017-06-08T15:24:00-04:00

Back in February, TU Delft won the first phase of SpaceX's Hyperloop Competition, beating out MIT and the Technical University of Munich, for their design of a human-scale Hyperloop pod. Well, last week, Europe's first hyperloop test facility on the TU Delft campus was unveiled.

Hardt, which was founded by some of the winners from Elon Musk's hyperloop competition, is the first European company to work on developing the futuristic transport system. They have been working in conjunction with the construction company BAM to build the 30-meter long test facility revealed last Thursday. The facility consists of a tube with a length of 30 meters and an external diameter of 3.2 and will allow Hardt to try out all the important systems at low speeds. Testing will focus on examining the safety, the propulsion, the gliding and the stabilization of the hyperloop vehicle. In addition, the company is also interested in looking into potential social issues concerning the new form of transportatio...

Hyperloop One plan would take travelers from NYC to D.C. in 20 minutes

2017-04-10T17:04:00-04:00

Passengers and cargo are loaded into a pod which gradually accelerates with electric propulsions through a low-pressure tube. Then, the pod lifts above the track using magnetic levitation and moves at airline speeds. This would connect 80 percent of the country, making a cross-country trip just about five hours long.

Hyperloop One–whose transportation concept was first proposed by Elon Musk–has revealed a plan that would take travelers from NYC to D.C. in just 20 minutes via magnetically levitating pods that move by electric propulsion and travel faster than 700 miles per hour.

Hyperloop One announces 35 semifinalists in 17 countries for its global challenge

2017-01-10T12:58:00-05:00

Whether you envisioned Hyperloop One as an overhyped pneumatic tube or an inventive way to transport cargo and/or passengers, 35 teams from 17 countries around the world have just been announced as semifinalists in the contest to create working transit corridors for the technology. The 35 proposed routes are sited in countries including Argentina, Poland, Australia, India, the U.K. and the U.S. (the full list is below). Finalists will be announced in May after three global showcase events where each team has the chance to demonstrate how their proposal will economically benefit their region. The showcases will be held in New Delhi on February 28th, Washington D.C. on April 6th, and London on April 27th. Twenty of the proposals currently have governmental or other funding sources already lined up.

Corridors in the semifinalist round include:
AR Buenos Aires-Cordoba
AU Sydney-Melbourne
CA Ontario (cargo)
CA Toronto-Montreal
CA Vancouver (cargo)
CH Shanghai-Hangzhou
DE Autobahn
EE Tallin-Helsi...

Hyperloop designs by BIG revealed for Dubai, featuring autonomous pods and city-wide portals

2016-11-08T13:43:00-05:00

Dubai is set on getting its own hyperloop, and the Los Angeles-based Hyperloop One (formerly Hyperloop Technologies), in collaboration with BIG, is champing at the bit to make that a reality.

The Dubai Roads and Transport Authority has agreed to review Hyperloop One’s feasibility study for a high-speed network throughout the United Arab Emirates, designed to get passengers between Dubai and Abu Dhabi (about an hour and a half apart by bus) in 12 minutes. BIG and consulting firm McKinsey & Co. will work in collaboration with Hyperloop One on the proposal. In a separate agreement formed this past August, Hyperloop One also has plans with Dubai to develop a hyperloop network for cargo.

This step closer to a full-scale, working hyperloop (which Hyperloop One estimates will come to fruition in the next five years) comes after the company’s dry run of its propulsion technology in the Nevada desert—part of SpaceX’s competition to design the pods and run them on a smaller-scale test-track. No...

'Hyperloop as transportation’s new girlfriend: mysterious, unencumbered, exciting, expensive.'

2016-05-24T13:12:00-04:00

“What we’re seeing right now is what I saw in 1996,” said Mr. Lloyd, a former president of sales and development at Cisco. “We all had I.P. routers and everything was done a certain way. At Cisco, we said, ‘You can carry that over the Internet,’ and everyone said, ‘No.’ But those high-speed networks made the Internet possible.” Hyperloop, he said, “will do to the physical world what the Internet did to the digital one.”

Allison Arieff (editorial director at SPUR and former Dry Futures judge) has some questions for Hyperloop One (formerly Hyperloop Technologies) after a propulsion test demonstration in the Nevada desert. While the company has managed remarkably fast developments in its tube technology for such high-speeds as the Hyperloop demands, it's nowhere near reality – and Arieff clearly articulates the (many) remaining concerns of such technology, after mere feasibility.

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