Well, American entrepreneur and inventor Elon Musk does.
It was first reported toward the end of the summer that Musk — who’s often described as a real-life Tony Stark (aka Iron Man) — was working on something he calls the “Hyperloop,” which would be some sort of tube capable of travelling between downtown San Francisco and Los Angeles in 30 minutes.
“What you want is something that never crashes, that’s at least twice as fast as a plane, that’s solar powered and that leaves right when you arrive, so there is no waiting for a specific departure time,” Musk told Bloomberg Businessweek back in September.
According to Musk’s friends, he had a Hyperloop technological breakthrough over the summer.
“I’d like to talk to the governor and president about it,” Musk told Bloomberg. “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.” (Musk says the San Francisco to LA Hyperloop would be in the $6 billion range.)
And that’s about all the information that was available, until now…
According to Wired.co.uk, Elon Musk will publish a paper on the Hyperloop transportation system “in the next month.”
Musk, who is the co-founder of PayPal and Tesla as well as the founder of SpaceX, told Wired earlier this week that he doesn’t want to control any company which might emerge from the Hyperloop system.
“I just want to put it out there in a way that doesn’t require me to do day-to-day execution,” Musk said. “I would like to do less, actually. I tried my hardest to avoid being CEO of Tesla. Running two companies is not the most fun thing in the world.”
We’ll wait and see what sort of details the paper will reveal, but it is worth noting that Musk isn’t the only person working on an ultra-fast tube transportation system.
Behold, the Evacuted Tube Transport:
If one of these concepts ever does get built, we can start looking past transit-oriented developments and start to consider transit-oriented cities!
