Imagine boarding a train at Southern Cross station and disembarking less than an hour later in Sydney. This seems far-fetched in the current public transport reality where arriving at a metro train destination can take more than an hour. Maybe this is because our public transport system was not designed by Elon Musk. Musk is the entrepreneur who is currently disrupting the transportation with electric cars, dreaming of sending people to Mars and envisioned the Hyperloop. The Hyperloop is a high speed train that could potentially disrupt transportation in the future.
The Australian air route from Melbourne to Sydney is one of the busiest in the world and in the future transport will need to dramatically be re-envisioned. This is where the Hyperloop could disrupt air travel, making it seem clunky and old fashioned in the future.
The Hyperloop was released to a public bid when Musk became too busy. The blueprint was released to parties willing to get it off the ground.
Los Angeles-based firm Hyperloop One won the right to bring Mr Musk’s concept to life. The company’s vice-president for worldwide business development, Alan James, says Australia is on its radar for testing the technology.
The proposed route would be along the Hume Highway and there would be no reason to claim additional land for the project. This is a massive project that will require the support of federal and state governments, however there are also local entrepreneurs who are ready to get on board.
A RMIT University student Zac McClelland is leading a team of students, VicHyper in the global SpaceX Hyperloop Pod competition. This team is the only one in the running from the southern hemisphere from more than 1000 applicants and will test their human-scale pod prototype in January. The winner is whoever achieves the highest speed.
“Our team is now up to 28 people and we’ve just finished the design and we’re about to start building it,” Mr McClelland told The Australian. “We’ll have a 3m long prototype we’ll transport to Los Angeles and test on a specially designed test track there.”
Mr McClelland said the Hyperloop would revolutionise Australia, and we had been moving people inefficiently for too long.
Australia is a ripe testing ground for a future with convenient high speed travel. Dr. Neo is keen to see how it all develops!
