"I sense a bit of hucksterism right now that's helping companies raise money," saysRalph Hollis, a research professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University who is an expert on maglev tech.

His concerns range from whether endless links of welded tubes can retain the vacuum integral to maintaining high speeds given the inevitable geological shifts in California's earthquake country, to the physiological impact on passengers of speeds that approach the supersonic.

"A lot of different things have to go right for this to really work, business, legal, technical," says Hollis. "Demonstrating that it runs isn't really enough."

Premise is solid, promise is murky

"That it runs" refers to a recent demo in the Nevada desert, where Los Angeles-based Hyperloop One successfully launched its maglev-enabled sled across a 100-yard (91 metre) track. The company plans to build a five-mile enclosed loop by year's end. More boldly, last week it announced a Russian partnership to explore a new Silk Road route across Asia.

A recovery vehicle moves a sled down a track after a test of a Hyperloop One propulsion system last month. John Locher

Hyperloop One has taken the lead in this tube race, raising $US90 million and boasting investors such as GE Ventures and SNCF, the French national railway company. A rival concern, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, announced in March that its futuristic pods could appear first in Slovakia, where officials are studying a proposal.

Do we want hyperloop?


Perhaps the biggest hurdle facing hyperloop is the poor reception offered to its slower cousin, high-speed rail.

Consider that for its size, the US has only one such run – Amtrack's Acela Expressline along the Northeast Corridor — while smaller England and France each have an example, the Eurostar and TGV respectively.

In 2008, California voters approved $US10 billion in funding for an ambitious San Francisco to Los Angeles bullet train akin to Japan's Shinkansen, but it has yet to make headway. The $US68 billion effort, which uses an alternative to maglev technology, was able to gain some initial traction thanks to billions in federal funding, but has been bogged down in lawsuits from aggrieved communities and by cumbersome land acquisition deals.

An L0 series magnetic levitation (maglev) train in Japan. Bloomberg

"Just getting a maglev train here would be great, but the US is a strange place," said Jim Mathews, spokesman for the National Association of Railroad Passengers. "Most people consider high-speed rail a boondoggle."

Mathews, a former Aviation Week editor, says he's learnt not to bet against Elon Musk, who founded SpaceX and Tesla Motors and drew up the concept of hyperloop in a white paper three years ago.

But he's not the only one doubting appetite for such projects, especially in the US.

John Macomber, senior lecturer on infrastructure and urbanisation issues at Harvard University, says he remains unclear "why hyperloop would be more valuable than trains or airplanes. I know speed matters, but maybe not that much."


Macomber considers hyperloop a fascinating but likely money-losing proposition that "could show up in a Gulf nation eager to try something new, where it could stand as a technological proof of concept but not an economic one," he says. "Here in the US, it's easier to make incremental improvements to the systems we have, like going to self-driving cars, than leaping to hyperloop."

Even when a high-speed train does pique interest, investors seem to get cold feet.

Tony Morris is CEO of American Maglev, an Atlanta-based company that has developed a small maglev train that could soon make its US debut in Orlando, where it will run between airport and convention centre. But first, officials there would need to opt for that variant over traditional trains.

"Maglev trains use 60 per cent less energy than their steel-wheeled counterparts, but even though we say maglev's time has come, the people making the decisions to build new lines aren't all about taking risks," says Morris. "The good news is this is new technology, and that's also the bad news."

Hyperloop One CEO Rob Lloyd is unfazed by suggestions that Hyperloop One is a moonshoot or boondoggle, preferring instead to call it simply ahead of its time. It's focused on developing a proof of concept that can be licensed to investors with the cash and desire to build hyperloop.

The firm is pursuing feasibility studies for a number of global cities, then would likely go through the traditional project finance process for new rail and ports infrastructure.

As for the high price: Lloyd notes Hyperloop One is keenly focused on generating profits by overhauling the existing freight transportation system. It even has sketched out a proposal that would see cargo ships unload their containers on floating docks outside Long Beach and into waiting hyperloop pods miles off-shore, thus freeing up lucrative shoreline real estate now taken up by the city's sprawling port.

"We will work to create new regulations as needed, because Hyperloop is a new kind of transportation system with unique properties and use cases," he says. "We don't necessarily see ourselves as competitive with existing modes of transport. We're complementary."


Sleek joy ride or vomit comet?

If we suddenly did make this hyper-leap to hyperloop, what would it be like riding in a windowless tube at such blistering speeds?

Carnegie Mellon's Hollis says that his own experiences aboard Shanghai's maglev train, which can hit 300 mph, "involves a lot of being jostled around due to the steel rails that expand and contract (with weather), leading to something that can be like a bumpy airplane ride". He adds that the tubes will have to be arrow straight otherwise deceleration forces generated by curves will be transferred to passengers.

The design of Hyperloop One's systems are for gradual acceleration. In the first 90 seconds of acceleration and the last 90 seconds of deceleration, a passenger would feel G forces similar to those in a Honda Civic merging onto the highway, says Lloyd.

Hollis says that 1G forces — equivalent to a person's body weight — are acceptable and what one might experience on a roller coaster. "But not everyone likes roller coasters," he says.

Transportation shifts inevitable

Hyperloop or not, something does has to give on the transportation landscape.

A swelling and ageing population is straining a highway ecosystem that President Eisenhower inaugurated 60 years ago this month. In Los Angeles, commuters waste a record 81 hours a year in traffic, according to transportation data company Inrix. The National Safety Council reports that traffic deaths jumped 8 per cent last year to 38,300.


"The terrain ahead for transportation is an increasing demand for mobility, especially from boomers who won't want to drive as they age," says Rocky Moretti, director of policy and research at Trips, a non-profit transportation advocacy group.

Moretti says that transportation officials from every state met this spring to discuss how to tackle these challenges, and the conclusion was to "make the best use of the resources available" while paying close attention to the growing progress made by tech and auto companies alike on self-driving cars.

And hyperloop?

"We see a lot of changes coming, so I suppose anything's possible," he says. "I'd say the biggest demand isn't so much to make the system faster, but safer."

MCT