Announcing plans to study a hyperloop in the year 2024, as happened recently in the pages of the Star Tribune, is embarrassing. It couldn’t be worse timing to raise funding for this particular technological pipe dream. Just two months ago, Hyperloop One, by far the largest and best-funded hyperloop startup, laid off its employees and liquidated its assets after burning through almost half a billion dollars worth of Saudi and Richard Branson funding.
This is why I almost admire the chutzpah of the Global Wellness Connection, a new nonprofit with a flimsy website seeking to funnel $2 million of federal transportation dollars into a “study” of something that looks to be vaporware. Without evidence or real-world experience, they want to engineer a 700-mph tunnel from the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport to Rochester.
As the great Admiral Ackbar once said, “it’s a trap.”
Technical problems
Once you sift through the booster nonsense, there are dozens of articles debunking the hyperloop as a legitimate form of transportation. (My favorite is this one from GQ, but a biting take from The Stranger and the YouTube video from Adam Something are similarly good.)
The fundamental problem is the lack of capacity. Due to several laws of physics, the “pods” or “capsules” will never carry more than a dozen or so people, if that. This means that the most important feature of linear mass transportation — moving large quantities at once — is never possible for a hyperloop. This geometry is why trains on rails have been so historically successful.
Count the seats on the hyperloop pod renderings over the years, like the 14-passenger diagram that appeared in the Star Tribune. While an actual train can comfortably carry 10 times that many people along with their luggage. (Even the much maligned Megabus carries 81 people on its double-decker buses.) This insurmountable problem is why no serious engineer has ever actually built a hyperloop, despite millions of dollars poured into the concept.
There are other issues, too. Most of the last decade’s hyperloop proposals planned for above-ground tubes, easier and cheaper to construct, which leaves me mildly shocked that the Rochester to Minneapolis proposal suggests digging a 100-mile-long tunnel. What justification can there possibly be to tunnel through Zumbrota? The process would make the Southwest Light Rail look highly efficient.
Either way, maintaining a vacuum tube over a long distance is a difficult engineering proposition, both energy intensive and vulnerable to disruption. The 700-mph speed is only as good as the brakes deployed if anything goes wrong, and there’s not much room for error in a sealed, windowless tube.
Meanwhile, the stations themselves are almost never shown in a rendering, and for good reason. (Elon Musk’s non-starter Chicago proposal is the exception that proves the rule, featuring lots of slow-moving elevators.) The logistics of loading and unloading people into a small “capsule” are not kind. Much like short-haul air travel, riders would spend far more time traveling to and from the station, parking, and going through security than in the actual vehicle itself.
Proven track record of amounting to nothing
It’s worth pointing out that vacuum tube transit is not a particularly new idea. People pondered trains in tubes throughout the 19th century, and a few entrepreneurs even built ineffective small-scale systems in London (1844) and New York (1869). Due to a mass of technical difficulties, none of them ever went anywhere.
The idea got a second life when Elon Musk released a 2013 paper touting the technology. Through his “Boring Company,” which supposedly specializes in digging tunnels, he began pitching hyperloops to cities Los Angeles, San Francisco, D.C., and Baltimore. It was a move straight out of the Simpson’s “monorail” episode.
Years later, nothing has become of any of these schemes, save for a brightly-lit, unpressurized tunnel under the Las Vegas Convention Center in which a driver shuttles you back and forth in a Tesla to save 12 minutes of walking time. That particular operation is a great litmus test to detect whether someone has basic common sense.
Finally, there’s the geometry of travel demand. While there’s lots of need for comfortable, efficient travel to and from Rochester and the Twin Cities, 700 mph is extreme overkill. Would you rather spend 15 minutes in a cramped windowless pod, or 40 minutes in a spacious train with a bathroom and snacks, looking out the window at the Minnesota countryside?
Over the last decade, other companies like Hyperloop One and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (TT) have also jumped into the game, garnering empty headlines in places like Alberta, Missouri, Ohio, India, and a few places in Europe. Before it liquidated its assets, all Hyperloop One ever created was a 500-meter-long test track in the Nevada desert. In 2020, it carried two people, one time, who reached a speed of 100 miles per hour. Nobody since has ridden in one, and the pods have been scrapped.
Most recently, HyperloopTT managed to get 4 million Euros of planning funds from organizers of the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan. But the timeline was laughable, and I’m confident that the closest thing to an operating hyperloop at the Italian Olympics will be the bobsled track.
Studying unproven technology is a waste
I have no problem with the Twin Cities being on the technological cutting edge, or Minnesotans committing to ambitious projects. As the Star Tribune’s editorial board has circuitously urged, investing in an alternative to the dreadful Highway 52 is long overdue. This is why a project like Ziprail should get funding as soon as possible from state-wide sources.
The opportunity cost here is that the $2 million “study” of a hyperloop tube takes away from the seven-county region’s federal funding for “Unique Projects.” The fund, which the Transportation Advisory Board (TAB) oversees, could be going to effective ride sharing programs like the Evie car share program or a similar effort in Woodbury. The last thing we need to do with scarce innovation dollars is to flush them down a vacuous tube.
I’ve been a Citizen Member of the TAB for over four years, and Edina Mayor James Hovland, one of Global Wellness Connections’ board members, has been an excellent chair. That said, if the Met Council gives this group $2 million to study the hyperloop in the year 2024, the Twin Cities will become a global punch line. You might as well grant money to the proverbial “sailboat fuel,” and the only people that will ever be taken for a ride by a Minnesota hyperloop are the credulous boosters and journalists.
My hope is that the region’s transportation leaders won’t be joining them.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story included a rendering of a hyperloop proposal that was produced by the Star Tribune. You can see that image here.
Bill Lindeke is a lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Geography, Environment and Society. He is the author of multiple books on Twin Cities culture and history, most recently St. Paul: an Urban Biography. Follow Bill on Twitter: @BillLindeke.
