FAST FORWARD
Toronto company hopes to build Hyperloop transportation system that could allow trips to Montreal in under 30 minutes,
It’s not a plane. It’s not a train. It’s not Superman either. It’s a Toronto company’s vision of sending you through a tube at almost supersonic speeds.
The promise is to get Canadians from Toronto to Montreal in less than half an hour — and to other Canadian cities at a similar speed.
The technology is called Hyperloop, and the idea has been around since 2012, when billionaire inventor Elon Musk first proposed it.
In a white paper, Musk laid out the basics of the system: a low-pressure tube, in which pods would transport people or freight at speeds of around 560 km/h, or even faster for longer trips. He then invited companies and teams to come up with functional designs and models.
Since then, several companies have sprung up with the goal of making Musk’s vision a reality. Most recently, Musk was involved with a contest hosted by Texas A&M University for pod designs, the winner of which would be tested on a prototype track built by Musk.
Transpod, which was founded last September as Hyperloop Toronto, was one of 120 teams who competed in Texas. But both Transpod founder Sebastien Gendron and director of research Ryan Janzen said the team quickly realized their ambitions were greater than the competition.
“We ended up realizing that our design was better than what all these students were working on at this competition,” Janzen said.
The company still went to Texas and presented their Mark I pod design, but Gendron said their aim right now is to present a full model — pod and tube — at InnoTrans, the world’s largest rail show taking place in Berlin in September.
“That’s the takeoff for getting the startup off the ground, and getting some investment,” Gendron said.
There are several other companies with the same aim. The biggest fish in the Hyperloop market currently are Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) and Hyperloop Technologies Inc. (HTI). Both are U.S-based companies, with estimated valuations of more than $100 million (U.S.).
Janzen hopes Transpod will find more success than either HTT or HTI, and place Canada on the map as a place for innovation.
“We want this to be a new time when Canadian achievements are leading the world, kind of like we were with the Canadarm and the Avro Arrow,” he said.
The company is getting some help from the Canadian aerospace industry to make that happen. Gendron said he’s in active discussions with Bombardier Inc., which is currently providing advice.
“They’ll let us do the work, and they can still be involved . . . and if they see it’s taking off, they’ll invest . . . money in the project,” he said.
Having Musk’s name attached to the technology helps, but Gendron said he doesn’t share the fanatical obsession many in the industry seem to have with Musk.
“It could be the pope or Obama or Trudeau. They go to the toilet like you and me. I appreciate the work (Musk does,) but it’s not the point to be a big fan,” he said.
The current goal for Transpod is to have a working model by 2020. Eventually, Janzen said, they want to connect all of Canada’s major cities, letting people travel at high speed, without turbulence. Janzen thinks the need for the system will only grow until then.
“Oil prices might be temporarily fairly low right now, but they will go back up, and more and more people will be needing energy-efficient high-speed transportation systems,” he said.
Not everybody is as optimistic about Hyperloop as Gendron and Janzen.
Matthew Siemiatycki, an associate professor at the University of Toronto who specializes in urban planning and transportation warns that logistics and urban planning are significant hurdles Transpod will have to overcome if it wants a cross-country transportation network.
“The technical part of ‘how do you build this’ is one part of the discussion. The actual planning and policy issues surrounding it are as complex — and then you have the costs,” Siemiatycki said.
“Building this in a country as large as ours will be astronomical.”
As an example, Siemiatycki talked about proposals in England to update the country’s high-speed rail system. Even with the technical aspects dealt with, the bureaucracy in the country has had to fight to get the tracks built.
“One of the biggest challenges (is) people in rural areas who do not want this very narrow ribbon crossing through their property,” he said.
“There (are) all sorts of rationales for why this will worsen their quality of life.”
But Siemiatycki said it’s possible Transpod will sovercome those challenges, even if he thinks it’s unlikely.
“Transportation is this place where you have dreamers, and a lot of the experiments don’t work and they fall off the table,” he said. “But if you hit the one in a million, then that one does change the world.”