Ohio planners will announce ‘first step’ on Midwest project

Five months after winning an international challenge from Virgin Hyperloop One, the MidOhio Regional Planning Commission says it will announce the first step in the project next week.

In September 2017, MORPC’s proposal to link Pittsburgh, Columbus and Chicago via high-speed transportation was chosen as one of 10 winners around the globe by Hyperloop One, a division of the Virgin Group. English business magnate and Virgin Group founder Richard Branson is the Hyperloop One chairman.

In a release at the time, Hyperloop One said the 10 winners qualify for “meaningful business and engineering resources and work closely with each of the winning teams/routes to determine their commercial viability.”

The other winning routes, which represent Canada, India, Mexico, the United Kingdom and the United States, are TorontoMontreal in Canada, Bengaluru-Chennai and Mumbai-Chennai in India, Edinburgh-London and Glasgow-Liverpool in the United Kingdom, Mexico City-Guadalajara in Mexico and Cheyenne-Denver-Pueblo, Dallas-Laredo-Houston and Miami-Orlando in the U. S.

Now, MORPC is ready for a “major announcement” that will involve “the first step we’ll be taking with Hyperloop One” sometime next week, according to Thea Walsh, MORPC’s director of transportation systems and funding. No information on the nature of the step was available.

Walsh said the concept is feeling more real than ever after MORPC officials took a trip last month to visit Hyperloop One’s first working concept, called DevLoop, in Nevada.

“I used to say ( it would take) decades on something like this,” Walsh said. “But transportation planning is moving so much faster than it used to. Things that are taking decades are now taking years.”

The idea behind MORPC’s proposal — called Midwest Connect — is to create a “Midwest Megaregion” out of the three cities they say would combine for a gross domestic product of $ 865 billion.

To accomplish that, a Hyperloop would run from Pittsburgh to Chicago, with “major stops” in Columbus and Fort Wayne, Indiana, on the way. Other stops, according to MORPC documents, would include Lima and Newark.

The Hyperloop design is based on the concept of using electric propulsion to power “pods” through a low- pressure tube, enabling those pods to reach speeds of hundreds of miles per hour.

The loop theoretically would allow passengers and freight to travel its full length in under an hour.

Information on budget, details of the loop’s route or even how funding might be divided still are not being discussed.