SUMMARY: What if you could make a train trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco in half an hour? It may sound farfetched, but a group of MIT students are developing a new form of transportation to bring that dream to life; the supersonic hyperloop, a pneumatic train powered by magnetism that would put the fastest high speed rail lines to shame. Science correspondent Miles O'Brien reports.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): But, first, we are kicking off a weekly series tonight that will expand our coverage of science and technology on our broadcast and online.
Our science correspondent Miles O'Brien will frequently be our guide on Wednesdays, as he reports on a wide variety of subjects, including the environment, space and technology, and takes us to the leading edge of research and thinking in these fields.
Tonight, we start with an ambitious dream to create a tube-based high-speed transportation system of the future, one that would cost billions. You may have heard of it, the Hyperloop.
Here's Miles.
MILES O'BRIEN (NewsHour): No rest for the weary on Saturday mornings at MIT.
Sandwiched cheek to jowl between grad students building a high-performance electric race car and a solar-powered endurance vehicle, you will find the Hyperloop team hard at work.
On this morning, they were attaching the outer shell, or fairing, for the first time.
JOHN MAYO, MIT Hyperloop Team: I trusted it would fit. I trust our team. Our team is really good. So, it's great to actually see if there on the pod.
MILES O'BRIEN: Measure twice, cut once, right?
JOHN MAYO: Yes.
MILES O'BRIEN: John Mayo is on the cusp of getting his master's in mechanical engineering. He is project manager of a 30-member team that he hopes is on the cusp of helping devise a fifth mode of transportation, to take its place beside planes, trains, automobiles and boats.
Hyperloop is a cross between the pneumatic tube you use at the drive-up teller, an air hockey table and a bullet train. Oh, and throw in Concorde too.
JOHN MAYO: One of the big differentiators here is that tube, because you have less aerodynamic drag, so you can go faster with less resistance.
MILES O'BRIEN: They are building this scale model to compete with about 30 other college teams in a Totally Tubular Challenge this summer to demonstrate the best prototype.
MAN:The winning team, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the MIT Hyperloop team.
MILES O'BRIEN: They are the team to beat after winning the design phase earlier this year at Texas A&M. The basic concept is not new. A short pneumatic train line was built beneath Manhattan in 1870, but the idea was just a novelty then, and has remained in the realm of George Jetson's Dream-O-Vision ever since.
But, in 2013, this white paper changed the equation. It's a technical description of a supersonic Hyperloop that would carry people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in about 30 minutes, a proposal like this would normally be dismissed, but the author was the real-life Iron Man, Elon Musk, the founder of PayPal, electric car manufacturer Tesla, and SpaceX, the private company that launches rockets into low-Earth orbit and, lately, lands the spent first stages onto small barges in one piece.
No construction money, completion date exists for San Diego section
Six years after voters green-lighted California’s high-speed rail network, San Diego remains firmly at the end of the project’s line, lacking any money to build track in the region and even an estimated date for when bullet trains could zip through.
Officials with the California High-Speed Rail Authority said there’s been incremental progress on the 167-mile Los Angeles-to-San Diego leg, and strong support for it on the agency’s board.
The local section, however, is far from the top priority of the embattled $68 billion project.
The focus now is on the Central Valley where federal funds are driving the start of 114-mile segment between Fresno and Bakersfield, which the state expects to complete by 2022. Demolition work started in Fresno in July to make way for the initial segment.
Unless priorities change — which they can with the a vote by the Legislature — the state doesn’t expect to break ground on the San Diego-to-Los Angeles link until after it completes the even larger San Francisco-to-Los Angeles portion by 2029.
Over the past few years, updates on high speed rail in San Diego have slowed considerably. Leaders at the region’s transportation planning agency have received just three reports on the topic since July 2012, with the last coming more than a year ago.
No land has been set aside in the region for the project’s eventual construction. The state doesn’t have the money or environmental clearances to do so.
“We’re just not at that stage,” said Lisa Marie Alley, a spokeswoman for the rail authority.
A future in San Diego?
Notably, the rail authority is not at that stage for any section outside of the Central Valley. Routes for the project are still being refined across the state, including the path through San Diego County, which is planned through Escondido along Interstate 15 and terminates at the San Diego International Airport.
Still, critics say the lack of tangible progress in San Diego County confirms what they’ve suspected for years: That bullet trains may never crisscross the county.
“I think the chances of San Diego becoming a member of whatever the project becomes in the future is slim to none,” said Mark Leslie, president and CEO of the San Diego County Taxpayers Association. “I think San Diegans should look at this as basically it was a bait-and-switch. There were promises made, most of which were not followed.”
Questions remain about the overall project’s ridership projections and ballooning budget, which is up from its original $40 billion estimate but down from a nearly $100 million estimate from a few years ago. The project, championed by Gov. Jerry Brown, has won key legal and funding victories over the past two years, securing $6 billion from the federal government in 2012 and revenue from the state’s cap and trade program this year.
Still, many of the region’s political leaders last week declined to comment or did not return messages asking them about the volatile project’s future in San Diego.
“There is a lot of support (for high speed rail) in San Diego. But its silent support,” said longtime San Diegan Lynn Schenk, who has served on the rail authority’s board since 2003 and is a former congresswoman.
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