India is getting a Hyperloop. The 149km journey between Mumbai and Pune takes around 2.5hrs by car, or 3+ hrs by train, but with Hyperloop, that time is set to be slashed to just 25 minutes. Right now more than 130,000 vehicles take that journey, so there’s a massive potential market for the service.
Today what we have is an announcement by the Indian State of Maharashtra of their intent to build a fully operational Hyperloop between the two destinations, but it is important to remember its early days. Today’s announcement comes off the back of a 6-week pre-feasibility report, with a further feasibility study over the next six-months to follow. The plan is to start with a fully-operational demonstration track which will help prove the technology and calm any nerves about safety issues with the public, before proceeding to the real thing if all goes well.
Given how new this new mode of transport is, it is not surprising the plan is multi-stage, heavily reliant on successful milestones, before racing to the final product.
Branson said,
As Virgin Hyperloop One Chairman, I’m incredibly excited about the potential to truly transform not just transportation, but wider society.
Virgin Hyperloop One can help India become a global transportation pioneer and forge a new world-changing industry.
As our team’s studies have found, the Pune-Mumbai route could result in USD $55 billion in socio-economic benefits, time savings, accident reduction and operational cost savings, over 30 years of operation.
He went on to say that the Pune-Mumbai route is an ideal first corridor as part of a national hyperloop network that will dramatically reduce travel times between most of India’s major cities to under two hours. India has a population of around 1.3 Billion people, which means they potentially have the most to gain by reducing the friction (time and cost) for transport between destinations.
Pune Metropolitan Region Development Authority (PMRDA) CEO, Kiran Gitte said,
Mumbai and Pune are the two largest cities in the Maharashtra State. Not only Maharashtra, but if you look at India, it’s one of the busiest transport corridors in the country. There is a very high-density of traffic between the two cities.
We want to establish superfast connectivity. Specifically, we want to look at futuristic technology which can handle not only the present traffic but also the exponential growth which we’ll see in these two cities.
For that, we believe that hyperloop is the best technology available. In the last two to three months, we’ve had a very exciting pre-feasibility study, and I think the Mumbai-Pune region will be the first in the country which will see this hyperloop implemented. I think the geography demands it and the demography also demands it. The technology solution provided with hyperloop will solve many of the problems that we have on our hands.
While we often think of Hyperloop as transporting people, that is certainly the plan, it’s also worth considering the potential economic benefits to having a freight network that runs at a much higher speed than road or rail.
The world is watching and with Dubai, the US and India now effectively signed up to trial Hyperloop, its just a matter of time before Australia, right?
More information at hyperloop-one.com
