Evacuated Tube Transport could see round the world travel in 6 hours
Designers behind the Evacuated Tube Transport (ET3) system say people could travel around the world in less than six hours through a network of elevated tubes.
The system could see ‘car sized passenger capsules travel in 1.5m diameter tubes on frictionless maglev’.
Air is ‘permanently removed from the two-way tubes that are built along a travel route. Airlocks at stations allow transfer of capsules without admitting air’.
Linear electric motors accelerate the capsules, which then coast through the vacuum for the remainder of the trip ‘using no additional power’. Most of the energy is regenerated as the capsules slow down, the designers said.
ET3 ‘can provide 50 times more transportation per kWh than electric cars or trains’, according to ET3′s creators.
Speed in initial ET3 systems would be 600km/h (370 mph) for in-state trips, and could be developed to 6,500 km/h (4,000 mph) for international travel that ‘will allow passenger or cargo travel from New York to Beijing in 2 hours’.
Designers said ET3 can be built for 1/10th the cost of high speed rail, or 1/4th the cost of a motorway.
... except of course those figures are meaningless. The ONLY cost that will be considered in future is the ENERGY cost and I suspect a system like this would be extremely energy expensive to build, maintain and fuel.
This really was an idea for the 50s and 60s and has absolutely no place in the real future that is just around the corner. A real future of constantly falling energy, no economic growth, an end to globalisation, and holidays at home. A transport future of railways (slow railways, conserving energy, using wood-burning steam and/or electricity), trams and ULR systems (using a mix of renewables and nuclear fuel), horses and carts, bicycles, walking, trolleybuses and perhaps a few short-range electric vehicles for freight traffic. A world where most people work from home or very locally and very rarely, if ever, interact with or travel abroad.
These concept ideas are only a bit of fun, they don't really offer us in 2012 anything, but fifty years ago perhaps were more relevant, when we weren't fully aware of the extremely transient nature of the oil economy.
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