Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal corridor selected as finalist for Hyperloop One

Hyperloop
Hyperloop

If Amazon’s HQ2 wasn’t enough to get you buzzing, a literal hypetrain may soon be speeding through Ottawa.

A route from Toronto to Montreal (including a stop in Ottawa) has been selected as one of ten finalists for the Hyperloop One Global Challenge, an opportunity to implement the high-speed transport system first popularly envisioned by Elon Musk.

The concept is similar to a railway, but uses magnetic levitation and electric propulsion to accelerate pods of people and cargo through a low-pressure tube. Hyperloop One claims to have made a successful full-scale test of its prototype earlier this summer.

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If the 640-km Toronto-Montreal corridor is selected for construction, the Hyperloop could purportedly reduce travel times between the two cities to 39 minutes. That means Ottawa residents could reach Toronto in 27 minutes and Montreal in just 12.

“The proposal would connect Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto and create a Canadian megaregion covering as much as a quarter of the country’s population,” reads a description on Hyperloop One’s website.

Canada’s HyperCan team represents the route, and will now compete with teams across the United States, Mexico, the United Kingdom and India to prove the Toronto-Montreal corridor is the most commercially viable choice.

“The Hyperloop One Global Challenge started as a call to action for innovators, engineers, trailblazers and dreamers around the world who shared our vision of creating a new mode of transportation,” said Shervin Pishevar, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Hyperloop One, in a statement.

“The Global Challenge became a movement of thousands of people from more than 100 countries over six continents. Like us, they believe that Hyperloop will not only solve transportation and urban development challenges within communities, it will unlock vast economic potential and transform how our cities operate and how we live. Our successful test this summer made Hyperloop a reality, and now we’re ready to bring our Hyperloop system to the world.”

The company states that it is hoping to implement three full-scale Hyperloop systems around the world by 2021.

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