UTTRI associated faculty Professor Matti Siemiatycki comments in “Alberta Weighs $7B Hyperloop Between Calgary and Edmonton,” Engineering News-Record, September 3, 2020.
TransPod’s Calgary-Edmonton 186-mile hyperloop project received approval – though not funding – from the Government of Alberta in a Memorandum of Understanding in August.
The article states that “the Alberta agreement is the first support of a government entity within a G7 country, according to a Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC) report.”
However, it also points to an August 2020 report from Transport Canada entitled “Preliminary Feasibility of Hyperloop Technology” indicating that there are still “too many uncertainties” with the technology.
TransPod hopes to begin work on the project in 2023.
Matti Siemiatycki, an urban planning and transportation professor at the University of Toronto, said the Transport Canada report underlines the challenges facing new and unproven transportation technologies like hyperloop, which are in early stages of a vetting process that could take years to play out.
Read Transport Canada’s report “Preliminary Feasibility of Hyperloop Technology” (prepared by AECOM)