1,000 km/h Edmonton-Calgary pod commute is the latest twist of an exploration that's been happening for ages

EDMONTON — Alberta is, once again, looking at a high-tech super-transit link between Edmonton and Calgary, this time a futuristic pod that sucks passengers down a tube.

It’s an exploration that’s been happening for ages: A train, a bullet train, and now, in a fit of futuristic excitement, a pod, similar in design to an airplane fuselage, that would haul passengers (and freight) between Edmonton and Calgary at speeds of up to 1,000 km/h, reducing the three-hour drive to a comfortable half-hour commute.

That is the same speed range as a jetliner.

The pod would be whisked along by “electrically-driven magnetic propulsion” inside a tube suspended on pillars, according to TransPod, the startup behind the hyperloop project. Concept art shows a translucent tube hustling a pod down the side of a highway (suitably flat to actually look like Alberta).

The whole idea of fast mass transit between Edmonton and Calgary has been around for decades. Just 300 kilometres apart, the combined population is around 2.3 million. In 2014, the Alberta government released a feasibility study, done by an economic standing committee, that concluded it wasn’t a good idea.

“The Government of Alberta should not invest in a high-speed rail transit system in the Edmonton-Calgary corridor at this time, because the population of the corridor is not sufficient to support the profitable operation of such a system,” the report concluded.

Sebastien Gendron, the company’s CEO and co-founder, figures he’s got a solution: The hyperloop could also haul freight, and solar panels placed along the line could be an additional revenue source.

“Most of the high speed rail around the world around the world are not profitable,” said Gendron. “It’s not to fill up the train — which is important — it’s to fill up the infrastructure.”

“That’s the main difference compared to a conventional rail track.”

Still, tubes in the air and shovels in the ground are still a long way off. On Tuesday morning, TransPod, a company headquartered in Toronto, and the Alberta government announced a memorandum of understanding; no financial commitment has been made by the Alberta government, but there would be further study on the feasibility of such a project.

“The MOU facilitates the process of attracting private investment to the province, in order to build a multi-billion-dollar infrastructure project,” says a TransPod statement.

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The project has been in the works since 2018, when the company began discussing building a test track along Alberta’s Highway 7, between Edmonton and Calgary. The company says the project will create 38,000 jobs in Alberta over the course of 10 years. The feasibility study is expected to begin this year and construction to start by 2022.

“Best-case scenario … we could have a line operational by 2030,” Gendron said.

Various politicians, including Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi and Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, told media Tuesday they couldn’t help but root for such a project.

“I’m excited about it. I don’t know if it’s real, I don’t know if it’s science fiction, but we’ll never know unless we continue to do more testing with folks other than one entrepreneur who talks about stuff a lot in the U.S.,” said Nenshi.

Alberta has little by way of inter-city transit, especially since Greyhound left in 2018. That leaves travelling by car or truck down Alberta’s main arterial highway, the Queen Elizabeth II Highway, as the only practical way to get north or south in the province.

The 2014 study estimated that by 2031, there would be 105 million trips between Edmonton and Calgary annually, meaning that some sort of high-speed transit between the two cities is a good idea — in theory.

Willem Klumpenhouwer, a post-doctoral student at the University of Toronto who studies transit and transportation, said the hyperloop idea has been around in Alberta for a while. “From a technology standpoint, there’s just a lot of unanswered questions and problems about the hyperloop,” he said.

Especially when there are other options, such as traditional rail, that have proven technology.  “There are some very obvious better ways to do it,” he said.

“I think we need to focus on what we know already works,” said Ashley Salvador, an Edmonton urban planner. “There’s lots of evidence out there showing regular high-speed rail already works.”

She added: “In reality I think it is a distraction tactic that can allow them to put off connecting Edmonton and Calgary indefinitely.”

With files from The Canadian Press

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