On August 11th, the Senate passed a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill. Significant provisions in the bill support private sector development of Hyperloop technology. The term “hyperloop” refers to a form of private high-speed transportation. Out of the many existing hyperloop proposals, the most likely-to-happen version of the hyperloop, which has inspired other hyperloops, comes from Elon Musk’s Boring Company, whose hyperloop concept involves a high-speed underground network of Tesla cars. Because Musk’s hyperloop concept has inspired many others, examining the flaws of the Boring Company’s hyperloop is useful, many of which could be generalized to other iterations.
Musk’s vision of a hyperloop is impractical. Theoretically, the advantage of a hyperloop is that there is an endless amount of space underground to dig and build tunnels. In practice, however, the logistics do not work out. The hyperloop and other forms of mass transit are only cost-effective and helpful if located in population-dense areas. To reach the speeds that Musk claims that hyperloops will reach, tracks need to have broad curves, requiring digging near the foundations of buildings. In cities with deep foundations, building such a hyperloop would not be safe or viable.
According to common law, there are property rights issues in suburban areas because rights extend “to hell.” Acquiring the rights to build on the land would be a much lengthier and costly process when compared to traditional forms of underground public transport. The mentioned concerns are just scratching the surface of the many impracticalities of Musk’s hyperloop idea. This video made by an engineer goes over, in depth, the many problems with the hyperloop.
The hyperloop faces not only functional concerns but also widespread community resistance. Community groups in the city of Los Angeles were able to kill a hyperloop after suing their city government for allowing Musk’s Boring Company to bypass environmental standards. The scrapped Sepulveda tunnel ran along affluent areas of Los Angeles whose residents were able to kill an ungainly project. But what happens when hyperloops creep into lower-income communities? Wealthier, white neighborhoods will be able to stave off these types of encroachments into their neighborhoods. However, impoverished BIPOC communities will have no choice in these matters.
The only location the Boring Company has successfully established a hyperloop is in Hawthorne, where residents claim that they had no say in the construction. Musk claimed he sent letters out to residents to discuss the project. By the time the public meetings took place, the project was almost complete. In contrast to this debacle, public transportation and government involvement in mass transit remain popular.
While it is vital to acknowledge the hyperloop’s flaws as a transportation system, discussing it as a solo project is futile. Since the advent of the neoliberal era, private companies have been acquiring and replacing various public services across the world with a promise of greater efficiency. Thus, one key sector targeted by private interests has been public transportation.
Across Europe, private interests gobbled up elements of the transportation system during the neoliberal wave towards the end of the 20th century. Whether the efficiency of urban mass transit has improved under private hands is debatable. Furthermore, privatization of public transit has, in some cases, diminished access to services by increasing the cost of using them.
For example, in the United Kingdom, train fares have increased by nearly 17.5% since 2003. The United States is a slightly different story. When it comes to public transportation, there was not the usual neoliberal turn in ownership of mass transit since the United States does not have the national transportation infrastructure that many European countries do. Moreover, many states in the United States have public or quasi-public transportation networks that have been surprisingly immune to privatization.
The recent power outages in Texas underscore the danger of private ownership of public utilities and services. Placing our infrastructure into the hands of private interests unaffected by democratic processes is unwise. Princeton sociologist Paul Starr lays out a similar argument, declaring that “there are certain public purposes that can be best served when the institutions are accountable to the public through the medium of elections, and ultimately, through the medium of democracy.” Relocating public transport control from democratically elected political officials and private companies means that those in charge of mass transit will be accountable to shareholders, not the citizens they serve. Therefore, if it makes sense to reduce quality of service or increase prices to maximize profit, a corporation will do that. This is a concern when people are dependent on mass transit as a primary means of transportation. Even if practical concerns did not exist, hyperloops are an obstacle to building inclusive, decarbonized infrastructure from which anyone can benefit.
The COVID-19 pandemic and its resultant ridership declines have drained the coffers of public transit systems around the United States. Many municipalities have cut bus routes and weekend and late-night services from Washington to Atlanta. These cuts add to the years of post-Great Recession cuts to public transit in cities around the United States. Access to reliable public transit has been the source of political tension in many cities worldwide. Local protests following government efforts to increase fares and ramp up subway policing illustrate the political consequences of transit policies. The brunt of these policies often falls on those who rely the most on transportation.
In general, solutions proposed by Green CEOs like Musk might be counterproductive to tackling environmental crises. According to the Harvard Business Review, “greening” our economy while maintaining or increasing current production levels would require unprecedented levels of resource extraction. Corporations involved in resource extraction could do more environmental damage by extracting in the cheapest and least environmentally conscious way possible from poorer countries with lax environmental regulations. This would make air and water quality worse for people in the Global South and offset emissions reductions made by green technology.
Political turmoil driven by the need for minerals used in green technology is another dimension to this issue. In 2019, former president Evo Morales of Bolivia canceled a lithium
deal with the German lithium company (ACISA) that supplies Tesla batteries. After a successful coup d’etat, a new Bolivian government reinstated the contract. When questioned on Twitter, Musk replied, “Will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” This event shows the potential for exploitation of the political conditions in poor countries for profit. Therefore, rejecting Musk’s green future is a necessary step to ensuring that everyone, regardless of nationality, can enjoy clean air and water.
Public infrastructure has unique political and social-economic effects. With the looming threats of climate change approaching and the global effort to decarbonize begins, society should reject the expansion of neoliberal infrastructure to reduce the impact of climate change. Instead, we can use climate change as an opportunity to build infrastructure that anyone can take advantage of, rejecting the ecofascist tendencies and climate fatalism that have permeated mainstream political discourse.