The Hyperloop and real estate

How will the transportation revolution change where people live again

As soon as I heard Elon Musk talk about the hyperloop I started to think about real estate and how this will affect where people live.

The ‘loop is being talked about again and man is it exciting:

The proposed system could reduce trips between San Francisco and Los Angeles to minutes, and reaching the East Coast from California could take under an hour. Crazy as it seems, the company ET3, based out of Longmont, Colorado, has already been hard at work making this a reality, calling their project the Evacuated Tube Transport.

Whenever transportation has a seismic shift like this we see massive changes. A couple that spring to mind are:

The London Express

I grew up one end of the Central Line on the tube. At some point I noticed that new express trains meant that it took as long for me to get to certain parts of the city as it did for others who lived so much further away. For example, I was a few miles out compared to Brighton, which was 50+ miles away… yet the commute was comprable.

Why not live by the beach?

Railroad Ghost Towns

When living in Wisconsin I would pass through ghost towns that used to be important as they were towns on the path of a great railroad. Once the Interstates were put in on the railroads changed their path, they died away.

Route 66

The Pixar movie “Cars” tells the story of a town that gets bypassed due to a bypass. Radiator Springs is fictional, but based on many real town histories.

If the Hyperloop ever happens, then the placement of the first stations will have huge ripple effects on towns. How strange will it be to take longer to get from Palo Alto to San Francisco compared to San Francisco to L.A.?

To begin with, will people become more urban to be need a hub? When more of them are created, will people spread out everywhere because it takes no time to get from point A to point B?

I really hope that I get to see the effects of this change in travel, and I also hope that I am not holding the bag with a mortgage for a house that can’t demand the premium that it once did.

Whenever I fly I can’t believe that I can get in a “room”, watch a couple of movies and read a book, and get out of the room to find myself half way around the world. The world feels smaller all the time. What’s next?