Public transport is a must, even for people who live under the toil of troubles and conflict. The Israeli town Sderot that borders the Gaza Strip has just got its first train station, linking them in a sustainable way to the center of the country.

The “mad” upside to this train station is that it’s been built with security in mind, and comes equipped with a dual functioning “armour” to protect locals from the regular barrage of rockets flying overhead.

We don’t like to dwell on conflict at Green Prophet but we are bringing this story up in the context of public transportation. Even though there is a seemingly no end in sight to the Middle East conflicts over here, it is good news that municipalities and governments plan for the interim.

Sometimes planners say, well let’s wait for the war to be over to think about trains, or the environment. In this case, the country has decided it must live with this reality of conflict and brace for it.

Rockets from Gaza have become a bizarrely “normal” way of life for people living in Sderot, Israel. The periphery town is cheap to live in, people are established there so they don’t want to move.

Schools and factories nearby are already outfitted with bomb shelters, as are peoples’ homes, so when planning their latest train station it had to be made to withstand rocket attacks.

Developed by architect Ami Shinar, the station is equipped with an extra long corridor (100 meters) which can be turned into a bomb shelter if the alarm sounds. The station was built bigger than an average train station to protect people if they need to run into the station for cover. Its walls are made from poured concrete about half a meter thick. It cost $14 million USD to build and it’s likely the only one of its kind in the world.

This station will open up more jobs and study opportunities for the people of Sderot. It will take them less than half an hour to reach Tel Aviv, which takes about an hour and a half by bus. For the next three months, residents of the city will get to use the train for free. 

Some 20,000 people live in the city of Sderot, and if we can dream, this station might serve as a link one day to Gaza City –– in times of peace and prosperity for all. Let’s hope the children of our children will look at this station, built to withstand rockets, as a strange reminder of the times.

And of course the station will be out of service, because we’ll all be riding on Elon Musk’s Hyperloop! 

Now we’re really dreaming. 

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Elon Musk is known as the founder of SpaceX, a pioneer in the commercialization of space travel and Tesla, a company named after a brilliantly mad high-voltage inventor of the nineteenth century and known for its electric cars. So what happens when this visionary sets his eyes on America’s decaying public transportation infrastructure?

The result is hyperloop, a futuristic type of tube transportation which combines the best of air travel with the best of rail.

That’s right you saw the phrase rail, tube transportation and futuristic in the same sentence. No, I’m not talking about the sweaty London Underground or the smelly New York subway system or even Turkey’s impressive Marmaray undersea tunnel. I’m talking about something that combines the magic of The Polar Express with the sleek practicalities of an iPhone.

If you’ve ever visited a drive-up bank, you’ve seen a small-scale version of hyperloop technology. That pint-sized cylindrical vehicle which carries your checks, identification, cash and IOUs quickly and safely to and from you bank teller via pneumatic tubes is the basis for the hyperloop concept.

Buildings in New York and other great cities relied on such pneumatic networks long before the age of Facebook and email. Scale everything up so that it can carry passengers the 570 kilometers from Los Angeles to San Francisco at a speed of at least 962kph (almost 600mph) and you have what Elon Musk calls Hyperloop, a fifth mode of transportation.

The idea itself isn’t entirely new. Anyone who has stood on a subway platform has noticed the wind that announces the arrival of each train. It turns out that air friction is one of the primary limitations on subway speed and efficiency.

By pumping air out in front of the train and compressing it behind the train, you not only reduce friction, you can actually propel the train through the tube. Back in 1868, Alfred Ely Beach, then editor of Scientific American magazine, designed and built a pneumatic passenger transport under Broadway in New York City.

To avoid hassles with building permits, “The Beach Pneumatic Transit Company” project was developed in secrecy under the false premise that it would only transport packages and mail.

The company eventually failed but fast forward 145 years and Elon Musk believes the concept can be brought back to life on a much grander scale. But even Musk knows it limitations.

The design intentionally limits speed to mach 0.98 to limit noise, turbulence and environmental damage. Musk admits that over very long distances, air travel would probably be more efficient but that hyperloop’s sweet spot is “high-traffic city pairs that are less than about 1,500 km or 900 miles apart.”

Video on how Hyperloop Travel works

Los Angeles and San Francisco fit into this range. But so do many of the great cities of the Middle East. Will we one day be able to travel from Tel Aviv to Cairo, Istanbul to Ankara or Riyadh to Abu Dhabi in less time than it takes for city traffic to get across town?

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