Yes, I’m thinking of industrialist/inventor Elon Musk’s intriguing, controversial Hyperloop. Musk has imagined an enclosed travel-tube stretching from Los Angeles to San Francisco. He pictures us climbing into vehicles that shoot through the tube on cushions of air, propelled by a magnetic pulse to speeds of up to 800 miles per hour.

If you’re thinking of one of those pneumatic devices that carries cash, checks and dog treats from the parking lot to the teller and back to your car in branch banking, Elon Musk will call you a moron and take his billions elsewhere in head-shaking disgust. But that’s what I’m picturing anyway, and it does not comfort me. Even if everything is OK on the journey from point A to point B, what about the people who handle the tube when it arrives at its destination? During the heyday of pneumatic office communication, the weak link always happened in the basement where all the tubes ended and various boobs and imbeciles fumbled to open the capsules and spilled the precious contents onto a dank cement floor. Or at least that’s how I picture it.

Receiving Musk’s scorn now is a small price to pay compared to what it would feel like to climb into one of his tubes and realize, too late, that you’ve been had. But then climbing into a tube of any kind is alarming. I had a bad experience once with a water park tube slide that had to do with someone else’s bodily functions and not enough space between travelers. And I’m sure I don’t have to point out to you that once you knock off the wings and the tail, an airplane is tube-shaped. Risk minimizers will tell you that a large, commercial airplane is incredibly safe, but look how easily I knocked off the wings and the tail! It didn’t even take an entire sentence.

I like having escape options, so I would want Musk’s speeding travel pods and the tubes they rocket through to have frequently spaced egress hatches in case I have to climb out for a breath of fresh air, or to escape flames, or to run away from snakes. But at the same time, I would worry while pfooshing down the California coast line that some low-level workman had left a hatch ajar. That can’t end well!

As a professional public-safety scold, it’s my job to seriously consider every worst-case scenario. So I worry about the pull of gravity every time I lift one of my feet off the ground! After all, think of the possibilities! Most of them aren’t pretty.

People say Elon Musk is our most imaginative business leader and technological visionary. But when I dwell on all the ways you could be mangled in his Hyperloop and then hear him say the thing is perfectly safe, it’s obvious that he’s just not imaginative enough!

Yours in Safety,
B.S.O.R.