The wonderful and extensively traveled Tom Scott was in Vancouver to talk about the University of British Columbia’s Rabbit Line, a 2.5 km pipeline across UBC’s campus. A mechanism uses air pressure to fire an aluminum capsule at 100km/hr to deliver short-lived radioactive isotopes from the university’s cyclotron to the hospital via the pipeline.
Because it’s UBC, say it al-YOU-min-yum. And a look at the specifics of what it takes to get this short vacuum tube transit to work emphasizes how Hyperloop is vaporware.
Ray Dubicki is a stay-at-home dad and parent-on-call for taking care of general school and neighborhood tasks around Ballard. This lets him see how urbanism works (or doesn’t) during the hours most people are locked in their office. He is an attorney and urbanist by training, with soup-to-nuts planning experience from code enforcement to university development to writing zoning ordinances. He enjoys using PowerPoint, but only because it’s no longer a weekly obligation.