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Click the tower to hear a statement by the Founder Justin Eric Sutton

This web page has been created as a record of an interview for:

www.EnvironmentalGraffitti.com 

by:

Columnist "Mr. Sustainable" , aka Corbett Kroehler
http://mistersustainable.com

on:

May 31st, 2008

Here is a link to the audio portion of the interview:

Justin-Corbett-Interview-20080531.mp3   (8.5 Megs ~ 30 minutes)

The following is the written portion of the interview as seven questions with answers provided by Justin Sutton.

1)      From glancing at the website InterstateTraveler.us visitors gain a quick understanding that your goal is to provide a hydrogen superhighway for the world. That is a bold, humanitarian vision. What inspired you to propose something so broad and aggressive?

An excellent question… specifically about inspiration.  After about five years of college beginning in 1986 with Computer Aided Design, Robotics and Factory Automation at community college with a transfer to a University to pursue Geophysical studies, I had a very broad formal education.  During this time I was intently studying popular business philosophy.  On March 19^th 1995 while reading a book about a fictional transcontinental rail road company trying to survive the Great Depression, and being a subscriber to a dozen popular news magazines with a high frequency of articles about the real condition of passenger rail service in the United States where one of the articles was entitled “Who will Fix Americas Passenger Rail Service?”  At that moment all of my combined education joined with my business philosophy studies and inspiration hit me when my mind answered question, “I will fix it..”  Certainly without the disciplined life growing up in an entrepreneurial family as the youngest of four which taught me both the love of Wisdom and Knowledge, but also the true value of industriousness and consciousness of good quality, “Do it right the first time…” credo, I probably would have answered that question with something less than the right answer.   On that day in March I wrote in my journal two pages of itemized categories addressing the various aspects of a system that would be self sustaining using solar power with embedded fiber optics and electrical distribution lines to provide communications and energy distribution from the miles and miles of solar panels that I proposed to be mounted on an elevated beam.   The basic idea for a self sustaining system using a solar grid was the original bridge to success, the embedded conduit then extended the basics to enable a full potential rail way that would do the job, and do it well.

2)      Back in the year 2004, I learned about your wonderful technology because of a brief news item I saw which reported that a suburb of Detroit, Michigan had decided to build a hydrogen-powered commuter rail system into the city. However, the Interstate Traveler is much more than a transportation system. What are the other capabilities of your system?

The capabilities of the Hydrogen Super Highway are quite simple in nature, and actually may be considered to be much less complicated that a simple suburban home that has electricity, cable, maybe computer network cable, water lines, sewer lines, gas lines for a furnace and a water heater, maybe a propane tank in the back yard, and hopefully a solar panel on the roof!   A house has thousands upon thousands of individual parts, which when fully assembled perform all the various functions that ‘modern’ people take for granted…  running water and flushing toilets.  Most people would consider building a typical house to be “Complicated”  yet a routine operation for traditionally skilled craftsman of the various crafts employed in the building of the house.  For the Hydrogen Super Highway to be a self sustaining system, and provide proper “Traveler Stations” or miniature “Grand Central Station” facilities at every entrance and exit to the US Highway network the system would require all the same features of a typical home, but they all had to work together as a part of the same system.   So, the next logical step was to design a new elevated rail supported using a specially optimized box-beam structure that would be filled with large conduit to not only provide the basics for electricity, water, sewer, and fiber optics, but to distribute Hydrogen, Oxygen, Gasoline, Diesel, Propane, Bio-diesel, crude oil, or any other important commodity that is a part of what we call modern living.   Beside the capability to move people at hundreds of miles an hour in maglev transports that completely mitigate lateral g-forces with our proprietary suspension system and the ability to operate mobile triage vehicles that bring a complete medical team to the seen of an accident or natural disaster, the energy that is collected from the solar grid is used to electrolyze an enormous amount of water to accumulate and distribute enormous amounts of Hydrogen.   That hydrogen, which can and will be used to power the system at night, will be oxidized to make the energy and regenerate the water molecules en-mass so that the Hydrogen Super Highway will consume polluted water, sewer water and even ocean brine, to make pure water.

3)      With so many diverse merits and solutions integrated into a single platform, the Interstate Traveler must involve hundreds if not thousands of skilled laborers to build, maintain and operate?

Yes!  Your assertion is correct!  The construction of the Hydrogen Super Highway from a dozen factories placed here in the United States will mean thousands of new permanent jobs in the supply chain for making the rail, will create thousands of jobs in the skilled trades for building the thousands of Traveler Stations, and thousands of more permanent jobs in the hospitality and entertainment industry as each of our Traveler Stations are built to house a minimum of three independent franchise businesses to serve the Traveler.   Our base metric is 10,000 square feet for each Traveler Station, but certainly the local district population will be free to elect the design of the local Traveler Stations according to the local desire for architecture and overall size.  Some Traveler Stations will be built as small sky-scrapers, while others may be small and humble in remote areas.   This same model for production and operation has been shared with a large number of foreign trade consulates who are getting ready to enable the same jobs-creation-public-service infrastructure on every continent.

4)      One of the most intriguing features of the Interstate Traveler is its ability to combine the power of the rail-based automobile carrier, such as the Amtrak Auto Train with the convenience of a commuter system which can connect city centers with outlying communities. People literally can drive their car onto your system at the station near their home and then drive off when they arrive at their destination, which is a real improvement over the park-and-ride paradigm. How much would it cost the average driver to bring his/her car onto the Interstate Traveler for a daily commute of 30 minutes?

There are two factors that will drive the price for the consumer that will enjoy using the car Transport to ride in safety in the privacy of their personal automobile or for a pedestrian riding one of the Public Transports:   Time and Mass.  As a basis for Pedistrian traffic, a simple fee of about $0.05 / minute would enable a pedestrian to go as much as 200 miles on the rail in an hour for about $3.00.  Now, with Car Transports, our costs are more drastically proportional to the amount of time we are levitating someone in their car and the total mass of the car plus occupants which could range from 1,000 to more than 10,000 lbs.   What I mean to say is that a massive SUV filled with six professional line-backers from the NFL, would pay more than the two tiny women in a tiny gas-sipper going on a shopping spree at a city a couple hundred miles away.   The fun part about the Car Transport is that you could ride a horse into it, a couple dozen dudes on motorcycles and ride into as a group, a pack of bicyclers with their graphite frame bikes, or even a pack of Boy Scouts with camping gear heading up into the mountains can all enjoy the benefits of the pay per pound/minute model.   What would it cost?  Let’s consider an average car with two adults on a business trip going 300 miles.  If the car ways 4,000 lbs in total, and the fee is $0.32 / Minute (because of the mass) we can project a cost of $19.20 to ride for an hour to get anywhere from 100 to 300 miles down the rail depending on traffic and topography.

5)      One of the reasons no alternative to the conventional rubber-on-asphalt transportation model has gained global adoption is that the old way works well in most any condition from the desert to the tropics to alpine applications. How do you provide for the varying demands of the natural elements as you plan to build the Interstate Traveler throughout the United States and then the world?

Certainly nothing can do better for terrestrial movement than a wheeled vehicle, except maybe a sure-footed horse where no roads have been built.  Since the invention of the wheel, there still has been no improvement other than material science to optimize the wheel for is millions of applications.  For the Hydrogen Super Highway, a fixed guide way is the foundation of the system and will never replace the value of the automobile, yet, when it comes to the reality of traffic in our growing cities all over the world, there just is not enough land available to make bigger roads to hold more cars.   If one is to consider the land area on a mile of eight-lane expressway, there is only room for maybe 2,500 cars such that it could take 400 miles of expressway to absorb only one million people.  What this means is that our highway system, as grand as it is can not serve well to evacuate large districts of people in harm’s way from storms and floods, but with the Hydrogen Super Highway installed on the expressway, we can move more people faster and safer than any other method.   Regarding the wonderful variety of wild environments, ecologies and regional topographies, the Hydrogen Super Highway is virtually inert with a near zero effect on the local environment and with it’s self-contained environmentally protected internal components embedded inside a stainless steel guide way, there is very little that mother nature can through at it that will cause any disruption of service.  In the advent of a direct earthquake event or a direct hit from a high-powered tornadic event there certainly could be real damage that could shut down the system at the localized affected area, but the lost rail sections can be quickly replaced with new sections built exactly as the missing sections and installed in hours and put on line immediately.  Regarding environmentally sensitive areas, this is where we shine the brightest.  Since the system is installed via an installation crane that rides the rail, we can install stanchions right through the most exotic environments with-out having to put a boot on the ground.   Mountains, deserts, jungle, arctic tundra or along the ocean floor, the system will work just fine.   In the mountains, we can install this system to match any grade and far exceed the grade restrictions of wheel trains, without cutting a path through the mountains with dynamite.

6)      With energy prices driving the beleaguered American airline industry to charge for all checked luggage, the Interstate Traveler seems a viable alternative to air travel, at least in some applications. What rule of thumb do you offer the passengers of the future so that they can judge whether to fly or ride?

There is a very clear cost / time decision to make when selecting which mode of travel.   Modern airliners are a marvel of engineering and can go faster and farther than the Hydrogen Super Highway when it comes to traveling long distances.  As the fixed guide way will always be limited or “fixed” in place, a Traveler can only go where the rail has been installed.     Considering a typical business commute, however, the Hydrogen Super Highway will surely be the better choice for anything less than four or five hundred miles.   It is well known the amount of time required for staging each and every flight of an aircraft, and the hassle of checking bags and being wedged into the most uncomfortable seats in the world and being asked to pay $2.00 for a $0.20 bag of pretzels.

The time to make a $99.00 one hour flight of 500 miles requires most Travelers to be tied up at the airport and going ‘to-n-fro’ eating up as much as five hours or more running the risk, cost, loss-of-time if the flight is canceled.   That same 500 miles on the Hydrogen Super Highway might take 3 or 4 hours and only cost upwards of $12.00 for a pedestrian.  As a rule of thumb however, distance exceeding 500 miles will start looking better to fly when it comes to time and money.    In the not too distant future, airplanes will run on hydrogen too, and that will really change things.

7)      One aspect of travel for which we have no rapid alternative today is across oceans. The newly liberalized North Atlantic airspace has seen a boon to many carriers. Still, if people can’t or won’t fly between the United States and Europe, today their only choices are to sail or swim, neither of which is particularly fast. Do you have plans to span oceans with the Interstate Traveler?

Yes.  Over the many years of the industrial age, many proposals have been “Floated” to build some kind of physical link across places like the Bearing Straits, and or course the English Channel.    Modern ingenuity and economic necessity finally made it possible to bore a set of tunnels from England to France, and the general public is winner with faster and more reliable transportation.   For traveling beneath the sea, there have been very real and good plans proposed to create a about 200,000 prefabricated tunnel sections that are floated out into the sea and submerged like a submarine to a prescribed depth of say 250 feet, linked together and tethered to the sea floor to complete a tunnel from New York to London across the Atlantic.  I like this idea.  Further, systems like this are proposed to use high velocity air movement to enable a train, or a Hydrogen Super Highway Transport to move through the tunnel at very high rates of speed making the journey as fast as super sonic jet.   For more localized applications, such as traveling from island to island in some of the large archipelagos in the South Pacific, the South China Sea, the Bahamas, and even to just travel across a bay area or to cross shallow seas, the Hydrogen Super Highway can operate at a reasonable speed under water on the same rail that will traverse the continents and mountain ranges.

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