Paving the way to an Italian Hyperloop: a survey and analysis of main stakeholders

This research aims to investigate how the perspective of industrial stakeholder can influence a megaproject in its earliest stage, that is an Hyperloop development project on Italian routes. The Hyperloop conceptualization was born in 2013 from an idea of Elon Musk (Taylor et al., 2013), who first described it as a new mode of transport, the fifth, in addition to car, plane, train and ship. The goal was to create an alternative means of transport both cheap and fast. The infrastructure consists of capsules, for passengers and/or freight, inserted in a low pressured tube, in order to limit the aerodynamic resistance, and to accelerate them by means of magnetic levitation linear accelerators (NOACA, HTT. AND TEMS, 2019). Most of the feasibility studies up to now realized, provide HY to be powered entirely by solar energy, or at least renewable. Moreover, since very little energy will be consumed by HY due to air resistance (NOACA et al., 2019), surplus energy can be stored and reused, thus making the infrastructure sustainable. To date, numerous feasibility studies have been carried out, highlighting the engineering and technological feasibility of the system (Van Goeverden et al., 2018; NOACA et al., 2019; AECOM, 2020). By analyzing a project such as Hyperloop, the Author recognizes that stakeholders will play a key role. In fact, large projects as HY, have impacts on a wide range of stakeholders (interested in the project both from the point of view of the realization of the infrastructure and its future use), who will express perceptions and judgements about the infrastructure not only before, during and at the end of the construction phase, but also over the months, years, and even decades following project completion (Turner et al., 2012).