High-speed Hopes

This high-speed system would get you from Dallas to Austin in just 20 minutes

Travel across Texas in a flash.

A Star Wars-esque innovation promises to put at least some of the nightmarish traffic on Texas’ most clogged roadways — I-35, I-45, and I-10 — in our rearview mirrors.

On Thursday, April 6, a company called Hyperloop One named a proposed high-speed, L-shaped route linking Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, Houston, San Antonio, and Laredo as one of 11 U.S. finalists in a contest to develop a futuristic tube-based system for shuttling passengers and cargo. Hyperloop One says it’ll give three U.S. proposals the green light to proceed.

The 640-mile Hyperloop in Texas would stretch south from Dallas-Fort Worth to Austin, San Antonio, and Laredo, and would stretch east from San Antonio to Houston. Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston would not be connected, as the state’s two largest metro areas tentatively are in line for a much-debated high-speed bullet train.

Organizers of the Texas proposal say a trip from Dallas to Austin would take 19.5 minutes — a far cry from the current three-hour drive (if you’re lucky) between the two cities. Top speeds would reach 700 mph, which is faster than a commercial airliner travels.

Los Angeles-based Hyperloop One explains that “passengers and cargo are loaded into a pod, and accelerate gradually via electric propulsion through a low-pressure tube. The pod quickly lifts above the track using magnetic levitation and glides at airline speeds for long distances due to ultra-low aerodynamic drag.”

Tesla and SpaceX mastermind Elon Musk introduced the tube-based transportation concept in 2013. (Last summer, Transonic Transportation announced plans for a similar Hyperloop connecting San Antonio and Austin.)

“The U.S. has always been a global innovation vanguard — driving advancements in computing, communication and media to rail, automobiles and aeronautics,” says Shervin Pishevar, executive chairman of Hyperloop One. “Now, with Hyperloop One, we are on the brink of the first great breakthrough in transportation technology of the 21st century, eliminating the barriers of time and distance and unlocking vast economic opportunities.”

Even if the Texas plan gets the go-ahead, a Hyperloop system wouldn’t be operating here for a number of years. And there’s no guarantee that the Texas system, or any other proposed tube-based transportation system, will ever be up and running. Hyperloop One is testing a 2-mile track in the desert north of Las Vegas.

A Dallas-based team from construction and engineering giant AECOM is overseeing the Texas proposal. AECOM built Hyperloop One’s test track in Nevada. In 2015, Musk had indicated Texas most likely would host the test track, but that idea didn’t pan out.

Backers of the Texas Hyperloop plan include the University of Texas at Arlington, Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART), the City of Dallas, Austin’s Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Cap Metro), and the U.S.-Mexico Chamber of Commerce.

Pishevar, the Hyperloop One executive chairman, says his company “is at the forefront of a movement to solve one of the planet’s most pressing problems. The brightest minds are coming together at the right time to eliminate the distances and borders that separate economies and cultures.”

transportation traffic

Jobs report

Texas ranks among 10 best states to find a job, says new report

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

You have a better chance of landing a job in Texas than in most other states.

If you’re hunting for a job in Texas amid a tough employment market, you stand a better chance of landing it here than you might in other states.

A new ranking by personal finance website WalletHub of the best states for jobs puts Texas at No. 7. The Lone Star State lands at No. 2 in the economic environment category and No. 18 in the job market category.

Massachusetts tops the list, and West Virginia appears at the bottom.

To determine the most attractive states for employment, WalletHub compared the 50 states across 34 key indicators of economic health and job market strength. Ranking factors included employment growth, median annual income, and average commute time.

“Living in one of the best states for jobs can provide stable conditions for the long term, helping you ride out the fluctuations that the economy will experience in the future,” WalletHub analyst Chip Lupo says.

In September, Gov. Greg Abbott announced Texas led the U.S. in job creation with the addition of 195,600 jobs over the past 12 months.

While Abbott proclaimed Texas is “America’s jobs leader,” the state’s level of job creation has recently slowed. In June, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas noted that the state’s year-to-date job growth rate had dipped to 1.8 percent, and that even slower job growth was expected in the second half of this year.

The August unemployment rate in Texas stood at 4.1 percent, according to the Texas Workforce Commission. Throughout 2025, the monthly rate in Texas has been either four percent or 4.1 percent.

By comparison, the U.S. unemployment rate in August was 4.3 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2025, the monthly rate for the U.S. has ranged from 4 percent to 4.3 percent.

Here’s a rundown of the August unemployment rates in Texas’ four biggest metro areas:

Austin — 3.9 percent
Dallas-Fort Worth — 4.4 percent
San Antonio — 4.4 percent
Houston — 5 percent

Unemployment rates have remained steady this year despite layoffs and hiring freezes driven by economic uncertainty. However, the number of U.S. workers who’ve been without a job for at least 27 weeks has risen by 385,000 this year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in August. That month, long-term unemployed workers accounted for about one-fourth of all unemployed workers.

An August survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showed a record-low 44.9 percent of Americans were confident about finding a job if they lost their current one.

This story originally was published on our sister site, InnovationMap.

job market texas wallethub jobs

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