"Nobody says they had a great elevator ride. They just got to the 29th floor," says Brogan Bambrogan, co-founder of Hyperloop Tech, in the video below. "I'm excited about not improving the transportation experience, but I'm excited about eliminating it."

The video - produced by The Atlantic, CityLab and the Van Alen Institute - is about the effort to build the pneumatic tube-like hyperloop, a radical transportation idea dreamed up by Elon Musk, founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX.

Bambrogan continues, saying the hyperloop can "shrink time," allowing people and goods to move across landscapes at unprecedented speeds. Imagine traveling from Spokane to Seattle in 20 minutes. That's what proponents of the technology promise. As the video shows, however, that promise is a long way from becoming reality.