This was the rare week when an innovative transportation scheme captivated America’s imagination. After months of expectation, on Monday Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled the Hyperloop, a giant vacuum tube designed to whisk passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco at nearly 800 miles per hour, completing a 520-mile journey in a mere 40 minutes. By now, attentive readers have experienced all the dizzying spins of the Hyperloop news cycle: anticipation, excitement, backlash, rebound.

Love it, hate it or just forget about it: the Hyperloop isn’t even the most exciting transit technology of the month. (New York City had a pneumatic train back in 1870, after all.)

No, that distinction goes to a road in the South Korean city of Gumi. While Musk and company were dotting their i’s and crossing their t’s in the 57-page Hyperloop proposal, Gumi (population 375,000) transformed a common section of road into something extraordinary: a wireless charging strip for electric vehicles. They may have reinvented the road.

On the 15-mile round-trip to and from the train station, Gumi’s electric buses are charged by electromagnetic fields generated by cables in the roadway. It’s a groundbreaking step for what engineers at nearby Korea Advanced Institute for Science and Technology […]