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Elon Musk's Boring Company has received permission to dig 10.1 miles of tunnel in Maryland:
On Thursday, Maryland officials gave Elon Musk's Boring Company permission to dig a 10.1-mile tunnel "beneath the state-owned portion of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, between the Baltimore city line and Maryland 175 in Hanover," according to the Baltimore Sun.
According to Maryland Transportation Secretary Pete Rahn, The Boring Company (which Tesla and SpaceX CEO Musk founded to advance tunneling technology) wants to build two 35-mile tunnels between Baltimore and Washington, DC. The federal government owns about two-thirds of the land that Musk's company would need to dig underneath. As of Friday, it was unclear whether that permission had been granted. (A Department of Transportation spokeswoman told Ars that the land in question was owned by the National Park Service, which did not immediately respond to request for comment.)
But the 10 miles that have been approved by the state of Maryland will for the first leg of an underground system that could contain a Hyperloop system. Musk first floated the idea of a Hyperloop—which would ferry passengers through a low-pressure tube in levitating pods floating above a track using air-bearings—in 2013. But the CEO determined that he didn't have time to see his idea through to fruition, so he issued a white paper and challenged startups and students alike to make headway on the concept.
Also at The Washington Post (archive).
Previously: Elon Musk Claims to Have "Verbal Approval" to Build New York to Washington, D.C. Hyperloop
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Monday October 23 2017, @03:03PM (4 children)
From the civilized world, looking in on the east coast, one endpoint is a famous hyper over crowded over security theater'd tourist trap surrounded by impressive poverty mere blocks away, and the other endpoint periodically contends for title of murder capital of USA or murder capital of world etc.
DC is rapidly gentrifying, so no, there isn't "impressive poverty mere blocks away", you have to do a fair bit of walking to get to the really bad parts of DC from the Capitol building if that's what you're talking about. One of the worse parts is across the river in fact, so you'll need to cross a bridge. However, that's poverty with a home; you don't have to go anywhere at all to see tons of homeless people. It's really shameful that the capital of the richest nation on earth is so full of homeless people. But they're not generally dangerous. There's so many cops all over that area that it's probably the safest place in the US from street crime.
As for DC-Baltimore traffic, parts of inner-city Baltimore are indeed bad places, but there's a lot more to the city than that. But I don't know whether that'd equate to a lot of people wanting to take a Hyperloop from downtown DC to downtown Baltimore. But it is apparently popular enough that Amtrak has a big stop there along the Northeast Corridor line.
There's nothing at all peculiar about this. The Northeast Corridor (DC to Boston) is easily the highest-traffic part of the nation for inter-city travel. If you're going to make a new train line in the US, this is the obvious place to put it, and you have to start somewhere, and it'd be stupid to bypass one of the major cities along the route. DC-to-Baltimore is just for the beginning. When they expand it to Philly, it'll have much more ridership, and when they expand it to NYC, it'll have much more than that. It'll be a real boon if they build it all the way between DC and Boston; there's a ton of air traffic among these cities, and this would probably cut out a lot of it. The stupid TSA crap takes almost as much time as the flight.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Monday October 23 2017, @10:43PM (3 children)
Your point ? These people are demanding a 29 minute service to Baltimore?
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday October 24 2017, @01:37AM (2 children)
Try reading the whole thing before you comment. The OP said something ignorant about poverty being steps away in DC, referring to the poor areas that used to be close to the White House, but have been pushed back by gentrification in recent years. I just made an aside about the numerous homeless people. This doesn't have anything to do with Hyperloop service to Baltimore. The DC metro area is one of the most expensive places in the country to live overall, and there's a ton of traffic between it, Baltimore, Philly, NYC, and Boston. And Hyperloop won't take 29 minutes to get to Baltimore; we can already do that with Amtrak (Baltimore is only ~40 miles away from DC). Hyperloop will probably make the trip in a few minutes. 29 minutes is the estimate to get from DC to NYC, *with* stops along the way in Baltimore and Philly. It doesn't take long to go 40 miles at supersonic speeds.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Tuesday October 24 2017, @10:39AM (1 child)
I read it all; it is you that went off topic with your aside (your word) about the homeless in DC. The thread was discussing potential passengers for Hyperloop between DC and Baltimore, and you mentioned the homeless. I saw the funny side of that.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday October 24 2017, @02:59PM
I didn't go off-topic; the person I was responding to specifically called DC "famous hyper over crowded over security theater'd tourist trap surrounded by impressive poverty mere blocks away". I was addressing the "impressive poverty" comment. If you think that's "off-topic", then you need to take it up with VLM, not me.