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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, Informative) by Grishnakh on Monday October 23 2017, @03:13PM (2 children)
You misunderstand. This first phase of Hyperloop is apparently planned between DC and Baltimore, so he's ineptly describing those two cities, not NYC.
Another reason is DC is a cheerless armpit. Lame. Deadly boring.
DC's not that bad. On the plus side, you can walk around the streets downtown and they're generally very clean, and it doesn't smell like garbage everywhere. NYC on the other hand frequently looks and smells like a 3rd-world nation: the streets and sidewalks are dirty, and there's always a bunch of trash everywhere. Also, bicycling in downtown DC is more popular and safer than in Manhattan. There's more and better restaurants in Manhattan though, though that could be changing: DC's restaurant scene is improving, while I've read many times that restaurants are being priced out of Manhattan because the rent is too high.
IMO, what NYC really needs to do is jump on the secession bandwagon, and secede from New York state.
There's already a lot of rail traffic between DC, NYC, and Boston.
There is, and it sucks. It's slow, expensive, and dangerous (they've had multiple fatal accidents because Amtrak trains don't have PTC like in civilized nations, and the drivers are apparently stupid and go around curves too fast).
(because mass transit never can seem to connect to airports in America)
That's because the taxi lobbies oppose it. And then people whine about Uber/Lyft "putting the hard-working taxi drivers out of work".
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday October 23 2017, @07:41PM (1 child)
Again, that impression's out of date. Giuliani and Bloomberg reduced litter. The Broken Windows theory of policing, that litter and ill-kempt cityscapes attract crime, has convinced subsequent administrations to follow suit.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday October 23 2017, @08:20PM
No, that impression isn't out of date at all. That's from personal, first-hand experience less than a month old. I was even reading an article about it recently, and one big reason, which NO amount of policing will ever fix, is the way the city is laid out: there are no alleys. So all the trash just gets dumped on the sidewalk. It's nasty, and it's not something you see in most other cities, where the trash is kept in dumpsters in alleys where pedestrians don't go. I'm not sure what can be done about it, unless they decide to build a huge system of underground tunnels just for collecting trash (i.e., there'd be depositories at every building, and on the street too, from which trash would just fall down a chute into a bin underground, similar to the trash systems that many high-rises use, or the laundry chutes used by large hotels), but this probably isn't feasible because they already have so much other stuff underground.
Anyway, between trash bags on the sidewalk for pick-up, and the constantly overflowing trash bins on the street, the city always smells like trash. The other problem is the smell of urine: the city doesn't have many places for people to use the bathroom, so homeless people and others just go in subway entrances and the like. Why can't they install some damn bathrooms?