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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: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Monday October 23 2017, @12:29PM (7 children)
Just in time for the Second American Revolution to lay waste to DC and Wall Street and move the capital to Denver for the dawning of the Second American Republic and its stark move away from the aristocratic fantasies of the DC-NY power elite.
Well, I can dream.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Funny) by realDonaldTrump on Monday October 23 2017, @01:32PM (5 children)
Washington, as you know, is a swamp. It's a swamp built on a swamp. I like your idea of moving the capital. If I do, I'll move it to Palm Beach. Can you imagine that? I want you to imagine how much better our future can be if we declare independence from the elites who've led us to one financial and foreign policy disaster after another. Crooked Hillary and her friends in global finance tried to scare America into thinking small -- and they tried to scare the American people out of voting for a better future. #MAGA 🇺🇸
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday October 23 2017, @07:03PM (4 children)
Moving it from a swamp to a place about to be underwater?
I vote for Kansas, or the Dakotas.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday October 23 2017, @07:37PM (2 children)
South Dakota I can sort of see. The Black Hills are awesome and the Badlands are, too.
Why Kansas, though? Unless you mean to place them in the middle of tornado alley in which case I applaud your diabolical plan...
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday October 23 2017, @07:45PM (1 child)
You read right through me...
Officially, Kansas is the center of the country, IIRC. Forcing all the DC [bleep] to move there would be a good test of their dedication to the career.
The badlands and black hills are fine, until winter comes knocking...
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday October 23 2017, @08:06PM
I concede. You are right. Kansas is the better choice. All the DC mavens, lawyers, and lobbyists and Wall Street bankers would shrivel up and die if they had to go there.
Plus, Kansans all speak English, work hard, and are honest. That should buy the Second American Republic at least another 250 years.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Touché) by realDonaldTrump on Tuesday October 24 2017, @05:02AM
Believe me, I'm not underwater with Mar-a-Lago. I bought it for a song, only $7 million. Fixed it up and it's now bringing me a very nice income. My members pay a $200,000 initiation fee and $14,000 in annual dues. Overnight parking is $2,000 per night. It's an acquisition that's been very, very accretive for me.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday October 23 2017, @02:50PM
Denver? The new pot-smoking capital of the US? You really think a bunch of pot-smokers are going to successfully revolt?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday October 23 2017, @01:09PM (27 children)
Is there a lot of traffic between those sites? I'm not trolling, genuinely interested, not having lived within 1000 miles I donno.
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.
I mean, even not living there I "know" there's a lot of traffic between LA and SF or NYC and Boston. I've never heard of traffic from Baltimore to DC.
It seems a peculiar route to build a high speed train on. Maybe they want to test it at low or low value ridership, LOL.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday October 23 2017, @01:18PM (4 children)
http://www.startribune.com/on-amtrak-s-fast-train-from-d-c-to-n-y-c/246415191/ [startribune.com]
So there is plenty of demand for our nation's fastest (as of 2014?) train service. But if you look at the previous article, Musk's Hyperloop could allegedly do it in 29 minutes instead of 2 hours, 45 minutes.
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(Score: 2) by donkeyhotay on Monday October 23 2017, @03:21PM (3 children)
Frazzled by airport security lines?
I don't think I'm too cynical when I say that they'll end up eventually having hyperloop security lines to deal with too. I mean, you'd have to be pretty naive to think that high-speed travel that's not in the air won't have any security concerns. The trip might only take 30 minutes, but you'll have to endure a 2-hour security line in order to take that trip.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday October 23 2017, @05:24PM (2 children)
TSA hasn't spread in earnest to the trains yet. However people still make it to their destinations alive somehow. Lucky for us, the cost of a ticket doesn't seem to cover the theater performance (yet).
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(Score: 2) by Nuke on Monday October 23 2017, @10:36PM (1 child)
To conventional trains, no. Terrorists and anti-terrorists alike don't think trains are cool enough to be attacked. Hyperloop will be different - it has had such publicity and a World-Wide high profile that security measures if/when it opens will be there in the extreme.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday October 24 2017, @03:02PM
Maybe. The big difference between airplanes and Hyperloop (or trains) is that it's utterly impossible to take over a Hyperloop pod (or train) and pilot it into a crowded building. With an airplane, it's pretty easy once you get into the cockpit.
It is possible to cause destruction to the Hyperloop which not only destroys a pod, but renders the tube unusable for a while (months?) until repairs can be made, which would be bad for transportation. But the death toll won't be that much. But the same can be said of an Amtrak Acela (though the tracks there are easier to repair), and TSA isn't bothering with those.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday October 23 2017, @01:23PM (2 children)
Also as of 2014 it seems nearly a quarter of a million people were commuting from Maryland to work in DC, while another 140k were commuting the other way, living in DC and working in Maryland. http://www.roads.maryland.gov/OPPEN/Traffic_Volume_Trends1.pdf
There are also two commuter rail lines, I didn't find a good link with numbers for that, but all told there's tremendous demand for transport in this area.
None of that changes the fact that this 'hyperloop' is still the worst kind of vapor - and this supposed grant of permission doesn't alter that in any way.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Monday October 23 2017, @07:49PM (1 child)
A ski chairlift has more throughput than Hyperloop.
It's not about decongesting, it's about finding enough millionaires trying to save commute time. Because paying tens of billions to transport a few thousand people a day, the math requires lots of really high income people in a rush.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday October 23 2017, @08:12PM
Well yes because a chairlift actually gets you from point A to point B.
All the hyperloop does is convince the gullible to give their money to a man that already has plenty.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Monday October 23 2017, @02:00PM (10 children)
I guess you're referring to Times Square and Hell's Kitchen. Ironically to New Yorkers "hell" sooner describes Times Square than Hell's Kitchen...
Anyway your impressions are about 30 years out of date. Hell's Kitchen has been a very hot neighborhood for 20 years. Even a crappy garden-style apartment (aka ground level) will cost you a million dollars.
There is a lot of traffic between NY and DC, both vehicular, air, and rail. There are a lot of reasons for that. One important one is that the whores in DC are constantly in NYC begging for bribes...I mean, campaign contributions. Democratic whores go to the Upper Left Side, republican whores go to the Upper Right Side. I mean, "Upper West Side" and "Upper East Side." Many people think they should go to DC if they want to meet with their representatives, but they'll never get that meeting. If they hang out at fundraisers in NYC every representative from every state, including governors, will show up to beg for money.
Another reason is DC is a cheerless armpit. Lame. Deadly boring. So many of the licensed thieves, I mean public servants, take off to have fun in NYC on the weekends, especially if it's a long weekend.
But I digress. Theoretically a hyperloop between NYC and DC makes perfect sense. There's already a lot of rail traffic between DC, NYC, and Boston. It's an efficient way to travel because you can go from city center to city center without the hassle of taking a taxi to the airport (because mass transit never can seem to connect to airports in America), waiting two hours for your anal probe and fondling from the TSA, and getting shoe-horned into a tiny seat and imprisoned for the duration of the flight. Walk out of work, walk into Penn Station, hop on the Acela, work in your seat with the outlet and wifi, and before you know it you're in city center DC or Boston.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday October 23 2017, @02:08PM (5 children)
But I digress. Theoretically a hyperloop between NYC and DC makes perfect sense. There's already a lot of rail traffic between DC, NYC, and Boston. It's an efficient way to travel because you can go from city center to city center without the hassle of taking a taxi to the airport (because mass transit never can seem to connect to airports in America), waiting two hours for your anal probe and fondling from the TSA, and getting shoe-horned into a tiny seat and imprisoned for the duration of the flight. Walk out of work, walk into Penn Station, hop on the Acela, work in your seat with the outlet and wifi, and before you know it you're in city center DC or Boston.
But work downtown in NY and Penn is hardly walking distance, and in many cases it's 2 metro lines away. DCA isn't far from central washington, indeed nearer to some locations than Union. It's on the metro too.
That said LGA isn't great with the current roadworks, and most of the time I do take the train -- last time I took a delta LGA-DCA though and took 2.5 hours from hotel in lower east side to office in georgetown.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday October 23 2017, @02:23PM (4 children)
Herald Square in NYC (adjacent to Penn Station, where Macy's is) hosts a lot more companies these days beyond the Fashion District; so it's walkable for those guys. You can take the A train there in a couple hops from Wall Street or from Midtown, too. So it's fast, much faster than taking a car.
LGA and JFK both should have subway stations in the airports, the way Schiphol does in Amsterdam. It is profoundly irritating that the Taxi & Limousine Commission has perennially killed that obvious measure.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday October 23 2017, @06:20PM (3 children)
Indeed, Heathrow has aa subway and a fast rail link into London. Stanstead and Gatwick have fast rail links too, as to Manchester and Birmingham into their cities (Birmingham has links to London too). Toronto too, and Singapore. I think Delhi does, but I've not used that. DME does - I always take the train when I go to Moscow. Tokyo NRT is clearly a train only due to the distance. PEK has a train which I've taken in the past. Shanghai has a maglev, although you then have to transfer to metro. Hong Kong has a fast train. Berlin isn't great, but Rome is fine with trains, Athens is on the metro, Paris CDG has a TGV station and RER, Edinburgh on the tram. Brussels is on a train line, but again it's quicker to get a taxi if you're not going to where the train is.
There's a few stations that are lacking -- in the UK Liverpool, Glasgow, Luton (bus then train), Bristol, and the famous Teeside airport, which has 1 train a week (and the station is nowhere near the airport, hence the parliamentary service)
In the US though it's not all terrible: Washington DCA has a metro, with IAD getting a metro extension. PHL had a rail link into town. EWR and BWI have airport links to a station too, not great, but not awful. I think BOS has a metro.
Even JFK has an 'airtrain' link to the metro, but a direct metro (or LIRR) station would have been far better. Still Uber does the job (no way I'm paying for one of those hideous NYC cabs)
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday October 23 2017, @07:40PM (1 child)
You forgot LAX, where they are finally building a light rail ... to a shuttle to get you in the same traffic jam as everyone else trying to get to the actual terminals.
I used to grumble about ORD being dated, before I realized the insanity of LAX.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday October 23 2017, @08:16PM
LAX is its own special type of stupid :(
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Monday October 23 2017, @10:23PM
Sometimes the existence of a subway station is not advertised. I have flown for years in/out of Mexico City Airport and until last year I didn’t know there was a Metro station right there, just kind of hidden in a corner out of the way.
Now Frankfurt is to me one of the best airports, you can practically get to anywhere else via bus or rail right from the airport and it is clearly marked.
(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?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday October 23 2017, @05:16PM
Watch out for The Hand, villainous landlords, and vigilantes though.
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(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.
(Score: 1) by jrmcferren on Monday October 23 2017, @08:20PM (1 child)
Significant traffic in this region, I'm surprised Boston was not included as that's a major city in Amtrak on the Acela Express (Fast Train*). I don't know about links between Baltimore and Washington, or Philly and Baltimore, but I do know you can Travel between Philly and NYC by commuter rail by changing trains in (I think) Trenton.
* Not bullet train fast though.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday October 23 2017, @08:21PM
The Acela Express *is* a "bullet train"... by American standards.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Monday October 23 2017, @10:39PM
Hope not. The capacity of Hyperloop will be small. It will be like what Concorde was to sub-sonic airliners, and what the Hindenberg was to ocean liners.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @12:39AM
I doubt the average Joe is going to afford a ticket on this any time soon. The Government can pay for all the politicians to ride it, and the multi-national corporations will pay for their lobbyists. The rest of us will only dream about accessing it.