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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, 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Anyway your impressions are about 30 years out of date.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.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]