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Elon Musk has a longstanding habit of trying to shake up the status quo, from Tesla, to SolarCity, to his ideas for a Hyperloop, and finally his new drill-boring machine, appropriately titled The Boring Company. While the first two examples are actively developed products, Hyperloops remain in their infancy, with only short, slow demonstrations of the technology appearing to date. The Boring Company isn’t a huge priority for Musk, but if what he calls a “verbal government approval” to build a Hyperloop from New York City to DC pans out, that could change.
According to Musk, the Hyperloop from NYC to DC would follow this route: New York City – Philadelphia – Baltimore – Washington DC, with a total travel time of 29 minutes. But a follow-up tweet put a bit of cold water on that claim, noting that “official approval” hasn’t been obtained yet.
Moreover, transportation experts say Musk would need approval from the federal Department of Transportation, six states, 17 counties, and “numerous” cities. That’s going to put the kibosh on any lightning-fast plan to get a Hyperloop up and running. Getting transport approved in the US is a long and drawn-out process at every level of government, and Musk isn’t likely to change that with exciting appeals to Hyperloop speed or his boring company. In fact, other organizations, like Amtrak, are likely to fight against the deal, since it would directly threaten one of the of the company’s most profitable routes, the Acela Express, which runs through most of the same route that Musk’s Hyperloop would cover.
We also don’t know if the Hyperloop would make intermediate stops at various stations within cities or between them. These factors can make a train less fast on the whole, since stopping and picking up passengers will inevitably impact average speed, but Musk is still claiming 29 minutes from NYC to DC. That kind of speed would seem to imply very few stops along the way, backed up by his statement that the Hyperloop will run from “city center to city center with up to a dozen or more entry/exit elevators in each city.”
Right now, the smart explanation is that what Musk is really looking for is funding for The Boring Company — a fact the man seemed to confirm in a response to his initial tweet.
It’s an interesting idea to run a Hyperloop in this particular corridor. But Musk is a long way from finalizing his concept or securing necessary permissions. So far, Hyperloop demonstrations have been small-scale and relatively slow, at around 70 mph. That’s not going to get you from NYC to DC in 29 minutes even if there were no stops along the way. While Musk has said he wants The Boring Company to be capable of digging and reinforcing tunnels simultaneously, he has yet to develop a commercial device that can perform that task.
There’s a lot of interesting things here, but we wouldn’t hold our breath for high-speed underground transport of this type any time soon.
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