MUSK TOUTS NY-TO-DC HYPERLOOP PROJECT
Innovator says he has ‘verbal’ government approval to build underground system that would carry passengers between the cities in 29 minutes
Billionaire innovator Elon Musk said Thursday he has “verbal” government approval to build an ultra-high-speed underground rail system in the Northeast, offering hope to travelers overwhelmed by mass-transit failures despite skepticism about such an ambitious project.
In a series of mysterious tweets that might not be taken seriously if they came from any other corporate executive, Musk flummoxed the transportation industry with claims that he is pursuing a network that would whisk passengers from New York City to Washington, D.C., in 29 minutes.
Transit experts say that gargantuan costs and prodigious bureaucratic hurdles would make such a plan extremely difficult to pull off.
Still, Musk has a track record of building groundbreaking companies from scratch — including electric-car maker Tesla and space travel firm SpaceX. Moreover, he plunged his own money into those ventures, a history that might hearten travelers stuck in New Jersey Turnpike traffic jams or delays along Amtrak’s Northeast rail passenger corridor.
Musk’s bold statements come a few months after he formed a venture called The Boring Co. to manufacture faster and more efficient tunnel-boring machines.
“Just received verbal govt approval for The Boring Company to build an underground NYPhil-Balt-DC Hyperloop,” Musk tweeted.
He added that the system would ferry passengers from “city center to city center in each case, with up to a dozen or more entry/exit elevators in each city.”
And he urged Americans to lobby federal and state officials “if you want this to happen fast.”
Madeline Brozen, associate director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UCLA, said the potential costs are “incomprehensible.”
A 120-mile above-ground stretch of the most comparable U.S. project, a high-speed rail project in California, will cost an estimated $7 billion to $10 billion, she said. But underground projects are more expensive, the hyperloop proposed by Musk is unproven technology and the innovator’s system theoretically would travel five times faster than California’s.
Similarly, the phase one expansion of New York City’s Second Avenue Subway opened for riders Jan. 1 — nearly a century after the project was proposed. Built at an estimated cost of $4.45 billion, the expansion included three new subway stations along an underground route of no more than 2 miles.
Winning approval for a project such as the one envisioned by Musk likely would require oversight reviews and authorization from transportation authorities and other government agencies that are “territorial” and bureaucratic by nature, Brozen said.
“It’s quite easy to draw up enthusiasm for a project in 140 characters when you have 10 million followers on Twitter,” she said. “It’s a very different ballgame when you’re trying to bring a megaproject to fruition.”
It was not immediately clear what Musk meant by “verbal” government approval, which carries little weight in a world in which tunneling can require navigating a byzantine thicket of regulations.
However, a White House spokesman said the Trump administration has had “promising conversations” with Musk and the Boring Co. and is “committed to transformative infrastructure projects” under the premise that “our greatest solutions have often come from the ingenuity and drive of the private sector.”
The U.S. Department of Transportation referred questions to the White House.
Having lost his patience with legendary California traffic, Musk recently vowed to build a short tunnel from his office to the Los Angeles airport before building a network of tunnels throughout the city. He has described a network of underground tunnels ferrying self-driving cars at high speeds as a solution to urban congestion.
After New York-to-Washington, Musk said he would probably proceed with a hyperloop from Los Angeles to San Francisco and one in Texas.
“It’s easy quiteto draw up enthusiasm for a project in 140 characters when you have 10 million followers on Twitter.” Madeline Brozen, associate director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UCLA