The following quotation is taken from a recent article in the New York Times.
. . . Mr. Musk said he had been given “verbal” government “approval” for his vision, in which one of his companies, the Boring Company, would build an underground transportation system connecting New York City to Philadelphia to Baltimore and on to the nation’s capital — enabling people to make the trip in the unheard-of time of 29 minutes.
It takes New Yorkers longer than that just to travel from one end of Manhattan to the other by subway.
When I read this article I had three immediate thoughts.
- Why not make Richmond one of the destinations?
- Musk understands the constraints that two dimensional travel imposes (ask anyone in Ashland or Hanover). So he says that our systems need to be three dimensional. My initial vision for hyperloop between Richmond and D.C. was to have elevated tubes over the I-95 median. Musk is going the other way: underground.
- Verbal approval isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.
