Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk is believed to have just gone past a bureaucratic hurdle in carrying out his long-planned project to ease Los Angeles traffic woes by building an underground rail system. He excitedly announced on Twitter that he got a verbal nod of approval from the US government to proceed with the NY—Phil-Balt-DC hyperloop.
Early this year, Musk had posted on social media a photograph of a baseball cap with the name The Boring Company inscribed on it. After forming the business venture, he lost no time living up to the challenge of pursuing the network that will be whisking passengers from New York City to Washington, D.C.
in a matter of minutes.
Ambitious project
As US President Donald Trump’s former tech investor, Musk has broached the idea of a hyperloop early on. The Chief Executive had cast his sights on a high-speed rail, but Musk maintained that the Hyperloop he envisioned could change the transport landscape in a massive way.
In terms of cost, the costs of building the underground road tunnel had been described as gargantuan. A representative of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California Los Angeles noted that the potential costs were "incomprehensible." Elon Musk, however, remained undaunted. The Tesla CEO is not directly involved in various other Hyperloop projects, some of which are in the Middle East and Asia, though he recently spearheaded a Hyperloop pod contest.
The Hyperloop Vision
Elon Musk’s Hyperloop vision includes tubes between key destinations where people along with cargo housed in capsules will be propelled at supersonic speed. There will be numerous entry/exit elevators in each city center. Musk estimated that the cost of the hyperloop line he intends to build will only be a fraction of a modern high-speed rail’s cost.
Even a visionary tech leader like Elon Musk needs all the support he can get. He had earlier urged fellow Americans to start lobbying federal and state officials to get the traffic-easing underground network going. Musk himself has been in a whirl of activities, and has engaged in promising conversations with city officials about the tunnel network that will be transporting not just pedestrians but also cars and bikes.
The underground tunnel project has been met with much skepticism by Musk’s online followers. Yet there are those who see a ray of hope in decongesting Los Angeles’ traffic. Certain quarters have also started mulling on the possibility of developing the tunnel somewhere else.
