The Boring Company
Elon Musk tweeted that he has received "verbal agreement" to build a super-fast, 29-minute "hyper loop" taking passengers from New York to Washington, D.C. Traveling within an airless tube, passengers could disembark or get on along the way in Baltimore and Philadelphia.
There were no further immediate details, and no confirmation from any officials along the route. But, should such a system be built, it would out-perform any type of current travel options in the East.
The bottom line: The idea still seems outlandish from almost every vantage point — technology, land acquisition, expense, and so on. Yet, given Musk's foray into space and his formidable electric car company, we have learned not to underestimate Musk. He even has a rival: On July 13, a company called Hyperloop One conducted a slow test of its technology on a Nevada track and is currently looking at 11 serious proposals for where to build a working model, with the idea of reducing the number to three.
Go deeper: The idea for a hyper loop seemed fantastical when, back in 2013, Musk first proposed such a transportation system from San Francisco to Los Angeles. But since then, his Boring Company says he has completed the first section of the Los Angeles portion, and the notion has taken fire, with proposals for such loops from Chicago to Pittsburgh, Cheyenne, Wyoming, to Pueblo, Colorado — 2,600 proposals in all, according to one count.