The Washington D.C. Department of Transport has issued a preliminary approval permit to Elon Musk‘s Boring Company to start digging under an abandoned D.C parking lot near the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms at New York Avenue. According to The Washington Post, it hasn’t been any official information on how extensive the digging will be.
A spokesperson for the Boring Company said “A New York Avenue location, if constructed, could become a station as part of the Hyperloop network of ultra-high-speed main lines and slower city loops. Stations in a Loop or Hyperloop system are small in size and widely distributed in a network. That’s very different from large-station terminals considered for train systems.”
The abandoned parking lot is set to be turned into a Hyperloop station that would transport people through futuristic pods on a cushion of air in tunnels to specific sites. Musk initially stated via Twitter that he received a verbal approval for an East Coast Tunnel project that would, as proposed and suggested by Musk, connect New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and D.C.
The Washington D.C Hyperloop is just one of the stations of the project, the real charm of the Hyperloop comes in with the transportation between major East Coast cities in less than half an hour, providing an evident state of the art transportation system in The United States that could change the way people handle their job locations across different states.
These Hyperloop pods could transport Washington passengers
A Hyperloop test track is being developed in the outskirt of Las Vegas, and it intends on testing the efficiency of the Hyperloop pods.
A group of German students recently won a pod design contest sponsored by Space X in which student and non-student teams had to provide a sub-scale model of the designed pod to demonstrate the technical feasibility of the design. The track competition was held in April 2017, in which the Technical University of Munich came up with top honors.
The Hyperloop pods must have a series of specifications for the test runs. The braking system of the Hyperloop ought to always have an emergency foam pit, and a network access pad provided by Pace X in the new designs provided by the Pod contestants.
There are three main designs for the pods. The first one is the air bearing design which consists of breaking the pod’s speed with air cushioning. This was Musk’s main idea. The second one consists on Magnetic levitation, this was provided by the MIT team on the pod contest, and the third one consists on the usage of high-speed wheels for under 100mph trips and air bearings for higher speeds.
Source: Teslarati