Hyperloop From NYC To D.C. Gets Approved

In a Tweet on Thursday, entrepreneur Elon Musk teased East Coast residents that his highly anticipated, blazingly fast Hyperloop One has received "verbal government approval" for an underground route connecting New York to Washington, D.C.

Just received verbal govt approval for The Boring Company to build an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop. NY-DC in 29 mins.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 20, 2017

As a refresher, Musk's ambitious mode of transportation involves pods that travel through tubes likened to a vacuum—the lack of air resistance means that theoretically the system could transport passengers at a top speed of over 700 miles per hour. According to NPR, Musk states that this recently approved project would connect New York to Philadelphia before making a connection to Baltimore and, finally, Washington, D.C.

Though his original Tweet made it seem like he's quite confident that in the near—OK, probably distant—future we'll be zooming across the Eastern Seaboard in less time than it takes to ride the subway into Manhattan, he clarified in a later post that this Hyperloop route still needs quite a bit of work before it receives a more formal stamp of approval.

Furthermore, Fortune reports that representatives from all four of the cities Musk mentioned have yet to even hold "substantive discussions on the proposal."