So this week Elon Musk tweeted that he'd gotten "verbal government approval" to build an underground tunnel system running New York to Washington DC, with a stop in Philadelphia and Baltimore along the way, and that the trip would take 29 minutes. Twenty nine minutes. Amtrak's fastest train on that route, the Acela, takes something like two hours and forty five minutes and costs more than a plane ticket half the time.
I want to like this. I really do. I've spent enough miserable hours on NJ Transit staring at a delay board that never resolves into an actual platform number to want literally any alternative to exist. But "verbal approval" is not a thing that means anything in infrastructure terms, and it bugs me that so much coverage this week just repeated the claim like it was a press release from the Department of Transportation.
Verbal approval from who, specifically? A tunnel under four states (five if you count DC as its own thing, which it sort of is and sort of isn't) touches roughly a hundred different jurisdictions, each with their own permitting process, environmental review, utility easements, and property rights fights that can and do take a decade before anyone breaks ground. The Boring Company, which is Musk's tunneling outfit, has at this point dug maybe a couple thousand feet under a parking lot in Los Angeles. That's the entire body of work. Going from "we dug a hole in a parking lot" to "we have permission to connect four major East Coast cities" in the space of one tweet is the kind of claim that should get more skepticism than it does, not less, because Musk has a real track record of things eventually shipping. That track record is exactly why people give the tunnel claim more credit than it's earned.
None of this is really about Musk being a liar or a con artist, for what it's worth — I don't think that's what's happening. I think it's closer to him thinking out loud in public, treating a friendly phone call or a hallway conversation with some agency staffer as the same thing as a permit. Which, fine, that's a personality trait, and it's clearly worked out for him more than it hasn't. But it puts tech journalists in this weird position where the responsible move is to write "there is no such thing as verbal government approval for a multi-state tunnel project" and instead most of the coverage I saw just ran the number, 29 minutes, in a headline with a rocket emoji basically implied.
I dont think hyperloop-style tunnels are a bad idea in the abstract. I actually think the concept of getting transit underground and out of weather and traffic entirely is a genuinely underrated approach, more so than surface high speed rail, which has to fight NIMBYs over every mile of visible track. The tunnel version is boring (pun very much intended, sorry) and unglamorous and doesn't require convincing a single homeowner that a train is going to be looking into their backyard. That part of the pitch makes sense to me.
What doesn't make sense is skipping over forty steps of a permitting process that exists for actual reasons — utility lines, subway tunnels already down there, building foundations, groundwater, the works. And acting like the hard part is basically done because somebody in a government office said something encouraging on the phone. The hard part of a project like this was never the digging, not really, even though digging is what gets the cool videos. The hard part is legal and procedural and deeply boring in the un-fun sense of the word, and that part doesn't move because a billionaire is impatient about his commute.
Anyway. Comic-Con is happening in San Diego right now too, and half my Twitter feed is trailers and cosplay photos instead of tunnel skepticism, so maybe I'm the only one still thinking about this on a Saturday. If the tunnel actually gets built in my lifetime I'll be thrilled and I'll say so. I just don't think a single tweet from Thursday counts as evidence that it will.