Remember the days before Elon Musk's DOGE, when the major discussion in D.C. was his fantastical hyperloop? No? Hardly surprising as it’s considered one of the biggest transport flops in D.C. history. We talked with Matt Ribel from Washingtonian for the full story of how it went down.
What’s the Hyperloop and Why Did DC Want It?
The hyperloop concept dates back to 2013, when Elon Musk and a team of SpaceX engineers proposed what they called the "fifth mode of transportation" — a vacuum-sealed tunnel between D.C. and Baltimore, eventually adding Philadelphia and New York — that would eliminate drag and propel passengers in pods at roughly 700 miles per hour.
In 2017, Musk suddenly took to Twitter to announce he had "verbal government approval" to build a hyperloop connecting D.C. and New York, a trip that would take 29 minutes. He claimed it would be 100% privately funded and would be done in two years.
But nobody in the government knew what he was talking about. Reporters reached out to state agencies, governors' offices, and mayors' offices along the proposed route — and found…nothing. “Eventually you actually get this trail of breadcrumbs that leads back to none other than real estate heir Jared Kushner, who seems to be the driving force behind this project,” explained Ribel.
The Hyperloop One test site in the desert north of Las Vegas. (UCG/Getty Images)
Where It All Went Wrong
It quickly became clear that The Boring Company — Musk's Hyperloop venture — struggled to answer even fundamental questions when meeting with transit officials. Had they accounted for D.C.'s notoriously wet, unstable soil? What if it ruptured? What about seismic activity? The answers were consistently no. “ Those [meetings] were described to me as an unmitigated disaster,” said Ribel.
Additionally, the technology itself was non-existent with prototypes struggling to make it work safely at even 200 mph, nevermind 700 mph. By 2018, the goalposts shifted dramatically. The new vision became essentially 16-person buses in a tunnel. Then that became Tesla sedans, which they showed off at a press demo.
By the time a draft environmental assessment was released in 2019, the project — now just called “The Loop” — was essentially an alarmingly unsafe lithium-powered underground shuttle with a daily capacity of less than a single Metro car. Nobody was on board. Eventually, the Boring Company stopped communicating at all, and by 2021 scrubbed the project from their website.
What's Next?
In short, nothing. The project quietly died in 2021, and Ribel unearthed its history for his recent piece in the Washingtonian. “ Nobody wants to revisit this chapter,” said Ribel, “People are embarrassed by this, as they should be.” The proposed Hyperloop terminal in NoMa was sold to a developer for luxury apartments, its web domain was taken over, and it effectively disappeared from the DMV zeitgeist.
In the meantime, the transit improvements that would actually move the needle — light rail, expanded bus service, increased Metro investment — are the unglamorous options that keep getting passed over. For this reason and others, many were glad it died. But if you close your eyes really hard on the red line, you can almost pretend you’re on a 700 mph hyperloop, right?
