Does "verbal approval" mean... anything, in the context of local construction regulation?

Best of luck to Musk, but there must be a misunderstanding going on here, or he is being somewhat misleading in use of the term "approval".

I have to assume there's a mountain of regulation for established / already-in-the-legislation transportation that would prevent this. If anything, an unproven (safety-wise) hyperloop would have an orders of magnitude harder time on top of that.

(I'm not based in the States, so I don't know, but it seems implausible that this wouldn't be the case).

The PR world of building momentum is probably a bigger win. This is the third time I've seen this so far today, for example. The single tweet being rebroadcast out a bunch, despite just being verbal confirmation, might build some inertia that could help later when dealing with real confirmation in contracts