Elon Musk Now Wants to Dig Another Tunnel Under LA
The Boring Company sure sounds sexy. It's founded and funded by Elon Musk, the guy who makes electric cars (Tesla) and sends rockets into space (SpaceX). It has come up with a new-albeit unproven-concept for dismantling traffic. It wants to build underground creations that you, mere human, can ride at speeds up to to 150 mph, without ever encountering a speck of traffic.
THE BORING COMPANY sure sounds sexy. It’s founded and funded by Elon Musk, the guy who makes electric cars (Tesla) and sends rockets into space (SpaceX). It has come up with a new—albeit unproven—concept for dismantling traffic. It wants to build underground creations that you, mere human, can ride at speeds up to to 150 mph, without ever encountering a speck of traffic. But before it sinks its machines into the ground and tunnels to victory, the Boring Company has to do something truly monumental: get past local government.
On Monday evening, Boring Company operations chief Jehn Balajadia stood before the city council of LA County's Culver City, and spent 45 minutes explaining why Musk wants and deserves the right to dig a tunnel under their homes. The sometimes chippy meeting was packed with members of the public, and highlighted both the exciting and not quite consistent elements of the transportation company's plans.
Balajadia said the Boring Company is done with its tech development phase, and is ready to carve out a "proof of process" tunnel that would run 6.5 miles between the city of Los Angeles and Culver City, its neighbor to the west. Part of the goal here is to test the company's ability to build across jurisdictions and handle all the hurdles that entails. She said the company has already asked LA for an excavation permit, and is working with Caltrans, the state transportation agency, to secure the right of way beneath public roads.
Musk came up with the Boring Company in late 2016 while stuck in LA traffic. He could destroy the scourge of congestion, he figured, by building layers upon layers of underground tunnels, each just wide enough for a personal car or a multi-passenger pod. Those vehicles would ride on electric skates that would zoom everyone along at triple-digit speeds. And, he insisted, he could do it far more cheaply and at least four times faster than typical tunneling tech—a claim he hasn't proven, and which tunneling engineers doubt. Longer tunnels between cities, Musk added, could contain the hyperloop, his idea for a levitating train that works in a near-vacuum tube.
By early last year, Musk had purchased a used tunnel boring machine and began building a test trench under SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, in LA County. By August, the Boring Company had secured the city of Hawthorne’s permission to build a 2-mile test tunnel beneath the city streets.
Balajadia focused on the “Loop,” the small pods meant to transport multiple passengers, rather than the individual Teslas highlighted in the Boring Company’s first promotional video. She said the Boring Company’s system would complement the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s expanding public transportation network, and that it would not ask for any taxpayer funding. And she said the cost of a ride in a Boring Company pod would be “comparable, if not lower, than than any existing public transportation.” (An LA Metro bus ride costs $1.75.)
Balajadia also revealed a few more new details about the Boring Company’s hard to nail down technical plans. Though the tunnel system will have many entrances and exits, any given pod will take all its riders to a single destination, rather than pausing at each stop, like a subway. In a document it submitted to the Culver City Council, the Boring Company writes, “The electric skates are faster than conventional subway cars, and are autonomous vehicles. Most importantly, Loop is an ‘express’ public transit system... Therefore, unlike trains, the skate’s average speed is very close to its maximum speed.”
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