Boring Company
Elon Musk presents his LA Tunnel Plan
Elon Musk’s Boring Co presented its plan to build an underground transportation tunnel through Culver City, California, at a well-attended council meeting Monday night, another sign that the entrepreneur is serious about pushing forward with his latest venture.
Musk, 46, is the chief executive officer of both Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies. But he is a man of expanding interests and side projects, the future of transportation being top among them.
“The purpose of Boring Company is to alleviate soul-destroying traffic and augment public transit,” Jehn Balajadia, its operations coordinator, said at the beginning of her presentation.
Balajadia stressed that the company isn’t seeking any public funding and that passenger trips would be comparable or cost less than existing forms of public transit in the region. Culver City made it clear that it would have to invest an enormous amount of staff time and hire consultants to properly evaluate the merits of the proposal and its impacts on the community.
Culver City is a 13sq km municipality of roughly 39,000 residents surrounded mostly by the City of Los Angeles. Musk himself did not speak at Monday’s meeting.
Musk first unveiled his idea for a “Hyperloop” — a plan to move people from San Francisco to Los Angeles through a tube in half an hour — in a 57-page white paper in August 2013 because he was frustrated with California’s plans for high-speed rail. His idea inspired a generation of college students and startups to work on the technology.
Musk, who lives in Bel Air, first floated plans for a tunnel system in December 2016,
“To solve the problem of souldestroying traffic, roads must go 3D, which means either flying cars or tunnels,” Boring says on its website. “Unlike flying cars, tunnels are weatherproof, out of sight and won’t fall on your head.”