Elon Musk sees people-moving Las Vegas tunnel opening in 2020
San Francisco, US - A nearly mile-long tunnel in Las Vegas meant to showcase a ‘traffic busting’ alternative for overcrowded cities should be completed next year, innovative entrepreneur Elon Musk said on Twitter.
The people-moving tunnel is being built by The Boring Company, one of several future-oriented enterprises founded by Musk, along with the Tesla electric-car company and SpaceX, which develops launch vehicles.
The billionaire tweeted that ‘Boring Co is completing its first commercial tunnel in Vegas, going from Convention Center to Strip’.
In a second tweet he said it would be ‘hopefully fully operational in 2020’.
The Las Vegas Convention Center is a sprawling complex being further enlarged - the 1.3km tunnel would facilitate travel within the centre and to the city’s famous Strip, where many of its major hotels and casinos are located.
Las Vegas officials selected The Boring Company in March to design, build and manage twin tunnels capable of transporting passengers in small, autonomous vehicles, each holding eight to 16 passengers.
Musk has long advocated a futuristic underground train system, called the Hyperloop, that would allow passenger capsules on Tesla-built chassis to move through low-pressure tubes at high speeds.
He aspires eventually to build such a system linking Washington and New York along the busy US Northeast corridor; he has also proposed projects for Chicago and Los Angeles.
Musk’s company last year showed reporters a new test tunnel in California, but Las Vegas is Boring’s first paying customer.
The cost of the tunnel, originally estimated to be as low as US$35mn, has since risen to US$52.5mn, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.