San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Innovation or tunnel vision?
Experts weigh Musk-backed firm’s underground loop
Greg Griffin is intrigued by the Boring Co.’s proposal to build an underground transportation loop between San Antonio International Airport and downtown — and by the Alamo Regional Mobility Authority’s interest in the project.
Intrigued, but not necessarily in a good way.
Griffin, an assistant professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Texas at San Antonio, has been talking with his graduate students about the Alamo RMA’s March 16 decision to try to work out a development agreement with the tunnel maker.
True, Griffin and his class don’t have much information about the project to go on.
The Alamo RMA and the Boring Co., which is is backed by SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, so far have kept most of the plan’s details under wraps. Neither one has publicly addressed the route the loop would take from the airport to the center city, the potential environmental impact of all that boring or the right-of-way challenges with property owners.
The biggest looming question is also the most basic: Why spend hundreds of millions of dollars to shuttle tourists, conventioneers and businesspeople underground for a trip of less than 10 miles — one that usually takes fewer than 15 minutes on surface roads?
The stretch of U.S. 281 between
the airport and downtown didn’t make the state’s list of top 100 most congested roadways.
Despite the lack of details, Griffin and his students have concerns — including ones centered on the Boring Co.’s ability to pull off such a large undertaking.
“What we do know is that the Boring Co.’s projects are not viable in other cities,” he said, referring to once-hailed plans that stalled in Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., over the past five years.
The company was founded in 2016 and, to date, has completed one project: a $52 million, 1.7mile transportation loop under the Las Vegas Convention Center. The company had to deal with a single property owner: the city of Las Vegas.
In October, however, it won approval from Las Vegas officials to move forward with building the Vegas Loop, a proposed 29-mile tunnel to carry tourists across the city.
The company is also currently looking to build projects in Miami and Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
The proposed airport-todowntown loop in San Antonio, which would move visitors back and forth in emissions-less Teslas, would be significantly more complex and expensive than the Las Vegas Convention Center loop, which opened in June.
The plan could include a leg linking the Convention Center to the Pearl area on Broadway.
Drilling for dollars
The Austin-based tunneling firm estimates its proposed
transportation loop here would cost between $247 million and $287 million. The Alamo RMA would cover most of the expense by selling revenue bonds, which would be repaid with revenue from passenger fares and possibly other sources. In other words, taxpayers wouldn’t be on the hook for bond payments.
The Boring Co. estimates the loop could bring in annual revenue of $25 million.
“At the end of the day … we’re going to need to have an outside third party do a revenue study and provide an opinion as to whether or not the projected revenue streams that are required to finance the project are achievable or not,” Alamo RMA Chairman Michael Lynd Jr. said.
“Ultimately, it’s got to be financeable,” added Lynd, CEO of real estate development firm Kairoi Residential. “As the RMA, we don’t have a bunch of money sitting in a bank account that we could throw at a project like this. So, ultimately, we’re looking to sell revenue bonds that are going to be supported by the project.”
The Boring Co. would kick in between $27 million and $45 million for the first phase of construction. If it completes a development agreement with the Alamo RMA, the company could start building the loop in 12 months, complete the first leg in 18 months and finish the entire project in 36 months.
To Griffin, it’s a question of priorities.
“There’s a lot of projects we could do for a quarter of a billion dollars,” he said. “For the same cost, you can build out an entire pedestrian and bicycle transportation system, you can improve sidewalks and streets, and create unique visible projects that connect major destinations.
“I’m not saying that we shouldn’t look at the Boring Co.’s project, but we need to consider what the community wants.”
For their part, city officials took a pass on the project when the Boring Co. discussed it with them last summer, largely because of San Antonio’s bigger