South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Tesla tunnel to the beach may not be a pipe dream
FORT LAUDERDALE — Imagine whizzing through an underground tunnel that travels below Las Olas Boulevard and the Intracoastal Waterway all the way to the beach. Your chauffeur is a se lf-driving Te sla that drops passengers off at the beach for as little as $5 a pop.
A second tunnel shuttles passengers back downtown, offering stops along the way.
That ambitious utopian vision might just become reality by the end of 2022.
So says Mayor Dean Trantalis, whose ongoing talks with rocket man Elon Musk’s Boring Co. have some wondering whether underground tunnels could be one way of killing gridlock on South Florida’s jam-packed roads.
Boring Co. officials, currently in talks with Fort Lauderdale about the possibility of building tunnels here, are eager to find out, the mayor says.
Trantalis is just as eager to find out whether tunnels could be an alternative to another plan: a longsought bridge for commuter rail that would hover over the New River at a height of 55 feet, splicing through the city’s growing downtown. A pair of train tunnels
would send Brightline commuters underground instead, saving cars on the road and boaters on the New River from having to wait on the trains, Trantalis says.
They’d also cost a lot less. Boring Co. officials estimate the tunnels would cost $45 million apiece. And a bridge would cost $445 million, according to state transportation officials.
But first, the mayor says Fort Lauderdale and the Boring Co. would likely tackle the pair of one-way tunnels to the beach.
“We’re working on them simultaneously,” Trantalis said. “But the train tunnel is more complicated and will require more research and design. This other tunnel is more in their wheelhouse and would take a few months to build.”
At $10 million a mile, the tunnels to the beach would be 2.6 miles long and cost $52 million.
The twin tunnels, each 12 feet in diameter, would transport passengers under Las Olas Boulevard all the way from the Brightline station downtown to the beach at A1A, with several stops along the way. Passengers would have the option of getting out of the car at certain spots and taking an escalator to the street.
“People would park their car at the Brightline station, then be chauffeured from there to the beach,” Trantalis said. “They’d avoid all that traffic and be let out right in front of the beach — and wouldn’t have to worry about parking. And they’d be driven back in a Tesla. This would go on all day long. This way they could avoid traffic and avoid contributing to the traffic.”
Talk of building underground tunnels to slay traffic jams has some gridlock-weary South Floridians sitting up and taking notice. But not everyone is a believer.
Pie in the sky?
“It sounds a little far-fetched,” said Elliot Wolf, Fort Lauderdale resident and restaurateur. “Building a tunnel to the beach sounds great, but I don’t see it happening. The reality is we have other infrastructure issues that need to be addressed first.”
Others say it’s worth a shot.
Mary Fertig and her neighbors in the Idlewyld neighborhood on the east end of Las Olas may have a great view of the Intracoastal, but they sometimes feel trapped by all the traffic heading to and from the beach.
“If it addresses traffic congestion and gets cars off the road, I definitely think it’s worth looking into,” Fertig said of the proposed beach tunnel. “At certain times of the year it’s total gridlock. Sometimes it’s difficult to leave your home on the weekend. Traffic has doubled. And a lot of those people are coming to the beach.”
The idea intrigues Charlie Ladd, chair of the Downtown Development Authority and a developer who owns property on Las Olas.
“It would be fascinating if it works,” Ladd said. “Anything they can do to reduce traffic across roads and waterways would be wonderful. The issue is can we afford it and would the tunnel move enough people to be cost effective?”
Digging deep
Potentially, the tunnels could transport several thousand people per hour, City Manager Chris Lagerbloom said.
Boring Co. officials, who did not respond to requests for comment, have already visited Fort Lauderdale to get the lay of the land.
Right now, they’re researching how far they’d have to dig to build the tunnel.
This week, they asked Fort Lauderdale to send 15 additional core samples to help determine how far they’d have to drill
down to get to buildable soil.
The bottom of the tunnel likely would be 21 feet or more below the road surface, Lagerbloom said. No one can say yet how deep they’d have to dig below the Intracoastal.
“It’s not as though it’s impossible to do,” Lagerbloom said. “It just depends on what type of boring equipment they use and what they use to harden the tunnel. They are confident it can be done. It’s just a matter of how.”
The hardest part will be tunneling through downtown, said Fred Bloetscher, associate dean of undergraduate studies and a civil engineering professor at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton.
“You have to dodge all the foundations of all those buildings,” Bloetscher said. “They may go 40 or 50 feet. The taller the building, the deeper the foundation. You just have to make sure you don’t hit any of those pilings.”
Then you also need to steer clear of the sewer lines. And the water lines, too. But than can be done, Bloetscher said.
If the tunnels get built, they could get flooded with water and sand in the event of a hurricane, he said.
“Storm surge can potentially flood the tunnel,” Bloetscher said. “If you get 10 feet of storm surge, I think the tunnel gets full.”
But there’s a solution for that, too.
“You could use the equivalent of a garage door to keep the water out, but it’s way heavier and more resistant that a garage door,” he said. ‘It would seal the entrance to the tunnel and not let water or sand flood into the tunnel.”
If water does get in, you can pump it out in a matter of days. Sand would be more of a headache.
“They’d have to go in there with excavators to get sand out,” Bloetscher said. “You’d have to go in and put it in the dump truck, one vehicle at a time.”
But some say that’s the cost of doing business in South Florida.
Commissioner Steve Glassman says the No. 1 complaint he gets yearround is about the hellish traffic. What if sending commuters underground is the answer?
“I don’t think people think it’s pie in the sky,” Glassman said. “Folks are intrigued by it. They just don’t know how doable it is. We’re at the very beginning.”
Undeterred by naysayers, Trantalis is taking the lead.
In mid-February, he led a delegation of city, county and railroad officials to visit Boring Co. tunnels in Las Vegas and Hawthorne, Calif., outside Los Angeles. They also met with Musk’s chief geologist and got a close look at the boring device used to tunnel through the earth.
Holy cow!
Musk founded the Boring Co. in 2016, citing his growing frustration with L.A. traffic.
Lagerbloom still recalls his trip through the company’s test tunnel at Musk’s SpaceX headquarters in a self-driving Tesla that booked along at 130 mph.
“I was like, ‘Holy cow!’,” Lagerbloom said. “We left the parking lot at Space X and drove 10 minutes through L.A. traffic to get to the tunnel. In the tunnel we got back to where we started in less than 90 seconds.”
If the beach tunnel project is a go, there remains one last irksome issue: How to pay for it.
Fort Lauderdale officials say it’s too early to say.
Glassman said he hopes the city will be in line for federal dollars.
“People wonder what the cost is and how that will get paid for,” he said. “There’s an infrastructure bill they’re trying to pass in Washington. I’m really optimistic that we can get our share of those dollars.”