Elon Musk Plans on Building an Underground Tunnel to Ease L.A. Traffic

Elon Musk’s plans of building a tunnel beneath L.A. could be overturned by bureaucracy and stupendous costs.

After focusing on the heavens and outer space for so long, it appears that Elon Musk has turned his sights on the ground. According to one of his Twitter posts, he is planning to build an underground tunnel in hopes of reducing L.A. traffic.

Last month, SpaceX’s CEO shared with his six million Twitter followers the toll L.A. traffic takes on him and announced he is now focusing on digging a tunnel beneath the crowded streets so that people wouldn’t have to sit through hours-long traffic jams anymore.

“The Boring Company” Project

It seems that not much is out of reach for the eccentric innovator. If he managed to land a rocket upright and, plans on colonizing Mars sometime in the near future, and made electric cars cool, digging a tunnel does not seem as a task exceptionally hard to accomplish.

Elon Musk dubbed the project “The Boring Company”. The catch is that he will not buy a boring machine, but he said he is going to design one himself. When you want the job done, you do it yourself, as they say. Earlier this week, on Wednesday, January 25^th, he let out yet another Twitter post announcing the first steps and “exciting progress on the tunnel front”. Elon Musk estimates the digging will start sometime next month.

Turning Blueprints Into Reality

No matter how sound the plan, there are still some questions unanswered. The location is somewhat a mystery so far, although Elon Musk said the tunnel is going to stretch from his desk at SpaceX. While tunnels have two ends, only the location of the starting point is known so far. However, he did say the passageway is going to run beneath Crenshaw and the 105 Freeway.

While rocket science seems more of a challenge rather than digging holes in the ground, building a tunnel beneath the crowded streets of L.A. might prove to be a bureaucratic nightmare for Elon Musk since he would need to gain multiple approvals for various municipalities. Furthermore, he will be forced to avoid existing infrastructure. Ultimately, in comparison, the cost for the first phase of Second Avenue opened only recently in New York City rose to $4.5 billion for just two miles of track. So before moving on to digging there is much work to be done in terms of paperwork and balancing costs and feasibility.

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