Elon Musk Wants To Build More Tunnels Under LA To Speed Up Traffic

After completing the first steps of their underground tunnel, The Boring Company is looking to extend their passageway under Los Angeles, California. With a goal to decrease traffic, this tunnel would autonomously send people and cargo over 6.5-mile distance. They’ll need to get approval from the Culver City Council as they’ll be running through the area, but members had mixed views on this concept.

On Monday, The Boring Company’s COO, Jehn Balajadia, presented the “proof of concept” plan to to the Culver City Council. The 6.5-mile tunnel would begin at the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, and would stretch to West Los Angeles. Both SpaceX and The Boring Company are owned by Elon Musk.

Balajadia told the council that the development behind the technology is completed and this project would showcase underground travel in action. According to Wired, this would also “test the company’s ability to build across jurisdictions and handle all the hurdles that entails.” She also talked about “Loop,” which would be mass-transit pods for multiple passengers.

"Loop" pods could reach up to 150 miles per hour and could send people from Culver City to Downtown Los Angeles in five minutes, according to Balajadia. These tunnels would also be used with electric vehicles and cargo shipment. Construction of the tunnels wouldn’t impact any activity on the surface nor would citizens be able to hear it. As far as the hazard of earthquakes, Balajadia argued it would be safer underground.

However, council members had their concerns with the new passageway under their community. One of them, Meghan Sahli-Wells, said that “it looks super sexy and super easy, but it’s half-baked.” Some residents were concerned about the number of people “Loop” could hold (between 8 to 16 passengers) and others simply didn’t want Culver City to be a testing area.

According to Bloomberg, one attendee at the meeting wrote off The Boring Company as only making money from selling hats, but company representatives said that they’re financed through Musk himself. Mayor Jeffrey Cooper still showed support for the project and believed it would be a mistake to write the concept off as “a very forward thinking city.” He hopes they’ll come back with a better proposal at a future city council meeting.

The Boring Company is also looking at two projects into the future. One of them is the potential to build a high-speed rail from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport to downtown area. Musk also talked about the potential of creating a hyperloop from New York City to Washington, DC, while connecting other major cities along the way.

Back in August, the company received permission to build the first two miles of the tunnel from the Hawthorne City Council. They’re currently working on retrieving an excavation permit from Los Angeles and they haven’t applied for a permit with Culver City yet. The presentation was supposed to win people over, but it looks like they’ll have some more work to do.