Elon Musk hopes to have a tunnel running under a 17-mile stretch of highway in Los Angeles “in a year or so.”
One of his multitude of companies, The Boring Company, is currently building tunnels under Los Angeles. Musk predicts cars will be rushed through the tunnels in pods going as fast as 125 miles per hour.
“To solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic, roads must go 3-D, which means either flying cars or tunnels. Unlike flying cars, tunnels are weatherproof, out of sight and won’t fall on your head,” The Boring Company website says.
So far, The Boring Company has built 500 feet worth of tunnel.
In three or four months, the tunnel will be two miles long, Musk says in a tweet.
And “hopefully stretch the whole 405 N-S corridor from LAX to the 101 in a year or so,” the iconic entrepreneur says, referring to two of California’s famously busy highways and the airport.
According to Google Maps, that’s a 17-mile journey that would currently take nearly an hour with L.A. traffic. (This estimate was generated Thursday at 11:15 am EST, or 8:15 am PST.)
That’s just too much time for Musk. By comparison, traveling at 125 miles per hour with zero traffic, that distance would take just over eight minutes.
In addition to tunneling his way under Los Angeles, Musk is the CEO of electric vehicle company Tesla and aerospace manufacturer and space services company SpaceX, and he is a co-founder of Neuralink, a company aiming to merge the brain with computers.
In December, Musk tweeted his frustration with the traffic in his hometown. “Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging.”
And, well, he did, and is.
See also:
Elon Musk says he is serious about tunneling under Los Angeles
Bill Gates: I do not agree with Elon Musk about A.I. ‘We shouldn’t panic about it’
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Source: Tech CNBC
Elon Musk says his traffic-busting tunnel from LAX should be 17 miles long ‘in a year or so’