Underground freeways could be part of our future

On April 28, Tesla CEO Elon Musk presented a new concept for a network of underground freeway tunnels at the 2017 TEDx conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. These tunnels, which will be appearing in Los Angeles, are a form of alleviating congested traffic within bigger cities.

This tunnel-boring project is known as The Boring Company.

“We are trying to dig a hole under LA. This is to create the beginning of what will hopefully be a 3D network of tunnels to alleviate congestion,” said Musk. “One of the most soul destroying things is traffic. It takes away so much of your life. It’s horrible and particularly horrible in LA”.

Musk is attempting to integrate car elevators seamlessly into the city of Los Angeles just by using parking spaces that lower into the earth.

“You can go much further deep than you can go up. There are no limits to how many underground tunnels,” said Musk.

The idea behind the tunnels started when Musk was stuck in Los Angeles traffic. The first time the idea was heard by the public was through Twitter, when Musk tweeted “Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging” on Dec. 17, 2016. The tweet was followed three hours later by another saying “I am actually going to do this.”

Many online speculators worry about the cost of creating the tunnels, yet Musk has ideas behind lowering cost. He plans on heightening the maximum speed of tunnel-boring machines as well as lowering the diameter of the tunnels to just 12 feet. Musk makes the analogy between a snail and a tunnel-boring machine, stating that a snail can move 14 times faster than the current tunnel-boring machines.

While The Boring Project may take a substantial amount of time to complete, the people of Los Angeles are sure to benefit from the traffic alleviator.