Elon Musk Receives Approval to Extend 2-Mile Tunnel Under Los Angeles
The Boring Company’s agenda just got a bit more exciting.
Good news if you're one of the lucky people who referred enough friends to buy Teslas—you'll soon have a place to drive that big ol' boring machine, Godot. After meeting with the Hawthorne city council, Elon Musk's aptly-named Boring Company has finally received approval to continue its efforts by extending its existing tunnel by two miles.
The tunnel will extend west from Musk's SpaceX's property, where the company's car elevator resides, and plow through the space underneath of 120th Street until it reaches Hawthorne Boulevard. Because the tunnel is being dug at a depth of around 44 feet, the public should be completely unaware of the entire process.
SpaceX's senior director of facilities and construction, Brett Horton, commented on the issue to The Daily Breeze, saying, "[residents] don’t see it, don’t hear it, and certainly don’t feel it. Everything happens underground, we won’t have construction crews walking down the street. We won’t have excavators."
On Tuesday evening, the measure passed the city council with a 4-1 vote, which permitted the company to start its process. The company can continue to dig, as long as the surface area above ground does not subside by as much as half an inch. This will require close monitoring of the work—though presumably not by construction workers, or else Horton's remarks above would begin to seem like a bit of truth-stretching.
This particular tunnel won't be used to transport cars just yet, but will rather be used as a learning process for the company's tunneling machine. Musk has said that he wanted to improve technology and efficiency of the tunneling process, and this will be the company's way of doing just that.
If all goes well, this will likely be the first step to creating the first two Hyperloops—one around Los Angeles, and the other from New York City to Washington D.C., both of which expected to be constructed at the same time. The learning process will be long and expensive...but may be worth it in the long run.
