Stop calling Elon Musk’s Boring tunnel public transit. For the 175,000 tech fans descending on Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show this week, one of the must-see attractions is located not among the acres of trade-show booths, but just outside the convention center.
In November 2019, Elon Musk’s Boring Company started work here on a project for its first paying customers: an underground transportation system that will carry passengers less than a mile from one end of the convention center to the other. Eager CES attendees hoping to catch a glimpse of the action can peek through the fence at the construction pit, where tunnels are in the process of being bored as part of a $48.68 million contract with the city’s convention and tourism authority. (Don’t worry: If you’re not at CES, there’s a livestream.)
“I think that 10, 15, 20 years from now, we’ll look back at this as a Kitty Hawk–type moment,” said Steve Hill, president of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, at the tunnel’s November groundbreaking. “This technology has the ability to change transportation not only here at the convention center, which is important to us, and here in Las Vegas, but around the country and around the world.”
Yet exactly what “technology” is being pioneered at the convention center site is still up for debate. Although the project is being publicly dubbed as the “first underground people mover,” what’s being built appears to be more of a mechanism for giving one-minute test rides in Teslas.
The Vegas tunnel is the first commercial application of what Musk has dubbed “Loop,” defined by the Boring Company’s website as a “high-speed underground public transportation system in which passengers are transported via compatible Autonomous Electric Vehicles (AEVs) at up to 155 miles per hour.”
According to documents filed last year by the Boring Company, the Vegas Loop is intended to move an expected 4,400 people per hour in 16-passenger autonomous vehicles through two 0.83-mile-long, 14-foot-wide tunnels. The system is planned to be open for testing by November 2020 and in operation by next year’s CES.
But since the Vegas contract was awarded in May, Musk has made public statements that contradict key elements of the original Loop proposal, including the type of track, speed, and vehicle type.
The most recent renderings from the Boring Company no longer show the 16-passenger public transit vehicles that Musk has promoted since 2017, and instead use what appear to be Tesla Model 3 cars that hold at most five passengers.
The vehicles also won’t be going 155 mph, as has been widely reported. Because the vehicles will travel between three stations along the 0.83-mile route, they will only reach speeds of up to 50 mph in each 0.4-mile segment.
And last month, Musk confirmed that the tunnels being dug by the Boring Company were indeed “road tunnels,” not transit tunnels at all, where the vehicles would travel on tires, not tracks. “Really, just an underground road, but limited to EVs (from all auto companies),” he tweeted.
As journalists in town from all over the world heap social-mediated praise upon his plan to “solve traffic,” is Elon Musk actually building a solution to anything at all?
Almost three years ago, in April 2017, Musk took the stage at the TED conference to propose an idea to eliminate the “soul-destroying traffic” he experienced on his own Los Angeles commute.
Musk’s plan at the time was to lower cars underground via elevator onto electric “skates” that would whisk vehicles at 130 mph through a series of tunnels to their destinations. Musk revealed he’d bought “some second-hand machinery” — a tunnel boring machine previously used to install sewer lines in Northern California—and was already digging beneath the Space X headquarters near Los Angeles. The TED audience clapped enthusiastically.
But when transportation planners pointed out that the only way tunnels relieve traffic is by moving high-capacity vehicles, Musk went on the defensive. At a different conference, he bashed public transportation—where riders must share space with “a bunch of random strangers, one of whom might be a serial killer”—and called an influential transit consultant an “idiot.”
Then, in June 2018—about six months after his dustup with advocates—Musk abruptly changed his tune: The Boring Company’s plans would be adjusted to prioritize pedestrians and cyclists over cars. “Will still transport cars but only after all personalized mass transit needs are met,” he wrote on Twitter. “If someone can’t afford a car, they should go first.”
But Musk has provided no explanation for how, exactly, that would work.
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