October 29, 2017
Elon Musk shared the first-ever photo of the Boring Company’s tunnel that runs deep under the streets of Los Angeles.
Musk, who’s also the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, in addition to Boring—his infrastructure and tunnel construction company—took to Twitter to show off the latest development of his much-anticipated plan to build a high-speed transit system, known as Hyperloop. He tweeted that the current tunnel is about 500-feet long, but it’s going to quickly expand.
“Should be 2 miles long in three or four months and hopefully stretch the whole 405 N-S corridor from LAX to the 101 in a year or so,” Musk tweeted Saturday afternoon.
Although Musk says he’s long thought about building tunnels, he didn’t actually start digging until less than a year ago. Last December, while driving along L.A.’s infamous congested highways, Musk decided it was time to get started, according to Bloomberg.
“Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging…” he tweeted on Dec. 17. “I am actually going to do this,” he added, two hours later.
Originally, the entrepreneur began digging underneath his SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California. But, in August he got approval from the Hawthorne City Council to start digging a test tunnel off of his company’s property, the Daily Breeze reports.
Los Angeles isn’t the only city with “soul-destroying traffic” that Musk hopes to improve. Ultimately, he plans to provide travel between New York and DC in less than 30 minutes, according to the Boring Company. On Oct. 20, he received conditional approval to start digging on the east coast, The Washington Post reports.
The Boring Company’s utility permit granted to them by the Maryland Department of Transportation will allow the company to dig about 10 miles of tunnels under a specific section of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, Doug Mayer, a spokesperson for Gov. Larry Hogan, told The Washington Post.
“It’s called a utility permit. That’s all they need to do the digging,” Mayer said. “It’s a private company, privately financed. The costs to the state will be extremely limited, if anything at all. The state has been working with them for multiple months on the permit process.”
Gov. Logan expressed his support for the company’s project.
It's unclear exactly what the tracks in the the photo of his L.A. tunnel will be used for. But, if anything is clear it's that there is still a long way to go. In April, the Boring Company shared a video showing off the proposed tunnels and Musk's final version of his futuristic concept.