I rode a single-lane highway that Elon Musk built in a tunnel under Las Vegas — experts call it ‘a whole new world’

ELON Musk built a busy, neon-colored tunnel under the sweltering asphalt parking lots surrounding the Las Vegas Convention Center.

The tunnels, a product of Musk’s Boring Company, are a far cry from the billionaire’s initial promises. The projects have divided highway engineers over the promise of the company’s pioneering technology.

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In 2018, Musk promised Los Angeles residents an upcoming 2.7-mile tunnel project.

On a mild May day at 6 p.m., at the height of the city’s famous rush-hour traffic jam, he held a meeting at city hall to explain his vision.

“Wouldn’t it be better if you could jump into a pod and go?” he asked as cars jammed the nearby highways.

The Boring Company, whose name has a double meaning in both the idea of ​​not being exciting and the act of drilling into the ground, aimed to create a simple capsule system to transport people underground.

Small stations equipped with elevators and escalators would transport hundreds of people to underground ramps.

Pods going through the tunnels would transport groups of 16 people at up to 150 mph to their destination, Musk said.

It would completely modernize road traffic as we know it.

Six years after Musk’s rush hour event, I walked the Las Vegas Loop, the brainchild of this project, at the Advanced Clean Technology Expo.

There are no capsules, there are Teslas.

We travel at normal highway speeds, not 150 mph. It was hundreds of miles from the promised construction site in Los Angeles and was a mile shorter than the initial design.

But some highway engineers believe the promise of the still-nascent project is critical for the modern American city.

“It’s a good idea to think in three-dimensional space,” Tim Menard, CEO of LYT, a cloud-based intelligent transportation software company, told The US Sun.

“The real technology behind [The Boring Company] It’s the reason we don’t go underground. It’s so difficult and long. If this is corrected, it will have a huge positive impact.”

The Boring Company is working on proprietary technology that engineers believe will be able to dig the holes and at the same time build the tunnel lining segments.

Menard, a former Tesla engineer, said residents should remain optimistic about the idea of ​​tunnels snaking beneath their city.

Tunnels allow for greater hybridization of ground-level activities, he said. Pedestrians on the earth’s surface can walk more easily without automotive infrastructure.

Menard added that residents can look to Singapore, a country that has invested heavily in tunnel construction, as an example.

On the ground, the country has developed a strong recreational economy with wide pedestrian walkways.

Underground, citizens can easily transport themselves from one area of ​​the country to another.

The real technology behind [The Boring Company] It’s the reason we don’t go underground. It’s so difficult and long. If this is corrected, it will have a huge positive impact.

Tim MenardCEO of LYT

Menard called the system “a whole new world” of transportation.

But critics of Musk’s private project said The Boring Company fell short of its initially lofty promises.

The lack of proprietary pods was the main complaint from transportation engineers I spoke to at the Expo.

They feared that The Boring Company, which claims to still be developing pod technology, was shifting to another form of highway construction.

Building more lanes encourages drivers to continue using their cars and can increase congestion, studies show.

Critics have also pointed to manned Teslas as a potential lack of innovation.

A driver on one of my Tesla rides said the company ran into difficulties with Las Vegas government bureaucracy when building the first version of the Loop.

“You have to have a fire department, communication, flood and smoke control [exhaust],” he said.

All necessary emergency systems have strained municipal resources, the driver added.

Musk has a history of making grandiose promises with his technology and launching a similar project with some missing bells and whistles a few years late – for example, the Cybertruck or the potentially upcoming $25,000 EV.

Still, the billionaire revolutionized the way modern Americans view transportation.

Its tunnels offer similar revolutionary promise to engineers like Menard, but skeptical electric vehicle experts are waiting to see how the programs actually roll out.

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