Posted on 02/17/2017 3:13:43 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Elon Musk announced plans to start digging a traffic-easing tunnel under Los Angeles “in a month or so”, but city planning bodies say he doesn’t yet have permission.
The SpaceX and Tesla CEO has been mulling the idea since December, when he revealed his frustrations with congestion in the city. “Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging,” he said on Twitter.
“It shall be called The Boring Company,” he added. “Boring, it’s what we do.”
At the time it wasn’t clear whether he was joking, but today’s announcement suggested he was not.
Elon Musk (@elonmusk)Exciting progress on the tunnel front. Plan to start digging in a month or so. January 25, 2017
Musk claimed he would start to drill the tunnel near his office at SpaceX, which is in the city of Hawthorne in Los Angeles County, a short distance from LAX airport. He didn’t revealed any further details of his planned route but did consider the risk of earthquakes.
Responding to a Twitter user worried about the impact of a quake on the tunnel, he said: “Earthquakes tend to have the biggest effect on the surface, like waves on water. That’s why LA can have a (lame, but getting better) subway.”
The Guardian contacted several of the bodies involved in decision-making about new infrastructure in the area. Arnold Shadbehr, the city manager of Hawthorne, told the Guardian: “They have been in preliminary engineering mode and in discussions with us back and forth since a few months ago, but no permit has been issued yet.”
Neither the Los Angeles department of city planning nor the bureau of engineering were aware of any permit applications or even contact from Musk or his team. A spokeswoman from the bureau of engineering said that building a tunnel beneath any public right of way would require city council approval.
The California department of transportation spokesman said there was no permit application for “any such work submitted”.
“Nor was there any conceptual meeting by any potential permit applicant for such a proposal within Los Angeles and Ventura Counties (District 7).”
Even if Musk were to get approval, there are a couple of additional hurdles he would need to overcome. The first is the incredible challenge of digging tunnels. Tunnels under Boston and Seattle have experienced enormous, unexpected and expensive problems while under construction. Boston’s ‘Big Dig’ tunnel project cost upwards of $15bn, while the Highway 99 Seattle project has been delayed by two years because of a broken down tunnel machine called Bertha.
The second – and this one’s a biggie – is that it’s not clear that adding such a tunnel would have the desired effect. A number of studies have shown that creating wider or new roads reduces congestion in the short term, but not in the long term. Less traffic encourages more people to consider driving, a phenomenon known as “induced demand”. It’s a paradox that’s well known by the California department of transportation, which released a paper in November 2015 titled Increasing Highway Capacity Unlikely to Relieve Traffic Congestion.
Combined PING! and DANG!
Paging Tommy Lee Jones; Mr. Jones, please pick up the white courtesy phone.
Do you realize that “Elon Musk” is an anagram for ‘Sunk Mole’?
there are a whole mess of electric and gas utility lines, water pipes, and sewer pipes under LosAngeles
just sayin...
hope Musk doesn’t bore into a sewer main....
And they say there’s no fake news
Who owns the subsurface rights?
I hear Don Cheadle wants his job.
Title companies and lawyers are salivating.
Really?
Whose money is he gonna use?
underground ownership varies from parcel to parcel
but certainly it aint Musk all over LA
good point
also he’d better not upset lateral and subjacent support...
and he’d be wise to take note of underground water and oil and gas fields, too, and tar pits with Dinosaurs...
just saying....
Urine and graffiti sold separately.
You would think Musk would be in the private helicopter caste. This just sounds like one of his grandiose gestures to get headlines.
Wait - The Big Dig cost $15 billion in year 2000 dollars...and some people think a wall is too expensive?
And if you change one letter of that anagram from Sunk Mole to Sank Mole.... and then reassemble it back into its original spelling, you wind up with Elon Mask. Lets call it, the Un-Anagram. Thank you very much. I will be here through the weekend. Try the fish. LOL!
One of the dumber ideas I’ve heard for all the reasons I’ve read in the above posts plus he knows nothing about the difficulties involved.
Actually, there are tons of tunnels that are under LA. Yes, you can drive a car through them. Actually 11 miles of tunnels. There are tours of them here:
http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/underground-tunnels-los-angeles
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