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.
I’ve had enough of this guy and his screwy ideas.
I hear digging is much easier along the fault lines.
Or he could just move to the desert. Not much traffic there.
or Lone Skum.
Yes thanks. But he’s talking about boring new tunnels. That will get him into a lot of gas lines and sewer pipes and oil gas and water and tar and so forth.
I think there is not enough traffic in LA...therefore they should double the population by importing people from third world cultures
Elon must not have heard that Uncle Sugar just left town, so he won’t be able to soak taxpayers again.
This is why so many in the LA area are insane. Sitting in traffic 3 hours or more per day is a slow motion trip to the rubber room for many. Rolling behind 10 zillion exhaust pipes pointed right at you, while sitting there sucking it up. All while some moron on the radio frantically warns that Trump will stop millions more from coming in and joining this epic slow crawling circus.
Or Seul Monk
Yes I’m a billionaire But to Hell with money. I always wanted to just be a nice furry little gopher digging up Los Angeles. I’m gonna dig a hole all the way from barbara streissand’s private mansion to the very last tract home in Indio! Yippee! Mommy watch me dig !!
If we could deport the one million illegals in LA/OC traffic would be so much better.
And ‘one million’ is the official number reported for illegals- the real number is liable to be double or even triple that.
The big dig in Boston only cost about $3 billion. The rest was for graft, corruption, and shakedowns.
And even then, it was poorly done, it was soon killing people. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/boston-tunnel-collapse-kills-newlywed/
This Mole should dig the tunnel all the way back to MeHico, one way.
Free entry for all the self-deporters.
What they really need for the entire S. CA area is an immediate 5 year moratorium or complete stop for ALL housing development of any kind.
Earthquake faults, rotten rock, seeping gas.
Slum Kone.
Hey, I have an idea! Don't give drivers licenses to illegal aliens, and take them away from those that already got them. Confiscate cars from illegal aliens. Deport illegal aliens. That ought to clear away at least half the traffic in L.A.
Who’s going to stop him, the mole people?
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