Elon Musk Layers on the Crazy With His Plan for Traffic-Killing Tunnels
“We’re trying to dig a hole under LA, and this is to create the beginning of what will hopefully be a 3-D network of tunnels to alleviate congestion,” Musk said from the stage at TED. Now before you argue that a few
tunnels won’t help traffic in LA, or San Francisco, or Mumbai, or anywhere else, please know that Musk is not talking about a few tunnels. “There’s no real limit to how many levels of tunnel you can have,” he says.
Now you’re surely thinking, “What about induced demand?,” the idea that if you build it, commuters will fill it. Musk’s reply? Build as many as 40 layers of underground streets and you can clear up any amount of congestion. And he promises that using more efficient boring machines to create narrower tunnels will make tunneling orders of magnitude cheaper.
It’s an appealing vision, held back only by its lunacy.
“I would put what Mr. Musk is saying today in the bullshit category,” says Thom Neff, a civil engineer who runs consulting company OckhamKonsult.