Serial entrepreneur Elon Musk has his fingers in a wide-range of transport-related technological pies, from SpaceX rockets launching supply capsules for the International Space Station to Tesla electric cars. Most recently, he is taking on urban transport deadlock with a tunneling business, the sardonically-named Boring Company, which aims to circumvent traffic jams by creating an underground electric transport network known as Loop.
At an event in Los Angeles on May 18, to which he arrived late because he had been “stuck on the damn 405,†one of the city’s notoriously car-choked highways, Musk and Boring Company executive Steve Davis explained their vision to revolutionize urban transport by moving people around the city in 16-person subterranean pods for a fare of $1 per journey.
Traffic congestion is the target of many technological innovation concepts. Autonomous taxi schemes are gathering increasing interest, with investment led by Google affiliate Waymo and ride-sharing company Uber in the US, as well as China’s Didi Chuxing.
Driverless Future?
But the vision of a driverless future, where vehicles are controlled by computers and accidents virtually non-existent, remains a long way off. Uber halted its testing and development program after one of its self-driving cars struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona in March.
Flying cars have long been a dream to bypass earthbound traffic chaos, but lately companies have been taking the idea more seriously. Uber’s Elevate summit in May unveiled some of the group’s ideas for future urban transport, outlining a partnership with NASA to create an urban air traffic control system and plans for landing pads. Uber promises, perhaps optimistically, that its flying taxis – a cross between a drone and a helicopter – will be flying over Los Angeles, Dallas and Dubai by 2020.
Airborne Options
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have joined the quest to develop airborne transport options. Page has backed Kitty Hawk, which is testing Cora flying taxis in New Zealand, while Brin’s LTA Research & Exploration is building a giant airship at Moffett Airfield near the group’s headquarters.
Musk is dubious about flying taxis. Aside from the safety concerns – the risk that inevitably a vehicle will one day “drop a hubcap and guillotine somebody†– he points to the huge power demand involved in lifting humans into the air. There’s also the noise – even the quietest helicopter, or a tiny drone, cannot fly over a neighborhood without causing disturbance.
Instead, he sees the future of transport lying below the city’s streets.
After facing criticism last year for suggesting the underground highways would prioritize private cars, Boring Company’s focus has now shifted to a more egalitarian system, with train carriage-type pods running on electromagnetic tracks that will carry up to 16 individuals, mostly pedestrians and cyclists.
Frictionless Travel
It claims Loop will carry people at 150 mph from downtown to the airport in just eight minutes, compared with the 45 it takes to get there in a car; the frictionless vacuum tube Hyperloop system should be able to transport passengers between cities at up to 500 mph.
Musk envisages not a metro-style system but a huge network of tiny stations the size of a single parking space, eventually almost outside every home, blending seamlessly into the fabric of a city. He also sees cost savings by evacuating soil from tunnels more quickly, and shoring them up as digging proceeds. There are also plans to compress and reuse the earth to make bricks.
Regarding California’s seismic activity, Musk argues that tunnels are among the safest places to be in an earthquake – from a structural safety standpoint, they move uniformly with the ground, in contrast to surface structures, he says.
Convincing the Public
The company has already run tests in a tunnel at its SpaceX headquarters in southern Los Angeles and in April received city council approval to bore a 2.7-mile test tunnel parallel to the 405. Two local residents associations have filed a lawsuit against the city for having circumvented full environmental testing for the project. A second hearing in a few weeks will determine whether the authorization will be upheld.
Other voices have cast doubt over the plans, with civil engineers saying it would be impossible to achieve the kind of speed and efficiency gains Musk has targeted.
The plan is as audacious as many of Musk’s projects, but he has shown skill in negotiating the approval process for his rockets, for example, although he will need all his experience to sell the underground tunnel network to officials – and the wider American public.
But with autonomous vehicles still struggling to win over the public, the Boring Company might be onto something interesting.