‘The traffic was driving me nuts’: Billionaire Elon Musk has dug a huge tunnel under LA
Elon Musk is the technology genius behind PayPal, Tesla Motors and Space X – and this week, he surprised the world with a picture of his latest project.
Musk is digging a huge tunnel under LA – and he believes that it could hold the key to beating traffic congestion.
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Musk hopes that he can relieve transport congestion in the city with his tunnels, telling Wired, ‘If you think of tunnels going 10, 20, 30 layers deep (or more), it is obvious that going 3D down will encompass the needs of any city’s transport of arbitrary size.’
Minecraft pic.twitter.com/lU1YzJjLOZ
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 4, 2017
Musk says that he has dug a ‘test trench’ 30 feet wide, 50 feet long and 15 feet deep at Space X’s HQ in Los Angeles.
Musk announced his plan in typically cryptic style earlier this month, with a Tweet saying ‘’Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging…’.
Exciting progress on the tunnel front. Plan to start digging in a month or so.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 25, 2017
He said, ‘We’re just going to figure out what it takes to improve tunnelling speed by, I think, somewhere between 500 and 1,000 per cent.
So far, his dig has been on private land – to do anything more, he’s going to need planning permission.