Elon Musk, the billionaire idea-guy behind Tesla, SpaceX and the Hyperloop, has a new project. He plans to build a giant tunnel under Los Angeles to divert car traffic off of surface freeways and alleviate jams along some of the region’s most crowded corridors—starting, specifically, with the corridor right outside his office—and he claims the dig will begin soon.
According to a Twitter post this morning, Musk says the tunnel digging should start in “a month or so.” The underground route would start at Interstate 105 near LAX, conveniently right across the street from SpaceX HQ.
It isn’t actually clear to anybody what permits or permissions he may have in place to begin what would be a massive construction project requiring buy-in from several different government agencies as well as property owners and community groups, but Business Insider reports that Musk has taken two meetings with the Trump administration, including a meeting just this week at the White House to discuss American manufacturing and infrastructure.
In a conversation about flying cars with Neil deGrasse Tyson—which is, we assume, just a normal sort of conversation to be having when you’re Elon Musk—recorded for the StarTalk podcast, Musk argued that the quotidian tunnel is actually a superior solution to traffic congestion than investing in trying to roll out flying technology to average consumers.
Car tunnels, he told Tyson, could “alleviate congestion completely,” adding that “You would not need a flying car in that case. And it would always work, even if the weather is bad. It would never ice up and it would never fall on your head.” (Hopefully those SpaceX rockets will never fall on our heads either, right Elon?)
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