Elon Musk's Boring Company's Texas ambitions: tunnels for cars, people and water

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Open documents obtained by Bloomberg show the scale of The Boring Company’s ambitions in Texas. Over the past year, the company has presented at least eight projects to officials. The proposals range from ideas to detailed presentations. None of them have progressed beyond the concept stage.



Most of the projects will be in the Austin area, near The Boring Company’s headquarters in the suburb of Pflugerville. The ideas include car tunnels, culverts and pedestrian walkways. Almost all of them have not been previously published. Each was referenced in correspondence with Texas officials or in other government documents obtained by Bloomberg through a public information request. Here is a list of Boring projects under consideration in Texas.

Underwater tunnel to Barrier Island
One of the first projects Boring sought to develop in Texas was an underwater car tunnel near the Gulf of Mexico. Brian Gettinger, Boring’s “tunnel evangelist,” who joined the company as head of business development in May 2021, created the project about a month after starting at the company. Port Aransas, near Corpus Christi, is a popular vacation spot for people from across the state. The roads and ferry routes there are constantly clogged.

Although the company has never done underwater tunnels on this scale, it has submitted similar projects in Miami and Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “Nothing new,” Valente Olivares, the Texas Department of Transportation district engineer for the area, wrote in a recent email about the proposal. “I will contact you if I need more information.”

Texas Hyperloop
Before Boring, Musk had a company called Hyperloop. The billionaire had announced a tubular, vacuum-filled transportation system that would allow people to travel between cities at incredible speeds. He called on engineers to build systems based on his proposals. Some have tried, and none have yet succeeded. Boring’s own plans have faced resistance, in part from regulators who have been slow to approve a system between New York and Washington, D.C.

A company presentation, marked confidential, that Gottinger ghana number data emailed to a Texas transportation official in June 2021 states:

"All ring tunnels are designed with loading and sealing requirements in mind to accommodate Hyperloop, allowing for speeds to increase from 240 km/h in the Loop to 960+ km/h in the Hyperloop."

Elon Musk himself promised that The Boring Company would try to build a Hyperloop system “in the coming years.”

Tunnel between two major highways
Musk, a former Angeleno, founded Boring in Southern California to solve traffic problems. Austin is offering a test similar to what happened in Los Angeles. Traffic in the Texas capital is terrible and getting worse. According to the 2020 census, the population reached almost 1 million, up more than 20% from the previous decade.

In September, Gettinger asked a state transportation official if his agency would support a project to create a new connection between two major highways running through Austin, U.S. Highway 290 and the state's Beltway. The latter is colloquially known as MoPac, named after the Missouri Pacific Railroad, a Civil War-era railroad project. Highway 290 and MoPac already intersect in southern Austin, but Gettinger apparently envisioned an additional intersection to the north. The next day, James Bass, an employee of the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority, called Gettinger, but the records do not contain a description of their conversation.

[yadaysrdone]

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