Elon Musk hates traffic, I’m sure you’ve heard. So he wants to dig tunnels, a fairytale project that won’t help alleviate congestion and probably can’t reach the scope Musk wants. And now, local government officials in California are saying as much, reportedly calling it an “absurd pipe dream.”
The Los Angeles Business Journal asked a couple officials who’d be directly impacted by Musk’s idea to dig multiple layers of tunnels under Los Angeles by way of his super interesting Boring Company. Their assessment—an entirely correct viewpoint—is that it’s not in fact good, but rather bad.
Yet Musk’s super-charged tunneling machines might never get the chance to bore the warren of holes below Los Angeles, government officials said. When asked what hurdles Boring would have to clear in order to dig under Santa Monica, City Manager Rick Cole, a former L.A. deputy mayor, replied without hesitation.
“We would laugh them out of our office,” he said. “It’s a completely absurd pipe dream.”
Oof. Cole went on to say the environmental review and permitting for digging Musk’s tunnels would take “decades.”
The city manager of Culver City, another community along the route, spoke to the Journal in more polite terms, calling it “novel.”
“There’s no cookbook for this,” the city manager, John Nachbar, told the publication.
Can we stop writing about this thing now?