Elon Musk is getting serious about digging a tunnel under Los Angeles
Musk said on Twitter early Wednesday morning that he is "making progress" with his plan to dig a tunnel under Los Angeles. He said digging will start in Crenshaw, California at Interstate 105, just five minutes from Los Angeles International Airport.
Musk has been a proponent of more car tunnels for a few years now. He brought up the topic on Neil DeGrasse Tyson's StarTalk radio show in March 2015 when he said tunnels were a far better way to reduce traffic than flying cars.
"If you were to extrapolate that to cars, and have more car tunnels, then you would alleviate congestion completely. You would not need a flying car in that case," Musk said at the time. "And it would always work, even if the weather is bad. It would never ice up, and it would never fall on your head."
But it seems Musk got serious about pursuing the idea himself when he got stuck in particularly nasty traffic in December.
"Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging... It shall be called 'The Boring Company,'" he tweeted Dec. 17.
Shortly thereafter, he added "Tunnels" to his bio on Twitter alongside his current ventures Tesla, SpaceX, and OpenAI.
Musk has met with President Donald Trump, who plans to spend $1 trillion on infrastructure projects, on two separate occasions - once in New York with other tech CEOs and, more recently, in the White House for a discussion on US manufacturing with other company executives.
That could potentially help Musk get some political leverage to make his tunnel vision a reality, especially since it would open up quite a few American jobs.