Today, Explained - Digging tunnels for cars

Episode Date: December 5, 2022

Elon Musk created The Boring Company to fix traffic, but his fantasy of underground Tesla tunnels is running on empty. Curbed’s Alissa Walker and author Paris Marx explain. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Amina Al-Sadi, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey, edited by Matt Collette, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Traffic is a scourge. It's done nothing for anyone except the makers of Xanax and Damien Chazelle. Americans have long known this and long complained about this, and yet we're stuck. But in 2018, a visionary presented a possible solution. Digging. We're trying to dig a hole under L.A. And this is to create the beginning of what will hopefully be a 3D network of tunnels to alleviate congestion. And we went for it. Of course we did. We needed a fix. We thought Elon Musk and his boring company had found one. Big cities, small cities. The boring company has approached them to solve their problems with tunnels, and they get them all excited for

tunnels. And then as soon as they need to get some approvals or they need to actually put the money up for what's being built, they have completely vanished. Coming up on Today Explained, what happened when we let Silicon Valley try to fix our traffic problem? Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King.

This episode starts with a tweet. So this was a tweet that was posted by Elon Musk in December of 2016. And it said, traffic is driving me nuts. I'm going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging. People were asking questions and wondering what this entailed. And he told everybody, I am actually going to do this. Alyssa Walker covers cities and transportation for Curbed. During this time, he had been making this commute from his Bel Air mansions to the SpaceX headquarters, which is near LAX. And you travel on one of the worst highways in the entire country. Notorious 405 has long been known as the busiest freeway in the country,

especially through the Sepulveda Pass, connecting LA's west side with the valley. He's stuck in traffic, can't get to work, and he thinks there's got to be a faster way for him personally to get to his job. Either we try something new or we will be stuck in traffic hell for the rest of our lives. And so he thinks, as many people do, that maybe if he could burrow beneath it, his car could get there faster. And he ended up proposing this giant network of tunnels that would fix congestion throughout the western Los Angeles area. Oh, so it wasn't just one tunnel. Yeah, I think this is so important. congestion throughout the western Los Angeles area.

Oh, so it wasn't just one tunnel. Yeah, I think this is so important. He never actually said it was going to be one tunnel. Like one tunnel obviously is not going to fix traffic. His idea that he proposed, he gave this TED Talk the following year. Why are you boring? Yeah, I ask myself that frequently. And he showed this animation of cars like dropping down out of the streets on these elevators. Sort of a car skate that's on an elevator.

And they would go onto these like shiny little silver ramps. There's no real limit to how many levels of tunnel you can have. And they'd be just jetting through these underground pathways, kind of like how a freeway looks, but under the ground. You can go much further deep than you can go up. The deepest mines are much deeper than the tallest buildings are tall. And you would go directly to your destination in your vehicle, and then you would pop back up to the surface and drive, I guess, the rest of the way or get out of your car.

And this would solve traffic, he said. That was his big claim, that this was going to end soul-destroying traffic and congestion for cities everywhere. It is one thing to tweet. It is another thing, maybe a more respectable thing to give a TED Talk. But neither of those things are real. When does this idea become real? Yeah, he did actually buy a tunnel boring machine. It was actually a secondhand machine that used to dig sewer tunnels in Northern California. And he starts digging in the SpaceX property, which is right near LAX in a different city, though, named Hawthorne. And he actually creates this whole culture around this new company that he names the Boring Company.

So he gets a digging machine, which I'm imagining, tell me if I'm wrong, do you remember the movie Tremors? I do. I do. Must be a million of them. Okay, is it like the monster from Tremors? It's just like big and round and it like pushes through the earth? Yeah, it chews through the ground. And that's exactly right. You have to dig a big hole, you kind of drop it down into the ground, and then it uses these like large metal teeth to chew through the substrate. OK, so he gets his tremors monster and then there is another step required here, which is convincing people, elected officials in various parts of the country to let him dig with it. How does he go about doing that?

At the beginning, you know, right, it's just under the SpaceX property. That's not a problem, but then it goes under the city. And then you see this just really tremendous excitement from L.A. elected officials. The council members actually grant him an environmental review exemption to be able to do a test dig within the city of LA area. And then you see

like the mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, posts some tweets about how supportive he is of the project. I want to be that government that gets out of the way where we need to get out of the way and lends a hand when you need us to be there. And then you start to see all this interest from other cities, representatives who do these types of projects in other cities are coming to this site, this test digging site, and trying to figure out like, well, what's he doing here? And like, maybe we can get in on this. We need tunnels. We, a great opportunity to dig a tunnel and make something happen. Does he and his digger, do they make a bunch of really awesome tunnels really quickly? That's the one thing I think is still up for debate. I mean, their big claim from the Boring Company was that they'd be able to dig faster, more efficiently and cheaper than the way that cities were already doing it. It's quite difficult to dig tunnels normally. I think we need to have at least a tenfold improvement in the cost per mile of tunneling. And it's not clear yet if they're able to introduce any type of innovation to the tunnel boring process. But the bigger problem is these challenges

that come from political, legal, environmental obstacles. And that's what Musk himself started to run up against. What happened in LA was kind of what happens to a lot of these projects. The lawsuit derails Elon Musk's plan to build a West Side tunnel under Sepulveda Boulevard. A group of neighbors who live on the West Side live near that 405 freeway

that is perpetually clogged with traffic. It's a very wealthy group of neighbors who were worried about the idea of somebody tunneling under their properties. But I will say also there were a lot of local groups that just said, hey, this isn't actually going to stop traffic. This isn't the way we fix this. The Boring Company released a statement saying it is no longer seeking the development of the Sepulveda test tunnel. All right, so in Los Angeles, things get hung up with a lawsuit,

but other cities do get on board. Their first paying customer came along, and it might not surprise you that it was Las Vegas. And they were planning a large expansion to their convention center and decided that they needed some kind of transportation system to get people from one side to another. The Boring Company comes along and says, hey, we can build you one of these systems that goes underneath the convention center. It's less than two miles long from one end to the other. So they underbid significantly compared to other proposals. They get the job and they get to work starting with their first paying customer. For about $50 million, they were paid to build this system. The project is underwhelming to say the least.

I wrote on it. It's one 12-foot wide tunnel that shuttles three passengers, three at a time in a Tesla between the Strip and the convention center 1.7 miles away. That's a $10 Uber. Then the Boring Company proposed this giant 30-mile system that's going all over Vegas. And that is actually starting to be dug. You can actually ride from the convention center under the strip and you can pop up in a casino across the street now. Las Vegas is a place where it actually happened, but Elon Musk was also trying to convince other cities. Where did it not work? Elon Musk had gone to Chicago and met with Mayor Rahm Emanuel at the time

and was proposing a tunnel that would go from the downtown area to O'Hare Airport. I'd like to thank the mayor and the mayor's office and the city of Chicago for having the faith to bet on the Boring Company.

They were saying it was going to cost up to a billion dollars and that the Boring Company would pay for all of it. In December of 2018, with the opening of the test tunnel, we had these at Elon Musk's career, he comes off as a grifter. So when Lori Lightfoot was elected mayor after Rahm Emanuel left office, she actually killed the tunnel immediately. Is Wall Street interested in the Boring Company? Is it getting investment? The Boring Company has gotten a huge round of investment just this year. In fact, Sequoia Capital, which is one of the biggest VC investors, they're pouring a lot of money into it.

A bunch of real estate developers that maybe want to integrate it into their new developments. And so it now has a valuation of five and a half billion dollars, if you can believe it. You know, Alyssa, I can't help but think of a particular Simpsons episode. Do you know where I'm going with this? I do. This comes up a lot. Anytime I tell people about what I'm reporting on and the long saga of the Boring Company and Elon Musk going from town to town trying to sell his tunnels, the monorail episode, Marge versus the monorail, comes up. Well, sir, there's nothing on earth like a genuine, bona fide, electrified six-car monorail.

They have this windfall of cash, and they decide they're going to invest in this monorail, even though they're not sure if it is going to solve their transportation problems. And meanwhile, they're driving home from the meeting where Lyle Landley has done a literal song and dance to sell the idea through and their car is like retching over these potholes. And, you know, Marge is like, I still think we should have spent the money to fix Main Street. Well, you should have written a song like that guy. I rewatched it many times in reporting my stories because the parallels are really quite eerily similar. Oh, it's not for you. It's more of a Shelbyville idea.

Now, wait just a minute. We're twice as smart as the people of Shelbyville. Just tell us your idea and we'll vote for it. episode of The Simpsons is that the way that the Boring Company can build its system in Vegas is that it has to be called a monorail. So on all the documents, on all the documents, it says like the Boring Company is now operating a monorail. Mono! Don't! to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, r-a-m-p.com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank. Member FDIC.

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It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. We try on this show to be fair to everyone. And so we got to ask whether this is all an Elon Musk problem or whether we, the citizens of Springfield, share some of the blame. And you're here to help us do that. And so can you just tell me what you do? Oh, and tell me your name. It's Paris Marks, and I write a lot about technology. I host a podcast called Tech Won't Save Us.

And I recently wrote a book called Road to Nowhere, What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation. What is the problem that Elon Musk is trying to solve with the Boring Company? Ostensibly, the problem he's trying to solve is traffic, right? The fact that many people are stuck in traffic, this idea kind of stems from an experience of being stuck in traffic himself. But if we look at how, you know, these projects have actually played out, I think it's very hard to argue that the Las Vegas tunnel that he built is doing very much to solve traffic at all. What do you think is wrong with how he's going about solving it?

Is the problem in the idea or is the problem in the execution? I would say both. I would say first, inherently, like the idea doesn't make a whole lot of sense, right? Because the idea is that if we just build all of these tunnels under the roads, you know, under our cities, that that is going to inherently solve traffic. And it's really interesting that his first idea for solving this problem was double decker highways. And we know, we have decades of experience now, that just adding a new lane to a road or a highway

doesn't actually reduce traffic in the way that we expect it would because what it actually ends up doing is just inducing more demand, right? When you build new lanes or roads, people who previously avoided driving at rush hour start becoming less careful about when and how much they drive. Getting more people to drive on those roads, and then traffic ends up getting worse. And so when we look at the Boring Company itself, you know, it's very naive to think that just building a load of tunnels is going to solve the problem. It's also going to be

incredibly expensive, even though he claims that he would bring the cost down. And he's not shown that he would actually be able to do that in any kind of realistic way. But then also on top of that, he's been very kind of poor at executing these projects. The Las Vegas one is the only one that we have so far. And that is a far cry from what he initially proposed when he rolled out these ideas for what it would look like in Los Angeles, right? He said that there were going to be like 10 to 100 to even unlimited layers of tunnels for cars within cities. And then what he's delivered in Las Vegas, I describe it as being like an amusement park ride. It's a short tunnel.

The vehicles are not autonomously driven. They go rather slow. It's nothing like what he originally proposed, but it's much more likely to be what these projects end up looking like, which means they're not a real solution to anything real in our cities. I do think that, like, in his actual mind, he believed that this was something that was going to work, that he was going to be able to fulfill. But it's really served to distract from projects or from other initiatives that could much better solve these problems,

especially the problem of traffic that the boring company is ostensibly about dealing with. Is this a problem with Elon Musk or is this a problem with Silicon Valley more broadly? It's both. Elon Musk in particular is this person who, especially before, you know, the past year or so, had a really positive reputation among much of the public, among the media in particular. And his whole ethos, the myth of what Elon Musk was, this idea that he was this genius delivering these incredible futures to us, whether it was autonomous vehicles or getting us to Mars or building this big network of tunnels under our cities for cars. There was

a desire to believe the types of things that he was telling us he'd be able to follow through on. But then, you know, more broadly, there was a desire to believe the broader promises of the tech industry, right? Especially as we're emerging out of 2008, as we are seeing kind of the consequences of the recession, and we're looking for a new industry to create jobs, to create economic growth and prosperity for people, Silicon Valley really gets away with selling us a lot of ideas for how they are going to transform society. We've got an incredible opportunity to try to uphold a legacy in Silicon Valley of changing the world. Disrupting the world. We're working 24-7 to do it.

And then a number of years later, we start to see the consequences of those things and how by not thinking critically about the potential impacts of them at the moment they were being rolled out or proposed, we failed to see the problems that were inherent in them. What other examples do we have of Silicon Valley trying to solve the problem of traffic? Oh, there are plenty, right? Google, for example, with its autonomous vehicles and the idea that it was going to create these cars and within a few years, it was going to completely revolutionize the way that we move around. And of course, we can see that, you know,

those autonomous vehicles didn't arrive in the way that they promised. But I think that the most notable one is Uber, co-founded by Travis Kalanick. And this was really a promise that by hailing a taxi or taxi-like vehicle from your phone, that it was going to have these really revolutionary implications for the transport system. There were a lot of promises in the early days around how this was going to reduce traffic, how it was going to reduce emissions, how it was going to serve the underserved populations in cities by expanding access to transportation, how it was going to be great

for workers by offering them these new ways to kind of employ themselves and work and all these sorts of things. Then you talk about shift change in New York. Then you talk about rain. Then you talk about Brooklyn. Each of these problems is like $100 million problems. And they're problems Uber is designed for. Yeah. But after a few years, you know, independent researchers started to look at these promises and the actual impacts that Uber was having on cities and on workers. And what they found, no surprise, was that a lot of those promises were not fulfilled. So everybody knows at this point that buses and trains and subways are better for the planet. They're faster ways to get around. They're imperfect for sure. The problem is

Americans don't want to give up their cars. That's it. Is this possibly a problem where there is simply not a solution unless Americans are willing to make significant changes to their lifestyles? To a certain degree, I would say yes. But I would say that, you know, why are Americans so linked to their cars? Why do Americans love cars so much, so to speak? And, you know, I would even question that, right? Like, sure, there are like a small group of car enthusiasts who do really love their cars, who are really interested in cars. But for most people, it's a utility kind of thing, right? They need a car to get around because society has been built in such a way to require them to do so. And that's actually quite expensive, right? AAA, which is, you know, kind of the group that represents automotive interests, says that the annual cost of owning

a car went over $10,000 in 2022. And so it's a huge expense for people, right? When you consider the cost of owning the car, the gas to fuel it, the maintenance, and all the other costs that go along with it. And so I think it's a real problem that we've built our society in such a way that so many people have to be reliant on cars. And I think that it's just kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. We build the infrastructure and our communities in such a way that people can only drive. And then we're surprised why people only drive and they keep buying cars, right? I think that if we actually started to make the investments in alternative ways to get around, we'd be surprised by the number of people

who would actually be interested in using them and want to use them if they're actually reliable, affordable, frequent, can actually get them to where they need to go. I think that there's a serious problem in how local officials, how government officials have been distracted by things like the Boring Company, like Uber and ride-hailing services, like autonomous vehicles. And that has led them not to pursue the policies that very obviously

would start to address these problems, like investing in public transportation, like investing in cycling infrastructure, like starting to kind of redesign roads so that you encourage people not to drive as quickly, so that you encourage people not to drive as quickly, so that you make them more safe for the other people who are using the roads and not just cars. There are many different solutions that we can pursue, but they're often like not as sexy as things that Silicon Valley thinks will be the future of transportation, but as we've seen over the past decade, don't produce the results that we need. Let me ask you lastly, a defender of Elon Musk, a defender of the boring company, a defender of what Silicon Valley has brought to the United

States and to the world more broadly, would say, but Paris, at least they're trying. They're trying to get something done. Maybe they're not succeeding, but like Elon Musk made an effort when no one else was. What do you think about that? I would say that there's part of it that is accurate, right? Elon Musk was proposing these things, especially at a moment where the government wasn't really setting out a big vision for what our future was going to look like. That was left to the private sector.

And that's kind of the consequence of decades of the public sector reining itself in and leaving more to the private sector. And so there was a need to think big about what the future could be. There's a real problem in how we've elevated Elon Musk to be this figure who is presenting these grand futures to us, who is building the future, because he's now become this real belligerent billionaire who feels that he's completely outside of the law, of scrutiny.

He doesn't feel a need to pay much attention to what various regulatory agencies would expect people operating in his capacity to do. He really acts like there's no one who can rein him in because he has this kind of power that he is the one who can drive things forward. And I think that that's a really serious problem, especially when we look at the impacts of the ideas and the technologies that he's put out into the world. And we can recognize that they haven't solved the problems that he promised they would solve. And that actually, if we're going to solve these really serious problems,

things like traffic, things like road deaths, that we do need to do those things, but the actual solutions are going to look very different than what someone like Elon Musk is going to propose. So I think that he served to distract us from really important issues and the actual solutions that can solve them, and that it's time for us to kind of wake up and have the difficult conversations to actually solve real problems

and to set out a future that works for everyone, that's not just kind of coming from the mind of the richest person in the world. Today's show was produced by Avishai Artsy and edited by Amina El-Sadi. It was fact-checked by Laura Bullard and engineered by Paul Robert Mouncey. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. you