Elon Musk’s The Boring Company is moving ahead with plans to build underground tunnels for cars in a bid to relieve clogged roads and highways in Miami and Texas. Musk’s firm has submitted a plan for a 6.2-mile underground transit system in South Florida where commuters would take Tesla vehicles that would carry them between seven stations. The North Miami Beach Loop includes stops along State Road 826 between Golden Glades Transit Center and Sunny Isles Beach at Newport Pier, according to Business Insider. The goal is for the system to carry between 7,500 and 15,000 passengers per hour, according to company estimates. The proposal’s price tag reportedly ranges from $185 million to $220 million. If local officials remove bureaucratic red tape, an expedited process could result in the project’s completion within three years. Plans also allow for the option to add extensions to the North Miami Beach Loop that would include connections to Hard Rock Stadium and Florida International University’s Biscayne Campus. “We have a lot of traffic congestion and this would be a way of alleviating a great deal of that traffic,” North Miami Beach commissioner Michael Joseph told Insider. The Boring Company is also setting its sights on Texas, where it is headquartered in the state capital of Austin, according to Bloomberg. The firm received approval to build a research and development test site where it will construct “as many tunnels as necessary” to test its technology. The tunnels, which will each measure between 300 and 600 feet long, will be dug using a boring machine known as Prufrock, which is considered an improvement over the one used to dig the Loop system under the Las Vegas Convention Center. The 1.7-mile-long tunnel in Las Vegas cost the company just $47 million to build. City lawmakers approved an expansion into downtown, which includes plans to connect the tunnel to the main airport. Last year, it was reported that The Boring Company was engaged in discussions with city officials from San Antonio and Austin about constructing tunnels. Musk has reportedly set his sights on Texas, Florida, and other states with fewer regulatory hurdles while scaling back ambitious plans in places like California. In April 2017, Musk told a TED conference that he hoped to dig tunnels underneath Los Angeles to solve the problem of “soul-destroying traffic.”
