Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, the tunnel drilling company for Elon Musk, has announced plans to build a 10-mile “loop” that connects downtown Nashville and its convention centers to local airports.
According to a press release from the governor, the project will be personally funded by the boring company “and its private partners,” but these partners are not named. The boring company and local officials will begin a “public process to assess potential routes, attract community stakeholders, and finalize plans for the first 10-mile phase of the project.”
Construction will not begin until the project has cleared the approval process. However, the Governor’s Office said the first segment of the loop could become operational “early in the fall of 2026.”
If that happens, Nashville will be the second city where a boring company has opened such a system, first in Las Vegas. The company has dug up and opened a Las Vegas Convention Center in Sin City for the past few years, claiming it has given 3 million vehicles to date at Teslas.
Musk launched a boring company in early 2017 (after the idea was published on Twitter while falling into traffic in late 2016), and has taken many forms ever since.
The original video detailing Musk’s ideas – now set to private on YouTube – shows vehicles removed from Surface Street Gridlock in elevator and type systems and removed into a network of tunnels in a 3D underground network. Musk also claimed that during the first Trump administration, the boring company had received “verbal government approval” from New York City to dig tunnels into Washington, D.C.
It never happened. The boring company has abandoned plans to dig into the main tunnel system beneath the Greater Los Angeles area after pushback from locals. The same thing happened in Chicago. And the boring company essentially ghosts many other cities across the country.
The idea of a hyperloop, which Musk admitted to biographer Ashlee Vance, came from hatred for California’s high-speed rail system, but was put aside. Even Tesla, which crosses a Las Vegas tunnel, is driven by humans despite masks being obsessed with self-driving cars.
Instead, the boring company is now more like the glorious convention center Peoplemover, but that approach has potential benefits to a typical monorail setup. Construction should not be disruptive to Nashville’s daily traffic. And, at least in its current form, taxpayers’ money is not costly.
The Tennessee Governor’s office cites the safety records of a boring company in Las Vegas in its announcement, but according to a press release, Loop said “we have recently achieved a 99.57% safety and security rating from the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Road Security,” not to mention the issues that mask tunnel excavation efforts have experienced during construction. (We were unable to contact the governor’s office for comments.)
The pace run by a boring company, like other musk companies – the same speed the Tennessee governor’s office praised in its announcement was a concern for some workers.
Last year, Fortune’s Jessica Matthews reported that a boring company employee told her then-safe manager:
The same safety manager spoke to Fortune on the record, saying, “The conditions they were told to work were honestly barely able to withstand… they couldn’t fix the wrong thing.”
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