Elon Musk, the tech billionaire behind revolutionary innovations, has come up with a new and ingenious way to address traffic congestion in Los Angeles – and he says he’s already started on it.
Musk is the brains behind SpaceX, the ambitious private space company that hopes to send civilians to Mars soon. He is also the founder of Tesla, which makes electric cars, and SolarCity, the largest solar energy services provider in the Unties States.
Now, the man who came up with PayPal intends to dig tubes underneath LA in order to find an easier and more efficient solution to the city’s daily traffic woes, the New York Post reports.
Musk officially broke ground last month, with his very own boring machine. The “mole” dug a trench 30 feet wide, 50 feet long and 15 feet deep as a test. Musk said,
We have no idea what we’re doing — I want to be clear about that. We’re just going to figure out what it takes to improve tunneling speed by, I think, somewhere between 500 and 1,000 percent.
The engineer and inventor has been complaining about LA’s traffic situation for months, voicing his frustrations on social media platform Twitter. “Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging,” read one of his tweets from December 17. The next day, Musk said, “I am actually going to do this.”
Via Twitter, Musk told The Verge that he was determined to dig below LA. He explained, “Without tunnels, we will all be in traffic hell forever. I really do think tunnels are the key to solving urban gridlock. Being stuck in traffic is soul-destroying.”
It’s not clear how Musk intends to use the tunnels – whether they will be for subways or vehicles. Last month, he answered a Twitter user, saying that the tunnel will start “across from my desk at SpaceX” all the way until “Crenshaw and the 105 Freeway, which is 5 mins from LAX.”