Fed up with LA traffic, Elon Musk experiments to make tunneling 500-1000% faster

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It’s time to take Elon Musk seriously and literally. After Twitter hints, tidbits, and whining about LA traffic, the serial entrepreneur and budding mole man is digging a tunnel. Well, a hole.

Over the weekend, workers excavated a “test trench” 30 feet wide, 50 feet long, and 15 feet deep on the grounds of SpaceX’s Los Angeles headquarters. Musk calls it the beginning of an experiment. “We’re just going to figure out what it takes to improve tunneling speed by, I think, somewhere between 500 and 1,000 percent,” he said Sunday during a hyperloop design competition at SpaceX. “We have no idea what we’re doing—I want to be clear about that.”

Musk first pitched this idea last week in a tweet lamenting LA’s atrocious traffic, promising to “build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging.” He has since revealed a far wider vision of eliminating the city’s famed congestion by shuffling humanity through a network of tunnels. “If you think of tunnels going 10, 20, 30 layers deep (or more), it is obvious that going 3D down will encompass the needs of any city’s transport of arbitrary size,” he told WIRED last week in a Twitter direct message.

“You have tall buildings, they’re all 3D, and then everyone wants to go into the building and leave the building at a same time,” he said Sunday. “On a 2D road network, that obviously doesn’t work, so you have to go 3D either up or down. And I think probably down.”

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