Elon Musk has solution to traffic jams: vows to build tunnels
19 Dec 2016
Elon Musk wants to do many things - put a human colony on Mars, fill the world with electric-powered driverless cars, charge houses with a battery and build super speed trains.
Now it seems he wants to solve the scourge of traffic congestion that plagues major cities around the world – by digging tunnels.
The chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla and co-founder of PayPal has got many world-changing projects currently in the works, but judging by an impromptu Twitter rant over the weekend, the innovative 45-year-old now wants to eradicate traffic congestion.
On Sunday, Musk was clearly frustrated by the slow moving traffic and decided to make a very public pledge to do something about it. The crux of his idea is tunnels.
''Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging...'' Musk tweeted, adding a little later, ''It shall be call the boring company'' and ''I am actually going to do this''.
A tunnel boring machine, also known as a ''mole'', is a machine used to excavate tunnels with a circular cross section. And it also happens to provide a nice play on words for when billionaire entrepreneurs are stuck in traffic and feel like joking around.
It was clearly a lighthearted rant, but his ensuing insistence has media speculation in overdrive.
To prove just how serious he supposedly is about his new business venture, Musk even edited his Twitter bio which now reads: ''Tesla, SpaceX, Tunnels (yes, tunnels) & OpenAI.''
It's certainly not the first time the PayPal co-founder has mentioned his keenness to build a bunch of tunnels.
Following an event in January this year dedicated to a competition to design passenger pods for the Hyperloop train conceptualised by Musk, he spoke of his fondness for tunnels.
''It's a really simple and obvious idea and I wish more people would do it: build more tunnels,'' he said during a question-and-answer session at the event.
''Tunnels are great. It's just a hole in the ground, it's not that hard. But if you have tunnels in cities you would massively alleviate congestion and you could have tunnels at all different levels; you could probably have 30 layers of tunnels and completely fix the congestion problem in high-density cities. So, I strongly recommend tunnels.''
Musk recently joined US president-elect Donald Trump's economic advisory team after attending a meeting of tech leaders and the real estate mogul turned politician.
Trump has signalled his intention to be a president that invests in infrastructure projects, and building tunnels is certainly a better idea than building border walls.
Anyone who is routinely caught in peak hour traffic would surely welcome any ideas to effectively reduce road congestion. So it is far from Musk's craziest idea. However the logistics and cost of building a bunch of underground roads probably makes it an unlikely venture at this point.
