The Boring Route to Progress ??
Close your eyes and picture the last day you were driving home from work. The time is 4:32 p.m. The sun is just beginning to set behind the hill, and you’ve just left the office fifteen minutes early to beat the traffic. Unfortunately, the traffic beat you, and now you’re stuck in a seemingly endless sea of other drivers, barely crawling along. Frustration is risking in your chest, since it’s been weeks since you’ve actually been able to spend dinner with your family. You check your car's clock, and know that you won’t be home in time to eat with them. You switch on the radio, but there aren’t any good music stations playing what you like to listen to on the drive home. On top of that, the news station continues to only drill deeper into your brain how bad the traffic will be the entire way home. What was only a thirty-minute easy commute at five in the morning now becomes an almost two-hour slog, for no reason other than there’s only so much grace room on the highway.
But why is that?
Can’t the city just knock out some more trees and open up two or three more lanes on each side??
It’s definitely an option, and one that has already been taken in many major cities to decrease traffic congestion. However, it doesn't seem to have dramatically reduced the numbers or the frequency of extended commute times.
The more ingenious answer: Dig tunnels.
The moment I heard about that, I honestly laughed. Dig tunnels? I thought back to Pixar’s The Incredibles and cringed mightily, because the only association I had to any kind of tunnel digging was to a villain called The Underminer, who shows up in the final two minutes of the film with a crazy massive ground drill thing. He’s literally a mole-like creature who lives underground and does all this stuff with his massive power tool the size of a building. It’s pretty disturbing, at least for me it was, because up to a point, I had only ever associated digging underground and drilling tunnels with destruction.
Luckily there’s a saner route we can take.
The Boring Company has already begun to execute this plan of boring tunnels underground into action, and the expectation is optimistic for solving the great transportation and traffic problem. Founded in 2016 by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, The Boring Company’s Mission Statement is “[t]o solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic.”? The extension of the mission statement continues, “[in order to do this], roads must go 3D, which means either flying cars or tunnels. Unlike flying cars, tunnels are weatherproof, out of sight and won't fall on your head. A large network of tunnels many levels deep would fix congestion in any city, no matter how large it grew (just keep adding levels).”
Fortunately, the foundational work has already begun. In the span of just the last four years, The Boring Co. has initiated a test tunnel in Hawthorne, CA, was approved to begin Loop construction in Las Vegas, is in review to begin construction leading from the Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, and is in review to build underground from Baltimore to downtown Washington D.C.?
Just when the world thought we’d for sure have flying cars in the next five years, here we are seeing the potential of just how much critical thinking and some deep digging up is about to do for the nation, and hopefully soon the entire world, for traffic relief and for individual peace of mind.
There’s only so much sky before you reach the max. But underground, there are far more endless possibilities.
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