The Boring Company was conceived as a solution to LA's traffic woes, and the first people to benefit from its forward-thinking tunnel networks may be the city's sports fans. The company today announced a proposed transport link between the LA Metro and Dodger Stadium, which would greatly reduce the travel time on match day and throw extra momentum behind the other projects in its pipeline.
Called Dugout loop, the underground transport system would be a single-lane tunnel with a terminal situated close to one of three stations along the LA Metro's Red Line, and another popping up close to the Dodger Stadium carpark. This is a distance of around 3.6 miles (5.8 km), which you could cover in a car pretty swiftly under normal circumstances. But as the folks of LA may well attest, the city's traffic situation isn't generally described as normal.
The Dugout Loop, if it goes ahead, would ferry passengers out to Dodger Stadium in four minutes. The tunnel would be accessed via elevators or ramps, and passengers would ride in specially designed pods built onto electric skates. These skates are modeled on the Tesla Model X platform and use several electric motors to hit speeds between 125 and 150 mph (200 and 241 km/h).
Eight to 16 passengers could ride in each pod at a time, with services to run in one direction out to the stadium leading up to a match or event, and then in the other direction towards the metro once proceedings are underway.
According to The Boring Company, it could transport 1,400 people per event, or around 2.5 percent of the stadium's capacity. With further work, it says this capacity could be increased to 2,800 per game, and a total of 250,000 a year in between matches and events.
It should be said that The Boring Company has already made a number of proposals for transport tunnels, with some further along than others. Last month the City of Chicago enlisted its services to construct an Express Loop linking its airport with downtown, allowing for travel times as little as 12 minutes.
Its ambitions in the City of Angels, meanwhile, have been pretty widely documented, with LA Mayor Eric Garcetti seemingly pretty receptive to its ideas. CEO Elon Musk held "promising talks" with Garcetti midway through last year, and it has since completed a test tunnel at its headquarters in Hawthorn and proposed a network beneath the city.
If it materializes, however, the link to Dodger Stadium will be its first operational tunnel to transport passengers. Over the next month the company is seeking input from the people and will hold a public scoping meeting at Dodger Stadium on August 28. It is also working with the city's Bureau of Engineering to draft an environmental impact report, along with other agencies to get the Dugout Loop up and running.
"Always exciting to see innovative ideas like the proposed Dugout Loop to Dodger Stadium that could help ease congestion on our roads and make our most iconic destinations more accessible to everyone," tweeted LA mayor Eric Garcetti.
Source: The Boring Company
Of course, the lines of fans waiting to get on the damn things will be fun to see as well. I can imagine this turning into the rich folks' way of arriving to the game in style, rather like a chopper would be if they were allowed to shuttle to Dodger Stadium. Musk claims a $1/ride cost, but the real cost will be the crowds trying to use it.
Let's just see how well the first notion - "car sleds" to whisk commuters through the tunnels Elon proposes to put under parts of LA in general - really works. Me, I'm not holding my breath.