Fort Lauderdale considering Boring Company project

Dive Temporary:

• Metropolis officers in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, are thinking about a proposal from The Boring Company for an underground transportation loop intended to reduce avenue targeted visitors.
• The city fee voted to overview the Elon Musk-owned firm’s proposal for a transit procedure developed to connect downtown Fort Lauderdale to the beach, Mayor Dean Trantalis declared by way of Twitter July 6.
• Other firms have 45 days to post proposals to compete with TBC on the project, dubbed “The Las Olas Loop.”

Dive Insight:

Critics of TBC have pointed to the company’s initial job — the 1-mile-extended transit loop at the Las Vegas Convention Centre — saying it consists of standard failures other transit programs presently clear up. The model works by using autonomous Tesla cars and trucks to ferry passengers along the tunnels, at speeds slower than TBC had very first indicated. These inefficiencies have drawn criticism from transit industry experts, whilst that has not slowed TBC’s efforts to uncover and get started new tasks.

Given that completing the conference center project before this yr, TBC has a amount of initiatives beneath thought, whilst none have fully arrive to fruition however. 

In December 2020, the Las Vegas Town Council voted to advance strategies to prolong the convention heart loop beneath the Strip, connecting it to big casinos and the airport.

In February, TBC began negotiations with the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority to generate a 4-mile-prolonged transit loop from a Metrolink educate station in Rancho Cucamonga, California, to Ontario Worldwide Airport.

And in March, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez explained that he desired to use federal cash to assemble a TBC tunnel less than the metropolis. Even so, the fate of this task is unsure as it would not slide below Suarez’s purview for the reason that in Miami-Dade County, the county controls the roadways. Also, South Florida has a superior drinking water table, indicating basements, tunnels and other underground work are scarce. 

The state has only two tunneling projects, and its limestone can make it complicated to enhance tunneling, in accordance to CNN Enterprise. On top of that, Florida has secured underground aquifers that can make tunneling cost prohibitive.

However, other opportunity tasks may perhaps be popping up shortly. In May well, Gapped Bass LLC — an entity tied to TBC — purchased 73 acres in Bastrop County, Texas, exterior of Austin, NBC affiliate KXAN described. The buy hints at some type of task there, be it tunneling or if not.