Elon Musk's Solution to Traffic? Underground Tunnels!

When Elon Musk unveiled The Boring Company, it was literally the boring company. It appears Musk wants to solve traffic in cities with yet another revolutionary idea, and that is through big tunnels under highways.

This is an idea he had while sitting in the midst of Los Angeles traffic, and the founder of SpaceX and Tesla appears to be dead-serious in solving traffic using tunnels.

According to Electrek, he first gave hints to this idea during SpaceX's Hyperloop pod design competition in January 2016.

He said that building tunnels is a good idea to reduce congestion, especially if there were a lot of them. He said 30 layers of tunnels would do good to reduce congestions in major cities around the world. 

According to The Verge, when he initially announced this, he said he was going to build a tunnel boring machine and start digging, and he wasn't kidding.

Called the tunnel boring machine (TBM), it's a "mole" or a machine that excavates tunnels and bores anything from rock to sand.

These are already used for projects like pipelines and things that require long-distance digging. However, Musk wants to dig in urban areas, which is already challenging on its own since the ground must not be disturbed.

But since this is already done is some measure, it appears his crazy idea is about to become a reality. According to Electrek, given the progress in his rockets and hyperloop idea, it appears this is not a surprise anymore of Musk fans.

This is also a good test bed for a Martian colony, which may need good digging techniques on its own to build habitats safe from the low-pressure, high radiation and extreme cold of the planet.

Of course, its main goal is still to reduce traffic, which has a lot of positive consequences. It can reduce fuel consumption and carbon emissions for now as well.

Given that Musk is on the President-elect's Strategic and Policy team, Musk may actually be able to pull this off.