{"id":104176,"date":"2025-07-30T07:09:30","date_gmt":"2025-07-30T07:09:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/104176\/"},"modified":"2025-07-30T07:09:30","modified_gmt":"2025-07-30T07:09:30","slug":"elon-musk-is-digging-tunnels-under-nashville","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/104176\/","title":{"rendered":"Elon Musk Is Digging Tunnels Under Nashville"},"content":{"rendered":"

Somehow, Elon Musk keeps convincing cities to allow him to dig under them. The latest locale to give The Boring Company the rights to displace dirt directly under their feet is Nashville, Tennessee, which announced<\/a> an agreement this week to allow Musk\u2019s firm to build a 10-mile \u201cloop\u201d that will connect the city\u2019s airport and convention center\u2014an arrangement that has modestly improved traffic flow in Las Vegas while turning the city into a laughingstock of the infrastructure design community<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Nashville project will be privately funded, according to an announcement<\/a> from Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, and will be backed by The Boring Company and \u201cits private partners,\u201d who were not named. Musk\u2019s firm will have to go through the approvals process to \u201cevaluate potential routes, engage community stakeholders, and finalize plans for the project\u2019s initial 10-mile phase,\u201d which one would imagine could result in some delays\u2014but the governor\u2019s office insisted that the loop may open as \u201cearly as fall of 2026,\u201d which sure sounds like the type of date you\u2019d set if you intended to steamroll the whole regulatory procedure.<\/p>\n

That would be in line with The Boring Company\u2019s M.O., for what it\u2019s worth. Earlier this year, ProPublica published a massive report<\/a> on The Boring Company\u2019s operation in Las Vegas, which has basically become a free-for-all. Taking the private funding approach allowed the company to bypass many of the regulatory hurdles that a publicly funded transit system would be required to undergo, which also means it may not be up to snuff on safety standards, either. It has, for instance, been regularly criticized for its lack of obvious emergency exits,<\/a> presenting the risk of trapping people in a fiery death hole.<\/p>\n

Musk\u2019s firm basically has free rein in Vegas, and The Boring Company Goes Country appears like it\u2019s going down the same path. But plenty of cities have opted to back out of agreements with The Boring Company once it became obvious that their plans were haphazard and the public wasn\u2019t all that into it. Chicago axed a plan<\/a> that would have built a loop to the O\u2019Hare International Airport, and even Musk-friendly Fort Lauderdale<\/a> backed off giving The Boring Company the go-ahead to dig after pushback from its residents. Even after undergoing an environmental review to build a tunnel between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., the company simply never started digging<\/a>. Frankly, that might be for the best.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Somehow, Elon Musk keeps convincing cities to allow him to dig under them. The latest locale to give…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":104177,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[64,66,67219,2987,7829,67220,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-104176","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-elon-musk","10":"tag-hyperloop","11":"tag-nashville","12":"tag-tesla","13":"tag-the-boring-company","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114940933835779456","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104176\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}