Community activists kill Elon Musk's plan for an underground highway tunnel in LA



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Elon Musk. Image: Daniel Oberhaus / Motherboard

Boring Company, the Elon Musk Tunnel Company, on Tuesday canceled its plan to build a 17 km tunnel under the Los Angeles Highway 405, after entering into a coalition with a coalition of community groups that will had been prosecuted. Instead, the company said it would build a much shorter test tunnel for the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball stadium.

The planned highway tunnel, known as the Sepulveda test tunnel, was announced last year by the Boring company, but construction quickly stagnated due to legal problems. Boring sought to circumvent a lengthy environmental review process for the tunnel and was able to convince the city to move quickly on the road to construction.

This angered a number of community groups in Los Angeles, who sued the city and demanded a full environmental review of the Musk test tunnel. The pressure of the community groups has worked and this week, the Boring company has abandoned all its projects concerning the Sepulveda tunnel.

Read more: Tech billionaires build their utopias without asking us

Musk had praised the plans of the Sepulveda Tunnel as recently as late October, when he tweeted that the first section of the tunnel would be open to pbadengers on 10 December. Now that Musk's dream of avoiding traffic in Los Angeles is dead, the company will focus on its so-called "dugout loop," which will transport Los Angelenos to Dodgers Stadium and other venues in the area. The loop will be populated with modified Tesla vehicles running on "electric pads", but until now, these transport vehicles have only been shown in promotional videos.

As often happens with Musk, he promised much more than he was able to do in the case of the Sepulveda Tunnel, but the Boring company meanwhile has a number of projects to focus on.

In 2017, the Maryland Roads Authority gave Musk permission to build a 12-kilometer tunnel between Baltimore and Washington, DC, but these projects faced legal problems this year. The mayor of Chicago has also asked the Boring Company to build an 18-kilometer transit tunnel around the city, but many residents are skeptical about its realization in a city with fantastic dreams.

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