[ad_1]
LOS ANGELES: Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has canceled the construction of a high-speed passenger tunnel under West LA, but is proposing a similar proposal across the city designed to bring baseball fans to the Dodger Stadium .
The well-known underground transport company Musk, The Boring Company, has given up developing a 4.4-kilometer tunnel in the west of Los Angeles to settle disputes brought by community groups opposed to the project, have Wednesday announced in a joint statement the two sides. (November 28)
This decision comes six months after Musk, the baron of high technology best known as the founder of the electric car company Tesla Inc. and CEO of the rocket builder SpaceX, made a rare personal appearance at a public event at Los Angeles to promote its controversial tunnel project.
At the time, Musk boasted of his intention to offer free walks in the tunnel located under Sepulveda Boulevard in order to gather public comment before continuing with a much larger network that he had considered for the metropolitan area of Los Angeles.
But opponents accused Musk of trying to evade the long environmental study required for such projects by seeking an exemption on the basis of what his company had claimed to be a small-scale demonstration of the fact that the company was doing business. a broader concept.
The precise terms of the court settlement were confidential, according to company spokeswoman Jehn Balajadia and plaintiff attorney John Given.
"The parties (…) have settled the case amicably," the statement said. "The Boring Company is no longer trying to develop the Sepulveda test tunnel, but is looking to build an operational tunnel at the Dodger stadium."
Plans for Boring's so-called "Dugout Loop", an underground high-speed transport corridor between Dodger Stadium and one of three existing subway stations along the city's red metro line, have been unveiled for the first time several months ago on the company's website.
A first public hearing on the project, the first major step in a large-scale regulatory review of the Dugout Loop, was organized by the city's public works department at the end of August.
Meanwhile, the company has announced that a separate shorter tunnel, dug beneath the tiny neighboring municipality of Hawthorne, home to Boring and SpaceX headquarters, would be completed by December 10th.
"Based on what we have learned from the Hawthorne Test Tunnel, we are moving forward with a much larger network of tunnels under Los Angeles," Musk tweeted Wednesday, adding: will not need a second test tunnel under Sepulveda. "
According to Boring, the Hawthorne Tunnel and its Dugout Loop would serve as proof-of-concept sites for a traffic-calming system consisting of underground tubes, allowing pedestrian vehicles called "skids" to be moved from one place to another at a distance of 240 km / h per hour).
The Dodger Stadium tunnel will initially be limited to about 1,400 passengers per event, or about 2.5% of the baseball stadium capacity, but traffic could possibly be doubled, the Boring website said. He said the rates would only cost $ 1 per trip.
In June, Boring was chosen by the city of Chicago for the construction of a 17-kilometer underground transportation system linking the city's downtown to the international airport O. Hare. The company also proposed an east coast loop that would connect downtown Washington to the suburbs of Maryland.
Musk, known for aggressively meeting large-scale technical challenges with which he had little experience, launched his foray into public transit after complaining of LA traffic on Twitter at the end of 2016, then promising to "build a boring machine and start digging".
(Steve Gorman report in Los Angeles, edited by Lisa Shumaker)
Source link
