Elon Musk’s pitch is seductively simple: instead of choking on traffic at street level, cities could slip cars into sleek tunnels and glide beneath the gridlock. The Boring Company promises faster trips, fewer headaches and a future where congestion is handled underground rather than on asphalt. I want to know whether that vision actually solves the problems cities face, or just buries them out of sight.
To answer that, I am looking at how the Vegas Loop is being built, what transportation experts say about capacity and geometry, and how communities from Los Angeles to Nashville are reacting. The result is less a sci‑fi breakthrough and more a revealing stress test of how we think about public space, equity and who urban infrastructure is really for.
What Musk is actually building under Las Vegas
The clearest real‑world test of this idea sits under the Las Vegas Convention Center, where the Vegas Loop runs Tesla cars through narrow tunnels instead of running trains. Customers are being told to expect a system that behaves like public transit, and Jan Leffel has argued that Vegas Loop customers will expect Boring to follow the same standards as a public transit system and that it should receive comparable oversight, yet the project has exposed a gap in how regulators treat private tunnels versus traditional rail or bus networks, according to Vegas Loop. That mismatch matters because riders will still expect safety, reliability and clear rules, even if the vehicles are Teslas instead of subway cars.
Capacity is another pressure point. Early descriptions of the system imagined high‑throughput “stations” where passengers would board quickly and vehicles would arrive in rapid succession. One analysis of the Las Vegas setup calculated that pairing a human driver with a Model 3 would give a maximum capacity of approximately 16,000 riders per hour, with a theoretical 24,000 if everything were automated and perfectly choreographed. On paper, those numbers sound competitive with light rail, but they depend on ideal conditions and do not change the basic geometry that each car carries only a handful of people at a time.
The geometry problem: cars versus transit
Urban planners have long argued that congestion is not just about speed, it is about how many people a corridor can move. Most gridlock occurs at the so‑called “last mile” of a trip, and Traffic on an interstate highway usually flows freely, but the bottlenecks appear where drivers exit into dense city streets, a pattern critics say tunnels full of cars do little to fix, as noted in Most. If vehicles emerge from underground into the same crowded intersections, the choke points simply move rather than disappear.
That is why many transportation engineers remain skeptical of replacing trains and buses with small electric cars in tunnels. A growing number of civil engineers and transit planners have looked at urban tunnels by Musk’s Boring Co and concluded that the concept does not fundamentally change the physics of moving people, even as They have twice hosted officials from Elon Musk’s Boring Co, which built the Vegas tunnel, to tour Fort Lauderdale and discuss similar ideas, according to They. When the same amount of tunnel space could carry full‑size trains, the choice to prioritize small pods looks less like innovation and more like a preference for cars at any cost.
Safety, oversight and the Robert Moses warning
Even if the capacity math worked, there is the question of who is watching over these systems. Elon Musk’s underground transit project has raised concerns over oversight and safety, with critics warning that the Vegas Loop promises a futuristic experience that may come at a steep cost if regulators do not treat it like a true transit line, as detailed in coverage of Elon Musk’s project. I see a tension here between the speed of private experimentation and the slower, more public process that usually governs subways and commuter rail.
There is also a historical echo that is hard to ignore. Jul reporting has compared Elon Musk’s approach to that of Robert Moses, warning that Musk’s promise is straightforward and seductive but risks repeating an era when highways were driven through neighborhoods in ways that privileged drivers over everyone else, and Through Tesla, Elon Musk has already tried to transform how people move in ways that sometimes clash with public planning, as noted in analysis of Elon Musk. When a single billionaire’s preferences shape long‑lived infrastructure, the risk is not just technical failure, it is locking in a car‑centric vision for generations.
Who gets served: equity, access and politics
Equity is where the tunnel dream starts to look most fragile. In Nashville, a proposed airport link has already drawn fire from residents who see it as a luxury amenity rather than a public good, with one Jul letter writer arguing that Elon’s tunnel is a gateway for the rich and that Not actually living within Nashville-Davidson County any more, they would never have the opportunity to use it, and that the city should build an elevated train instead, according to a critique of Nashville. That complaint captures a broader fear that these projects prioritize tourists and business travelers over the people who rely on transit every day.
Political dynamics add another layer. Mar commentary on Musk’s earlier foray into Chicago transit described how Transportation Professionals Saw Elon Musk, Lies and Disdain for the Public Firsthand, recounting how local planners felt sidelined while President Trump allowed Elon Musk to pitch a privately controlled tunnel as a quick fix for airport access, according to Transportation Professionals Saw. When big promises collide with local process, the result can be years of distraction from more modest but proven upgrades like bus lanes or commuter rail improvements.
Could tunnels ever be useful transit, and what should cities do now?
None of this means tunnels are inherently a bad idea. Because they are underground the trains could potentially travel faster without worrying about obstacles, can pass under populated areas without taking surface land and, in some high speed concepts, could reach velocities equal to modern jet aircraft, as one analysis of underground systems has argued in discussing Because. Nov commentary on California has even suggested that Aside from being able to accommodate more passengers, future Boring Company vans with level boarding could improve accessibility while avoiding the need to spend billions to build wider tunnels, according to a proposal that framed this as a Aside alternative. If the vehicles look more like trains and less like private cars, the geometry starts to shift.
There are also cost arguments that appeal to some transit advocates. In one Jun discussion among tunnel supporters, a commenter noted that At LVCC, the 2nd place, $215M Doppelmeyer Cableliner bid was four times the fixed-price Loop bid, and that Loop is an express system with a peak median of 10 minutes, using this comparison to argue that Non traditional tunneling could deliver more for less, according to a debate over At LVCC. Supporters on Feb threads have contrasted this with BRT, saying that if you went BRT, you would lose the advantages of PRT such as wait times measured in seconds and extremely high frequency headways, using PRT as shorthand for the kind of on‑demand service Boring promises, as seen in one BRT debate. Those arguments show why the idea keeps resurfacing even as experts warn about its limits.
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