Elon Musk’s Hilariously Bad Subway System Leaves Virginia Transit Officials Baffled
It is good for smart people to spend their time coming up with genuinely innovative methods of overhauling this country's crumbling transportation infrastructure, and for diligent public servants to invest accordingly in promising technologies. It is, however, perhaps the height of Silicon Valley's terminal delusions of grandeur to decide that turning expensive electric vehicles into tiny train cars will accomplish anything other than enriching the already very rich people who manufacture them.
This, more or less, is the conclusion at which a trio of Virginia transportation officials recently arrived after traveling to Southern California to test out Elon Musk's much-hyped tunneling venture, hopeful that it could one day revolutionize commuting in the greater Washington area. Suffice it to say that their firsthand reviews of the experience, which involved strapping themselves into a Tesla that made its way through a 1.14-mile tunnel beneath a Los Angeles industrial park, are unlikely to appear in The Boring Company's marketing materials anytime soon. From the Virginia Mercury:
“It’s a car in a very small tunnel,” Michael McLaughlin, Virginia’s chief of rail transportation, told members of the Commonwealth Transportation Board’s public transit subcommittee on Wednesday.
“If one day we decide it’s feasible, we’ll obviously come back to you.”
When Musk conceived of The Boring Company—famously, via a series of frustrated tweets posted in the midst of an L.A. traffic jam—he pledged a network of subterranean luggage carousels, on top of which vehicles would park before being magically WHOOSHED from one end of town to the other at speeds of up to 150 miles per hour. Since then, he has pivoted to a system in which cars are equipped with "tracking wheels" that flip out from underneath the front bumper and run along rails built into the tunnel. Astute students of transportation will note that this ostensibly paradigm-wrecking technology bears a remarkable resemblance to "the train."
Last winter, a Chicago alderman who traveled to L.A. for his own test ride politely described it as "a little bumpy," noting that the Model X in which he traveled had reached a top speed of 34 miles per hour. Traffic-weary residents of northern Virginia will note that this description could easily apply to "the Metro that already exists," only if it were equipped with smaller trains that are capable of allowing fewer people to reach their intended destinations. So far, in what is probably a coincidence, only vehicles manufactured by Musk's Tesla company are compatible with the service.
Scott Kasprowicz, another Virginia Transportation Board member who gave it the proverbial college try, sounds as if he left feeling equally baffled by, uh, whatever he had just endured.
I think there’s a lot of show going on here...I don’t mean to suggest that they don’t have a serious plan in mind, but I don’t consider the steps they’ve taken to date to be substantive. They’ve purchased a used boring machine. They’ve put a bore in the neighborhood where they developed the SpaceX product, and they’ve taken a Model 3 and put guidewheels on it and they’re running it through the tunnel at 60 miles per hour. None of that, I think, is really significant from a standpoint of moving this process forward.
All of this analysis sounds like a genteel, safe-for-public-access-TV version of Wait, we flew how far to sit through a turn on his beep-boop kiddie roller coaster?—a conversation which, I assume, took place the moment they were out of earshot of Boring Company representatives, and had finished silently processing their overwhelming gratitude upon realizing that the preceding minutes had not resulted in their ignominious deaths.
“The reality is it’s a great idea, but I’m not sure its time has come,” concluded Kasprowicz. “We’ll give Elon Musk and the Boring Company credit for at least trying.” The Mercury's account does not specify whether he did so while maintaining a straight face, or found himself unable to suppress a final, befuddled smirk.
