After years of hype and promises to wipe out the scourge of traffic — but with only a Las Vegas tourist attraction to show for it — Elon Musk’s tunneling startup says it’s set to begin digging its first full-fledged transit corridor underneath Nashville.
There’s just one catch: City officials, as well as people with more experience building tunnels, think it’s a very bad idea.
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The Boring Co. has dug a launch shaft and assembled a machine to begin drilling two roughly 10-mile tunnels running from a spot near the Tennessee capitol building to the airport. The “Music City Loop” will feature a fleet of chauffeured Teslas taking “thousands of people per hour” between downtown and the airport, easing highway congestion. Boring says the system will be safe and operate with the required state and city permits.
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The company says the project will be entirely self-funded, requiring nothing from taxpayers. In documents provided to Nashville officials, Boring says it will spend “a few hundred million dollars” to build a seamless and expandable underground network.
Those claims are baffling to people in the tunneling business, especially because of the terrain Boring will have to navigate: the tricky, sinkhole-prone limestone bedrock of middle Tennessee. The construction risks range from collapsing the ground beneath a heavily traveled state highway, to knocking out utility connections, to flooding the tunnel with groundwater.
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Many Nashville officials share those doubts. Over months, the city has pressed Boring for details on its technical prowess as well as basic information about how the system would operate in emergencies such as fires and floods. The responses, many officials say, have been inadequate.
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But Boring has an advantage in pushing the project: the American partisan divide, as seen in Nashville itself — a city dominated by Democrats like O’Connell in a state where Republicans rule. Musk’s reputation for spouting grandiose ideas that fail to come to fruition and running roughshod over rules, along with his support for Donald Trump, made many Nashville officials skeptical of Boring when the company first approached in 2024. But Musk’s ties to the MAGA movement have been seen as an asset in Boring’s dealings with Lee and the state.
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There is little the city can do to stop the project from getting underway as long as it has the state’s support. The Lee administration is allowing Boring to use a state-owned parking lot as staging grounds to launch its tunneling machine. The route to the airport is almost entirely under state-controlled roads, reducing the need for easements from private landowners or the city.
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