The Boring Company is just tunnels. And tunnels

When Elon Musk announced The Boring Company, everyone assumed it was about hyperloops. Vacuum tubes. Magnetic levitation. Pods shooting through underground tunnels at 600 mph. The sci-fi stuff.

Turns out it’s about tunnels.

Just… tunnels. Regular tunnels. The kind we’ve been digging for centuries. The Boring Company’s pitch isn’t a new transportation technology. It’s an old transportation technology built faster and cheaper. Their first real project is a loop under the Las Vegas Convention Center. Not a hyperloop. A loop. Teslas driving through a tunnel at 35 mph.

A lot of people are disappointed. I get it. After the initial hype (and the flamethrowers, and the hat), a tunnel with Teslas in it feels anticlimactic.

But I’ve been thinking about it, and I think the boring version might be the smarter bet.

The 10x argument

Here’s the thing about tunnels. They work. We know they work. The London Underground has been running since 1863. The Channel Tunnel connects two countries under the sea. New York’s subway moves millions of people every day. Tunnels are proven technology.

The problem with tunnels has never been the concept. It’s the cost. Digging a tunnel in the US costs somewhere between $100 million and $1 billion per mile. That’s not a typo. A billion dollars. Per mile. The Second Avenue Subway in New York is costing about $2.5 billion per mile, which is the most expensive infrastructure project per unit of distance in human history.

The Boring Company’s claim is that they can bring that cost down by a factor of ten. Through a combination of a smaller tunnel diameter, continuous boring (most tunnel boring machines stop frequently), and improvements to the machine itself.

If they’re right (and that’s a big if), the implications are enormous. Not because of hyperloops or magnetic levitation or any exotic technology. Because cheap tunnels change cities.

What cheap tunnels mean

Right now, building a subway line in a major American city takes decades and costs tens of billions of dollars. Most cities can’t afford it. So they don’t build it. So they get more cars, more congestion, more sprawl, more pollution.

If tunnel cost drops by 10x, the math changes completely. A city that couldn’t justify a $20 billion subway could justify a $2 billion one. Tunnels that were economically impossible become routine. You could build them in medium-sized cities, not just New York and London. You could build bypass tunnels under congested highways. You could put utility lines underground instead of on ugly poles.

None of this is futuristic. It’s all stuff we already know how to do. We just can’t afford to do it at the current price.

Why tunnels are hard right now

I went down a rabbit hole (tunnel pun, sorry) on why American tunneling is so expensive. The reasons are predictable and depressing.

Labor rules that require more workers than necessary. Environmental review processes that take years. Multiple government agencies with overlapping jurisdiction. Change orders that double or triple the cost mid-project. A contracting industry with no incentive to bid accurately because cost overruns are standard.

None of this is about the physical difficulty of digging. It’s about the institutional difficulty. The tunnel boring machines themselves work fine. The TBMs that dug the Channel Tunnel in the 1980s were, mechanically, not that different from modern ones. The machines aren’t the bottleneck. Everything around the machines is the bottleneck.

The Boring Company’s bet is that a vertically integrated company, one that builds its own TBMs, employs its own workers, and strips out the overhead from the process end to end, can cut through the institutional bloat. It’s the same bet SpaceX made with rockets: the physics isn’t the hard part, the bureaucracy is.

Whether that bet pays off is an open question. The space industry had fewer entrenched interests fighting against change than the construction industry does. Tunneling has unions, regulations, local politics, property rights, environmental concerns. It’s messier.

But the attempt interests me.

The boring theory of progress

I have this theory (and I’m probably wrong about it, but here it is anyway).

The most important technological advances aren’t the ones that create new capabilities. They’re the ones that make existing capabilities affordable. The printing press didn’t create writing. It made writing cheap. The Model T didn’t create cars. It made cars cheap. The transistor didn’t create computation. It made computation cheap.

Making things cheap is unsexy. Nobody writes breathless articles about cost reduction. “Tunnels, but cheaper” doesn’t generate the same excitement as “pods in vacuum tubes at 600 mph.”

But cheaper tunnels might actually change how cities work. Hyperloops, even if they worked perfectly, would be point-to-point systems connecting a few cities. Cheap tunnels would reshape the underground of every city on Earth.

I realize the Las Vegas Convention Center loop is a far cry from reshaping cities. It’s a mile-long tunnel with Teslas in it. It’s a proof of concept at best, a glorified shuttle at worst.

But if the cost numbers are real, if they can actually bore tunnels at 1/10th the current price, the Convention Center loop isn’t the product. It’s the demo.

And I’ve learned to pay attention to boring demos. They tend to matter more than the flashy ones.

Pun intended. Sorry.

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