Monday, March 4, 2019

Boring Company tunnel from Downtown San Jose to SJC

Last month there was a surprise announcement that Sam Liccardo has been in talks with The Boring Company for the past 18 months about a project that would connect Diridon to the airport via a 4-mile tunnel. The Boring Company is a disruptor in the tunneling space using hybrid-electric boring machines and several other innovations to reduce the cost of tunneling by a factor of 10. A two-way tunnel to the airport could cost less than $100 million versus the $800+ million a traditional people-mover would cost to build.

Now is really the perfect opportunity to start looking at next generation transportation options. As we have witnessed with California High-Speed Rail, paying for something that is both the most expensive and slowest high-speed train in the world makes little sense. Same goes for spending almost a billion dollars for a 4 mile people mover shuttling people at 25-35 MPH. If we can lay the foundation for a network that will reduce traffic and move people faster and do it at a far lower cost, that is worth exploring. Kudos for Sam for taking the initiative so long ago. Silicon Valley deserve a transit system that makes our innovative heritage proud.

Source: Teslarati, SVBJ



1 comment:

  1. It's factually inaccurate to say CAHSR would have been the slowest HSR in the world. 220 mph is a higher max operating speed than the overwhelming majority of HSR systems in the world.

    And beyond that, TBC hasn't proven or even operationally tested any of the core elements of this system yet.

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