After Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago, and Las Vegas, the ‘Boring Company’ will go to Miami, where it’ll build a two-mile tunnel passing under the river to connect Brickell Avenue and Biscayne Boulevard. According to several reports, Elon Musk has met (virtually) with Miami’s mayor, Francis Suarez, who asked for a tunnel that will cost the city only $30 million and will be constructed and commissioned in as little as six months.
To achieve the feat of making the tunnel quickly and also keeping the costs in check, one has to cut corners. The idea is to omit any ventilation systems and make the tunnel accessible only to electric vehicles. This way, there would be no toxic fumes accumulating in the tunnel, and EV cars would get a clean, quick, and also exclusive shortcut.
Miami’s engineers have been trying to find an inexpensive way to dig a tunnel under the Miami River since 2018 but failed to reduce the cost any further than $1 billion. Moreover, it would take about four years to build, creating serious traffic congestion problems in the area for an extensive period of time. Thus, the Boring Company appears like the only feasible solution right now, and Miami hopes that the particular project will act as an example to the whole world.
If you’re thinking that such a tunnel wouldn’t be enough to have a notable effect on the current traffic situation in Miami because all petrol and diesel cars will be forbidden from using it, you have fallen behind. Aside from the fact that the near future is bound to bring a lot more EVs into the American urban roads, their percentage is already significant enough to make such projects sound and worthy. In Florida, the YoY (year over year) EV sales increase by a rate of 100% annually since 2016, and the market share is now standing at a venerable 5%.
Image by Marco Brugo from Pixabay
