Tesla CEO Elon Musk Offers To Solve $8.2B SF Downtown Rail Extension Problem For Just 1% Of Cost

The Boring Company founder Elon Musk, on Saturday, touted his company as the future of underground tunnel transport in response to reports of rising costs of the San Francisco Downtown Rail extension.

What Happened: The San Francisco Standard reported on Friday that the cost of a proposed rail tunnel intended to connect Fourth and King streets station to the Salesforce Transit Center in the city has swelled to $8.25 billion since October 2022, owing to inflation and expanding project timelines among other reasons.

Musk responded to the news on X, formerly Twitter, and wrote, “This will take an eternity and hurt taxpayers badly.”

Touting the ability and cost-effectiveness of his own tunnel making company, Musk said, “The @boringcompany can solve this problem for ~1% of this cost.”

Why It Matters: The Boring Company aims to solve traffic with underground tunnel systems or loops that enable rapid point-to-point transportation. It has currently completed three projects — the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) loop, the Hyperloop Test Track and the R&D Tunnel in Hawthorne.

"A large network of tunnels can alleviate congestion in any city; no matter how large a city grows, more levels of tunnels can be added," the company website reads.

Tunnel digging is an expensive process. As per the company’s website, several tunnel digging projects now cost between $100 million and $1 billion per mile.

“In order to make vast tunnel networks feasible, tunneling costs must be reduced by a factor of more than 10, with TBC’s Loop tunnels currently priced at approximately $10 million per mile,” the company said, highlighting its cost efficiency.

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Photo by Frederic Legrand – COMEO on Shutterstock