The Boring Company's plan to ease traffic is relatively simple, but has been criticized by transportation experts.
According to the company's website, passengers will enter a "pod" vehicle that can hold between 8 and sixteen passengers, which is then lowered into the tunnel.
Even at a capacity of 16 people per "skate," the capacity of the system is a tiny fraction of a traditional subway system. The New York City subway, for example, can carry up to 2,000 passengers in a single 10-car train. And the system can handle 24 of those trains per hour.
Musk's number one goal: reduce tunneling costs
The company claims tunneling costs must be reduced at least 10-fold for a network of crisscrossing tunnels to be feasible. It's not clear what the current costs for The Boring Company tunnels might be, but the firm claims to have engineered a cheaper way through smaller diameters and 24/7 boring.
Once finished, here's how a cross-section of the tunnels will look.
The system can also transport individual cars, but will prioritize pedestrians and cyclists, its website says, at speeds up to 150 miles per hour.
The tunnel walls are equipped with vertical "curbs" to keep the skates in line as they travel, and a walkway for maintenance and emergency exits.
Eventually, it could make up a sprawling network.
Speaking with Recode, Musk said eventually there could be 100 levels of tunnels below the streets.
"We do expect to, over time, create a network of tunnels under greater LA," he said, "and I think this is really the key to getting around the city very fast. You've got to go 3-D."
"You could certainly have a subway system which had many layers of tunnels, but the tunnels are so prohibitively expensive that they don't do it. But you can go down 100 levels if you want to, you could have 100 layers of tunnels on top of each other … the key is a massive improvement in tunneling technology. That's the linchpin, that's fundamentally what it amounts to."
