The South African visionary reinvents the goal of his Boring Company to prioritize the transport of pedestrians and cyclists with the public bus of the future.
Elon Musk says that he is rethinking The Boring Company’s goal to prioritize pedestrians and bicyclists over cars, and to do so suggests that the high-speed tunnels planned by the company should serve as a form of public transportation. Last year, The Boring Company presented its project of tunnels for urban transport with high speed electric vehicles in the cities. Now, the company claims that the public bus of the future will take precedence over private vehicles. Details are scarce and is still unclear how much of this is real or just a strategy to generate noise in Twitter.
“We will continue to transport cars, but only after all the needs of personalized public transport are met, it is a matter of courtesy and fairness, if someone can not buy a car, they should go first.”
Elon Musk, CEO and Founder of Boring Company
Musk posted a video on Twitter that reveals how his new and futuristic electric bus capable of moving over 150 km / h will work:
Musk’s plans are overall acclaimed, even remarkable, but this time they have raised many doubts among the experts. The founder of Tesla and SpaceX stated that Boring’s original plan is the transport of high-speed underground cars, but only after “all the needs of personalized mass transit” are met. The project contemplates the construction of thousands of mini stations integrated throughout the city, for its public bus of the future, instead of the mass transit stations of the current metro network of the cities.
And although it looks a lot like the original plan, now instead of driving your own car, the tunnels will be occupied by public transport buses. The vision of Musk is equivalent to a network of underground buses, only that the “shuttles” must surface very slowly in expensive elevators and then go back down. And although many experts are critical of the feasibility of the project, Musk says that this would multiply by 14 the speed of public transport in cities.
The Controversy
The Boring Company had already carried out simulations of this type of vehicle during last summer, although mass transit of passengers had never been the main objective of the company. In fact, Musk has received a lot of criticism on social networks for his controversial statements by public transport advocates. In December, Musk entered i a dialectical war on Twitter with public transport policy expert Jarrett Walker. Walker accused Musk of harboring a deep “hatred of sharing space with strangers” after his claim that public transport is a “pimple in the ass” that forces you to share space with other people, especially when the stranger is sit next to you could be a “serial killer” and Musk responded to Walker by calling him a “sanctimonious idiot”.
First, he gave us Hyperloop. Then, the South African iconoclastic CEO created The Boring Company to retry urban transport through an underground network of tunnels for high-speed electric vehicles. SpaceX has just launched the largest rocket in the world. Tesla is becoming one of the most important car manufacturers in the USA. Is this another bold initiative of the kind that wants to take us to Mars or merge our brains with computers?
However extravagant The Boring Company may seem, Musk’s latest project looks to be progressing. He is already digging a tunnel under Los Angeles, and recently received approval to dig under Washington, DC.
Sources | The Boring Company, SpaceX, Cnet.com, The Register, The Verge
Videos and Images | The Boring Company, ES Interesante
