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The Boring Company won’t pursue LA tunnel under 405 freeway anymore
Back in August, The Boring Company was already distancing itself from a plan it pitched earlier in the year to build a test tunnel under Sepulveda Boulevard and the 405 freeway in Los Angeles.
On Tuesday, The Boring Company and a group of Westside residents issued a joint statement that they had "amicably settled" a lawsuit brought by the residents against The Boring Company in May of this year, according to the Los Angeles Times. The company, founded by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, said it would drop plans to build the 405 test tunnel and focus instead on building the so-called "Dugout Loop" that will run between a downtown LA Metro station and Dodger Stadium, if all goes as planned.
Elon Musk talks proof-of-concept tunnel parallel to the 405 in Los Angeles Musk announced the 405-parallel tunnel in an evening talk back in May, describing it as a 2.7 mile north-south test tunnel that wouldn't carry the general public—at first. Musk added at the time that The Boring Company would eventually do test rides to get user feedback. The City of Los Angeles appeared poised to fast-track Musk's idea, with LA Metro announcing: "We'll be partners moving forward."
[...] Now, The Boring Company intends to focus on the Dugout Loop, for which it has begun the CEQA permitting process (although it's unclear if a full permit will be acquired before construction starts). Critics have charged that The Boring Company has taken advantage of poorer neighborhoods, like the Hawthorne neighborhood under which Musk's first tunnel is being completed. Meanwhile, richer neighborhoods represented by the coalition of Westside neighborhoods have the resources to fight back. Others might see the opposition from wealthy LA neighborhoods as a form of NIMBYism that stops innovation from coming to impacted LA transit.
For now, Musk's first Hawthorne tunnel is almost complete. The Boring company intends to open the tunnel to the public in December.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday December 03 2018, @05:18PM
There were no subways no light rail lines when I was at Tech from 1982-85. At the time there were buses but their bus system sucked. Whenever a serious effort was made to build a subway, a whole whack of political opposition brought the banhammer down on it. I never so much as heard of proposals for light rail.
Imagine attending a very, very elite Astronomy school so you could major in it there.
Now imagine not being able to see the stars at night. I would _not_ have even _applied_ at Caltech had I ever visited the campus before applying.
But somehow quite a lot of light rail got built, the buses systems was _massively_ expanded - there are even some twenty-four hour lines. While there's not much subway yet, what little there is is quite heavily used, with well-planned connections to light rail and buses from it.
My friend Ted lives in LA now; I visited him late in the Spring of 2013. The air was pure and clean as far as I could tell when I visited him. When I was at the Institute, more often than not the sky was _brown_. That was Nitric Oxide, it's what the fumes from Fuming Nitric Oxide are made out of. Just run your sprinkler on a hot summer day, mix it with some sulfuric pool acid then some drug store hand softener and you've got Nitroglycerin.
Ted is always posting photos of the LA skyline. That skyline never has any smog hanging over it.
Surely there was some reason that the subway was fought so heavily?
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]