Elon Musk Is Digging Tunnels Under Nashville

Somehow, Elon Musk keeps convincing cities to allow him to dig under them. The latest locale to give The Boring Company the rights to displace dirt directly under their feet is Nashville, Tennessee, which announced an agreement this week to allow Musk’s firm to build a 10-mile “loop” that will connect the city’s airport and convention center—an arrangement that has modestly improved traffic flow in Las Vegas while turning the city into a laughingstock of the infrastructure design community.

The Nashville project will be privately funded, according to an announcement from Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, and will be backed by The Boring Company and “its private partners,” who were not named. Musk’s firm will have to go through the approvals process to “evaluate potential routes, engage community stakeholders, and finalize plans for the project’s initial 10-mile phase,” which one would imagine could result in some delays—but the governor’s office insisted that the loop may open as “early as fall of 2026,” which sure sounds like the type of date you’d set if you intended to steamroll the whole regulatory procedure.

That would be in line with The Boring Company’s M.O., for what it’s worth. Earlier this year, ProPublica published a massive report on The Boring Company’s operation in Las Vegas, which has basically become a free-for-all. Taking the private funding approach allowed the company to bypass many of the regulatory hurdles that a publicly funded transit system would be required to undergo, which also means it may not be up to snuff on safety standards, either. It has, for instance, been regularly criticized for its lack of obvious emergency exits, presenting the risk of trapping people in a fiery death hole.

Musk’s firm basically has free rein in Vegas, and The Boring Company Goes Country appears like it’s going down the same path. But plenty of cities have opted to back out of agreements with The Boring Company once it became obvious that their plans were haphazard and the public wasn’t all that into it. Chicago axed a plan that would have built a loop to the O’Hare International Airport, and even Musk-friendly Fort Lauderdale backed off giving The Boring Company the go-ahead to dig after pushback from its residents. Even after undergoing an environmental review to build a tunnel between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., the company simply never started digging. Frankly, that might be for the best.