What the Hyperloop Can Teach Nashville About Our Tesla Tunnels

I think the tide was maybe starting to turn a little bit in terms of public opinion. But he wasn't yet the most reviled man in America. I mean, he wasn't particularly political. He wasn't tweeting through the night about white genocide. And he was still, you know, one of the world's most. prominent entrepreneurs who ran some very successful companies. People wanted to believe in his new ideas when he put him out there because he'd done it a couple of times with Tesla, with SpaceX. So it was a simpler time. Well, so as you know, we are facing the latest iteration of the Hyperloop right here in Nashville, Tennessee, the Music City Loop. Got speed. And your story highlights so many very familiar parallels. The first being when he showed up initially in the D.C. area saying, I'm going to build this tunnel. But there in D.C. and the surrounding area, what was the initial reaction from the D.C. area officials? I mean, the very first reaction was confusion because this announcement came out of the blue. Elon Musk tweets randomly without any previous notice that he has received, quote, verbal government approval to build this hyperloop from D.C. to New York. He doesn't specify which government. And so reporters start reaching out to D.C., Maryland, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and so forth. Not a single government at the state or local level is able to answer any questions because this is the first they've heard of it. People start reaching out to the U.S. Department of Transportation. They refer all comment to the White House. The White House mostly refuses to comment. And so he walks back to claim about 90 minutes later. and says, well, you know, there's still a long way to go, but we're encouraged by the conversations we've had so far. But once the dust settles, I think the reaction is curiosity, cautious optimism, because traffic is awful. And the first leg of this thing is supposed to run from D.C. to Baltimore. It would be two parallel 35-mile tunnels that will shrink that trip to nine minutes or so. People would love to see that. So I think, you know, the government of D.C., of Maryland are intrigued. Were any of these folks asking, like, real logistical questions from the start? And how were those then answered? Poorly. Poorly is the answer. So I think politicians, elected, seem very taken with this idea. But once the transit officials, the bureaucrats, the people who've been doing this for a long time, get involved, they are immediately skeptical for many, many, many, many reasons.

The first, which is maybe the least technical, but maybe the most daunting is the regulatory ringer, right? So this route is going to run through like eight or nine different jurisdictions. So you need permitting approval from D.C., Baltimore, Maryland, the Federal Highway Administration, the National Park Service, the Army Corps of Engineers. It's maybe the worst possible place you could build in terms of regulations. So that's a huge lift. How do you do that in months? given that they said they're going to build this thing to completion in less than two years. And then there's the technical one. So for one, the hyperloop doesn't exist. The technology doesn't exist. It has never existed. It probably never will exist. They're at the time dozens of firms all competing to try to build the first working prototype. They raise over a billion dollars between all of them to do this. But they're only achieving about a fourth of the speed that they promised. There's the tunneling challenges, right, which are huge. There's a reason that tunnels in populated areas cost about a billion dollars a mile. to drill. There are questions about safety. And this is really where the transit officials start to get caught up. Remember, the hyperloop is vacuum sealed. So that means a small rupture in the concrete shell of the tunnel. could cause explosive decompression killing everybody on board. So somebody asked about earthquakes. Somebody also asked about the swampy terrain in the DC metro area. The soil is wet and it's constantly shifting. Have they thought about that? Have they factored some of these things into their cost projections? And across the board, the answer seems to be, no, we didn't really think about any of that. The transit officials described these meetings to me as a total disaster. The boring folks seem to be earnest but not serious and really not ready to take on a project of this scale. He named a man named Steve Davis as his CEO. And Davis remains the president and CEO to this day. What do we know about Steve Davis? He was here in Nashville for the press conference. How lucky all of you were. I mean, Steve is, Steve's reclusive. I mean, that's maybe the first public appearance he's made in a long time. You'll see anytime he's named or the subject of an article, they usually use the same photo of him. He's very difficult to pin down. So here's what we know about Steve. Steve is... seemingly an incredibly intelligent man who is prone to flying way too close to the sun. He is the CEO of the Boring Company, among many other things. By training, Davis is a rocket scientist, and he's also a PhD economist. He is hired at SpaceX in the mid-2000s. He's one of the first employees.

And he's mostly charged with bringing down the cost of rocket components, which is the core of the business model over there. So he's really important. And he seems pretty good at that job. But his frugality also leads to mistakes. Some people have alleged that he removed too many components from the Falcon One rocket, which caused it to plunge into the Pacific Ocean in 2007. But all is seemingly forgiven. Over time, he becomes a top lieutenant Elon Musk. He is the fixer. He's a utility man who will throw himself at any problem, no matter how out of his depth. And so he's appointed to be the hatchet man after the Twitter acquisition. He's responsible for laying off 80% of the workforce. And then in 2025, he becomes the functional head of the Department of Government Efficiency. He's living in the GSA headquarters for months on end. He is known to be a very challenging manager at Elon Musk has famously compared him to chemotherapy, brutally effective but toxic in large doses. You also wrote in your article that Steve Davis's plan for the groundbreaking was to put up a big screen fence. And Matt, this sounds so eerily familiar to everyone here in Nashville because right now on Tennessee land, there is a big screened fence. The difference here seems to be we actually did break ground. There is a hole. Right downtown Nashville at the moment with this been surrounding it. That is the furthest that one of these projects has gotten in a very long time. So about five weeks after Elon Musk announces that this is happening, in the background, D.C. is dragging their feet. Maryland, which at the time has a Republican administration, is all in on this because the transit politics were a little bit strange at the time. So five weeks after the announcement, Maryland is ready. to do a groundbreaking of some sort. They email DC officials and the DC officials are really spooked by the idea. So Steve, Steve Davis takes the lead on planning this thing. And yeah, as you said, his grand plan is not so grand. We're going to put up a fence and take some pictures. So a big fence goes up near Fort Meade. Governor sets aside 20 minutes in his calendar. Guys take some photos. But the funny thing about the photos is that... It's a pretty sunny day. So you can see through the green vinyl sheeting around this chain link fence. And you can see that there's nothing back there. There's no. Oh, no. The emperor has no clothes. Yeah, exactly. There's no machinery. There are no porta-potties. There's no hole in the ground. And they didn't invite media either to this thing. So there were no questions asked about what was behind the fence.

But it still seems like the local officials there were going out of their way to please the boring company, even circumventing some necessary permitting and environmental processes. Is this where we should bring up that Jared Kushner was involved? I'm so glad you brought up Jared Kushner. I can't say definitively that it was Jared, but at minimum it was Jared's top associates in the White House. There's a trail of breadcrumbs that leads back to, especially when we're talking about who gave verbal government approval. It seems to go back to the White House Office of American Innovation during Trump One, which was run by Jared Kushner. And their role seemed to be. mostly greasing the skids. So in the beginning, they made some calls. They set up some meetings with the local officials. They exerted seems to be some light pressure on DC, given that DC receives a lot of their... transit project funding from the federal government. But the more interesting thing here is that Jared Kushner's team, according to some of the transit officials, is really interested in bypassing the federal regulatory process. Most notably, what's called NEPA or the National Environmental Policy Act. So NEPA reviews are essentially a study in unintended consequences, right? The whole goal is to think really critically about, okay, if we build this big project, what could happen? Not just environmentally, but socially, culturally, economically, climatically, are we going to end up with a stranded asset in a couple years because we built this thing in a floodplain? Things like that. Niebu reviews take a really long time. At least... three years. For a project of this magnitude, it's probably a lot longer. And NEPA gets a lot of criticism from critics of the regulatory state as being part of the reason why we can't build anything. And to some extent, I think that's fair. You know, there are these worst case examples of it taking 12 years to fix a highway median. But for a transit technology that's never been built before, this is the kind of thing that you really want to take your time with. Jared Kushner wants to get this done in a month. And that freaks a lot of people out. That freaks out a lot of the transit officials, both at the state, local and federal level because there's just no way. Wasn't it the mayor that you wrote about saying like, wait, wait, wait, when are you planning to do this? Because it had only been five weeks at that point. Wait, wait, wait. Yeah, when they emailed it was the DC at the time deputy mayor for transit and economic development. They said, hey, we're breaking ground. Are you guys in? But he wrote back, how soon are we talking?

Okay. So by 2018, what had happened to the whole Hyperloop concept? So this whole story is really a study in moving the goalposts, which is, I mean, as we know, kind of an Elon Musk classic. The death of this thing is kind of slow and drawn out. It starts to become clear. I mean, honestly, before he even announced this in 2017, but increasingly throughout 2017 and 2018, that the original hyperloop design was a flop. They wanted to levitate their train on this cushion of air, basically, but the testing wasn't going well. It took way too much energy to float the train, and also the air gap between the tunnel and the train was way too thin. Like if the track was misaligned by a millimeter or two, it could crash. In early 2018, out of the blue, Elon Musk posts this 3D rendered video on Twitter. And instead of a 700 mile per hour train, it's a 16-person self-driving vehicle that could move up to 150 miles per hour. So he says, but to be clear, this is just a bus with a dedicated lane. Which we have above ground. Which we all have above ground. And they work really well above ground. And then a few months later, there's this highly anticipated demo in California. They invite all the tech press out to come see the new thing, but there's no bus. Instead, there is a Tesla sedan that carries passengers through a little tiny stretch of tunnel, occasionally approaching 50 miles per hour. And the ride is so bumpy, the tunnel is so poorly paved that one journalist purportedly vomits for motion sickness. The new, new vision is just a car that's moving slower than it would move above ground. And then in April 2019, that environmental assessment finally comes out. It took obviously way longer than a month, probably a year and a half or so, depending on how you count. It's a disaster. It's this four or five hundred page document that lays out the new design. And it confirms that there will be no hyperloop. Boring has stopped using the term entirely. It is now the loop. And... The ambition has shrunk considerably. So instead of the fast train, a fleet of Teslas will move passengers between two existing train stations in DC and Baltimore, underneath an existing highway, moving at max speeds that are comparable to the train that already exists. There's also these huge oversights in the document that transit officials are losing their mind over. So the loop would be the longest road tunnel in the entire world if it gets built. And it would also be packed with lithium ion batteries that are known to explode when they overheat. So you need to be thinking a lot about fire and evacuation and all that. But if you look at the escape routes,

in this plan, they're spaced two miles apart and they're connected to the surface by these ladders that are like 10 stories tall. So you imagine you're 70 years old, your car is on fire and you need to get out of the tunnel and you have to walk several miles and then climb a ladder the size of an apartment building to get out of there as the tunnel fills with smoke. It's bad. And then also the ridership. This new system is only going to move 1,000 people per direction per day, which we have a great public transit system in the metro in D.C. A single eight-car metro train can move more people than that. When did the project actually officially die? If the assessment comes out in April 2019, people start asking questions and doing public comment throughout 2019. You know, if you look at the FOIA records and the emails between officials and boring, they become increasingly sparse throughout 2020. And then by 2021, they kind of have just fizzled out. And then by April of 2021, the project gets completely scrubbed from the boring company's website. And look, this is how the boring company operates. Historically, you know, with one exception being Vegas, whenever they face any meaningful scrutiny, they tend to stop answering the phone. This has happened across the country and... I think they're trying to kind of reinvent themselves right now as a more responsive and accountable company. We'll see. Well, what happened to the land in Maryland where the ground was broken? The land in Maryland, I believe, is just an office park now. The terminal in D.C. That was sold to condo developers and will presumably be turned into luxury apartments in the near future. And the web domain for that project has also been commandeered by like foreign SEO marketers. So now the whole thing, like if you type in DC Baltimore Loop.com, it's this like AI generated guide to online gambling, which just feels like the perfect metaphor for this whole thing. Well then. The real knife to the heart, you wrote that the Boring Company has never cracked more than $23 million in revenue, and its digging machines move slower than a snail. All it will take to solve Boring's problems is to throw someone else's money at them. And then you called Tennessee naive. Why do you think our leaders are still convinced that this is the right thing to do? Okay, on some level, I get it. I understand this, right? Like, traffic-induced psychosis, it leads some people to kill. And sometimes it leads us to put our faith in the world's most visible con man. Like, I understand that we're all desperate to reduce congestion, spend less time on the road. There's just no reason to believe that this is an effective way to solve that. We know that fewer cars on the road by way of investing in mass transit.

works. It reduces congestion meaningfully. But those things are expensive. They aren't sexy. They take time. That's not good politics. So I get why an elected official with a short time horizon would think this is worth the risk, especially if boring says, we'll foot the cost. But I don't know. I also, maybe this is the case in Tennessee, when I look at the Vegas loop, I think the Vegas fiasco makes a little bit more sense if you stop thinking about it as a transit project and instead think about it as an $80 million publicity stunt. Nevada wants to be the new Silicon Valley. They want to be the Silicon Desert. And so I think sanctioning something like this is a way to say to the tech industry, hey, do you have a big and unworkable idea that will one day collapse under the weight of its own ambition? Well, we're open for business, baby. Come on down. So then what was your hot take on Nashville when you heard that it was coming here? Is my understanding correct that the state took the lead on this? Yes. Oh, yeah. Circumventing the city? Absolutely. It feels like the easiest answer is this is a weird, like never underestimate what people are willing to polarize themselves into doing. Yes. And a lot of people think this is a partisan issue. And that if you oppose the tunnels, it's because you hate Elon Musk and his ideology. Do you think that's an accurate representation? It in some ways feels too simple, but also we've done stupider things for the same reason. I mean, maybe all this does come down to if you want to drive above ground, you're woke. Do you have any advice for us? Big picture, I think a dedicated bus lane above ground might be a better approach to solving this problem. On a more practical note, if you look back at. Under what circumstances boring has pulled back from cities, a common thread does seem to be the city required financial disclosure of some kind from the company. And then they stopped answering the phone. I don't know what the municipal permitting process looks like in Nashville. I also don't know what it looks like when the state seems hellbent on working without your cooperation. But if I were a local official, I'd maybe be looking into that. Under what circumstances can we require this company to open up their balance sheet to us? Because I suspect it's messy. Matt, thank you for writing the article and thank you for joining us today. No problem. Happy to talk.

That's all for today here on CityCast Nashville. And don't forget, you can support this show and get great perks by becoming a CityCast Nashville neighbor at membership.citycast.fm. If you enjoyed the show, why not tell your friends, rate the show. Leave us a review and subscribe to our Citycast Nashville newsletter. We'll be back tomorrow morning with more news from around the city. Doodles!