BERKELEY, California (Reuters) – Elon Musk’s tunneling enterprise, Boring Company, has submitted a bid to build an underground transit system between downtown and the beach in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the city’s mayor said.
“This could be a truly innovative way to reduce traffic congestion,” Fort Lauderdale Mayor Dean J. Trantalis tweeted on Tuesday, adding that other firms have 45 days to submit competing proposals.
Terms of the bid were not disclosed, and Boring Company had no immediate comment. The company retweeted the mayor’s tweet.
In June, Boring Company opened its first commercial tunnel project in Las Vegas to transport visitors through the city’s Convention Center using human-driven Tesla vehicles.
Boring Company said the 1.7-mile (2.7 kilometer) tunnel reduces “a 45 minute cross-campus walk time to approximately 2 minutes” at the facility.
Musk, who leads electric-car maker Tesla Inc and rocket company SpaceX, launched the Boring Company after complaining on Twitter in December 2016 that L.A.’s traffic was “driving me nuts,” promising to “build a boring machine and just start digging.”
In February, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez said that Musk had told him a local tunnel project, previously priced at $1 billion, could be done for closer to $30 million in six months.
(Reporting by Hyunjoo Jin; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
