Virginia transit officials flew out to California earlier this year to check out a tunnel dug by Elon Musk’s Boring Company and, well, they think the state should stick with traditional railways and roads for now.
“It’s a car in a very small tunnel,” Michael McLaughlin, Virginia’s chief of rail transportation, told members of the Commonwealth Transportation Board’s public transit subcommittee on Wednesday.
“If one day we decide it’s feasible, we’ll obviously come back to you.”
The board has been discussing high-dollar investments in the state’s rail infrastructure, including a $1.3 billion bridge between Virginia and Washington. But board members say those conversations have been clouded by questions about whether such upgrades might be rendered obsolete before they’re even completed if Musk’s much-hyped tunneling and hyperloop technology advances beyond its current experimental stage.
The officials from Virginia who met with company leaders and took a drive through the tunnel in January say nothing they saw would lead them to change their approach to transit in the near term.
“I think there’s a lot of show going on here,” said Scott Kasprowicz, a Commonwealth Transportation Board member who made the trip with McLaughlin and public transit chief Jennifer Mitchell.
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