Why Tunnels Could Build Tomorrow's Cities

Elon Musk’s mind works a little differently than the average person. When he once found himself stuck in bumper-to-bumper LA traffic, he didn’t start cursing other drivers or fever-dreaming the opening dance number in the movie La La Land. He didn’t even turn to the more commonplace fantasy of sprouting wings and soaring away from the gridlock. 

Instead, Musk channeled his inner groundhog and thought down. Namely, he wondered why valuable real estate above ground had to be packed with cars when there were hundreds of meters available for development below the Earth’s crust. 

Humanity is no stranger to digging down for its transportation infrastructure. Much of the globe’s public transit was built underground, criss-crossing under urban metropolises. So why hasn’t anyone built freeways for cars like that?

This train of thought ultimately culminated in Musk’s creation of The Boring Company—tunnel boring, that is. On the surface (heh), it’s not exactly the sexiest topic, so it doesn’t get much airtime in the media. But advancements in tunnel boring could transform our infrastructure, allowing us much-needed room for human population growth—and help ameliorate issues from increasingly random weather patterns in an era of climate change. 

It’s high time we stop thinking about our civilization in two-dimensional terms—existing on the surface of the Earth—and begin thinking in three dimensions. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit for investment in TBM, or tunnel boring machines. Let’s get into the evolution of the industry and the current opportunities for disruption.

The big American tunneling slump

The rules of structural engineering assert that there are limits to how tall buildings can get. There are no such limits when we build in the other direction—down. The Burj Khalifa, the tallest building on Earth, stands at around 2,700 feet tall. One of the deepest holes ever dug, the Kola Superdeep Borehole (a scientific drilling experiment carried out by the Soviet Union in the 1970s), is over 15 Burj Khalifas in depth.

Large, powerful boring machines capable of producing underground structures have been available in their modern form since the seventies. Unfortunately, that was also the last time the tunneling industry saw any significant innovations.