It’s been three years since a Bexar County company gave the nod for an underground tunnel between the airport and downtown San Antonio.
It now seems these plans have been tanked, however not by the controversy over price and environmental affect that ensued.
The Boring Firm is a tunneling firm owned by Elon Musk, the businessman behind Tesla and SpaceX who has emerged as a political determine with a job within the Trump administration’s Division of Authorities Effectivity.
In 2021, the Alamo Regional Mobility Authority, an company tasked with bettering transportation in Bexar County, launched a request for data (RFI) inviting revenue-generating transit proposals. The Boring Firm and 4 others responded; three proposals had been superior for consideration.
Boring’s proposal was a rideshare system utilizing Tesla’s electric-powered vehicles in a tunnel 30 ft under floor and ferrying passengers the 9 miles between the airport and downtown.
The full estimated price was between $247 million and $289 million, with estimated income to the RMA that was anticipated to come back in at $25 million a yr.
Boring mentioned it might foot your complete $27 million to $45 million invoice for the primary section of the mission, whereas the opposite proposals relied closely on federal subsidies.
The opposite bids included one which employed an autonomous bus utilizing a mixture of elevated and underground tracks; one which pitched an autonomous tram operating alongside the U.S. Hwy. 281 right-of-way, and one other that used a system of at-grade or elevated journey lanes operating alongside McCullough Avenue.
A plan provided by TriTrack Motors referred to as for spending $24 million to construct an elevated monitor for three-wheeled autonomous autos that would journey at as much as 180 mph.
In March 2022, the RMA board, led by then-Chairman Michael Lynd chosen Boring’s bid over the others and created a improvement settlement to review the feasibility of the mission.
“Then we by no means heard again from them,” mentioned Reggie Fountain, operations engineer for the Alamo RMA.
Boring didn’t reply to the settlement, he mentioned. That was two years in the past.
Company employees adopted up with Boring in February 2023. “They had been reviewing it internally and so they had been going to tell us,” Fountain mentioned.
Additional calls went unanswered, he mentioned. “They only type of ghosted us. So we primarily simply assumed that it was lifeless and didn’t transfer additional with it.”
A Boring spokesman didn’t reply to a request for remark.
The mobility authority had not spent cash on the mission or budgeted for it, so the company has moved on, Fountain added.
Funding that would have been allotted to the tunnel mission is now dedicated to different transportation-related initiatives.
For one, RMA is concentrated on bettering Alamo Ranch Parkway, a $94 million mission to ease main congestion in far Northwest San Antonio after a visitors congestion examine bumped it into precedence.
The two.4-mile roadway will go from 4 to eight lanes with overpasses at three intersections. Building is predicted to begin in summer time 2027.
The company will use its money reserves to fund the enhancements, Fountain mentioned.
Boring’s tunnel mission might have gone the way in which of its different proposals — canceled by cities from Los Angeles to Baltimore principally over environmental considerations — after which forgotten, Fountain mentioned. However the RMA board will doubtless need to vote to sundown the RFI, which now not seems on the authority’s web site.
In the meantime, the Boring Firm’s web site remains to be promoting its tunnel and loop initiatives but additionally what seem like satirical merchandise like a “Not a Flamethrower” machine, and a perfume, “Burnt Hair.”
It additionally states the corporate is “at the moment working with varied native governments and personal stakeholders” to check the viability of high-speed transportation in tubes Boring calls “Hyperloop.” The corporate’s Las Vegas Conference Heart Loop, opened in 2021, stays in operation.
Gov. Greg Abbott lately appointed John Asel of Helotes as presiding officer of the Alamo Regional Mobility Authority, changing Lynd.
Asel is chairman and managing member of Asel & Associates, a “boutique-style” accounting agency in San Antonio, in keeping with an announcement. In 2024, each Lynd and Asel every contributed $25,000 to Abbott’s reelection marketing campaign, in keeping with transparencyusa.com.
