Elon Musk may be going to Vegas.
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority has recommended that The Boring Company be chosen to construct a "people mover" below the expanding convention center.
The Las Vegas Convention Center is one of the largest and most popular event spaces in the world, with more than a million people passing through every year. Its flagship exhibition is the Consumer Electronics Show, which brings in roughly 150,000 visitors every January. The massive space is about to get even bigger, with a $1.4 billion renovation and expansion about to get underway. The plan is for a new underground tunnel to be operating in time for CES 2021, according to the LVCVA.
For Musk's Boring Company, the Las Vegas plan is easier and significantly smaller in scale compared to its projects in D.C., Chicago, and Los Angeles. The proposal calls for a way to move convention attendants quickly as the space expands to become a nearly two-mile walk from end to end. It would also leave room for potential further expansion.
The LVCVA chose Boring because its proposal came in with a far cheaper price tag than other proposed options above-ground. Musk has said the purpose of The Boring Company is to make the notoriously costly and time-consuming process of tunnel-boring cheaper and faster by making the tunnels themselves smaller, and by speeding up the TBM ー the massive earth-moving machines that are needed to bore under cities. The Las Vegas tunnel would cost between $35 and $55 million, according to the company. It can also be constructed more quickly because there are few landowners to contend with.
So far, The Boring Company's main success has been a two-mile-long test tunnel near Los Angeles International Airport, which it built at a cost of $10 million per mile.
The final recommendation for the Vegas project will be made on March 12.
