LAS VEGAS, NV – A plan by Elon Musk’s Boring Company to maximize its Las Vegas investment while digging an at least 68-mile long labyrinth of tunnels beneath the tourism corridor won approval Thursday from the Nevada Transportation Authority.
Musk’s fleet of 102 Teslas can now transport passengers between tunnels and any of the 104 proposed stations along its planned route, as well as to and from Harry Reid International Airport.
Every above-ground trip “must include the tunnel transportation system,” Tyler Fairbanks of the Boring Company told NTA commissioners.
For instance, a passenger in a tunneled Tesla that reaches the end of a tunnel can continue the ride on surface streets for an additional price, and as long as their destination is one of the stops on Boring’s planned network of stations. Only a handful of stations are currently in operation.
Taxi company executives, as well as taxi drivers, complained the Boring subsidiary Paradise Transportation’s per capita charges would undercut taxi fares.
“We have approximately 50% of the market here in Vegas,” Michael Bailin, general manager of Taxi Management, the largest operator in Nevada, told the NTA, adding the company’s 2,400 employees and independent contractors would be challenged to make a living competing with Musk’s venture.
Paradise sought to charge $7 for trips up to three miles, $12 for four to six miles, and $14 for trips of more than six miles.
“Vegas is struggling,” Bailin said. “We all know it. And to add something else that’s not needed, it doesn’t seem like the time or place.”
Bailin added Musk knew his plan to ease traffic congestion “wasn’t going to happen overnight,” adding now they want to come up from the tunnels “to stay afloat.”
“This is a tough thing for people to swallow, because you came in under the guise of one thing, of being in the tunnels, and now you’re saying ‘we’re not going to be in the tunnels,’” NTA chairman Vaughn Hartung told the Boring Company representatives. Hartung voiced his “discomfort with approving a blanket approval knowing that the tunnels are coming,” noting “they’re not just going from the tunnel to the airport or from the airport to the tunnel,” as was erroneously asserted by Commissioner Adam Teti and NTA Administrative Attorney Yoneet Wilburn.
Hartung proposed that Boring commit to completing 20% of its project each year, with a goal of tunneling the remaining 58 miles in five years. Boring has so far dug ten miles of tunnels.
Fairbanks, of Boring Company, said the uncertain timetable of obtaining approvals from regulatory agencies made such a commitment untenable. “We hope it expands beyond the 68 miles we’re entitled to build,” he added.
NTA staff supported approval of the application and noted they received verification of market necessity for the surface street version of the Vegas Loop from Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority Chief Strategy Officer Ed Finger.
The LVCVA, “the busiest convention center in America, the owner of the Las Vegas Monorail and the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop, strongly supports and encourages transportation options in the Strip resort corridor,” Finger said during public comment. “The Strip resort corridor is a long way away from being optimized transportation-wise.”
Finger offered no tangible evidence of a need for more automobile transit in the tourism corridor.
Steve Hill, executive director of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, has hailed going underground as a means of alleviating traffic congestion since 2019, when the LVCVA granted Musk’s Boring Company a $52.5 million contract to connect its expanding convention facility via tunnels. Hill also planted the seeds for expanding the labyrinth to run beneath Strip and downtown casinos, with Musk footing the bill and collecting the revenue.
Musk’s Tesla Corporation is reaping the benefits of more than $1.6 billion in tax breaks. Hill shepherded the initial portion of that deal in his former job as executive director of the Governor’s Office of Economic Development.
The NTA unanimously approved a motion that called for Boring, although it was not the applicant, to “make best efforts to complete the tunnels,” limit above-ground travel to no more than four miles per trip, and come back for a status check in two years.
The NTA also required that Paradise, which requested unlimited ability to add to its fleet, come before the commission for permission to do so.
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