The first Boring Company test tunnel in California late last year.
A Twitter question about how much a 50km tunnel through the Blue Mountains in New South Wales would cost has prompted Tesla chief executive officer Elon Musk to suggest around $1 billion.
The proposal for the high-speed tunnel has come from NSW MP Jeremy Buckingham, who also asked Australian billionaire entrepreneur Mike Cannon-Brookes.
Buckingham says Sydney is choking with traffic and he asks how much it would cost to build the tunnel to connect Sydney from near Penrith to Lithgow in the state’s west
Musk estimates about US$15m/km for a two-way high speed transit, “so probably around $750m plus maybe $50m/station” for the Boring Company system he’s already trialling which uses guided rails or platforms to whiz vehicles along at high speeds.
Buckingham has been pushing for the Blue Mountains tunnel project since the 1990s, when he was a councillor in Orange in regional NSW, 9News reports.
“For about the price of knocking down one stadium, Elon Musk says he can build a transport loop for NSW that would be the envy of the world,” he says.
An ABC report quotes tunnel experts as saying Musk’s $1b offer is too low and NSW transport minister Andrew Constance saying it “isn’t a reality at this time”.
Transport NSW did some basic costings and estimates $3b for a road tunnel and double that for a road and rail tunnel through the Blue Mountains, the ABC says.
