Never ever trust anything that guy says.
It’s been three years since a Bexar County agency gave the nod for an underground tunnel between the airport and downtown San Antonio.
It now appears those plans have been tanked, but not by the controversy over cost and environmental impact that ensued.
The Boring Company is a tunneling company owned by Elon Musk, the businessman behind Tesla and SpaceX who has emerged as a political figure with a role in the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency.
In 2021, the Alamo Regional Mobility Authority, an agency tasked with improving transportation in Bexar County, released a request for information (RFI) inviting revenue-generating transit proposals. The Boring Company and four others responded; three proposals were advanced for consideration.
Boring’s proposal was a rideshare system using Tesla’s electric-powered cars in a tunnel 30 feet below ground and ferrying passengers the 9 miles between the airport and downtown.
The total estimated cost was between $247 million and $289 million, with estimated revenue to the RMA that was expected to come in at $25 million a year.
Boring said it would foot the entire $27 million to $45 million bill for the first phase of the project, while the other proposals relied heavily on federal subsidies.
[…]
In March 2022, the RMA board, led by then-Chairman Michael Lynd selected Boring’s bid over the others and created a development agreement to study the feasibility of the project.
“Then we never heard back from them,” said Reggie Fountain, operations engineer for the Alamo RMA.
Boring did not respond to the agreement, he said. That was two years ago.
Agency staff followed up with Boring in February 2023. “They were reviewing it internally and they were going to let us know,” Fountain said.
Further calls went unanswered, he said. “They just kind of ghosted us. So we essentially just assumed that it was dead and didn’t move further with it.”
See here, here, here, here, and here for the background, and note that the most recent update I had was from May of 2022. I know that this fucking guy is doing much worse things at the federal level now, but I would like to note for the record that he’s basically always been a grifter. I don’t know what one could possibly say at this point. I suppose we can at least thank the Alamo Regional Mobility Authority for being the cautionary tale that we needed. It’s 100% clear who this guy is. Stay the hell away.
I’m glad some people are finally opening their eyes about the Trump/Musk kind of people.
It’s pretty standard for governments to discount cheapest bids if they seem unlikely to achieve success.
This should be the default expectation for Boring (and other Musk controlled) bids in the future.