(Bloomberg) – Two years ago, Los Angeles Dodgers CFO Tucker Kain talked about a plan to get baseball fans to the team’s stadium in minutes using a tunnel filled with electric cars, built by Eling Musk’s Boring Co. would be ready, he said, in time for the 2020 baseball season.
But on Thursday, when the Dodgers play their first game against the San Francisco Giants, there will be no fans, thanks to the new coronavirus. And even if there were, they would have to sit in traffic as usual to get to the stadium the old-fashioned way.
The project has not advanced much since Kain spoke two years ago. The scrapped timeline comes despite the season being delayed four months due to the pandemic.
While this is not the future that Kain had envisioned for 2020, the project is still at stake. A representative from the city’s engineering department said it is working on an environmental review of the project and hopes to launch it later this year. That will kick off a 45-day review and comment period, and eventually a city council vote.
Representatives of Boring Co. and the Dodgers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
After Boring Co. announced its plans in 2018, the Dugout Loop project at first moved quickly and on an ambitious schedule: “The expectation right now is that we will have approvals early next year and start building the tunnel, and Hopefully we’ll have it open by the end of 2019, in time for the 2020 season, “Kain told CNBC in August of that year. An initial public meeting was held a few days after Kain’s comments.
But not long after that, the attention of Boring Co. executives shifted to Las Vegas, where the company won a high-profile bid to build a “Loop” tunnel system under the Las Vegas Convention Center. This project will open in January and could be expanded to two hotels in Las Vegas.
Construction of the approximately four-mile Dugout Loop would take up to 14 months, Boring Co. says on its website, and would run from the southwest side of Dodger Stadium to a nearby Los Angeles subway station. Fans would ride in autonomous, electric vehicles based on Tesla Model X cars, but much larger, seating up to 16 people per vehicle. The trip would take less than four minutes and cost $ 1, although the price of the ticket is not final.
Another proposed Boring Co. project in Los Angeles, a north-south tunnel under the west side of the city, failed amid a protest that the city’s public works committee had recommended its exemption from the environmental review. She also faced a now settled lawsuit from potentially affected neighbors. A separate proposal from Boring Co. in Chicago vanished after the mayor who defended it, Rahm Emanuel, left office.
(Updates beginning in paragraph four with comments from the City of Los Angeles and details on the status of the project).
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