With six weeks left in the 2018 baseball season, the Los Angeles Dodgers are just two games out of first place in the National League West and a trip to the playoffs. But even if they can top last year’s pennant-winning performance, the men in blue may not be the only heroes for the faithful packing into Dodger Stadium. Another Angeleno wants to share in the glory, with his own contribution: Elon Musk. Getting to Dodger Stadium is a nightmare, even for a city where traffic is a way of life. Vehicles back up for miles. Brake lights outshine the sun. Exhaust pipes spew pollutants, choking up the 110 freeway and Sunset Boulevard, as cars notch forward inch by inch. It’s the sort of inefficiency Musk abhors, particularly when it’s him sitting in the middle of it. That’s why he is announcing that his Boring Company plans to dig a tunnel to the stadium, through which fans would ride in pod-like electric skates. Passengers will ride in pods that fit between eight and 16 people, which will sit on electric skates. The Boring Company The 3.6-mile tunnel would pick up near one of three LA Metro subway stations and run under Sunset Boulevard, ending in the stadium parking lot and making it far easier to take public transit to the game. Fans would pay about a dollar for the four-minute ride, called the Dugout Loop. This project is just a single tunnel, meaning the service can only run one way at a time. It’ll stage a number of skates at one end and sell tickets with fixed departure times. When fans turn up (hopefully riding the Metro, biking, or walking), they’ll pile into the 8- to 16-passenger pods, which will whisk them through the tunnel. The skates will then be parked at the other end. After the game or concert, they run the other way. Bookings for seats will be limited to 1,400 people per event at first, about 2.5 percent of stadium capacity. (The company’s still figuring out if it’ll need about 100 skates, or if it can work in batches of 12 to 15, sending the empty pods back to fetch more people.) At the beginning or end of a journey, the Boring Company's pods take elevators down to the tunnel, or up to street level. The Boring Company Those user targets are unusually modest for an Elon Musk company, but taking a measured approach should allow the company to figure out whether its idea works, and if it might have unintended impacts, like increasing traffic around the boarding stations. And the project complements the public-transit projects that LA has underway, serving a niche use case that probably wouldn’t score well for public funding. (Even at 81 regular season games a year, the pain of a Dodger Stadium commute is limited to a small section of the community.) But small, incremental change is part of dealing with a municipal bureaucracy. So are things like environmental reviews and careful city planning. The Boring Company is working on that with the City of Los Angeles, a process that could take a year. The Department of Public Works needs to make sure the route is safe and isn’t going to hit existing sewer or water lines. The company will then have to get permits and sign-off from the city council after a public discussion period. The route will stick to public right-of-way, which should simplify permissions. Construction will take up to 14 months, and the Boring Company is bearing the entire, undisclosed cost. In short, a project of this magnitude requires a significant amount of work and coordination with local government. But it already has one important backer: Mayor Eric Garcetti. “It’s a great example of public-private partnership,” he told WIRED Wednesday. Garcetti is all about bringing high-tech projects to his city, which is hosting the Olympics again in 2028 and is vying to shed its car-clogged image. The 3.6-mile tunnel would pick up near one of three LA Metro subway stations, and run under Sunset Boulevard, ending in the stadium parking lot and making it far easier to take public transit to the game. The Boring Company