Save In response to a report about Elon Musk's The Boring Co.'s interest in Nashville, the Post sought further information on the feasibility of the concept. State officials and Elon Musk's The Boring Co. have discussed a tunnel to connect downtown Nashville and the Nashville International Airport, the Nashville Business Journal reported last week. Eric Hoke Photo: Civic Design Center To get an outside perspective, the Post spoke with transportation expert Eric Hoke, design director at the Civic Design Center, about the idea of a tunnel and Musk's company's potential involvement. First, explain your reaction when you learned there were conversations for a potential tunnel. There are challenges with privatizing public transportation, but there have been successful examples of it. The one I think of — and the one I think works best — the Heathrow light rail is a really interesting example. It's not a boring project. It came about through subway and other modes. There's the tube, you can take the public subway in the main airport in England, Heathrow, and so you can use the public [transportation]. But if you want to pay a little more for slightly faster service, you can. And it's super efficient and fast and gets you to the city pretty quickly. So I think that's a pretty good example of a private company that's operating public transportation. And it works, and you have to pay for it, but for a higher-end user, it might be a way to introduce transit as a viable way of getting around. Which in Nashville, we don't have a lot of those types of users that are taking public transportation, that might be in a higher tax bracket, for example. So I think that's also friendly competition and works to get other transit agencies, like WeGo, for example, to consider different users as well. So, it's not going to be WeGo’s primary objective ever, but I think it's something to think about. I can't imagine it being a super feasible project. And I would probably say that the light rail to the airport is something better to consider, just a better use of funds. But, if there's interest in building a subway to do that, I think that might be worth exploring at the very least. My understanding of what Musk’s company is doing in tunnels is that, instead of a subway, it's more like fleets of Tesla cars running through the tunnels. What do you think about that kind of system? I disagree with that, just on principle, if you're moving four people at a time through. How does that work? How does that business model work for anyone? It doesn't seem like you're moving enough people, if you look at the volumes that a train can do, versus a car. The math is pretty simple there. How many people can you move on a train versus how many people can you move on a car an hour? It's a pretty simple conversion that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. If we're to do a project like that, I would be strongly opposed to just running one car a time when we could have something the size of a train. On the low-end, bus rapid transit, like we are striving for on most of Nashville's pikes, can move 10,000 people per hour per direction (pphpd) and uses existing right-of-way. It also gives us the added benefit of reimagining our streetscapes on the pikes with other improved infrastructure like adding trees, stormwater management and sidewalks. This making an investment on our most important streets would be a much better value than building a tunnel for 4,500 pphpd in place of making an investment on our most important streets. Though potential details are unknown, with The Boring Co. working on a project in Vegas, the question is, would they be modeling something in Tennessee after that? Yeah, that Vegas project has seen a lot of issues too. So, if that is what they're modeling off of, I'll have some serious concerns. I would not want something like that. Essentially, that one is just short, and maybe it's that tourism idea too; it's sort of a novelty. And maybe, they like that thought that Nashville is this tourist economy, and again, all speculation. But, I think maybe there's something to that for their business models. Like, 'Hey, I can be in a Tesla and cruise underneath Nashville to get to my destination,’ I could see something like that in the works. What do you think about it in the context of the past proposal for a tunnel in the last transit referendum? And with the most recent referendum, the plan is scaled down from that. So, do people still have an appetite for something like this? This time around, we tried to learn from our mistakes and not make the price tag the thing that is distracting. And, I think that a subway or boring system would add significant cost to the project. So, I think that was the right move. But we really just needed to get dedicated funding for transportation, because we were one of the four top 50 cities in the nation that didn't have that. I think we needed to get over that hurdle, so that was the right approach. But all that said, I do think in the first transit referendum [under then-Mayor Megan Barry], I think that it was a good idea in theory. Nashville’s roadways are constrained, especially downtown. I think that the width of the streets is a challenge for transit. And so, to move it subterranean was a pretty good idea in my mind, hypothetically. But then the dollar amount just clearly was a barrier for voters. So, I think that was something that we couldn't do again. Within this [most recent] referendum, we needed to make sure we were responding to people that thought that [expense] was a problem. The idea is good. I mean, we want less conflicts for transit. And that's sort of the idea. You start to see it in the Connect Downtown proposal, or the plan with the queue jump lanes. It's like, let's eliminate as much bus conflict as we can to get transit priority. And so if you put it underground, then it doesn't have conflict, it's kind of simple logic. And so if if the funding is there, if there's federal support or state support for a project like that, I think it might be worth exploring. It's still going to be a very costly and heavy lift for Nashville, just because if we start talking about light rail or light rail conversion, even — we have all this bus rapid transit in this plan. So if we design for important corridors like Murfreesboro, for example, that should be designed to accommodate light rail in the future. Or, there's other cities that have done BRT to light rail conversion projects, and I think that's something that we should definitely be thinking about for Murfreesboro, and probably a better thought, at least more fiscally responsible idea, than trying to just build a tunnel all the way there. What about the idea of The Boring Co. tunnel is different from other tunnels around the country for public transit? I think boring altogether is definitely the way to build the subway-style infrastructure. Historically, for subways you had to basically open up a chasm. You have a big hole and then you had to build basically a platform over it, and then cover it back up. But now, with boring technology, you can just dig the hole straight through, and so it makes construction a lot more efficient and less disruptive. … Back in the Barry-era plan, we had one of the engineering companies that does it — it wasn't Musk's company — that specializes in boring. And they said that Tennessee, like the Tennessee limestone, is ideal for boring. And so I think the engineers obviously were excited about the concept and just the idea of doing a project like this in downtown Nashville, and they said it was very feasible and something they could imagine. … I forget the comparisons they made. This was a long time ago, but I remember they thought that boring through downtown Nashville was something they could do. If not this, what is the next big thing that needs to be undertaken to move the needle for Nashville transit? I'd say step one, let's get some of this funding that we passed as voters going. So, let's get some proof of concept, I'd say, before we start thinking about the next transit project, because we are behind on infrastructure. … I think we know that Main Street, Gallatin and Murfreesboro are going to be those big focus areas. I think we should try to do those really well with the funding that we have. And then, we heard a lot of discussion in this last referendum about the need for connection to the airport. That's sort of Nashville’s regional center, and that's our link to the world, really. And so I think that's an important thing to focus on for expanded transit, especially. So, I really hope we consider that BRT conversion to light rail as another option. But then there's also the idea that the WeGo Star, I mean, it exists, and so we have rail that goes pretty close to the airport. I think I remember calculating it's a little less than two miles of track needed to connect the existing Cheatham County rail line, which WeGo Star uses, to BNA. And BNA, when they did their last renovation, they built accommodations for a light rail to basically dock at BNA. So, that infrastructure exists. It's really just getting a rail down there. … I think there's something to be said, too, for tourism as an important part of our economy, and the Star literally drops you off at the terminus of Broadway. And, at the very least, it could be a way to convince tourists not to rent a car. And I know a lot of people really like the idea of having a car on vacation, but a lot of people go on vacation and don't rent a car. And so if we could encourage that behavior through a link to downtown, … it's sort of like trying to change the culture through tourism, which is not usually how culture changes. But I think Nashville is kind of unique in that a lot of our decisions are geared towards our tourists. And it might be a different approach to change culture and promote transit. Do you think a potential tunnel puts the Star at risk at all? Probably. I mean, if that was reasonable, if we were really considering a tunnel, I guess then it becomes more important for Mount Juliet or Lebanon, and sort of that corridor. Because I imagine the BNA connection would be the tunnel link, or maybe it is like the Barry-era plan, and it's just a downtown link. And for that, I don't think it jeopardizes the Star much, but if it does become the link to the airport, then I don't know. It's like, how much are we going to subsidize those suburban areas for a rail that doesn't get that much use? It's kind of a hard argument. Facebook