Mike Schroepfer

Also a reminder that the laws governing ethics approvals in western countries are insane

Europe has the Eiffel Tower Europe has the Colosseum Europe has Big Ben Europe has the Acropolis Europe has the Sagrada Família Europe has the Louvre China has the Great Wall China has the Forbidden City China has the Terracotta Army, etc The United States has...?

The real story is the $25 million per mile price tag they’re betting on. Nashville’s own 2018 light rail plan priced at $200 million per mile. New York’s East Side Access cost $3.5 billion per mile. The LA Metro expansion is running $1 billion per mile. The Boring Company says it can build 13 miles of twin tunnels through Nashville for $240-300 million total. That’s a 95% cost reduction from the industry average. If the number holds, it rewrites the economics of every transit project in America. If it doesn’t, a few hundred million in private capital evaporates and taxpayers lose nothing. That risk asymmetry explains why Tennessee said yes when LA, Chicago, Baltimore, and DC all said no. The engineering gamble is wild. 12-foot diameter tunnels instead of 28-foot. Fully electric Prufrock machines that mine continuously instead of stopping every 5 feet to install lining segments. Zero people in the tunnel during operations. A machine that “porpoises” into the ground from a truck instead of requiring million-dollar launch pits and cranes. Every one of those innovations has worked in Las Vegas sand. None have been tested in karst limestone, the geology that creates sinkholes, caves, and underground streams. Their own CEO said at the unveiling that Nashville would not be their choice if they were optimizing for easiest places to tunnel. This tells you everything about what The Boring Company is actually trying to prove. Nashville is where the thesis meets the hardest possible geology. 50 inches of annual rainfall versus Vegas’s 4. Rock that creates underground caves and streams. They just signed a construction contract in Dubai too, meaning they need Nashville to work before the next project launches. The internal memo from the governor’s office estimates 1 mile per month. The Boring Company’s website claims 1 mile per week. That 4x gap between political planning and corporate marketing will determine whether this finishes in 2027 or 2030. Week 7, when Prufrock-MB2 arrives, is when this gets real. Two machines boring simultaneously through Tennessee limestone will answer the question the entire tunneling industry has been debating for a decade: whether a startup can actually outrun the physics that made infrastructure the slowest-moving sector in construction.