Musk sees Las Vegas tunnel opening in 2020

A nearly mile-long tunnel in Las Vegas meant to showcase a “traffic busting” alternative for overcrowded cities should be completed next year, innovative entrepreneur Elon Musk said on Twitter.

The people-moving tunnel is being built by The Boring Company, one of several future-oriented enterprises founded by Musk, along with the Tesla electric-car company and SpaceX, which develops launch vehicles. The 48-year-old billionaire tweeted late Friday that “Boring Co is completing its first commercial tunnel in Vegas, going from Convention Center to Strip.”

In a second tweet he said it would be “hopefully fully operational in 2020.” The Las Vegas convention center is a sprawling complex being further enlarged -- the 0.8-mile (1.3 kilometer) tunnel would facilitate travel within the center and to the city’s famous Strip, where many of its major hotels and casinos are located.

Musk’s company last year showed reporters a new test tunnel in California, but Las Vegas is Boring’s first paying customer. The cost of the tunnel, originally estimated to be as low as $35 million, has since risen to $52.5 million, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

He says the idea came to him as he sat in growing frustration in his car, stuck in a traffic jam between his pricey villa in Bel Air, California and the SpaceX offices in Hawthorne, south of Los Angeles.

He envisions thousands of autonomous electric vehicles eventually moving millions of people underground at speeds up to 155 miles per hour (250 kph) -- far higher than the moderate 35 mph speeds planned for the short Las Vegas link.