Visitors enter a station to ride in Tesla electric vehicles through the Boring Company's Vegas Loop during the CES trade show in Las Vegas on Jan. 5, 2023.
PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty ImagesLess than a week ago, the Oakland A’s quietly acknowledged that their Las Vegas stadium renderings should literally be thrown in the trash.
Now, they’re clinging to something that is somehow both more unrealistic and underwhelming: Elon Musk’s Boring Company Vegas Loop.
In an interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Brad Schrock, the A’s director of design, called the loop “a major piece of the master plan,” referring to the baseball team’s unresolved goal of relocating to the Tropicana site. He added, “We believe that anything that can bring fans to the site without having to drive their cars or making it more convenient for people is a real positive.”
The A’s fascination with the Boring Loop goes back years, in no small part due to the team's president, Dave Kaval, a Twitter Blue subscriber and avid Musk believer. In 2021, during his “troll A’s fans and Oakland City Council members” phase, Kaval tweeted about his “incredible” tour of the Boring Loop in Vegas.
The Boring Loop had just recently opened to the public when Kaval toured it. Back then, it was reportedly pared down from a high-speed autonomous transportation system to something significantly more modest: 11 human-driven Teslas restricted to a speed limit of 40 mph, and only 10 mph at each of the 1.7-mile loop’s three stops, whisking a few passengers at a time.
Two years later, the Boring Loop still requires (part-time) Tesla drivers. It’s grown to 2.2 miles and five stops. Boring Company claims its daily capacity in Vegas is currently 32,000 passengers, a number that is both laughably tiny and only remotely plausible if strangers are jam-packed into Teslas crawling through the tunnels. Traffic jams — the entire motivation to hypothetically head to an underground transportation hub, as opposed to using an aboveground vehicle — are reportedly an issue in Musk’s tunnels, too. In an ostensibly promotional video for the Boring Loop, the executive director of infrastructure for the city of Las Vegas assuaged traffic concerns by saying that if the tunnels really do get popular enough, Musk can just … build more tunnels.
“He’ll just build another tunnel next to it,” Mike Janssen said, describing a car lane.
Nevertheless, a paltry proof of concept was enough for the Boring Company to secure a massive expansion approval in Vegas. Just a few weeks ago, the Las Vegas City Council unanimously backed an 81-station, 68-mile pipe dream, hence the A’s foolhardy hopes for a few station stops at or near their possible ballpark. Since the venture is privately funded, local politicians seem to be of the “who cares, it’s free” mindset. Mayor Carolyn Goodman, who approved the expansion, described the whole venture the same way one might talk about the title hopes of the 30-77 Oakland A’s — or more cynically, the A’s actually building a stadium.
“I am one who just does not believe [it] will come to be, certainly not in my lifetime,” Goodman said of the Boring project. “Hopefully in the lifetime forthcoming.”