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Elon Musk's Boring Company Cancels Los Angeles Tunnel Following Lawsuit (gizmodo.com)
Elon Musk's Boring Company has settled a lawsuit preventing the company from building a tunnel beneath the 405 freeway in Los Angeles. "[T]he cancellation of the Westside tunnel project is a major blow to Musk's grand plan in the City of Angels," reports Gizmodo. From the report: The Los Angeles Times reports that the project's demise began shortly after the Boring Company obtained a preliminary exemption to skip California's environmental review process and start digging. The city's authorities have been friendly to Musk's plans, but a group of residents in the Westside area filed an environmental suit in May alleging that the tunnel violates state law. The crux of the group's argument was that the Westside tunnel is part of a larger project that the company outlined with a map late last year. According to the suit, California law forbids the approval of individual facets of a larger project, stating that a full environmental review can't "be evaded by chopping large projects into smaller pieces that taken individually appear to have no significant environmental impacts."
The Westside group did not get a ruling on its lawsuit; instead, it seems the two parties settled. The Boring Company did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Gizmodo, but it sent a statement to NBC News that reads: "The parties (The Boring Company, Brentwood Residents Coalition, Sunset Coalition, and Wendy-Sue Rosen) have amicably settled the matter of Brentwood Residents Coalition et al. v. City of Los Angeles (TBC -- The Boring Company). The Boring Company is no longer seeking the development of the Sepulveda test tunnel and instead seeks to construct an operational tunnel at Dodger Stadium."
The Westside group did not get a ruling on its lawsuit; instead, it seems the two parties settled. The Boring Company did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Gizmodo, but it sent a statement to NBC News that reads: "The parties (The Boring Company, Brentwood Residents Coalition, Sunset Coalition, and Wendy-Sue Rosen) have amicably settled the matter of Brentwood Residents Coalition et al. v. City of Los Angeles (TBC -- The Boring Company). The Boring Company is no longer seeking the development of the Sepulveda test tunnel and instead seeks to construct an operational tunnel at Dodger Stadium."
Oh no, Elon Musk is such a genius he can't do basic paperwork
That's... not true. Things have nonlinear effects. It's sorites paradox.
Or, put it another way, no given xray (or cigarette) is likely to give you cancer. But getting 100 xrays a day (or smoking 5 packs a day) is likely to cause you to get cancer. That's why it's illegal to split a project into smaller pieces.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
It's probably not an issue with wildlife, but an issue with digging under people's property.
*shakes fist*
Not Under My Back Yard!
More correctly, it's not that they have an impact that is the question. It's WHAT their impact is going to be and how the infrastructure company is going to mitigate that impact. You have to prove that you can build this thing safely BEFORE you start digging.
It's called ethics. I know this is a new concept for most programmers reading this on /., but it's a thing civil guys have been dealing with for decades. It's not a new problem for us.
See here for an example:
http://www.hudsontunnelproject...
No one said the individual parts have no environmental impact. They said "no significant environment impact".
If the bar for "significant" is "10" and your project is deemed to be "20", you're not allowed to complete it in 4 parts, each with "5", to avoid mitigation of the impact.
Also, we should consider the environmental impact of NOT building the tunnels, and everyone continuing to commute with SUVs on the freeway.
NIMBYism is destroying America.
NIMBY doesn't know state boundaries. This is a wealthy neighborhood concerned about elevated traffic due to the tunnel. This happens everywhere in the US anytime you attempt any construction project near wealthy people.
You'll get this worse in other states east of California where property owners also own the mineral rights. Somewhere like Texas you'd get every single property owner anywhere close to project suing to be paid claiming an impact to their mineral rights. California like many of the states west of Colorado have state laws that separate out mineral and surface rights giving the property owner no challenge to tunnel type projects via mineral rights. Instead these wealthy property owners are using a state environmental law to claim no analysis of impacts like traffic to attack the project.
Honestly the property owners are right, if Musk does want to build this massive private tunnel network he needs to spend a little money and do a real environmental analysis on what the impacts will be. Such a system would likely dramatically change traffic patterns and could cause aquifers to be disrupted along with a bunch of other things that should be analyzed before building it.
Environmental documents aren't a bad thing, they are simply a process that requires planning and a look at the effects the project will have before you build it. This is a good thing, these documents and the process they entail can often make projects run smoother and win public support and once the document is approved many of the avenues for a lawsuit get closed off, which is one of the purposes of the document.