Late last year, entrepreneur Elon Musk sent out a series of tweets complaining about the heavy traffic in LA. Can’t argue with him there –  Southern California has the country’s worst traffic, according to a study released by the data company Inrix. Musk called being stuck in traffic “soul-destroying.” But he didn’t just whine, he proposed a solution: tunnels. At first, it wasn’t clear if this was a billionaire’s joke or if he’s really serious about The Boring Company (suggested tagline: it’s not boring!). But then Musk added “Tunnels” to his Twitter bio, alongside Tesla, SpaceX and OpenAI, and the announced on January 28 that digging has begun. A team of workers excavated a “test trench” 30 feet wide, 50 feet long and 15 feet deep on the grounds of SpaceX’s Los Angeles headquarters, at Crenshaw Boulevard and 120th Street. So far, Musk calls it the start of an experiment. The “pilot tunnel” will only traverse Crenshaw Boulevard to SpaceX’s employee parking structure, but he made it public that his tunnel ambitions are much bigger. “We’re just going to figure out what it takes to improve tunneling speed by, I think, somewhere between 500 and 1,000 percent,” he said during a recent Hyperloop design competition at SpaceX. “We have no idea what we’re doing—I want to be clear about that. We’re going to get this machine, take it apart, figure out how to make it go much faster while still being safe and not affecting people on the surface. We’ll see how much progress we can make, but I’m optimistic tunneling can be improved by at least five-fold, maybe 10-fold.” That’s key to a lot of technologies—road tunnels, train tunnels, Hyperloop tunnels. For those who aren’t familiar, Hyperloop is a space-agey proposed mode of transportation...