The Boring Co.’s Bastrop-area facility in March 2023. The company recently said it’s considering a tunnel project at the Morgan’s Wonderland theme park in San Antonio.
San Antonio Express-News file photo
Morgan’s Wonderland’s promotes inclusion and accessibility, especially for children and adults with special needs. Elon Musk’s Boring Co. wants to build a tunnel to the park.
Morgan’s Wonderland
Elon Musk’s Boring Co. wants to build a tunnel for a San Antonio theme park in what would be the first project by the company in Bexar County after the failed bid to build a tunnel to connect the airport with downtown.
The company, which is headquartered in Bastrop, said it’s taking on a project proposed by Morgan’s Wonderland, the nonprofit park that’s accessible to people with special needs.
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The “Morgan’s Wonderland Tunnel” is one of five projects, including one in Dallas, the company said it was pursuing as the result of a recent contest that sought pitches from entities around the country. When it announced the contest in January, it said it would build the winning submission for no charge. It ended up naming three winners, including the Dallas project.
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While not one of the three projects designated as winners, the Boring Co. said the Morgan’s Wonderland project and another in Hendersonville, Tenn., “were so compelling” that it is “going to continue to work with the entrants and try to get them built.”
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Morgan’s Wonderland referred questions about its proposal to the Boring Co., which has not responded to requests for information. The park’s founder Gordon Hartman, a philanthropist and former homebuilder, hasn’t responded to a separate request for comment.
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The Boring Co. said the next steps include meetings with elected officials, regulators and community and business leaders about the winning sites. It also will begin investigating the soil and subsurface of the potential sites for feasibility. If the projects are deemed to be feasible, the company said it will fund and build them.
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So far, neither the city’s Public Works nor Capital Delivery departments are involved in the project at the North Side theme park. It would be the first in Bexar County for the Boring Co., but not the first time it’s pitched doing a project in the city.
In 2022, the Alamo Regional Mobility Authority voted to negotiate with the Boring Co. on a tunnel to shuttle visitors between San Antonio International Airport and downtown.
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The system had an estimated price tag between $247 million to $289 million and was expected to carry as many as 112,000 passengers daily on a route roughly following U.S. 281. It was to produce annual revenue of up to $25 million for the RMA.
But Boring Co. went silent after it sent its proposal, and the airport tunnel idea is essentially dead, according to the county.
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“No one at the county has had any contact with the Boring Company since the end of 2021 when they had initially proposed (in response to an Alamo Regional Mobility RFQ) a potential tunnel project between the airport and downtown San Antonio,” David Wegmann, the county’s interim director of public works, said in an email. “Conversations went nowhere with that, and we have had no further contact with them.”
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Like other Musk-owned companies, secretive talks are a hallmark of the Boring Co.’s efforts in the region.
The winning tunnel projects selected by the company are the University Hills Loop in Dallas, the NOLA Loop in New Orleans and the Ravens Loop in Baltimore.
In an update Wednesday, Boring Co. said initial meetings on the Dallas and New Orleans projects went well and are continuing, but the Ravens Loop in Baltimore “will not be moving forward as part of the competition.”
WBAL-TV reported that local and state government officials had no prior knowledge about the proposed Ravens Loop. The Baltimore Ravens officially declined to move forward with the project Wednesday, saying the proposal was only in an exploratory phase, according to CBS News Baltimore.
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The selected projects were among hundreds submitted to the company’s “Tunnel Vision Challenge” that invited entities to propose projects that would solve transportation problems with tunnels 1 mile or less in length.
The proposals were evaluated on the project’s usefulness, such as how much time it would save people, the support the project has from local stakeholders as well as their feasibility.
Boring Co. already has tunnels in Las Vegas, at two sites in California, at its Bastrop headquarters and at the Tesla factory outside Austin. It’s also building tunnels in Nashville and Dubai.
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The company uses its proprietary Prufrock boring machines to dig the tunnels. The giant cylindrical devices arrive via truck and tilt down to start digging. They install a precast concrete tunnel liner as they go and don’t require employees to be in the tunnel while digging.
Boring Co. says the technology eventually will be able to dig 1 mile of tunnel per week at a cost of $8 million per mile.