What Musk’s Boring Company is up to-Tunnels considered in Kyle and San Antonio

As headlines swirl over Elon Musk’s efforts to buy Twitter Inc. or Tesla Inc.’s “Cyber Rodeo” grand opening party in Austin, another one of his companies is beginning to ramp up its presence working in Central Texas.

In recent weeks, details about Musk’s Pflugerville-based tunneling startup, The Boring Company, have been popping up in the public sector, including efforts to build out its site in Bastrop County, east of Austin. The company is also eyeing an alternative transportation plan in San Antonio that would yield a series of tunnels that would extend from the San Antonio International Airport and the city center.

Now, the company is getting involved in talks with both the cities of Austin and nearby Kyle, the latter of which will consider entering an agreement for preliminary engineering for a pedestrian tunnel that would connect the Plum Creek subdivision to the $90 million, 39-acre second phase of the Kyle Crossing mixed-use development that is expected to bring destination dining and retail to the suburb south of Austin.

The Kyle City Council was scheduled on April 19 to potentially approve the professional services agreement with Boring, according to council documents, but officials said that discussion will be delayed. The pedestrian underpass would stretch under the Union Pacific Railroad tracks south of Kyle Parkway/Farm to Market 1626. The company laid out a nine-step plan as part of the engineering process that would total $50,000 in costs and include a site visit, engineering studies and a delivered report.

“The pedestrian underpass will accommodate multimodal transportation options both slow and fast moving, including electric vehicles, bicycles, and pedestrians,” a preliminary engineering report stated. “The pedestrian underpass will connect people from the region to encourage multimodal movement to leisure and outdoor activities and integrate into the urban environment. The surrounding area will connect to a destination park, adjacent professional offices, dining, and retail options.”

The idea for the pedestrian tunnel stemmed around the time the city held a March groundbreaking for the Kyle Crossing project from Central Southwest Texas Development. The developers were approved for a Chapter 380 agreement in December for the project that includes ample retail, commercial and residential space, including destination restaurants and ground-floor retail on multi-family developments. It’s expected to generate roughly $1.2-$1.6 million in annual tax revenue.

At the time, city officials said the developers were committed to building a pedestrian bridge or tunnel. Mitchell said they wanted to build an elevated bridge, but the presence of electrical wires made that difficult, so they engaged with Boring executives about the tunnel. He said they were able to raise enough private developer funds for the tunnel, which is estimated to not exceed $3 million in costs.

The Kyle plans mark a significant escalation in Boring’s Austin presence since the Austin Business Journal first reported that the company snagged industrial space in Pflugerville back in December 2020. That space is now referred to as the company’s headquarters.

Since then, ABJ has reported that an entity tied to The Boring Company had purchased 73 acres of land in Bastrop County. A tent-like structure and equipment on the site was visible to a reporter that visited, and neighbors have detailed the ramping up of construction in recent weeks. The site also includes residences, while the company is also aiming to build an 80,000-square-foot warehouse on it, leading to some pushback.

Job postings for Central Texas have outlined that the Bastrop site could be used to develop a tunneling technology called “Prufrock.”

Prufrock is a machine designed by The Boring Company to “porpoise,” meaning it launches from the surface, mines underground and re-emerges once it’s finished, according to past ABJ reporting. It’s designed to tunnel faster than one mile per week, which is six times faster than the company’s previous machinery. The medium-term goal is to increase that to seven miles per day, according to its website.

ABJ has also detailed apparent plans for an $11 million, 220,000-square-foot warehouse on land across from the Tesla gigafactory in eastern Travis County.

And last week, the Austin Chronicle reported that 10 employees with the city of Austin’s Development Services Department flew to Las Vegas to meet with representatives of The Boring Company, the Las Vegas Convention Center, and their counterparts in Clark County to better “understand best practices for permitting subgrade mobility infrastructure,” a DSD spokesperson confirmed for the Chronicle.

The purpose of the trip was described to the Chronicle as a discussion of the challenges a peer city has faced in planning new subgrade transportation projects, such as those that may be needed to support the Project Con­nect transit system and expansion of Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.

“Management staff tasked with permitting these systems in Austin will have the opportunity to view the Boring Company’s construction site and visit with the permitting municipality,” the spokesperson said.

The company has not submitted any project for review but has met with the city to discuss regulations, according to Austin Chronicle.

Courtesy of Austin Business Journal. See the full article here.