It doesn’t take a genius city planner to know that tunnels under the city spare pedestrians and foot traffic in the city above. Major cities around the world have built traffic tunnels, and it’s obvious when you are in New York how tunnels can get you across the city quickly.

Tunneling is impressive but it comes with problems. London’s Crossrail project, for example, uncovered thousands of archaeological artifacts mid-construction.

Modern cities have centuries of buried infrastructure: gas pipes, water mains, electrical conduits, fiber optic cables, old foundations. Routing tunnels around all of this requires painstaking planning and coordination with dozens of agencies but Dubai, a relatively new city that’s missing even basic sewage pipes in some buildings, has a great chance to build its city from scratch right.

Dubai has announced this month that they will be working with Elon Musk‘s Boring Company to build tunnels in Dubai.

At an estimated $545 million for 14 miles, the Dubai Loop is actually relatively cheap by global standards: New York’s Second Avenue Subway cost roughly $2.5 billion per mile. Most cities simply can’t finance that.

Dubai’s Particular “Boring” Problem

Dubai is sprawling, car-dependent, and built in a desert climate where surface-level public transport is actively hostile to pedestrians for much of the year. Temperatures regularly exceed 40°C (104°F) in summer, making walking between transit stops an uncomfortable proposition. Imagine how you feel when your car’s air conditioning stops working?

Underground transport sidesteps the heat. A cool, connected tunnel network with frequent stops could shift behavior in a city where the private car, and even gold Mercedes, have long reigned supreme. The pilot route will offer “first- and last-mile solutions”, meaning it’s designed to work with Dubai’s existing Metro rather than in competition with it.

If it succeeds, Dubai Loop could become a compelling model for other Gulf cities, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Doha, all that share the same urban sprawl, heat, and car dependency challenges.

Steve Davis, President of The Boring Company, commented that: “We are proud to partner with the Roads and Transport Authority, one of the world’s leading entities in adopting innovative solutions in the transport sector. Through this partnership, we look forward to delivering advanced, safe, and highly efficient tunnelling solutions that support Dubai’s vision for sustainable and future mobility.”

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