Elon Musk's Boring Company nixes one L.A. tunnel, moves onto next project

Elon Musk's Boring Company is dropping one of its Los Angeles underground tunnel plans after some residents' concerns.

The L.A.-based underground transit initiative said Tuesday it was withdrawing its plans for a tunnel below Interstate 405 after a settlement with some community groups that had sued the city when the project was exempted from an environmental review process, NBC News reported.

"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)," according to Boring Co. statement sent to NBC News. "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."

Musk had said a stretch of that "test tunnel" in the southern suburb of Hawthorne, between downtown LA and Torrance, was finished and would be shown to the public Dec. 10.

Now, the Boring Co., which Musk founded in late 2016 as a reaction to his frustration with traffic around his Los Angeles home, will focus on the Dugout Loop, an approximate 3.6-mile underground public transportation tunnel to Dodger Stadium.

The Dugout Loop would "help reduce traffic in Los Angeles by providing a clean and efficient public transportation option," the company says on its website.

The company's "Loop" system, which would whisk people through the system's tunnels on an electric-powered platform called a "skate" at up to 150 miles per hour, is different from Musk and the Boring Co.'s longer-range Hyperloop projects, which envision a tunnel connecting, for instance, Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, D.C..