Dubbed ‘Slowloop Tunnel’, the concept has been submitted to The Boring Company’s Tunnel Vision Challenge – a competition wherein proposals for tunnel-building projects will be judged and the winning proposal built free of charge.
‘I’ve had the idea for a long period of time, but in the past it was a struggle to get hold of The Boring Company, and so I thought it was great when I happened to see they launched this competition,’ said Marc Winn, the mind behind the Slowloop organisation.
The Boring Company, founded by Elon Musk, was created to help alleviate traffic congestion and minimise the use of valuable surface land for roads. Its innovative boring technology is now able to tunnel a mile per week, potentially bringing years-long projects down to only a few weeks in duration, and subsequently making tunnel infrastructure vastly more cost-effective and convenient to build.
The company’s tunnel boring machines are also on a trajectory to become even cheaper and more efficient, with its latest machine, Prufrock, already beating its previous machine’s speed six times over.
‘Tunnelling is going to get cheaper and cheaper as technology and AI develop,’ said Mr Winn. ‘This could be great for the company because Guernsey has some really interesting things to offer. For example, they’ve never done an underwater tunnel before.
‘They have also already tunnelled through a lot of soft rock, but Guernsey has a lot of granite, which is very hard. It might be a good opportunity for them to bore through hard rock.’
Mr Winn’s vision for Slowloop is about more than just benefitting the company’s innovation, though.
He sees it as having great potential benefit for the local community, who could use it for recreation and all-weather exercise.
‘It would be somewhere that people can go all the time to run and cycle, which are things that probably a lot of us only do in the summer. It could also be really good for Guernsey’s tourism. The Boring Company has already built a three-mile tunnel in Las Vegas, and I think a lot of people have travelled just to see it,’ he said.
From a less pragmatic standpoint, the concept for the tunnel is specifically for it to be a civic space covered in community artwork, which Mr Winn thinks will also offer benefit to islanders in a different way.
‘In a world that’s speeding up all the time, this would be something that challenges that.’
Slowloop has already garnered public support from private and public persons, notably deputy Chris Blin, and Mr Winn is now working towards developing a broader base of public support – community backing is one of the criteria which the Boring Company’s judges will evaluate when deciding which proposal to move forward with.
He has made more information about the project and ways to support it available on the slowloop.org website.
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