It's time to take Elon Musk seriously and literally. After Twitter hints, tidbits, and whining about LA traffic, the serial entrepreneur and budding mole man is digging a tunnel. Well, a hole.

Over the weekend, workers excavated a "test trench" 30 feet wide, 50 feet long, and 15 feet deep on the grounds of SpaceX’s Los Angeles headquarters. Musk calls it the beginning of an experiment. “We’re just going to figure out what it takes to improve tunneling speed by, I think, somewhere between 500 and 1,000 percent,” he said Sunday during a hyperloop design competition at SpaceX. “We have no idea what we’re doing—I want to be clear about that.”

Musk first pitched this idea last week in a tweet lamenting LA's atrocious traffic, promising to "build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging." He has since revealed a far wider vision of eliminating the city's famed congestion by shuffling humanity through a network of tunnels. "If you think of tunnels going 10, 20, 30 layers deep (or more), it is obvious that going 3D down will encompass the needs of any city’s transport of arbitrary size," he told WIRED last week in a Twitter direct message.

“You have tall buildings, they’re all 3D, and then everyone wants to go into the building and leave the building at a same time,” he said Sunday. “On a 2D road network, that obviously doesn’t work, so you have to go 3D either up or down. And I think probably down.”

That grandiose vision starts with a hole in Hawthorne, the Los Angeles suburb SpaceX calls home. Musk doesn't need permission to dig on company property, but is working with the city on plans for a pedestrian bridge or tunnel so people can safely cross the wide thoroughfare alongside the campus. (Three SpaceX employees were hit by a car last month.) Now, it seems, Musk has settled on the tunnel, where he can get his fingernails dirty testing new boring techniques. But extending the shaft all the way to Los Angeles' airport—as Musk has threatened to do—would require more discussion, paperwork, and LA City Council approval, says a spokesperson for the LA Department of Public Works.

The Boring Part

Unfortunately for urban humanity, and Angelenos in particular, boring is more than an engineering problem to be solved by Musk's knack for clever solutions. Big American digging projects are definitely screwy—Big Dig and Second Avenue Subway, anyone?—but not just because the machinery gets busted.

Digging under cities takes time because a) the ground is full of stuff; b) that stuff is poorly mapped; and c) construction freaks out the locals. "Our recent experience with tunnels in the US is that neighbors worry, you run up against various environmental laws, and you just never know what’s underneath the Earth," says Michael Manville, who studies urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles.

As the LA Metro has discovered, these things can be very, very costly. Relocating underground electricity, power, gas, and telecommunications lines ate through more than $45 million of the LA’s new rail line reserve budget—half of what the transportation authority had put aside for accidental project hiccups—five years before the project is set to conclude. A decade of lawsuits filed by the Beverly Hills school district to prevent tunneling under its name-brand high school held up construction on a Metro extension for years. And as New York City learned with the Second Avenue subway project, big tunnels also have to contend with unsteady funding and complaints about construction noise.

Meanwhile, the solution to horrifying traffic is definitely not more roads, but getting people out of their vehicles. Make trains and Bus Rapid Transit truly convenient and folks just might let someone else do the driving. Charge drivers to use the road and they just might embrace the low-tech carpool.

"Roads are basically the only infrastructure we have that we experience daily shortages of," says Manville. "We don’t have rolling blackouts, the toilets don’t back up twice a day, and that’s not because the technology in those things is so much better. We just don’t give them away for free."

Asked about these alternatives, Musk said, "better tunneling tech improves everything: road, subway, Hyperloop." Fair point—Bertha, the tunneling machine formerly stuck under Seattle with a jammed cutterhead, would appreciate the help.

So better boring? Bring it on. But boring’s not the only thing bungling big builds.