Automobile interests don't favor mass transit

 Tesla cars awaiting delivery.  Odin Jaege, Bloomberg/Getty Images.

Nothing new here.  But Elon Musk, in reality, is no friend of the environment.

1.  Elon Musk said he came up with the hyperloop to diminish planning and funding for high speed rail in California ("Elon Musk Is Convinced He's the Future. We Need to Look Beyond Him," TIME Magazine).  From the article:

He has a history of floating false solutions to the drawbacks of our over-reliance on cars that stifle efforts to give people other options. The Boring Company was supposed to solve traffic, not be the Las Vegas amusement ride it is now. As I’ve written in my book, Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it.

2.  His tunnels project, The Boring Company, is operative in Las Vegas, but is nothing special ("Elon Musk’s Boring Company to expand underground tunnels in Las Vegas," The Hill).  

Understanding the value of dedicated lanes, above ground or underground, is well understood.

-- "London Mayor proposes roadway tunnels to divert surface motor vehicle traffic and congestion," 2016 

I've proposed it for DC for years.

-- "Who knew? There's been a freeway deck in Oak Park, Michigan over I-696 for almost 30 years," 2018

There would be a lot more throughput for mass transit underground in Las Vegas, rather than his car-based "solution."

The capacity for cars is less than 2,000 people per hour per lane, for a shuttle 6,000, for rail more than that.

George Monbiot's "Pollution Paradox" makes the point that special interests profiting from "pollution" are the most motivated to spend money on lobbying and image development ("The Power of Big Oil," PBS Frontline) to ward off change.

While electric vehicles are "better" than gasoline-powered vehicles when it comes to the environment, even better is a focus on sustainable land use and mobility paradigm, reducing the need and demand for personal transit.

From the TIME article:

A much more sustainable alternative to mass ownership of electric vehicles is to get people out of cars altogether—that entails making serious investments to create more reliable public transit networks, building out cycling infrastructure so people can safely ride a bike, and revitalizing the rail network after decades of underinvestment. But Musk has continually tried to stand in the way of such alternatives.

My joke is that EVs are merely "next generation asphalt nation."

But sure, were I in the position to choose, I'd rather have one over an ICE car.