the times | Wednesday June 8 2022 2GM 43Business
A $5 ride from the city centre to the beach
Fort Lauderdale faces a
familiar quandary for
cities all over the world:
how does it reduce traffic
on already-congested
roads while its
population continues to
swell? Its mayor believes
he has found the answer.
A little over a year ago,
Dean Trantalis flew from
Florida across America to
meet officials from The
Boring Company in
Hawthorne, California,
and to inspect its one
completed project in Las
Vegas, Nevada.
Tunnels are the
solution, Trantalis has
concluded. “Avoiding all
the traffic, you don’t have
to cut through
neighbourhoods, you
don’t have to cut through
a busy, busy commercial
district,” he said. “You’reable to just get to where
you want to go.”
Providing that
passengers want to go to
the beach or to
downtown Fort
Lauderdale, they could
travel in Tesla vehicles
through a pair of two-
mile tunnels for about $5
a ride. The project in the
city just north of Miami
could cost between
$70 million and
$90 million. Trantalis
expects The Boring
Company to fund the
construction work itself,
before Fort Lauderdale
pays it back.
“We will seek financing
either through the
federal government, the
state and the county,” he
said. “Optimistically, we
can really get it all done
by the end of 2023.”risen by 43 per cent, compared with a
year earlier, as demand for high-margin
discretionary items such as kitchen
appliances and televisions waned.
Target was founded under the name
of Dayton’s Dry Goods Company at the
start of the last century and became
Target Corporation in 2000.
Its strategy to keep most of its
products affordable compared with its
rivals is proving to be costly, with the
company now saying that it will also
have to raise prices on some items.
Target now expects its second-quarter
operating margin to be about 2 per cent,
compared with its previous estimate of
5.3 per cent. However, Target did
maintain its sales goals for the year.
Shares in the retailer closed down by
2.3 per cent, or $3.69, at $155.98 in New
York last night.6 Elon Musk’s efforts to arrange new
financing that will limit his cash contri-
bution to his $44 billion acquisition of
Twitter were said last night to have
been put on hold because of the uncer-
tainty surrounding the deal.
Musk has threatened to walk away
unless the social media company pro-
vides him with data to back up its esti-
mate that false or spam accounts com-
prise less than 5 per cent of its user base.
He is liable to pay $33.5 billion in cash
to fund the deal after arranging debt
financing to cover the rest and has been
in talks to arrange up to $3 billion in
preferred equity financing from private
equity firms led by Apollo Global
Management that would reduce his
cash contribution. Musk and Twitter
did not respond to requests for com-
ment. Apollo declined to comment.One of America’s biggest retail chains
has cut a quarterly profit margin fore-
cast that it issued only weeks ago and
warned that it will have to offer deeper
discounts to clear stock as inflation
takes a toll on demand.
Target Corporation, which has stores
in all 50 states, said it would mark
down prices in the second quarter and
would cancel orders with suppliers,
strengthen parts of its supply chain and
prioritise categories such as food and
household essentials.
Target, along with Walmart, had
reported a much steeper drop in quar-
terly profit in May than Wall Street
analysts had expected, sending shock-
waves through the retail industry. At
the time, Target said its stock levels hadBusiness Reporter2%
Expected second-
quarter operating
margin, compared
with prior estimate
of 5.3 per cent
Source: Target CorporationTarget lowers its aim amid tighter margins
Sixth”. But
the firm will
soon open a new
tunnel between
Resorts World on the Vegas
strip and the convention
centre, and last October re-
ceived initial approval to
eventually grow this loop
into a 29-mile network withA Tesla tackles a Boring test
tunnel but the company’s
sole commercial project is in
Las Vegas, left. It sold
flamethrowers to
raise cash51 entry points. While what has hap-
pened in Vegas has thus far stayed in
Vegas, Boring is looking far beyond. It
recently moved from Hawthorne, Cali-
fornia, to Pflugerville, Texas — half an
hour’s drive from Tesla’s gigafactory
and its new headquarters — and is hir-
ing dozens of staff. Executives are in
talks with local authorities in Fort
Lauderdale, Florida, and San Antonio,
also in Texas. A pedestrian underpass
has been mooted in the small Texan
city of Kyle on the outskirts of Austin.
“They’re extremely intelligent,”
Dean Trantalis, mayor of Fort Lauder-
dale, said of Boring’s executives.
“They’re eager to work with our city.
They’ve been good working partners,
so we’re very happy to continue our
progress with them.”
In contrast, plans in Los Angeles and
Chicago have fallen by the wayside, and
a proposed system between Washing-
ton and Baltimore is on the shelf.
As Boring tries to sell its vision of
underground transportation to officials
across the United States, the company
points to Prufrock, its boring machine.
This latest-generation tool can tunnel
at a rate faster than a mile per week —
still much slower than the speed of a
garden snail, but catching up, execu-
tives insist. The “medium-term goal” is
for it to accelerate to a tenth of human
walking pace.
Musk, who has a patchy record when
it comes to predicting how quickly tar-
gets will be met, has clinched a string of
many unprecedented feats at Tesla and
SpaceX, but when the first significant
test of hyperloop technology took place
in November 2020, with two human
passengers travelling in a superfast
vacuum tube, it was not conducted by
Boring, but Virgin Hyperloop.
Sir Richard Branson, whose Virgin
Group is a key backer, hailed a “spirit of
innovation” that he said would “change
the way people everywhere live, work,
and travel in the years to come”. Less
than 18 months later, the venture — al-
so backed by DP World, the Dubai-
based ports and logistics group — ab-
ruptly altered its course. It laid off about
half its workforce, telling the Financial
Times it was “changing direction” and
responding “in a more cost-efficient
manner” to global supply chain issues
as it pivoted from passenger to freight
transport.
Boring, preparing to commence
“full-scale” hyperloop testing later this
year, has made no such decision.
Shortly after its latest fundraising, a
Twitter account dedicated to statistics
listed the ten cities with the worst traffic
on earth. London, Paris and Brussels
topped the rankings. Musk replied:
“Tunnels anyone?”underground is far from boring
ROBYN BECK/AFP/GETTY IMAGESSt