LA’s famously heinous traffic jams are going down.
At least if this giant robotic worm has anything to say about it.
Meet Angeli, the 400-foot-long Regional Connector Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) currently digging twin tunnels that will connect three of LA’s subway lines and add three more stops. Weighing more than one million pounds, Angeli can travel upwards of 50 feet each day and excavate 1,300 tons of soil. In a single 24-hour period, it’s best production was 175 feet— nearly a football field.
While tunneling has been around for more than a century, engineers in recent years have developed dramatically high-tech, low-cost automated systems to bulldoze through complex geology without disturbing cities above—even seismic ones like LA. Although an operator runs Angeli, for example, a computer runs the brains. Teams can monitor all the parameters of the machine from their iPhones and in control data centers.
That’s what we call top-notch tunnel vision.