DUBAI: Elon Musk said Thursday that he was partnering with Dubai authorities to create a “Loop” underground road network in the congested city. Musk’s Boring Company has built a similar system in Las Vegas, with Tesla cars — another of his products — driving passengers down narrow, one-way tunnels for a fee.

“It’s gonna be like a wormhole — you just wormhole from one part of the city, boom, and you’re out in another part of the city,” Musk, the world’s richest person, said by videolink at the World Governments Summit in Dubai. Currently the Vegas Loop has four stops and costs $10 for a five-minute, eight-kilometer ride. “I think (when) people try it out, they’ll be like, ‘This is really cool.’ And it’s so obvious in retrospect, but until you actually do it you don’t know,” said Musk.

Dubai’s Crown Prince Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed Al-Maktoum said the project was still at the planning stage, but could extend to 11 stations and capacity to transport 20,000 passengers an hour. “Dubai will explore the development of the 17-kilometre project,” he said in a statement.

Despite a giant road network of six-lane highways crisscrossing Dubai, traffic jams are common in the fast-growing United Arab Emirates city of about 3.6 million people. According to UAE Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence Omar Al-Olama, who announced the joint project with Musk, the Loop will “cover Dubai’s most densely populated areas for people to go from point to point”.

The project is not to be confused with the Musk-inspired Hyperloop, which envisages floating pods traveling at ultra-high speeds along a vacuum-sealed tube. After initial steps began in 2016 to build a Hyperloop between Dubai and oil-rich UAE’s capital, Abu Dhabi, the project is yet to become reality.

Musk, a key appointee of US President Donald Trump, is currently slashing government spending, freezing aid programs and pushing staff reductions in federal agencies.

Meanwhile, the UAE has begun mapping air corridors for air taxis and cargo drones, its civil aviation authority said in a statement on Thursday. The oil and gas-rich country has sought to distinguish itself in the Middle East as a high-tech, forward-looking society, with Dubai starting to test two-seater, propeller-topped flying taxis made by Germany’s Volocopter in 2017.

In September, US-based air-taxi maker Joby Aviation said it had applied for a certificate that will allow it to operate commercial air transport in the UAE. “Air corridor mapping for piloted and autonomous air taxis and drones is a crucial milestone that will enable the seamless implementation of advanced air mobility into the UAE’s infrastructure,” said civil aviation authority director Saif Mohammed Al-Suwaidi.

The UAE’s civil aviation authority said the aerial corridors and regulations were set to be defined within the next 20 months. UAE official news agency WAM has reported that air taxis are expected to start flying in 2026. The civil aviation authority is developing the mapping in partnership with the Technology Innovation Institute (TII), a global advanced technology research center based in Abu Dhabi, and ASPIRE, a UAE research and development funding organization, according to the authority. – Agencies