The Boring Company’s Nashville Music City Loop Gets Final Green Light, Tunneling Already Underway

The Boring Company has been sitting in Nashville with its Prufrock-MB1 tunnel boring machine since January, engine ready, waiting on permits. Today, the last major regulatory hurdle cleared. By tonight, the company announced it was already 2.5 feet into the ground.

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee announced Wednesday that the Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT) and Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) jointly approved The Boring Company’s lease application and enhanced grading permit to use state-owned right-of-way. Construction began the same day.

• The Fact: TDOT and FHWA approved The Boring Company’s lease and permit on February 25, 2026, completing a multi-agency approval stack that required federal, state, and local sign-off simultaneously.
• The Delta: Tunneling started hours after approval. Prufrock-MB1 is already in the ground, with a second machine, Prufrock-MB2, arriving from its Texas assembly facility in March.
• The Scale: The Music City Loop is 100% privately funded, connecting downtown Nashville, the Convention Center, and Lower Broadway to Nashville International Airport (BNA) in approximately 8 minutes. No taxpayer dollars involved.

The Music City Loop Approval Timeline Tells the Real Story

The Boring Company announced its intent to build the Music City Loop on July 28, 2025. Nashville was chosen for its rapid population growth, strong economic potential, and the need to reduce traffic congestion as Nashville International Airport sets passenger records year after year. But turning that announcement into a construction permit took seven months of multi-agency negotiations across federal, state, and local levels.

The Metropolitan Nashville Airport Authority voted 7-0 on February 18 to approve a 40-year licensing agreement — with two optional five-year extensions that could extend it to 50 years — covering roughly 933,000 square feet of airport property. The Boring Company will pay $300,000 annually, increasing 3% per year, totaling approximately $34 million in licensing fees over the initial term. Once operational, a $5 fee per airport pickup and drop-off is projected to generate approximately $309 million in operational revenue for the airport over the agreement’s duration — a figure MNAA officials called conservative.

The state approvals came one week later. That sequence matters: the airport deal locked in the southern terminus, and the TDOT permit cleared the route through state-owned highways. Both had to happen before a single foot of tunnel could be dug.

Prufrock-MB1’s Nashville Timeline: Weeks 1 Through 7

The Boring Company’s Prufrock-series tunnel boring machines work on a specific ramp-up schedule, and Nashville is no different. Weeks one through three are testing and calibration at low production. Weeks four through six scale to high production. Week seven is when Prufrock-MB2 arrives from Texas to begin a parallel tunnel.

The machine targets speeds greater than one mile per week — six times faster than The Boring Company’s original Godot TBM. At that pace, the initial downtown-to-airport route could be complete within months. The Vegas Loop’s LVCC segment, 1.7 miles across three stations, was built in approximately one year at a cost of $47 million. Nashville’s first phase covers roughly 13 miles, a substantially different engineering challenge.

The Boring Company is now tunneling simultaneously in Nevada, Texas, and Tennessee — a first for the company.

Passengers will ride in Tesla vehicles, initially Model Y and Model X, through tunnels roughly 30 feet below street level with a 12-foot internal diameter — the same proven specification from the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop, which earned a 99.51% safety and security rating from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and TSA — the highest score ever awarded to any transportation system — and has demonstrated peak capacity of 4,500 passengers per hour.

Criticism and Community Concerns Are Real

Not everyone in Nashville is celebrating. A downtown congregation near the tunneling site says its members have already felt blasting from preliminary work, and the pastor sent Governor Lee a letter that went unanswered. The church’s concern isn’t unique — reporting from the Nashville Banner in August 2025 revealed that no environmental studies, community outreach, or impact assessments had taken place before the project’s initial approval, and that state-owned land was leased to The Boring Company for free for staging and a job fair before the lease even formally began. The Boring Company did release an Environmental Impact Assessment in December 2025, but that came five months after construction had already begun on the launch site. And in November 2025, a local contractor’s crew walked off the project citing safety concerns and payment disputes — a data point the project’s boosters rarely mention.

“This governor serves certain constituents. He’s not interested in serving all of Tennessee,” the pastor told NewsChannel 5.

The Boring Company’s track record includes canceled projects in Chicago, Baltimore, San Jose, Los Angeles, San Bernardino, and Fort Lauderdale. Nashville knows this. The question is whether the Vegas Loop’s operational success — and the fact that construction is now literally underway — changes the calculus.

EVXL’s Take

The Music City Loop is the most credible Boring Company project outside Las Vegas, and today’s permit-to-tunneling-in-hours sequence shows the company learned something from years of stalled announcements in other cities. Having the machine on-site and ready before final permits cleared was a deliberate strategy. The moment the approval came through, there was nothing to debate.

The 100% private funding model is the story that gets buried. No taxpayer exposure means no political kill switch once the money is committed. That’s what differentiates Nashville from Chicago or Baltimore, where Boring’s deals fell apart the moment political winds shifted.

But the community criticism deserves more than a gubernatorial non-answer. Tunneling under state highways in a dense urban corridor affects residents who never voted on this. The environmental process shortcut that reporting revealed last August was genuinely troubling. A project can be privately funded and still owe the public a serious engagement process.

The Vegas Loop proves the technology works at small scale. Nashville will prove whether it scales. The Boring Company’s own FAQ puts the first operational segment at Q1 2027 — which it acknowledges is “an aggressive schedule.” My read is later than that. Station buildout, systems integration, and the regulatory approvals required at each stop will be the actual pacing items, not the tunneling itself. Prufrock speeds are impressive, but Prufrock is only one part of the equation. A realistic first-segment opening is late 2027. The full 13-mile route won’t be complete until 2029 at the earliest.

Watch what happens at the first community meeting after a blasting incident near a residential property. That’s when we’ll see whether The Boring Company treats Nashville like a partner or a permit.

Editorial Note: AI tools were used to assist with research and archive retrieval for this article. All reporting, analysis, and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.