MUSIC CITY
LOOP

What is the Music City Loop?

The Music City Loop is The Boring Company's underground transportation project in Nashville, Tennessee. The system is intended to move passengers directly between stations using all-electric vehicles traveling through dedicated tunnels beneath the city.

The project was publicly announced in July 2025 as a connection between downtown Nashville and Nashville International Airport. Since then, the publicly described network has expanded to include the Lower Broadway and West End corridors, additional downtown destinations, private-property stations and a much larger potential station network.

Unlike a conventional rail line, Loop is designed around point-to-point trips. Passengers would enter a vehicle at one station and travel directly to their destination without stopping at every station along the way.

Where will the Music City Loop go?

The State of Tennessee says the system will connect downtown Nashville to BNA and Lower Broadway to West End. The Boring Company reported in August 2026 that its executed TDOT permit and lease authorize approximately 25 miles of tunnel within state right-of-way.

That does not mean 25 miles of tunnel are already complete. It describes the corridor authorized under the state agreement. Individual branches, station connections and property-specific alignments continue to move through planning, design and permitting.

More than 40 stations are in the pipeline

The Boring Company said in its August 2026 Nashville update that it was working with property owners on more than 40 stations in various stages of planning and design. The company has not released a complete list, so it is important to distinguish publicly confirmed station activity from locations that remain private or preliminary.

As individual station locations become public, LOOP Nashville adds them to the list below and identifies the most specific public status available.

How is a Loop station different from a subway or light-rail station?

A Music City Loop station would operate very differently from a traditional subway or light-rail station.

Traditional rail systems are built around trains carrying large groups of passengers along a fixed route. Riders typically wait on a platform, board the next train and travel through a sequence of intermediate stations before reaching their stop. That model can move very large numbers of people along a heavily traveled corridor, but adding more stations generally means more stops for every train and longer end-to-end travel times.

Loop uses a different model. It is designed more like an underground road network with stations functioning as entrances and exits. Passengers board a smaller vehicle assigned to their destination and travel directly there without stopping at every station along the route. The Boring Company describes the concept as more similar to an underground highway than a conventional subway.

That distinction has major implications for station design. A traditional rail station may require long platforms, large underground caverns, elevators, escalators, ventilation systems and enough space to accommodate an entire trainload of passengers at once. A Loop station can be much smaller because passengers are distributed among many individual vehicles and many destinations. The Boring Company says some Loop stations can occupy approximately the space of only a few parking spaces, allowing stations to be integrated into hotels, parking garages, residential developments and other private properties.

For Nashville, that could help explain why the proposed network can contemplate more than 40 stations. Instead of relying on a relatively small number of major rail stations, Loop can potentially distribute passengers among a much larger number of smaller access points.

The tradeoff: smaller vehicles, but many more of them

The most obvious difference is vehicle capacity.

A subway train can carry hundreds or even more than 1,000 passengers at once. A Loop vehicle carries only a small number of passengers. Looking only at the capacity of an individual vehicle therefore makes Loop appear dramatically smaller than rail.

But that is not how the system is designed to generate capacity.

Loop capacity comes from the continuous flow of many vehicles through multiple tunnels and stations, rather than periodically sending one very large train through a limited number of stations. Vehicles can also bypass stations they are not serving, meaning one passenger's stop does not necessarily become everyone else's stop.

The Boring Company says overall Loop capacity depends on several variables, including the number of tunnels, number and size of stations and the number of vehicles operating in the network.

How many passengers can Loop actually move?

The best real-world evidence comes from Las Vegas.

The Las Vegas Convention Center Loop has demonstrated peak throughput of more than 4,500 passengers per hour and more than 32,000 passengers in a day. That system began as a relatively small network serving the convention-center campus.

A larger Loop network can theoretically move substantially more passengers because capacity is distributed among many stations and tunnel segments. The Boring Company currently says the full Vegas Loop is being designed to serve as many as 90,000 passengers per hour across a large network of stations. That is a systemwide target, not the capacity of a single tunnel or individual station.

That distinction is important when evaluating Nashville. Asking how many passengers a single Loop vehicle can carry is a little like judging the capacity of an interstate by asking how many people fit inside one car. The more useful questions are how many vehicles can move through the network, how many stations can load and unload passengers simultaneously, how traffic is distributed among tunnel branches and how efficiently vehicles can be dispatched.

How does that compare with rail systems in other cities?

Capacity comparisons between Loop and rail require some caution because the systems are organized differently.

A subway or light-rail line concentrates passengers into relatively few high-capacity trains operating along a defined corridor. Loop attempts to distribute passengers among many smaller vehicles, many stations and multiple tunnel branches. As a result, the capacity of one vehicle, one station or even one tunnel does not tell the whole story.

For conventional rail, a useful measure is passengers per hour per direction, or how many people a particular line can move past a point during its busiest period. Depending on train size, train frequency, platform length and signaling, a major heavy-rail line can potentially carry tens of thousands of passengers per hour in one direction. Light rail generally provides lower corridor capacity, although it can still move several thousand passengers per hour in each direction when trains are long and frequent.

Loop's demonstrated capacity is currently much smaller at the individual-facility level. The Las Vegas Convention Center Loop has demonstrated peak throughput of more than 4,500 passengers per hour. The Boring Company has also reported more than 6,500 passengers per hour across the expanding Vegas system in earlier Music City Loop materials.

The company argues that a mature Loop network should be evaluated at the network level rather than as a single rail line. Its current design target for the full Vegas Loop is as many as 90,000 passengers per hour systemwide, with capacity spread among numerous stations and tunnel segments.

That distinction matters. A subway line capable of moving 25,000 passengers per hour in each direction is demonstrating enormous capacity along a particular corridor. A 90,000-passenger-per-hour Loop network would represent passengers moving simultaneously across many origins, destinations and branches. Those figures are therefore not directly interchangeable.

Loop and rail solve different transportation problems

None of this means Loop is simply better than rail.

Heavy rail and high-capacity light rail remain extremely effective where enormous numbers of passengers need to move along the same corridor, particularly during concentrated peak periods. A train's ability to carry hundreds of passengers at once is a major advantage in those circumstances.

Loop emphasizes different advantages: direct trips, smaller stations, more station locations, shorter walking distances and fewer intermediate stops.

That makes the comparison less about whether one technology can carry more people in a single vehicle and more about how each system distributes those passengers across a city.

What might that mean for Nashville?

For Nashville, the more useful comparison may be with the actual transportation demand the city is trying to serve, rather than asking whether Loop can match the theoretical maximum capacity of the world's busiest subway lines.

Nashville does not currently have a heavy-rail subway system. Any proposed rail alternative would have to be designed around expected ridership, train frequency, station spacing, construction cost and the corridors where demand is concentrated.

A traditional rail line might offer substantially greater capacity along a single extremely busy corridor. Loop's proposed advantage is different: a large number of smaller stations, direct trips without intermediate stops and the ability to distribute passengers across many origins and destinations.

That could be particularly relevant in Nashville, where major destinations are dispersed among downtown, Lower Broadway, the Convention Center, BNA, West End, hotels, residential towers and entertainment venues rather than being concentrated along a single existing rail spine.

For Nashville, the most important question will ultimately be whether the completed Music City Loop has enough tunnels, stations and operating vehicles to deliver the capacity promised for the places Nashville actually needs to serve, particularly downtown, BNA, major entertainment districts and large events.

Is the Music City Loop being built?

Yes. On February 25, 2026, Tennessee announced that TDOT and the Federal Highway Administration had approved The Boring Company's lease application and enhanced grading permit for state-owned property along the highway system. State officials said construction could move forward immediately.

By August, The Boring Company reported that multiple tunnel boring machines were working in Nashville and that geological testing was showing strong rock conditions. The company has continued hiring in Nashville across engineering, construction, operations, safety, legal and development roles.

Who pays for the Music City Loop?

State and airport officials have consistently described Music City Loop as a privately funded project. Tennessee says the project is being built without taxpayer construction funding.

At BNA, the Metropolitan Nashville Airport Authority said The Boring Company would fund design, construction, operations and maintenance. The airport's agreement also anticipates license revenue, passenger pickup and drop-off fees and reimbursement of certain Airport Authority expenses.

That funding model is one of the project's most consequential differences from traditional publicly financed transportation infrastructure, although the project still relies on public permits, rights-of-way, safety review and other governmental approvals.

When will the Music City Loop open?

Tennessee officials said in February 2026 that the first segment was expected to be operational by the end of 2026. Earlier announcements had described an opening as early as fall 2026.

Those statements are targets rather than guarantees. The opening date will depend on tunneling progress, stations, systems integration, safety testing and final operating approvals. LOOP Nashville will update this page whenever an official schedule changes.

Music City Loop FAQ