After more than 400 submissions and 1,175 votes on a name for San Jose BART’s tunnel boring machine, we have a winner — and it’s sure to make sci-fi fans giddy.
“Shai-Hulud” came in first place, with 229 votes, a nod to the sand worm creatures in the popular “Dune” novels and movies that many readers say resemble the boring machine that will carve a nearly five-mile tunnel underneath San Jose for the future BART extension. The Valley Transportation Authority purchased the $76 million dollar device in November from Germany and it will be shipped to the South Bay in pieces before being reassembled. Construction is set to begin in 2025.
“It is just such a perfect fit for Silicon Valley,” said Rob Lofland, a Sunnyvale resident who is a big fan of the books written by Frank Herbert and submitted the name. “We have so many engineering geeks.”
For the non-Dune fans: The Shai-Hulud are enormous worms that populate the planet of Arrakis. Their larvae produce a valuable resource known as “spice,” which allows humans to travel through space safely, though harvesting it can be risky. The battle over who controls the supply is a major part of the Dune novels and has been compared to real-world geopolitical tensions over resources like oil. The first of six Dune novels came out in 1965 and has since seen multiple film adaptions, most recently starring Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya.
“I’m tickled it was selected,” said San Jose resident Ross Smith, who also submitted Shai-Hulud. “I just hope it doesn’t eat people in the process.”
In second place is “Boris,” with 220 votes. In third: “Chewy” with 200 votes.
The BART mega project will run through the Berryessa Transit Center in North San Jose, loop underneath the city’s downtown and up toward Santa Clara. The entire extension will run six miles and add four stations. At an estimated cost of $12.2 billion, it is one of the most expensive transportation projects in the country.
Tunnel boring machines have usually been named after women of local significance to a region, a tradition that dates back centuries to when miners used to pray to Saint Barbara to keep them safe underground. In Seattle, the city named their machine “Bertha” after their first female mayor, Bertha Knight Landes. Washington, D.C., named theirs “Lady Bird” after the first lady and wife of President Lyndon B. Johnson, while San Francisco named theirs “Mom Chung” after the first Chinese-American woman to become a physician in the city’s Chinatown.
Here are the names that didn’t make it into the top three for BART’s project:
– Diggy McDigface – 127 votes
– Dionne Warwick (Grammy Award-winning singer of “Do You Know the Way to San Jose”) – 114 votes
– Boring McBoringface – 87 votes
– Janet Gray (San Jose’s first female mayor) – 86 votes
– Sarah Winchester (Designer and resident of San Jose’s Winchester Mystery House) – 64 votes
– Susan Hammer (San Jose’s second female mayor) – 26 votes
– Dianne Feinstein (Former California senator) – 22 votes
The BART extension has faced multiple timeline delays and cost increases over the years. In October, VTA announced a new cost estimate that was more than twice the original proposal of $4.7 billion — and an expected opening in 2036 — a decade behind schedule.