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Comment by monodeldiablo | Hacker News Reader

I generally find Elon Musk to be an offputting individual, but I struggle to disagree with most of his ideas. In dense urban areas, skyrocketing property costs and the erosion of eminent domain have made mass transit expansion unsustainable in terms of time and money. Tunneling under it all has the potential to sidestep so many costs.

To do so, of course, he'll need to reduce the costs of tunnel boring by an order of magnitude. As the economist quoted in the article noted, though, the construction industry has been famously stagnant for decades. Commoditizing boring machines would bring down costs substantially. Speeding them up would also reduce costs. And if he gets costs down by a factor of two or more, he could be the preferred vendor for a truly massive market worldwide.

It might be his least crazy idea, honestly.

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> the construction industry has been famously stagnant for decades

My guess is that the construction industry has not actually been stagnant, but rather the market/regulations have emphasized things other than speed/cost, such as:

- Environmental-friendliness (think of those lengthy environmental reviews that have to be done in advance of major projects)

- Labor-friendliness/safety of workers

- Higher quality construction w/r/t earthquake and fire safety

You make a very fair point. Shame on me for taking such a one-dimensional view of the matter. Cheers!

One thing that isn't as obvious at first is how tunneling traffic under a city can greatly increase the walkability of the city. Look at Boston after the Big Dig. Neighborhoods that were previously cut in half are coming back together. Downtown is seen as a desirable place to be. It's a big QoL improvement for a city.

I'm not sure if he will be able to bring the costs of tunnel boring down as much as you would like, but I'll hold out hope. At the very least he does have a flair for picking company names, "The Boring Company".

Not sure if the Big Dig is a great project to reference here, it went over budget by some 200% and many years. It was seen as one of the greatest civil engineering mistakes by the end. Sure it improved the QoL, but what other projects that take less than some 15 billion dollars can improve QoL just as much?

The Big Dig was one of the "cost-plus" projects mentioned in the article. The contract was for a guaranteed 7% profit on top of costs for design and construction. Is it any wonder that the construction company has zero incentive to do it efficiently or reduce costs! Overruns only bring benefits (more work, paid for by the state), and no downsides.

Another industry that loves their cost-plus projects is interestingly the traditional rocket launching business. Boeing and friends has for decades gotten used to massive cost-plus project contracts from the government for their launches, and is now feeling the pain of having to start to compete with Space X that operates at a magnitude or more efficiently and continues to drive down the price despite already being the cheapest.

There are lots of lessons to learn from the Big Dig - but I don't think one of them is that the eventual cost and time overruns were strictly necessary. Also: regardless of the implementation issues I think it is interesting to look at how it has affected Boston after completion. If only to identify any positive effects and see if you can work out how to achieve similar ones at lower cost.

You don't need a new tunnel and highway to fix neighbourhoods and improve walkability. There are plenty examples of cities that simply removed highways and didn't replace them with anything, instead relying on increased public transit options to continue to move people around the city.

Talking about underground transport, Musk, and potentially truck driver industry metamorphosis... I had this vision of underground transport network, but not for people, just for things.

It would have extremely simple, rail like or stupidly easy to Computer Vision track the lanes for big wagons of stuff.

It would make streets for human mobility 80% with occasional trucks and we could have automated Network of Things (NoT (c) agumonkey) below ground, at lower cost:

- less or no wind

- less or no rain

- simple flow => lower congestion

- no human => higher speed

- avoiding property negociations most of the time

etc etc

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tunnel_Company

Yes, but an interpolis version.

Interpolis is the worst place to start with your transportation networks.

1. We don't really have an interpolis transportation problem in most of the US. You jump on the interstate everything is fine. We've got freight rail, barges, and air freight. You only run into congestion when your poleis have grown together like between Boston and DC or around the Bay Area.

2. Your interpolis transportation networks are useless without first having an intrapolis transportation network. If your system just dumps people or packages at a depot in each city, they won't bother using it in the first place.

3. You trade the political challenges of building in the cities for the engineering challenges of building thing hundreds of miles long and the political challenges of building things that go through dozens of municipalities without benefiting any of them.

All good points. But intrapolis also reduces the value quite a lot in a way. There's a lot less stuff I'd buy from my city or even wide local area. And local stuff can be brought by foot or bike (depending on weight and size of course). Still it could be pretty cool to be able to pack a thing and push it down a tube like cashiers uploading money in the 70s.

In what sense has eminent domain been eroded? Given that the Supreme Court ruled about ten years ago that eminent domain may even be used to make way for private enterprise it seems to me that it is quite powerful.

A close family member is an urban planner, and he blames a succession of legal challenges that have forced public entities to account for all sorts of value that the property could never actually attain. And, of course, the increase in number and density of holdouts has driven acquisition costs way, way up for large public projects, since time delays incur costs. Lawyers have learned that, even if the city/state makes a good offer, they can get a better one by grinding through the process slowly.

Eminent domain is a powerful (and easily abused) idea, but it's devilishly hard to strike the right balance between property owners' rights and the common good. At least on the West Coast, the scales seem to have tipped in favor of property owners.

I mean, I don't think it would really be ideal for the government to be seizing property for a pittance left and right either.

Neither do I. As I said, it's a delicate balance to strike. Personally, I'd rather it tilted in favor of property owners than the other direction.

There's no denying, though, that it's a huge and increasing cost to public works projects.

Sure eminent domain remains legally powerful. But politically it has become more of a hot button issue in certain conservative circles who actively lobby against its use. And when eminent domain is used the takers have to pay fair market price so with the huge increase in urban real estate values over the past few years it's much harder to just find the money.

Given its frequency of use and the fact that since Kelo it can be used to the benefit of private businesses, I'd say it is very much politically powerful as well as legally powerful.

You don't think the decisions to remove people from their homes, which people to remove from their homes, and the price they should be paid for this major disruption to their lives is already a massively political issue?

The poorest among us are disproportionately affected by eminent domain, because their property is the cheapest and because they are least able to defend themselves. Kudos to the 'certain conservative circles' who are trying to defend those people and shame on anyone who tries to trivialize that battle.

Yes I think it's already a massively political issue. But there are more powerful and vocal people focusing on eminent domain for ideological reasons after Kelo. Before that it was easier to take advantage of poor property owners and kind of slide things through under the radar.

Not to mention all the accounting and legal shenanigans that can be used to pump up "fair market" value. Including the costs of arbitration if the seller doesn't feel the offer is fair. Which itself gets budgeted into the price...

Same. Don't much like the guy but he does admittedly good stuff, kinda like Steve Jobs.

Actually a lot like Jobs: Think big (he even has Steve beat there), hire great people then push them to the brink to achieve the impossible.

Pure curiosity - what do you find offputting?

SUBJECTIVITY WARNING!

I struggle to trust the motives of anybody who is so certain of so many things. Especially one who acts so impulsively. He's clearly very bright, probably brighter than most smart people, but he's not brighter than all smart people. Yet he frequently presumes to be, even boasting of being a "nano-manager". He has definitely bought into his own hype.

But when you have billions in the bank, I guess you can get away with that.

Bonus round: He's also surprisingly thin-skinned and petty. Oh, and he stuffs his boards with family members and cronies.

Thanks for the reply (and the subjectivity warning). I agree that the hype, nano-managing, etc is offputting and all else being equal I probably would be very skeptical of such a person. That being said, he does seem to generate results, which makes me think of him as an anomaly that I can't categorize.

I have mixed feelings about the shades of nepotism. Hiring cousin Bob because he's your cousin irrespective of qualifications is definitely a bad idea; hiring cousin Stephanie who is qualified and you know you have a good relationship with where you can communicate and you can rely on them, is quite another. Disclosure: I've not read enough to have an opinion on if his family hires are Bobs or Stephanies - just playing devil's advocate.

> To do so, of course, he'll need to reduce the costs of tunnel boring by an order of magnitude.

That's easy. Construction projects these days are horribly expensive because the entrenched companies usually overcharge the state (and in some cases even private customers) and redirect that money into the coffers of corrupt officials (e.g. Odebrecht, http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/odebrecht-gigantischer...). Also, in most state founded projects there is no risk control or project management so companies end up fleecing the state - just look at the Berlin Airport for what happens when oversight, competences and reports are lacking. Not to mention that "pay by work hour" contracts almost automatically lead to slow work, overtime and delays because the state pays the losses of inefficiency compared to a contract "here's 20B €, build this tunnel, there won't be any additional money except in case of unforeseeable stuff like geological issues".

Musk on the other hand does not have these problems because he does not (neccessarily) need profit, or at least not illegal profits. Also, his companies are massively vertically integrated, which means that he won't get fleeced by suppliers, as well as horizontally integrated - I highly believe that the knowledge present in SpaceX can also be used for creating drilling rigs.

Big, if true.

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