The Boring Company [video]
boringcompany.com
boringcompany.com
I'm starting to believe the only difference between those who start their own companies and those who don't is that the latter convinces themselves that it is impossible, never builds anything, and from their own lack of having ever produced anything, concludes that their original supposition was indeed correct.
Thinking about tomorrow can be counter-intuitive as to the way things work today, and it is pretty easy to construct negative arguments about tomorrow that are based on what we know right now.
He didn't launch the Hyperloop, though. He explicitly said he wasn't personally going to pursue it, he was just putting the idea out there. You can't put the fact that it hasn't yet been implemented (even though there are people working on it) on him. I've seen no evidence that the concept is infeasible, or poorly thought out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNFesa01llk
Maybe it will pivot into something not-as-originally-hyped by the same name.
Did you miss the bit where he never at all claimed it was 'impossible', only that it was bullshit that it would be doable within two orders of magnitude of the claimed price, with the claimed speed advantages, or with any acceptable amount of safety?
What a terrible misrepresentation of the video.
I'm confused as to who exactly you're referencing here seeing as Musk has no stake in any of the hyperloop companies currently operating.
In your book, Musk hasn't delivered enough yet? But why am I arguing with a Ph.D student. I wish you that your life is as fullfilled as Musk's.
The fact that people think they can spend two seconds evaluating and dismissing an engineering idea from someone who literally sends things into space is hilarious.
> If you live by hype at some point you gotta start delivering.
If putting cars on the road and rockets on the launchpad doesn't count as "delivering", I don't know what does.
He and his companies have delivered the Falcon, Model S, Modex X, and a concept Model 3 set to be delivered soon, along with a Falcon Heavy.
If any person were able to deliver even one of those products, they'd be deserving of attention. And that's not even everything he's delivered.
If delivering three groundbreaking products (as in you can go out and use them right now) is hype, then I think maybe you need to revise your definition of "hype".
The Tesla stuff is over-hyped by people who think that it's currently the global leader in everything they do, be it manufacturing or self-driving tech. In reality, the EV space is competitive as all get out and Tesla is a pretty small player.
The boring stuff? I have no idea.
He's delivering to the freakin' International Space Station. What have you delivered lately?
The latter are also aware of survivorship bias
While that may be true, it would be interesting to compare the frequencies with which successful founders bring up the topic of survivorship bias vs the rate at which those who never found anything bring it up.
I think that taking advice from those who failed is as important as from those who might suffer from a "survivorship bias". I am sure most of these failed startups initially followed Musk's (et al.) "impossible is nothing" mantra before venturing out into the market.
And I think there are no causation and correlation between thinking reasons that make it impossible and starting a company.
Not really. It's easy to think of reasons why something won't work. It requires an insanely small amount of effort compared to finding a way to make something work. "Reasons why not" are a dime a dozen.
> And I think there are no causation and correlation between thinking reasons that make it impossible and starting a company.
I certainly think there is. I haven't collected any evidence, but I wouldn't be surprised if those who find success are always looking for reasons why something will work, and those who run into failure are always looking for reasons why something won't work.
Now, to be fair, thinking of reasons "why not" does have its specialized use cases. Safety, for instance. But even then, that requires thinking outside of the box for unusual failure situations.
If we didn't have critics we'd still have kings with divine right. This seems like an exaggeration, but it's really just to say that we need people to look at things critically.
I haven't collected any evidence, but I wouldn't be surprised if those who find success are always looking for reasons why something will work, and those who run into failure are always looking for reasons why something won't work.
This isn't that far from prosperity gospel preaching. Believing doesn't make things happen, otherwise NeXT would be dominating the industry and not Apple because boy did Jobs believe and give it his all.
Sometimes smart people are wrong, and it doesn't hurt those people anyway if dummies are discussing their work.
That's an extreme straw man that trades a lot on what a "critic" is.
Martin Luther didn't criticize the papacy because he doubted the papacy's capacity to realize its ambitions. He criticized the way the papacy was then operating.
People holding forth on how something can't be done are best described not as critics but doubters (or haters). "I can't imagine a way to do X, therefore X can't be done." How many impossible things does Musk have to do before people take serious Musk's ability to realize his visions?
Hating is so easy. But today's capacity to develop technology is utterly unprecedented.
Lead. Follow. Or get out of the way.
We're talking about strawmen: nobody is saying that. Nobody is saying it can't be done. They are saying...let's wait until it is done, because right now it's just a video. Is that hating or an entirely reasonable stance to take?
The technology Jobs believed in and developed at NeXT really did dominate the industry. It's in the phone I'm typing this on right now.
I think Linux on the desktop would have been a better example though. Millions of hours of dev time have been spent on it and it's no closer to providing any competition to Apple or Microsoft now than it did in the 90s. I think there was a complacency in the Linux desktop world that success was inevitable given enough effort. I don't think Musk has ever been complacent about the success of his businesses. I don't think Jobs was either.
"Reasons why not" are indeed a dime a dozen, but that doesn't mean they are useless. It may be a bit annoying to have to filter through the feedback that identifies the wrong risks, but we shouldn't use that as an excuse to ignore critical feedback. Some of the best feedback I've ever received that got my mind churning was from people who truly understood the problems and were able to identify "reasons why not" that I hadn't thought of.
On the contrary, it seems more likely that Musk would've not only thought about risks already for more than a couple hours, but that he would've consulted a lot of domain experts about such things before even deciding to take on such a project. Even the most optimistic business person isn't naive enough to take on something they see as a sure bet to fail. Not to suggest that there haven't been entrepreneurs attempting silly businesses before, but rather that one should pause and think about the possibilities of how something might work, before jumping to the conclusion that they already understand everything there is to know about a project, and that it definitely won't work.
As another comment mentioned elsewhere in this thread, a good entrepreneur's main skill is being able to figure out some unique/unorthodox way to make something work, and capitalizing on that. Now, that doesn't mean that everyone opposing these ideas are wrong or don't know what they're talking about, it just goes to show that a lot of people's default state is one of risk-aversion.
Three months ago, after the Bloomberg feature was released, he literally said that they had no idea what they were doing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPzpugrbwBE&feature=youtu.be...
Also, there's a ton of companies with a ton of knowledge who have done things which failed spectacularly or have refused to do things that would work. Tesla's whole existence is sentiment to that.
Is Musk immune to making such mistakes? The consensus on his Hyperloop idea still seems to be that is infeasible.
I'd enhance that a little and say that it's easy to think of facile reasons it won't work. But let's say you think of a reason why a thing won't work after two minutes. If someone else has been working at the problem for two hours, or two days, or two months, or two years, what's more probable?
- They never made the initial connection to the flaw, and have failed subsequently to notice it or account for it.
- They thought of a solution to the flaw which you haven't.
Hrm. Maybe I just don't have that high of an opinion of my own faculties, but I tend to assume it's the latter. Especially if the person in question is a very intelligent person with a strong track record of outperforming expectations.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't probe, or seek clarification, or ruminate on the flaw. But if you tell someone who's been working on a tunnel boring problem for a whole quarter that "boring through rock is the most expensive way to connect 2 places (sic)" as at least one person in this thread has observed, I'd argue that that's not a useful reaction. My reaction is, "I wonder what he knows that I don't."
It would be interesting to hear what experts think, though
And not because of socio-economic factors, obviously, no, it has to be that.
The fucking pretentiousness HN can have never ceases to amaze me.
The video is clearly made to just hype it up. It serves no purpose other than Science fiction.
With Musk's established track record I think it's pretty arrogant for anyone to call his ideas foolish. He has achieved things that people thought were impossible or bound to fail. You can say: “I can see this potential problem”, or “I wonder how he's going to deal with this physical limitation” or similar sorts of statements. That's feedback and analysis given with respect. Simple dismissive negativity against ideas put forward by a person who would already rank in the top 10 in the world today for technological and engineering achievement is arrogance and narrow-mindedness.
I dislike this sort of miscasting of what I just said. I'm a very strong proponent of free speech and the right of anyone to say anything. But with my support for free speech comes a commitment to try to be considered and careful in what I personally say and I'm encouraging others to do the same in this particular context. You can take it or leave it and of course you can go on calling him foolish if you like. Musk doesn't probably care a whole lot and in the end, I would say that the negativity simply reflects back on you.
You can break down the world into the 99% that "know" that it's impossible. They'll never invent that world-changing thing.
That leaves 1% that "don't know" that it's impossible. Of that 1%, 99% will try and fail.
The remaining 1% of the 1% succeed, like George Dantzig (who came late to a Stats class at UC Berkeley, thought some problems on the board were homework, and a few days later handed the professor solutions to some famous open problems in statistics), and Jack Kilby (who, seeing computer performance limited by the number of wires soldered by hand, demonstrated -- against the protests of his "we-know-better" co-workers -- that you could get rid of the wires, resulting in the integrated circuit).
It's important to remember the 99% of the 1%. There are probably people on HN who have tried and failed. But rather than simply saying that it is impossible, we should encourage people to share share how and why the problem is difficult, so that hopefully the next person to try won't waste their time retracing the failures of the previous generation.
The Boring Company however, yeah, he messed this one up.
HN is full of Elon fanboys. I'm one myself. The die hard, willing to say "the world is flat" fanboys are out here defending him. Look, I like Elon. But the sane fanboys are trying to save Elon a lot of headache by not pursuing this venture.
Why would you use this instead of a system where you take a neighborhood bus to the local transit station & shopping center where you can pick up a light rail to the closest subway station, where you take the express train downtown to the high-speed rail station, where you take that to visit the next state for the day? No cars, and you can sit and read a book or take a nap or enjoy the view if you wanted to.
The only scalable transit solution is mass public transit. The world can't afford to pave a private luxury road for everyone to go wherever they want to go. They need to learn to sit next to random strangers on the subway or the bus. If people can't sit next to random strangers on the subway or on the bus, they should be seen as dysfunctional and sociopathic.
This really is one of the worst things I've seen. It may possibly be worse than his Hyperloop, another truly awful idea.
Elon Musk strikes me as one of those guys that defunds mass transit, and then wonders why mass transit is so bad. "It's always breaking down and never on time hurr durr.. So, therefore, buy one of my shiny new cars!"
He really hates mass transit for some reason. Maybe he just can't stand the general public? Is that why he's so into Mars, because he hates everyone here?
We need less pampered and coddled people like Musk, and more people with grit that has the ability to interact with the general public.
> We need less pampered and coddled people like Musk, and more people with grit that has the ability to interact with the general public
Spot on.
I'll take that one.
Because I love my car - not the car itself, although I really do think it's beautiful - but the freedom that it gives me. I can get in it right now, without any planning or waiting and drive almost anywhere using exactly the route I choose. While sitting behind the wheel, I'm forced to not be able to do anything else than driving. That is a very nice time to think and just be. Some of the most beautiful scenery I've ever seen was in places where the nearest public transport option was a hour's drive away.
I can leave stuff in the trunk if I buy it one day and then need it the next day. I also do grocery shopping weekly - carrying 5 bags of food by hand gets old really fast.
The car is also where my younger kid's car seat is. I'm pretty sure nobody else would put their kid in there, the shape of the chocolate and cookie crumb mountain is exactly the shape he fits in you know.
So, yes, you can do what you described. In fact, you can do it already today, but having a car? There's a reason people buy and repair and like them.
When you consider the costs, cars just don't have the appeal they used to, and you can spend money elsewhere that'll make you just as happy if not happier, especially as more services orient themselves to remove cars from the picture, such as Amazon & grocery delivery services.
Besides, do you want a system that forces the rest of the public to buy cars? The congestion alone should be enough to discourage people from cars.
I often don't buy the cheapest food, but the food that I like.
I don't want to force cars on anyone - it should be an individual choice of course. What I'm saying is that there are a lot of reasons people want to own cars.
It's the choice between working with the existing system to make it better versus demanding that everyone adapts to a new system that you claim is better.
Maybe it is, but getting the whole world to change at once to a completely different and in many ways harder system is very un likely to happen.
Indeed, which is why we need as a society needs to pay for more rail systems, a tried-and-true mass transit system that's been around a lot longer than the more inefficient cars.
Right now roads are such a wasteful government mess that's completely unprofitable. The personal automotive transport system is a failed experiment that society needs to move on from.
And we need to stop subsidizing the wasteful and destructive suburban lifestyle.
How much more of my money do you want me to pay for your roads so you can have the luxury of riding in comfort?
Is there anything else that you would like me to pay for you?
Ah, and this is where we come to the root of the discussion. Because ultimately the question isn't "Why would ANYONE want to drive cars" (though I confess it was originally presented to you as such), but rather "Why should society and governments INCENTIVIZE continued use of cars."
The Boring Company's proposal here directly benefits people like you (and by the way me - I also love my car), those who can afford that privilege.
But our tax dollars and policies should be going towards systems that benefit the most people, and that will only happen in North America if we fall out of love with the "freedom" promised by our cars and realize that waiting 2-5 minutes at two different transfers, with a total trip length of 15-25% longer (optimistic, but that is realistic in cities with good public transport) is a worthwhile tradeoff for the greater good.
That's how a proper public transport network works too. For example in London, when I want to go somewhere, I just whip out an app that plans for me the best combination of busses/subway/train/walking to accomplish that and I'm immediately on the go. The wait times are minimal (under 2-5 minutes) most of the time.
I live in the Netherlands which is a very densely populated country, and anywhere outside the city center or early/late on the day, the busses go every 30 minutes or hourly. At night there are barely any options, esp. between 2 and 6 AM.
This is the idea I was responding to. I think cars are mostly practical in suburbs and rural areas (I live in a city and basically only bike and walk), mass transit isn't the best solution for all personal transit.
The video shows an electric rail system, that isn't incompatible with moving larger numbers of people. Look at the high occupancy car at :47.
>If people can't sit next to random strangers on the subway or on the bus, they should be seen as dysfunctional and sociopathic.
Mental illness is probably not going to disappear any time soon. Viewing them hatefully isn't going to get them to like riding the bus. It's just going to make you a hateful person.
People go shopping, they don't want to carry on $200 worth of groceries onto public transportation.
Finally people have kids. Kids require a plethora of specialized items including car seats. I dont want to put my kid in a car seat a prior kid just urinated in. Kid's are also messy and require snacks and water bottles.
People who can afford it are going to take cars. I hope The Boring Company is a rousing success.
I am not arguing against the need for mass transport but I see no reason we cant have both.
Your point about rural scenarios is pointless because this video and idea are clearly aimed at the urban transport problem which needs to be solved due to the fact that, around the world, people are increasingly moving to cities rather than the to rural areas.
When it comes to shopping, I don't know about you but I often find myself looking at other peoples trolleys and asking myself "Why would anyone buy 10 2L bottles of coke? Do you really need all those doritos? My word random stranger, do you subsist entirely on junk food?". There are times that one does come away with a large load of shopping but my wife and I have found that when you start planning your meals for the week and optimising what you buy to fit that plan you tend to come away with a lot less shopping than if you just go in an randomly buy stuff. Would would have guessed?
Your point about children is good but ignores the fact that there are huge numbers of people throughout the world with children who somehow manage to make life work despite not owning a 7-seater SUV...
I think it's better to say that people who can afford it might want to use a car now and then but they'd probably also love to have access to viable public transport for all those scenarios where getting into a car is more trouble than its worth.
Because I don't want to walk four miles in weather that could be 90 degrees or 9 degrees to get my "neighborhood" bus, and then waste hours of the day because I have to change to other buses (sometimes going in the wrong direction) to get somewhat close to my destination. I especially don't want to do that carrying heavy or fragile things, or in the rain or snow.
As long as the US continues to be a sprawl, personal transportation will be important.
Light rail and subways are key to effective public transportation and affordable connected cities. Buses are best for last-minute/first-mile transport.
Commoditization of tunnel boring technology around a couple standard sizes for any soil condition would radically reduce subway construction costs around the nation. That same technology could be leveraged for commercial transportation as well.
I strongly suspect "tunnels for cars" is just marketing. Elon is known for doing his research, and the research shows that traffic is reduced by getting people off the road... Traffic is the equilibrium of convenience and discomfort, adding roads just puts more people on the road.
Making mass transportation more convenient and cheap is vital to reducing traffic... the other piece is zoning for high density to support mass transportation.
Those people get flack -- they really do. Despite the inundation of aphorisms all over Facebook and LinkedIn belaboring the concept of radical thinking, when it happens in this, the real world, it's still met with rolled eyes and often anger.
We know we can create lifts that do underground and then connect entry points and exit points by tunnel networks. We already have very miniature things like this.
What the video shows is a vast network of underground tunnels with a tram system for personal vehicles and some public transit connecting different points in the city or connecting other cities. I can kinda see why you might do this and it sounds like a fun ride.
But even a layman can see this is going to be incredibly expensive and you have to wonder why would build this ahead of other types of mass transit. I'd like to see a business plan. Until then, I'm a sceptic.
The problems of zoning alone make this a massive undertaking. Much of the counter-criticism in this thread is misdirected. Very few people are doubting Musk's technical ability to pull this off, they are suggesting it worn't work for practical reasons. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand those, just have to have lived in a city, or simply lived.
The only way to justify a good idea is to have people argue that it is a bad idea. It's up to the person behind the good idea to prove the arguers are wrong.
The 1% of the 1% succeed because they are driven to find success, because they are relentlessly applying logic to the problems they face, because of determination - because they don't give up. I think the term thrown around these days is grit.
So yes, share what happened before, but more than likely those with 'grit' are going to figure out what has been tried before on their own and sometimes they'll reapply what failed in the past and make it work.
It's about wasting time and money and talent instead of directing it towards "winning" ideas.
Meat-space engineering is hard. I'm an early '90s kid who grew up hearing about how we're going to put people on Mars by 2020.[1] I got a degree in aerospace because of that! Then I realized that physics hates you most of the field is about eking out 1% more fuel economy every decade so United can turn a slight profit. Even Space X is more interesting from a business model point of view than an engineering point of view. It's like someone figured out how to make a $10 iPhone 3g in 2017. Neat, I guess.
[1] Almost everything pop science said would happen was a lie. Moon bases, NYC-London flights, flying cars, etc. Outside of computers and pharma, technology has progressed at a glacial pace over the last 40 years. If you transported someone from 1890 to 1950, planes, international calls, etc. would blow their minds. If you transported someone from 1950 to 2010, I think that they'd frankly be disappointed.
I think that's why people think Global warming is false. There are other people saying that all life is going to disappear, which is funny and clearly alarmism.
Not that it's not a problem - it obviously is - but it's not like the earth is going to be barbecue'd in our lifetime.
Most of Musk's companies are about kicking the can down the road. I admire that he is mostly burning his own money on this but then skepticism of such ideas is natural. The man should probably stick to one thing and take it completion than starting 10.
That said, to assume feedback against one project is a testament to lack of entrepreneurial spirit, rings about as true as claiming people who don't like Justin Bieber are deaf.
His projects are cool.
The incessant "Elon is so smart and will save the world!" from this place is tiring. Everytime he tweets it makes the front page. Some people see there's more to these businesses than Elon being generous to us,and run a bit more skeptical. Perhaps it's you that needs to take a step back and assess what the other side is saying?
Not even close to true.
The lack of good mass transit is a political problem: why European mass transit is in general so good and why American mass transit is problematic? It's not a problem of technology. It's Politics, stupid. :)
Reminds me of the "Are we the Baddies?" sketch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU (I'm not calling anyone nazis)
Freaking solar roadways got 2 Million and more. A City payed them 500k to install that stuff. It is not hard to calculate the stupidity of this. Especially of a couple who is doing this in a garage. There is a reason why big companies are not doing it. It has to make sense and money.
This video above looks nice but if you think just a step back, it is probably 1000x cheaper and a much better solution to make the existing streets automaticly drivable instead. How much does it cost to build this? How much does it cost to build automatic driving into every car who wanna use a highway which is only accessible to automatic driving?
It doesn't take to long is still much cheaper.
In munich you have a autobahn/cityring in the city. It takes perhaps 20 Minutes in city traffic to get onto the autobahn / highway.
There is a reason why we have only underground trains and why it takes years to build a new tunnel for them.
Also having the city traffic more autonomous would increase the traffic flow.
Post-war London tried something similar, a futuristic vision of pedestrian walkways ("pedways") to separate people from the traffic. This failed, for various practical reasons, and you can see the remnants of the experiment throughout parts of London to this day.
This scheme would come at an unimaginable cost, surely changing planning laws to create less car-centric cities is a more realistic approach to the problem?
Fundamentally, this is about short-circuiting the regular road network and establishing a managed packet network that can bypass congestion. Interestingly, that's also the value proposition of public transit, though it also runs into issues of cost, and too low of a population density make it unfeasible.
I still think we haven't fully leveraged the potential of busses. In most cities, they are slow because they combine the disadvantages of road traffic with the disadvantage of time tables. But what if busses operated on their own dedicated network? Bogota deployed a public transit system made with busses but with a UX of a train[1]. This is a genius idea that could work in many US cities, which have a lot more space to spare.
But back to the original idea, I think we might see in the future a "managed" road network, reserved to self-driving cars which are driven by some central management system, optimising routing for the whole network so as to prevent congestion. This won't require tunnels, just gates, dedicated roads and lots of software.
[1] http://www.sheepletv.com/nuclear-tunnel-boring-machines-swit... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subterrene
My impression is the boring feasibility and costs will not be the limiter of a very cool tech like this happening, but a more boring practical cost, probably the "zoning" cost required to get compliance and permission for all that state and federal land needed to build the underground link network.
At the moment boring machines do not work like that, a conveyor belt of small pieces comes out. What if A380 fuselage sized pieces of rock came out instead and were conveyed off to the coast for coastal defence purposes, or even land reclamation? Carrying objects weighing thousands of tonnes to the sea is not simple but the amount of material excavated the hard way - ground to pieces first - would be significantly lower.
Maybe they have a 'coring machine' rather than a 'boring machine'?
I'm not convinced that the video you linked on sheepletv above the "underground alien bases" one is the most reliable info.
Finally, from my point of view, getting your ridicule feedback hurts because my aim is to contribute to substantive discussion here, and I don't want to feel discouraged from posting something substantive because it might also have info that could be cherrypicked for ridicule, then letting me feel like I wasted my effort contributing because the info was later unfairly presented. I don't want to feel like I have to do extra work "defending" the original effort to contribute, against such ridicule. So, please, before you rush to ridicule something, really take a look to see if there is substantive content there, and refrain from misrepresenting it, thanks.
* Several videos about Pizzagate (and I don't mean critical examinations, either)
* A number of anti-Semitic images ("Jews control the banks", etc)
* A video literally titled "Hitler Survived WWII & Occult Nazi Scientists Developed VRIL Haunebu Foo-Craft (UFO’s) at Secret Antarctic Base-211"
* Another video literally titled "Illuminati Hip Hop Blood Sacrifices Exposed"
* A video about how Christmas is a "Satanic Illuminati Holiday"
* And this video
It's not a great stretch to say that their description of a "nuclear tunnel boring machine" is every bit as absurd and untrue as the other videos they distribute.
I linked to that page and specified NTBM. You could have substantially commented on the Los Alamos patents and their discussion on that page. But you chose to go off that page and to emphasize easy-to-ridicule parts. Please don't do that, thank you.
It might be a logical error, but it's not a mistake. If someone tells you lie after lie after lie, and then says something new, whose truth you can't immediately evaluate, the sensible thing to do is to think: this is also probably a lie.
It just didn't work as a strategy if you actually wanted the find the truth. That's one thing this is about here.
The other thing I think you missed was the emotional context of these comments. I'm clearly asking for support and help to make HN welcoming, by not misrepresenting or cherry picking easy-to-ridicule info. It hurts when they do that and I don't like it. Please don't do it, don't ignore the people behind the comments, and don't quote this
> You just did the thing I suggested was insubstantial and said hurts and I didn't like. Please stop.
pretending that you've contradicted this, and made it somehow okay. You haven't and it's not.
While this is true, getting very good at boring underground could be helpful for building underground habitats on mars.
Also, buses don't have the same capacity as rail does—it's difficult to string together 10 buses and still accelerate quickly, navigate turns, and deal with grade crossings with street vehicles (although guided buses maybe can get partway there? [1]). You can feel the burn in the Bay Area if you try riding the lines on Geary or Mission during hot hours.
And the speeds at which buses run within dense metros often cannot compete with modern subway trains—BART, which is an old system already, hits 70 mph and can go faster, which would be kinda scary to do on city streets in a bus.
Not to mention that buses can serve many routes that don't have enough capacity to merit a train, bus routes can be reconfigured without it taking years, and a bus system doesn't cost billions upon billions of dollars to build. Heck, even a single line of a metro system can cost a billion dollars to build.
My favorite is Vancouver skytrain. While building highways they built a train track on pillars. It's fast and usually got me in and out of the city quicker than a car.
I imagine train tracks on pillars cost effective than underground tunnels. For a dense city it makes sense. Not for outskirts.
For now. I think that's the whole point of this company. Reduce cost and risk of drilling just like SpaceX's goal is to reduce cost and risk of space flight.
I also get a feeling he's read "foundation" from Isaac Asimov which talks about this.
Highway 7 started as a car-only multi-lane highway. They took a multi-phase approach to building out a light-rail system. The first phase was adding bus rapid transit, increasing fares, and increasing density of new construction. The second phase was adding dedicated bus lanes and light-rail-ready stations. The final phase will be to add tracks and trains on top of the road.
But if you're building a dedicated network in a major city, why on earth would you limit it to buses? Even with a dedicated network, I don't believe buses can be as fast, comfortable or quiet as rail.
I spent a lot of time in Melbourne, Australia and the trams there are fantastic. You can barely hear them when they're operating so they do a lot to decrease noise, they have a ton of standing room and are quite long, so they can carry a lot of people and I don't believe a bus can come close to the comfort of rail.
Even buses are useless during/after disasters in my experience (avoiding legal liability, lack flexibility to mitigate problems, inability to publish changes etc).
Yes, but so do roads. Tunnels especially!
http://i.stuff.co.nz/national/91972268/government-confirms-8...
I get the impression Musk looked at that expense, brought in some subject matter experts, probed them on why that was the case, and decided there must be a better way. From what I've read of tunnel boring, I can see that happening. Not uncommon for a tunnel boring machine to be custom-built and then abandoned in place at the end of the project. A more general-purpose or modular machine might be what he's thinking about. Unexpected geologic formations come up frequently, a function of the expense of manually-intensive sampling processes today. A robotic sampling crawler that bores hundreds of samples, and automatically classifies as it goes instead of sending to an off-site lab, building a 3D map as it moves, might be what he's looking into.
There might be red tape issues even if these technical challenges are overcome, though. Even if you propose going so deep you avoid all other underground infrastructure altogether, government bureaucracies' permitting and related processes will put a floor on the cost avoidance Musk seeks.
If he's looking for mega-good, Musk would do significantly better to drop a full subway network.
edit: tunnelling is a broadly solved problem. It's difficult, expensive, slow, etc. But there's no engineering reason why a hole in the ground can't happen. Musk might be able to drive some significant improvements there. No idea. But tunneling itself is not a reason to knock an idea beyond the cost and geoengineering involved.
Even in London, where you have a major, successful transport engineering project (Crossrail) completing, and an entire city dependency on, and supportive of, public transport, you only hear the most anemic plans for future expansion.
For example, TFL is pushing a "New Tube For London" plan that consists of little more than trivial improvements. Some new trains, platform edge doors, etc., scheduled to be delivered in 2050 or so. But absolutely nothing with real ambition, like entirely new lines, that would actually solve London's insane congestion problems.
You can reduce demand by not needing everyone to go the same place every day. Why does everyone have to work in London and why don't they already live where they work?
If you want to see ambition in infrastructure, check out China. Being a technocracy bent on having world-class infrastructure, combined with the ability to remove people from their homes for the greater good with little repercussion, they've built some of the most thorough infrastructural improvements ever seen on the planet. For instance, the first line of the Shanghai Metro was opened in 1993; today, it is the longest metro in the world, with 14 lines. And this rapid growth can be seen not just in the megacities like Shanghai, but in countless smaller ones throughout the country—not to mention their incredible construction of their thorough long distance high speed rail network. And on top of that, since their system is so modern, the trains are a hell of a lot safer and more reliable than any piece of infrastructure in the USA.
I think they've made mistakes with how car-oriented the streetscapes are, the generic architectural styles throughout that country, overbuilding before demand arises, and a lack of mixed-use neighborhood zoning, amongst other things; but when it comes to imagining an integrated, efficient commuter rail network, they've killed it.
I think you underestimate how poorly compensated the relocated people are. Unless it's an outcome of "Weird China" reporting, which is very possible, I've seen plenty of reports of people being forced out of their houses in exchange for flats with smaller floor space and property in an inferior location.
I'm not saying what Chinese infrastructure officials isn't impressive. I'm just saying it has massive costs for the people being displaced.
It costs the moved people a great deal, but the government doesn't care.
but we don't have the political leverage today, and the little we have is with the Democrats, not the Republicans.
Decide which one is it.
He's proposing the transportation equivalent of a personal computer with perfect security, completely crash free, 1000x faster than current PCs that cost lesss tha. We have today. It's not impractical, it's laughable.
> On the other hand, whenever I read stuff by politicians and engineers with real knowledge and influence in this field, I'm astonished by the total lack of vision.
If you want to see total vision, come to a Transportation Research Board annual meeting. Or an APTA annual meeting. Visions are out there. The political support is not.
He misses all his deadlines for precisely this reason.
Right now, it's just a video mocked together over two days. It's just a very, very broad "idea".
Things will change over time. Why knock something so early in the development phase?
If he's looking for mega-good, Musk would do significantly
better to drop a full subway network.
https://www.slashgear.com/japans-new-maglev-bullet-train-is-...
That's 600km/h. For 600mph you'd need Hyperloop to prove they can do that speed first.
China is building new, high-speed maglev trains and there's many lines already open for business.
Maybe one day Hyperloop will get built and will be open for passenger travel. When that day comes it's possible that surface rail may have already achieved the same speed because third or fourth generation maglev trains are in service.
China is looking at building something like that: http://www.zdnet.com/article/china-developing-600-mph-airles...
Note that it's an above-ground system because the costs of building underground are utterly ridiculous for long distances.
I think it's neat. I like London, but it'd be sweet to have my car while I was there.
Well, unless you count damage to whatever happens to be in the way of the tunnel and buildings on top of tunnel. This might be more of a problem in Europe than in the U.S. though.
In effect, this is a subway system. It's an underground rail system. The major difference is that you have a mixture of public and private passenger vehicles and smaller vehicles.
In places where land is cheap, and there are single family houses, cars will be the most efficient way to commute for years to come. We'll switch to self-driving electric cars, but still.
The point of the boring company is to make excavation of tunnels an order of magnitude cheaper. [1] And if he succeeds, I suspect demand for the tunnels will push them out to the burbs.
Nor, presumably, transfer from an autonomous taxi or bus to a subway train at that station.
Maybe he's right? Think of this as a subway for cars!
Also people per hour is not really the metric the average person cares about. It's travel time to destination.
[1] http://www.lamag.com/driver/l-s-subway-cars-will-definitely-...
Also, each LA subway car can fit over 50 people seated and probably three times that standing. $3M divided by the price of the cheapest Tesla is about 85. So the number doesn't seem high at all.
Actually I'm not. I just want to point out that public trains cost huge amounts of money for investment, they need special infrastructure which many US cities don't have, and the only way they work feasibly is if the population density is high enough so the taxes will support them.
In other words, there's a huge upfront cost to even considering building a system that most cities/governments will choose roads over rail.
A bus on the other hand is $300,000, holds around 60 passengers, and uses the same infrastructure the city already has, and doesn't incur the need to have right of way fights with land owners.
What would you realistically do given the choice?
If I had the choice of spending $3 million to buy 10 buses, or to do nothing at all, I'd save the $3 million and wait until it's feasible to develop something that the city will keep wanting to fund.
That seems high to me, full-stop. The London Underground S-Stock order came to around £1 million per car (though was a much, much larger order); even smaller orders of Bombardier Movia family trains have come far closer to that than the $3 million per car.
http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-sol...
..not to mention all the energy required to move each of those vehicles compared to a train that can move hundreds of more people in a similar space.
Americans need to get over all their train/bus hate. Other countries love mass transit. Many Americans try to shoot down any attempt to even put in a small system (small systems can grown) and kill off attempts to grow existing systems (see the Seattle Green Line).
Self driving cars can work great in Europe, where there is tons of transport and you just need to solve the last leg (or where self-driving trucks are rented just to move large items). In America we have massive gridlock due to a lack of rails and that needs to be fixed before self driving tech will fix anything.
Maybe this is me being ethnocentric, but it seems the American way of embracing diversity (through political correctness, affirmative action, etc) has come at the cost of craving for isolation and independence from each other.
It's not clear how public transit advocates will convince us to vote to downgrade our lives. Maybe the bicyclists and pedestrians in cities will be able to block suburban drivers from entering.
If there was more public transportation, the problems you bring up about personal space would go away.
When the problem you're trying to solve is "some people aren't in Times Square right now," you might need to engage with the fact that it's crowded.
More public transportation, sure, and I'll vote for it every time.
Less car infrastructure, and there is no pressure for public transportation to be comfortable or effective because the only way to opt out of it is to move away.
That is to say, there's a known solution already: funding.
Same for the North Bay (original plans had the BART go almost all the way from Petaluma to Gilroy).
http://www.lamag.com/driver/l-s-subway-cars-will-definitely-...
It's a shame. Public transportation would be so awesome if it weren't for the bad press.
The number of people that can fit on 1 bus can hit in the ballpark of 50 people, so we're getting a roughly 10x capacity boost here. You lose the "ever-moving system" benefit doing this, but I highly doubt some stopping and starting would lead to an order of magnitude slower speed.
Now, the number of people that can fit on 1 SF BART train is in the realm of 10 cars * 200 = 2000 people per train. The spacing is not going to be on the order of 100x longer than in the individual car case, and the starting-stopping speed is going to be not a bit slower than the bus case.
I'll let you work out the math on that, but it's not even orders of magnitude close. Don't need to be a "visionary" to see that.
The real issue is not highways, but what happens when people try and get off or onto them. It's possible but rare to do this well.
Further, roads and bridges do get used from 2-4 AM when subway systems are generally not operating, so it's the use over the full day that's important not just peak usage.
On page 4, 2006: 80% used a carpool or single occupancy car. 2013: 76% used a carpool or single occupancy car which is counter to their narrative. Further, metro areas are rather large, I commute less than 3 miles on secondary roads in the DC metro area from just outside the beltway to just inside of it and encounter approximately zero traffic.
The tunnels could use solar energy which is not wasteful.
Actually it's the land use on roads and parking which is most wasteful. Maybe we could solve half the problem with this, even if it is boring.
Because real subways have miserable sardine-can standing room conditions during commute times. Public transit is dead in the water in the US because its advocates use terms like "incredibly wasteful" to describe making systems anywhere near as comfortable as private cars.
For most people, the most comfortable chair they own is their driver seat. For many, the commute is the only time they get to be alone, meditative, and in complete control of their environment (cube farm or open office at work, children at home, etc).
When the CIA forces people to spend hours with their arms fully extended over their heads while bombarding them with 100db noise, there's a Senate inquiry. When BART does it, it's a regular Tuesday at 9am. (Yes, this is an extreme comparison, real stress positions are much worse, but your average Midwestern suburbanite used to his Toyota Camry is in for a real shock).
If you want Americans to get over their train/bus hate, then don't advocate such drastic reductions in the quality of our lives or the livability of our cities. Your average SUV-driving Wisconsin soccer mom has been to Manhattan as a tourist and decided that her one accidental peak-hours train ride was enough for one lifetime.
That, or densify the environment. We might put up with transit if the rides were shorter.
(I am a daily BART rider, and public transit dependence is the #1 reason I want to GTFO of the Bay Area).
Have you ridden on systems that are better than our crappy one before? Riding in cities like Singapore and Hong Kong is a wonderful experience.
The real problem is that we have nowhere near to as much capacity as we need, and nowhere near to as much coverage either. And that's 100% a result of political incompetence and a lack of funding for something that almost certainly would improve the livability and productivity of this city.
Coupled with how filthy San Francisco is and how pitifully little we do to address affordability and the resulting, predictable homelessness and mental illness crisis we see here, you get an uncomfortable transit experience.
Our lack of a robust, functional public transit network is a big reason I want to GTFO of the Bay Area.
Centripetal acceleration on a curve with radius r is (v^2/r) so it seems that it grows quadratically, not exponentially.
Exponential growth would mean that the v appears in an exponent in the formula.
Quite frankly, I would much prefer to not have the costs and issues of owning a private vehicle.
In addition a subway or bus system has to run on a schedule even when the train is mostly empty. The train and bus is always starting and stopping and causing all it's passengers increased delay to serve the needs of the few entering or leaving.
Public transport is the token ring networking of transportation. It's just inherently less efficient compared to a P2P routing system that only operates when there is a need and with the minimum number of stops (which is exactly 1).
[1]: https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pu...
But it's also important to note that the numbers for Amtrak are averaged across the entire system -- and most Amtrak routes outside the Northeast Corridor operate way below capacity, despite it being very inefficient to do so. If you look at rail systems where this is not the case, like in Switzerland (716 BTU/passenger-mile) or Japan (534 BTU/passenger-mile), you end up with 5.4x and 7.3x improvements energy efficiency over driving, respectively.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport...
Edit: I mean, sure, great science fiction fun to think about!
The drag:person inefficiency is a price we still consider worth paying presently, even when it also requires an inefficient decentralized gas-burning energy conversion.
Add in reduced vehicle wear, and of course the time advantage, and with some of the efficiency gains like centralized power/reduced friction/huge electromagnetic actuators/maybe partially evacuated tunnel, it could still conceivably be profitable at a bargain on gas travel.
However, i think the advantages permit it to be sold for more than we are paying for gas travel. People already pay daily just to use a special lane which is nearly the same hassle with only slightly reduced traffic.
Well, which is it? Solved, or difficult/expensive/slow?
Depending on the specific location, there may very well be. Underground tunnels are vulnerable to earthquake-inflicted damage, for instance, and you would want to avoid repair as much as possible.
Similarly, there may be environmental or conservatory reasons not to build tunnels, or reasons related to cost, or obstacles not yet encountered (that last one is less likely though).
Are subways targets for terrorism the same way that airports are?
http://oglobo.globo.com/fotos/2007/07/11/11_MHG_sp_metro4.jp... https://www.ita-aites.org/fr/news/download/383_4725e686e12d3...
just like software is doable. :)
sometimes you can't do it. but generally... you can. :)
In the same way a road offers private and public transportation, a tunnel can do both. Why can't the car be a bus, say?
I live in Paris, France. 100% of its inhabitants have at least one of the 300+ subway stations under 1 km (0.6 miles) of their home. The subway system transports 5M people every single day. That’s twice the city population. That’s also 1.9B per year. During the peak hours you can have up to one train every 90 seconds for a capacity of 700 people each.
That's actually pretty awesome, but you may have noticed that Americans don't really care about efficiency.
Once the tunnel is built, you can put anything you want into it. But I suspect we would still choose cars over trains.
(That being said, building a bunch of tunnels in the bosom of San Andreas strikes me as hubris... But having lived in LA and its traffic for many years, I'm willing to be convinced. :-) )
Agree, except that while many ridiculously wealthy people would be willing to help pay for private access to some tunnels — _perhaps_ subsidizing a system that is later available to others — many fewer wealthy people would help pay for a subway.
The real question is: is this new solution more efficient than the current alternative of driving on the highway?
Low-speed maglev: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8SqDVUdMtY
Caltrain has two primary constraints, neither population-linked: diesel trains accelerate badly, and freight track scheduling.
Diesel trains are theoretically being swapped for electric, which will permit the trains to stop and start more efficiently. They predict one additional train during peak rush hour per day for this improvement, iirc.
Freight traffic consumes a fixed amount of rail time, focused primarily on the "one hour between" segments of the schedule. Increasing frequency can only occur within existing scheduled route times, and cannot disrupt that freight traffic.
But to answer your question: maybe, but it doesn't matter. American cities are already bankrupting themselves in road maintenance. Adding a series of super car tunnels for an efficiency benefit? Out of the question.
Obviously having a network of underground express tunnels for cars would be amazing. It's just economic nonsense when municipal governments are racking up huge debts in normal, above ground road maintenance. If it's not publically subsidized, drivers will be exposed to the true cost, which will be enormous. That high cost cannot be supported will prevent mass adoption.
Problem: if you drive to the subway, then take the subway, then you have two problems: where do you park your car, and how do you get to your destination once you get off the subway if it's not walking distance?
Currently - people just drive. And the surface streets get progressively more crowded. We could drill more regular roadways - but it's notable that one reason we don't is controlling emissions and safety is difficult with human drivers.
So, taking that back to the video: replace the subway with general purpose transport stations that provide a mix of subway-like transport of passengers, or entire vehicles, powered electrically.
No vehicle emissions (huge problem with tunnels) and no endpoint transport issues - the subway becomes an extension of the road network, and if it's cheap enough to do, hopefully a very scalable one.
Also cost. Drilling car tunnels is more expensive per passenger served than a mass transit system
> if it's cheap enough to do, hopefully a very scalable one
That's a big unproven if, and a hope that's almost out of a science fiction novel. If Musk has ideas about how to solve those problems, let's hear them.
We already understand that tunnels with electric cars would be great. Everything we do has a cost and if we're going to work together on something as a society, let's do something that benefits more of us than luxury car owners
Solution for problem 1: Park and Ride. Giant multi story parking lots. Cheaper to build even underground than the tunnel Solution for problem 2: Local transit like Tram, bus, or bikeshare.
American cities are already spending more than they can afford on road maintenance. Are these underground trains going to be cheaper than above ground roads? Public money for this doesn't seem all that likely.
Here in Tokyo, the Yamanote above ground train serves a million riders daily. Costs a couple dollars to go 10km. The boring concept looks much more expensive than that, as it is underground, but those costs are spread out over many fewer people. Private money seems hard, too.
You are right, I imagine that we should just have teleporting gates!
> if you drive to the subway
How about not driving to the subway? how about having local buses or that can take you there?
> where do you park your car
Car parks next to the station?
> how do you get to your destination once you get off the subway if it's not walking distance?
Buses or trams.
> Currently - people just drive.
Not everywhere, look at London for example.
> We could drill more regular roadways
No we can't, tunnels are expensive and bring a whole new set of problems like how do you handle an accident, how do you get to the surface etc.
> subway-like transport of passengers, or entire vehicles
That is horribly inefficient in terms of space and weight, average car weight is ~2 tons.
> powered electrically
Having it electrically powered does not mean that it's clean energy.
Well, suburbanization was a totally dumbass move. Maybe instead of building tunnels, we could be rebuilding cities. We could be designing them to be attractive enough that people would want to live there.
which of course is seems crazy to most people. But the consequences are all around us.
No.
Because - the exurbs and beyond simply don't have the density numbers to make this kind of investment pencil out without something like a 1000x class drop in costs, which would be wildly optimistic for physical equipment cost savings. Some suburbs might be able to handle it; Bellevue in the Puget Sound comes to mind immediately, but it's only a suburb in the context of Seattle; it'd be a major city in its own right in most of the US.
Further, you're not even getting to the fun part of driving a car - the wind, the sights, the open road. You've got a dang tunnel there. I'd get mildly claustrophobic and probably nauseous: subways already do that to me a little bit.
It's probably much more effective public policy at the federal level to focus on densifying American cities and reversing sprawl: this generates a nice sequence of network effects related to funding and infrastructural improvements. Among those would, eventually, be the demand for nice buses and nice trains with a regular security presence.
I sure do love the wind, the sights, the open road of stop and go traffic every day.
And now Musk is trying to solve for those three factors
As rockets were before Space X?
It costs a billion dollars per mile to dig a subway tunnel. If the costs could be brought down, it would change a lot about the way we build mass transit systems.
Also, fwiw, I think cut and cover is a much better approach, despite the street level disruption. Ce la vie.
The question is if he can drop those costs substantially. I certainly wish him the absolute best in doing so. But, if he's going to propose building transportation systems with huge operational costs (SOV tunnels), they had better be efficient in the cost per rider mile and competitive with other technologies.
https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/us-r...
It seems that $1B/__km__ (not mile, you're right) is sadly par for the course in the US, and Crossrail passes that threshold too. Projects elsewhere are below that threshold though.
I doubt it. I think he's looking for the same thing as everybody else: mega profits.
Mass transit is fundamentally superior and realistically inferior. The second any rational actor has the economic advantage necessary to not ride in a box packed with people of questionable hygiene they'll chose option #2 no matter the negative externalities.
I love this place but people aren't packets in your stream, they actively decide against your well designed "optimal" systems and opt for less efficient "luxurious" options as soon as they possibly can.
:: raises hand :: I can easily afford to drive and park. I bus to work instead. No time difference. A number of people are like me.
(the fact that buses allow people who aren't very well house trained on board is a matter that needs to be addressed, no question about it)
I get the train to work each day and 99% of the time I get to sit down with space to comfortably work on my laptop and I get through a bunch of stuff each way. When I think of the alternative - spending 20% less time but dealing with the risk and frustration of driving and getting nothing done in return - driving myself seems positively toxic.
There seems to be this weird thing where people are embracing things that strip autonomy from them.
The video looks more like a high-speed form of personal rapid transit [1], which is a sort of hybrid system that tries to achieve the best of both. It's like a bus or train system, except the vehicles are smaller and don't operate on a timetable. Instead, they pick you up when and where you want and they take you where you want to go.
- SpaceX:
Obvious, got to get to space somehow
- Tesla:
Build cars/machines to run on something
that is guaranteed to exist on Mars (the sun) vs. Oil
- Gigafactory:
How to build batteries 101
- Solar roof:
While Earths environment may not be as
harsh as Mars you still learn something, and improve
solar panel production in the process
- Boring:
May not make too much sense on Earth with
existing infrastructure, but undereart..undermars?
transportation is protected from the environment/sand
stroms/whathaveyou.
How to go to Mars and stay there:
1. Figure out what you need
2. Build it
3. ???
4. Mars
Or he just hates LA traffic.
In practice, it might be a little tougher than it sounds. :-)
PS: Don't think this comment is down vote worthy, just healthy discussion imo.
That our current methods are unsustainable? There are plenty of ideas for solutions.
That the current state of human cooperation is below the necessary threshold to achieve a self-sustaining society on Mars? Maybe, but I'm optimistic that we'll find the inspirational leaders that are required.
- Even if all of Musk's enterprises were aimed at colonizing Mars (like gp suggested), they can be quite useful here.
- Turning Mars into a self-sufficient habitat is both an absurdly long-term (and laudable) goal and no guarantee of survival. We have to worry about the problems of surviving on Earth today and, in the very long run, how to live in many other places.
(upvoted your comment, because I agree with it)
In my opinion that's part of "knowing how" - knowing how to make something actually happen outside of theories. Hopefully we'll get there soon.
It seems to me that this really isn't the case. Our attempt to make a home here is causing a mass extinction, extremely fast change in atmospheric makeup (compared to historical models), depletion of fresh water reserves (in some areas anyways), increased frequency of bad weather, earthquakes, etc. Under a 'business as usual' model I have trouble seeing our current ecosystem supporting us for long (e.g. another 100 years).
Not to mention that you need to make the materials such that they resist a huge side pressure, water leaks and so on.
Psychological costs are also costs.
Tangential: the source [2] is pretty interesting.
I've been assuming the latter, but I realize now that I don't actually know.
Nope that's the main one. You obviously haven't lived in LA :)
I agree with the theory that Musk is aiming these boring machines at Mars. That makes more sense than using them to attack the traffic problem when that problem is already being solved by one of his other companies.
But self-driving cars will enable a sort of ad-hoc, on demand carpooling style 'mass' transit: something like ten-passenger vans that deliver commuters from similar downtown areas to similar home neighborhoods. If only ten percent of commuters switched to that method, taking ten cars off the road and replacing it with one van, the volume of traffic drops immediately to 91% of what it was. That alone, plus significantly smarter, denser, more efficient, networked AI driving, will hugely reduce gridlock.
And at some point as more jobs get automated, and the jobs that remain human-accessible become more knowledge-based and less presence- and specific time-based, we'll move away from the huge spikes in traffic at 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., spreading traffic volumes more evenly out across the day.
https://io9.gizmodo.com/every-single-pinky-and-the-brain-pla...
Consider a man/machine interface where the man controls the intent and the machine controls the precision.
Musks starts a healthcare company? Mars-related of course, he wants to solve the cosmic radiation problem on route to Mars. Buys Netflix? Heh, that's pretty obvious, people on Mars will need some entertainment!
You can throw OpenAI in the mix also. If there are strong advancements in AI then it could possibly be used to automate the facilities if there are not enough workers or as a possible fallback option, among other scenarios.
Build cars/machines to run on something
that is guaranteed to exist on Mars (the sun) vs. Oil
Apparently the problem of martian storms is not that rocks are flying around[1] but just plain ol' dust[2] reducing the efficiency to very low levels, both by deposit and by floating in the air.
[1]: http://www.space.com/30663-the-martian-dust-storms-a-breeze....
Kinda like in Verne's "From Earth to the Moon", both try to move and accelerate objects, maybe enough to launch something into orbit?
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Non-rocket_spacelaunch
Or maybe im reading to much scifi :)
PS: sorry for the broken english, not my native language.
I'm totally down with that, by the way: I believe there's a nonzero risk that our resource consumption trajectory, population growth and environmental carelessness will combine within centuries (if not sooner) to make this planet incapable of supporting us.
If plan A is "fix human behaviour", then we need a plan B. Plan B must be get another planet.
"All of this was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars." - Sinclair.
Still fascinating to see all of this stuff take shape. It's definitely like living in the future. You would think there wouldn't be money in it... but there is!
https://twitter.com/EmilyGorcenski/status/858022699112824832
You might not agree with all/any of it but I think it's hard to say this isn't thought-provoking.
(Real question - I don't understand the relationship between technical contractors and cities in this context.)
I'm as liberal as they come, I'm very sensitive to disguised racism, but the tweets' entire basis of comparison between Musk and Moses is "both are/were ambitious men and now musk is talking about infrastructure". It's free-association garbage.
The Moses story is fascinating because he accomplished great things that built NYC but was also a horrible person. The tweeter you linked is like, "hey, Musk is trying to accomplish great things, he must be just like Moses".
I think it's your rebuttal that's facile here, not the comparison in the Twitter thread, but, like you, I might be wrong.
> Robert Moses weaponized Civil Engineering and Urban Planning to suppress marginalized communities. Engineering is always political.
Words like "weaponized" and "suppress" suggest that Emily thinks Moses was ill-intentioned, not merely an ambitious guy who in his monomania happened to overlook some of the more sinister side-effects of his work.
Everyone thinks what they do is right. Ill-intentioned refers to whether the characterizer thinks it was right, not the actor.
How does that have anything to do with whether he was horrible? In general, people think they're doing the right thing. That doesn't mean they're not horrible.
As one of his friends described him: "He's so forthright and honest that if he saw a man across the street who he thought was a son of a bitch, he would cross the street and call him a son of a bitch, lest by passing him in silence, his silence be misconstrued".
Musk also claimed Tesla's solar roof would cost less than a "normal" roof... (PS Musk considers a "normal" roof to be made of slate)
The "affordable" (his words) Model 3 has a standard configuration of about $40k.
I think he's a super interesting guy doing amazing things... but I think he's vastly out of touch with what concepts like "affordable" or "normal" mean to the majority of this country. His "normal" doesn't extend very far outside of silicon valley.
He's more Tony Stark than Iron Man.
[1] https://www.tesla.com/model3 [2] http://mediaroom.kbb.com/2017-04-03-New-Car-Transaction-Pric...
Sure it would be very nice and charitable of Musk to make sure that poorer communities are served by tunnels too, but that runs more risk of his already super risky business going bankrupt. In that case nobody, rich or poor, would benefit.
I imagine he'll follow a strategy similar to Tesla where he starts by pursuing the most wealthy markets while his costs are high and as the company refines its technique he'll go down market and become accessible to a broader swath of the population.
Elon Musk doesn't strike me as an innovator when he talks about building tunnels and subways. He strikes me as Robert Moses. Who are these tunnels going to serve? The Latino communities in LA? Or are we just running them straight to the rich neighborhoods?
It's hard for me to believe someone doesn't have an axe to grind when they make statements like this. On what basis does this person claim that Elon Musk bears resemblance to Robert Moses?
This is my problem with many politics-in-tech discussions. People who take politics seriously say, "technology always has political implications." True enough; we do indeed seem to forget that. They stir some history into their argument. Even better. But once they have to perform analysis, free of the rigorous standards of thought you have in e.g. math or science, they start saying baseless things.
When you see a technology like this and think of the benefits, considering who gets those benefits is a big part of the value of the idea practically. To me, it's nothing against the ideas technological merit, academic impressiveness, creative ingenuity, etc. It does reflect what ideas someone like Musk is focused on though, and I don't think bringing it up inherently means they have an axe to grind. I think Elon is doing a ton of good and is one of the few SV bigshots that deserves hype (looks sideways at Peter Thiel), but we should have realistic views on who his projects are exactly helping both short and long term.
(Sorry for replying to a long, substantive comment with a short one; I just don't have anything to add.)
Not through-provoking; just more verbal diarrhea from a very angry, misguided individual that uses twitter as a platform to spread their dumb ideas.
The whole thing comes off so self aggrandizing and baselessly accusatory.
In particular, I enjoyed this person's tweet[0] when challenged for some evidence of Musk's racism. Apparently, the rock solid evidence doesn't even have to do with tunnel boring, infrastructure, or urban planning, but instead with Musk not following any/enough women on Twitter. Truly revelatory stuff right here.
[0]https://twitter.com/EmilyGorcenski/status/858048505327366144
However, I think the tweetstorm misses that it is poor and middle class people who are most hurt today by inadequate transit, and one thing that would have an enormous effect is an order of magnitude drop in tunneling costs.
My other post <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14225045> links to a look at why the Second Avenue Subway's $2.2 B per km costs are 20x higher than other cities. A technology that drops tunnelling costs will be great for the poor, and thankfully, I do not believe the news media (with all of its flaws) would ever allow someone like Moses (or Musk) to operate the way he did today.
You all sound like Balmer.
This is a CONCEPT!!
Elon is THINKING you all are pointing, laughing and adding no value to the conversation of "What comes next?"
If your idea is "the metro works", a 150 year old system, then this video is not for you.
To the video, I like the concept of combining public and private transportation in the same path.
It also makes sense as a way to directly link far distances. To me, this is a modification of the hyperloop concept. Something more feasible in the shorter term and definitely less risky.
Of course all this depends on the economics and physics of boring becoming cheap and 10x faster. keep thinking Elon.
Earth needs more of your "fantasies". Let the pointers keep pointing.
So perhaps instead of 'pointing' you should take your own advice?
Maybe you're referring to SpaceX in proving skeptics wrong? We have yet to see if that company ever becomes profitable. Reusing rockets is not what made people skeptical as much as pretending it'd make financial sense to do.
Most of his other popular pet projects are even more pie-in-the-sky. Neuralink? That's nothing but talk. Hyperloop? not a single prototype built in the real world, in a real location. OpenAi sounds like what a conspiracy theorist would come up with.
Not saying it isn't possible or what he has achieved isn't great. Just saying his existing successes don't prove what he's proposing will succeed, since, his new goals are as big or bigger than his initial as-yet-incomplete goals.
Maybe it takes more than 5 minutes to make all cities capable of powering electrical cars then competing with the existing car market? He's already built a successful product, has successful competitors, prevented the 2000's era proprietary cell phone charger fiasco from happening again. It's a little too late to be skeptical.
Citation needed. I see teslas multiple times daily. In my book that counts as mainstream.
This just isn't a very rational statement.
Good luck, Elon. It'll be another moonshot company if you can pull it off.
I'm pretty sure Elon Musk doesn't enter a market unless he intends to do just that.
Edit: I got downvoted a bit but it is his MO. He takes things that are expensive and makes them cheaper. For what it's worth though, I do think the tunnels in that video are ridiculous.
And battery production? And crash test safety? And coordination with NHTSA?
He's cut component costs on the Tesla by maybe 70%. On the SpaceX project it's more like 80% compared to the highest cost competitor. Both of these are huge achievements.
The problem with tunnels is they're not cars, not rockets, not anything like he's ever done before. If he had a functioning Hyperloop system, if he'd proven he can build out infrastructure on a geographic scale and not just product from a factory I'd be more likely to agree with you.
This is a bad idea, a bad project, and a total waste of time.
If, by some stroke of genius and fluke of luck, this thing does get built it will go down in history as the most absurd thing ever constructed.
Then perhaps a hundred years after it goes bankrupt someone will be drilling down there and hit a tunnel that nobody knew existed and re-discover its brief and absurd history just like Chicago has done with their own boring company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tunnel_Company
> And concrete production? And underground hazard detection? And coordination with city infrastructure? And...
to...
> And battery production, and driving hazard detection, and coordinating with the FAA and NASA, and rockets, and...
It's not guaranteed success (not even remotely) but if I had to bet on anyone...
You act like Musk does all the work himself. If he wanted to he could hire the best and brightest in each of those areas and they can work in parallel.
I don't even know if the guy is a good engineer. But I'm pretty sure to have the success he has had he knows how to inspire them.
But he might succeed at something somewhere in between the tunnel he is boring in his parking lot and the video.
Context: I lived in Boston during much of the Big Dig. Large tunnel projects scare the heck out of me as a tax payer.
If he retreats from this and builds some kind of pneumatic tube system to transport goods, people, or whatever, he still might have a chance of a win. Those systems have been proposed, and in some cases actually built, and in many cases they've been great ideas.
If he stubbornly insists on pursuing this batshit insane system of tubes he will fail, and he'll fail hard. There is not enough concrete in the world to make that many tunnels.
A rocket can go to the moon and come back safely, that takes an abundance of caution and significant attention to detail, but it's a fixed-length trip. Civil infrastructure has to exist for decades, or in the case of many American undertakings, well over a century. That requires extreme caution.
If you invented a concrete alternative today it'd take at least twenty years for it to be considered a viable alternative to concrete because long-term studies of the mechanical characteristics of it under a wide variety of conditions will have to be taken out.
Concrete is an extremely complicated material, I know people that have gotten a Ph.D. in aspects of it, and it's very well understood. This hypothetical alternative you're talking about has a lot to measure up to.
That's true. But techniques like compressed stabilized earth blocks can reduce the required percentage of concrete from ~30% to 4%.[1] For example, recently a 4% concrete and 8% ash CSEB was shown to be as strong as class 30 concrete.[2] Fly ash can also be used. Obviously considerations like longevity and manufacturability need to be validated, but the strength is there.
Essentially you're mechanically squeezing all the air out of the concrete, thus reducing the cement requirement. Since TBM tunnels are made from precast formed concrete currently, it seems like a natural cost (and CO2) saving improvement.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267637559_Effect_Of...
Sending rockets to another solar system would be cheaper than the tunnels depicted in this video. I'm not even kidding.
Where is all that material going to go? There's so many tunnels there you could build a small mountain with it. Maybe he can team up with some sea-steading outfit and build a small continent off the shore of San Francisco.
You'd need three or four orders of magnitude reduction in tunnelling costs to make that anywhere near affordable, and even then you'd still have unbelievably complicated logistical issues. How much concrete do you need for those tunnels? What about ventilation? Safety procedures? Flood control? A single one of those could cost upwards of a billion dollars and I'm not sure there's a lot of cost savings by doing more of them, the complexities don't scale that way.
The more you dig, the more you're likely to hit something expensive you're going to have to pay to fix.
Next up: Elon's Space Elevator! Elon's Fusion Reactor! Elon's Teleporter!
Musk's a sales technique to promise the moon (Mars really) and then use the cash to build a revolutionary but realistic company.
SpaceX isn't going to colonize mars, but its putting satellites in orbit.
As absolutely insane as his goals are, betting against him overall tends to be a losing bet. I'd be careful about what you think SpaceX "isn't" going to do. If it is technologically possible, they will do it. Period.
And X.Com didn't become Paypal. Paypal became Paypal. Paypal was already developed before the merger and it was not Musk's idea.
No, it's a hellacious mess of rocks of different types, of muck of all kinds, of brittle, water-filled pockets of who knows what, and every inch you dig you find out there's another problem up ahead.
In the case of Seattle they planned, they surveyed, they did test drilling, and they plotted a course that should have avoided everything, yet they still managed to slam into a steel pole that shouldn't have been there. It set their project back months, the machine was trashed and had to be dug up and fixed.
Plus, these tunnels are only part of the package. You need those surface access lifts, and those may well be the most logistically complicated of the whole system. To make this accessible you'll need hundreds of them, potentially thousands, and each one is a mega-project unto itself if you've sunk the tunnel down deep enough to avoid all those hazards you're now digging straight through.
The deeper you go, the more those lift stations cost. The shallower you go the more you'll come into conflict with infrastructure. There's no easy win here.
(I'm kidding)
That may be a lofty goal, but at least the message I got is that it is the one they want to reach.
Actually in some ways it bears a resemblance to the spaceflight industry (expensive, custom-made, few players). Coincidence?
Former tunnel boring engineer here.
There is a ton of room for innovation around tunnel boring machines built by the major manufacturers (primarily Herrenknecht and Robbins), around reliability, durability, ease of serviceability etc. I cannot emphasize enough how modern TBM's require an unbelievable amount of engineering attention, repair labor, spare parts infrastructure etc, similar to many super-early-stage fragile prototype technologies. Unfortunately TBM's are no longer early stage, but for some reason the technology is frozen at just-good-enough-to-barely-work."
However I don't know if the economics will work out to fix any of these. Here are a couple of the big problems:
* Most TBM's are semi- or fully-customized for a single job. This raises machine costs. It'd be better if there were only a small range of small-medium-large TBM's that work ~everywhere.
* Most TBM's are fully assembled in the factory, smoketested aka turned on to make sure they work, disassembled and shipped to the job, then reassembled and used. This is not efficient, surely we can figure out a better way.
* Most TBM's are entombed aka thrown away at the end of the job, because getting them out of the hole is expensive and difficult.
* Changing the cutterheads is labor intensive and dangerous and requires highly trained very expensive humans, and it's slow. While you change the cutterheads, your billion dollar toy is sitting there doing nothing.
* TBM architecture is highly dependent on geology. A slurry faced TBM that works in mixed soils is a totally different beast from a hard-rock TBM. It would be cool to have one machine that works in many geologies, perhaps with minimal or automated modifications.
* TBM's require lots of care and feeding from a small army of humans. This raises job costs.
* Topside support infrastructure such as slurry plants and ground freezing machinery comes from different vendors, often even from different countries. E.g. it's common to buy your topside slurry plant from the MS company, in France, while your ground freeze vendor might be Tachibana from Japan. Often each subsystem's engineers on site literally don't even speak a common language. Hilarity predictably ensues. Vertical integration would pay huge dividends here.
Ideally Elon can mass-produce TBM's that just work out of the box for most jobs, and that are easier to work on. Then we can laugh him out of town for his stupid "put cars in tunnels" ideas and use his miracle machines to build sensible train tunnels.
They are often custom built (at least partly) and thus not mass produced. While we won't see that for rockets any time soon, it believe he managed to bring down the cost of building rockets and continues to do so (he uses his own money after all and does not have the support of every tax-paying citizen like NASA used to during the Apollo missions).
Sure the engineering challenges are probably different for the most part but the economics are the same. Rockets are more expensive then they should be. Boring is also more expensive then it needs to be.
> he uses his own money after all and does not have the support of every tax-paying citizen like NASA used to during the Apollo missions
This isn't really true. SpaceX, like pretty much all private Spaceflight providers, has received many development contracts from NASA. These are basically NASA giving the company a bucket of money to develop launch capabilities to certain requirements.
SpaceX has _absolutely_ been supported by the US taxpayer, and likely will continue to be. It definitely has been _much_ cheaper for the taxpayer than Apollo, but we haven't gotten a free lunch on this one.
They had to prove that they could do it before they saw a dime. The NASA has a project and gets funded without having at least a prove of concept (e.g. A single rocket that can do the job) as long as congress likes it. I'm not saying that this is bad, but this way he earned the money.
Furthermore, unlike the Apollo missions, sending satellites into orbit served a practical purpose. Sure the apollo missions were really cool and have helped science a lot but their practicality was a lot less.
I know Cincinnati's subway failed because of some bad tunnelling that caused foundations to sink .. well that and the great depression. If they had started earlier or designed it better, Cincinnati could have a Chicago like transit system today. Unfortunately it took them years to get a tram and there are people still trying to shut that down instead of expand it! Unbelievable.
I know in Seattle, many of the tunnels (like to Northgate/UDistrict) have actually been fully bored. The new stations are still not due to open for a few years, mostly because the majority of time isn't spend on the tunnels, but installing track, electrics and building the underground rail stations.
Here's Crossrail's video explaning how their TBMs work. This gives enough detail that you can get an understanding of what's going on.[1]
There's so much variation in geology. The Seikan tunnel to Hokkaido had huge variations in soil and the project went very slowly. Eurotunnel is mostly through chalk, and went well. The Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland was a long grind through hard rock well above water level. That's a slow process, but was reasonably uniform. SF's BART tunnel, unusually, was built onshore in sections and lowered into a dredged trench. NYC's Water Tunnel #3 was in hard rock, and that project went very slowly.
Many things can go wrong. Hard rock may not be competent rock capable of supporting itself. The Tom Lantos tunnels south of San Francisco were through a small mountain of loose shale. One tunneling project in Japan hit an underground river.
The most advanced underground rail project today is probably the Tokyo-Osaka maglev line.[2] 43 kilometers of this is already operating, and most of the route is in tunnel. Tokyo to Nagoya is scheduled to open in 2027. The connection through to Osaka was scheduled for 2045, but the Government has decided to accelerate the program and get it done sooner. Here's what the ride looks like.[3] 500km/h. Working now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen
I have a naïve question about subterrean _housing_.
With the real estate skyrocketing in some cities, and scarcity of terrain, I wonder why there is not much more underground liveable habitations (for example, near an expensive city center with no space left).
I think this is really just Elon's goal, and the talk and fluffy marketing video are just that. Fluffy marketing and PR for his companies.
If Elon could make tunnelling 10x faster, requires much less Human labour and reusable, this will dramatically cut down the cost of building SubWay, or other underground Networks. I am not sure if such tech could be used to build like a underground Shopping Mall in Cities. But if we could build a Walk way under every Car Road would be great for urban cities.
I wonder if anyone has tried that yet?
He's going to involve the government? :|
Your phrasing is interesting given that SpaceX announced sending two people around the moon next year.
http://www.spacex.com/news/2017/02/27/spacex-send-privately-...
So I suppose my above was wrong. I'd guess the more reliable enablers are only sufficient density, coupled with good geology and a cooperating regulatory / permitting structure.
Not sure what the geology of San Francisco / California tends to be like, but I believe most of the Manhattan skyscrapers are anchored down to the bedrock. Which I'd expect would require cutting and reinforcing vs just "drill on through".
(which were during construction, but happened in "finished" sections, I believe. NATM applies a single pass of shotcrete to the cut rock surface)
And, hell, the fact that many cities aren't built on rock (e.g., London, Berlin, Moscow), so even if you can bore through solid rock you're probably not actually that well off: can you also bore through clay and gravel?
This is a marketing fluff video untouched by engineers
We have a hardwired respect for heights, but at no time in our evolutionary history did we ever have to deal with the kind of speed cars move at. So we look at a 10 foot deep unprotected hole in the ground and instantly think 'Hey, that's a hazard', but we don't give nearly enough consideration to speed, and as such 2 million people each year who are killed and injured in US motor vehicle accidents, and we just sort of shrug our shoulders.
Now imagine having tens of thousands of subway cars instead of a couple hundred.
And die.
And lawsuits.
This is far from the hardest problem to solve in the video.
A damn disappointment for something hyped a while back from Musk himself. He should learn from Hollywood, movie trailers are far more important than the movie itself when public interest is involved.
This seems like technology that addresses mostly fun, theoretical problems - like traffic optimization, not ugly, practical ones like tight municipal budgets and urban sprawl.
Creating a powered tunnel, especially if it can be engineered to be done faster and cheaper, could result in increased urban density?
That being said the cost is currently extremely high, the tunnel that is finished boring and still under construction is estimated to cost 4.2 billion for 2 miles dug over 3 years.
Even in the US, passenger rail is typically run by the government or government-like bodies, while freight rail is just private companies. I don't think there's an intrinsic reason for that, it's just how it is. (More like, people with goods to transport are willing to pay, but people with only themselves to transport aren't. Or we see public transportation as a "public good" that's worth subsidizing, but of course the government super subsidizes the road network too.)
The fact that your local politician doesn't want to allocate public funds to shoring up a collapsing bridge doesn't mean that Elon Musk can't spend his own money to build his own bridge (tunnel in this case), right?
It would be relatively easy (which is to say, it would be easier than doing it to private cars) to fit the municipal bus fleet with the equipment to also become automatically piloted "packets." For that matter, it would also be possible to bake-in such functionality to Tesla cars.
If you're advocating for a private transportation network, then I'm theoretically OK with that as long as it's not subsidized directly or indirectly by the taxpayer. No special tax loopholes or favourable deals on digging rights please.
It would be interesting to learn details: How often? Who is making how much? And in what circumstances does it tend to work and not work?
During World War I, regulation prevented the rail industry from properly responding to an uptick in rail demand for exports to fuel the war's various foreign factions (ship capacity had been greatly reduced by German submarines). After the rail companies asked for a rate increase in order to help deal with the increased traffic (which was rejected), the President seized the rail network in order to sidestep the debacle and get their exports out.
The rails were de-nationalized when the war ended 2 years later. After that, the use for passenger travel steadily declined as automobile and bus transportation grew, and the rails never recovered (except during WWII). In 1971, when the entire network was about to collapse, the government created Amtrak. Amazingly, most of the network is still limited in capacity and speed due to regulations from 1947. And most of the improvements in the system have come since 2000. Any subsidies that could have upgraded the network or increased capacity or efficiency over a period of 80 years went into building highways and airport control towers (but not more efficient public buses or light rail).
Of course, Amtrak still leased its rail lines from the railroads, so the old rail companies became the new landlords and freight providers, while Amtrak serviced passengers. Amtrak basically cut passenger service and available rail lines in half, with whole corridors becoming freight-only. Later Amtrak bought bankrupted railroad track, and currently something like 25% of the rails Amtrak travels are owned by it.
The parent is half-correct. The freight customers don't have the same needs as the passengers, and "more convenient" methods of transportation exist for them, but for some reason the government demands that passenger rail remain (for the next big war?) so it got bailed out and nationalized.
But I seriously doubt this thing is actually cost efficient.
But seriously, Elon Musk appears to be dating hot and crazy at the moment. Let's just let him get through this phase of his bucket list so he can get back to being visionary once he realizes why one should never marry hot and crazy.
It will interact with the surface economic reality in the same way that flying Audis in tunnels interact with the dystopian wilderness in Hollywood sci-fi films.
Ignoring the marketing video, it's easy to see why he's potentially going to spend more engineer time and money on the boring technology and schemes for building big swooping curvy tunnels through prime metropolitan real estate whilst being happy to "open-source" the idea of firing people through metal vacuum tubes for others to work on.
I would suggest that tunnelling is a more fertile opportunity, given that there had already been a bunch of rocket startups that had tried and failed over the last couple decades. Tunneling today is insanely expensive. Here's a superb article from Matt Yglesias at Vox on the $2.2 B per km Second Avenue Subway: http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/1/14112776/new... . Other countries are already achieving costs of $100 M per km or less.
Now, does the car carriage from the video make perfect sense? I'm skeptical. But Musk has never been slavishly faithful to the original conception of his ideas. He gets started and then iterates, and so far the results have been awfully impressive.
Autonomous ground travel optimization, hyperloops, and air travel all work together to make a seamless system that make this seem redundant.
> from a cost or safety perspective
Maybe that is why he is pursuing it, is because maybe he can help reduce the cost and safety. Just look at how much he is going to reduce the cost of rocket launches and landing them is far safer. And to me that is a far harder challenge than making underground transit cheaper and safer.
> By the time a system like this is built, all cars will be autonomous
I think even if we all switch to traveling pods, this doesn't JUST solve a transportation problem. It solves underground expansion problems.
That tunnel could alleviate 'autonomous pod traffic' in dense areas. OR perhaps it could be used to build underground cities (tube cities) or (tube storefronts). Or perhaps just improved and accessible infrastructure for a city to utilize more expandable tunnels instead of the tiny ones we have now. (If they made boring significantly cheaper/safer).
Just remember there is more to underground boring than just transportation. And your 2 reasons why it won't work is likely the very 2 things they are trying to address.
A huge amount of condo development has been done right next to it and having lived in one the noise is a real problem. Living on the south-end of the highway towards the water almost feels like being cut off from the real city
You basically have to keep your window closed most of the time otherwise it's a constant drone. Night time is the worst as it goes quiet then occasionally a truck will come by and wake you up. The higher up you live the better, but that still leaves about half the units close to it.
So not only would it open up a lot of new property development but also significantly increase the value of existing properties.
The city has been considering burying the highway underground similar to Boston's tunneling project. But the Boston one ended up going billions over budget, so it is not an easy thing to do.
If they can bring the price down dramatically and perfect the concept I'm sure we'd be one of the first consumers for the tech.
The City Council is inept so good luck hoping they could ever have the insight to agree to something like this. , so I really doubt they will ever be capable of implementing a solution to the traffic congestion, noise, etc.
Even GO could cut down a lot of traffic if they'd just add more parking lots on the edge of the city and make it all day two way. When I use to live north of the city there were 3 trains into Toronto in the morning on the Stouffville line and 3 trains back at the end of the day and if your schedule didn't fit them exactly then you had to drive to Finch and hope for a parking spot or drive in.
I use to live at 18 Harbor about 3 stories up from it and while the drone just became white noise the motorcycles at night were awful. Though that spot also had the horns from ACC spoiling the hockey games on TV(you knew a goal was coming) and the noise from concerts was often loud enough to clearly hear the singers words. Before that I lived at 33 Bay st in the same complex and you didn't hear a thing but I was 30 stories higher.
There's no need for this absurd fantasy tech. We can solve our transportation problems with the very basic tools we already have.
Now imagine every one of them is sitting in a sedan that is delivered out of an elevator, one by one.
According to Wikipedia, "Times Square–42nd Street/42nd Street–Port Authority Bus Terminal" station has 206,247 riders on each weekday on average. If we have 100 elevators which can transport a car every five seconds, it will take 172 minutes to move all of them.
With more realistic numbers (an elevator usually doesn't go down and come back in five seconds) it will be more than a day.
Visit Switzerland and you'll see that it is superfluous to build all this expensive infrastructure just to stick your personal car on a train.
Riding in a train is bigger, way more comfortable, and much cheaper.
Also, entering this system leaves a big hole in the street where the carriage was. Before another car can enter, a new carriage must be brought up from below. That decreases capacity even further, except for the ideal situation where that carriage always carries a car. In the less than ideal sitautin, there's the added problem of getting that replacement carriage in place at just the right time (for example, at the end of the day in a business district)
I lived in a dense city with good public transportation and good bike and pedestrian lanes. To get around the city and its surroundings, I would mostly use my bike. It was incredibly fast to find a parking spot and to get from point A to point B. Other times, I would use the integrated public transport system (bus/train/tram) if wanted to go somewhere further in less time. I had options, flexibility and much more freedom than I would if I used/owned a car. Not only that, but my quality of life was way higher than that in the suburbs. Not having a car made a huge difference: more physical activity, less monetary burdens and the piece of mind acquired by not thinking about its maintenance and care.
This takes me to my second point: passenger cars are mostly useful in sparse areas, like the suburbs. In dense areas it makes less sense to have a personal cocoon for transportation. Although the boring company's tunnels are underground, that same energy and investment would be better suited in a public transport alternative, like a subway. This subway would transport people and their bikes, and this could serve as a push for the street level pedestrian, bike and public transport infrastructures to get better.
If you are willing to build entirely new infrastructure, like this project, there is so much you can do. The main reason self driving cars are taking so long is because they have to be able to do everything a human driver can do. Which is very hard. If you build tracks and sensors into the road itself, it could be much easier. You could have a city filled with fleets of small automated electric people movers.
We don't take the car without an explicit reason: we're late, it's far away, we're hauling stuff, it's raining.
But this is Oklahoma, and as soon as you're a block from the OU campus, pedestrians are seen as freaks. Young guys yell at you from pickup trucks. (It's not just me; I have confirmed this with other people over the last 12 years.)
We need electric cars, but we also need a cultural change. We drive, and I don't want to judge people for driving. But I wish it were seen as a fallback, rather than a default.
(A lot of it is complaining about the ridiculous cost of New York's Second Avenue Subway, and complaining about how the media won't even mention that its cost was 3-5 times more per km than similar routes in London, Paris, and elsewhere in Europe. @MarketUrbanism also has a few other ticks:
* He aggressively argues that train systems in the US should save money by getting rid of conductors.
* Also, he argues that US buses should use Europe-style fare policing (with ticket inspectors) rather than requiring people to swipe as they board the bus.)
They're snarky and a bit hard to undeedia won't even mention that its cost was 3-5 times more per km than similar routes in London, Paris, and elsewhere in Europe. @MarketUrbanisrstand to the uninitiated, but they grow on you. I've learned a lot from them.
The car weights would be kept to a minimum, allowing tracks and supports to be sized much smaller, lowering cost and design requirements. The average car would weight less than a bus, and could travel at very high speeds.
Existing trains and subway systems are based off of hundred-year old freight train systems which were designed to transport thousands of tons of weight. This has a huge cost for subway and commuter train design. A modern subway train costs millions of dollars, weighs multiple tons, and is an immense engineering task.
By engineering a total target track and car weight of a few tons per spacing instead - this system would be far cheaper and easier to maintain.
Passenger cars would be designed to hold only a dozen people, and cars would be linked or unlinked as needed to increase capacity and efficiency. This design also allows the system to maintain extra cars of varying sizes to manage variable rider capacity. Rather than time tables, the system would run based on rider demand, maintaining a slight over-capacity to handle peaks. This is no different than the typical Uber-type demand based system.
On the typical street, such systems would only utilize a few square feet of space per block. They could also utilize existing utilities and would require minimal space for stations. Trains would exit the main track to prevent stalling the main rails while boarding passengers.
This system could also be extended to long-hail service as well into suburbs, or perhaps across states, It wouldn't have nearly the same difficulties of property right of way, environmental impact, and NYMBY - as it essentially has about the same impact as a typical electrical infrastructure. It could also be placed along existing roads and bridges to quickly build out the system.
Anyway - just an idea.
If that something is cheap autonomous mining that can be sent to Mars to build a colony before anyone arrives, or a sneaky way to make very large underground nuclear bunkers that always have a surprisingly large number of random ordinary people in them, or just that Elon knows about a major valuable mineral deposit that nobody else is aware if yet, great. But if this really is just some self-driving pods that attach to your car and take you around at relatively high speeds, I don't see the "while underground" doing much for the congestion.
We have too much cars, millions of people, each driving a ton of steel to move from place to place alone. Cars on the underground is not a good solution.
What world needs is automated and intelligent transport, and for the masses.
Americans hate those.
PS: Hiperloop also seems a good solution for long travels. PS: Each solution is better for a specific problem. Automated cars seems promise to small and medium cities.
- Why is it built with React? - Why does it need to load so much JavaScript? - Why does it need to load a custom web font? (There's exactly zero text from what I see). - Why does it need a CSS grid framework?
It actually looks like it was made using a GoDaddy website builder. https://builtwith.com/boringcompany.com
I suppose they don't really need a perfect website at this point.
This idea is only useful if it could deliver traffic volumes at meaninful percentage of the current 405 throughput.
wikipedia says "The freeway's annual average daily traffic between exits 21 and 22 in Seal Beach reached 374,000 in 2008" .
So how many car elevators to do 10% of that? How many car elevators to move 37,000 vehicles per day? Assuming a 1 minute cycle time, that would be 25 elevators running 24/7 evenly, with no rush hour (obvious unrealistic).
I think it is a scale problem, much like 3D printers won't upset the economics of high speed injection molding anytime soon.
Hyperloops are round + tunnels are round = Boring Company
Putting cars through the tunnels is not what I first expected.
A car is a massive investment of time, money, and emotional capital that an increasing number of people are simply unwilling to make.
1. "Boring Company" is such a great, funny and fitting name for a tunneling startup. FYI there are people who get so excited about a name they think is just perfect (or title for book or name for a yacht...) that they pursue creating it even though they aren't seriously into the idea. See: the better the name of the yacht, the less the owner uses it...
2. Agree with other comments the video verges on embarrassing. I don't think it helps Musk's cause much...Unless: (A) he subscribes to "there's no such thing as bad publicity" and/or (B) Musk in fact wants other entrepreneurs to see his crazy ideas as a catalyst to start their own copy-cat companies working on the same issue usually with their twist. He has made public comments (especially around the time when he open-sourced his patents) that support both (A) and (B) being true. See: all the new space, solar and hyperloop like companies that started in Musk's wake.
3. I don't think we should blindly give big-thinking entrepreneurs the benefit of the doubt. That has gone very poorly recently and historically. But I think we/the public/government regulators can support innovation and keep an eye on big-thinking well-funded entrepreneurs so they don't do something f'ing stupid full of negative externalities and tragedies of commons and tyrannies of small decisions etc...
4. This particular form of new tunneling as seen in the video might not happen. I hope it doesn't as there are serious engineering and public safety issues. But Musk has a point about needing to dig! AND Musk thinks very long term (the guy is working on going to Mars). Earth only has so much land, as human population increases, especially around cities, we can only build up or down. Both should probably be tried. I remember when Jeff Bezos said Amazon wants to try to deliver your packages by drones, and that Amazon also is out destroy the American economy. Ok he didn't say the second thing. But as for drones, people went nuts on both sides he said that but it's going forward. What if Musk's tunnels started off smaller, focused on delivering packages into and across cities, so not huge tunnels for people but more like conveyor belts for deliveries? There is a need for that or there will be soon. Would that be more palpable and would there be less averse reaction?
Have a good, relaxing weekend to all!
Also, what is the point of those rails? Seems like self-driving cars would be much easier and require a lot less.
I think the robotic conveyer belt style design like seen in movies like iRobot would be cheaper and more convenient. Plus, having it so people don't walk to their cars means you don't have to worry about theft in parking garages as much either.
That was my first reaction as well. I think it might have to do with there being no way of expelling the exhaust gas. As long as even just 1% of the cars using the tunnel are fossil fuel powered their exhaust will poison the whole system (carbon monoxide can fuck you up at even just 50 PPM).
They could limit the tunnels to just self-driving electric cars though.
The ideal scenario to me is this:
1. wait for a self-driving car to pick you up,
2. be driven to a subway/train-station,
3. take a train to the airport
4. fly at supersonic/hypersonic speed
5. repeat previous steps in reverseEdit: To be a little less snarky, multi-modal transport of this form has been considered; it's one of the ways in which PRT systems have been proposed. But those systems don't also say "and now we build the highway underground."
A tbm can make a tunnel for 19k a foot in the right environment (https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-high-tech-low-cost-world-of...), but that cost is dropping as more and more tbm projects since 2000 have driven the costs down.
So basically it's 20x as expensive to bury a highway as it is to build one on the surface.
Ok.
But, when you look deeper, in urban areas there just aren't rights of way available to put new highways, and so you have huge slow costs that grind out projects. In addition, if you can find a place to put one, they are... ready... usually public infrastructure.
This is a private highway... private highways are a good idea. Take a look at https://mises.org/library/privatization-roads-and-highways
This is a bet on free market roads. That is a big bet, but goodness it's not a naive one.
I feel like Elon has some kind of cache of historic photos and documents from the late 60s and early 70s that he is just pulling pages out of.
Anyways, 20x more expensive is very doable and these roads could operate profitably in urban areas (and that's the opening, current cost). Oh, and the son of a gun bought a used tbm, which will save gobs of the cost. Oh, and it's for a ton of jobs (the cost of acquiring the Tbm is a large part of the cost of tunnels), and there is going to be a glut of tbm inventory in coming years.
Add it all up, and it sure isn't a "dumb idea" in some kind of intrinsic, obvious fashion.
Seems like a good bet actually.
Sorry Elon, I support 99% of your ideas, this one belongs to the other 1%...
Examples would be the gigafactory, his comments about how Tesla is not learning how to build cars, but learning how to build car factories, etc. The approach with SpaceX wasn't "OK, let's build a rocket system that can get to Mars." Instead it was "OK, let's build a company that has a repeatable and sustainable launch business that can drive down cost and drive up efficiency over time, so that getting to Mars won't be a near-impossible problem anymore."
Building a one-off public transit system in the Bay Area, with all the current technological, regulatory, and social headaches, doesn't really offer many opportunities to improve things, does it? Elon isn't God; he can't magically overcome all the factors that cause the Bay Area to have bad transit today, just like he couldn't magically start colonizing Mars in 2004.
So building a new class of technologies to bore tunnels much more quickly, safely, and cheaply seems like it enables a whole new set of opportunities to make the current transit problems more tractable. It creates a whole new set of opportunities for transportation that simply don't exist today.
I'm tired, so forgive me if that isn't clear, just what's running through my head.
For that alone he gets my gratitude.
But it does seem pretty far out that we'd have tens of levels of tunnels for all this underground traffic. Hyperloops seem more plausible.
the vacuum requirements alone make hyperloop an non-starter imo. This type of "fastloop" seems a lot more viable.
If Elon Musk wants to spend--or convince others to spend--billions of dollars innovating tunneling construction, then I'll enthusiastically support whatever vision motivates him.
It's like if a kid decides to clean his room so the aliens can land their spacecraft, then by all means, let's get ready for the aliens!
I don't know, but we did rebuild our roads from scratch to serve as a vehicle for the 20th century, and it was a disaster. Let's first fix the problems that the last attempt to start from zero created (read up on Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs), before trying to start from zero again.
I would have thought semi self driving cars platooning would be a cheaper and more practical way to beat the jams.
Self driving car services would allow us to reclaim huge portions of cities by reducing the need for parking spaces everywhere we go, and make driving safer. Tunnels for highways could replace interstates that cut cities in two, as well as provide more flexible routes. Electric cars could make our cities healthier. I think I see what Elon is trying to do...
My question: will the debris Musk will need to transport away from the next "beta-test" city happen to contain large quantities of lithium? Or will his current suppliers have a new source of (too-good-to-refuse) industrial machinery?
I would have thought you'd say where you wanted to go, and if you had enough battery to get there, the car would just drive itself in the tunnel, eliminating the need for a whole other wheeled, motorized sled to move a wheeled, motorized vehicle.
To the extent that at $800/meter, a 4 km fiber path could cost $3.2m.
A bored small diameter service tunnel sized lined with concrete sections (basically a mini version of what the Bertha TBM in Seattle has just finished boring), sized to accommodate small electric carts that could be shared by multiple cables stuck to walls would be a game changer.
Some pros: - If its a shitty, poor regulated car.. this will lead to more safety - Avoid adding extra gear (software/hardware) to the car
Cons: - Size restriction - Clean up and Maintenance - How do you ensure the car is in the platform securely?
A restriction would be to simply have all windows and doors locked but this can be circumvented in older cars. Perhaps a restriction would be to cover the entire car in some sort of a housing. This will lead to the size constraints I described earlier.
So all in all, a lot of safety concerns with this but I am confident Musk has something up his sleeve. Something like this is a raging yes to one of his two questions; (Yes - "[Will this do good]" | Maybe - "[Is it tractable]" ). I think a solution like this is great if we have a blank slate, which will be the case on Mars.
Edit: Spelling and grammar.
Sedan, the new one that's in backlog, truck that is being unveiled in September, etc.
I also do not think he will convince any municipality to allow boring of a network just for tesla. I also do not think he is that close minded.
If he has any sense he would be bidding for these projects too.
It would be great if by default we could get bigger tunnels (if crossrail were bigger then we could get double deck train in the future for instance).
I think that this is a case where a secondary source submission, such as this one [1] to a TechCrunch story about this, is better than the primary source source submission, because the TechCrunch story actually tells us what the hell we are looking at. I think the moderators goofed by deciding that this submission was the one that should win.
Anyway, it's an Elon Musk company, and he talked about it at a recent TED talk.
If it could be done inexpensively and quickly it's interesting.
Some sort of a cross-country vacuum tube type tunnel that could let you go from NYC to LA in 15 minutes would be amazing and I think closer to the original hyperloop idea, but ridiculously expensive and engineering-wise beyond the initial goals of this project.
A crash at that speed would wreck that tunnel and put it out of service for weeks.
(See also: Channel Tunnel)
Isn’t that called “a train”?
I am of two minds about self driving cars. From a technology point of view, I think its great, but I don't really see what problem they solve that would not be better solved by ubiquitous public transportation (trains, mostly). Now, Musk wants to carry cars on sleds through tunnels under LA? Why not just build some damn trains?
EDIT: the real news is that he wants to improve boring machines which is not a bad goal. There will be more and more tunnels regardless of what you actually put in them, so faster, more efficient boring is a worthwhile goal.
Compare that to Seattle, where my friend got lost trying to get from the light rail to the incredibly slow train up to Vancouver because they're several blocks apart. And then had to do the same on the Vancouver end for the same reason. To make matters worse, the train between the two cities is actually slower than the train between Tokyo and Hiroshima, with roughly 3x the distance.
Keep the trains, but replace buses, taxis, and probably quite a lot of private cars with an automated fleet. It would be a huge change, a huge improvement in many lives.
Plus, like with most rail systems, you get the big benefits of having a custom right-of-way. No need to contend with pedestrians, people parking in the traffic lane, vehicles that aren't as fast as others, etc etc.
Of course... if you want to build a new underground right of way, what's the best way to use it? Is a big open question in my mind. You could go for electric BRT, for instance, or big-dig style freeway.
Too bad that only a small % of them really get developed - really love his creative consistency though.
Apparently the concept behind The Boring Company is to reduce the cost of tunnelling, but surely the "pods" would add a great deal of cost to this system.
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/25/local/la-me-ln-elon-...
Replace the underground rails with above-ground "rails" (perhaps electromagent based, when there's enough power to do so.)
I'm just not sure if the entrance to the boring market is a high-risk venture. But at least the idea of building an underground network under existing cities is a very ambitious project.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/elon-musk-ted...
Dig big tunnels to ferry trains with people underground. Works pretty well.
Unless there is a stop at every home and business, you'll be needing cars. You might as well transport them.
Edit: fixed typo
Based on that video it looks like the cycle time on those platforms is pretty limited. There's a fixed number of them circulating at any time. You'll be stuck waiting for one to pop up even if you're second in line.
If you're tenth? Get out a magazine.
...solving the hole problem
...it's underground
...making tools to take you down
PS I am ashamed of the current top comment (despite not having anything to do with it).
Look forward to seeing the next iteration.
Someone is pointing to problems that seem obvious, I can see a lot too, but they've solved monetization.
Then a vast network of these tunnels is somehow posited.
I don't think reality was one of the constraints applied to this concept.
electric hub motors would work here quite easily.
There's already a project to do just this, called SkyTran. It never gets any attention.
So nothing special at all, people had such visions for some decades.
Funny thing is projects like "Hyperloop", "Boring Company", etc all are already tried many decades ago in various places around the word, just marketed under a different name e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube