It's amazing to me the amount of negativity directed toward his projects and the millions of reasons people give for why they "won't work" (not necessarily on HN, but at least on general news websites).
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.
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.
Everybody is trying to invent shit and make things better. It's true from your waiter at your restaurant who will try to find a way to be more amiable to you, or it's true from the public researchers who just invented the artificial utero when they're being paid nips and wont become billionaires out of their invention. This is not Atlas Shrugged. This is the real world.
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% had a good idea that no one else has ever had. This is not such an idea. This is a video of "what if subways were much less efficient?".
I find it hard to believe the common case for the 1% of the 1% always succeed because of sheer luck, brillance (although those things certainly can help).
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.
I love Elon as much as the next guy. I think SpaceX, Tesla, OpenAI and even Neuralink are great companies tackling meaningful problems and wish them the best.
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.
Engineers skew rational. They know that most ideas won't work. It's like aspiring actors or singers. Statistically, any given aspiring actors or singers won't become famous. The existence of Tom Cruise or Taylor Swift doesn't change that. Think about the dozen articles you read every day about some promising lab result or prototype that. How many of them do you ever hear about again?
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.
Engineers skew likes-to-tell-themselves-they-are-rational, but ironically I find belief in self-rationality interferes with listening and makes you less rational.
I don't really get the point of this comment. I'm also early 90's and I'm wondering why you're not more heavily for or against either side. You're living in an insanely fast paced world where, in 50 years, we will either be dead and roasted in Earth-Venus, or we will have carbon sequestration figured out and be on Mars. We need engineers to get option two, and you being neutral increases the chances of Earth-Venus.
'The millions of reasons people give for why they won't work' are so important and useful not only for the development but for other possible innovations. They should be welcomed.
And I think there are no causation and correlation between thinking reasons that make it impossible and starting a company.
> 'The millions of reasons people give for why they won't work' [...] should be welcomed.
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.
99% of popular critical feedback on ideas like this is nonsense so ill-informed it would take days to intelligibly refute to an objective third party - and the only way to convince the original negative Nancy would be to succeed.
It would be interesting to hear what experts think, though
>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.
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.
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.
Many people think and are incentivized to think about how to optimize for today.
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.
I think the skepticism and pretty much well deserved. I would like to see both spaceX and Tesla being well profitable and sustainable without the need for direct/indirect taxpayer support.
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.
It's amazing to me the amount of negativity directed toward his projects
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?
If cities decide that The Boring Company is the way forward and it turns out not to be, that's lost opportunity cost and likely decades of people suffering increasingly poor transport infrastructure leading to more wasted time and less time that people can spend doing important things, like spending time being a productive member of society (not necessarily working a job - things like spending time with family and friends, educating oneself, etc etc, come under this).
Society or a company of people operates like an organism at scale - it can get sick with the slightest imbalance of resources, so its collective experience builds antibodies to protect itself. If this was an idea for a portable gadget, it would probably be welcomed, but the underground tunnels and the risks that come with them (collapses, maintenance, infrastructure shifts, ecological impact) are scaring people. California's central valley and a lot of building foundations have been moving up and down with the drought and rains of late. Now imagine that happening with a mesh of concrete tunnels carrying people underneath.
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.
One group convinces themselves that it is impossible and never builds anything. Musk's group convinces themselves it is possible and never builds anything. At least the former is honest.
>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.
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.
Both groups are real. Certainly there are many, many disadvantaged people who never had much of an opportunity. At the same time, though, there are also plenty of people who have had opportunities and could've created something but didn't due to defeatism, and they're often the most vocal naysayers.
Well, that's a well-deserved negativity: they are the Juicero of mass transportation... they are trying to solve a problem that is already resolved with a very complicated and frankly ridiculous solution.
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. :)
The play on words in the name is used also used by a charity: Well Boring, who digs wells in rural Africa. The fact that we, as a species, have failed to deal with challenges like providing global simple access to water, make me think that a project like this is unrealistic in many ways.
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?
There is often enough a clear understanding why something is stupid.
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's possible to start your own company and still think Musk's ideas are foolish. People are giving millions of reasons why they won't work not because they are haters, but because there are millions of reasons why they won't work.
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 wonder if these naysayers realize that their modern lives stand on the shoulders of giants like Musk, and that Musk's predecessors had to deal with the naysayers' predecessors.
This 'boring company' is one of the worst ideas ever.
The intelligent criticisms I have read of this concept don't claim that it "won't work" or that it isn't possible.
Its just a really bad solution to a problem we have at least a dozen other, easier, cheaper, simpler solutions for already.
Imagine we wanted to go to the moon, but the shuttle and all its parts had to be made of platinum. We also have to make sure all the astronauts have at least a 40 BMI and will bring everything they currently own with them. It might still be possible, but its stupid.
> The Hyperloop was supposed to be a revolutionary form of transport, turns out it was overblown.
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.
> The fact that people feel the need to defend unfinished (and very unproven) projects of a billionaire says a lot.
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.
Where have you been exactly? He receives the hype precisely because he has delivered after people insisted he couldn't.
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".
This looks really cool. However, boring through rock is the most expensive way to connect 2 places. It only makes sense if the land features or purchase value require it.
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.
While I generally agree with what you're saying about embracing bus rapid transit and the cost effectiveness of that option, it's not 100% just a matter of congestion. Surface rail often reduces the value of the land around it due to noise, poor streetscape, etc. whereas subways typically dramatically increase the value of the land around it and don't disrupt the neighborhood. Same goes for large surface roadways.
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.
I'm not convinced that buses don't have the capacity trains do, when you consider that headway between trains is at least 90 seconds. If headway between buses is three seconds, in those 90 seconds, 30 buses can pass by. Assuming a bus has roughly the same capacity as a coach in a train, and that the train has 8 coaches, buses have roughly 4x the capacity.
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.
> ...boring through rock is the most expensive way to connect 2 places.
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.
> But what if busses operated on their own dedicated network?
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.
Rail fails in a serious earthquake. Large infrastructure can take years to return to operation after disasters.
Even buses are useless during/after disasters in my experience (avoiding legal liability, lack flexibility to mitigate problems, inability to publish changes etc).
Maybe because it's cheaper? For example, I don't think India can afford to simultaneously build metro systems that cover all cities, and cover a good enough area of each city. Or, if we can afford it, the govt wouldn't consider spending $100 billion+ the best use of the money. Bus is much more doable.
Trams are more expensive than buses. They have removed tram networks on many cities in Europe in favour of cheap diesel buses but slowly now some are getting back.
I'm from Bogotá and I can tell you that the bus experience is ugly, it worked for about 10 years but now the buses can't cope with the amount of people Bogotá has.
I actually think the Viva system in York Region, Ontario, Canada is a great model for 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.
> However, boring through rock is the most expensive way to connect 2 places.
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 wonder why it's so expensive. I agree with musk. It makes sense for humans to have a 3d transport system rather than 2d. The payoff is huge. Moving 200mph through tunnels is the future we should be aiming for.
I also get a feeling he's read "foundation" from Isaac Asimov which talks about this.
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.
The boring could theoretically be done with close to zero energy, and the cost of the tunnel is just to remove the material. Breaking the chemical bonds along the surface of the tunnel is actually a pretty tiny amount of energy, even if it's solid rock.
This is very, very wasteful compared to actual mass transit. A subway network is much more effective at delivering people.
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.
You're asking the wrong question. There are over a hundred million Americans who commute long distances in their car. Mostly because they live/work in areas that aren't dense enough to have good last-mile public transit, and they don't want to deal with transfers. You can lecture them all you want, but ultimately, these people aren't going to downgrade their lifestyle just to fit your ideas of engineering efficiency.
The real question is: is this new solution more efficient than the current alternative of driving on the highway?
If places aren't dense enough to support mass transit, they are certainly not dense enough to financially support car-trains tunnels. The depicted tunnels have the same costs as building subways, and I imagine similar maintenance costs. On the other hand, they can only serve a fraction of the riders a traditional subway can, which means the cost per rider is huge. Not to mention it still requires owning a car, so the traditional capital and insurance savings from mass transit don't apply.
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.
> Mostly because they live/work in areas that aren't dense enough to have good last-mile public transit, and they don't want to deal with transfers.
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.
> : is this new solution more efficient than the current alternative of driving on the highway?
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.
if you'd create 124mph transportation from 20-60 miles outside and through the city into the city, you wouldn't need to drive into the city. Most commuter trains average less than 50 so it's worth trying to drive. The average speed of the NYC subway is less than 35 mph. Light Rail?
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.
It's still incredibly wasteful compared to a real subway. The amount of people a real mass transit system can move is orders of magnitude above tons if individual little cars:
..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.
But... a subway for cars? This strikes me as significantly less efficient use of resources than everyone switching over to printing out their emails/IMs/photothings and faxing them to each other.
Edit: I mean, sure, great science fiction fun to think about!
But can you get a moving block signalling system such that they can follow each other with minimal separation? Until you can do that, a real train will always win at people/hour due to the fact that you can have more people per consist as ultimately the signalling challenges are comparable and you can therefore have comparable separation.
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.
What? Are you serious??? If it's true then in US you are getting ripped off big time.
The whole crossrail project is 73 miles with 14 miles of tunnels and 40 station and it has a cost of 15B£ (19B$ with today exchange rate).
I cannot find the total cost of the tunnels, but apparently for 1.25B£ you can have 18km of tunnels: http://www.crossrail.co.uk/news/articles/crossrail-awards-ma...
That is 1.6B$ for 11 miles. Basically an order of magnitude less than your figure of 1B$ per mile.
If really Musk wants to improve by an order of magnitude over that figure then he is late, the crossrail tunnel have been completed 2 years ago.
If Elon can develop an massively more efficient boring system that the rest of the USA can use; fine, he can have his personal car-way network under his house while I ride around on the highly gridded subway network in Seattle or Austin or Boise. I won't grudge him that.
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.
Except the monoculture here doesn't account for just how terrible buses and trains are.
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.
Have you ever ridden on a really good train system?
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.
> 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.
:: 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 mean, where I lived I _tried_ to use public transit. But with a 50/50 chance of getting passed by the single bus running that route, it just wasn't making sense anymore. And that route ran every 60 minutes .. and also didn't run on Sunday's.
It's not even hygiene. When you ride a train, you cede control of your life to it: you have to plan things by schedule, if it's delayed you are delayed, and you don't even have the luxury of silence. people don't usually vote to let other people have immediate control of their lives like that.
There seems to be this weird thing where people are embracing things that strip autonomy from them.
Reports I read on this a month or more ago suggested that yes, part of his goal is to improve the speed/cost of building tunnels, so that it's feasible to go build a whole bunch of them quickly.
(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. :-) )
Hilariously so even. This is basically a subway system, except you have to provide your own seats. All this is succeeding in doing is making Musk look hilariously out of touch.
He may well be out of touch, but at least Musk's suggesting a real solution to current transit problems, even if it's impractical. 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.
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.
>But there's no engineering reason why a hole in the ground can't happen.
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.
Look at the Seattle viaduct replacement problem. Bertha came to a standstill for years due to engineers not taking care of a well pipe they thought they removed.
Because that’s hugely inefficient compared to a subway network.
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.
Because cars, which are relatively wasteful spacewise, create negative externalities on the public transportation by causing congestion, which resultantly makes public transportation less efficient.
> But there's no engineering reason why a hole in the ground can't happen.
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).
This is Elon's response to a Twitter users similar comment about earthquakes. I don't know enough about physics to say if he's just throwing things out there or if he already did some research.
Hyperloop was a completely infeasible design that Musk quite openly had no intention of building. It mainly seemed to exist as a tactic to attack actual planned public transport expansion in the Bay Area, which Musk compared it unfavourably to based on figures that didn't add up.
I bet this tunnel boring idea was inspired by the lack of an economical path for hyperloop to get to downtown LA. The hyperloop concept took a lot of heat for that.
Cars and mass transit both have major problems. Cars aren't scalable, and mass transit is often slow when you have to wait for trains/buses to come. (It's worse when you have to change buses or trains.)
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.
> If he's looking for mega-good, Musk would do significantly better to drop a full subway network.
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.
As a counter-point: do some research into Seattle's absolute disaster with tunnelling the last few years. Yes, there are some details of the situation that are specific to Seattle, but it just goes to show that even nowadays, tunnelling isn't as easy as we think it is.
I feel like everything Elon Musk undertakes with his companies is just one huge Mars Beta Test.
- 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.
I also don't know about the mineral composition of Mars and what boring does to the usability of those, but this may be a 2 birds one stone: Bore underground network and get required materials to build out mars base.
How to go to Mars and stay there:
1. Figure out what you need
2. Build it
3. ???
4. Mars
Where 3. is use it, refine it, perfect it, like landing a rocket on a automated barge in the middle of the sea.
I thought we already knew how to make a home on Earth. What is this in reference to?
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.
This crazy theory has to die, it just doesn't make any sense. I've seen this several times on reddit and hn usually with a bunch of upvotes and perhaps the most perplexing thing is how so many presumably smart people don't see how obviously little sense it makes.
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!
Because in some respects it's not a theory, it's his own explanation for why he does certain things. The extrapolation to how it applies to new ventures is theory, but it doesn't obviously make little sense. It doesn't even need to be realistic, all that has to be true for the theory to be true is that Musk believes it, as it's an explanation of his behavior.
I assume this is part of his motivation. The cost of LA's perpetual traffic clusterfuck must be immense. The car tunnels in the video were silly, but being able to build subway tunnels faster and for cheap would be a huge boon for everyone. I'm sure he's fully cognizant of the utility of tunnel boring technology on Mars though. There's no way he hasn't thought about it.
We'll have to look seriously at living underground on mars. It won't protect us from solar rays on the surface. One of the cheaper ways to protect yourself is to put a layer of rock inbetween you and the sun.
Underground living on Mercury is much more interesting than Mars. (There's a band close to the poles and a few meters down that has very stable and comfortable temperatures.
I'm pretty sure Elon Musk is preserving our species by laying the foundations for us to leave and survive beyond this planet. He's the ultimate prepper.
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.
> While Earths environment may not be as harsh as Mars you still learn something
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.
That is totally how you are going to fly his rockets :-) So much easier if you just put on a helmet and now you can use your thoughts to control the switches and inputs.
Build cars/machines to run on something
that is guaranteed to exist on Mars (the sun) vs. Oil
You can run internal combustion engines on Mars, provided you supply your own oxygen. This is discussed at length in The Case for Mars. It's likely that the first indigenous Mars-built Utility Vehicles will be fueled with Methane/O2 or Methanol/O2. It will be far easier to establish the tooling for internal combustion on Mars than it would be to establish Li-ion battery production.
Musk could probably afford to take a helicopter from his home to work everyday if he wanted. It'd be a little ridiculous but feasible. At any rate he could probably rent landing time at one of the skyscrapers on Wilshire if his home doesn't have a helicopter pad. I think he flies from Torrance to San Carlos a lot already.
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!
That's a really interesting perspective. I've never made those connections with Elon's work.
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.
There will be lots of positive uses for AI, both on Mars and on Earth, but Musk's main stated motivation for both Open AI and Neuralink is that he's deeply worried about AI being an existential risk to humanity, and he's trying to take steps to mitigate that risk.
Since this is a thread about Elon Musk, transportation infrastructure, public transportation, and urban design, and because HN has a sort of affinity for the Robert Moses story (The Power Broker was one of 'aaronsw's favorite books), this seems like a particularly on-point Twitter thread to read after the video:
It's not thought provoking, it's a series of thought terminating cliches.
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".
Moses wasn't a horrible person. He was an ambitious, unscrupulous, and effective person with a singular view --- one not totally out of step with the elite of his time --- that happened to be (in the opinion of many, including me) very harmful to the long-term health of New York.
I think it's your rebuttal that's facile here, not the comparison in the Twitter thread, but, like you, I might be wrong.
Let's not forget that Musk literally said he wants to bore tunnels because it takes him too long to get to work... and this video is essentially showcasing a rapid transit system for people who own his cars.
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.
I suppose you could call it thought provoking, but the primary takeaway from that thread for me was to reaffirm why I don't follow many people on Twitter, and why I've grown very reluctant to patiently listen to privileged white people talk to me about the historical and contemporary oppression that people of my ancestry face in this country.
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.
I found the thread interesting and informative up until she drew her conclusion:
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.
I don't see this as baseless to be honest. As someone in the camp of "technology always has political implications", one of the interesting trends I've seen with tech is that most of the benefits go to the rich first. In some ways yes, that makes sense. The problem is when they never transition to the whole population effectively. Take subways, a well-defined technology at this point. Pretty much every city you look at, there's a minority community without proper access because the city sees the cost as not worth it to build the additional line or pay for service. The Orange Line and Roxbury come to mind in Boston, who instead got a talked up bus system to replace a line moved out of a minority community.
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.
The trick with this kind of thing is separating malicious deliberate exclusion from just trying to finance a project by catering to people who have money to fund it.
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.
The Power Broker is one of my favorite books and I agree that Moses was ultimately a despicable man, who made NYC a much worse place to live to withholding funding for transit while pouring money into road building in a hopeless attempt to deal with the congestion he was causing.
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.
Very real risk for developing transport infrastructure... Would checks against this kind of malicious intent be on the digging company, or on the city planning departments that determine route alignments, etc.?
(Real question - I don't understand the relationship between technical contractors and cities in this context.)
The only though it provokes in me is, Man, here we are a century later, and the ignorant masses are still letting rich white dudes decide their future for them.
I think there is nothing more boring than reading a bunch of people who never propose anything point out flaws.
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.
If that is your idea of value, there exist plenty of scifi writers/artists with concepts like this, except more practical, better thought out, or so on
So perhaps instead of 'pointing' you should take your own advice?
That's really unfair considering the source. This is someone who continually has proved the skeptics wrong. At what point does he earn the benefit of the doubt in your eyes?
The costs of tunneling are like FAR more expensive than most think. Breaking, excavating, and supporting rock is slow, time and cost heavy, and precarious work. While this is an interesting concept, unless there are serious advances in rock boring techniques (personal opinion: there are none coming) this will never approach fruition. I would suggest anyone interested in further research look into the "Big Dig" of Boston and the staggering costs and challenges it faced.
Good luck, Elon. It'll be another moonshot company if you can pull it off.
That's the entire point of The Boring Company. It's way more expensive than anyone expects. That's the problem they are trying to solve. The entire goal is "serious advances in rock boring techniques".
That may be a lofty goal, but at least the message I got is that it is the one they want to reach.
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.
It seems to me that there may be room for disruption. Currently every TBM (tunnel boring machine) is completely bespoke and is used for exactly one project and is then dismantled/recycled. They cost hundreds of millions of dollars each. I imagine there are relatively few manufacturers out there building TBMs.
Actually in some ways it bears a resemblance to the spaceflight industry (expensive, custom-made, few players). Coincidence?
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.
Somehow I think Elon Musk has made it through the middlebrow dismissal phase of this if the concept has made it this far(to include actual digging in SpaceX's parking lot even).
> unless there are serious advances in rock boring techniques
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.
Not only the drilling, but the shoring up and walling of the tunnel. Also, people tend to be opposed to "move fast and break things" if they're likely to get buried under them.
Above ground rail isn't practical in urban areas. The video had silly car tunnels, but in practice, I'm sure the bulk of their business will be subway tunnels.
"unless there are serious advances" ...which is precisely what Musk is researching (bottleneck of boring machines): “We’re trying to dramatically increase the tunneling speed,” Musk says. “We want to know what it would take to get to a mile a week? Could it be possible?” See https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-02-16/elon-musk...
AFAIK, in many major cities, a major part of the cost of tunnelling is the fact we simply don't know where hundred-year old utilities are.
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?
The whole process can be fully robotized, and the energy comes from cheap solar. It's not even a moonshot, it will happen. We will do even crazier things than this. In the future we will bore tunnels out of boredom.
I mean, you can easily cover up the hole with a sliding door pretty quickly after dropping, or, as someone else mentioned, raise fences during the process.
This is far from the hardest problem to solve in the video.
I'm just pointing out that the flaw is egregious. PR videos are supposed to give people a view of the future, suspend disbelief for a minute. This just looks like something slapped together by an intern told to "put some future cars in a tunnel"
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 is obviously just a marketing video, but that isn't a very hard problem to solve. The bigger issue is building an enormous underground highway network under an existing city.
I was too busy noticing how there was no contention between the newly raised car leaving the platform and a new car driving into the platform, or the endless line of cars queueing to be raised or lowered, or the amount of time it would take for a car to make it in or out at rush hour, or brain sizzles
Do you really think that no one, not even Elon did notice? I would rather assume, that for this concept video they considered this detail as non-essential and the actual entry points would look quite differently (and safer) than displayed. They most certainly would be different to those "parking spots" shown in the video.
So you raise a fence around it (stored on the sides, underground of course), or slide a roof in (once again, stored below the surface) to prevent anyone from going in even if they wanted to. This doesn't sound like a biggie to me.
The easiest solution is to make it a covered "garage" with doors on both sides then the hole is always covered. But that doesn't look as good on a promotional video.
There's a sidewalk I walk down, it's quite narrow and runs along a shoulderless road with a steady stream of cars whizzing by at 50 miles an hour. I think to myself 'how much more or less dangerous is this than walking along the edge of the Grand Canyon? One misstep and I'm toast. One misstep from one of those cars and I'm toast.'
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.
I don't get it. Much of the USA is faced with crumbling infrastructure and a lack of money for maintaining that infrastructure. How is creating a network of powered tunnels - which are much more expensive to maintain than surface roads - going to interact with this economic reality?
This seems like technology that addresses mostly fun, theoretical problems - like traffic optimization, not ugly, practical ones like tight municipal budgets and urban sprawl.
I am not sure the poor state of existing infrastructure precludes someone from building their own new infrastructure. Public transportation outside of the US is often run by private companies, and they make plenty of money.
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?
I am not sure the poor state of existing infrastructure precludes someone from building their own new infrastructure. Public transportation outside of the US is often run by private companies, and they make plenty of money.
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.
> 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?
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.
They are clearly pictured as being private tunnels for Tesla owners, which allow the rich technologist to avoid surface traffic, charge their car while on the tunnel platform, and avoid driving through all those uncomfortable poor regions.
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.
It's unclear why this centralized control car-train approach even needs to be underground. Seems like you could do something very similar above-ground. It's basically freeways but without human operation.
But getting rights of way are more complicated above ground. That's probably the one thing that's going to kill the Hyperloop and it already strangles passenger rail in the US.
Well, since the Internet was once described as a series of tubes(tm), the Boring company is just extending this metaphor to create the Mole People Highway of The Future. That said, it seems like a great experiment to run somewhere in the middle of nowhere in China the next time they want to build another one of those nearly empty cities they wish to fill with future citizens some day.
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.
I feel as though a large scale privatization of roads would see an explosion in toll roads, which I don't believe is a sustainable solution to infrastructure problems.
I have to give Elon Musk credit - the average person would be hard-pressed to come up with even a single laughably impractical mode of transportation, but he's got two.
On the other hand, investments in better boring technology produces a lot of valuable real world construction industry IP for pretty conventionally dull projects that happen to involve underground travel (as well as potentially being useful for his Mars and megacity dreams). Millions of people travel on underground railways and drive through hillsides every day. Whereas most innovations necessary to develop relatively-less-unsafe means of propel people at high speed through long distance above-ground vacuum tubes are kind of predicated on the assumption that people might actually travel in a way similar to his concept sketch.
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.
The essence of The Boring Company is the same as the business plan behind SpaceX: people assume that an existing industry (tunnel development, rocket launches) is reasonably well run and operating at something of a local optimum. But it turns out that there are order of magnitude (i.e., 10x) improvements available when Musk is able to assemble a sufficiently capable team to focus on it.
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.
I would love to see a cheap tunnelling technology in the US. Musk certainly has experience dropping the costs of technology, and I would guess that a well designed private subway system might be profitable after a time in some US cities. Would. Love. It.
I can't get over how impossibly dumb this idea is. It's a clever fantasy but it doesn't seem practical at all, from a cost or safety perspective... has he given a "first principles" talk about why any of this makes sense? By the time a system like this is built, all cars will be autonomous, so the self-driving sleds will be entirely redundant and it just becomes a super expensive road with no safety escapes.
Autonomous ground travel optimization, hyperloops, and air travel all work together to make a seamless system that make this seem redundant.
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.
Toronto really needs this. We have a raised express way that's right in front of our harbourfront and it makes the whole area noisy and ugly, blocking what should be a great view towards (great) Lake Ontario. Most importantly it takes up a ton of very valuable real estate.
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.
I don't expect the Gardiner will ever be buried but I really wish the vote to tear it down and widen Lakeshore had won. I've read that the backfill land that makes up that whole area south of Front street would make it a lot more expensive than normal tunneling.
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.
Toronto is one of the most dysfunctional cities in NA. They can't even add a new subway line or additional stops. They have no problem closing down every major high way in the City for a marathon every weekend during the summer or the Molson Indy causing massive traffic issues.
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.
Toronto has enough space that LRT makes way more sense financially than subways but Ford ruined LRT in the minds of almost everyone.
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.
Just tear down the Gardiner and build public transit everywhere. The traffic will evaporate as people change their behaviour, just as we've seen in Paris and other jurisdictions that have removed road capacity. https://pricetags.wordpress.com/2017/03/30/paris-road-closur...
There's no need for this absurd fantasy tech. We can solve our transportation problems with the very basic tools we already have.
Ever been to New York or a similar city and watched people pouring out of a subway station at 8:30 am?
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.
I would think that elevator has less capacity than a tunnel entry would have. The video compensates for that by having multiple such elevators, closely spaced, that presumable share an on-ramp. I'm not convinced that gives you enough capacity, because each car being lowered on that on-ramp blocks traffic for quite a while.
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 have profound respect of Musk's perseverance and courage to tackle difficult problems, coupled with a great vision of the future. This project however, as it was presented, strikes me as a bit off the mark.
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.
Now what if we add an Uber-like component to this and let people share/carpool together to reduce the number of cars above and below ground? Instead of tires that wear out, we could use steel on rails! Aaaand, we just re-invented the subway.
I thought Disney wouldn't want that shown much any more. But no. It's on a big display screen at Disneyland for the queue at Autopia.[1] Nuclear reactor scene and all.
City streets have more than enough space for fast transpiration. We just don't use them efficiently. Congestion is a tragedy of the commons. It could be trivially solved by putting a high tax on cars using city streets. Then the only vehicles on the street would be those that transport multiple people or valuable goods. And they would have free reign with minimal congestion. (Also maybe put an extra tax on nonelectric vehicles, because there's much less justification for using them in a city.)
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.
A game I play with my kids when we're waiting at street corners is to count the vehicles' occupancy. Spotting anything > 1 is like scoring points.
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.
Oh jeez I wish someone could just invent some kind of underground mass transportation system able to efficiently transport lots of people from place to place in built up metropolitan areas. That'd be awesome. We could call it a 'Metro' or something.
If anyone's looking for a good source of information on transportation costs, I highly recommend http://twitter.com/MarketUrbanism and http://twitter.com/2AveSagas. They cut through the BS of the mainstream media and politicians on transportation policy and give really intelligent opinions, particularly on zoning/land use and on the US's ridiculous transit costs.
(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.
Not that tunnels are a boring idea, but if you handed me a couple of billion, I think we could solve public transportation using ultralight above ground systems. I would base it on a roller coaster type design using single or dual tracks suspended by high load anchored polls.
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.
The whole thing is sufficiently bizarre that I just have to assume it's an excuse to develop something more useful.
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.
So it's roll-on roll-off rail, with one car per train rather than running on a schedule. Loading and unloading is also parallelized through elevators (though it'd likely be far better to build a ramp down to a station. Basically it'd be an underground angled parking lot, except the parking spots can put themselves on rails and go somewhere else.)
What we really need to do is to figure out ways that reduce the need for all this transportation. When you look at it from a distance almost none of it makes sense. The only travel that really needs doing is people working with physical stuff, moving the goods themselves around and leisure travel (and that one is definitely not a must but it is hard to make a stand-in experience that is comparable to the real one). Most commuting is - or rather should be - totally useless.
Dense cities and narrow streets would solve the same problems with fewer technical demands. Look up New World Economics and "Really Narrow Streets"; the author provides a blueprint of sorts for traditional cities with minimal commute/transport expenses.
My opinion: moving a problem to other place you do not solve the problem.
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.
Subways are expensive and complicated in some terrains, but woks pretty good I think, don't you?
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.
Kinda off topic with what this is about but I have a few technical questions regarding the website (which is just a logo and a YouTube video embed on a white background):
- 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?
If I recall, this whole idea started as a result of traffic on the 405 or something.
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.
Looking from the other direction, say an elevator can handle 60 cars an hour, so given staggered commutes it might serve the needs of 100 drivers. If having elevator access let you cover most of your commute at 100mph, what would that be worth? Multiply by 100 drivers, and 10 more to get from annual revenue to capital expense and I'd say million dollar elevators are no impediment at all.
Interesting idea but very weird video. A couple thoughts:
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?
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.
>Also, what is the point of those rails? Seems like self-driving cars would be much easier and require a lot less.
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.
This. When Musk came up with his hyperloop idea, I found it odd. It seems to me that transportation nowadays needs two things : supersonic airliners and self-driving vehicles.
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 reverse
It's a great video, but one of the most impractical ideas I've ever seen. It would be cheaper to buy more buses and install congestion charges (fees to drive in cities during peak times).
So you want to reduce traffic by making the roads less enjoyable and more expensive to drive on? Not exactly the type of solution I would like be excited about.
This seems pretty similar to Musk looking at everyone throwing away rockets and deciding to do something about it, however if you look at Seattle's big dig the cost of the machine was only 80 million out of 4.2 billion. He's going to have to find significant price reductions beyond just reusing a boring machine.
This is not likely to work in SoCal. Our geology and prolific and scattered mineral/gas reserves simply would not allow for it. Maybe elsewhere, but not down here.
If you go and do something like that, why have the car at all?
Edit: 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."
It solves the last mile problem -- same problem we have fiber installation. You can build fast transport hubs but you can't get right from door to door.
Well if you figure a mile of urban freeway in an urban area is an easy 5 million per mile which makes it about a thousand bucks a foot. That doesn't include annexation or planning, just construction.
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 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.
I think he's motivated by the idea of building systems that enable other systems that wouldn't be possible otherwise.
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.
Whether Elon Musk can deliver on all of his ideas is almost an moot point. The important thing is that he is inspiring an entire generation to think outside the box and to believe that they really can change things.
It seems crazy, but there's also some appeal in the idea of opting out of all the legacy infrastructure. If we could rebuild our roads from scratch today to serve a vehicle for the 21st century, what would we build? Probably something like this - standardized vehicles on automated roadways with built in electric connections that enable unlimited long-distance high-speed travel (though we'd just build this into cars instead of using 'carriers').
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.
Hyperloop would seem even _more_ plausible if we were able to lower the cost of tunnel construction. Likewise, traditional mass transit and other infrastructure (power, telecom, sewage) could be significantly cheaper with improved tunneling technology.
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!
Sorry I know that post quality is important and everyone should strive to make important points that move the conversation forward but at the same time I have to say "let's get ready for the aliens" really made me happy. Funny.
> It seems crazy, but there's also some appeal in the idea of opting out of all the legacy infrastructure. If we could rebuild our roads from scratch today to serve a vehicle for the 21st century, what would we build?
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 think this is actually more of a fix for the problems with self driving cars, specifically: other traffic.
By creating a new category of infrastructure the selfdriving parts can be far more reliable and simple.
While this looks very cool I'm not sure how the economics would work out. The UK-France channel tunnel for instance which transports cars fairly rapidly through a 31 mile tunnel cost $21 bn to build and the tickets aren't cheap (~£100 single) which works if the competition is a ferry but may not if it's just driving a bit. Maybe Musk will figure how to bring down the cost a few times.
I would have thought semi self driving cars platooning would be a cheaper and more practical way to beat the jams.
I do like the idea of coupling self-driving car technology with taxi service and underground highways. When it comes to urban environments, automobiles and associated infrastructure takes up an enormous amount of the available space. It hurts resident's quality of life in many ways (noise, pollution, traffic, stress, less green space, etc). This is one of the reasons I am totally on board with investing heavily in mass transit underground (super excited that Seattle is finally getting their act together on this, which is my home). If the cost of developing underground transport infrastructure is driven down enough by this venture, we could improve traffic flow and reclaim some of the space on the surface as space for people, not cars. Couple that and a future with clean energy for cars and when using a self driving car service is more convenient than owning a car, we could create a transportation system that can get you anywhere, quickly, efficiently, and without transfers.
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 bet: it's all about the lithium. The Gigafactory (located near a large domestic lithium cache) will soon consume a large fraction of the world's lithium output, and currently, Tesla is completely dependent on other companies to mine it.
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?
By the time you could conceivably build some of these tunnels, the Teslas and most other cars will be at least somewhat self-driving. (Since you're in tunnels, the problem gets a lot simpler, with on/off the real tricky parts.
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.
Advancements in boring technology for small stuff (1.5 meter diameter utility tunnels) would also be a game changer in major urban areas. If you need to do cut and cover trenching to install vaults/manholes and duct for underground fiber in a major city nowadays, a several km distance project can run anywhere from $400 to $1000 per meter or more. Traffic closures, street closures, flagging, shoring of excavations, moving big construction equipment around on flatbed trailer in urban cores, etc.
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.
Also: according to the video, entry is quite free. How will they prevent some terrorist asshole from causing major damage with a car full of explosives?
Yes. This is also a concern. Also people are usually fucked up. How will I know that some idiot wont jump out of his damn car during this?
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.
This seems like a premium service, because you have to choose your destination somehow, and here comes some device that you have to install in your car (I'm referring to some kind electronic toll collection + navigation system).
Also, the amount of people using this service has to be limited somehow.
As the technology is presented in video, the input/output of the carriages is quite limited.
Also, what about the rush hours?
Everyone wants to get in, to go faster, so queue will be created, waiting for their turn.
What will happen when more people, than the exit queue can handle, want to get out on the same exit/area? You will be redirected to another exit, far away as much as how many people wanted to get out in that area.
This is very confusing. There is nothing on the site but the video, and the video doesn't explain who they are and whether this is a serious project or just a design concept, and so on.
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.
I feel this could be useful as a kind of underground super-highway for some cities i.e. I need to get from one end of the city to the other end without stopping somewhere in between. Tunnels can get built today as opposed to drones or flying vehicles which are at least several years away. It could probably help traffic in some large cities.
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.
I was just wondering if building bridges is more feasible idea than digging tunnels. Bridges will be easier to maintain, costs relatively cheaper, relatively easier to setup and we already have more experience in building bridges.
Don't fully get the benefit of moving cars on rails vs. moving cars on wheels... Higher fixed costs to power the rail vs. just letting cars auto-drive with internal propulsion. What am I missing?
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.
Shared self-driving cars would essentially be an ultra-efficient bus service. Instead of huge (often half-empty) vehicles driving set routes, you have small custom electric vehicles (remember, the interior could be anything) going exactly where they're required.
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.
It's about the last mile connectivity. People don't want to walk/uber from home to the train station and from the train station to work. Having a car on rails solves this problem.
It reduces the complexity of the tunnel needed for combustion vehicles (most cars today) by not needing more complex exhaust infrastructure, and thus makes this idea more immediately viable.
If you want cars to be more closely packed, travelling at higher speeds and controlled by computers, you probably don't want individual car owners to be able to bring the whole thing to a screeching halt through sloppy maintenance or shutting the engine down
It allows the entire system to be controlled by one system - e.g., no need for each car to have its own LIDAR system. ATO is way easier than self-driving cars. You get all the benefits of being able to group vehicles together, have all stop simultaneously in response to hazards, etc.
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.
The fact that the idea is that most cars would be able to use the system, not just ones from a certain company. Additionally, 130mph is pretty sporty to maintain for all vehicles using the system! Most cars probably can't even achieve that speed all out, let alone safely (even if self-driven).
I wonder if you could make a big drill out of hundreds of hot swappable high torque Tesla motors that were intelligently geared and well mounted. Hot swapping battery packs from the underside of a car via automation was demonstrated years back by Tesla so learnings there could be used. Tesla uses a bunch of widely available 18650s for their packs and benefit from that same modularity, and I imagine big cost savings there for a drill that size even with a great deal of breakage in the array of motors.
Check out the absolute lack of any pedestrians and cyclists in the street scenes. That tells you everything you need to know about the value of this video (pretty much zero).
Where is the advantage to the tried and tested metro? Transporting individual vehicles instead of people is much more complex, costly and will require more maintenance.
Musk might probably not want to build a full network but just one or two tunnels for his own convenience and grab some more focus and investment as well.
Why the "pods"? Wouldn't it make more sense for self-driving electric vehicles (which can safely maintain separations from other traffic and travel at high speed on a narrow track) to use their own propulsion?
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.
They will be, though. It's reasonable to restrict tunnel access to appropriately equipped vehicles. Why jump through expensive hoops to support classic cars which can still use surface streets anyway?
It would be interesting if TBC commercialized a subterrene [1], and drove down costs of building underground structures to a tenth or hundredth of current. But commercial mobile nuclear power is unfortunately not available.
As a backup you could always sell them as automated parking lots while you were working on the tunnels. Because I'm odd in that sort of way, I imagine the tunnel as an infinite tape and the entrance/exit ramp as a place where you can read or write the tape. Now if you could just force the cars to either forward or backward on demand ...
Side note/tangent: I think this is closer to what "flying cars" look like in the future vs. what's being attempted lately (which are really just increasingly small lift-based aircraft.)
Replace the underground rails with above-ground "rails" (perhaps electromagent based, when there's enough power to do so.)
The funny thing about Elon is, that the lower the general chances for a successful undertaking are, the higher are the chances that he will succeed.
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.
Exactly. A transportation infrastructure operates most economically when its capacity is (close to) maxed out. Since demand is variable it will inevitably happen that the capacity is sometimes not enough (as in overbooked flights). Traffic jams are the result. So what this system is doing is moving traffic jams underground or, as you say, to the on-ramps. What have we gained?
When I heard about this previously I wondered if it's a way of developing tunnel boring technology and expertise that would ultimately be useful on Mars. Underground tunnels and spaces are likely to be useful for a Mars colony and Musk is trying to figure out a way to get someone to fund it here first.
Anyone else notice the mess of CSS and HTML? The document fully downloaded almost 900kb. In hosting costs alone this could have been down with bare fraction of that and supported 20x more traffic for the same cost. Anyway. Love the idea :D
If you ignore the boring and tunnel part. A autonomous high speed contraption to carry cars, yes human driven cars including the fuel driven ones is the actual innovation. This will definitely work in many cities now itself.
The rails are a rather interesting vote against batteries. Previously, the hyperloop designs were all gung-ho about loading batteries, however that's not shown here, implying third rail power.
I like the idea of putting cars underground, because then you can build a human focused city above. But the video shows an urban wasteland of aboveground high-speed traffic and no people. WAT?
How about... mass transit. You know, not needing to dig giant big tunnels and build the infrastructure to ferry individual people in huge cars around underground, because the roads are too congested with individual people in huge cars.
Dig big tunnels to ferry trains with people underground. Works pretty well.
This is the thing. Why on earth would you build this insane network to ferry one person in their car, the displacement of which could probably move 8 people using the same footprint. I think they throw that idea a laurel at the end, where a more people-pod-like vehicle is getting lowered in the same manner.
If the system doesn't move your car, then you need two cars and parking for both of them. Park your first car, use the system, then get into another car that you have previously left waiting for you.
Unless there is a stop at every home and business, you'll be needing cars. You might as well transport them.
On the downside, LA traffic sucks but at least you get the sun shining in. Spending your whole commute in tunnels seems a depressing way to live, even if its shorter.
So what you're saying is you'd rather get stuck in line waiting for tunnel access instead of actually driving to where you're going?
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.
I dunno man, spending 2 hours in traffic versus 15 minutes is probably a pretty easy choice for most people. I get the sentiment, but if we are being honest, sitting in traffic is ALREADY a depressing way to live for most people.
What happens to those holes once the car is lowered into the tunnel by those carriers? Can I pedestrian just jump into the hole and then sue the boring company?
Yeah, proposing a massive engineering and infrastructure effort with an insane upfront cost in order to be the exclusive provider of the commodity trains for a few years until other manufacturers lobby for manufacturing rights is the real business venture here.
Well, Tesla is getting into the large vehicle industry, so it's not crazy to think they'd make autonomous vehicles for public transit if there was a market for it.
And worse in others. This at least has the advantage that people might actually want to use it since it's zero latency and you have your car for local driving.
If you think this is zero latency you're out of your mind. People can't merge or parallel park without causing traffic on normal streets and you think they'll be able to do it on elevators?
Instead of using all this space and energy to move cars around, it'd make more sense to just have small pods for 1-2 people, and transport the people around from point to point.
There's already a project to do just this, called SkyTran. It never gets any attention.
This looks totally like a copy cat of old school books about electric cars and the future.
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
This doesn't seem feasible at all. Especially the overview shot of the underground network, like it's all open air. Definitely wouldn't be possible like that under a major city.
What happens to those holes once the carrier lowers the car into the tunnel? Can I, pedestrian, just jump in there with the intention of discovering the future and then sue the Boring company? Well jks aside future is getting here sooner than we think.
Whenever I am stuck in traffic, I am thinking about how can we have no traffic jams at all. My idea is similar to this but not in tunnels. I think we can do it on earth. Just have an elevated freeway that is reserved for this type of traffic where road is like a conveyor belt. I hope you got the idea.
It's amazing to me the amount of negativity directed toward his projects and the millions of reasons people give for why they "won't work" (not necessarily on HN, but at least on general news websites).
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.
I think it's more nuanced than that.
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.
Everybody is trying to invent shit and make things better. It's true from your waiter at your restaurant who will try to find a way to be more amiable to you, or it's true from the public researchers who just invented the artificial utero when they're being paid nips and wont become billionaires out of their invention. This is not Atlas Shrugged. This is the real world.
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I agree.
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.
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The 1% of the 1% had a good idea that no one else has ever had. This is not such an idea. This is a video of "what if subways were much less efficient?".
I find it hard to believe the common case for the 1% of the 1% always succeed because of sheer luck, brillance (although those things certainly can help).
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.
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How many people in the world have tried this, let alone people on HN? Very, very few people even attempt things on this scale.
I love Elon as much as the next guy. I think SpaceX, Tesla, OpenAI and even Neuralink are great companies tackling meaningful problems and wish them the best.
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.
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Engineers skew rational. They know that most ideas won't work. It's like aspiring actors or singers. Statistically, any given aspiring actors or singers won't become famous. The existence of Tom Cruise or Taylor Swift doesn't change that. Think about the dozen articles you read every day about some promising lab result or prototype that. How many of them do you ever hear about again?
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.
Engineers skew likes-to-tell-themselves-they-are-rational, but ironically I find belief in self-rationality interferes with listening and makes you less rational.
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NYC-London flights were a lie?
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I don't really get the point of this comment. I'm also early 90's and I'm wondering why you're not more heavily for or against either side. You're living in an insanely fast paced world where, in 50 years, we will either be dead and roasted in Earth-Venus, or we will have carbon sequestration figured out and be on Mars. We need engineers to get option two, and you being neutral increases the chances of Earth-Venus.
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I get what you're saying, but sometimes a bad idea is a bad idea. You can't just positive think yourself out of it.
Sure, but you can't make that call when you have no real clue what the actual idea is or have the full details.
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And there is the dilemma. :-)
Not with that attitude!
'The millions of reasons people give for why they won't work' are so important and useful not only for the development but for other possible innovations. They should be welcomed.
And I think there are no causation and correlation between thinking reasons that make it impossible and starting a company.
> 'The millions of reasons people give for why they won't work' [...] should be welcomed.
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.
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I'm sure Elon Musk is browsing Hacker News to find out what blind spots he has, that only Javascript programmers can see.
99% of popular critical feedback on ideas like this is nonsense so ill-informed it would take days to intelligibly refute to an objective third party - and the only way to convince the original negative Nancy would be to succeed.
It would be interesting to hear what experts think, though
Except most people have no idea what they are talking about beyond their obvious 2 second observations.
>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.
The latter are also aware of survivorship bias
I don't know if there exists a proper antonym of "survivorship bias" but here is a nice "casualty" list of failed ventures from which plenty of good insights can be taken. https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/startup-failure-post-mortem/
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.
> 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.
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Many people think and are incentivized to think about how to optimize for today.
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.
I think the skepticism and pretty much well deserved. I would like to see both spaceX and Tesla being well profitable and sustainable without the need for direct/indirect taxpayer support.
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.
It's amazing to me the amount of negativity directed toward his projects
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?
> Everytime he tweets it makes the front page
Not even close to true.
Who cares if The Boring Company fails? It looks cool! You know what happens if you don't try? Nothing. You never score for a shot you don't take!
If cities decide that The Boring Company is the way forward and it turns out not to be, that's lost opportunity cost and likely decades of people suffering increasingly poor transport infrastructure leading to more wasted time and less time that people can spend doing important things, like spending time being a productive member of society (not necessarily working a job - things like spending time with family and friends, educating oneself, etc etc, come under this).
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But you can score if you take the right shot.
It's about wasting time and money and talent instead of directing it towards "winning" ideas.
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Society or a company of people operates like an organism at scale - it can get sick with the slightest imbalance of resources, so its collective experience builds antibodies to protect itself. If this was an idea for a portable gadget, it would probably be welcomed, but the underground tunnels and the risks that come with them (collapses, maintenance, infrastructure shifts, ecological impact) are scaring people. California's central valley and a lot of building foundations have been moving up and down with the drought and rains of late. Now imagine that happening with a mesh of concrete tunnels carrying people underneath.
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.
One group convinces themselves that it is impossible and never builds anything. Musk's group convinces themselves it is possible and never builds anything. At least the former is honest.
>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.
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.
Both groups are real. Certainly there are many, many disadvantaged people who never had much of an opportunity. At the same time, though, there are also plenty of people who have had opportunities and could've created something but didn't due to defeatism, and they're often the most vocal naysayers.
You're just not believing hard enough.
Well, that's a well-deserved negativity: they are the Juicero of mass transportation... they are trying to solve a problem that is already resolved with a very complicated and frankly ridiculous solution.
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. :)
The play on words in the name is used also used by a charity: Well Boring, who digs wells in rural Africa. The fact that we, as a species, have failed to deal with challenges like providing global simple access to water, make me think that a project like this is unrealistic in many ways.
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?
There is often enough a clear understanding why something is stupid.
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?
You can't have cars driving at 200 km/h on city streets.
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It's possible to start your own company and still think Musk's ideas are foolish. People are giving millions of reasons why they won't work not because they are haters, but because there are millions of reasons why they won't work.
> and still think Musk's ideas are foolish
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.
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I think it's both, actually. There's lots to criticize and there's also lots of hate/jealousy/whatever.
The Genius of the Crowd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gifEn61dZBc
I wonder if these naysayers realize that their modern lives stand on the shoulders of giants like Musk, and that Musk's predecessors had to deal with the naysayers' predecessors.
Reminds me of the "Are we the Baddies?" sketch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU (I'm not calling anyone nazis)
It's not about what is or isn't possible. This video participates in an awful kind of ignorance about the ecological impact of tunneling.
This can work if you are starting on blank slate aka building a new city from scratch. It won't work with an existing city.
This 'boring company' is one of the worst ideas ever.
The intelligent criticisms I have read of this concept don't claim that it "won't work" or that it isn't possible.
Its just a really bad solution to a problem we have at least a dozen other, easier, cheaper, simpler solutions for already.
Imagine we wanted to go to the moon, but the shuttle and all its parts had to be made of platinum. We also have to make sure all the astronauts have at least a 40 BMI and will bring everything they currently own with them. It might still be possible, but its stupid.
edit: don't feel like arguing. Best of luck to Musk.
> The Hyperloop was supposed to be a revolutionary form of transport, turns out it was overblown.
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.
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> The fact that people feel the need to defend unfinished (and very unproven) projects of a billionaire says a lot.
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.
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Where have you been exactly? He receives the hype precisely because he has delivered after people insisted he couldn't.
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".
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If you live by hype at some point you gotta start delivering (edit: this is overstated, but whatever).
He's delivering to the freakin' International Space Station. What have you delivered lately?
> Musk is a master of hype. > If you live by hype at some point you gotta start delivering
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 feel the need to defend unfinished projects of a billionaire says a lot.
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.
You don't have an argument.
This looks really cool. However, boring through rock is the most expensive way to connect 2 places. It only makes sense if the land features or purchase value require it.
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] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU6ImWY4IBc
While I generally agree with what you're saying about embracing bus rapid transit and the cost effectiveness of that option, it's not 100% just a matter of congestion. Surface rail often reduces the value of the land around it due to noise, poor streetscape, etc. whereas subways typically dramatically increase the value of the land around it and don't disrupt the neighborhood. Same goes for large surface roadways.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guided_bus
I'm not convinced that buses don't have the capacity trains do, when you consider that headway between trains is at least 90 seconds. If headway between buses is three seconds, in those 90 seconds, 30 buses can pass by. Assuming a bus has roughly the same capacity as a coach in a train, and that the train has 8 coaches, buses have roughly 4x the capacity.
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.
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> ...boring through rock is the most expensive way to connect 2 places.
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.
> boring through rock is the most expensive way to connect 2 places
While this is true, getting very good at boring underground could be helpful for building underground habitats on mars.
I never thought of that but it actually makes perfect sense for a Musk venture.
...and mining asteroids.
> But what if busses operated on their own dedicated network?
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.
Rail fails in a serious earthquake. Large infrastructure can take years to return to operation after disasters.
Even buses are useless during/after disasters in my experience (avoiding legal liability, lack flexibility to mitigate problems, inability to publish changes etc).
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Maybe because it's cheaper? For example, I don't think India can afford to simultaneously build metro systems that cover all cities, and cover a good enough area of each city. Or, if we can afford it, the govt wouldn't consider spending $100 billion+ the best use of the money. Bus is much more doable.
Trams are more expensive than buses. They have removed tram networks on many cities in Europe in favour of cheap diesel buses but slowly now some are getting back.
Only a visitor so don't know the details, but plenty of Brisbane's tunnels seem to be for buses only...
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I'm from Bogotá and I can tell you that the bus experience is ugly, it worked for about 10 years but now the buses can't cope with the amount of people Bogotá has.
Yes, it worked for a couple years, but right now it's a chaos. A subway would definitely solve the problem.
I actually think the Viva system in York Region, Ontario, Canada is a great model for 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.
> However, boring through rock is the most expensive way to connect 2 places.
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 wonder why it's so expensive. I agree with musk. It makes sense for humans to have a 3d transport system rather than 2d. The payoff is huge. Moving 200mph through tunnels is the future we should be aiming for.
I also get a feeling he's read "foundation" from Isaac Asimov which talks about this.
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Regarding the boring expense, an NTBM[1] or subterrene[2], is said to be cheaper and faster.
[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.
Cheaper? A nuclear machine that melts rock and probably doesn't exist?
I'm not convinced that the video you linked on sheepletv above the "underground alien bases" one is the most reliable info.
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Considering the name of the company, maybe they have invented a radical new way to reduce boring costs?
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The boring could theoretically be done with close to zero energy, and the cost of the tunnel is just to remove the material. Breaking the chemical bonds along the surface of the tunnel is actually a pretty tiny amount of energy, even if it's solid rock.
Ride the relatively new Silver Line in Boston to see what that's like. Hint: It's not good.
This is very, very wasteful compared to actual mass transit. A subway network is much more effective at delivering people.
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.
You're asking the wrong question. There are over a hundred million Americans who commute long distances in their car. Mostly because they live/work in areas that aren't dense enough to have good last-mile public transit, and they don't want to deal with transfers. You can lecture them all you want, but ultimately, these people aren't going to downgrade their lifestyle just to fit your ideas of engineering efficiency.
The real question is: is this new solution more efficient than the current alternative of driving on the highway?
If places aren't dense enough to support mass transit, they are certainly not dense enough to financially support car-trains tunnels. The depicted tunnels have the same costs as building subways, and I imagine similar maintenance costs. On the other hand, they can only serve a fraction of the riders a traditional subway can, which means the cost per rider is huge. Not to mention it still requires owning a car, so the traditional capital and insurance savings from mass transit don't apply.
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.
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> Mostly because they live/work in areas that aren't dense enough to have good last-mile public transit, and they don't want to deal with transfers.
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.
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> : is this new solution more efficient than the current alternative of driving on the highway?
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.
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Avoiding driving for ours in congestion would sound like an upgrade to me...
if you'd create 124mph transportation from 20-60 miles outside and through the city into the city, you wouldn't need to drive into the city. Most commuter trains average less than 50 so it's worth trying to drive. The average speed of the NYC subway is less than 35 mph. Light Rail?
Low-speed maglev: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8SqDVUdMtY
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The video shows some sort of shuttle using the track. Those could be small busses or even public transport.
http://imgur.com/a/Wv8YD
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.
It's still incredibly wasteful compared to a real subway. The amount of people a real mass transit system can move is orders of magnitude above tons if individual little cars:
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.
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But... a subway for cars? This strikes me as significantly less efficient use of resources than everyone switching over to printing out their emails/IMs/photothings and faxing them to each other.
Edit: I mean, sure, great science fiction fun to think about!
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But can you get a moving block signalling system such that they can follow each other with minimal separation? Until you can do that, a real train will always win at people/hour due to the fact that you can have more people per consist as ultimately the signalling challenges are comparable and you can therefore have comparable separation.
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This is still completely ridiculous and wasteful.
> tunnelling is a broadly solved problem
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.
What? Are you serious??? If it's true then in US you are getting ripped off big time. The whole crossrail project is 73 miles with 14 miles of tunnels and 40 station and it has a cost of 15B£ (19B$ with today exchange rate). I cannot find the total cost of the tunnels, but apparently for 1.25B£ you can have 18km of tunnels: http://www.crossrail.co.uk/news/articles/crossrail-awards-ma... That is 1.6B$ for 11 miles. Basically an order of magnitude less than your figure of 1B$ per mile. If really Musk wants to improve by an order of magnitude over that figure then he is late, the crossrail tunnel have been completed 2 years ago.
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If Elon can develop an massively more efficient boring system that the rest of the USA can use; fine, he can have his personal car-way network under his house while I ride around on the highly gridded subway network in Seattle or Austin or Boise. I won't grudge him that.
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.
Except the monoculture here doesn't account for just how terrible buses and trains are.
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.
Have you ever ridden on a really good train system?
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.
> 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.
:: 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 mean, where I lived I _tried_ to use public transit. But with a 50/50 chance of getting passed by the single bus running that route, it just wasn't making sense anymore. And that route ran every 60 minutes .. and also didn't run on Sunday's.
It's not even hygiene. When you ride a train, you cede control of your life to it: you have to plan things by schedule, if it's delayed you are delayed, and you don't even have the luxury of silence. people don't usually vote to let other people have immediate control of their lives like that.
There seems to be this weird thing where people are embracing things that strip autonomy from them.
Reports I read on this a month or more ago suggested that yes, part of his goal is to improve the speed/cost of building tunnels, so that it's feasible to go build a whole bunch of them quickly.
(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. :-) )
Hilariously so even. This is basically a subway system, except you have to provide your own seats. All this is succeeding in doing is making Musk look hilariously out of touch.
He may well be out of touch, but at least Musk's suggesting a real solution to current transit problems, even if it's impractical. 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.
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.
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Getting to provide your own seats might just be what convinces drivers to use a subway system.
Isn't Musk's track record simply to shoot for the moon (or heck, Mars), then temper things down?
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?
hilariously.
>But there's no engineering reason why a hole in the ground can't happen.
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.
Look at the Seattle viaduct replacement problem. Bertha came to a standstill for years due to engineers not taking care of a well pipe they thought they removed.
I think the video was just to look flashy and show off the Model 3 design. I imagine most of the tunnel boring will be for mass transit.
> tunnelling is a broadly solved problem. It's difficult, expensive, slow
And now Musk is trying to solve for those three factors
>Musk would do significantly better to drop a full subway network.
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?
Because that’s hugely inefficient compared to a subway network.
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.
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Because cars, which are relatively wasteful spacewise, create negative externalities on the public transportation by causing congestion, which resultantly makes public transportation less efficient.
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> But there's no engineering reason why a hole in the ground can't happen.
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).
This is Elon's response to a Twitter users similar comment about earthquakes. I don't know enough about physics to say if he's just throwing things out there or if he already did some research.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/824300186834898945
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Just look at the Big Dig. One small mistake (using the wrong glue or fasteners) can put the safety of the entire safety into question.
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But those exist for above ground systems too, right? Earthquakes damage roads, bridges. Road and rail impact the environment as well.
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broadly, a generic hole is doable, it's been done many places.
just like software is doable. :)
sometimes you can't do it. but generally... you can. :)
Like Hyperloop?
Hyperloop was a completely infeasible design that Musk quite openly had no intention of building. It mainly seemed to exist as a tactic to attack actual planned public transport expansion in the Bay Area, which Musk compared it unfavourably to based on figures that didn't add up.
I bet this tunnel boring idea was inspired by the lack of an economical path for hyperloop to get to downtown LA. The hyperloop concept took a lot of heat for that.
This is to subways like hyperloop is to high-speed rail. A stupid overelaboration of an existing, proven idea.
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Cars and mass transit both have major problems. Cars aren't scalable, and mass transit is often slow when you have to wait for trains/buses to come. (It's worse when you have to change buses or trains.)
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit
edit: tunnelling is a broadly solved problem. It's difficult, expensive, slow, etc
Well, which is it? Solved, or difficult/expensive/slow?
It's all four, They aren't mutually exclusive.
> If he's looking for mega-good, Musk would do significantly better to drop a full subway network.
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.
What? You could put trains on those tracks.
I think it's neat. I like London, but it'd be sweet to have my car while I was there.
Yeah, like you can't use the car transport floats without a car? Why?
> If he's looking for mega-good
I doubt it. I think he's looking for the same thing as everybody else: mega profits.
Yes Musk only works for the $$$
why not both?
As a counter-point: do some research into Seattle's absolute disaster with tunnelling the last few years. Yes, there are some details of the situation that are specific to Seattle, but it just goes to show that even nowadays, tunnelling isn't as easy as we think it is.
I feel like everything Elon Musk undertakes with his companies is just one huge Mars Beta Test.
I also don't know about the mineral composition of Mars and what boring does to the usability of those, but this may be a 2 birds one stone: Bore underground network and get required materials to build out mars base.
How to go to Mars and stay there:
Where 3. is use it, refine it, perfect it, like landing a rocket on a automated barge in the middle of the sea.
Or he just hates LA traffic.
By the time we've learned how to live on a planet as inhospitable as Mars, maybe we'll know how to make a home on Earth.
I thought we already knew how to make a home on Earth. What is this in reference to?
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.
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By the time we've learned how to live on a planet as inhospitable as Mars, maybe we'll have figured out how to deal with LA traffic.
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That kind of attitude gets you nowhere very quickly. Why do _anything_ better?
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We know how to live on another planet like Mars. The issue is getting there, and getting there at scale.
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This crazy theory has to die, it just doesn't make any sense. I've seen this several times on reddit and hn usually with a bunch of upvotes and perhaps the most perplexing thing is how so many presumably smart people don't see how obviously little sense it makes.
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!
Because in some respects it's not a theory, it's his own explanation for why he does certain things. The extrapolation to how it applies to new ventures is theory, but it doesn't obviously make little sense. It doesn't even need to be realistic, all that has to be true for the theory to be true is that Musk believes it, as it's an explanation of his behavior.
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It isn't a theory at all. It is what drives him.
http://mashable.com/2013/03/10/elon-musk-sxsw-2013-mars/
It's a joke :p
> Or he just hates LA traffic.
Nope that's the main one. You obviously haven't lived in LA :)
I assume this is part of his motivation. The cost of LA's perpetual traffic clusterfuck must be immense. The car tunnels in the video were silly, but being able to build subway tunnels faster and for cheap would be a huge boon for everyone. I'm sure he's fully cognizant of the utility of tunnel boring technology on Mars though. There's no way he hasn't thought about it.
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This is the only possible answer. LA traffic sucks.
We'll have to look seriously at living underground on mars. It won't protect us from solar rays on the surface. One of the cheaper ways to protect yourself is to put a layer of rock inbetween you and the sun.
Is the main radiation danger the Sun or the background "cosmic" radiation?
I've been assuming the latter, but I realize now that I don't actually know.
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Underground living on Mercury is much more interesting than Mars. (There's a band close to the poles and a few meters down that has very stable and comfortable temperatures.
Perhaps if you're building a cellar. If you want to make a 10-story building - even in a virgin terrain, it's a complicated operation.
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.
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Is it possible to make a huge nuclear explosion/reaction that produces the same atmosphere we have on earth?
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how to become ant people
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I'm pretty sure Elon Musk is preserving our species by laying the foundations for us to leave and survive beyond this planet. He's the ultimate prepper.
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.
> While Earths environment may not be as harsh as Mars you still learn something
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....
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleaning_event
I've always enjoyed this theory. Just one guy figuring out how to take over a planet; no big deal.
Obligatory Pinky and the Brain reference.
https://io9.gizmodo.com/every-single-pinky-and-the-brain-pla...
The thing to do is to check for what is potentially inconsistent with your hypothesis. For example, what about the neural link company?
That is totally how you are going to fly his rockets :-) So much easier if you just put on a helmet and now you can use your thoughts to control the switches and inputs.
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Why bring a bottle of earth with us everywhere we go? Why not adapt ourselves to the environments rather than the environments to us?
You can run internal combustion engines on Mars, provided you supply your own oxygen. This is discussed at length in The Case for Mars. It's likely that the first indigenous Mars-built Utility Vehicles will be fueled with Methane/O2 or Methanol/O2. It will be far easier to establish the tooling for internal combustion on Mars than it would be to establish Li-ion battery production.
Musk could probably afford to take a helicopter from his home to work everyday if he wanted. It'd be a little ridiculous but feasible. At any rate he could probably rent landing time at one of the skyscrapers on Wilshire if his home doesn't have a helicopter pad. I think he flies from Torrance to San Carlos a lot already.
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!
This project and the Hiperloop to me seems really alike, testing the capabilities of non-rocket launchers.
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.
That's a really interesting perspective. I've never made those connections with Elon's work.
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.
There will be lots of positive uses for AI, both on Mars and on Earth, but Musk's main stated motivation for both Open AI and Neuralink is that he's deeply worried about AI being an existential risk to humanity, and he's trying to take steps to mitigate that risk.
He has stated unambiguously that he wants to die on Mars and not on impact. All of his investments lead to Mars.
This was exactly my thought as I watched the video.
Hyperloop is a mass driver too
This is exactly my thoughts
Since this is a thread about Elon Musk, transportation infrastructure, public transportation, and urban design, and because HN has a sort of affinity for the Robert Moses story (The Power Broker was one of 'aaronsw's favorite books), this seems like a particularly on-point Twitter thread to read after the video:
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.
It's not thought provoking, it's a series of thought terminating cliches.
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".
Moses wasn't a horrible person. He was an ambitious, unscrupulous, and effective person with a singular view --- one not totally out of step with the elite of his time --- that happened to be (in the opinion of many, including me) very harmful to the long-term health of New York.
I think it's your rebuttal that's facile here, not the comparison in the Twitter thread, but, like you, I might be wrong.
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Let's not forget that Musk literally said he wants to bore tunnels because it takes him too long to get to work... and this video is essentially showcasing a rapid transit system for people who own his cars.
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.
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I suppose you could call it thought provoking, but the primary takeaway from that thread for me was to reaffirm why I don't follow many people on Twitter, and why I've grown very reluctant to patiently listen to privileged white people talk to me about the historical and contemporary oppression that people of my ancestry face in this country.
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
I found the thread interesting and informative up until she drew her conclusion:
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.
I don't see this as baseless to be honest. As someone in the camp of "technology always has political implications", one of the interesting trends I've seen with tech is that most of the benefits go to the rich first. In some ways yes, that makes sense. The problem is when they never transition to the whole population effectively. Take subways, a well-defined technology at this point. Pretty much every city you look at, there's a minority community without proper access because the city sees the cost as not worth it to build the additional line or pay for service. The Orange Line and Roxbury come to mind in Boston, who instead got a talked up bus system to replace a line moved out of a minority community.
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.
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Yeah, that's also not the conclusion I would draw, either. And that's fine: I don't have to agree with the whole thread to get value out of it.
The trick with this kind of thing is separating malicious deliberate exclusion from just trying to finance a project by catering to people who have money to fund it.
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.
The Power Broker is one of my favorite books and I agree that Moses was ultimately a despicable man, who made NYC a much worse place to live to withholding funding for transit while pouring money into road building in a hopeless attempt to deal with the congestion he was causing.
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.
Very real risk for developing transport infrastructure... Would checks against this kind of malicious intent be on the digging company, or on the city planning departments that determine route alignments, etc.?
(Real question - I don't understand the relationship between technical contractors and cities in this context.)
Every self-driving car video I've seen is set in a place built for cars, not people. Not a coincidence.
This seems like a fairly average Five Minutes of Hate that Twitter users seem to produce all the time.
The only though it provokes in me is, Man, here we are a century later, and the ignorant masses are still letting rich white dudes decide their future for them.
"This white dude is a racist. Elon Musk is white! He must be planning to do the same imaginary thing!"
Not through-provoking; just more verbal diarrhea from a very angry, misguided individual that uses twitter as a platform to spread their dumb ideas.
I think there is nothing more boring than reading a bunch of people who never propose anything point out flaws.
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.
If that is your idea of value, there exist plenty of scifi writers/artists with concepts like this, except more practical, better thought out, or so on
So perhaps instead of 'pointing' you should take your own advice?
That's really unfair considering the source. This is someone who continually has proved the skeptics wrong. At what point does he earn the benefit of the doubt in your eyes?
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"I think there is nothing more boring than reading a bunch of people who never propose anything point out flaws."
This just isn't a very rational statement.
We need some solar frickin' roadways!
This is just FUD to crowd out practical solutions that compete with his magical car bullshit.
The costs of tunneling are like FAR more expensive than most think. Breaking, excavating, and supporting rock is slow, time and cost heavy, and precarious work. While this is an interesting concept, unless there are serious advances in rock boring techniques (personal opinion: there are none coming) this will never approach fruition. I would suggest anyone interested in further research look into the "Big Dig" of Boston and the staggering costs and challenges it faced.
Good luck, Elon. It'll be another moonshot company if you can pull it off.
That's the entire point of The Boring Company. It's way more expensive than anyone expects. That's the problem they are trying to solve. The entire goal is "serious advances in rock boring techniques".
That may be a lofty goal, but at least the message I got is that it is the one they want to reach.
>> "(personal opinion: there are none coming)"
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.
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It seems to me that there may be room for disruption. Currently every TBM (tunnel boring machine) is completely bespoke and is used for exactly one project and is then dismantled/recycled. They cost hundreds of millions of dollars each. I imagine there are relatively few manufacturers out there building TBMs.
Actually in some ways it bears a resemblance to the spaceflight industry (expensive, custom-made, few players). Coincidence?
Seattle's Bigger Dig is also worth studying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaskan_Way_Viaduct_replacemen...
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.
Somehow I think Elon Musk has made it through the middlebrow dismissal phase of this if the concept has made it this far(to include actual digging in SpaceX's parking lot even).
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Make an underground concrete factory in the tunnel system and use the tunnel material to make concrete to make the tunnels.
(I'm kidding)
Loose dirt off of the coast of SF? That doesn't work so well in an earthquake. Lookup "liquefaction".
If you start the tunnel down far enough, you could be below anything that could be hit. Would that make it less expensive?
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> unless there are serious advances in rock boring techniques
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 concrete production? And underground hazard detection? And coordination with city infrastructure? And...
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> It'll be another moonshot company if you can pull it off.
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-...
Anyone know what it's costing Tokyo Mwtro to keep digging tunnels at very large depths? They have great coverage yet they're still digging new lines.
The issue with Tokyo is that the density supports metro expansions.
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Not only the drilling, but the shoring up and walling of the tunnel. Also, people tend to be opposed to "move fast and break things" if they're likely to get buried under them.
Until you remove the "they" by fully automating the system.
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Elon has stated that he believes it is possible to reduce tunnel creation speeds by 5 to 10 times, and that this is what they will work on doing:
https://youtu.be/FPzpugrbwBE?t=120
possible to reduce tunnel creation speeds by 5 to 10 times
He's going to involve the government? :|
Maybe one day we could connect the individual pods, and even gasp route these "coupled cars" on rails above ground.
I wonder if anyone has tried that yet?
That would be amazing! I wonder if car manufacturers wouldn't oppose it through some sneaky moves though...
Above ground rail isn't practical in urban areas. The video had silly car tunnels, but in practice, I'm sure the bulk of their business will be subway tunnels.
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"unless there are serious advances" ...which is precisely what Musk is researching (bottleneck of boring machines): “We’re trying to dramatically increase the tunneling speed,” Musk says. “We want to know what it would take to get to a mile a week? Could it be possible?” See https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-02-16/elon-musk...
AFAIK, in many major cities, a major part of the cost of tunnelling is the fact we simply don't know where hundred-year old utilities are.
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?
The whole process can be fully robotized, and the energy comes from cheap solar. It's not even a moonshot, it will happen. We will do even crazier things than this. In the future we will bore tunnels out of boredom.
Did anyone else notice that cars being lowered leaves a giant fucking hole in the middle of the street?!
This is a marketing fluff video untouched by engineers
I mean, you can easily cover up the hole with a sliding door pretty quickly after dropping, or, as someone else mentioned, raise fences during the process.
This is far from the hardest problem to solve in the video.
I'm just pointing out that the flaw is egregious. PR videos are supposed to give people a view of the future, suspend disbelief for a minute. This just looks like something slapped together by an intern told to "put some future cars in a tunnel"
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.
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This is obviously just a marketing video, but that isn't a very hard problem to solve. The bigger issue is building an enormous underground highway network under an existing city.
I was too busy noticing how there was no contention between the newly raised car leaving the platform and a new car driving into the platform, or the endless line of cars queueing to be raised or lowered, or the amount of time it would take for a car to make it in or out at rush hour, or brain sizzles
Do you really think that no one, not even Elon did notice? I would rather assume, that for this concept video they considered this detail as non-essential and the actual entry points would look quite differently (and safer) than displayed. They most certainly would be different to those "parking spots" shown in the video.
So you raise a fence around it (stored on the sides, underground of course), or slide a roof in (once again, stored below the surface) to prevent anyone from going in even if they wanted to. This doesn't sound like a biggie to me.
The ongoing maintenance of tens of thousands of sliding doors, elevators, and retracting fences sounds like a biggie to me.
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The easiest solution is to make it a covered "garage" with doors on both sides then the hole is always covered. But that doesn't look as good on a promotional video.
You didn't see the force field the appeared as the car lowered past the threshold?
uh duh??? Ever heard of a concept? How many concept cars actually get released as the "marketing fluff" that you see in auto shows?
Tesla releases every one they've shown. Or they will have, starting in July. (Though they'll soon have more to show.)
If this is ever built someone will absolutely ghost-ride the whip in the tunnel.
And die.
And lawsuits.
Someone needs to edit the video so you see a pedestrian falling down the shaft and breaking their neck
There's a sidewalk I walk down, it's quite narrow and runs along a shoulderless road with a steady stream of cars whizzing by at 50 miles an hour. I think to myself 'how much more or less dangerous is this than walking along the edge of the Grand Canyon? One misstep and I'm toast. One misstep from one of those cars and I'm toast.'
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.
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Might as well add Judge Judy and a scene in court when the lawsuit happens.
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I don't get it. Much of the USA is faced with crumbling infrastructure and a lack of money for maintaining that infrastructure. How is creating a network of powered tunnels - which are much more expensive to maintain than surface roads - going to interact with this economic reality?
This seems like technology that addresses mostly fun, theoretical problems - like traffic optimization, not ugly, practical ones like tight municipal budgets and urban sprawl.
I am not sure the poor state of existing infrastructure precludes someone from building their own new infrastructure. Public transportation outside of the US is often run by private companies, and they make plenty of money.
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?
Many US passenger rail systems were private but stopped turning a profit and were "nationalized".
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I am not sure the poor state of existing infrastructure precludes someone from building their own new infrastructure. Public transportation outside of the US is often run by private companies, and they make plenty of money.
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.
> Public transportation outside of the US is often run by private companies, and they make plenty of money.
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?
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> 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?
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.
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Degradation of infrastructure is caused by heavy vehicules (trucks), weather and bad driving. Tunnels solve these 3 issues.
How do tunnels solve bad driving? Tunnel accidents are even worse than those on the surface.
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They are clearly pictured as being private tunnels for Tesla owners, which allow the rich technologist to avoid surface traffic, charge their car while on the tunnel platform, and avoid driving through all those uncomfortable poor regions.
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.
Lack of money for maintenance is a problem of overextension and overconstruction. Urban sprawls result in the same thing.
Creating a powered tunnel, especially if it can be engineered to be done faster and cheaper, could result in increased urban density?
It's unclear why this centralized control car-train approach even needs to be underground. Seems like you could do something very similar above-ground. It's basically freeways but without human operation.
But getting rights of way are more complicated above ground. That's probably the one thing that's going to kill the Hyperloop and it already strangles passenger rail in the US.
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Well, since the Internet was once described as a series of tubes(tm), the Boring company is just extending this metaphor to create the Mole People Highway of The Future. That said, it seems like a great experiment to run somewhere in the middle of nowhere in China the next time they want to build another one of those nearly empty cities they wish to fill with future citizens some day.
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.
The easy solution is using private project finance instead of public funds.
But I seriously doubt this thing is actually cost efficient.
I feel as though a large scale privatization of roads would see an explosion in toll roads, which I don't believe is a sustainable solution to infrastructure problems.
municipal budget problems are only a problem for the people in office when it goes downhill.
I have to give Elon Musk credit - the average person would be hard-pressed to come up with even a single laughably impractical mode of transportation, but he's got two.
Hyperloop looks insanely good in comparison. Like ideally it's just an upgrade on trains. This is some bizarre daydream.
On the other hand, investments in better boring technology produces a lot of valuable real world construction industry IP for pretty conventionally dull projects that happen to involve underground travel (as well as potentially being useful for his Mars and megacity dreams). Millions of people travel on underground railways and drive through hillsides every day. Whereas most innovations necessary to develop relatively-less-unsafe means of propel people at high speed through long distance above-ground vacuum tubes are kind of predicated on the assumption that people might actually travel in a way similar to his concept sketch.
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.
People said exactly the same thing about toilet paper when it was invented.
Actually he has 3... Rocketry is a pretty impractical mode of transportation as well.
It's the only practical way to get to space and stay there...
gondolas and busses
The essence of The Boring Company is the same as the business plan behind SpaceX: people assume that an existing industry (tunnel development, rocket launches) is reasonably well run and operating at something of a local optimum. But it turns out that there are order of magnitude (i.e., 10x) improvements available when Musk is able to assemble a sufficiently capable team to focus on it.
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.
I would love to see a cheap tunnelling technology in the US. Musk certainly has experience dropping the costs of technology, and I would guess that a well designed private subway system might be profitable after a time in some US cities. Would. Love. It.
I can't get over how impossibly dumb this idea is. It's a clever fantasy but it doesn't seem practical at all, from a cost or safety perspective... has he given a "first principles" talk about why any of this makes sense? By the time a system like this is built, all cars will be autonomous, so the self-driving sleds will be entirely redundant and it just becomes a super expensive road with no safety escapes.
Autonomous ground travel optimization, hyperloops, and air travel all work together to make a seamless system that make this seem redundant.
why is it impossibly dumb?
> 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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ateh7hnEnik
Toronto really needs this. We have a raised express way that's right in front of our harbourfront and it makes the whole area noisy and ugly, blocking what should be a great view towards (great) Lake Ontario. Most importantly it takes up a ton of very valuable real estate.
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.
I don't expect the Gardiner will ever be buried but I really wish the vote to tear it down and widen Lakeshore had won. I've read that the backfill land that makes up that whole area south of Front street would make it a lot more expensive than normal tunneling.
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.
Toronto is one of the most dysfunctional cities in NA. They can't even add a new subway line or additional stops. They have no problem closing down every major high way in the City for a marathon every weekend during the summer or the Molson Indy causing massive traffic issues.
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.
Toronto has enough space that LRT makes way more sense financially than subways but Ford ruined LRT in the minds of almost everyone.
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.
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Just tear down the Gardiner and build public transit everywhere. The traffic will evaporate as people change their behaviour, just as we've seen in Paris and other jurisdictions that have removed road capacity. https://pricetags.wordpress.com/2017/03/30/paris-road-closur...
There's no need for this absurd fantasy tech. We can solve our transportation problems with the very basic tools we already have.
Ever been to New York or a similar city and watched people pouring out of a subway station at 8:30 am?
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.
This is a solved problem. It's called trains.
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.
I would think that elevator has less capacity than a tunnel entry would have. The video compensates for that by having multiple such elevators, closely spaced, that presumable share an on-ramp. I'm not convinced that gives you enough capacity, because each car being lowered on that on-ramp blocks traffic for quite a while.
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 have profound respect of Musk's perseverance and courage to tackle difficult problems, coupled with a great vision of the future. This project however, as it was presented, strikes me as a bit off the mark.
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.
Now what if we add an Uber-like component to this and let people share/carpool together to reduce the number of cars above and below ground? Instead of tires that wear out, we could use steel on rails! Aaaand, we just re-invented the subway.
The Disney version of this concept: [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0q_oP9TPD4&t=2479
I thought Disney wouldn't want that shown much any more. But no. It's on a big display screen at Disneyland for the queue at Autopia.[1] Nuclear reactor scene and all.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uA82TQmMUvU
City streets have more than enough space for fast transpiration. We just don't use them efficiently. Congestion is a tragedy of the commons. It could be trivially solved by putting a high tax on cars using city streets. Then the only vehicles on the street would be those that transport multiple people or valuable goods. And they would have free reign with minimal congestion. (Also maybe put an extra tax on nonelectric vehicles, because there's much less justification for using them in a city.)
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.
A game I play with my kids when we're waiting at street corners is to count the vehicles' occupancy. Spotting anything > 1 is like scoring points.
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.
Oh jeez I wish someone could just invent some kind of underground mass transportation system able to efficiently transport lots of people from place to place in built up metropolitan areas. That'd be awesome. We could call it a 'Metro' or something.
If anyone's looking for a good source of information on transportation costs, I highly recommend http://twitter.com/MarketUrbanism and http://twitter.com/2AveSagas. They cut through the BS of the mainstream media and politicians on transportation policy and give really intelligent opinions, particularly on zoning/land use and on the US's ridiculous transit costs.
(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.
We have fare policing on express busses here in NYC.
Not that tunnels are a boring idea, but if you handed me a couple of billion, I think we could solve public transportation using ultralight above ground systems. I would base it on a roller coaster type design using single or dual tracks suspended by high load anchored polls.
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.
Sounds better than drilling through rock to me.
The whole thing is sufficiently bizarre that I just have to assume it's an excuse to develop something more useful.
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.
So it's roll-on roll-off rail, with one car per train rather than running on a schedule. Loading and unloading is also parallelized through elevators (though it'd likely be far better to build a ramp down to a station. Basically it'd be an underground angled parking lot, except the parking spots can put themselves on rails and go somewhere else.)
What we really need to do is to figure out ways that reduce the need for all this transportation. When you look at it from a distance almost none of it makes sense. The only travel that really needs doing is people working with physical stuff, moving the goods themselves around and leisure travel (and that one is definitely not a must but it is hard to make a stand-in experience that is comparable to the real one). Most commuting is - or rather should be - totally useless.
Robots doing physical work, people discussing strategies in conf room with collaborative tools. Problem solved ?
Dense cities and narrow streets would solve the same problems with fewer technical demands. Look up New World Economics and "Really Narrow Streets"; the author provides a blueprint of sorts for traditional cities with minimal commute/transport expenses.
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My opinion: moving a problem to other place you do not solve the problem.
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.
Automated intelligent transport for the masses. Subway trains you say?
Americans hate those.
Subways are expensive and complicated in some terrains, but woks pretty good I think, don't you?
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.
Is it just a coincidence that Musk's main competitor in the space business is called "The Boeing Company"? I don't think so.
The Boring Company isn't a jab at Boeing, it's a generic name for a company that bores holes in the ground... Ya know.. Tunnels?
Kinda off topic with what this is about but I have a few technical questions regarding the website (which is just a logo and a YouTube video embed on a white background):
- 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?
Yeah, it's amazing how much code is on that page. Really? How many font weights are you pulling in? 5? Is there _any_ text on that page? :)
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.
There is obviously more coming soon.
If I recall, this whole idea started as a result of traffic on the 405 or something.
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.
Looking from the other direction, say an elevator can handle 60 cars an hour, so given staggered commutes it might serve the needs of 100 drivers. If having elevator access let you cover most of your commute at 100mph, what would that be worth? Multiply by 100 drivers, and 10 more to get from annual revenue to capital expense and I'd say million dollar elevators are no impediment at all.
When I heard about Boring Company I kind of just assumed it would be used for underground hyper loops. This feels kind of wrong.
Actually I believe part of the thinking behind this is that hyperloops underground would be easier to route and maintain especially under cities.
AFAICT nobody is planning to build hyperloops. They are building evacuated tunnels and calling them hyperloops.
Hyperloop at least has the right idea: Building above-ground is vastly less expensive than tunnelling.
My thought process was...
Hyperloops are round + tunnels are round = Boring Company
Putting cars through the tunnels is not what I first expected.
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Interesting idea but very weird video. A couple thoughts:
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!
Telecommuting is a lot cheaper and easier.
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.
>Also, what is the point of those rails? Seems like self-driving cars would be much easier and require a lot less.
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.
This. When Musk came up with his hyperloop idea, I found it odd. It seems to me that transportation nowadays needs two things : supersonic airliners and self-driving vehicles.
The ideal scenario to me is this:
Consistency of acceleration/deceleration/top-speed, I'd guess.
It's a great video, but one of the most impractical ideas I've ever seen. It would be cheaper to buy more buses and install congestion charges (fees to drive in cities during peak times).
So you want to reduce traffic by making the roads less enjoyable and more expensive to drive on? Not exactly the type of solution I would like be excited about.
The tracks were surprising until I thought about all the idiots I encounter on regulars roads. Then it made perfect sense.
Metal on metal also has a fraction of the rolling resistance.
Though it looks like they're still rubber-wheeled with a guide-rail down the centre rather than steel-wheel on a pair of running rails.
This seems pretty similar to Musk looking at everyone throwing away rockets and deciding to do something about it, however if you look at Seattle's big dig the cost of the machine was only 80 million out of 4.2 billion. He's going to have to find significant price reductions beyond just reusing a boring machine.
This is not likely to work in SoCal. Our geology and prolific and scattered mineral/gas reserves simply would not allow for it. Maybe elsewhere, but not down here.
If you go and do something like that, why have the car at all?
Edit: 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."
It solves the last mile problem -- same problem we have fiber installation. You can build fast transport hubs but you can't get right from door to door.
I don't think anyone really enjoys hiring or renting cars on both ends of the journey. Being able to BYOCar would make me use this system immediately.
Well if you figure a mile of urban freeway in an urban area is an easy 5 million per mile which makes it about a thousand bucks a foot. That doesn't include annexation or planning, just construction.
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.
This is impractical in SO MANY levels...
Sorry Elon, I support 99% of your ideas, this one belongs to the other 1%...
Stupid naive question. If Musk cares so much about environment and all that, why not just build proper public transport for the bay area?
I think he's motivated by the idea of building systems that enable other systems that wouldn't be possible otherwise.
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.
This is actually a very, very good question.
Whether Elon Musk can deliver on all of his ideas is almost an moot point. The important thing is that he is inspiring an entire generation to think outside the box and to believe that they really can change things.
For that alone he gets my gratitude.
It seems crazy, but there's also some appeal in the idea of opting out of all the legacy infrastructure. If we could rebuild our roads from scratch today to serve a vehicle for the 21st century, what would we build? Probably something like this - standardized vehicles on automated roadways with built in electric connections that enable unlimited long-distance high-speed travel (though we'd just build this into cars instead of using 'carriers').
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.
Hyperloop would seem even _more_ plausible if we were able to lower the cost of tunnel construction. Likewise, traditional mass transit and other infrastructure (power, telecom, sewage) could be significantly cheaper with improved tunneling technology.
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!
Sorry I know that post quality is important and everyone should strive to make important points that move the conversation forward but at the same time I have to say "let's get ready for the aliens" really made me happy. Funny.
> It seems crazy, but there's also some appeal in the idea of opting out of all the legacy infrastructure. If we could rebuild our roads from scratch today to serve a vehicle for the 21st century, what would we build?
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.
> Hyperloops seem more plausible
the vacuum requirements alone make hyperloop an non-starter imo. This type of "fastloop" seems a lot more viable.
Isn't this a solution that becomes outdated with self driving cars?
I think this is actually more of a fix for the problems with self driving cars, specifically: other traffic. By creating a new category of infrastructure the selfdriving parts can be far more reliable and simple.
While this looks very cool I'm not sure how the economics would work out. The UK-France channel tunnel for instance which transports cars fairly rapidly through a 31 mile tunnel cost $21 bn to build and the tickets aren't cheap (~£100 single) which works if the competition is a ferry but may not if it's just driving a bit. Maybe Musk will figure how to bring down the cost a few times.
I would have thought semi self driving cars platooning would be a cheaper and more practical way to beat the jams.
I do like the idea of coupling self-driving car technology with taxi service and underground highways. When it comes to urban environments, automobiles and associated infrastructure takes up an enormous amount of the available space. It hurts resident's quality of life in many ways (noise, pollution, traffic, stress, less green space, etc). This is one of the reasons I am totally on board with investing heavily in mass transit underground (super excited that Seattle is finally getting their act together on this, which is my home). If the cost of developing underground transport infrastructure is driven down enough by this venture, we could improve traffic flow and reclaim some of the space on the surface as space for people, not cars. Couple that and a future with clean energy for cars and when using a self driving car service is more convenient than owning a car, we could create a transportation system that can get you anywhere, quickly, efficiently, and without transfers.
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 bet: it's all about the lithium. The Gigafactory (located near a large domestic lithium cache) will soon consume a large fraction of the world's lithium output, and currently, Tesla is completely dependent on other companies to mine it.
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?
By the time you could conceivably build some of these tunnels, the Teslas and most other cars will be at least somewhat self-driving. (Since you're in tunnels, the problem gets a lot simpler, with on/off the real tricky parts.
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.
A subway, but you have to be in a car to use it. Brilliant.
I thought this was satire until I came to the comments.
You know, we have something like that and it's called Metro.
Advancements in boring technology for small stuff (1.5 meter diameter utility tunnels) would also be a game changer in major urban areas. If you need to do cut and cover trenching to install vaults/manholes and duct for underground fiber in a major city nowadays, a several km distance project can run anywhere from $400 to $1000 per meter or more. Traffic closures, street closures, flagging, shoring of excavations, moving big construction equipment around on flatbed trailer in urban cores, etc.
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.
Here's a question for those way smarter than me. Why is there a need for a platform?
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?
Also: according to the video, entry is quite free. How will they prevent some terrorist asshole from causing major damage with a car full of explosives?
Yes. This is also a concern. Also people are usually fucked up. How will I know that some idiot wont jump out of his damn car during this?
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.
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This seems like a premium service, because you have to choose your destination somehow, and here comes some device that you have to install in your car (I'm referring to some kind electronic toll collection + navigation system). Also, the amount of people using this service has to be limited somehow. As the technology is presented in video, the input/output of the carriages is quite limited. Also, what about the rush hours? Everyone wants to get in, to go faster, so queue will be created, waiting for their turn. What will happen when more people, than the exit queue can handle, want to get out on the same exit/area? You will be redirected to another exit, far away as much as how many people wanted to get out in that area.
If he does bring down the cost of tunnelling, I hope we get a lot more tunnels for trains.
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).
Given the time, cost, and complexity of Boston's big dig[1]; I'd be very surprised if there's a way to do this practically.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig
This is very confusing. There is nothing on the site but the video, and the video doesn't explain who they are and whether this is a serious project or just a design concept, and so on.
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.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14222545
I feel this could be useful as a kind of underground super-highway for some cities i.e. I need to get from one end of the city to the other end without stopping somewhere in between. Tunnels can get built today as opposed to drones or flying vehicles which are at least several years away. It could probably help traffic in some large cities.
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.
I was just wondering if building bridges is more feasible idea than digging tunnels. Bridges will be easier to maintain, costs relatively cheaper, relatively easier to setup and we already have more experience in building bridges.
Don't fully get the benefit of moving cars on rails vs. moving cars on wheels... Higher fixed costs to power the rail vs. just letting cars auto-drive with internal propulsion. What am I missing?
Or how about moving trains on rails?
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.
Shared self-driving cars would essentially be an ultra-efficient bus service. Instead of huge (often half-empty) vehicles driving set routes, you have small custom electric vehicles (remember, the interior could be anything) going exactly where they're required.
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.
I thought this too completely inefficient for your transport dollar. I actually thought maybe this was satire.
It's about the last mile connectivity. People don't want to walk/uber from home to the train station and from the train station to work. Having a car on rails solves this problem.
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It reduces the complexity of the tunnel needed for combustion vehicles (most cars today) by not needing more complex exhaust infrastructure, and thus makes this idea more immediately viable.
If you want cars to be more closely packed, travelling at higher speeds and controlled by computers, you probably don't want individual car owners to be able to bring the whole thing to a screeching halt through sloppy maintenance or shutting the engine down
(See also: Channel Tunnel)
> If you want cars to be more closely packed, travelling at higher speeds and controlled by computers
Isn’t that called “a train”?
It allows the entire system to be controlled by one system - e.g., no need for each car to have its own LIDAR system. ATO is way easier than self-driving cars. You get all the benefits of being able to group vehicles together, have all stop simultaneously in response to hazards, etc.
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.
The rolling friction of rails is really really low. And couple that with removing driver variability out of the equation and it makes some sense.
The fact that the idea is that most cars would be able to use the system, not just ones from a certain company. Additionally, 130mph is pretty sporty to maintain for all vehicles using the system! Most cars probably can't even achieve that speed all out, let alone safely (even if self-driven).
Rails allow the sleds to not require batteries. This is especially important if you're moving things at inefficiently high speeds.
I suppose you can't control (or detect?) if the car fails, and if that is the case, the whole system would be screwed.
These platforms will have to strap the car down somehow to prevent someone from driving off the platform while it's operating.
A crash at that speed would wreck that tunnel and put it out of service for weeks.
Why does it even need the rails when the cards have autopilot built-in???
I wonder if you could make a big drill out of hundreds of hot swappable high torque Tesla motors that were intelligently geared and well mounted. Hot swapping battery packs from the underside of a car via automation was demonstrated years back by Tesla so learnings there could be used. Tesla uses a bunch of widely available 18650s for their packs and benefit from that same modularity, and I imagine big cost savings there for a drill that size even with a great deal of breakage in the array of motors.
Check out the absolute lack of any pedestrians and cyclists in the street scenes. That tells you everything you need to know about the value of this video (pretty much zero).
Where is the advantage to the tried and tested metro? Transporting individual vehicles instead of people is much more complex, costly and will require more maintenance.
Musk might probably not want to build a full network but just one or two tunnels for his own convenience and grab some more focus and investment as well.
In germany this is called a subway. We also fixed the problem with the queue and people being required to bring their vehicle to use this vehicle.
Engineering aside, how does this work out legally? How does a company get permission to dig tunnels under Lps Angeles, or any other American city?
Musk launches companies like designers post on Dribbble.
Too bad that only a small % of them really get developed - really love his creative consistency though.
Why the "pods"? Wouldn't it make more sense for self-driving electric vehicles (which can safely maintain separations from other traffic and travel at high speed on a narrow track) to use their own propulsion?
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.
Because not all vehicles are self driving.
They will be, though. It's reasonable to restrict tunnel access to appropriately equipped vehicles. Why jump through expensive hoops to support classic cars which can still use surface streets anyway?
It would be interesting if TBC commercialized a subterrene [1], and drove down costs of building underground structures to a tenth or hundredth of current. But commercial mobile nuclear power is unfortunately not available.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subterrene
As a backup you could always sell them as automated parking lots while you were working on the tunnels. Because I'm odd in that sort of way, I imagine the tunnel as an infinite tape and the entrance/exit ramp as a place where you can read or write the tape. Now if you could just force the cars to either forward or backward on demand ...
This is the kind of idea you come up with when you spend too long inhaling exhaust fumes on the 405.
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/25/local/la-me-ln-elon-...
I don't know why you got so many down votes. That's EXACTLY how Elon Musk came up with the Boring Company.
Side note/tangent: I think this is closer to what "flying cars" look like in the future vs. what's being attempted lately (which are really just increasingly small lift-based aircraft.)
Replace the underground rails with above-ground "rails" (perhaps electromagent based, when there's enough power to do so.)
The funny thing about Elon is, that the lower the general chances for a successful undertaking are, the higher are the chances that he will succeed.
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.
What if the tunnels themselves are congested? Wouldn't it mean a line of cars surface-side waiting for their turn?
Exactly. A transportation infrastructure operates most economically when its capacity is (close to) maxed out. Since demand is variable it will inevitably happen that the capacity is sometimes not enough (as in overbooked flights). Traffic jams are the result. So what this system is doing is moving traffic jams underground or, as you say, to the on-ramps. What have we gained?
When I heard about this previously I wondered if it's a way of developing tunnel boring technology and expertise that would ultimately be useful on Mars. Underground tunnels and spaces are likely to be useful for a Mars colony and Musk is trying to figure out a way to get someone to fund it here first.
Where's everyone going in this automated universe? To the work from home office? To the online store?
The experts are panning this idea.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/elon-musk-ted...
Anyone else notice the mess of CSS and HTML? The document fully downloaded almost 900kb. In hosting costs alone this could have been down with bare fraction of that and supported 20x more traffic for the same cost. Anyway. Love the idea :D
If you ignore the boring and tunnel part. A autonomous high speed contraption to carry cars, yes human driven cars including the fuel driven ones is the actual innovation. This will definitely work in many cities now itself.
Elon should do AMA on Boring company to answer many questions and confusions here.
The rails are a rather interesting vote against batteries. Previously, the hyperloop designs were all gung-ho about loading batteries, however that's not shown here, implying third rail power.
I like the idea of putting cars underground, because then you can build a human focused city above. But the video shows an urban wasteland of aboveground high-speed traffic and no people. WAT?
How about... mass transit. You know, not needing to dig giant big tunnels and build the infrastructure to ferry individual people in huge cars around underground, because the roads are too congested with individual people in huge cars.
Dig big tunnels to ferry trains with people underground. Works pretty well.
This is the thing. Why on earth would you build this insane network to ferry one person in their car, the displacement of which could probably move 8 people using the same footprint. I think they throw that idea a laurel at the end, where a more people-pod-like vehicle is getting lowered in the same manner.
If the system doesn't move your car, then you need two cars and parking for both of them. Park your first car, use the system, then get into another car that you have previously left waiting for you.
Unless there is a stop at every home and business, you'll be needing cars. You might as well transport them.
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I can't see how the economics of this would make it viable.
What a huge waste of resources for individual transport options.
On the downside, LA traffic sucks but at least you get the sun shining in. Spending your whole commute in tunnels seems a depressing way to live, even if its shorter.
That's your opinion. Getting stuck in a traffic jam on a hot sunny day is very displeasing to me. I'd rather move fast through a tunnel.
Edit: fixed typo
So what you're saying is you'd rather get stuck in line waiting for tunnel access instead of actually driving to where you're going?
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.
I dunno man, spending 2 hours in traffic versus 15 minutes is probably a pretty easy choice for most people. I get the sentiment, but if we are being honest, sitting in traffic is ALREADY a depressing way to live for most people.
Genius marketing/PR - just look at this huge thread ;)
The Boring Company:
...solving the hole problem
...it's underground
...making tools to take you down
What they don't show you is the dome keeping the air in, as this is the future society which Elon Musk will build on the moon.
I'd like to see them try to do that beneath my city.
PS I am ashamed of the current top comment (despite not having anything to do with it).
This looks like a cool (probably impractical) way to recharging the car on the go. No more delays to re-charge the battery.
My guess is Space X came across a way to make tunnels really fast and cheaply. Now to interconnect the world underground.
Interesting concept, but big, deep holes in the road seem like a health and safety nightmare.
Look forward to seeing the next iteration.
If successful, I assume this will be used to drill underground hyperloop tunnels. That's obvious, right?
Obviously a terrible idea, but a mining/tunnel building company would be a reasonable outcome.
As someone who has been in the UG mining industry for the past decade. This is very interesting.
Where do you get the energy to make this and then to maintain this? Entrophy? Hello?
I wonder why having to transport a car and not just the passengers themselves.
He is a car salesman ?
Curious: how many solar panels do you need to drive a tunnel boring machine?
Why is that interesting?
Bollards around the elevators; the car-cars should connect into trains.
Ridiculously wasteful. Not needed. Optimize "self-driving in packs with prefiled flight plans." No new infrastructure required.
Maybe car tunnels are a gateway to terraforming small moons.
besides google, what are the best sites for learning about the challenges of underground mapping and the current state-of-the-art?
This is not boring at all. Finally someone found a way to monetize tunnels.
Someone is pointing to problems that seem obvious, I can see a lot too, but they've solved monetization.
I can't quite tell if you're being sarcastic or not. If you are, credit to you as you fooled me.
What happens to those holes once the car is lowered into the tunnel by those carriers? Can I pedestrian just jump into the hole and then sue the boring company?
Giant hole opens up in street with no gate around it. Have they actually spent time thinking about this or is this a joke?
there is cool new technology called a "barrier" that could be used
Indeed. They might want to have included that in the video if they were suggesting this as an actual project and not a toy vision.
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then the vehicle on a tray is accelerated up to high speed inside a tunnel without its axles or body being secured onto the carrier.
Then a vast network of these tunnels is somehow posited.
I don't think reality was one of the constraints applied to this concept.
> without its axles
electric hub motors would work here quite easily.
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I love it
This is the dumbest thing I've seen him produce. Reliable rapid public transit is better in dozens of ways.
I don't know. It looks like a public transit system to me.
a public transit system... that requires a car
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... except in the crucial way of "getting people to buy more Teslas", which is the metric Musk is most concerned about.
Yeah, proposing a massive engineering and infrastructure effort with an insane upfront cost in order to be the exclusive provider of the commodity trains for a few years until other manufacturers lobby for manufacturing rights is the real business venture here.
Well, Tesla is getting into the large vehicle industry, so it's not crazy to think they'd make autonomous vehicles for public transit if there was a market for it.
And worse in others. This at least has the advantage that people might actually want to use it since it's zero latency and you have your car for local driving.
If you think this is zero latency you're out of your mind. People can't merge or parallel park without causing traffic on normal streets and you think they'll be able to do it on elevators?
Europe and Japan seem to have solved that problem with public transit.
Instead of using all this space and energy to move cars around, it'd make more sense to just have small pods for 1-2 people, and transport the people around from point to point.
There's already a project to do just this, called SkyTran. It never gets any attention.
This looks totally like a copy cat of old school books about electric cars and the future.
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
this solves the "last mile" problem since your car will be at your destination
Makes more sense than the hyper loop to be honest...
I'm pretty sure cheap and efficient tunneling would be a prerequisite for the hyperloop
I'm still waiting on this to be revealed to be a part of the new Nathan For You season.
This is 100% Nathan For You.
Just... wow! How did they generate that monstrosity of a html document?
The monorail!
who wants to buy these domains tunnelrider.com tunnelriders.com
who wants to buy these domain names tunnelrider.com tunnelriders.com
"The Grimdark Slotcar Company"
This doesn't seem feasible at all. Especially the overview shot of the underground network, like it's all open air. Definitely wouldn't be possible like that under a major city.
Pretty sure that's a cutaway view.
What happens to those holes once the carrier lowers the car into the tunnel? Can I, pedestrian, just jump in there with the intention of discovering the future and then sue the Boring company? Well jks aside future is getting here sooner than we think.
Whenever I am stuck in traffic, I am thinking about how can we have no traffic jams at all. My idea is similar to this but not in tunnels. I think we can do it on earth. Just have an elevated freeway that is reserved for this type of traffic where road is like a conveyor belt. I hope you got the idea.
Auto piloted cars could easily reap the "conveyor belt" advantage if they were the only type of vehicle allowed on the road.