- Smaller diameter tunnels. 14' is suggested. This is slightly larger than the deep London Tube lines.
- Electrically powered TBMs. Those exist. However, often the business end of the machine is hydraulically powered. Musk is probably thinking of going all electric, at least for the cutter head. After all, he has lots of experience with high-torque electric motors.
- Do cutting and tunnel ring assembly simultaneously. Some TBMs already do that. Those exist; they're called double-shielded TBMs.
Issues glossed over:
- Soil variability. Very different techniques are required for different soils. Sometimes the soil has to be "conditioned", adding something to make it solid enough it can be drilled through.[1] This is the biggest practical problem in tunneling. Too much water is the usual problem.
- The back end. TBMs are long machines. The front end does cutting and ring assembly. The back end, which can be several hundred feet long, is mostly material handling. There's usually a two-track narrow gauge railroad behind the TBM, carrying ring segments forward and dirt backwards. It's constantly being extended with new track sections. That's part of the TBM's job.
Here's a good overview of TBMs design, from Machine Design.[2]
Yeah this is all very odd and everyone is lapping it up. He claims to want to reduce tunneling costs by a factor of 10, but starts by quoting a very high benchmark of $1 billion per mile which is quite easy to beat. Then he reduces diameters to something much smaller than all the expensive mega projects, into the range of something where technology is well established and costs are already 1/10th of his quoted $1 billion per mile. But then for some reason the solution has to involve putting cars into these tunnels. If what he thinks he is on to is viable with cars in those tunnels, it's even more viable with trains carrying 1,000 passengers each coming every 3 minutes. So why aren't we building these subways with trains?
The largest part of the problem to solve here for the US is not the technology of tunneling. It's the process of engineering and building infrastructure like this that seems to become way more expensive in the US compared to places like Spain. I do believe he could reduce costs by vertically integrating the whole thing. But then we should ask why don't we do that anyway?
> But then we should ask why don't we do that anyway?
Sure. Why didn't we have electric cars before tesla? Why didn't Boeing or Lockheed Martin make reusable rockets?
Alan Kay said something[1] recently that has been bouncing around my head for the past few days. He said that many people think darwinian processes (like the economy) optimize. "One my degrees is in molecular biology, and I can tell you, any biologist would say they're absolutely not optimized. The whole point is to fit into some niche in an environment. And if the environment isn't the right kind of environment evolution isn't going to give you something interesting".
In the context of the economy, if there's no innovation, and not enough competition, and no new players entering a market, I don't think its all that surprising that the existing companies might stop reaching to be more efficient.
It seems strange to think that companies would leave money on the table, but in older industries I think this is exactly what happens. The money just requires too much organizational churn for their corporate appetite.
You nailed it on the head. "It seems strange to think that companies would leave money on the table, but in older industries I think this is exactly what happens. The money just requires too much organizational churn for their corporate appetite." As companies grow, they get filled with layers of middle management to handle organizational complexity but this is one of the biggest costs centers. Additionally, as time goes by, these are the jobs that are looked at during cuts so everyone in this layer is in self preservation mode. They start hoarding information going up and down to make themselves indispensable and slowly the organization becomes the Titantic and can't get out of their own way.
The more I think about organizations the more I they seem to be the key players preventing change to me. (Which is not necessarily a bad thing)
Business says: We had this great idea, now let's freeze everything in time and let's make money of this snapshot forever, because who knows when we'll find gold again.
Entertainment industry likes to do that especially.
NO, I'm saying that even individuals are conservative in that they will tend to stay with an existing job, locale or speciality even when an alternative could potentially offer better returns. I don't check the job listings every day.
Risk vs reward. Often the risk is too great, especially for a company that is making a lot of money. Why risk R&D when there's no competitor. Companies are optimised to make money, not progress.
In my opinion autonomy is key. Big organizations like to talk a big game that they empower their employees to take risks. Yet most of the time they default to the status quo. It's culturally there or not.
I think both the 'people' Kay refers to and Kay himself are right. It just depends on the scale you're looking at.
Darwinian processes are near-perfectly optimized ... for an extremely local maximum. Once there, they fail to make jumps to much better nearby maxima.
If you look at a somewhat larger scale, where there are better maxima available, then the correct conclusion is that they are absolutely not optimized.
Wouldn't Darwinian processes produce "just barely good enough" solutions? i.e. once you're at the stage where things are good enough to survive long enough to reproduce, evolution doesn't play much of a role.
A great example of this is me; I'm pretty amazing; I can move around my environment, make a living to a sufficient degree to cover costs of food and shelter, and somehow even have a fiancée and manage to keep another organism alive & fed. However I'm not an expert at everything, I'm pretty bad at most sporting based things (even compared to other, existing humans; not some theoretical concept of perfection), and I spend about a third of my life doing nothing (sleeping), despite this not necessarily being required (e.g. Dolphins can sleep half their brain at a time, allowing them to avoid this inefficient downtime).
Yup. Until there's selection pressure working against you once again. Imagine if society broke down completely, so you had to fight for the limited amount of food that was available?
Somewhat related: it was interesting when my kids were born; they both had to be C-sectioned. I asked the obstetrician about it, and yes, bigger heads are becoming more and more common because mother+child no longer just die when they do occur. We really are removing selection pressures!
That's a nice way to put it. My personal opinion is that Darwinian processes are certainly optimization algorithms, they are just not necessarily optimizing for the same thing as what we might think. As an example, survival is a long-term game. I'm sure there were more aggressive adaptation strategies that went for the local minima and succeeded in the short term, only to be surpassed by the more "patient" algorithms.
There's a huge difference between "exploit in the now" and "exploit, but still be viable in a billion+ years".
Why didn't Boeing or Lockheed Martin make reusable rockets?
Von Braun originally proposed reusable boosters, although he had in mind a parachute system with a water splashdown. A recovery system for the Saturn V was considered, but it would have added time to the schedule, and the "man/moon/decade" goal would have been at risk.
Alan Kay should remember that evolution includes random mutations that get you out of local extrema, and "interesting" recombinations. The rate of these is maybe low, but there are examples where large organizations renew themselves this way. But I agree with the conclusion that this is slow and unreliable.
Alan Kay majored in molecular biology and mathematics ... so he probably does understand just how evolution works. (Hint: the Internet is a good source of bios to look at before making assumptions). We put in a fair amount of work many years ago on personal computing and the Internet so that people can be a few typed characters and clicks away from much of the knowledge of the human race ... what does it take to get people to make use of this?
There's a paper out there with the title "Cognition is not computation; evolution is not optimization". I haven't read it!
I'm not sure you are accepting the basic principle, which is that evolution is not in any way optimization (not that the evolutionary process is not "optimized").
The important bit is evolution is not optimizing for things humans understand. If you say evolution is optimizing for more copies of your DNA fragments your closer to the truth than saying 'fitness' in larger contexts. Don't forget there is more biomass in single celled organisms than single celled organisms. In terms of 'fitness' that does not seem like progress.
Optimization implies "teleonomy", the idea that there's a goal toward which evolution is working, however obscure to us. The interesting question IMHO is whether such a goal exists, somehow expressed or implied by the laws of physics. Jeremy England's work on thermodynamic reasons for the emergence of configurations/mechanisms/organisms that are good at dissipating energy is an example of recent research that asks why we have these complex organisms at all, and tries to answer that question with pure physics.
Not really. A fire's heat creates conditions under which fire more easily spreads by drying out the surrounding area. That's does not suggest needs / wants / goals etc it simply a statement of what happens in very specific circumstances. Further, while evolution might seem to be dissipating energy, oxygen + coal is a much larger reserve of energy than you get in similar environment without life.
And the rate of random mutation varies, influenced by evolution. Eukaryotes even have two sets of DNA, mitochondrial and regular, with very different mutation rates. The complexity of biology, I think, is greatly underestimated by most.
If you are more on the side of accepting punctuated equilibrium, then this isn't true. Organisms will evolve to the local optimum and then stay there. By definition, since most mutations will result in lower fitness.
It's only when the environment changes (rise of mammals post dinosaur-extinction) or the organisms themselves change environment (Darwin's finches) that you get the rapid rates of evolution to find the new optimumm.
Some obvious analogies of these two situations in tech are the rise of the Internet (Microsoft did change, but struggled), and the rise of the smartphone (Apple came from nowhere to a position of dominance).
We should eliminate the things other agencies can do from discussions like this one. It's not about what other companies can do, it's about what they are doing. Sure, any major car manufacturer could produce a strong competitor to the Tesla, but they aren't.
I dunno, if you've got $40,000 and a tight schedule you probably end up with a Bolt.
But sure, no one is out there doing anything other than Tesla.
And I think I am giving credit where credit is due. Battery research made a lot of progress, Tesla used the resulting batteries to make nice electric vehicles. I mean, they have a battery partner and all that jazz.
Agreed that Tesla likely couldn't exist without battery technology that's developed only in the last several years, however, a Tesla is a lot more than a battery. No company has stepped up to say, "let's build a consumer electric sports car" or "consumer electric SUV" or "consumer electric luxury sedan", and that's probably down to stale corporate culture more than any single other reason.
An interesting aspect of carrying cars rather than trains is that it makes an incomplete network far more useful.
A public transportation network's usefulness is roughly quadratic in proportion to its size, because it needs to cover both your origin and your destination. A small subway system is nearly useless, because even people who live or work near it probably don't live and work near it. You can mitigate this to an extent with busses, taxis, letting people park at stations, etc., but there's still a lot of friction.
By carrying cars, these tunnels will act as an extension of the road network, which almost certainly covers your origin and destination already. The tunnel part doesn't need to serve the ends, it just needs to exist somewhere in the middle to be useful.
If you build one subway line, it's pretty much "great, let's finish the system so we can have something useful." If you build one Boring Tunnel, it would be immediately useful for anyone whose car trips are vaguely in that direction.
I'm really skeptical it'll all work out, but I don't think it should be thought of as a lame subway.
Indeed. This was implemented here ~15 years ago. The initial fears "Just ride the damn bikes! Trains full of cyclists! Cats and dogs living together!!!" did not materialize, and it's a major improvement on a bike's radius.
> But then for some reason the solution has to involve putting cars into these tunnels. If what he thinks he is on to is viable with cars in those tunnels, it's even more viable with trains carrying 1,000 passengers each coming every 3 minutes. So why aren't we building these subways with trains?
Because with trains you never build just a tunnel - there are train stations, escalators leading in and out, ticketing booths/machines, electrical work to power all that fun stuff, connectors to existing depots so that maintenance workers can come and service the cars and the engines.
His idea is closer to Madrid, which has dug tunnels to relieve the city streets of the traffic. The tunnels themselves are very unassuming and look like onramps and underground parking garage entrances.
But even with the stations, escalators and everything else, you're talking about orders of magnitude between trains and cars. London during peak hour has trains arriving less than 1 min 30 sec apart. They move an absolutely insane amount of people. Singapore's trains are entirely automated and arrive at <2min intervals at peak.
Everything about Musk's idea seems absolutely terrible. If America had better trains and subways, it could move massive amounts of people. Train automation is a solved problem, and currently implemented in cities around the world. There is absolutely no possible way in any reality where individual car/pod transport could even approach the capacity of real mass transit:
Americans need to get over our wasteful individualism, our "alone time" in cars and realize you can read a book, watch a movie or do something not involving driving on real public transport. Buses need to stop being just a means of transport for the poor.
> If America had better trains and subways, it could move massive amounts of people. Train automation is a solved problem, and currently implemented in cities around the world.
In most European cities, if you get off at train station, you're in the midst of (or very close to) the city center, office locations, touristy walking sites and plenty of choices for retail or food.
In the US once you get off at the train station, well, you're at the train station, and now need a car to go anywhere you actually need to go. NYC and SF are likely to be the only exception - train stations as close as LA or San Jose are fairly sparse and have limited connections.
You can run the fastest most frequent train you can handle, and California in fact is building one between Borden and Corcoran, but the "step 2" in US cities generally involves getting a car.
There is no right place for a train station in a sprawling city. An effective train station needs a certain amount of stuff within walking distance, which is only possible if the city is built that way.
They didn't become sprawling cities on their own. If you plant down rail, the city reshapes over time. The areas right next to stations becomes high value retail space. Their sales immediately jump up. Rails literally change the commerce and economy around their points.
For many cities, not just NYC and SF, but yes, it is true only for major cities.
EDIT: embellishment due to baq, this tends to be true of cities which developed before the car revolution of the 50's and 60's. For example, my city has a pretty poor average walkability score, but for where I live in the city core, it is very walkable since it is the older part of the city.
> In the US once you get off at the train station, well, you're at the train station, and now need a car to go anywhere you actually need to go.
This lesson seems to have been lost for some reason but infrastructure is to be built first, destinations second. Much of the New York City Subway system, like in the Bronx, was built through farmland. Once the infrastructure was built, destinations (dense residential) was built. It has to work that way. It's not practical to expect there to be any destinations available when the subway opens- people need a few decades to rearrange themselves.
This system applies to moving people just as much as moving cars. But for political reasons it makes sense to emphasize the extent to which this is about car owners.
also what about safety? If there is an accident then you will have a huge pile of cars/sleds crashing into each other; How do you get injured out of a narrow tunnel? What about fires? What about ventilation (in case of fire) ? These are all problems of tunnels, now the narrow tunnel makes these problems more difficult to deal with.
Absolutely. And the biggest problem is what to do with all those cars in the city. It's an enormous waste of space to park all those cars, besides the enormous hazards of the moving cars, not being to be able to walk. It destroyed cities.
That's why public mass transport was created and was so successful in the big cities. US big automotive destroyed most of this working infrastructure in the last century (E.g. Los Angeles, Houston, ...) but it's still cheaper to build mass transport than to support individual transport. Just ask a New Yorker or a foreigner.
Tunnels are a hazard for individual traffic. That's why pods do help. But trains are still preferred.
It's a good alternative idea to build long range tunnels. He is right. But the focus needs to be mass transport, not individual. It's a matter of costs.
If there's a tunneled transport infrastructure with cars moving around on sleds, you just need a few mile length tunnels off in nowhere and you've made a robot parking garage.
You could rent your car back to the system to use as a lounge for people who want to travel but didn't bring a car to get on the network. Saves you parking costs, maybe an operator could work out paying you for that.
> And the biggest problem is what to do with all those cars in the city.
Tunnels are great parking structures. Cars on sleds provide a great interface to said parking structure. Heck, NYC has automated parking structures with car elevators and sleds. The only imagination required is not having to dig a big hole down to the depth of the lowest level of the garage first.
One problem is that trains only move an insane amount of people that are all going the same way.
Another problem is that all those people have to walk to and from the end station.
A "packet switched" system of sending individual cars at high speed solves both those problems, and going just by my gut feel, should have a quite high throughput too.
Here in Melbourne, I used to have a bit of a "gut feel" that it might not be efficient to give over two entire lanes of our roads to our light rail vehicles. Having two lanes sit empty for so long between trams seemed so wasteful. And for what, a single vehicle to come through every minute or two?
Then I sat at an intersection one day and counted how many individuals were being moved through two lanes of regular car traffic vs how many came through on the light rail.
I was shocked by how inefficient regular traffic is.
So now MY gut feel is that without any technological breakthrough, this sort of system would already be starting with an order of magnitude disadvantage: which is to say, shockingly inefficient compared to allready available technology and solutions...
>One problem is that trains only move an insane amount of people that are all going the same way. Another problem is that all those people have to walk to and from the end station. A "packet switched" system of sending individual cars at high speed solves both those problems, and going just by my gut feel, should have a quite high throughput too.
People are walking from the station to these giant office towers in central London. The walk from the Tube station to the office must only take 5-10 minutes, total. My gut feeling says the throughput won't be high specifically because you'll have 800 or so people trying to get out at the same place at roughly the same time.
> This doesn't apply to the centrally controlled car delivery system Musk is planning.
How would that work? Now it's true that there won't be any delays caused by drivers not paying attention, but unless the cars will go 125 mph with only a couple meters of space between them (eep!) the cars will require a non-zero delay "off the line" to allow them to spread out as they gain speed.
Centrally controlled trains are still required to be spaced out by their stopping distance. The only way this or hyperloop will do better than trains is through regulatory arbitrage.
Quite the opposite: the requirement to be spaced out by their stopping distance is regulatory arbitrage; if the design was "it might, in corner cases, crash and injure people, but who cares, they knew the risk", you could run trains far closer together (which happens all the time in manually controlled streetcars: tailgate the other tram and pray the guy in front won't slam the brakes).
Regulatory arbitrage is when you profit from a difference in regulations. If someone could figure out how to run a train but have it regulated as a car (with car-like safety properties) they would be able to run an extremely high-capacity service; I suspect this is Musk's gameplan.
Why are you assuming that there won't be minivans on the sleds? Or a larger format sled that can accommodate a bus-sized transport or a mid-size truck?
I think in the original video, they showed a pod with a group of commuters.
The American obsession with "alone time" is exactly why Musk's idea is the only effective way to relieve the traffic problem. Americans are adverse to change, and the result of this is a solution needs to leverage our existing infrastructure. Putting the cars on sleds allows people to keep the luxury and flexibility of personal cars without requiring a lifestyle shift.
Furthermore, a solution that leverages personal vehicles is slightly more viable for a private sector company. Telsa can continue to promote their car sales without that having a negative effect on the Boring Company.
This idea that a company can replace our entire existing infrastructure with a train/bus system is just purely impractical. There is the solution that seems the most obvious (current public transit), and then there is the one that is actually viable from a business perspective.
I don't get it, where does that come from anyway? I mean America's mostly a country of immigrants; most inhabitants' forefathers, only a couple generations ago, abandoned everything they know to build up a new life. If that's not change, then IDK what is.
I think that at one point it's not about what they want - having the option even to drive anywhere is a luxury a lot of people don't have - it's what's practical. Driving in New York isn't practical, so people take the tube - regular services, high capacity, etc. There's no way a tunnel system with individual cars, which will have a much lower capacity than a regular road, will be able to compete, neither on cost nor capacity.
Of course, if you're rich then it doesn't matter. I'm sure it'll work in SF, where there should be plenty of people that can afford it.
> I don't get it, where does that come from anyway?
The best answer I have: the more people are individualistic, the more difficult it is for them to coordinate. Big changes like fundamental infrastructure require collective buy-in, and when you have lots of self-interested individuals who stand to gain by introducing friction into the process, costs skyrocket.
The alternative ends of the spectrum (it's not 1D) of that is more social people (dream utopia, I don't know where it exists, if at all) and more authoritarian control (easiest way to coordinate people is to have someone unilaterally decide for them).
That's an excellent answer and I think you are right. Car culture is a big deal in the US and I think the perceived independence it represents is part of the reason why.
I think LA is an even better example of where it will work. There are no trains, and the bus system is very poor.
The tunnels obviously don't make sense in places that have well established train systems, but a lot of places don't have that. Often in America, the only 'practical' way to get around is using a personal vehicle.
I'd wager that there is a lot of hidden infrastructure in a tunnel, which carries cars compared to train tunnels.
Ventilation, as a very critical entity, comes to mind. Also safety features are extremely critical. I live in a country with lots of tunnels and essentially every longer auto tunnel has additional tubes that are under pressure, for example. That's required if you suddenly have a burning vehicle in the middle of a narrow tube.
While car tunnels don't need to be sexy from an optical perspective there's a ton of necessary infrastructure and safety features, which aren't immediately obvious.
Maybe this changes when we all go electric, but I really don't see that happening anytime soon.
Not just that. You need telematics (you don't want cars stuck in the tunnel - if a fire breaks out, it's a death trap), you need emergency exit/access tunnels, you need ventilation tunnels, and you need all of that to run in HA mode. "Just a hole in the ground" is a very simplistic view; but perhaps this is a thought-provoking way to put it, EM is known for some radical solutions.
The Boring Company isn't just looking to build tunnels either- there's going to be a bunch of interesting infrastructure to get cars onto those electric sleds and operating them, and that'll need maintenance and access and etc too.
For what its worth, it hints that those sleds will also become public transit platforms as well - "if one adds a vacuum shell, it is now a Hyperloop pod" - but Musk will want to call it something cool like an Urban Hyperloop instead of just a subway.
>For what its worth, it hints that those sleds will also become public transit platforms as well
So this is something I've been trying to address all thread, so excuse me picking your comment.
You can only create a public transit platform by having _dedicated_ infrastructure. We know this because cities like London and Paris (and not-so-big Vancouver) all have mostly-to-fully automated trains with 90-second headways between each train at rush hour. This basically means that if once a train pulls out of the station, the next one pulls in mere seconds later. These trains are usually packed to the gills. Even one single-occupancy vehicle would decrease the overall efficiency of that system.
Heck, you can create a tunnel in each which sled contains one bus and it'd still be less efficient than the London Tube because the whole thing will take up more space, physically (these trains squeeze in every last passenger). This is what Seattle tried to do with the downtown bus tunnel and they're evicting all the buses there in favor of light rail.
I think it will always make sense for subway trains in dense city cores, but I think the discussion about dedicated rapid transit is hampered in more suburban areas because of the whole notion that we have to fit in cars into rapid transit corridors, or else it's not worth it. But this ends up making buses less reliable and gives them their crappy reputation (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_bunching).
Grade-separation is absolutely necessary for good rapid transit.
You are making too many assumptions about the system. For example, their goal seems to be multiple stacked tunnels vs a single one for metro, plus trains don't go 125mph.
Well, my city has dug tunnels to redirect ground traffic. Result: traffic on top abates for a few months, people notice, more of them start driving, now we have tunnels and the same level of surface traffic as before. Yay.
With the capacity in mind, this project will end up having much lower throughput than a regular road, even when taking congestion in mind - unless they build dozens of parallel tubes, in which case the costs will become very, very large. I also don't see it becoming a long-distance alternative, again because tunneling is a slow and long process.
It would be interesting I guess if they combined it with the Hyperloop concept, board the tube system in the city, transition to a (cheaper?) above-ground vacuum tunnel system at a transit station.
But it's all very science-fiction and, if anything, it's not going to be cheap. Like, at all.
At least it's a commercial project, not something a government has to pay for.
It's not science fiction, it's just drilling holes in the ground vs waiting for flying cars.
It may be expensive - but you only have to build each tunnel once.
There's a startup that got some hype recently for flying an electric airplane between London and Paris - when as someone commented on the HN story [0] you can just take the Eurostar through the tunnel - which is electric and takes just as long and doesn't cost any more.
In traffic, you have to look at both throughput and carrying capacity. Traffic jams usually result when the carrying capacity gets strained, not throughput. (The throughput of stop-and-go traffic is lower than the throughput of 70 mph traffic, but the road can carry more cars in total, so that equilibrium dominates when the load coming from surface streets exceeds some threshold.)
I think you're missing the point. Of course trains are better. So why don't we have more trains?
Because people have opinions on trains. So instead of building train tunnels you debate it for 20 years in town halls and NIMBY protests and nothing changes.
This is clearly a hack around that issue. The article mentions a Hyperloop several times, that's the ultimate goal here.
While this article[0] demonstrates that numbers have improved slightly for actual car ownership as millenials age, it still contains other tidbits and statistics (like the having driver's license by 18 stat at 60% vs. 80% in 1980) that reflect views on car ownership amongst millenials today.
Anecdote, I don't have a lot of mileage (pun unintended), but every girl I've ever dated did not have license, and neither do I, and I am 27. I live alone and bike and bus ride for the most part.
Don't make the mistake of making macro predictions based on a niche segment. I think generally people aren't "interested" in car ownership; they are interested in fulfilling their transportation needs as best as possible. Car ownership just happens to fulfill that the best right now.
There is the possibility of increased urbanization and improvements to self-driving car technology will make it economically feasible for car ownership to be unnecessary for most, but I highly doubt that happens within the millennial generation. Probably the next one.
I agree. I couldn't be less interested in owning a car. But in the US unless you live in certain few cities, you can't really do without one. And those cities are very expensive.
One of the reasons that subways are built only in very large cities is that you need a very high population density to make it worthwhile because of the cost of digging the tunnels.
But what if the cost were a tenth as much? I posit that for a city of 500,000 - 1,000,000 it might become practical to have subways and that radically changes the transit equation.
So I am very bullish on Musk bringing down the cost of tunneling. It all depends on how low he's able to reduce the cost.
I've got confidence in them too. I think internet commenters are far too quick to overlook the fact that Musk is not going to push forward a venture like this without loads of research from a team of really smart people. It's not like it's just the one Elon with a fantasy about tunnels. It'd start with a bunch of talented people brainstorming and then, early in the process, they'd surely be speaking with really knowledgeable people who know the industry and pitfalls.
If smart and motivated teams can't do something, can anyone?
With something like soil, maybe they figure the technology will be useful even if it only services projects with easy terrain and environments and avoids areas with swamps.
> Musk is not going to push forward a venture like this without loads of research from a team of really smart people. It's not like it's just the one Elon with a fantasy about tunnels. It'd start with a bunch of talented people brainstorming and then, early in the process, they'd surely be speaking with really knowledgeable people who know the industry and pitfalls.
Actually, the story is that Musk made it up on a whim while stuck in L.A. traffic, founded the company the same day and bought a used drilling rig which started digging in the Tesla parking lot.
OK, it'd start with a user frustrated by a problem, then go to brainstorming with colleagues/employees/peers/friends and then go to industry experts and hires with direct experience. ;)
Really the main difference is that someone without money and follow through would've just sat in traffic and complained.
You're implying that Musk's "follow through" is a result of his money and connections, when the reverse is true.
Yes, of course, now that he has money, connections, and a powerful reputation, that makes it easier for him to do things. But he created the money, connections, and power by being able to do things even when he had none of them.
Obviously that eases the process but some people follow through and some don't. Some have big dreams and some just invest for themselves only. I can think of loads of rich people who aren't out there starting companies to push forward space exploration, car technology, tunnelling machines, etc. He has pretty serious runs on the board now.
>the Hyperloop story wasn't true, it was really conceived by Et3
You might want to look at them closer. Hyperloop and ET3 are very different from a technical perspective, even though they're superficially similar.
ET3 tubes need 1/1,000,000th of an atmosphere to mitigate the sonic boom, and that makes the pumping requirements exceedingly hard (requiring multi-stage pumping with turbo- and cryo-pumps). That also means ET3 has a higher top speed, assuming you can secure the right-of-way to satisfy the minimum curve radius.
Hyperloop tubes use 1/1,000th of an atmosphere, chosen because it's the lowest pressure achievable with purely mechanical pumping. They then route air around the pod, allowing them to approach the speed of sound despite the fact that air has to speed up as it squeezes around the pod (aka the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kantrowitz_Limit).
So ET3's pumps see basically the same differential pressure, but 1,000x more volume needs to be pumped per m^3 of air that leaks in. This means the Hyperloop requires less pumping power, fewer pump units, uses only cheap mechanical pumps, and can tolerate more air leakage than ET3. This is a big win, since the tube is the expensive part.
Yes, smart people are magic. Doesn't matter how much sense the idea itself makes, one only needs to ship it off to those 'motivated talented people', they will figure everything out.
Indeed they are. As any experience with anything remotely more complicated than building a cube out of Lego bricks should tell you. For any practical problem there are many ways to address it that may not seem obvious in the first five seconds of looking at it.
Lausanne recently took the smallest-city-with-a-subway title from Rennes, France (214k).
My family is from Lausanne and I spent a few months studying in Rennes–the size and density plus the metro system makes these cities really pleasingly 'human scaled' in my view. Walking-first center city areas with lots of restaurants/shops, easily accessed from less dense areas by metro+good bus systems+intercity train, but small enough overall to not feel sprawling.
He's trying to hit a price point. We're not completely allergic to the $20M freeway bridge that's about 100ft long, and comes with heavy upkeep costs over the long term. So, $100M per mile with Upkeep Lite™ sounds good when making conversation about the topic. Also the $1B/mile is the cost of the Purple Line extension in Los Angeles. Worst case cost no doubt. A real figure nevertheless.
> So, $100M per mile with Upkeep Lite™ sounds good when making conversation about the topic. Also the $1B/mile is the cost of the Purple Line extension in Los Angeles. Worst case cost no doubt. A real figure nevertheless.
The figure is way out. Crossrail in London has a $20 billion total budget (£15b GBP), with 26 miles of tunnel[1]. But the tunnel is only part of the project, several billion is being spent on new regular track and station rebuilds, so the tunneling figure is really closer to $15 billion.
That's about $570 million per mile, but the Crossrail tunnels are just shy of 50% bigger in diameter than what Musk wants to build (20.5' vs 14'). And as the FAQ says, "reducing the diameter in half reduces tunneling costs by 3-4 times".
LA's tunnel might be costing $1B/mile, but how much of that cost is actual construction versus bureaucracy and mismanagement?
I don't know where this "$1B/mile" just for tunneling figure comes from. That's certainly not the tunneling cost for any current subway extension project in Los Angeles: all-in (i.e. not only tunneling) estimates for the first phase of the Purple Line extension are at $2.8B for 3.9 miles of heavy rail subway; the full Purple Line Extension is estimated at $6.3B for 9 miles of heavy rail subway.
The closest thing is the Regional Connector project, which will be 1.9 miles of light rail and has a budget of $1.8B. But that's the entire project budget. Tunneling costs are only part of it; it's hard to find a finely grained budget, but total construction (including four new underground stations) is budgeted at $1.2B here [1], which is still "just" $600M/mile.
Well, that's some adverse conditions - a silt riverbed behaves quite like water, so you're actually building a submerged part of the city. Look at London's early tunnels and their cost overruns (and the maintenance due to leaks).
> If what he thinks he is on to is viable with cars in those tunnels, it's even more viable with trains carrying 1,000 passengers each coming every 3 minutes.
A few reasons off the top of my head:
- flexibility; car infrastructure is much more flexible than train infrastructure
- incremental construction - cars already exist, you're only solving the problem of moving them around (building train infrastructure means building more trains with additional train-supporting infrastructure and more railroads outside of tunnels)
- meshes well with electrification of car transportation
- allows to reduce fossil fuel polution with minimum impact on people's habits - instead of asking someone to start using trains, you just ask them to drive into a tunnel, and for the duration of tunnel transit, the pollution (and fuel costs) magically disappear
- related, it's easier do incremental changes than all-out revolutions
- R&D in efficient boring could be of vital importance to future Mars colony
- last but not least, electric PRT system (aka. "packed-switched" public transport) could be, and probably will, incrementally implemented with self-driving electric cars; this again meshes nicely with that future (benefits of PRT over other forms of public transit are a longer topic)
Presumably whether this system is privately or publicly operated, there would be a major toll associated with its use. So the ask isn't just "drive into a tunnel", it's "drive into a tunnel and pay $$$", compared with a new subway line integrated with the existing mass transit system (trains and buses) and under the same fare.
I suppose you could let people buy monthly tickets the same way they do for public transit, and handle the rest the same way automated ticketing of speeding is handled.
I think the sled idea is really interesting. Imagine a conveyor belt like you have in airports. Except it moves cars at 150 mph through an underground tunnel instead of people at 15mph.
Traffic is often massively asymmetric so you can just reverse the direction it travels at noon.
It seems plausible that keeping a conveyor belt in good service is cheaper than keeping a fleet of railway cars is. It's also significantly less hassle as you don't need to figure out where to put railway cars when they get the end of the track. Finally it's costs would scale fairly linearly with distance, making short belts totally doable in a way that short railway systems are not.
The natural throughput of the system will be high. Like a new car on the belt every x seconds, where x is not a big number, seems totally plausible.
Generously assuming that it averages 150mph, and very generously assuming 1.5 people per car and estimating from the video a gap between sleds of 40m gives a capacity of around 9,000 pax/hr per line. The Tube in London has trains with around 900 pax capacity, and they run at around 90 second intervals at peak time, giving 40 trains per hour and 36,000 pax/hr.
One point people seem to be ignoring is that Elon mentions on multiple occasions that he plans to build in 3D, i.e. not just one layer of tunnel in one direction but multiple tunnels at multiple depths in multiple directions i.e. to get your 36k pax/hr will require 4 layers.
It's already been mentioned that putting cars in the tunnels increases the usefulness of the tunnels quickly without requiring a large network of tunnels right off the bat. I think it's always possible to convert the tunnels to trains at a later date with a much lower cost than the initial investment. I think having the tunnels be designed for cars makes a lot of sense for Elon in particular because he can design the tunnels as an ideal environment for the first generation of self driving cars. This would give him a good start getting self driving cars on the road.
In order to be useful trains need to form large network. Few mile subway route is not so interesting.
A tunnel for cars is different. Even a single and relatively short tunnel is useful and people would probably pay something for access. This means you would start making money on the investment quite quickly.
I agree that trains are the right thing to do, but that is much larger project and likely too big to be an option for private company.
the smaller diameter is because he's building for cars and not roads, and as for trains I think he need the early adopters aka, the rich to invest. mass transit is for the poor and doesn't attract investors. but in the long run it's probably better. but if you look at the mockup video there's an mpv that enters the tunnels, not just teslas.
I think it's move polivalent to transport vehicles (personal or mpv) that way the last 1-5 miles can be resumed by the vehicle and they don't have to stop everywhere (which is the main crutch of trains), you want to cover as much area and not have "why don't you stop near my house" syndrome.
there's also nothing stopping bicycle riders from using the system provided there are seats to strap into and goggles to wear.
"If what he thinks he is on to is viable with cars in those tunnels, it's even more viable with trains carrying 1,000 passengers each coming every 3 minutes"
When it's all said and done, Elon is a car salesman and entrepreneur, I guess that's why?
Maybe the explanation for glossing over some of the obvious hindrances (that you and several other commenters wisely point out) is that these projects are not conceived out of an organic need or to problem-solve issues - even though they are projected as such...but, these are projects that are born out of some (unpublished) masterplan/roadmap for learning to establish a colony on Mars.
Just learning how to build tunnels is interesting from that respect.
The reason that isn't stated is because Musk likes to create projects around a "purpose" and business plan for them to succeed (even if they are retro-fitted - that is, he decided first that it would be important to tunnel, and then arrived at the "why tunnels on earth").
edit: not a new thought. some other commenters already pointed this out. I read those after posting this.
Yeah; come to think of it, any reasonable project of bootstrapping a viable Mars colony with present-era tech would have to involve tunnelling, as it offers many benefits at the cost of only shipping construction equipment and delivering electricity. I could totally believe Elon has Mars in mind with this project.
> Issues glossed over: Soil variability. … The back end.
Good points. And beyond the technical aspects, there's a lot that the FAQ doesn't say about the service:
- How do you tell your sled where to go? Does it always go to the same place? If so, do you merge lanes? If you merge lanes, wouldn't there be jams there? If instead you build many parallel tunnels, don't you remove the gains you had from building smaller tunnels, by having many more tunnels?
- How is it meant to compete on price or human bandwidth with subways? Surely at 200 km/h you need to maintain space between sleds in case one fails. Plus, the sleds are not large, which limits human bandwidth. Finally, if you have lots of tunnels (at least one for each origin/destination, instead of subways with many stops), you will need to maintain and repair that infrastructure, which will require service tunnels and backup tunnels, which adds to the cost.
Another thought: they don't mention how they'll design the tunnel network yet. My guess is that it will be backboned by double circular tracks (one for clockwise driving, the other for anticlockwise), from which you have regular exit/entrance ramps at each stop. The circularity would avoid having a terminus where everyone slows down.
Still, any design would have a maximum capacity corresponding to how fast vehicles can exit in the worst case, if they all suddenly decided to leave at the exact same stop.
the giant ipad on the dashboard of your tesla, or your phone otherwise.
>If you merge lanes, wouldn't there be jams there? If instead you build many parallel tunnels [etc]
because if the increased speed, one lane is the equivalent of about 2.5 highway lanes in terms of throughput per hour. Regarding safety distance, I think you can actually safely achieve smaller spacing with a roller-coaster style mechanism than with tires on asphalt. I would say that as well is a 2x throughput multiplier. So parallelization seems largely unnecessary.
>How is it meant to compete on price or human bandwidth with subways?
ok so take an 8 car subway train with 40 people per car on a 10 minute interval. 8 * 40 * 6 = 1920 people per hour travel from A to B.
then take sleds each containing a car with 2 people, paced 300ft apart traveling at 125mph. that is 2 people * (125mph / 0.0568182mi) = 4400 people per hour
> take sleds each containing a car with 2 people, paced 300ft apart traveling at 125mph. that is 2 people (125mph / 0.0568182mi) = 4400 people per hour*
I think 300 ft is for 75 mph. Using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braking_distance, the distance at 125 mph is 55 m/s * 55 m/s / (2 * 1 * 10 m/s2) = 150 m = 500 ft, resulting in 2 people * 125 mph / 0.09 mi = 2.8 khumans/h.
(On the demo video, their vehicles look like they are tire-on-asphalt.)
The vehicles use a monorail, not asphalt. Both in the concept video and the actual prototype of the electric sled in a tube video.
Also, the concept video shows multi-user pods. If you pack them as full as a rush hour subway, you could probably equal or exceed a subway's throughput.
Melbourne's light rail E-class trams have a carrying capacity of 64 seated: 146 standing. They can regularly mix with pedestrians. The E class is the "big" one at about 40 seconds:
Melbournes older, 6 car trains have a crush capacity of ~1526. Seatwise they have ~500-600, with a standard target capacity of about 800 (above that the extra variance/numbers people start to complain about overcrowding).
Now, those old trains aren't the newest, and they're single-decker and not the biggest or double-decker like sydney's, and they're not the bestest like some of the asian fully-auto metros.
But, my point being is that by the numbers before we start getting too crowded, our quite average older 6 car trains have point in time comfortable capacity about 2-3 times more than your 8 car subway estimate. Hell, three of our light rail vehicles regularly move the numbers of your 8-car subway.
But wait...
We've not actually accounted for the trips accurately, because if a train runs the full length of its track only carrying its estimated point in time comfortable capacity, the carriages would be quite empty: the total passengers using a train aren't its point-in-time-carrying capacity, but how many get on and off between all the stops along its path. That goes for light rail too. So to find the actual number of people moved by train or light rail, you generally have to multiply the carrying capacity by some additional multiple.
On the other hand, private vehicles generally, in practice have a person per vehicle estimate UNDER 2 (barring geography, time, purpose variances), meaning your estimate is overly optimistic for the cars, and out by about an order of magnitude for the rail vehicles.
I was not being facetious when I made another comment in this thread when I said I was shocked by how inefficient private vehicles were when I actual went down to the intersection and started counting how long it took them to move say 100 people (equivalent of 1 of our trams), nor am I being facetious when I say not only that this is likely a problem with an already known solution, but a problem where The Boring Companies apparent solution is starting with a rough order-of-magnitude efficiency penalty.
I'm honestly a bit...feel like I'm taking crazy pills...that people are talking about the proposal of putting private individual vehicles on rails...in tunnels.
I totally agree with you that cars are hilariously inefficient. Let alone single occupancy cars.
The problem is that most US cities are completely unwalkable, so you need a car once you hop out of the station, or you need an incredibly large subway system.
This is being proposed for LA initially, which is one of the most sprawled, least walkable cities in the US.
TBMs can turn, albeit slowly. Bigger tunnels are not necessarily more efficient than parallel tunnels. Consider changing a 1 lane to a 2 lane tunnel. You can dig two adjacent tunnels, or you can use a TBM that is twice as wide, and therefore has to remove 4x as much material. Even if you can only build 2 or 3 TBMs per bigger TBM, it's a win.
The tunnels are still pretty big, and the sleds could be 10' wide and 10' vertical if the tunnel ID is 14'. That's pretty comparable to a subway or bus, and the increased distance between the sleds is made up for by the increased speed.
"- Soil variability. Very different techniques are required for different soils. Sometimes the soil has to be "conditioned", adding something to make it solid enough it can be drilled through.[1] This is the biggest practical problem in tunneling. Too much water is the usual problem."
Too much water won't be a problem on Mars... where I think the end-game here is for Musk on why he's learning how to build tunneling machines.
Fine, dry sand is also a problem. It leads to "over-excavating"; you keep digging and removing material as more slides down. You either get a big unwanted cavern that has to be supported, or break through to the surface.
In my fantasies I've got a microtbm which digs a 4" diameter tunnel over to San Jose right under MAE-WEST so that I can pull a fiber right to the Internet :-)
For the soil variability, is that hit when the TBM gets to a bad patch, is some kind of geophys carried out beforehand, or are there probe TBMs?
I suspect having mini TBMs which go ahead of the main machine, boring small tubes would be an effective way to give feedback on what's coming up; avoiding nasty surprises / helping to prepare ahead of a change of soil type.
Soil testing by drilling small vertical test holes with well-drilling equipment is routine. This would be essential in Los Angeles, which is a mountain range covered by sedimentary basin fill. Here and there the mountain range peeks above ground, which is why you see some rock outcroppings in mostly flat LA. The mountain range is still there, underground.
It is well-mapped. LA used to have an oil industry, with oil wells all over the city. So the underground has been explored and studied by the oil industry. UCLA has been studying Los Angeles area geology since the 1920s.
Exploring horizontally has been done for a few projects that lack vertical access. Eurotunnel drilled the service tunnel first. Some mountain tunnel projects in Japan did horizontal test bores. You can't do this directly ahead of the main TBM without interfering with the main dig.
JFYT, that is a technique widely used, but normally not on tunnels that are (final diameter) TBM excavated, only or those that are excavaed through more traditional means (explosives/excavators).
Basically if you want to excavate a tunnel (say) 12 m in diameter, you first bore a tunnel with a much more small TBM, typically 3.6 m in diameter.
This pre-bore provides three great advantages:
1) Ventilation of the tunnel during the enlargement is greatly simplified
2) You have a very sensible saving on explosives (if explosives are used) or however faster excavating times (because a large part of the amount of explosive is needed to "start" the demolition of the rock, i.e. pull the center "core" out)
3) From the pre-bore you can (when you encounter problematic terrain) drill radial holes for consolidation of the surrounding terrain (though cement injection or other similar techniques)
If the final diameter is TBM excavated as well, #1 advantage above is only partial, #2 is almost non-existing while of course #3 remains, BUT, you cannot make the pre-bore much smaller than the 3/3.6 m diameter as otherwise it would be only useful as a geo prospection mean, as it wouldn't be practical to use it for anything else, and there would surely be issues (for smaller diameters) with ventilation.
AND the other bad news are that - more or less and as a first approximation - a TBM has an operative tunnelling speed of roughly 400 m/month that is almost independent from the diameter (while a traditionally excavated tunnel is more around 100 m/month without pre-bore and 120/130 m/month with the pre-bore), so while it may make sense (of course a lot of factors are involved), if you have a 4 Km tunnel to make a pre-bore that will add roughly 12 month to your 50-60 months project excavation time (traditional), it won't make much sense unless for other very particular considerations to add those same 12 months to the 12 months a full face TBM would take.
What is often done on full face excavated tunnels with TBM is prospection holes (horizontal, drilled from the face of the TBM) in the 30-50 m range, to explore what lies ahead in the immediate future.
Electric car motors are not anywhere near high torque. They're mostly designed for high speeds and go through a reduction gearbox (in addition to the reduction of the differential itself). Furthermore, the motors in Tesla cars are pedestrian in design.
Tesla pioneered mass-produced liquid-cooled electric motors. Those were rare before Tesla. Now they're much more widely used.
Tesla was forced into that technology. The original Roadster had a two-speed transmission and an air-cooled motor. The huge jolt on the transmission when it shifted during acceleration wore it out in months. So Tesla had to develop a motor with a wider power range that would fit in the original space. That forced them to liquid cooling. Previously, liquid cooling an electric motor was considered unnecessary complexity; just make it a little bigger and use air cooling. Now, it's common for electric cars and is being used for electric powered aircraft.
Liquid-cooled motors are widespread in many applications already and technically it's not something complicated. Furthermore, high torque, multi-pole motors (assuming you want to direct-drive a cutting head moving at 2-4 RPM) have little to do with with the kinds of motors used in cars.
If NYC didn't have a third dimension for transportation (subway and trains), no amount of busses and bikes would fix the soul-destroying traffic. The listed alternatives are all nice, but none of them allow you to move at 125+ mph. We should be able to get to our destination faster, not just with a bit less soul-destruction. Remote work is of course not for every or even most professions, and I don't see why it would reduce the density of cities. Cities are still highly desired to live in outside of work
> If NYC didn't have a third dimension for transportation (subway and trains), no amount of busses and bikes would fix the soul-destroying traffic.
Yes they would. If you took the existing surface street network and made it 100% buses and/or ground-level trains you could accomodate current subway and road capacity with room to spare, even before you reclaimed all the space currently used for car parking. Private cars are an astonishingly inefficient use of space, and taxis are barely any better.
> The listed alternatives are all nice, but none of them allow you to move at 125+ mph.
We don't need to though. There's no conceivable need for a city to accommodate more people than could live within a 30-minute commute at current speeds if we were willing to build at the high densities that are actually possible.
"Private cars are an astonishingly inefficient use of space, and taxis are barely any better."
... and buses are even worse.
NYC works because of trains and as a proponent of train travel and public transportation (except buses) I believe they have indeed solved many problems with their diverse rail network.
Buses are a canard - they are the minimum viable public transport option that were pried out of suburban taxpayer hands and presented to poor urban (usually black) riders by planners who didn't care about public transportation at all.
This ruse has gone on so long that in 2017, well meaning (and brainwashed) proponents of public transportation see buses as one of the core components of a transport network. Wake up. This is false. You need subways and trains.
Well-functioning transit in cities that prioritize it use very few buses and they use them for weird stopgap or edge cases (or emergencies). BRT is a farce[1]. You should be demanding real, not fake, investment in transit networks. You should be demanding trains.
[1] To be fair, I have seen two very functional BRT models - both in very specific (and wealthy) environments: VelociRFTA in Aspen and Hop/Skip in Boulder. In both cases, however, a well-designed rail corridor would be even better.
London buses have a capacity of 80 to 130 people and are often full. How can that be worse than 60 to 110 cars for each bus?
Even at half the capacity (single deck) you use the space way more efficiently than cars.
Now if you live in a city where the planning was botched, the transit routes made inefficient, and poorly targeted at ghetto areas that's a different problem. In fact you'd probably have the same problem if the same routes were done by trains.
Buses are just a way to transport a lot more people than cars and I can't see how that's a problem...
I agree that buses a terrible solution, but are definitely better than no public transit at all. Sadly, Seattle is almost entirely dependent on buses for public transit, although things are getting slightly better here with recent investments in light rail. Of course, the costs are astronomical and the most important parts of the project won't be complete for decades, so it's cold comfort for anyone currently stuck with a 7 mile, 1 hour commute by bus (or worse).
What's baffling to me is that, in addition to "real" light rail, Seattle is also building out a network of street-level trains. These trains barely carry more passengers than an articulated bus, are subject to the same traffic issues as the buses since they don't have a dedicated right of way, cost way more than adding bus lines, and their tracks create significant hazards for cyclists. I could be wrong, but it seems like this is an example of "buses = bad; trains = good" thinking gone awry.
Tokyo is a much bigger city. They solved the problem by building elevated toll highways. Much simpler solution than digging new holes everywhere and keeping those silly carts running.
Doesn't this just mean that they are expensive? I heard complaints about how expensive Tokyo's subway is. Reducing price and propping the system with tax can be a better approach in the long term, because that can encourage more people to use public transit and reduce demand for costly highways.
(Also, one could argue that the freedom to move around at an affordable price is a basic service the government should strive to provide, although I'm sure some people will regard such an idea as socialist nonsense.)
I was in Tokyo recently. You can cross most of the city by subway/train for ~300 yen, or $2.66 USD at today's change rate. Compare to San Francisco, where I live. A Muni ticket is around $2.25, and a BART ticket ~$4... both with much worse service and smaller coverage.
You could argue, perhaps, that the price is expensive relative to what Japanese people earn, but from my impression it was a very effective and reasonably priced public transportation system.
I can only speak from experience for Hong Kong's MTR system. It has over 100% farebox recovery as well. Fares are distance-based [0] so it's hard to tell, but the average seems to be US$1.20 or so per person (unless you are traveling to Shenzhen) one way, which doesn't include transfers to the privately-run buses. If you believe in the Big Mac index at all this doesn't seem to be much more expensive compared to the US. (Note that it doesn't include transfers to buses.)
But the MTR actually was subsidized by the government, which let MTR Corporation develop the land above the subway to make malls and stuff, which they make even more money on. Presumably some of this profit gets reinvested into the system itself.
It's hard to say, because there's a few different subway operators in Tokyo, and if you switch between them your fare doesn't transfer. An example is JR and Tokyo Metro. There also exists Tobu lines, which run on Tokyo Metro lines, but sometimes have a different schedule. In my experience, the base fare (the price of entry) seems a little high, but the price stays the same for the first few stops, meaning that going 2 stops is more expensive than 4 stops. I think this effect continues into longer subway lines, and the prices of going to different stations is staggered if they are close together (e.g. if two stations are close enough, the price will be the same to go to if you come from the same location). I would argue that Tokyo's subway, overall, is probably about the same price if Bart was the same size.
Beyond the price, Tokyo Metro is almost always on time and pretty clean, and generally the delays happen late at night (the delays are only for a minute or two). Having been here for over a month, I've only experienced one daytime delay that lasted more than 30 seconds.
It only costs that much if you're staying far away or going pretty long distances. I stay in a station pretty far from Central Tokyo (past Kita Senju on the Tobu line) and to get to somewhere like Ginza costs less than 400 Yen, which is about $3.75. However, a chunk of that cost is due to Tobu, and if I was staying in Kita Senju or Ueno my trip would only be about 200-250 Yen.
If you are going from Kita Senju to Ginza then you would be using the Hibiya line. That trip will cost 195yen. Which is the same price for going all the way down to Roppongi where Google is. The Tokyo Metro and Toei lines tend to only have two or three prices depending on distance. This is why going two and three stations almost always costs the same.
Since employers always pay for commuting costs a regular working person spends very little on train tickets day to day. Me and my wife spend about $100 per month between us. With our companies paying a further $70 per month for each of us for our passes to work.
Living in another crowded city, Hong Kong, perhaps I can offer some perspective: We have tons of elevated tools highways and bypasses aimed at reducing traffic, the problem is all these elevated roads needs to go around a lot of tall buildings. Going underground with subway already provides us with better solution to a lot more of our traffic problem. What the boring company's proposing isn't all that different from the subway solution (we already have subway going three or four level deep), it simply allows cars to transported via subway.
That's the difference though, they're not talking about putting tons of people down there, they're talking about putting a small handful at a time (at most) by using cars. It appears much less efficient.
Pay today or pay tomorrow. I don't think it is an outlandish thought IF $100M/mile tunnels are achieved that the TCO for an elevated roadway will be higher. Elevated roadways have to be replaced eventually. Tunnels are more durable, look at the Holland Tunnel for example, 89 years old and no need for replacement in sight. And it's $48M price tag would be $3.3B today for 1.62 miles.
Well, given that both tunnels and elevated roads are still being built, the most expensive likely varies depending on the situation. If Musk really reduces the cost of tunneling by 10x, that calculus will shift in the direction of tunneling, obviously.
Dirt roads are extremely cheap and have been around forever. That doesn't make them the best choice in a modern society.
But rock comes with supporting structure, whereas you need to build those into "sky tunnels". This limits just how much "sky tunnels" you can make in two ways - there's only so much space on the ground you can use, and there's only so much weight it can support. That, and people will get anxious if their sky is totally obstructed by highways in the sky.
Tensile-strength-to-volume ratios for many materials is ridiculously high. Tunnel wall, ceiling, and floor quantities represent massive overengineered for that purpose
A cable tramway is one option for an aerial system. The load-bearing capacity of a 15mm steel cable is impressively high, and it can be strung along pylons.
Not that you'd want to bolt street cars to such a system, but it's an example of a possible people-mover that doesn't require persuading a multiple-kilometers-long bolus of solid granite it'd prefer being elsewhere.
Whilst I'm aware that Musk's premise here is that he can be the boringest guy ever, I'll note that the Gotthard Base Tunnel, in Switzerland, required 17 years of excavation to extend 35.5 km.
Tunnel systems can also give rise to some interesting cascade failure modes. Cab-forward deisel locomotives aren't generally considered a risk factor, until they are. Summary of an accident report, here, five souls lost to bad design of stock and tunnel, inadequate maintenance, poor judgement, and panic response:
Parking is a bigger problem in tokyo if you drive, and the tolls are expensive.
The newer the subway lines in Tokyo are fun because they have to built in under the others (as referenced in the FAQ), you can tell you're on a new line when you descend down flights and flights of stairs.
Yes, for a MagLev train that achieves the fantasy of hyperloop (but is actually happening now). From my perspective, hyperloop and TBC are each 100% upside down in terms of their approach. America can only dream of 505km/hr interstate ground transport.
I'm writing this from aboard the Nozomi express Shinkansen at around 300km/hr, by the way. Just left 名古屋駅.
Hah, amused to be able to read kanji after so many years (nagoya-eki :P)
I have ridden on the Nozomi and it's a fantastically smooth ride. There are indicators of the current speed on the wagon passage doors and it is incredible when it achieves 270+ km/h and everything is passing by so quickly, and yet you can drink your beverage from a cup just fine, just like in an airplane :)
That is still going 3D but without the significant speed increase. Also it is much more beautiful and less noisy to have highways out of sight so that the city is left for people and bikes, as opposed to stacked highways towering over head.
Next to NYC, commuting in Tokyo is effectively trouble-free. It may be crowded, but it's also predictable when the crunch times will be. Trains are on time. Cars keep moving and don't block every intersection with incessant honking.
The "problem of soul-destroying traffic" will exist for as long as driving remains the best all-round option. It's induced demand: build more roads > capacity increases > driving becomes easier > traffic increases until driving is as hard as it was.
Add a congestion charge or tolls, and a proper public transport network. The solution is not more roads, it's fewer cars.
America suffers from one more blight: too much parking. Large chunks of LA have mandatory parking no-one needs. This spreads the city out further whilst not actually providing parking where it's needed.
Cities like LA will become denser over time. It might seem counterintuitive but increasing density alleviate traffic (people walk).
You can't clean a hotel or flip a burger remote.
Public transit has failed to solve the problem despite a 100-year head start.
Cycling... in LA...
I don't think the Boring Company is trying to solve the gridlock. They will, however, provide an option for those who can afford to pop down into a Teslalane [sic] for a trip to the airport. And that's fine. It's [Teslalanes] infrastructure that ultimately helps the city thrive until the time that the land use patterns rebalance. There will always be traffic - but it won't always have the same overall impact.
>Public transit has failed to solve the problem despite a 100-year head start.
I take objection to this because, aside from other cities where public transit is the norm, the interurban system in LA [0] was dismantled, partially because it was forced out by cars that increased congestion to the point that streetcars could no longer run on time, and partially because of car companies advocating that buses could replace the streetcars (they didn't).
Things don't exist in a vacuum, and LA decided to make itself a city where you could only be comfortable getting from place to place inside a car.
> Public transit has failed to solve the problem despite a 100-year head start.
So the question here really is "which would improve LA more: tunnels that carry trains, or tunnels that carry carts that hold single cars?"
There is plenty of strong evidence that shows adding additional road capacity increases overall traffic. I'm not sure that adding ways to move cars around faster wouldn't have the same impact, versus a train.
If the boring company solves issues with personal travel then cities like LS will become less dense. There's a reason urban sprawl didn't exist before the car.
Agreed this is exactly the line of inquiry needed Dave. The Boring Company while novel, does not seem to be a representative "first principles" approach Elon has taken with other problems, it's we have cars how do we move more of them faster. I lived in London 10 years and happily moved from home, work, social activity on trains and buses very easily and happily.
It's either you move to it, or it moves to you, or change the game so you don't need to physically move to be effective/productive/social i.e. remote work, home delivery, VR socialising.
The Boring tunnel network - tunnel network as a service? TNaaS would be great for an automated freight and home delivery network, kind of like the modern scaled up pneumatic tube delivery system https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sd58w0CXQrM I can imagine Amazon scaling this up.
Freight would be a great case for tunnels, if you could find a way to make the freight companies (say, Amazon) pay to use it. There's a reason why Amazon is pushing drone delivery, and I bet it's because they think they can get the rights to use the skies for free.
There's another obvious solution, wait a few years and the end of cheap oil will fix traffic. Then the countries that built themselves around roads, cars and cheap oil will face larger issues (mostly US and Australia IIANM).
The worst part is that this had been foreseen and warnings have been made but nothing is done to deal with it.
If you wait a few years you'll have electric cars that are independent of cheap oil. And there will still be traffic.
Perhaps it will no longer be soul-destroying because you'll be able to watch a movie, take a nap or get work done on your PC in your self-driving car.
There will be no end to cheap oil in the next 50 years. As demand decreases due to electric cars we'll see nearly 30-40% of the use of crude oil going away. The world has absolutely massive reserves of crude.
"I feel like only somebody who lives in LA would make the "must" assertion and not think about all the other options..."
I live in San Francisco and I assert that: To solve the soul-destroying practice of driving from (north of golden gate bridge) to SFO, roads must go 3D (tunnel).
You may not be aware of this, but if you need to go to SFO from Marin (or anywhere north of the city) you need to drive through small residential neighborhoods, stopping at up to 12 stoplights. It's incredibly wasteful of time and gas and degrades the lives of everyone involved. You find yourself stopped in traffic on a four lane boulevard in front of a single family home with a yard. That's how you get to SFO.
San Francisco desperately needs a tunnel from the GGB to SFSU/ParkMerced.
Reducing density of cities actually increases a lot of problems. It means you have to spend a lot more of your time traveling, which will make all these problems worse. LA is a fairly low density city and has terrible traffic problems. It reduces economic efficiency, too.
Additionally, public transport often interferes with regular road traffic, making the problem worse. The solution is to use an elevated train (Chicago) or subways. So now you're back at 3D.
And biking in a low-density city isn't a practical solution.
I think remote work and online shopping are developing perfectly well without Musk's help. And I think we need to increase the density of cities (at least, city centres and inner suburbs).
How do the sleds preclude developing public transport? Why wouldn't we see mini-vans pick people up from homes or community hubs and then use the tunnels to take an express route to the CBD? Or larger sleds that accommodate a bus or truck sized pod? If these HOV pods avoided a congestion charge, there would be an incentive to use them.
Obviously drivers and their cars will fill any space given to them, and cycling tunnels might be too expensive, but hopefully a change in traffic flow and parking availability would make room and safety for cycling above ground.
Imagine buses with good cycling storage so you could ride to the hub, board a bus, zip to the CBD, alight and ride the last few kilometres to your destination.
Entrenched interests will fight it for a time, but it wouldn't surprise me if these guys could make it happen.
Your solutions are proportional reductions, a % reduction in the number of drivers. The problem of traffic rises with the ~2nd power of population because not only are there more people, there are more intersections.
Intersections can only be solved with 3d roads, by eliminating overlaps. The bigger the city, the more artery roads you need with uninterrupted flow, and they eventually choke each other. Build tunnels and you can have point-to-point connections without choking off local flow.
Reducing the number of drivers can't fully solve gridlock because at some point you have to hit a long light when you try to move from a high flow to low flow area. The only way to avoid that is with onramps and elevated freeways, but you can't build enough of those.
Every point you brought forward is also true for subways, but it's again at least an order of magnitude more space-efficient than sending cars through tunnels.
Reduced density of cities leads to longer distances and higher transportation needs, and less than ideal utilization of public transport. So that's counter-productive.
You can also fly. Skies are more 3D than digging and easier to access -- the problem with digging is that many people live and work and drive right above where you dig. At some point the holes could cause collapses. There's also water mains and other hazards and obstacles. Sounds dangerous.
I mean, it's also art. I would want it in my city just for that pissing-contest factor of 'hey, look at this cool shit we've got'. We deserve to make our cities beautiful and to build monuments to be proud of.
I'm more interested in the nuances of tunneling, like how they'll handle water seepage and flooding. Flooding is actually a huge problem with climate change causing larger and more frequent major weather events.
After Hurricane Sandy, it took almost a week to reopen the subway tunnels.
I can just imagine the kind of kinetic force that'll occur if a sled carrying a car slams into a section that has a few feet of water.
Airflow and humidity are other concerns. Airflow is necessary to keep passengers safe. Controlling humidity is important for keeping the infrastructure from degrading more quickly.
Any good paints or fabrics or metamaterials that could be used as a tunnel liner that only allow water to wick in one direction (from tunnel internals to surrounding soil)?
> it took almost a week to reopen the subway tunnels.
More like a few years collectively - a section of the G was closed every weekend for many months, the R was closed for a year, the L closes in 2019 for over a year.
This has just made me wonder what happens in emergencies or system failures. Are the tunnels wide enough to open your door or climb out a window? How far apart and numerous are emergency exit hatches? Is there off-grid emergency lighting (e.g. battery-backed)?
There would be few things more upsetting than your sled coming to a halt, inside a dark tunnel, and being unable to get out of your car. It would activate the same part of your brain that fears being buried alive.
Air isn't really a problem. A person breathes about .5 cubic meters of air per hour, so 100 people trapped for 6 hours will go through 300 cubic meters of air. The diameter of the tunnel being 14', that air supply would take up 68' of tunnel lengthwise. And that's one breath, the air can be breathed many times before the co2 level becomes too high.
The air inside the volume of a coffin can last you a few hours. Unless you are literally shoulder to shoulder with no other air, your oxygen will last as long as you need.
"The air inside the volume of a coffin can last you a few hours. Unless you are literally shoulder to shoulder with no other air, your oxygen will last as long as you need."
... unless there is a fire:
"Most drivers rolled up their windows and waited for rescue. The ventilation system in the tunnel drove toxic smoke back down the tunnel faster than anyone could run to safety. These fumes quickly filled the tunnel and caused vehicle engines to stall because of lack of oxygen. This included fire engines which, once affected, had to be abandoned by the firefighters. Many drivers near the blaze who attempted to leave their cars and seek refuge points were quickly overcome."[1]
In that case ventilation was the cause of those deaths, or at least made the situation worse. It doesn't have much to do with the availability of oxygen.
>Any good paints or fabrics or metamaterials that could be used as a tunnel liner that only allow water to wick in one direction (from tunnel internals to surrounding soil)?
Thermodynamically impossible without an input of energy. FWIW.
It turns out that most transportation tunnels do in fact have a significant input of energy.
Ventillation to exhaust waste heat is a major concern.
From discussions of net-zero housing in Alaska (Thorstein Chlupp), my understanding is that water tends to flow from hot to cold -- it will condense along a cold surface. A condenser + sump system where some engineering mechanism keeps the inner tunnel wall from remaining at equilibrium temperature with the interior, might work, though how cold that would need to be to keep humidity manageable would be a question. Routing the cold-side air ducts such that they waste heat to the subsurface and draw heat from the tunnel wall might be one approach. Further cooling through water (fresh, sea) is another possibility, though both present significant issues, scarcity of fresh in Los Angeles, and general nastiness of sea,
While you're right, in that heat is an issue in tunnels, harvesting low-temperature-delta energy is incredibly inefficient. It is always better to source the needed electricity from a generator that is specifically designed for such.
(The only time this may be untrue is when dealing with very small things like remote sensors, where running a wire might actually be more expensive than harvesting the microwatts needed locally. But this is a fraction of a fraction of a percent of total system needs.)
What I'm saying is that for the purposes of removing moisture, the temperature gradient itself is an energy flux which might be utilised.
In some ways, this is the inverse of an evaporative cooler, where the incoming air is saturated with moisture to lower its temperature before being vented to a warm space to be cooled ("swamp coolers" are best suited to dry climates, and have humidity issues). Here, instead, cool (possibly chilled) air could be ducted through the warm space, with the intent of condensing moisture onto the ductwork (for drainage by other means) prior to being vented into the space.
You're trading cooling capacity (condensing water warms the cold air supply) for humidity control.
I'm not trying to imply that this is practical, only that a latent energy flux might exist.
Something that can discriminate without energy input is a form of Maxwell's Demon. If you are unfamiliar, it's a lot of fun to learn about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon is a reasonable start.
Check valves absolutely do consume energy. Something has to resist the spring forcing them closed, or they would never open. They are convenient in that their energy is sourced from the very thing they are controlling, but they are energy-consuming devices.
There's a Quartz piece about how Musk conceives all of his ventures that goes into some detail about the considerations behind The Boring Company, but the issue you mention is one of the ones where the technology still needs to advance, I believe.
>... The Boring Company is investigating technologies that will recycle the earth into useful bricks to be used to build structures... These bricks can potentially be used as a portion of the tunnel lining itself, which is typically built from concrete. Since concrete production accounts for 4.5% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, earth bricks would reduce both environmental impact and tunneling costs.
>~3 decades old earth bricks (granted, uncompressed) and it's not pretty
No surprise there. CSEB is an entirely different material from regular old compressed earth block, which itself is entirely different from uncompressed earth. Squeezing out the empty space and adding a binder (cement) makes it all one solid piece as strong as concrete. Uncompressed earth is just... dirt.
It's like saying, "Concrete roads won't work. How do we know? Because gravel is an ingredient of concrete, and gravel roads suck."
I'd like to see more details about edge case scenarios.
What happens if a sled gets stuck? What would be the procedure and response time for getting the right personnel down there?
What failsafes are in place for disasters? What if the power grid went offline or there was a flood?
How do you prevent human error? What if people left their gas vehicles on and there was a toxic level of carbon monoxide in the tunnels? What if people jumped or accidentally fell onto a sled while it was descending?
> I'd like to see more details about edge case scenarios.
The thing is, we're all MUCH more comfortable with the danger we're familiar with, than the danger we're unfamiliar with. Imagine if planes were just being introduced today - what are the edge case scenarios? What happens if there's mechanical failure at 30,000 feet? What happens if there's turbulence, lightning, birds, volcanic ash? What happens if the pilot is suicidal? What happens if... But we really don't care, do we? Air transport is familiar.
I'm not saying the dangers of new tech aren't important - they're very important; but keep in mind that while the idea of suffocating after a crash or malfunction in a hyperloop tube/tunnel will feel significantly more perilous than any misfortune that may befall you on a plane simply because a plane's risks are now familiar.
When we look back at how planes came of age, it seems like people were idiots to get on them (I recently read about the de Havilland Comet... it disintegrated in mid-air like 3 times in a year - don't quote me on that, but it was bad). Did it have to be so bad? No; of course some disasters could have been avoided with better oversight and accountability, but nonetheless, in the face of risk, the new tech provided such great advantages that its risks were accepted.
It's fair to be aware of the way new tech can fail, but we shouldn't dismiss a tech simply because it can't "prevent human error" 100% of the time, or be perfectly immune to failure of any sort.
If we can introduce a new tech that has failure properties similar or better to current tech, but that adds significant value to everyday life, we're netting a very positive gain. We shouldn't let fear any failure prevent us from pursuing new tech, just like we shouldn't let fear of stubbing our toes prevent us from walking.
We actually care a lot about all the problems you mentioned with airplanes and there are extremely strict regulations that you need to fulfill before you can put people in your plane.
>I'm not saying the dangers of new tech aren't important - they're very important; but keep in mind that while the idea of suffocating after a crash or malfunction in a hyperloop tube/tunnel will feel significantly more perilous than any misfortune that may befall you on a plane simply because a plane's risks are now familiar.
Without understanding edge case scenarios, we cannot make claims like these. Maybe these tunnels really will be more perilous than planes. Or maybe not. The whole point of asking the 'what if' questions is to clarify these issues.
Airplanes have been studied intensely enough that we know the rates and modes of failure. It's worth pondering the same for new technologies as well.
> Without understanding edge case scenarios, we cannot make claims like these.
Actually, this claim isn't based on any particulars of any scenario. It's simply a common human cognitive pattern. We will readily accept a familiar risk over an unfamiliar risk, even if the unfamiliar risk is less risky. We all readily jump in our cars every day despite the statistical fact that car-miles are quite deadly when compared with alternatives like bus-miles, train-miles, or plane-miles.
We're also likely to underestimate the magnitude of a risk when we have some perceived sense of control. Most drivers believe they are above average - so the risk of accidents is undervalued (due to ego). On planes, the risk of harm is overvalued because passengers have no sense of control in failure scenarios.
Like I said, we SHOULD understand how new tech can fail. We ALSO need to be careful about the biases with which we approach a new technology and aware of what we're expecting from it. We tend to overvalue the ways in which a new tech can introduce unfamiliar harm, while undervaluing the ways in which a new tech can remove familiar harm that's currently taken for granted (hence, undervalued). This presents policy/planning problems that can inhibit introduction of society-benefiting innovations. This does not mean that conservative approaches to deploying new tech are wrong - far from it: conservative adoption is responsible - it simply points out that our natural human biases tend to maintenance of the status quo.
My point is that, quite simply, we need to be as realistic and comprehensive in our establishment of the benefits a new tech could introduce, as well as the risks, in order to have a balanced perspective of its overall value.
Then by all means, go ahead and answer @atarian, not me. His or her questions didn't seem straightforward to me, but perhaps you or someone else knows better.
You can have the sleds equipped with oxygen and a mask, similar to what airplanes have for cabin depressurization.
As for point B you can have doors or what not around the sled. But if people really want to commit suicide by sled there's nothing stopping them. What stops someone from jumping off a bridge with a highway below?
This is FANTASTIC! It's important to understand how massive the Earth is (even though it's a pinprick when compared to the sun). You can EASILY go 3-D or deep.
The deepest mines in the world are around 12,000 feet deep. This is about 6x the height of the tallest building in the world (2000 feet tall).
Imagine, thus, putting in a tunnel at what would be every 5th floor of a skyscraper and that you could fit 6 skyscrapers underground...that allows for approximately 150 stacked tunnels! Excessive of course but possible!
When imagining a 150 way merge I can't help but feel like it'll pollute enough to make nearby trees crumble in a matter of days. 150 ways at approximately 1 car per second (a very full highway) and 1.1 people per car (I hardly know anyone who carpools), there's 1501.1120 = ~20 000 people every two minutes. Trains can operate at the same frequency, carry a few thousand each and pollute a lot less -- heck, electric ones can draw from solar panels, reducing pollution to near zero. Give it ten tracks and you have equivalent capacity to 150 stinky lanes.
Musk's idea was that gas-powered cars would not be driving through tunnels themselves, but on electric sleds, which makes the tunnels as non-stinky as with electric trains.
I think it's rather scary how thin the mantle is in many places. The oceanic crust is just above 10km deep, I'm sitting on something like 15km. That's.. not a lot. I can cycle that in less than an hour.
Tesla /is/ investing in public transportation. From the Tesla Master Plan Part Deux[1]:
"In addition to consumer vehicles,... high passenger-density urban transport... in the early stages of development at Tesla and should be ready for unveiling next year. With the advent of autonomy, it will probably make sense to shrink the size of buses and transition the role of bus driver to that of fleet manager... It would also take people all the way to their destination. Fixed summon buttons at existing bus stops would serve those who don't have a phone. Design accommodates wheelchairs, strollers and bikes."
Indeed, strange how that's not mentioned at all. Or whether any transportation engineers have evaluated what kind of traffic reduction would occur from using all these tunnels for a subway system instead of just moving a few cars around.
Edit: The more I think about it, the worse it seems. Compare how much space is eaten out of the road above for a few cars... per minute?...to go up/down to this tunnel vs. how many a stairwell could take up/down to the subway. Even if the car's were relatively crammed close together in the tunnel, I can't imagine it would be anywhere near the density you could fit on subway trains. The economics of this make no sense.... unless you consider that this will be something that only the incredibly elite will be able to afford. The majority of people in rush hour LA traffic will remain stuck there, the rich will go down I guess.
>Even if the car's were relatively crammed close together in the tunnel, I can't imagine it would be anywhere near the density you could fit on subway trains.
Indeed. The problem always fundamentally reduces to geometry, and the only way to solve it is to increase density.
People always say, "we can just build more tunnels", but you'll just end up with congestion at interchange and entry/exit points, just like on freeways today. And the more tunnels you build, the more it takes for the operating company to recoup the costs, meaning higher fares to use the tunnels.
Best case scenario, this company reduces the cost of developing rail transit. Likely scenario, we just get the same awful freeway situation but below. Worst-case scenario is the unfortunate situation you described.
It costs 1 billion dollars a mile to dig subway tunnels in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Improving tunnel digging technology would help bring those costs down. The American solution to every problem is to spend more money as money is the universal and only sufficient remedy to all problems.
Eventually, you run into a situation where spending more money makes things worse such as with health care. Sometimes it's better to invest in lowering the cost of things instead.
San Francisco's new Central Subway drilled two bores at a cost of about 150M/mi. What makes these projects insanely expensive is not the tunnel, it's the stations.
If this technology truly can reduce the cost of tunnel boring by a factor of ten, subway systems can be created in many more cities and existing systems updated with a thicker network.
I also wonder if, because of the smaller diameter of the tunnels, a network of self-driving buses doesn't make more sense to deploy in these tunnel networks.
Because the decision whether or not to invest in public transport is a political one. A private company can't force society to allocate more tax money to public transport infrastructure. It can, however, provide more attractive infrastructure options, which seems to be what the Boring company is trying to do.
It could just build transit though couldn't it? Instead of sleds? Private companies operate passenger and freight rail networks, especially in the UK to my understanding.
At least for Buses this is highly regulated in the US. I would assume the same is true for everything else.
Free-Market people have long advocated for a liberalisation of buses and taxis. Uber has help breaking the Taxi monopoly, but the Bus regulation still stand. Eventually somebody will attack Uber because of too much ridesharing and accuse them of breaking the laws against private buses.
I believe they're usually heavily subsidized. Possibly, if a private company could reduce costs enough they could operate a transit system without subsidies and make money doing it, but I think ordinarily a private company running public transit is heavily reliant on government support. (Bus networks might be an exception, since they can use the roads that already exist and there isn't a huge up-front cost.)
It sounds like the Boring company is mostly interested in providing the capability to make small tunnels cheaply. The car sled thing is just one possible way to use the tunnels, but if some city wants to do something different with them that's up to them.
This IS public transit. Public transit without the last mile (or in LA, the last 5 miles) problem. This freedom-supporting tech also thwarts the tyranny inherent in public transit (schedules, robbing your life with all the waiting, limited load carrying capacity, forced interactions with antisocial individuals, etc.)
But there is still a last mile problem, you have to enter and exit out of the tunnels. That's the last mile. Or do you suggest that tunnel building will become so viable from an economic and engineering standpoint that everyone will have an entry point in their garage?
> This freedom-supporting tech also thwarts the tyranny inherent in public transit (schedules, robbing your life with all the waiting, limited load carrying capacity, forced interactions with antisocial individuals, etc.)
Funny you don't mention the tyranny inherent in single-occupancy vehicles: Robbing your life having to find parking. Paying to park your car (if you live or work downtown). The antisocialness of sitting in your car for 1-2 hours a day with just NPR as your only friend. The inherent inflexibility of SOV travel, where your car carries just 20% of the designed capacity most of the time. And finally, the infrastructure that has to be built to support cars, driverless or not, zipping around everywhere, making it harder to walk or bike to where you want to go.
I guess you missed the 125mph speed in the tunnel, thus decreasing that 1-2 hour commute to about 9 minutes or less. Or, 20 times faster than even the best crammed in a sardine can public transit.
The idea of public transit being redefined as 6-8 passenger vehicles you get paired with at the bus stop that then use the tunnel network to decrease transit time for those who need to use public transit is also absent from your retort. As is the honesty about the typical case for public transit, non-peak. This case in the tunnel system suddenly realized for a fraction of the cost because vehicles are on-demand instead of driving a mostly empty big ass bus (or light rail car) on a route according to a schedule. It's basically for public transit what streaming is for TV.
Also, all of the things you describe as "tyranny" are actually choices, making them "freedom", the opposite of "tyranny". I've lived in Los Angeles for almost 35 years and I've never chosen a 1+ hour commute, though you are free to if you choose. I also don't choose to go to the parking insane areas. Again, your choice. But there is little choice with current public transit solutions. You go where they tell you when they tell you and that's that. And don't forget your mandatory sampling of the, I'll put it nicely, culture du jour.
The last mile problem isn't about difficulty to drive, it is about congestion. Tunnels, however long they maybe to take advantage of the speed, must end. At the endpoint is where the problems start with trying to accommodate capacity everyone thinks it'll achieve.
nobody said that cars are the only thing that these sleds would shuttle around. use your imagination a bit and i think you can probably imagine how this can be use for a public transit system.
I do love the "freedom" of driving to Lake Tahoe once a year or so, but it's a patently silly adjective for describing people commuting between two fixed points (home and work), at a fixed hour, five times a week. Which is what all these urban traffic ideas are trying to solve, basically.
I don't think all those people stuck at I-680 have a deep love of staring at the next car's bumper for two hours every day. Re-branding it as "freedom" doesn't make the experience particularly palatable.
Yes, it's called a subway. Being on average 5-10x faster than a car in a city, having stops every 5min walking time, having someone else who always keeps it clean instead of you, and allowing you to still do something or read something instead of driving.
It's cheaper, faster (the time spent on the car elevator is a massive reduction in efficiency for Musks system), and you don't have to own or clean a car.
Go visit Tokyo someday, and try their mass transit.
> ...schedules, robbing your life with all the waiting, limited load carrying capacity, forced interactions with antisocial individuals, etc.
Reading this, the first thing that comes to mind is daily traffic in the city.
Rush hours are scheduled. You spend so much time waiting at lights, in traffic jams, etc. The roads are congested due to inherent capacity limits. And you're forced to interact with antisocial individuals speeding, texting, making dangerous lane changes, etc.
30 to 40 thousand people are killed every year in car crashes [in the US alone]. Millions are injured. I think I'd rather take my chances with the occasional "antisocial" person on public transit. Of course, given the ubiquity of cars and the massive (socialized) infrastructure to support them, they are useful sometimes.
There's also the fact that in many place you're practically forced to own a car (or at least are convinced that you absolutely need one (or two)). How is that not "tyrannical"?
"To solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic, roads must go 3D"
This is not very convincing. Solving congestion by building more roads isn't exactly a new idea. Its track record isn't that glorious either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
Not to sound too negative but how about some evidence on why it will work this time?
The induced demand argument applies to marginal increases in capacity on already-congested roads. If you make enough extra capacity, eventually you run into limits in how much demand can be created. For example, if you check out the city streets at 3 AM, you'll typically find that there's a lot more capacity than people are using.
These guys are quite ambitious in the scale of the tunneling they want to do.
So in the concept video it shows passengers loading on to a sled at surface level that can hold maybe a dozen people, and then it descends on an elevator 50 metres to the tube and goes down the line. This sounds cost effective compared to a full on underground subway station, which really aren't cheap to build even if you 10x the cost of tunneling, but it isn't good for much unless all those passengers intend to also get off at the same stop, which isn't really something that happens. So if one of those dozen passengers wants to get off, then all 12 will have to go all the way back up to the surface and back down again, which could end up being cripplingly slow.
I think you're right that stops will be longer, but it's my understanding they'll also be less frequent and they'll cover greater distances than a regular subway track (in say, NY). So you'll end up getting there faster and not have the stress of driving in traffic.
For a conventional subway at rush hour, there's 1000s of people getting on or off every hour at any given station, which isn't feasible if you're only loading a dozen people at a time. The alternative being to build proper underground stations, which are a big part of that 'billion dollars per mile' subway construction cost.
And this reminds me of Musk's Hyperloop whitepaper, where he estimated it would cost 10 billion to run an evacuated tube from LA to SF, which was ridiculous. There's all this reality that he failed to factor in to his calculations, and once you've addressed the full costs relative to people moving capacity, all of the sudden Hyperloop doesn't look so great compared to conventional high speed rail, and his Boring concept starts looking more and more like conventional subway.
Elevator engineers sometimes handle this problem by having "express" elevators that travel between distant floors and "local" elevators that operate between nearby floors.
That avoids the need for big central stations (other than the ground-floor lobby, of course, but there's no way around that for a building -- a street transport system isn't limited to a single point of entry).
With intended throughput and few stops, allocating in bunches of 12 people with the same destinations or at least least stops automatically is trivial.
I'm no starry-eyed admirer of The Boring Company, but it's funny how many peoples' argument here seem to be: "The Boring Company's plan to alleviate traffic congestion is flawed and non-optimal. It would make more sense to replace American cities with high-density ones and build mass transit instead".
Why is that funny? I see a proposal that requires cars as something that at best maintains status quo. A walkable/bikeable city seems far better to me than one that is made for cars. Roads are for cars instead of people. All that parking is for cars.
Yeah but people don't want that! No one is going to invest in getting rid of roads or giving away bicycles. That serves no one but the poor. People will invest in an underground transport network that solidifies Tesla's advantage.
Think about what will actually work, what is actionable. Getting rid of cars is completely unactionable. Tunnels are. So Elon does tunnels.
I have to assume that the same set of people complaining about high rent prices because of NIMBYism are not the same people dismissing this solution, which has the subtext of being NIMBY-proof. But they're probably the same.
I have! These would be good for expanding existing cave systems as well as building planned structures where lava tubes aren't naturally occurring or are exposed to the atmosphere
Well hang on. Do we understand the impact of, for example, just a single lane, one-direction tunnel with respect to rush hour traffic in LA? It's like a shunt. Sure, more is better, but we're not talking about replacing freeways. We're looking at a way to improve traffic.
I really doubt one person on a lane can be faster than a freeway with 4+ lanes (in one direction) no matter how fast it is going.
Another thing you'll have to consider is that there will be a logistical problem at the exit stops if you want to take advantage of all the high speeds being talking about. I'm talking about passengers getting stopped off there.
There have to be atleast X/2 get-in/get-out stops for people to climb into the sleds or there will be a bottleneck. (Considering X is the throughput for the amount of time it take a passenger to embark/disembark)
(If you're taking about intra-city travel)
Building these tunnels would be very, very inefficient compared to say building another road over the current roads.
I'm not from LA but I believe the major traffic occurs at rush hour, and short stretches of roads are really the problem. So finding out the hotspots and mending them would do much better than digging out lots of tunnels under heavily populated areas.
Another point is that in intra-city travel, high speeds cannot really be taken advantage of, so they'll basically travel at subway speeds. Now, subways as you see are already filled up if you take a look at New York. How do you think a one man car would fare compared to that?
(off topic) Again, I'm a fan of musk, but to me, this seems similar to the 'Put man on Mars' argument because that's where we have to be in a couple centuries. Rather than that, putting money towards colonizing harsher places on earth like deserts or Antarctica would be money much better spend IMO.
Presumably we would get better at building more tunnels after the first one, and presumably once an existence proof is in place the economics will justify accelerated R&D, resulting in a technological feedback loop.
You can only layer so many roads above ground. But as said in the post, tunnels have no such limit. 100 years from now one could imagine a very thick subterranean transportation network. The interchange and routing problems I'd guess are solvable iteratively over the course of decades, since you have a lot of free space to work in with minimal constraints once you are deep enough to allow "forking" the network as you build more advanced technology.
Slapping two freeways together is not strategy that lands you ultimately in that future, but starting on the problem building cheaper tunnels is.
Tunnels might look more futuristic, but I can't imagine a world where building layers of tunnels will be cheaper than larger roads.
We've already put the R&D into roads, and the cars that run on them. Routing problems have also been solved. No matter that feedback loop, it wouldn't get cheaper than laying a road.
It's true that you can build many tunnels, but why? Congestion is really a problem in inner city roads. I rarely hear of any congestion in freeways, and I have to say, expanding to a couple more lanes sounds a lot more viable.
See I don't know what specifics they're talking about when they say 'a large network'.
It'll obviously be more efficient to dig a wider tunnel than multiple tunnel on a single route. So, unless I'm wrong, to me it looks like it'll only be one tunnel, with one track to and one track back.
How many people do you think can be transported in a direction in a 'sled' in one lane? I'm talking about one point to another point throughput not the complete network. I'm betting the numbers will be very underwhelming.
The car in the video looks like Model S size. About 16 feet long. Add 2 feet on each end for an even 20 feet for the sled. At 125mph one gets 660,000 feet per hour. So if you can pack the cars next to each other, the maximum is 33,000 cars per hour. So 33,000 people per hour with each person getting a space that would rent in SF for $1000/month. Pack that sled space with people at the same density as a train at rush hour (50?) you get 1.65 million per hour. Mix and match your people density and sled packing to determine your own rate. Seems like in reasonable scenarios you could get train like rates with one tunnel.
Bart says at peak commute it does 60,00 per hour. Maybe other systems do better, but those BART trains are full.
It is very easy to come up with theoretical numbers and look nice. We already know know the subway infrastructure works. Forget what exists currently, and try to calculate the theoretical throughput of the subway system. I bet you'll come up with much more that what it is currently.
On first look at your calculations the flaws I find are these:
1. 125mph is a very, very optimistic number in my opinion. In reality I think anywhere near 100mph is what I would expect.
2. You can't fit 50(!) people in a 20ft x 6.5ft 'sled' for hours. If something goes wrong, they'll trapped in a tunnel with no escape to surface for hours!!!
3. The numbers might make financial sense if you cram them with theoretical people at peak hours. But the thing is, most of the day (and night) those sled will mostly be empty. So you can only count the sleds to be used close to their limit for a couple hours a day morning and night.
4. You can't just daisy chain 33k sleds along the track. As I've said before, one malfunction would possibly wreck havoc in the system. Which can actually lead to people's death. Think of them as you would an airplane, but you can't land in an emergency like you can in an airplane
5. This is close to what @so33 said. The last couple miles and the first couple miles will be very congested because people slow down, and getting off them would take time and many stations. The only way to remove bottlenecks would be to make lots of places to easily disembark, which would increase the costs.
There is a lot details to work out of course but Musk surely has thought about this more than you or me, with a brain that is optimized for this sort of thing. He has the clout to talk to the best people in the field, people to do computer simulations, and a record of success in very hard businesses. He is serious about this. Look at the open jobs list. More people trying and doing and less people just criticizing the better. My biggest concern would be Musk spreading too much of his focus away from SpaceX and having that venture flounder.
Yeah, but that's 33,000 cars per hour without any of the cars stopping to exit the tunnels. The trains used in BART and other public transit systems can very easily exceed 60+mph already, but they don't because they have to stop, bringing down the average speed of the system.
BART, by the way, does 28000 passengers per hour per direction in the Transbay Tube (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transbay_Tube). You can probably fit over 200 people into a BART train car at absolute crush capacity.
By the way, the maximum rate of 60,000/hour in each direction for BART I quoted was from BART itself[1]. I should have provided a link. Primary sources are good.
Of course the sleds in an operating system would not be absolutely packed together. This was just a Fermi estimation to get some idea of the flow rate the parent comment was wondering about. Looks like max rates would vary from somewhat worse than trains to much better.
The sleds would be automated so that when one wants to exit the others would give it enough space to do so without problems. Another Fermi estimation could be done to get an idea of how long the exit tunnel would need to be for a sled to stop given a range of deceleration rates.
I think Musk is on the right track but that his biggest hurdles may be social and political in the USA. Maybe China or India will want to try it out (or the Swiss).
>To solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic, roads must go 3D
There are other methods. Public transport on trains of course or more high tech maybe semi self driving cars platooning ( http://www.tech-faq.com/vehicle-platooning.html ) which could almost be done with present tech.
> Secondly, increase the speed of the Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM). TBMs are super slow. A snail is effectively 14 times faster than a soft-soil TBM. Our goal is to defeat the snail in a race.
I can imagine them at parties:
"So what do you do for a living?"
"Our company is trying to win a race from a snail."
"Hahah-- wait you're serious? What kinda company is that?"
Costs can be reduced greatly even without any technological innovation. NYC and LA spend ~10x more per km of subway than what some European cities spend. (E.g. NYC's $2.2B/km vs. Paris's $230M / km. [1]) So try to replicate what foreign cities are doing and you get significant savings.
However since either way digging tunnels will be expensive, it seems inefficient to try to do this for cars. It would be more reasonable to just build a better subway system. Especially if in the future there will be automated fleets of self-driving cars waiting for you at each subway stop...
"This is not a new concept, as buildings have been constructed from Earth for thousands of years including, according to recent evidence, the Pyramids."
This is a little crazy. Because of too much surface traffic, let's bore tunnels and develop sleds. The problem is: inefficient use of the existing infrastructure, 1 person per car, and the like. This wii be improved by the sharing of vehicles, and the driving of vehicles in formations by filing flight paths, using driverless technology. Cars are a highly unattractive investment anyway, a $50,000 car sits unused 23 hours a day. I am also skeptical that right of way, permits, and local governments could ever be satisfied by this scheme. And one pleasure of driving is looking out the window. You want to go in tunnels? By yourself? Oh you will work?
Agree with the first point - if the final goal is to move people around at low costs in terms of construction/maintenance, land use, and environmental factors, the low ratio of "transported human" vs. "transported metal" makes cars the worst of all choices. This can also only alleviated for so long by making roads more congested in a more efficient way. In the end, roads are still a massive waste.
Some of your other points make too many assumptions of maintaining a status quo. E.g. automated cars will make sharing schemes more feasible. You can either hop on an uber-like car to get home, or lease your car out in the 96% of the time it sits idle.
Unfortunately (depending on the right price) I think this will make car travel more attractive compared to other forms of transport. One can think of a lot of sharing schemes - individual cars, minibuses, or large busses like we have today - with different price points. Overall costs of motorized travel is likely to fall. So I would think that overall we will see that vehicle use will go up (at the expense of walking on foot, for example) and use of parking lots will go down. In fact if traffic wasn't as cyclic as it is one wouldn't need any parking lots at all.
Also, if you can really get to the 130 or so MPH in the tunnel, then travel time will not be such an issue.
The main fallacy of the whole initiative, however, is that it is based on status quo of the structure of cities. Compare the urban sprawl of a post-WW2 US city with those of a medieval town. The main difference was that travel was slower, and faster travel was incredibly expensive (mostly unreachable due to lacking technology). It led to a much more efficient use of resources. If anything we need to redesign our cities based on these old principles in order to reduce overall resource consumption.
There's some interesting stuff in here, I'm excited to see what comes of it.
But I'm a bit worried about the thought process in the intro:
> A large network of road tunnels many levels deep would fix congestion in any city, no matter how large it grew (just keep adding levels)
this is untrue in the general case. Notably, if everyone wants to drive to the city center, then there will be congestion, because at one point you must get to the destination.
It's not just volume, but throughput that causes congestion.
When the traffic flow isn't spread out nicely, your traffic can only go as fast as the weakest link.
You know what has higher throughput than cars? trains
Independent of the tunnel, a network of sleds able to move vehicles at one sled per vehicle... is going to be ludicrously expensive and the maintenance costs will be huge. Current roads don't need sleds, sled tracks, elevators, switching and management, safety gear etc, and that's even before we get to the usual tunnel needs of ventilation, pumps, and lighting.
It seems a bit odd to be proposing very high maintenance infrastructure at a time when the US is famously facing a huge problem in not being able to afford maintenance for its existing infrastructure.
To solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic takes just a mindshift from corporate decision makers to realize that physical presence of employees are not necessary for success.
I think people are missing the strategic importance here. Tesla is going to be in the game of self driving cars. Once self driving cars happens, there is no longer going to be anyone who buys cars, they will simply hail a ride using the self-driving Telsa(Uber, Lift, Google) network. Soul-Crushing-Traffic is going to be optimized heavily, using certain algorithms and the inter connectivity of the cars. However, one HUGE advantage that Tesla cars are going to be able to have are these tunnels. I think this is of huge strategic importance, because they can reduce the cost for transportation across cities, because they don't have to deal with all the traffic. As discussed in plenty of places on hackernews, ride-hailing is going to be a commodity similar to the airline or ocean transport industry. It will be solely based on cost. If Tesla can make the cars at cost, owns the self-driving tech, are all electric with a huge network of free fuel, and have tunnels that allow you to bypass traffic then they will own the future transportation industry, while everyone else tries to catch up.
I don't see how the tunnels can be commercially viable just carrying Teslas. That's a tiny fraction of traffic. Apart from anything else I can't see cities granting permits for exclusive tunnel systems like that, which don't benefit the broader public.
I think you missed the first point I made. Tesla will be THE biggest ride-sharing service once it gets to scale with self-driving cars. Why would you buy a car in a large city if it'll be 2.50 to get to work in a self driving, all electric car? In California there are toll roads all over the place. How are the tunnels different from a normal toll freeway? Tesla could allow use of the tunnels for a fee. This fee will be the deciding factor between whether I take uber, google, lift or tesla. I am going to take whatever offer is cheaper. I'm suprised there isn't an app out there yet that lets you compare prices for your destination through various ride hailing services, but i'm sure there will be one in the future.
Along these lines, there was just an interesting latimes article a couple days ago about a subway tunnel currently being bored in downtown LA which provides some insight into the current process: http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-metro-tunneling/
The problem with this idea is not with throughput of the tunnels, but with the shafts that lead to the tunnel. Lowering one car to the tunnel will take time, and unless there is some kind of elevator with multiple carts you will only be able to lower one car at a time.
Let's say that the shaft is 20m height and let's allow 2 meters for each car. We could get ~ 10 cars "stored" in the elevator, but if it takes one minute to load and unload the car it will take ~10 minutes for the car to get to the tunnel. One shaft will be able to load only 60 cars/hour. This will not solve any traffic problems and it actually may make the traffic around the shafts worse (depending on how many cars are waiting to go into the tunnel, and how large "the Boring Station" is.
There are two solutions either load/unload cars faster - possible but unlikely, or have more elevators connected to each tunnel. The problem with the second solution is that these cars have to safely join the rest of the cars that are currently in the tunnel.
If you have 10 elevators, each unloading one car a minute, you would need a system that allows one car to join the traffic every 6 seconds. If the cars are traveling at 125mph the sleds would need to have a pretty good acceleration to get to that speed as quickly as possible, or you would need longer adjacent tunnels.
When you make traveling easier for people, more people will do it - induced demand. Why can't anyone grasp this concept? You want to create autonomous cars so that basically 100% of the population can be on the road at any given time and you expect traffic to go away because you built some single lane tubes?
> The Boring Company is investigating technologies that will recycle the earth into useful bricks to be used to build structures. This is not a new concept, as buildings have been constructed from Earth for thousands of years including, according to recent evidence, the Pyramids.
The difference is that it takes up existing infrastructure to do that. A freeway/Roadway in itself takes up huge amount of spaces from the city. A tunnel under the city would only take space at the "exit" points.
> No. Once a TBM is below a certain depth (approximately two tunnel diameters – or 28 feet in this case), the tunneling process is almost impossible to detect, especially in soft soil.
They missed an important FAQ, Will this tech increase bank heists?
It troubles me that my mind keeps interpreting "boring" as an adjective and not as a verb every time news about this company pop out...
Leaving that aside, I believe the logistics about getting the cars on and off board of the electric sled will (in most scenarios) defeat the gains on speed once the cars are inside the tunnel.
For public transportation it may be a good idea, IF they are able to deliver all those technological breakthroughs...
Also, is 14 feet small enough for some people to get claustrophobic feelings?
Then he will figure out that he can produce electricity with the geothermal vertical tunnels! And will merge the Boring Company with Tesla like he did with Solar City!
This feels a lot like the Shanghai Maglev [1]. Gets you between the airport and part of downtown for a relatively high fee. Built because they could, and wanted to show off. Not particularly useful, but cool. It'll be interesting to see what this turns into in reality.
What a great title. Before clicking, I fully expected to see things like "Why should I keep working here?" and "Will anything, ever, happen here?" and other questions about working in a boring, mind numbing job... Real topic is much more important, but still, I think we also need a real "Boring Company" FAQs list.
Part of me keeps waiting for someone with the right clout and means to attack the elephant in the room:
Change the rules of the road.
Our roads can move far more cars per unit time than they do now. This is easy to see if you drive around Los Angeles for a fair amount of time. I drive the 405 corridor with some frequency and I can say it has gotten worst over the last few years.
Yet, the one common theme you see every day consists of these characteristics:
- Cars driving everywhere at whatever speed they want
- Cars driving slowly on the left
- "Synchronized" driving, where two cars drive equally slow side-by-side
- People who can and want to drive faster have to zig-zag through traffic
- The carpool lane is inhabited by people who do nor carpool
Just because a car has more than one person it doesn't mean they are
carpooling.
- The carpool lane has buses going slow and sometimes (often) empty
- No penalty for slowing down when going uphill and causing backup
It's insane, there are no penalties for going slow and causing backups that trigger massive oscillations that lead to the entire freeway going through these nodes where speed grinds down to zero. This wave travels backwards and it can be triggered by slow or insecure drivers. I've seen in time and time again.
If I were to generalize, the rules of the road are not designed or evolved to optimize flow. You can't even say they are optimized for safety because there is nothing safe about a moron going 55 on the fast lane while people are swerving all over the place to get around him.
What we need is a new mentality: Caltrans and CHP need to work together to optimize flow, not get in the way of it. The carpool lane is a disgrace. It takes-up 20 to 25 percent of the road's capacity for no gains whatsoever. We need a layered system where slow drivers get out of the way and don't impede others. I am not saying go full autobahn but there's merit to the idea that slow drivers should not be allowed to impede others. I've watched the 405 grind to a halt because of a few (two or three) drivers who manage to lock-up an area. It always gets worst before it gets better.
Tunnels? Sure. But first fix the real problem.
This is where self driving cars might do an amazing job. We will be able to extract far more capacity out of the existing infrastructure by increasing speeds and layering them from right to left.
All of Elon's ideas and actions: tunnels, hyperloop, solar, AI, electric cars, space launches and travel - are useful for getting to other planets and settling there. The investigation and ideas can be proved out in parallel here on Earth, and then applied in other planets.
No clue why this is downvoted, these are valid concerns.
Measuring and avoiding ground settlement consumes an enormous amount of engineering and contracting resources in every urban tunneling job.
Flooding too can lead to work stoppages or long delays. You should have seen the Queens Bored Tunnels and Structures Project after Hurricane Sandy. It was pretty soupy.
Source: Was a tunnel boring engineer in NYC, where we had an abundant supply of both buildings and groundwater.
Any large project is likely to have difficulties of some sort that need to be taken into account to overcome: it's the nature of the beast. You're right, these are valid concerns. Asking the questions as your parent does implies that those at the Boring Company—while they may have not solved them in all cases—are not aware of them, especially as these aren't new problems. I speculate that the downvotes are a reflection that your parent isn't granting them this benefit of the doubt. One can infer from the FAQ that they are thinking of this in part from the R&D bullet point:
> Tunneling R&D. In the United States, there is virtually no investment in tunneling Research and Development (and in many other forms of construction). Thus, the construction industry is one of the only sectors in our economy that has not improved its productivity in the last 50 years.
No, it doesn't. If it did, buildings in NYC would be falling down left and right. Heck, I hear they even put them under entire bodies of water!
Yes, tunnels can flood, if they are below the water table. Good pumps can fix that problem. Again, the Chunnel being Exhibit A - it hasn't flooded, yet.
Yes, but in those cases the tunnel structure itself ends up taking up load previously carried by the material that's removed. That is why the walls of the tunnel are shored up with reinforced concrete rings, which provide mechanical support AND keep out water. That's why we have tunnels that are bored only a few tens of feet in the mud under deep bodies of water, and yet don't collapse or flood.
How can a company produce something coherent like this?
Usually it's really hard to understand what a company is doing from their web page because it's hidden behind so much meaningless marketing speak "We help you solve problems and be awesome!".
Couldn't we have a problem with tunnels that cross a tectonic plate? During an earthquake, if one plate moves up or down and the adjoining doesn't move, wouldn't that sheer the tunnel closed?
My theory is that these tunnels are truly being built to support the Hyper Loop. It's only a matter of time before they acquire one of the companies that did all of the R&D work.
Make these tunnels cycling only, and sell electric bikes specially designed for such tunnels, and provide resting/charging stations in the tunnel. Higher throughput, even smaller tunnels.
How are vehicles secured to the "electric sleds"? Seems like any obvious method would be super-unsafe and/or time-consuming and/or likely to scratch the paint.
That's far from an instantaneous process. Would hold up traffic quite a while. And there are no people riding inside, and the speeds are far less than 125+ mph, so mishaps aren't nearly as risky.
I've been a little skeptical of Tesla lately but I love how quickly The Boring Company has gone from a tweet that seemed more like a joke than a real plan, to a hole in the company parking lot, to now actually working on prototypes and real plans.
Also SpaceX is killing it. I'm not a Musk fanboy but IMO he's 2/3 right now in the companies he's working on and Tesla still has a decent shot of bringing that back to 3/3
Nothing carrying objects more than 14 feet in their shortest dimension (minus whatever the sled wheels take up), but that is only a very small portion of commercial traffic.
That's like comparing oranges to apples. And planes, indeed fly over your head all the time; there is probably hundred of thousands of them in the air as we speak - how many of them are falling on your head?
If I have a choice of an autonomous emergency parachutte -deployed landing done by my mid-air broken aircar, and being stuck in the heart of Earth with no air and very high temperature literally feeling like a needle in someone's body, I chose the falling cars.
Building tunnels in California and LA is great and all. But I'd like to see him do it in Houston, honestly, where common knowledge (cough) says that you can't dig deep in Houston because it's a swamp.
No, the ground water level is ~2m. This is a swamp, tunnels would be too expensive. And Houston is too big.
Houston had a working public mass transport system, but big automotive pressure/corruption destroyed it. That's why Houston is unique. The mayor is elected every two years, because corruption is so rampant.
The now widest highway worldwide, the I10 to Katy once had a railroad track in the middle. They even had a star system and park & ride before WW2.
Does Elon wake up in the morning and say to himself "what kind of company should I make today that is both marketable and is achevable to increase my brand?". It seems like he is spreading himself too thin . Why not focus on Tesla QA or improving working conditions at his other engineering projects ?
>Why not focus on Tesla QA or improving working conditions at his other engineering projects ?
Bluntly, because I would imagine because he realizes that he is going to die eventually, and has a limited amount of time to do the things he wants to do.
Many TBM's are already nuclear powered, in that the grid power they consume was generated in a reactor somewhere. There is no reason to bring the reactor closer to the dig site.
Using the grid there must be a lot of transformers and cabling involved. Plus with massive amounts of power in situ one might be able to process the waste rock differently (e.g. if it's looser material with fissures, compress it against the sides of the tunnel or perhaps even melt it rather than removing it. Admittedly I'm rather ignorant of soil and rock physics.)
Nuclear reactors require a heatsink, usually a large amount of water.
If you put a nuclear reactor underground, you have to pump water back up. This takes a lot of energy. Whereas, electrical energy travelling through cables is not affected by gravity.
> Since concrete production accounts for 4.5% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions,
there is no way this is even close to being correct. For a point of comparison, "Airlines account for about 2 percent of global emissions".
just how much concrete does this guy think is being produced. come on. He probably misreported a figure that said concrete production accounts for 4.5% of all construction-related greenhouse gas emissions.
That's shocking. The Wikipedia page gives a 2002 reference (for the sentence you cite), so I guess in order of magnitude it must be correct.
It seems to say that the reason for this is that it must be heated to absolutely insane temperatures, which is, obviously, energy-intensive.
5% is huge though. I still have trouble believing it. I wish I could see a pie chart with the major sources of CO2 emissions. After things like cars, planes, factories, POWER GENERATION, etc, I would have thought those were the major ones.
if you Google "pie chart of co2 emissions" it's hard to see where just concrete fits in. Oh well.
- Smaller diameter tunnels. 14' is suggested. This is slightly larger than the deep London Tube lines.
- Electrically powered TBMs. Those exist. However, often the business end of the machine is hydraulically powered. Musk is probably thinking of going all electric, at least for the cutter head. After all, he has lots of experience with high-torque electric motors.
- Do cutting and tunnel ring assembly simultaneously. Some TBMs already do that. Those exist; they're called double-shielded TBMs.
Issues glossed over:
- Soil variability. Very different techniques are required for different soils. Sometimes the soil has to be "conditioned", adding something to make it solid enough it can be drilled through.[1] This is the biggest practical problem in tunneling. Too much water is the usual problem.
- The back end. TBMs are long machines. The front end does cutting and ring assembly. The back end, which can be several hundred feet long, is mostly material handling. There's usually a two-track narrow gauge railroad behind the TBM, carrying ring segments forward and dirt backwards. It's constantly being extended with new track sections. That's part of the TBM's job.
Here's a good overview of TBMs design, from Machine Design.[2]
[1] http://www.therobbinscompany.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/... [2] http://www.machinedesign.com/archive/art-digging-hole