ELI5... why is digging a tunnel tech news? Does Elon dig them faster or more cheaply or something? Otherwise do I submit this to HN? https://www.sydneymetro.info/tunnelling.
I think tunnels are the future though for cities. But I'd prefer trains to be running in them, or roads that only allow electric public transport.
Edit. In 1988 they started work on the Channel Tunnel UK to France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel - I am still in awe that they did this! I like the vision, bean counters be damned. If he made a tunnel like that it'd be news.
Thanks for posting. This really shows the power of the English language.
I am not French, I don't live in France, I don't speak French and I am not particularly interested in tunnels or rails. And probably that's why it's the first time I hear about this. But I am not American either, and I don't live there, but I have read about the expensive few mile extension of a subway line in the Upper East Side of Manhattan and the failed attempts to build a high speed train between LA and San Francisco hundreds of times.
A project of that scale in one of the largest Western capitals goes relatively unnoticed outside of France mainly because of language.
Think about what else is lost. I bet there are thousands of businesses, and lots of culture which never get noticed mainly because of language.
Not just language though. The MSM in the UK has such a narrow range it's shocking - today's leading story on the news will often be something like the rapper Stormzy's latest completely predictable opinions about whatever, and then I'll turn over to Al Jazeera and find out there's thousands dead in Peru from flooding, civil war breaking out somewhere in Africa, etc. It's hard not to come to the conclusion that they explicitly do not want an informed populace. It didn't used to be like this.
To be fair, "civil war breaking out somewhere in Africa" is news in the same way that the tide going out is news. If you're upset about how predictable it is to hear about a rapper's opinions, you should be more upset about coverage of a war going on in Africa.
> To be fair, "civil war breaking out somewhere in Africa" is news in the same way that the tide going out is news.
Remarkably complacent view, and undermined by the fact that other channels will report on this stuff, but not the BBC. The point is firstly that the signal to noise used to be far higher in the UK - I've been watching it for 40 years - I know what I'm talking about - and secondly that it's extremely unlikely I'm going to learn anything new from Stormzy's poorly informed opinions. And yet the latter is prioritised over the former.
> undermined by the fact that other channels will report on this stuff, but not the BBC.
If you think the willingness of a news organization to publish something depends on how newsworthy it is, I guess all I can do is respond by quoting the Daily Mail Song:
Pop stars take drugs
Teen boys wear hoods
Sports stars have sex
Bears shit in woods
But that's still English news. I guess I can quote something else:
> the more lurid, titillating, sensational, or nationalistic, the better. Even the distinguished Xinhua News Service is not immune from this sort of thing. I couldn't help but chuckle when the podcast host Scott Peters worried whether or not the American press corps' obsession with non-stories like Kim Kardashian and Bruce/Catelynn Jenner would give it [Xinhua] a strategic advantage in the contest to control global media narratives. My guess is Mr. Peters doesn't read Xinhua too often. If I had few dollars [for] every time Xinhua placed a photo collage like "Beautiful Female Soldiers From All Over the World," "Singer Valen Hsu Poses For Fashion Shots," "Sleeping Babies With Their Cutest Pets," on their front page...
Newsworthiness is something that can force news organizations to begrudgingly give up space they would rather have allocated to -- going back to the song -- their photo feature on schoolgirl skirt styles. If you're watching the news because you're hoping to learn something, you're making a blatant category error; that's not what the news is for.
And "civil war in Africa" fits tabloid desires perfectly; it's lurid and violent, drawing readers or watchers, without being at all surprising or important.
This is a big reason why I moved from SF Bay to SE Asia (vietnam). While the language is totally impossible for me (mostly just cause I've learned ignorance is bliss), I can still learn a lot about how locals live, what's happening in the environment, cultural things, etc... my eyes have really been opened to the fact that when you stay in one place, you really miss out on larger perspectives.
Elon's making bold claims about how he's going to disrupt the tunnelling industry but so far the results are unimpressive to say the least.
Tunnel boring is a complex, multi-faceted civil engineering discipline with a large number of well-funded firms that are aggressively competing and innovating. In this space Elon is utterly insignificant.
The ELI5 version is: "Elon thinks he can dig tunnels faster and cheaper than anyone else, but so he's failed to demonstrate he can create even one useful tunnel. The only reason he's doing this is because he hates traffic and thinks that driving in a private tunnel will make it easier to get to work on time."
> Tunnel boring is a complex, multi-faceted civil engineering discipline with a large number of well-funded firms that are aggressively competing and innovating. In this space Elon is utterly insignificant.
20 years ago you could have said much the same thing about Elon Musk and rocketry.
You're bad mouthing someone who regularly lands rockets on ships in the ocean and has bootstrapped the first electric car company. I think Elon deserves the benefit of the doubt here.
It’s actually a fairly common trap to fall into - having expertise in one area and assuming you can jump into a completely different field and revolutionise it.
That doesn’t mean it doesn’t sometimes happen, but at this point there’s no evidence that the Boring Company is really doing anything particularly novel at this point...
I'm a fan of Elon but he did not bootstrap the first electric car company. Electric cars have been around since the 1800s with a resurgence in the late 1900s. Musk got into electric cars in the 2000s.
I think if we're being charitable, it's pretty clear that they meant no major electric car companies. And there were no major car companies on the scale of early Ford before early Ford.
I guess if we're being pedantic, he also didn't bootstrap Tesla.
because gas was cheap and batteries back then couldn't go 400 miles and charge in 5 mins. had the economics been flipped, and there were stations on the side of the road with charged batteries for swapping, maybe elon would be forming a petrol sports car company about now.
Strapping a motor into some wheels is not "electric car company". Designing a high-volume, easily produced, long range, beautiful, profitable(!) business out of it, meaning something people actually use - that's bootstrapping an electric car company. We live in a real world, not in some imaginary "that was technically an electric car in 1800"-fairy tale.
He bought the title of founder in title in a way that the original founders couldn't use it so saying he bootstrapped it is a bit much same with saying it's the first electric car company.
He has a knack for attracting nice attention and generally is a great marketeer for his brands and himself as a brand.
I think this follows Elons pattern of being able to find areas where the fundamental technology has advanced and is available, but the integration and step up to a new level hasn't been invested in yet. I think the Boring company basically made more efficient custom built tunneling equipment.
And Tesla's Gigfactory is a JV with Panasonic and partially funded by taxpayers.
I'd say the largest value add about Elon Musk is his ability to create a reality distortion field to convince large swathes of people to follow his dream.
I'm actually not being critical of Musk here. Jobs did this and you can see how transformative certain technologies have been as a result.
> And Tesla's Gigfactory is a JV with Panasonic and partially funded by taxpayers.
What you don't seem to understand is that the battery tech's problems currently are not the chemical process or format of the cells, but the volume. The volume of cells that we are able to produce. This is a major bottleneck of electric cars. It is not just some minor problem, it is a great fundamental problem.
This is also why tesla can churn out hundreds of thousands of cars with battery only, and with range of hundreds of miles, and where practically all other manufacturers in this price range are only able to do hybdrids with small batteries. This is not coincidence, this is because tesla has a gigafactory and those others do not and are subject to volume problems in the outside battery production chain.
So no this is not only about vision, Tesla (whether Musk himself or his engineers) identified a real problem, and engineered a real solution - the gigafactory.
> What you don't seem to understand is that the battery tech's problems currently are not the chemical process or format of the cells, but the volume.
> So no this is not only about vision, Tesla (whether Musk himself or his engineers) identified a real problem, and engineered a real solution - the gigafactory
So, Musk identified a problem (manufacturing batteries at scale), found a vendor with a solution (Panasonic) and sold it under the name Tesla.
Every car manufacturer uses parts sourced from other companies - software, parts of engines, whole engines, whole gearboxes, complete modules, raw materials... That's how the industry works...
I assume that you have undertaken some engineering tasks in the past, and so then you have surely experienced that research, proper selection and setting up the sourcing chain for the parts is a big chunk of decisions that go into engineering a production line or even a single project/machine. Research that ultimately affects the choice of mechanical and otherwise building of the machines itself, because it depends on which parts are viable to source.
So not sure why you would focus on that superficial difference here, like what are you trying to prove? I don't understand your point. Elon Musk has a lot of results behind his companies to prove that he can engineer and a good ratio of technical terms and numbers he can spur off the top of his head in an interview to prove that he is not even mainly marketer, his brain is in engineering, he knows the technical stuff deeply down to revision numbers and decimal points and can give you an educated opinion on technical matters. So this shows you that he is indeed an engineer, not sure if that's your point even though?
Renting COTS tunneling machine, digging a plain old and quite unimpressive 1-mile-long tunnel, and calling it something fantastic and extraordinary is a good example of said reality distortion field.
Let's put it in perspective: London is covered by a network of small tunnels dedicated to cart mail around by autonomous vehicles. The tunnels were opened almost a century ago.
Passion and vision are a part of it, but the reality distortion field encompasses everything good, bad, and ugly about musk that he offers to the public, unsavory tweets included.
Can we not use the word 'passion'. In a world where subway job applicants need to have a passion for sandwiches the word has long since passed its sell by date.
Yeah they are.. they have a few, their first was just off-the-shelf technology, the second is a hybrid, and their third one is apparently fully designed by Boring Co.:
The pictures are jokes since it's proprietary to the company, but the names and descriptions are real. There were some spy shots of the gantry being used to set up 'proof-rock' awhile back:
With the Tesla EV, you have to market to the public how the car is better because you're selling it to the end customer. With the Boring company, you don't have to prove to anyone but yourself, or the governments or the project investors that your bid is good.
So you think the article is saying they have made improvements because it's the "ultimate goal" or something? This is kind of funny to me. The tech industry thinks it has a monopoly on the idea of improving efficiency or something?
Most of the costs are also emergency systems, such as ventilation and frequent exits. From what I've seen (I'm not an engineer or a tunnel expert), his tunnels do not account for these things. The standards, which cost a lot to meet, are there for a reason.
What I am skeptical about is putting large car batteries in tunnels, which store enormous amounts of energy that could potentially be released in combustion and need be managed by adequate ventilation and fire suppression systems.
Versus an electric train. Theoretically, since the energy is transported into the tunnel via power lines, wouldn’t fire suppression and ventilation systems be cheaper since they wouldn’t need to handle so much stored energy potential (via batteries) traveling through a tunnel?
Yes, seems like it. An engineer acquaintance who builds subway tunnels says that they put in emergency exits every X feet, so that emergency-exiting people never have to walk more than a certain distance before they have a chance to make it to ground level. And in the case of an emergency, massive ventilation fans kick in (that are otherwise dormant). So, from what he's told me, the costs are less in suppression than in providing safe exit opportunities.
Simply using public funds to employ a workforce rather than contract one would save the most money due to eliminating the need to house and feed shareholders and turn a profit, but voters seem to like the contractor profiteering model even if it eats the public purse.
NYC only has a big subway system because it gobbled up all the failing private railways over the years. LA used to have the largest rail transportation network in the world, it was private, and it too failed to turn a profit and failed. Transportation runs at a loss.
Using public funds to employ a workforce is basically “How to Bloat 101.” The MTA in NYC is a shining example of taxpayer waste. They call it “Money Thrown Away” for a reason.
This is false. The biggest cost to tunnels is moving and replacing utility lines (power, internet, sewage, water, etc.) that were not properly recorded by private entities when they constructed their buildings.
It's precisely where government bureaucracy was involved that tunneling is the cheapest, because then moving and replacing the utility lines can happen all at once instead of over the course of months as the tunneling machine bores into them, and bureaucracy can coordinate road closures, utility shutoffs, etc.
Also, private entities use subcontractors not because bureaucracy requires it but because it lets them delegate out responsibility for areas in which they do not have competence for less than the cost of developing such competence in-house. It's simply the way the construction industry works. Even Joe Blow Contractor rebuilding someone's bathroom will hire contractors to do specific parts of the rebuild (like the plumbing, or the tiles). Another example: the SoFi Stadium in Inglewood has hundreds of subcontractors, and is fully privately funded.
From the perspective of the city, the ROI of a subway train is high.
From the perspective of an individual, the ROI of using my own car in a tunnel, exactly when I want to, without parking, waiting, embarking, smelling the vagrants, disembarking, walking or getting a cab, ... Priceless!
From the perspective of an individual, the ROI of using my own car ON a FREEWAY, exactly when I want to, without parking, waiting, embarking, smelling the vagrants, disembarking, walking or getting a cab, ... Priceless!
My corrections in CAPS.
I don't think I need to say more, it should be obvious way tunnels for cars are a bad idea.
Hey, everyone — I (fairly) accurately expressed the points of view of some participants in this equation. Why are you spanking me for that? Or... were you looking for an echo chamber here on HN?
Because if you keep downvoting every statement that you don’t agree with, that’s what you’ll soon have!
It's not where technology has advanced, per se, but where he can find a niche that provides an excuse to not be constrained by existing burdensome regulation, or where he can shape and use regulation as a competitive advantage. So far this has mostly been by advances in tech, but the tech isn't necessarily the key component to the formula.
In the case of the boring company, I suspect the initial plan was the same (a la hyperloop), but have 1) discovered hyperloop is not cost feasible, 2) discovered that the same skills for negotiating regulation is itself a major advantage in subsurface construction, and 3) can use the Elon marketing hype machine to overcome NIMBY opposition, whether that be publicly or via politically (whereas people generally view mega construction companies as untrustworthy, and these companies are unlikely to be able to sway public opinion, except by maybe buying politicians.)
It's sort of an Uber approach to dodging rules, but in markets that limit competition by being relatively capital and knowledge intensive.
Along with the tunnelling speed improvements from what I'm gathering they are using model X chassis vehicles within the tunnels. The benefit of this is that you don't need rails, just line following sensors. There's no brake replacement because of regen etc. The main takeaway is that the carriage system will be able to be maintained by car mechanics and not locomotion engineers. What the stations will look like will be interesting to see because each "carriage" will be able to depart once full instead of waiting for an entire train to fill up.
But rails were invented for a reason - they're drastically more efficient. So doesn't this just trade lower upfront costs for much higher operational costs (in energy consumption per mile travelled)?
I hope this is a joke, but if not please look into the cost and timeliness of subway maintenance costs by unionized workforce’s dealing with things like switching and signaling equipment - your claim is that this is drastically more efficient than some car mechanics?
And if your number is low - you are not counting deferred maintenance which is huge in these systems
Yes, even counting "unionized workforce" cars cannot even remotely compete with mass transit rail on a per capita cost. Why is this so hard for people to understand?
The comparison here is to a transit system that uses vehicles which can be serviced by car mechanics. This will be cheaper.
And rail has otherwise struggled in the US.
The amtrak story is not great. I've tried to use them repeatedly, and outside of northeast corridor it is cheaper to fly then to take them anywhere. Let that sink in, the cost to get you up in air, and FLY is cheaper than rolling along on low friction rails. When you say why is it hard to understand that rail is cheapest it's because folks KNOW that things like buses are MUCH MUCH cheaper.
This is ignoring the absolutely stupid cost to build one mile of rail tunnel.
Building a tunnel and then filling it with cars is a waste of space. The per capita gains don't just come from being underground, they come from density of people - which is abysmal for cars, multiplied by the fact that most people drive alone for most of the time.
Mass transit rail has hardly "struggled" in the US - it has high usage and conflating the distinction between mass transit rail and long distance rail is disingenuous when considering the usecases of Musks tunnels.
Yes, rail transit is far more cost-effective than private automobiles when it comes to getting people from one place where they don't want to be to another place where they don't want to be.
induced demand is often (intentionally?) misunderstood as demand being literally insatiable (and by extension, "why bother?"), but really, we're just severly underserving the market, and there are very limited price signals we can rely on to understand the cost and value of a road foot-second (or meter-second).
people want more fast, affordable, on-demand, point-to-point private transportation. "induced demand" tells us we're woefully under-providing that demand. we're very far from the desired equilibrium point in nearly every metro area. elon seems to understand that better than a pithy quip might indicate.
along with mixed-use-as-default along transportation corridors, i would prefer more underground trains, dedicated busways, and small personal transport infrastructure (for electric bikes, scooters, etc.) in our cities (particularly in LA), but every effort, including the boring company's, that addresses that overwhelming demand helps.
On paper, when everything is just objects floating in gaseous infinite space, this makes sense. Once you begin to realize that a car takes space, this all falls apart. You can make the 405 100 miles wide to fit everyone across, but you'd loose the entire county in the process.
The fact of the matter is that it's absurd to transport people in a dense environment 25'x10' apart, one at a time, all going back and forth to the same exact two places five days a week for 40+ years. Trains let you fit way more people in a given area, people who are already heading the same direction, and therefor offer more space for a city to be a city rather than a place for infrastructure.
Until we get to a point where people are able to move easily with high capacity transit, it's irresponsible to waste precious political will to build with the intention of providing low capacity transport for those who can afford a $30k+ car.
> "...realize that a car takes space, this all falls apart."
that's accounted for in the foot-second metric. by a (very) rough calculation, we'd only need to double road foot-seconds to alleviate most congestion. that's very expensive, since most of these roads would have to go underground or be elevated, but not impossible (elon is trying to do just that for teslas).
i'm not advocating we double our roads, however. i'm just refuting the pithy notion that it's impossible to meet the supposedly insatiable demand implied by "induced demand" arguments.
but yes, let's build way more public transit and smaller personal transport networks (along with taller, mixed-use buildings)! it's definitely more efficient and can be less expensive and stressful.
The problem is that you don't pay for the slowdown you cause to everyone else. You're offloading that cost, so you keep choosing to use the road well beyond the point where traffic should be increasing.
To make up for that, we can charge people at the entrance point. But charging people time is basically impossible, so money is used instead.
Therefore more roads => more cars => same trip times. I could see that people would make decisions to take jobs where they travel by car, or choose to live further away etc. with more tunnels. That could be a good thing or bad, but yes the demand will increase, because people will find new reasons to get about if there is more road to do it on. Let alone business use of roads.
I think you've missed the point, going by your second paragraph.
How capacity is provisioned from A to B influences how people choose to move and, over the long term, build homes/workplaces.
Induced demand does not suggest that supply is less than demand - it implies that demand is "flexible" to meet any supply conditions. There is overwhelming evidence of this at work over 50 years and across continents.
As a consequence, the argument is not "why bother?" but rather - "build it in a way that scales". For urban areas, private transport doesn't scale well.
> "Induced demand does not suggest that supply is less than demand - it implies that demand is "flexible" to meet any supply conditions."
that's the exact interpretation i'm refuting.
of course supply is less than demand. that's because the price of using roads is (perceived to be) zero, but the cost of construction on the supply side is high (and increasing, relative to inflation). it's impossible to meet the demand for free when costs are high.
my point is that this mispricing is a political and cultural choice, not an economic one explained by "induced demand". by using an economic concept for a non-economic market, we fall prey to misinterpreting and misadvocating.
we need to make the price of private transport much more transparent (e.g., real-time pricing) and rein in costs (land prices, legal/regulatory costs) so that we can make better choices in allocating our precious and limited resources (toward more mass transit for example).
(real-time pricing should also be progressive so that roads aren't just for rich people.)
If you believe that car travel must be innately evil, then induced demand is a problem with building more roads. More roads mean more people using them to do something they want to do. These tunnels will be toll roads, so if you just up the tolls you can have them not get jammed up. You then have a real idea of how much a tunnel can make and you can get people to invest in building more of them.
Individual point-to-point transport systems are great. We just need to find a way to reduce the bad externalities of cars (pollution, traffic deaths, non-walkable cities/town, traffic congestion, taking up surface space). Elon Musk is working on three of these with Tesla and the Boring Company.
> More roads mean more people using them to do something they want to do.
I'd argue that a lot of people don't want to drive a car, they want to get to their destination.
Where options other than driving are available, then they weigh cost/convenience to make their decision.
My view isn't that cars travel is innately evil, or that building roads is always terrible - but that so much more money is spent on building more roads than on public transit options.
For some reason we ignore the last 60+ years of evidence to show that building more roads doesn't lead to reduced traffic. It's simply not possible to build out roads fast enough to beat the rise in traffic.
If you build public transit options that get people between locations they want to travel, ensure that it's run on time, clean, and affordable - then people who already drive will evaluate that cost/convenience function for themselves and decide that public transport is actually better. This results in much reduced road traffic.
The bad externalities of cars are numerous and extend well beyond those things you list, but primarily they create an astoundingly expensive barrier to being part of society and not someone who's left behind.
There aren't enough tunnels in the world to dig your way out of traffic problems. The more roads you make the more traffic you get.
Toll roads just increase the already staggering cost of owning a car, marginalizing even more people.
What about not doing that and instead investing in alternatives?
A lot of this stuff, 'ride sharing', self driving cars, boring company tunnels, and electric flopters seems not like a way to solve societies transportation/congestion issues but to solve it for the small percentage of well to do people.
I think he's woefully disconnected from the non-rich person's life, then. He can already afford to buy however much space he wants.
>If the transport system exceeds public travel needs, there will be very little traffic.
Sure. But... it would take an enormous amount of development to make this happen, because so many people are going to want more space if they can have it with still a <1hr commute. So more sprawl, leading to more pressure on the new network, lather, rinse, repeat...
For all the talk of walkable neighborhoods, if you gave people the choice of a 30min walk-and-subway commute in a 5-story condo building vs a 30min new-car-tunnel point to point commute with a 2000sqft house on a private parcel of land, you're going to have a lot (not everyone, but a lot) of people picking the latter.
Best case it's going to, for a long time, until we reach steady state, still just be a repeat of the "build roads, watch sprawl" cycle of the last century, just with potential to build even more roads by being able to continually go deeper (but is this that much easier than vertical overpasses and such?).
Induced demand = the product is actually being used. The hoary old cliché that says, "Building roads just increases congestion," is nothing more than an exercise in measuring the wrong thing.
Market demand, induced and otherwise, is a good thing, if the externalities are also addressed. That's basically Musk's whole business model.
Infrastructure operates differently from a good or service where you have a multitude of often interchangeable selections.
The easy availability of roads leads to more people driving since it's the more effective option, which in turn leads to more traffic. Eventually the system reaches equilibrium where it's busy enough that other alternatives are more desirable.
Time and time again predictions of apocalyptic traffic doom have failed to manifest when roads are removed. The traffic just goes away largely because the traffic was an artifact of the roads being there in the first place.
People are highly adaptable. They take the path of least resistance. If that path is a road, they take it. If you make the road bigger, it reduces resistance and becomes busier.
I know of some areas that would disagree with you: it is possible to out build demand, most rural areas have done it. I have driving 4 lane highways on a nice weekday where I could see for miles in either direction and there wasn't even one other car!
The only problem is cost. For a city to out build unmet demand they would need to get to add several dozen layers of road, one on top of another (that is bridges over bridges for 12 layers). Nobody would seriously propose building such a thing. If we had it the mobility of the city would allow people to accomplish more things in the city than they can today.
So where are we on this particular rendition of the Laffer curve? Are we already fortunate enough to be at "peak road," right here and now? That seems unlikely, but I suppose it's possible. Or would it be best to either remove more lanes, or add new ones?
Would traffic flow become infinitely fast if we removed them all?
Conversely, would it become infinitely slow if we paved every square inch of land in sight?
It's almost as if such simplistic models are worse than useless, huh.
> It's almost as if such simplistic models are worse than useless, huh.
I'd say that it's more like taking models to extremes is useless.
If your doctor says that you're consuming too much salt it is increasing your risk of a range of diseases, you don't turn around and say "But salt is necessary for the function of life, I can't just cut it out entirely!".
The answer, as with most things - is somewhere in between.
With our current set of transport options - a mix of transport options are going to be optimal. The specific mix is going to depend entirely on the area and traffic patterns.
That Sydney Metro tunnel is coming in at nearly double the initial budgeted cost. It's over $1B per km of tunnel. Australian infrastructure projects are hardly something to be proud of.
The MTA's Second Avenue line in New York comes out to more than AU$2Bn per km, on my reckoning (US$2.6Bn/mile). It's the current world champion for expensive holes.
The fact is that megaprojects basically never come in anywhere near their schedule or budget. That's because of a selection bias. When you crunch the numbers honestly, megaprojects come out as a terrible on a cost-benefit or ROI analysis. The ones that get built are built by people who choose to ignore the honest figures in favour of the shiny, optimistic ones. Et voila, another farce.
There are lots of other factors, but that's the core one that precedes the others.
Can you elucidate on that line of reasoning some more? I am unconvinced.
It has been my experience -- which some more "keepin it real" journalism concurs with -- that New York's outlandish infrastructure costs, as well as the majority of the USA's public projects, are primarily due to two main agents:
1. White collar bureaucracy
2. Blue collar "bureaucracy"
Both parties -- and the multitude of agents that operate within them -- are all too able to align their "piece" of the project towards their own interests.
These interests very much involve time and money.
For money, it's simply rerouting costs. And for time, it's "making one's mark," by misallocating resources to personally-enriching matters, that do not benefit the project as a whole, and usually hinder it.
It's late, and I'm not at 100% to go into detail, but surely this is well-known already?
I did structure my argument to say that the optimistic estimates precede the other problems. Before ordinary problems of inefficiency and corruption arise, the project has to be sold as a viable investment.
I take the argument about selection bias from Brent Flyvbjerg, who has been studying megaprojects for a fair while now. He calls it "survival of the unfittest"[0].
A similar resource is Merrow's Industrial Megaprojects[1], which is based on a large dataset of such efforts. He identifies many factors in project overruns, but essentially notes that most projects start off with fanciful estimates that will never be met. For a book about petrochemical plants, bridges and power stations, it's a fun read.
Megaprojects do come in near budget in many places. Not in the US for a number of reasons elucidated in this NYMag piece[0] by Josh Barro, whose takes I usually find surprisingly persuasive.
But it's just a subway tunnel, which have been built in cities since the 19th century. Is it really so much harder to do such "megaprojects" in the 21st century, with the vastly better equipment now available?
There are a raft of issues. The construction industry has not significantly benefited from large technological advancements that other industries have over the last century and is still human labor dependent. Wages have increased, we've decided it's not ok to kill people anymore, unions have removed exploitation in the immediate supply chains.
We also have more complicated, and are dependent on, soft and hard power structures to access and use capital. A great place to start looking into these issues is Bent Flyvbjerg at Said, Oxford
We’ve been building houses for millennia and construction is still notorious for not going according to plan. One-off projects are just hard to get to go as planned.
Lesson: don't do one-off projects. Find a project that meets you needs, and copy it. Make minor tweaks to their design to fit your needs, but copy as much as possible.
Houses typically go according to plan because so many of the processes and parts are standard. Even large mansions can go according to plan if you have good management (note that cheap management is rewarded for change orders and thus will ensure things don't go according to plan while better management will see that if they don't make a minor change now things won't go according to plan latter.
Imo big infrastructure needs like roads and subways shouldn't be done on a project basis at all. For instance, NYC shouldn't bid and build out massive contracts for a few km of subway. They should own a boring machine and add 10-100m of tunnels a week, every week[0]. (numbers arbitrary) You can shake so much overhead around project start-up and shut-down and it will be a long time before NYC (nevermind someplace like SF) has saturated the demand for public transit.
[0] Best example of this sort of logic that I have seen implemented is painting the golden gate bridge, just one properly sized and experienced crew painting from one end to the other and back again without the boondoggle.
I've thought the same for a while. A lot of the expense in upgrading rail cars, replacing frigates, building hospitals etc comes from the fact that every such project has massively expensive organisation constructed around it and then ... it's thrown away.
The Project Production Institute take a similar view: that instead of modeling a project as a fixed thing, you focus on it as a production process.
To make up some numbers: Assume that a paint job lasts 20 years. So if it takes a team of five 20 years to paint the bridge by the time they've reached the end the beginning will need a new coat.
Otherwise every 20 years they would need to hire, train, then fire 200 painters for a 6 month-long paint job project. 200 painters, managers, and etc. who will invariably be less experienced with the finer points of painting said bridge since they don't do it every day.
Most houses are unavoidably one-off projects. The point of comparison would be an assembly line at a factory. Compared to that, most houses are one-offs; that particular design has never been built at that particular site by that particular group of people and contractors.
We have improved it a lot, but the wheel has been round for a very long time. We laugh at people who reinvent the wheel as opposed to doing incremental improvements on it.
We do have ships, rockets, and a few other things that don't need wheels (tough they tend to have wheels of some form inside), but the wheel itself is still just incremental improvements on that first one way back...
NIH and 'reinventing the wheel' are phrases for questioning the need to spend time and money to develop a thing that has the same purpose as an existing thing and doesn't improve on it, which I agree with. But to use ships as an example, at some point people decided it would be useful to cross bodies of water without getting wet so they invented the boat, and as a new invention it improved quality of life immeasurably. It feels like you're saying people should exclusively stop making things which have new and novel purposes and just focus on improving existing things, which is the part I disagree with. Also, I think as an example, gears and wheels which have similar bases of design are two completely different inventions because they have different purposes, this might be where we disagree.
A large fraction of NYC's subway system was built using cut-and-cover, which is much cheaper than the deep tunneling being used for projects like the Second Avenue line or the East Side Access.
That's before adding other factors such as increase regulation, inflation and good ol' corruption.
That and there was no EPA, no environmental design reviews, not much permitting, lax or zero safety standards (today it is a huge deal when somebody dies on a construction project... no so much back then). There was no ADA accessibility standards, no elevators or required wheelchair access, there was very little underground.
If all the businesses along the block you are trenching through back then went under... so fucking what?
If your 24/7 jackhammers kept all the block up the whole night you’d tell them to take a hike.... etc, etc, etc.
If turns out if you care about any or all of those things, your costs go up. Back then it was all just negative externalities that got foisted on the neighborhoods around them. Think of the negative externalities causes by our interstate highway system. Good luck building that now! It literally divided entire neighborhoods. The entire thing would be require to go into a tunnel under the city. No way would people tolerate that shit now.
While this is all true, on a dollar-for-dollar basis, cut-and-cover is still cheaper than deep tunneling. There's no way around the fact that there is far more expertise, equipment, experience and competition for digging holes compared to digging tunnels.
I really don't understand the aversion to cut and cover these days. Whole blocks of street are routinely closed and resurfaced for long periods of time, especially if sewer work is involved. Businesses in urban environments aren't really reliant on the business from the street parking directly in front of their storefront anyway. Closing a couple blocks at a time wouldn't be all that bad, and it probably wouldn't take too long to throw a temporary grate for car traffic over the open cut anyway.
Recently there was squabble about the projected revenues of the LA olympics. The more recent figures were pessimistic, and naturally the media had their time writing pieces in different directions about this, blaming the city for incompetence and budget overruns, and the public formed their opinions and became ever more polarized. The reason why the figures had changed was simply that inflation had occurred over the years since the initial projection.
All sorts of reasons, but corruption (along-side organized crime) is a big issue in the construction industry. Imagine Oracle-style of service and business approach coupled with an npm-deep level of dependencies/middlemen whose palms need greasing and to have their cut of the project. Then on the other side you are boxed in by physics, thousands of regulations, zoning laws, complaints, city council, government bureaucracy.
"npm-deep" I love that phrase. anyone who suffers a dig around the node_modules folder knows the pain! Ugh! I also used Oracle in the early 2000's, I need hypnotherapy to get over that.
Massively cool cutting edge technology, even before Elon involvement. ;-)
There is also a huge amount of interesting videos on Youtube about these projects, all the way from the initial tunnel boring/blasting all the way to final outfitting (imagine installing rails & electric equipment in a 57 km long tunnel - no wonder it took 6 years of multi shift daily work, etc.).
>>A 2002 report by Michitsugu Ikuma described, for the undersea section, that "the tunnel structure appears to remain in a good condition." The amount of inflow has been decreasing with time, although it "increases right after a large earthquake".
Channel Tunnel suffered significant delays and additional costs for instance because the brackets supporting cable and pipe runs needed to be taken down after everything had been installed because of a latent design defect and replaced.
Imagine how long it takes to pull 20+km of cable off the wall.
Also, compared to other construction sites, tunnels are a different beast, you often need to transport huge amounts of materials, people and equipment long distances to get to your work-front (and back again). It might be a straight line, but it's still far.
As much as I love the Channel Tunnel (my father was an engineer on it and I grew up during the construction) the actual outrun cost benefit ratio just isn't there. Extra ferries probably would have been more economical.
Yes it is exactly that. A lot faster and much cheaper. Please watch the initial boring company presentation, the motivation is presented like in the first minutes. It is not like they are trying to hide anything, they are very open about what is new with their technology.
The old quote about rich people using public transit applies : my personal preference is to live in an (european) city with a great public transport system.
If you want to see a working model of Elon's tunnel then take a look at this video[0]. He actually invited lots a bunch of people to test it out and give them an idea of how it'll all work.
Toronto can't build a subway stop for under 1 billion. I would imagine someone like Elon could could dig a complete line with a dozen stops for 1 billion.
It's amazing how he creates companies and solutions on a whim that revolutionize complete industries.
What's amazing to me is that we built the Golden Gate bridge for $35 million in 1933 (would be $688 million in today's dollars) and it only took 4 years. The Empire State building was built in one year (1930). What happened to our ability to build massive structures quickly? Is it amazing that Musk can do things so quickly or is it just that we got so fucking slow on everything that it seems amazing?
If you want a serious answer: try and build a house. I did. It will expose you to the bananas state of local government.
Planning/zoning will kill you, it's simply illegal to build most types of houses in most of the US. There was a recent blog post about this I can't find, but it outlined all the houses that exist that are now practically illegal. For example, mixed use where there's a business on the ground floor. Or building 3 stories in a 2-story zone. Or having an ADU. The list is endless. In fact my current town just made it illegal to build single family units next to multi-family (with a buffer), and we only have two places in the town where you're allowed to build office space. Retail is slightly better, there are three places that's okay.
If you get through planning, then permits will kill you. The permits to demolish our place (different town!) were more than buying a new house. I'm not kidding.
If you get through permits then good luck with inspections.
What musk is doing with tunnels is what the entire tech industry is doing: working in a zone with a lot less rules. It's illegal to make a building but you can make any website you want. Though that is going away too, it'll get regulated to death eventually and you can already see it starting to happen with data and privacy laws.
The main escape from all this, as far as I've been able to find, is Texas. It's apparently still legal to build things there.
Going threw this in Zürich Switzerland, it seems to me that the local government is basically like interacting with a fascist. They are obsessed with 'image' of the city and everything from colors, to shapes of windows, size of outside area, parking spots and so on is regulated.
It seems to me like building a house is more like a doing a complex tree fitting problem then actual design.
Honestly, this is a quite frightening comment. It's never been obvious to me that regulation for the sake of destroying competition is coming to tech. But now that you mention it, it's inevitable. And it will kill innovation.
Just the whole GDPR compliance and showing the cookie alert is a PITA if you're going to run any small online business. And it will get much worse.
> What happened to our ability to build massive structures quickly?
It takes longer to complete an environmental impact review to do a major project than it did to build the Golden Gate. And that's just one of several major red tape & time hurdles that didn't exist in 1933.
> According to CEQ, the average length of a full-blown Environmental Impact Statement is currently 600 pages and takes 4.5 years to conclude. US federal agencies prepare approximately 170 such assessments per year.
We can build a building like the empire state today in a year if we are willing to waste a half dozen lives in the process as well. In fact in some countries that's pretty much what's done.
You look at the old photos of the construction and these guys were walking around on steel beams 80 stories high with no hard hats, no rails, no protection from falls...it's no surprise they lost 5 workers. I wouldn't argue that safety should be sacrificed, but as others said, a lot of the hold up in construction is environmental review, inspections, permitting process, etc. It's nuts, but the architect conceived of the design in two weeks. Construction began the next year after concept drawings and it took 13 months to build. They were putting down nearly one floor a day. Amazing. And it's an iconic building that remains a landmark today.
I can't speak for Toronto, but NYC builds a subway at $2.2 billion/km while Berlin spends $250million/km[1]. We don't need to revolutionize. We need to copy.
As a space exploration enthusiast, Elon's tunnel boring activities are especially interesting to me. He is the only tunnel boring CEO who has openly expressed interest in developing the technology for Mars.
> ELI5... why is digging a tunnel tech news? Does Elon dig them faster or more cheaply or something?
Honestly as a 5 year old you are not going to get it.
This is multi levelled. Some people just like Elon. But what's really however interesting is how Elon is changing manufacturing. It's like a new Kanban
But it's not 5 year old stuff. I'd just say,
I know all the other kids like rockets and think they are cool to watch take off, but tunnels are pretty cool to watch too.... and so are processes but that's adult stuff for now kido (and give them a wink)
Just a pet peeve, I hope I don't tell my kids it's "adults stuff" and leave it at that. I think kids can sometimes surprise you at how much they can understand. Explain it as simply as you can, and if they don't get it try again. If they still don't get it, well maybe it's too advanced for them, or maybe you can't explain it in a simple enough way.
I know I was eternally annoyed at how much adults underestimated me growing up.
Stated opening date isn't until 2021, so they're doing the first 90% of the project which is drilling then the second 90% which is finishing the infrastructure, installing stations, etc. It's interesting to see but not exactly a milestone just yet.
So they're halfway through digging the tunnel, not halfway through doing all the other things to make the tunnel actually as useful as musk is claiming.
This all just seems like subways from first principles but probably worse.
If you want to build subways in less time for less money, the from-first-principles conclusion is that cut-and-cover is stupendously cheaper and quicker than tunneling.
But nobody wants to be the one who signs off on "long sections of major roads closed for months at a time over a period of several years".
You can’t really do multiple layers of tunnels with cut and cover. It also requires the tunnels to follow where you can actually cut instead of the most direct route.
> You can’t really do multiple layers of tunnels with cut and cover.
Sure you can. I ride such a line every week day.
True about the most direct route, but having uncontested right of way tends to make a big difference in travel times. And in grid layouts, where you want to go is closely aligned to how you get there.
>This all just seems like subways from first principles but probably worse.
The big advantage is creating tunnels with a smaller diameter, allowing them to dig much quicker. So much space is wasted between each subway car that a large diameter isn't necessary.
Though if they really dug that much tunnel under a city in such a short time, maybe there's an actual innovation in a better way to make subway tunnels?
I think putting cars in these tunnels is silly and that subways are obviously the best answer personally, but I'm also watching two new light rail lines being put in next to my house. It does not seem quick (though they're elevated). It'd be lovely if those tracks were somehow underground faster and cheaper than above ground.
I'm happy enough it's finally happening, but if it could be done economically in a way that reclaimed the land the rail lines are on to make a park or more housing? And without trains driving by my windows on both sides? Maybe the boring machine itself is somehow better than what we dig tunnels now.
Though if they really dug that much tunnel under a city in such a short time, maybe there's an actual innovation in a better way to make subway tunnels?
Don't believe the hype that this is "under a city." It's under a bunch of parking lots, which have little to zero underground utilities or other infrastructure.
It's not like they're burrowing under New York. But it might be good practice.
If there were an actual innovation in tunneling, I feel like they’d be able to give actual specific metrics to rebut critics who argue that it’s apples to oranges. But AFAIK the bottleneck in tunneling is not a mechanical engineering one.
The tunnel boring in Seattle began right at the edge of downtown, went under a highway and a monumental retaining wall (They covered that wall with surveying targets and monitored it the entire time), then pretty deep under a residential neighbhorhood and a canal.
I think the only time it's moving close to high-rises again is over by the University.
Edit: I believe they went so deep because of the volume of glacial deposits in this area. Otherwise they would have been going through gravel. That made building the stations a bit of a pain (the Beacon Hill station still has chronic problems with water. It smelled like a moldy towel for a long time).
Geotech is a bitch. Soils aren't homogenous and vary a lot in both composition and characteristics. There are multiple types of TBMs that are designed to operate under very specific conditions, for example a soft rock/soil TBM excavates through different mechanisms than a hard rock TBM. One of the big problems in any excavation is you have no idea what's actually down there until you start working in it. The underlying material can differ a lot over very short distances. You can very easily be minding your own business driving the TBM and run into a transition that will straight up mess you up. Combine that with all the previous mentioned stuff and you get a lot of cost overruns and time overruns. But yea, subsurface is a bitch.
Even if you had ideal conditions or an amazing new TBM that goes through any material, you're still dealing with a machine that scrapes at rocks for miles on end. The parts that do the digging need constant replacement, underground, on the inconvenient side of the boring machine, and even if you did the actual digging faster that'd mean repairing it even more often.
I’m not disagreeing with you (I know nothing about geotechnical), but I was thinking the bottleneck is all the bureaucracy and infrastructure factors, which don’t have mechanically scalable solutions. I’m assuming tunneling through Las Vegas is much different than tunneling in NYC or SF or even LA.
Judging by the pace of the SF chinatown muni tunnel, the digging happens relatively quickly...the slow parts are the parts before and after the digging.
In SF, they spent years surveying, moving utilities, excavating stations, etc., dug the actual tunnel in (IIRC) a year, and have spent subsequent years finishing all of the other stuff that makes it more than a hole in the ground.
Yeah, that’s not a very useful comment. I realize it’s popular to blame NIMBYs for everything bad in SF these days (“NIMBY” is tech for “I’m not getting 100% of what I want, immediately!”), but your comment does nothing to address the substance of the observation: the digging was the fast part of the SF project.
Maybe the whole thing could have been done in half the time without public meetings, but that’s neither here nor there. The work of moving utilities and keeping sinkholes from forming in downtown SF is still incredibly complex, and seems to me to make up the bulk of the schedule.
> Though if they really dug that much tunnel under a city in such a short time, maybe there's an actual innovation in a better way to make subway tunnels?
Or maybe tunneling speed simply isn't the bottleneck so no one ever tried going faster. If it takes 3 months to dig out the tunnel but 6 months to fit it out then you've gained nothing.
His goal is to somehow run a tunnel boring machine on Mars, right? He'll certainly be testing out new tech if that's the goal. These machines are magnificently heavy at present, aren't they?
He’s trying to parlay his life’s work into civilization on Mars. Everything he’s investing time and energy into has uses here, today, but the prize he has his eye on is not here.
Does making a tunnel boring machine lighter or smaller have advantages? Sure, if the machines get used to dig more than one tunnel then a more portable design will begin to develop. But nobody is worried about paying well over $1000/lbs to move the damn thing. And nobody is worried about how big a parachute you need to land it in Martian atmosphere without breaking it.
Knowing Musk, he isn’t spending time on this plan if it does nothing for his dream. Therefore there’s a connection. What might that be? What would digging large holes have to do with sending people to an environment with barely any atmosphere and massive sandstorms? Oh.
I expect solving that problem will take ages. If he starts now he might have some major progress by the time he’s gotten a few missions to Mars. By the time habitat management is a problem he may have something that is pretty crazy but not insane.
I also expect that when spending another $1000/lbs on cutting surfaces represents a net savings, you’ll see him working with some pretty bizarre and exotic materials. What that would be will come as a surprise to me, since I haven’t paid any attention to materials science since about the time they started making synthetic diamond.
No, it's just a lot smaller. A 12-foot-wide tunnel is, shockingly, much cheaper than a 21-foot-wide tunnel. It also has essentially zero capacity, much like a hyperloop. If you want to punch useless holes in the earth, Elon Musk is your man without a doubt.
According to an analysis I saw on youtube somewhere, they were able to find companies that dig similar sized tunnels (Boring Co. is just using off the shelf tunnel digging equipment.) They were running comparable if not a bit slower than similar projects that have been done many times before.
Is this for real? They are basically getting orgasms just because someone drills a tunnel, which is indeed revolutionary for public transportation... And it transports a whopping 4500 people per hour, will you think of that! That is almost as much as a normal, 100 year old subway train can do in a few minutes.
I don't know a lot about the background of this project or the region. Why has it taken this long for a tunnel to be built in LV? Was/is it not considered necessary?
It's pretty much misleading to describe this as a Los Vegas tunnel to be honest. What they're actually doing is building a small shuttle system to get from one side of a convention centre to the other. The total length of the tunnel will be 1 mile. So in terms of what this project does, it's best compared to the sorts of bus systems, monorails, and light rail systems that airports use to transport people from one terminal to another. There's a reason these small funky transit systems are only used on small scales.
It's not comparable to real mass transit systems used on the scale of a city and the length of the tunnel means that the public really can't view the cost of this as comparable to the cost of a real Subway system tunnel or road tunnel.
The relevance of the project for TBC is that they're going to learn from it, but for the rest of us it's really not going to be that interesting.
The Strip, McCarran airport, and downtown are not within one or two miles of each other. They are further apart than that so there must be something else to it.
The Strip itself could use the whole length of the tunnel, so whatever this is connecting to is going to be more limited then it might sound from the article.
The expansion of the LVCC made me vaguely curious about what types of shows use it given that all the IT shows I'm familiar with use the Venetian/Sands or, if they're a bit smaller, The Mandalay Bay. I haven't been there since Comdex days. It looks as if it's things like Kitchen and Bath Builders, World of Concrete, etc. So maybe things that are more oriented towards a mega show floor and less to speaking rooms.
what types of shows use it given that all the IT shows I'm familiar with use the Venetian/Sands
Here's the list of big conventions this year:
CES: 175,000 people
Automotive Aftermarket Show: 160,000
ConExpo-Con/Agg: 129,000
National Association of Broadcasters: 103,000
MAGIC (fashion/makeup, I believe): 78,0000
International Builders Show: 68,000
Shooting, Hunting & Outdoor Trade Show: 61,000
World of Concrete: 60,000
National Mining Association: 50,000
Las Vegas Market, Winter: 50,000
Las Vegas Market, Summer: 50,000
ASD Market Week Winter: 46,000
Mr. Olympia: 45,000
ASD Market Week Summer: 44,000
Nightclub and Bar Show: 39,000
Audiovisual and Integrated Experience: 38,000
RECon: 37,000
Those are just the top attendees. There are many dozens more.
Of those I listed, only the Automotive Aftermarket show is also at the Sands.
The expansion isn't to handle larger shows, it's to handle more large shows simultaneously.
Also not listed is the NFR Rodeo which is big enough to be held at the UNLV stadium, plus the expo center, plus over a dozen hotels. I think that one is around 103,000 people.
CES is the key one. It occupies all of LVCC and Sands, with spillover and unofficial meeting rooms taking up basically all of the strip. It's not clear what CES is going to do with another full hall though. The show is already kind of a mish-mash of industries.
I forgot about CES because I've never been to that one.
It still sort of amazes me that CES hasn't collapsed under its own weight. Comdex did. CeBIT finally did. I thought it was finally going to happen about a decade ago when Microsoft pulled out; that's the usual "emperor has no clothes" moment. But it kept on going.
"is expected to connect the Las Vegas Convention Center to popular Las Vegas hot spots. Downtown Las Vegas, the Strip, and McCarran International Airport will all be destination options for riders"
That statement in the article makes no sense in the context of other stated facts in the article. And seems to be simply untrue. [1] It's a contract with the Las Vegas Convention Center.
"LVCC Loop will connect the LVCC New Exhibit Hall with the existing campus (North/Central/South Halls). Three stations locations (see map below) will offer convenient access between key LVCC destinations and nearby transportation connections."
Getting around Vegas in general is a pain. What transportation systems there are aren't integrated. And individual casinos/conference centers are so sprawling that, as this project shows, you practically (or do) need transit systems just to get around a single property.
ADDED: The Boring Company page shows "conceptual future expansion" to a ton of other locations. Those other locations include Los Angeles so I'll leave it to readers to judge how realistic those are.
The article is confusing. It says that they are supposed to deliver two tunnels - are both going on at the same time?
It also says that they’re 6 football fields in: 1800 ft. This is only 35% of the stated mile length for the tunnel. Under what metric is this tunnel or project 50% complete?
Also good to note that Teslarati is an "Elon Musk fan boy" blog. Anything that you read there is usually lacking critical sense. They probably rounded 44% to 50%
Musk as a company leader means a lot. I’m sure a lot of other people had the idea for a “Tesla” before there was Tesla. Or the idea of self-landing rockets.
When you build the tunnel for a tenth the cost, that's a pretty big difference. The same budget lets you build ten times more infrastructure, which is quite badly needed! I live in Los Angeles and things are so bad here that often you simply can't see friends that live only a few miles away.
They're using standard tunnel boring machines same as anyone else. It's not clear what their "special sauce" is that's supposed to enable them to do it at one-tenth the cost. So far they haven't delivered.
As for LA, you've had ample opportunity to expand your subway system over the past decades to solve this problem, it's just never actually been done. It's not clear how Boring Company changes anything. I would love to be wrong about this, but I'm not seeing it.
LA has expanded its rail system quite dramatically in the past decade and will be opening a new rail line next year...
It turns out the expensive part was not the digging. It was moving undisclosed utility lines and building the stations. Moving undisclosed utility lines is almost singlehandedly the reason the regional connector and Crenshaw lines are over budget.
And acquiring all the land to build the stations ...
And subways have relatively few surface interfaces compared to what you'd need to build to move the same amount of people in cars. Come to Manhattan and look at the massive, multi-block entrances to the Lincoln Tunnel, Holland Tunnel, Midtown Tunnel, etc. You're talking billions worth in real estate acquisition costs, demolition, and construction just to build a new tunnel entrance in the city, completely ignoring the tunnel cost itself.
And these tunnels move fewer people per day than the most-used subway stations, which are easier to integrate into the urban environment because you only need to build stairways and a couple elevators, not massive ramps and road connections for vehicles.
But what if it's also tenth the capacity? According to the article this accommodates 4,400 people/hr. BART ridership is 411k/day, and (to pick a random example) Gangnam subway station in Seoul averages at 230k/day. And that's actual usage, not max capacity.
That's only a valid comparison if you take massive infrastructure projects head-on. There is no law of physics stating that these tunnels can't be used for other situations and purposes.
Several things come to mind:
1. There are lots of places with lower density than city centers, but higher density than suburbs that would benefit massively from underground transportation.
3. Let's not discount the strong likelihood of further cost reductions. The Boring Company has made huge strides already, with further cost and speed gains to be had from a TBM they are designing and building from scratch: https://www.teslarati.com/boring-company-line-storm-tunnelin...
Do you have any citation for the "huge strides" TBC has made already? The only concrete numbers I've seen have been apples to oranges, either not normalizing for cross section area, or comparing just the cost of TBC digging to complete projects.
It appears that The Boring Company uses both off-the-shelf TBMs and their own designs (and, I think, also a customized off-the-shelf TBM). It would be interesting to learn which one they used here.
Except this 10% of cost is just a marketing ploy by Musk to sell you the project. When you compare to the price of subways in Europe, this isn't any cheaper. North America is extremely bad at building cheap subways, but other places of the world have already achieved it.
I personally know people that work at SpaceX (because my wife works there). Reusable rockets weren't a cheap marketing ploy. I don't have personal contact with anyone at the Boring Company, but it's located right across the street from SpaceX in Hawthorne, and I know that many of the people there are from SpaceX. In fact, I just drove past the test tunnel there this morning, as I dropped her off at work.
I might be biased given where my friends work, but how do you know that calling it a "marketing ploy" isn't an overly-cynical view of things? After all, Musk sees more cost reductions coming, and his track record has been pretty good (if a bit late at times).
I also have some questions for you that I hope can resolve things:
1. Do you believe it is possible to do better than the infrastructure projects in other countries that you cite?
2. Do you agree that it would be a good thing if they succeed in making tunnels far cheaper than they are anywhere else in the world?
Finally, I hope that my tone does not come across to you as being negative in any way. I do not mean to sound strident, overconfident, or for any of the above to come across as a put-down. I mean no harm!
Your tone does come off as negative, especially the second question. I think virtually everyone agrees with that, so why bother asking unless you are questioning the intelligence of him (which I do not think you do, but you come off that way)? If you do not want to sound negative you should skip any questions with only one sane answer.
1: yes I believe it is possible to better. However I also believe that many of the reasons those other countries do better than the US - as much a 7 times cheaper - are political and thus not something any manager can solve. Going from 4x more expensive than best world prices prices (LA is about 4x, NYX is about 7x) to 3.9x more expensive than world prices are possible - that is a drop in the bucket though compared to the 4x improvement possible by finding the real issues where are political.
How is this different from saying someone selling a fine bottle of wine for $2 in New York is scamming you, because you could get the same bottle for $2 in France... ?
If we can get good wine at $2 in France, a fine bottle of wine at $2 in NY is still a bargain. But a NY-based company saying they'll revolutionize wine industry by selling quality wine at $2/bottle, might be trying to scam you.
The difference between one that falls into the ocean and one that brings itself back down into orbit and lands safely is one is cheaper than the other?
I guess the better analogy is "an orbit is an orbit". We don't care about the orbit as much as we care about the rockets in the case of SpaceX, because what the rockets mean for our ability to explore space.
In the case of Boring, a tunnel is a tunnel, but if they can make them cheap and fast, that opens up a bunch of possibilities for improving transit.
With SpaceX, it's very clear how they're getting the >10X cost efficiencies. Rockets are massively expensive to build, and instead of building a new one for each launch and throwing them away as part of the mission, SpaceX is reusing each rocket many times. Their next-gen architecture BFR will be reusable dozens of times. So it's super obvious how SpaceX is putting things into orbit cheaply.
This is not true at all for tunnel construction, though. SpaceX is using largely the same technology (tunnel-boring machines) and is going to have all the same problems going through permitting, land acquisition, entrance/exit construction, etc., same as anyone else. It's not clear at all what fundamental advantage they have that would allow them to do this stuff much more cheaply.
Maybe the price? My city recently built an overpass over a single rail track that cost the same amount - $50 million. A tunnel like this would probably be a 10x cost run by most companies.
The "wow" factor is the price per distance, and digging rate. These infrastructure projects (in the USA at least) are usually extremely expensive and slow.
In London I have a thousand
options, and every single one of them is clogged at 6 pm. People stay extra hour at work because there is no way for them all to get home.
London has two options - tube or (half each) car or bus. All suck, but tube gets you there fastest (with probably higher level of discomfort as bus does).
Imagine having real bike lanes (and not getting killed) where you'd be able to use e-bikes and e-scooters. Imagine pooling electric car with your neighbour in a Boring tunnel. Even when it's slower you are not a sardine in a sweaty, hearing-damaging tube.
Options dont matter when roads are already clogged. Whether the cars are electric or not wont make a difference.
Bikes/scooter are last mile transport, sure, you can squeeze another 10% capacity out of them or whatever. Maybe another 10% from car pooling. That's it. The only way to get more throughput on the surface is to replace cars with buses. The only way to get more throughput underground is to expand the tube. It does not need to be sweaty or ear damaging, in Prague our metro is really nice, and so is the one in Madrid.
The boring tunnel is basically useless, a hundred of them will move less people than a single tube line.
There is no space in central megacities for cars and the sooner you people realise that, the sooner we can start solving the problem.
I mean, neither the Tesla being an electric car or an iPhone being a smart phone were new things but they are changing/changed the landscape of technology.
I guess it makes sense to listen in when someone who has shown to be more than a one hit wonder tries to do more of these things.
Also, I think the point here is the hypothetical way that cars can be moved in the tunnels which makes the smaller size still useful.
I think tunnels are the future though for cities. But I'd prefer trains to be running in them, or roads that only allow electric public transport.
Edit. In 1988 they started work on the Channel Tunnel UK to France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel - I am still in awe that they did this! I like the vision, bean counters be damned. If he made a tunnel like that it'd be news.