
The Boring Company FAQ - schiffern
https://www.boringcompany.com/faq
======
Animats
So, the key ideas are:

\- 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/...](http://www.therobbinscompany.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/08/FastEPBAdvance_NAT2014.pdf) [2]
[http://www.machinedesign.com/archive/art-digging-
hole](http://www.machinedesign.com/archive/art-digging-hole)

~~~
erentz
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?

~~~
josephg
> 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.

[1]
[https://youtu.be/DIR6Rmhm3To?t=54m17s](https://youtu.be/DIR6Rmhm3To?t=54m17s)

~~~
cel1ne
Off topic:

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.

~~~
Angostura
That's not businesses - that's humans. Or do you apply for a new job every two
weeks whenever you see a higher salary advertised?

~~~
cel1ne
More precisely it's humans when they form a bunch / organization ;).

~~~
Angostura
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.

~~~
monk_e_boy
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.

------
discodave
The old strategy of hiding your outlandish claim in an assertion in the first
sentence!

"To solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic, roads must go 3D"

The word "must" is a very strong one here, there are other options:

* Reduce the amount of travel that people need to do (remote work, online shopping).

* Reduce the density of cities (enabled by remote work or longer commutes with better internet access).

* Increase public transport options (higher passenger density).

* Encourage cycling.

I feel like only somebody who lives in LA would make the "must" assertion and
not think about all the other options... oh wait:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/b/6e27fcba-309d-494e-b...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/b/6e27fcba-309d-494e-b87d-c73fb8bb1750)

~~~
sAuronas
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.

~~~
bsder
> Public transit has failed to solve the problem despite a 100-year head
> start.

Public transit _SOLVED_ the problem 100 years ago in the US. And then it was
sabotaged by the big automakers.

~~~
24gttghh
>Public transit SOLVED the problem 100 years ago in the US. And then it was
sabotaged by the big automakers.

I think American Individualism sabotaged Public Transit when it realized it
could avoid the public by using automobiles.

------
deftnerd
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)?

~~~
Baeocystin
>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.

~~~
dredmorbius
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,

~~~
Baeocystin
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.)

~~~
dredmorbius
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.

------
schiffern
> _What do you do with all that dirt?_

>... 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.

I called it. :)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14224261](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14224261)

~~~
easilyBored
I have seen ~3 decades old earth bricks (granted, uncompressed) and it's not
pretty. Maybe compression and hydro-isolation does wonders.

~~~
jacquesm
Mix in some resin?

~~~
greglindahl
The traditional way is to use straw.

------
atarian
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?

~~~
astrocat
> 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.

~~~
tedsanders
>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.

~~~
Turing_Machine
People have been building tunnels for a lot longer than they've been building
planes. They are extremely well-understood.

The innovation here is in digging the tunnels, not their operation.

~~~
tedsanders
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.

~~~
Turing_Machine
You are the one who is suggesting that there are vague, ill-defined risks
involved in this "new" technology.

------
theprop
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!

~~~
catmanjan
I'm just imaging a 150 way 3-d lane merge at the other end :O

~~~
lucb1e
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 150 _1.1_ 120 = ~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.

~~~
TeMPOraL
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.

------
HappyTypist
This does not answer the most obvious and important question: why not invest
in public transport? It's boring but it will work.

~~~
CodeWriter23
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.)

~~~
so33
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.

~~~
CodeWriter23
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.

~~~
kuschku
I recommend you first try mass transit in Berlim, Tokyo, Singapore,etc before
discussing this.

Your impression of mass transit seems to be very biased due to the american
fuckups with them.

------
praptak
"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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand)

Not to sound too negative but how about some evidence on why it will work this
time?

~~~
pjscott
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.

------
Fricken
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.

~~~
iamacynic
> _that can hold maybe a dozen passengers_

there's no reason this system couldn't carry a bus.

musk markets to the elites first, then uses that to subsidize the mass market
solutions.

~~~
LandoCalrissian
Or how about trains underground...

~~~
iamacynic
yes, imagine that, subterranean.. rail.. ways.... a type of 'sub-way'.
possibly even a private one.

------
nmeofthestate
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".

~~~
mangodrunk
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.

~~~
crush-n-spread
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.

------
dennyabraham
An automated electric tunneling system that can recycle material into building
components sounds incredibly useful to prep mars for colonies.

~~~
rocky1138
Have you ever read up on Mars lava tubes? The idea of using them to start
colonies makes a lot of sense to me.

~~~
dennyabraham
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

------
ktta
Uhh, this isn't going to be the panacea many are making it out to be here.
This will not come close to accommodating the current capacity of freeways.

The tunnel is being planned to be 14 feet wide, which is how it suddenly
becomes viable. That's around two 'stabilized electric sleds' in one tunnel.

Current freeways are 8+ lanes and you'll have to consider how the specifics of
group travel are going to be worked out.

Can anyone who've done their own research comment on the throughput once there
are interconnected tunnels?

~~~
xyzzy_plugh
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.

~~~
ktta
(If you're taking about inter-city travel)

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.

~~~
gfodor
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.

~~~
ktta
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.

~~~
gfodor
The company is based in LA, a city known for its hellscape of congested
freeways.

------
tim333
>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](http://www.tech-faq.com/vehicle-
platooning.html) ) which could almost be done with present tech.

------
lucb1e
> 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?"

"The Boring Company."

~~~
nickik
SpaceX actually does the same.

------
arikrak
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...

[1] [https://www.vox.com/policy-and-
politics/2017/1/1/14112776/ne...](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-
politics/2017/1/1/14112776/new-york-second-avenue-subway-phase-2)

------
rdruxn
"This is not a new concept, as buildings have been constructed from Earth for
thousands of years including, according to recent evidence, the Pyramids."

Classic Musk snark. Love it.

------
agjacobson
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?

Nahh.

~~~
cmarschner
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.

------
rtpg
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

------
vacri
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.

------
gesman
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.

------
lorenzorhoades
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.

~~~
simonh
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.

~~~
lorenzorhoades
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.

------
danp
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/](http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-metro-tunneling/)

------
cperciva
I'm rather surprised that "are you boring yet?" isn't in the FAQ.

------
mcculley
One question I don't see answered in the FAQ is "Who owns the tunnels?"

Does the Boring Company own them? The municipality? How does one go about
getting permission to tunnel below property owned by other entities?

------
IanDrake
>Unlike flying cars, tunnels are weatherproof, out of sight and won't fall on
your head.

Anyone from Boston can tell you that's not true. I don't think this sort of
hyperbole helps the case for tunneling.

------
6d6b73
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.

------
lomereiter
This page forced me to find and install autoConvert Chrome plug-in, so that I
can read the text without stopping to wonder what 14 feet is.

------
bischofs
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?

------
radiorental
> out of sight and won't fall on your head

Tunnels are known for quite the opposite:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/us/11cnd-
boston.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/us/11cnd-boston.html)

------
jl6
I wish them the best of luck but I can't help feel the entire premise of the
company is based on a pun.

~~~
thatwebdude
"When dad jokes go too far, Musk edition."

------
RangerScience
> 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.

Yesssss.

------
Tiktaalik
>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).

A large network of highways many lanes wide would fix congestion in any city,
no matter how large it grew (just keep adding lanes).

~~~
lorenzorhoades
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.

------
sathishmanohar
> 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?

------
otto_ortega
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?

------
i_am_olo
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!

~~~
Andrenid
In the future I assume Tesla, Space X, Boring Co, etc will all become Mars
Corp.

He's said again and again his true goal is to colonize Mars and everything
until then is to get to that goal.

What happens when he does get there? Can be claim it? Become President? Or an
area of it?

~~~
wilonth
He will become the Elon of Mars
[http://imgur.com/a/yhvDH](http://imgur.com/a/yhvDH).

------
arcticbull
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.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Maglev_Train](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Maglev_Train)

------
arcticbull
All due respect, I'd rather just bring in the Hong Kong MTR corporation and
let them run the entire LA public transit system instead as they do in
Stockholm and Melbourne, among others
([https://www.mtr.com.hk/en/corporate/consultancy/railwayopera...](https://www.mtr.com.hk/en/corporate/consultancy/railwayoperation.html)).

------
hung2201
I believe digging tunnels on earth is Elon's way to practice on earth. The
machine will be use to dig tunnel in Mars in the future.

------
hoorayimhelping
>* A large network of road tunnels many levels deep would fix congestion in
any city*

heh, sorry Miami, Orlando, Tampa and I'm sure many others.

------
mwexler
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.

------
rebootthesystem
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.

------
shriphani
I love the punchy writing style of the FAQ - so full of Elon's spirit and go-
getter attitude!

I hope these guys do a great job!

------
solarengineer
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.

------
beefsack
Given the name of the company and how that FAQ reads, I feel there's a good
chance it's satire.

------
Kluny
Whoever wrote this, I'd like them to evaluate my life and write me a mission
statement as well.

------
shpx
Doesn't a tunnel under a building significantly increase the chances of the
building falling down?

What about flooding?

~~~
avn2109
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.

~~~
grzm
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._

------
rimher
Unfortunately this is never going to work in Rome, where there's a whole
underground city already

------
Gravityloss
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!".

------
libeclipse
But what to do with all the dirt?

~~~
thatwebdude
I laughed at "disposal".

Perhaps they aren't fully aware of the volume disturbed soil takes up.
Logistics of moving it could be a cost not necessarily considered.

------
schlipity
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?

------
jqueryin
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.

------
abakus
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.

------
jlebrech
If he reduced the tunnels even more by a factor or 20 instead he could put
schweebs in the tunnels.

[http://shweeb.com/](http://shweeb.com/)

------
smitherfield
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.

~~~
greglindahl
Have you ever seen a car on a flatbed tow truck?

~~~
smitherfield
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.

------
neillyons
I love how Elon is just fucking going for it. No time to waste.

~~~
pythonaut_16
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

------
aMayn
_Tunnel construction /operation is silent to anyone on the surface._

I am pretty sure the neighbours of the Copenhagen metro construction sites
would wholeheartedly disagree.

------
cmac2992
>By placing vehicles on a stabilized electric sled, the diameter can be
reduced to less than 14 feet.

Interesting. No chance of large commerical vehicles in tunnels at that size.

~~~
Turing_Machine
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.

------
adamsea
"To solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic, roads must go 3D"

I question this. Does anyone know why/how The Boring Company came to this
conclusion?

------
fatninja
When everyone thinks about flying cars, this is a good thought. At least
things won't fall in my head when I go out for a burrito.

~~~
joering2
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.

------
meggar
Isn't this basically the same design as the Circuits of Time from Bill and
Ted's Excellent Adventure?

------
jheriko
"Tunnel construction/operation is silent to anyone on the surface."

so... nothing like the tube then? :P

------
sroussey
Doesn't the $1B/mile include station costs? That's the real killer for
subways.

------
steve-benjamins
As an aside, I love that The Boring Company is a Squarespace website :D

------
inetknght
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.

Houston has, arguably, worse traffic than LA

~~~
imron
> you can't dig deep in Houston because it's a swamp.

That just means you need to dig deeper!

~~~
rurban
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.

~~~
inetknght
> Tunnels would be too expensive

> Houston is too big

Sounds like a job for Musk, to be quite honest. He's pretty good at driving
down costs.

> corruption

Now there's a statement I can, sadly, agree with. :(

------
zitterbewegung
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 ?

~~~
blhack
>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.

------
gosheroo
If speed is key, what about developing nuclear-powered TBMs?

~~~
avn2109
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.

Also, see e.g.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Core](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Core)
for prior art /s

~~~
gosheroo
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.)

~~~
resf
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.

~~~
gosheroo
What if you used the heat to melt rock?

------
stijnsanders
Wall bricks from earth from the dig? I still think they should buy from
[https://www.theoceancleanup.com/](https://www.theoceancleanup.com/) and press
them from molten reclaimed plastic.

------
logicallee
> 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.

~~~
SteveGregory
Concrete production actually does have crazy CO2 emissions. Wikipedia says
it's up to 5% globally:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_concre...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_concrete)

~~~
logicallee
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.

