
Elon Musk’s Ideas About Transportation are Boring - Osiris30
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2017/12/15/elon-musks-ideas-about-transportation-are-boring/
======
akgerber
Elon Musk seems like a rich guy from the California suburbs interested in
decarbonizing his lifestyle— a reasonably noble goal, but the California
suburbs have a ton of issues totally unrelated to their ecological footprint—
not least of which is that their car-dependent transportation system can't
scale beyond a certain level of density without massive congestion. And
preventing them from scaling beyond that density instead results in a
profoundly broken housing market because everyone who wants to live in
California is required to bid up a profoundly expensive patch of land.

A modest improvement in road throughput from automation is nothing but a
short-term solution, and might well make congestion worse because of the
reduced time/attention cost of driving— potentially much worse, since people
many more people could move into RVs occupying the only free land in coastal
California, its roads.

Elon Musk does not look like a smart guy when he rejects what clever outsiders
who have been paying attention to these issues for years have to say and by
calling them idiots— after all, he supposedly got into rocketry by devouring
textbooks, not by getting angry during his commute.

This graphic makes the point about why cars can never be a solution for mass
urban mobility better than pretty much anything else:
[https://i.imgur.com/sCvRIEd.gif](https://i.imgur.com/sCvRIEd.gif)

~~~
candiodari
Maybe it's just me but that picture makes the exact opposite point from what
you're saying. It clearly points out that the difference between cars and
other forms of transportation is linear. Public transportation doesn't scale
this especially well, as anybody using public transport knows, but this
article is a nice summary [1].

We all know what would happen to bus stops, stations, and generally to public
places if people on buses actually had anywhere near the density "made
possible" by public transport. It just won't work.

While for instance, adding roads in the sky (ie. very long bridges) scales
exponentially, for obvious reasons. As does just flying (flying, incidentally,
is a lot more efficient than people think). People don't want this, for
obvious reasons, but there comes a point in cities where we have no choice.
Frankly, cities like depicted in "the fifth element" and "star wars" are the
future. Probably more rails, less floating, but the general idea is where
we'll be going.

Doesn't even really matter if they have public or private transport. Given how
fast public transport upgrades (even when absolutely required by the numbers
of people they just refuse to upgrade for decades. Yes. Decades) and how
comfortable it is, and add of course the fact that they just don't support the
use cases cars enable (some of which, like an elderly or disabled person doing
groceries, are absolute requirements) and you get to the point : private
transport is far preferable to public transport.

[1]
[http://www.uwgb.edu/DutchS/PSEUDOSC/MassTransit.HTM](http://www.uwgb.edu/DutchS/PSEUDOSC/MassTransit.HTM)

~~~
craftyguy
> Public transportation doesn't scale this especially well, as anybody using
> public transport knows, but this article is a nice summary

Then how do cities like Singapore, with a population density of nearly 8k
people per square km, have far less traffic than pretty much any major US
city? They make public transportation work, and if you've ever been there,
you'd know it works really well.

Just because western countries haven't figured it out yet doesn't mean that it
can't work at all. Public transportation in the US _sucks_ because the US, as
a whole, wants it to suck.

~~~
mc32
Well, there are a couple of reasons they can make it work:

-Tax cars really highly.

-Have car quotas

-Suppress dissent and in practice a one party system

-Build out public transit

-Pop Density.

-No land for sprawl available.

~~~
jacobolus
You don’t need to run a one-party police state in order to have a functioning
public transit system or limit urban car use, and it’s entirely possible to
have a one-party police state while also having car-dependent suburban sprawl.

~~~
mc32
Granted. I'm just pointing out those were the reasons it was "easy" to pull
off in SG.

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njarboe
"b) promises reducing tunneling costs by a factor of 10, a feat that he
himself has no chance to achieve, and c) is unaware that the cost reduction he
promises, relative to American construction costs, has already been achieved
in a number of countries."

So Musk, a person who owns and is the CTO of a company that can now land
reusable rockets that were only dreamed about in science fiction a decade ago,
won't be able to drop tunneling costs in the US by a factor of ten, when the
author admits this is already done in other countries.

Not sure this is worth reading past that part.

~~~
hacknat
He’s specifically calling out the goal of reducing tunneling costs by
accelerating the TBM. The other projects that have reduced costs have done so
through boring old sound construction management practices (the article
pointing out the labor and stations are actually the expensive parts of these
projects, not the tunnel by itself).

Also, if you read the rest of the article he literally predicts your response
of appealing to the authoritative win of SpaceX as a completely invalid
counter argument (and he’d be right, appeals to authority is on the list of
logical fallacies, last I checked ;) ).

~~~
njarboe
One can't prove a negative. The Boring company has a plan and a goal. Saying
it can't be done is not useful or productive. There has not been much change
in tunneling tech in the last 20 years and Musk seems to think it is possible
to get some great improvements. He has done it in two other very different
fields with SpaceX and Tesla. Creating a new technology is not about the logic
of debates but doing things and failing over and over again, in a productive
way, to get to success.

Musk can access great people and large amounts of capital, thinks things out
from first principles, doesn't believe in "safety first", and thinks tunnels
could be of great value. Traffic (on car and trains) is killing our cities and
nothing is being done about it. No new transportation infrastructure built in
the Bay Area since 1980 except a few small BART extensions. We could put
anything in these tunnels. Not sure why people are so worried that he is going
to get some people together and try.

~~~
bobthechef
Theorem. There are no even prime numbers greater than 2.

Proof. Assume n > 2, 2 divides n and n is prime. Therefore, 2 is a prime
factor of n. But since every prime number only has one prime factor, itself,
then n = 2. But n = 2 contradicts n > 2\. Therefore, no prime numbers greater
than 2 exist. QED.

\- or -

Claim. There is no beer in the fridge. Argument. I opened the fridge, there
was no beer in the fridge.

\- or -

p is a proposition. ~p is its negation. Take q = ~p. Proving p is the same as
proving ~q.

Seems to me you can most certainly prove "negatives".

~~~
thephyber
> One can't prove a negative.

Fine. One can't _necessarily_ prove a negative. Only if you can prove the
negation of the assertion can you "prove the negative".

Now apply that logic to: <Musk> I can reduce the cost of boring by an order of
magnitude.

Can you prove that he can't? The gp was (over)simply stating that just because
no other digging project has done what Musk claims to be able to do doesn't
necessarily mean that Musk can't do it.

------
falcolas
Underground freeways? Wow. I didn't realize that was the target of The Boring
Company. I thought it was a start at making Hyperloop a thing. That would have
(to me) made more sense than underground freeways.

This is a scathing review, but I can't really find anything inaccurate in it.
Perhaps I didn't try hard enough, but the thought of riding hundreds of miles
underground doesn't make me enthusiastic about looking for ways to make it
more real. I've seen what happens when Lithium batteries catch on fire, and I
wouldn't want to be stuck in a tunnel when that happened.

~~~
tfha
No I think it's generally right. The boring company seems like a really silly
idea. It's an extension of a broken transportation system.

Cities scale with busses and trains. For some reason, the boring company wants
to scale a city with cars. You build this big expensive tunnel to get 1/10th
or even 1/50th the throughput that you could get with a train system.

Maybe that's not the California way though.

~~~
njarboe
With automated driving systems you can put the vehicles really close together
with high speed and get throughput equal to train systems with single
passenger cars. These same tunnels can also have vehicles in them with higher
density seating (call them buses, if you like). If you put these vehicles
close together you get a train. With this system you can have both cars, buses
and trains running all in the same tunnel. Charge each by how much space they
take up and vary the price so there is never a backup to get on. Seems like a
transportation dream come true. Everybody gets the system they want to use.

~~~
jcranmer
That's not solving the issue: single-passenger cars are just extremely
inefficient passenger density. Technology might allow you to pack them to 2×
or 3× density, but the space efficiency of a single railcar is closer to 100×
that of a single-passenger car.

~~~
njarboe
How close can you put trains together? For BART it is 24 trains max per hour
in the tube and with a new switching and control system they claim they will
get up to 30[1]. They go about 60mph. So two minutes between trains. Think
about how much space that is: 2 miles between trains. Trains have to carry
100x more people otherwise they would not work at all. Imagine a freeway where
cars had to be two miles apart at max density and only going 60mph. You would
never see another car while you were driving.

The plan would to be able to pack cars at 100x the density of trains.

[1]
[https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2016/news20160502-0](https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2016/news20160502-0)

~~~
jcranmer
If your signalling and switches are good enough, you can get to about ~30s
headways. You can't really go faster than that because station dwell times
will screw you. Scheduling this theoretical maximum is a daft idea, though,
because any mishaps, and you have no spare time for recovery. Metro systems in
practice usually end up being scheduled around 90-150s headway, so about
24-45tph.

There's one catch for trains though: most trains aren't dispatching single
cars. Rather, trains on busy systems are generally 8 or 10 cars that move as a
consist. If you factor that in to your example, you don't have 120s between
cars, but rather 12s. That might sound like a lot, but you should have 3s
between cars for safe driving anyways, and train cars carry well over 4× the
number of people in individual cars. Even if every road car were full Jitney
vans.

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Osiris30
Background info to the 'flame war' between Musk and Jared Walker
(humantransit.org), which was the catalyst for this post, can be found here -
[http://humantransit.org/2017/12/elon-musk-
responds.html](http://humantransit.org/2017/12/elon-musk-responds.html)

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WheelsAtLarge
Why is boring the way to go? Here in L.A., we keep on widening the freeways
and traffic is just as bad. Boring is just another channel that will get
clogged once it's built. Mass transportation is a better way to go.
Also,policies that make it desirable for people to work close to where they
live will help.

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sidcool
This is an opinionated blog, not necessarily wrong. But a bad idea implemented
is sometimes better than a good one not implemented at all. And if you think I
am a biased fan of Elon Musk, well you would be right.

~~~
sundaeofshock
The problem is money. Implementing the bad idea means there won’t be money for
the good idea. The bad idea also gains inertia, so it tends to stay around and
worsen for decades (e.g. current auto-centric infrastructure).

~~~
rohit2412
Exactly! I'm Indian, and am tired of listening to the argument that India
shouldn't build bullet trains, as hyperloops will obviously be real in 5
years. People think that hsr which will cost 80 billion dollars will be
replaced by a maglev in pnuematic tubes for only 6 billion.

------
blindwatchmaker
Tunnel costs aside, I hadn't known that Musk's idea was to dig this for car
use. I honestly feel that money would be put to better use just making a
subway.

------
bryananderson
I am on the same page with everyone here about the problems with car-centered
infrastructure, but I think perhaps we haven’t fully internalized the extent
to which driverless, electric, shared vehicles will change this equation. It’s
an entirely new paradigm - and even more so if cheap tunneling can be
achieved. While Musk’s initial ideas about how to reduce the cost may be
wrong, at least he’s trying to! His initial ideas about electric cars and
rockets weren’t completely right either, because he was not an expert in those
areas. He hired the most talented people in those fields and learned and
changed over a period of years until he found what worked. It’s a good
algorithm, and it helps to be wealthy so that you can survive the failures and
dead-ends without running out of money.

There are two arguments in the article: that Musk is going about solving the
problem in the wrong way, and that he is solving the wrong problem altogether
by trying to put cars in tunnels. The author may well be right about the
first, but I think he/she is wrong about the second.

Let’s think about everything that changes in a fully driverless, electric,
shared, and tunnel-augmented vehicle ecosystem.

No more greenhouse gas emissions directly from vehicles (and none at all once
the grid is fully renewable).

No more need to dedicate huge amounts of valuable land in our cities and
suburbs to parking (cars can drive themselves to outlying areas to park or,
better yet, can be shared).

Dramatically higher throughput because the human mistakes that cause
congestion can be avoided (I recommend CGP Grey’s video on the causes of
traffic: [https://youtu.be/iHzzSao6ypE](https://youtu.be/iHzzSao6ypE) ).
Driverless cars could drive faster and closer together, especially if they can
communicate with one another.

Even more dramatic reduction in deaths and injuries as human error is removed
from the equation.

Far fewer cars are needed in a shared-vehicle ecosystem. Most privately-owned
cars are idle nearly all of the time, but they still take up space. Sharing
vehicles allows us to reduce the amount of infrastructure needed for cars.

The average size of vehicles in the fleet can also be reduced. Right now
people drive unnecessarily large vehicles because they might need the space a
few times per year (annual family skiing trip, etc). These vehicles use up
more energy and take up more space. In a shared-vehicle ecosystem, most of the
vehicles can be something like a Smart ForTwo, with a smaller number of large
vehicles that can be used by whoever actually needs them at any moment.

A shared-vehicle ecosystem could also include something like a cross between a
scaled-up UberPOOL and a scaled-down bus: a Sprinter van (or equivalent) could
pick up and drop off a dozen or so commuters who live in area A and work in
area B. This improves the density of the system.

With affordable tunneling, freeways can go underground instead of destroying
communities on the surface. This is one of the greatest evils of our car-
centric infrastructure today, but with affordable tunneling we can abolish it.

Train-based mass transit will always be desirable for high-traffic corridors
because it can be made far more dense. And despite this article’s attempts to
paint him otherwise, Musk agrees with this - he is in talks to build a
Hyperloop between Washington and Baltimore, as well as a lower-speed mass
transit “loop” in Chicago.

However, trains will never be all that we need for transit, because they just
can’t go everywhere. You will almost always need last-mile transportation at
the endpoints, and there will always be routes that are not efficiently served
by the train network. That’s where cars (or whatever we call the things they
evolve into) come in.

A driverless, electric, shared, and tunnel-augmented vehicle ecosystem is
probably the perfect mass transit system.

~~~
jcranmer
> No more need to dedicate huge amounts of valuable land in our cities and
> suburbs to parking (cars can drive themselves to outlying areas to park or,
> better yet, can be shared).

Let's solve our congestion problems by doubling the amount of traffic on the
roads! Sharing vehicles is a red herring; the peak traffic is caused by what's
effectively a unidirectional, time-compressed mode of transit--once the car
drops someone off at work, there's not enough trips nearby that it can do.

> Driverless cars could drive faster and closer together, especially if they
> can communicate with one another.

Yeah, except for all those unpredictable pedestrians walking on the street in
busy cities. You could drive faster and closer together only if a) every car
were so wired, and no one drove manually and b) it's a limited-access highway
with little conflicting movement. It might help I-70 in Kansas; it's not
helping any street in NYC.

> A driverless, electric, shared, and tunnel-augmented vehicle ecosystem is
> probably the perfect mass transit system.

No, it ain't. The way you get mass transit is you start packing people into
tighter spaces. A single-occupant car, no matter how many times it's reused,
no matter how tightly you pack them, is just way too much extra space. The
twin Hudson river NEC tubes carry more capacity than the GWB, Lincon Tunnel,
Holland Tunnel, Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, and Brooklyn Bridge combined.

------
jimrandomh
This article claims (1) that Elon Musk has no chance to achieve a 10x
reduction in tunneling costs, and (2) that this reduction has already been
achieved in other countries. This seems like a contradiction. If all his
company does is catch up to the international state of the art, that will be a
huge improvement for the US. And if he pretends that the 10x reduction in
price is due to technological advancement rather than reducing profit margin
and egregious waste, that will help city governments and competitors save
face.

~~~
yiyus
There is an extra claim that clarifies the contradiction: Elon Musk is trying
to achieve that 10x reduction reducing the tunnel diameter. The author argues
this won't work. What I understood is that, if the company indeed was trying
to catch up with the international state of the art, they could actually
achieve their goal, but the problem is that Mr.Musk is not only ignoring it,
but calling them idiots.

So, I do not see any contradiction. But that is just how I interpret the
article, I do not have a personal opinion in this issue.

~~~
jimrandomh
Prediction: The Boring Company's first tunneling machine will be small-
diameter, and each subsequent one will be larger, similar to the scale-up from
Falcon 1 to Falcon 9 to Falcon Heavy, simply because that's the right way to
do the R&D. But it would be very bad salesmanship to say "the first TBM is
really small because that was easier for us", so instead he talks about the
benefits of being smaller.

------
m3kw9
The author has a bunch of numbers and stats written down which supports his
claims but none of us would even bother to check up. Now the thing is do I
trust what his guy says that Musk can’t actually do it or do I trust a man
that has already built a working reusable rocket to space and made a few
electrical vehicles? If Elon says he’s an idiot, i wouldn’t bet against that

