
The Boring Company [video] - janvdberg
https://boringcompany.com/
======
Xcelerate
It's amazing to me the amount of negativity directed toward his projects and
the millions of reasons people give for why they "won't work" (not necessarily
on HN, but at least on general news websites).

I'm starting to believe the only difference between those who start their own
companies and those who don't is that the latter convinces themselves that it
is impossible, never builds anything, and from their own lack of having ever
produced anything, concludes that their original supposition was indeed
correct.

~~~
aaron-lebo
edit: don't feel like arguing. Best of luck to Musk.

~~~
darawk
> The Hyperloop was supposed to be a revolutionary form of transport, turns
> out it was overblown.

He didn't launch the Hyperloop, though. He explicitly said he wasn't
personally going to pursue it, he was just putting the idea out there. You
can't put the fact that it hasn't yet been implemented (even though there are
people working on it) on him. I've seen no evidence that the concept is
infeasible, or poorly thought out.

~~~
jodrellblank
It is infeasible, if it's going to be vacuum, for a pile of practical and
safety reasons:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNFesa01llk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNFesa01llk)

Maybe it will pivot into something not-as-originally-hyped by the same name.

~~~
mdekkers
What a terrible video. "I can't imagine anybody can make this work, so it is
absolutely impossible"

~~~
jodrellblank
Did you miss the bit where he says the idea of travelling fast in a vacuum is
fundamentally sound and workable?

Did you miss the bit where he never at all claimed it was 'impossible', only
that it was bullshit that it would be doable within two orders of magnitude of
the claimed price, with the claimed speed advantages, or with any acceptable
amount of safety?

What a terrible misrepresentation of the video.

~~~
darawk
Ya, but he doesn't actually justify his position. And to the extent that he
does, his calculations are inaccurate. The only legitimate criticism he makes
is the one about depressurization (all the others are trivial and can be
solved trivially in ways that have already been addressed in the whitepaper).
And fotunately for the hyperloop, his calculations on that one issue are off
by six orders of magnitude, per the videos that respond to his video.

------
athenot
This looks really cool. However, boring through rock is the most expensive way
to connect 2 places. It only makes sense if the land features or purchase
value require it.

Fundamentally, this is about short-circuiting the regular road network and
establishing a managed packet network that can bypass congestion.
Interestingly, that's also the value proposition of public transit, though it
also runs into issues of cost, and too low of a population density make it
unfeasible.

I still think we haven't fully leveraged the potential of busses. In most
cities, they are slow because they combine the disadvantages of road traffic
with the disadvantage of time tables. But what if busses operated on their own
dedicated network? Bogota deployed a public transit system made with busses
but with a UX of a train[1]. This is a genius idea that could work in many US
cities, which have a lot more space to spare.

But back to the original idea, I think we might see in the future a "managed"
road network, reserved to self-driving cars which are driven by some central
management system, optimising routing for the whole network so as to prevent
congestion. This won't require tunnels, just gates, dedicated roads and lots
of software.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU6ImWY4IBc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU6ImWY4IBc)

~~~
Veratyr
> But what if busses operated on their own dedicated network?

But if you're building a dedicated network in a major city, why on earth would
you limit it to buses? Even with a dedicated network, I don't believe buses
can be as fast, comfortable or quiet as rail.

I spent a lot of time in Melbourne, Australia and the trams there are
fantastic. You can barely hear them when they're operating so they do a lot to
decrease noise, they have a ton of standing room and are quite long, so they
can carry a lot of people and I don't believe a bus can come close to the
comfort of rail.

~~~
robocat
Rail fails in a serious earthquake. Large infrastructure can take years to
return to operation after disasters.

Even buses are useless during/after disasters in my experience (avoiding legal
liability, lack flexibility to mitigate problems, inability to publish changes
etc).

~~~
Reason077
_Rail fails in a serious earthquake._

Yes, but so do roads. Tunnels especially!

[http://i.stuff.co.nz/national/91972268/government-
confirms-8...](http://i.stuff.co.nz/national/91972268/government-
confirms-812m-for-state-highway-1-fix)

------
pnathan
This is very, very wasteful compared to actual mass transit. A subway network
is much more effective at delivering people.

If he's looking for mega-good, Musk would do significantly better to drop a
full subway network.

edit: tunnelling is a broadly solved problem. It's difficult, expensive, slow,
etc. But there's no engineering reason why a hole in the ground can't happen.
Musk might be able to drive some significant improvements there. No idea. But
tunneling itself is not a reason to knock an idea beyond the cost and
geoengineering involved.

~~~
whack
You're asking the wrong question. There are over a hundred million Americans
who commute long distances in their car. Mostly because they live/work in
areas that aren't dense enough to have good last-mile public transit, and they
don't want to deal with transfers. You can lecture them all you want, but
ultimately, these people aren't going to downgrade their lifestyle just to fit
your ideas of engineering efficiency.

The real question is: is this new solution more efficient than the current
alternative of driving on the highway?

~~~
jaredklewis
If places aren't dense enough to support mass transit, they are certainly not
dense enough to financially support car-trains tunnels. The depicted tunnels
have the same costs as building subways, and I imagine similar maintenance
costs. On the other hand, they can only serve a fraction of the riders a
traditional subway can, which means the cost per rider is huge. Not to mention
it still requires owning a car, so the traditional capital and insurance
savings from mass transit don't apply.

But to answer your question: maybe, but it doesn't matter. American cities are
already bankrupting themselves in road maintenance. Adding a series of super
car tunnels for an efficiency benefit? Out of the question.

~~~
XorNot
Why does everyone lack imagination on this topic?

Problem: if you drive to the subway, then take the subway, then you have two
problems: where do you park your car, and how do you get to your destination
once you get off the subway if it's not walking distance?

Currently - people just drive. And the surface streets get progressively more
crowded. We could drill more regular roadways - but it's notable that one
reason we don't is controlling emissions and safety is difficult with human
drivers.

So, taking that back to the video: replace the subway with general purpose
transport stations that provide a mix of subway-like transport of passengers,
or entire vehicles, powered electrically.

No vehicle emissions (huge problem with tunnels) and no endpoint transport
issues - the subway becomes an extension of the road network, and if it's
cheap enough to do, hopefully a very scalable one.

~~~
deanCommie
The two problems you discuss are both easier to solve than LONG DISTANCE BORED
TUNNELS.

Solution for problem 1: Park and Ride. Giant multi story parking lots. Cheaper
to build even underground than the tunnel Solution for problem 2: Local
transit like Tram, bus, or bikeshare.

~~~
vinay427
I think a far better solution to #2 is taxis or other on-demand transportation
that can take you directly from subway stops to your destination. Trams and
buses have the same last-mile problem as subways, but to a lesser extent, and
often require passengers to wait longer for the next tram/bus. Bicycles have
practicality limitations such as luggage storage, cold weather, and physical
ability.

------
tuacker
I feel like everything Elon Musk undertakes with his companies is just one
huge Mars Beta Test.

    
    
      - SpaceX:
          Obvious, got to get to space somehow  
      - Tesla:
          Build cars/machines to run on something
          that is guaranteed to exist on Mars (the sun) vs. Oil  
      - Gigafactory:
          How to build batteries 101  
      - Solar roof:
          While Earths environment may not be as
          harsh as Mars you still learn something, and improve
          solar panel production in the process  
      - Boring:
          May not make too much sense on Earth with  
          existing infrastructure, but undereart..undermars?
          transportation is protected from the environment/sand
          stroms/whathaveyou.
    

I also don't know about the mineral composition of Mars and what boring does
to the usability of those, but this may be a 2 birds one stone: Bore
underground network and get required materials to build out mars base.

How to go to Mars and stay there:

    
    
      1. Figure out what you need
      2. Build it
      3. ???
      4. Mars
    

Where 3. is use it, refine it, perfect it, like landing a rocket on a
automated barge in the middle of the sea.

Or he just hates LA traffic.

~~~
placeybordeaux
We'll have to look seriously at living underground on mars. It won't protect
us from solar rays on the surface. One of the cheaper ways to protect yourself
is to put a layer of rock inbetween you and the sun.

~~~
kolinko
Perhaps if you're building a cellar. If you want to make a 10-story building -
even in a virgin terrain, it's a complicated operation.

Not to mention that you need to make the materials such that they resist a
huge side pressure, water leaks and so on.

Psychological costs are also costs.

~~~
clock_tower
Wide-open spaces, even enclosed ones, can reduce the psychological burden of
confinement quite a bit -- there's a variety of Russian strategic-missile
submarine with a swimming pool, for example. This subject also comes up
frequently in SF (science fiction, not San Francisco, which has the opposite
problem); there was some discussion of it on the "Atomic Rocket" worldbuilding
guide, IIRC.

~~~
lambdadmitry
I… I think the picture of that "pool" in your head is slightly wrong [1].

Tangential: the source [2] is pretty interesting.

[1]:
[http://pics.livejournal.com/igor113/pic/001e551p](http://pics.livejournal.com/igor113/pic/001e551p)

[2]:
[http://igor113.livejournal.com/27205.html](http://igor113.livejournal.com/27205.html)

------
tptacek
Since this is a thread about Elon Musk, transportation infrastructure, public
transportation, and urban design, and because HN has a sort of affinity for
the Robert Moses story (The Power Broker was one of 'aaronsw's favorite
books), this seems like a particularly on-point Twitter thread to read after
the video:

[https://twitter.com/EmilyGorcenski/status/858022699112824832](https://twitter.com/EmilyGorcenski/status/858022699112824832)

You might not agree with all/any of it but I think it's hard to say this isn't
thought-provoking.

~~~
jbooth
It's not thought provoking, it's a series of thought terminating cliches.

I'm as liberal as they come, I'm very sensitive to disguised racism, but the
tweets' entire basis of comparison between Musk and Moses is "both are/were
ambitious men and now musk is talking about infrastructure". It's free-
association garbage.

The Moses story is fascinating because he accomplished great things that built
NYC but was also a horrible person. The tweeter you linked is like, "hey, Musk
is trying to accomplish great things, he must be just like Moses".

~~~
tptacek
Moses wasn't a horrible person. He was an ambitious, unscrupulous, and
effective person with a singular view --- one not totally out of step with the
elite of his time --- that happened to be (in the opinion of many, including
me) very harmful to the long-term health of New York.

I think it's your rebuttal that's facile here, not the comparison in the
Twitter thread, but, like you, I might be wrong.

~~~
kgu
That disagrees with the Twitter thread you linked to, which claims:

> Robert Moses weaponized Civil Engineering and Urban Planning to suppress
> marginalized communities. Engineering is always political.

Words like "weaponized" and "suppress" suggest that Emily thinks Moses was
ill-intentioned, not merely an ambitious guy who in his monomania happened to
overlook some of the more sinister side-effects of his work.

~~~
tptacek
I don't entirely agree with the Twitter thread, but it's also possible to
"weaponize" and "suppress" because you think it's the right thing to do.
Overly-influential people exerting their power to harm others in the interest
of what they believe to be "right" is something that bothers me a lot about
the power structure of our industry today. I don't think the comparison is at
all unwarranted.

~~~
dragonwriter
> I don't entirely agree with the Twitter thread, but it's also possible to
> "weaponize" and "suppress" because you think it's the right thing to do.

Everyone thinks what they do is right. Ill-intentioned refers to whether the
characterizer thinks it was right, not the actor.

------
OoTheNigerian
I think there is nothing more boring than reading a bunch of people who never
propose anything point out flaws.

You all sound like Balmer.

This is a CONCEPT!!

Elon is THINKING you all are pointing, laughing and adding no value to the
conversation of "What comes next?"

If your idea is "the metro works", a 150 year old system, then this video is
not for you.

To the video, I like the concept of combining public and private
transportation in the same path.

It also makes sense as a way to directly link far distances. To me, this is a
modification of the hyperloop concept. Something more feasible in the shorter
term and definitely less risky.

Of course all this depends on the economics and physics of boring becoming
cheap and 10x faster. keep thinking Elon.

Earth needs more of your "fantasies". Let the pointers keep pointing.

~~~
nebabyte
If that is your idea of value, there exist plenty of scifi writers/artists
with concepts like this, except more practical, better thought out, or so on

So perhaps instead of 'pointing' you should take your own advice?

~~~
ryanwaggoner
That's really unfair considering the source. This is someone who continually
has proved the skeptics wrong. At what point does he earn the benefit of the
doubt in your eyes?

~~~
Trd
Proven what? His main claim of glory, Tesla, still hasn't achieved what he
built the company for: making EVs mainstream. Rather than the ecological
revolution he pretends it to be (his focus on climate change), it is still
nothing but an expensive toy for the wealthy. Not exactly selling at the
levels where we could talk about making a change for the planet.

Maybe you're referring to SpaceX in proving skeptics wrong? We have yet to see
if that company ever becomes profitable. Reusing rockets is not what made
people skeptical as much as pretending it'd make financial sense to do.

Most of his other popular pet projects are even more pie-in-the-sky.
Neuralink? That's nothing but talk. Hyperloop? not a single prototype built in
the real world, in a real location. OpenAi sounds like what a conspiracy
theorist would come up with.

~~~
MattRix
I think this crazy tunnel thing Elon just announced looks horrible, but the
moment you claim that Tesla and SpaceX aren't doing anything special is where
it becomes pretty obvious that you don't know what you're talking about.

~~~
unityByFreedom
Tesla sells high tech luxury vehicles that, as yet, aren't mainstream, and
there are several road bumps to overcome before getting there. To laud Musk's
success today to the point of proving success on his future products is
premature. He hasn't completed his initial goals -- making electric mainstream
and space flight an enterprise.

Not saying it isn't possible or what he has achieved isn't great. Just saying
his existing successes don't prove what he's proposing will succeed, since,
his new goals are as big or bigger than his initial as-yet-incomplete goals.

~~~
Can_Not
> as yet, aren't mainstream

Maybe it takes more than 5 minutes to make all cities capable of powering
electrical cars then competing with the existing car market? He's already
built a successful product, has successful competitors, prevented the 2000's
era proprietary cell phone charger fiasco from happening again. It's a little
too late to be skeptical.

~~~
unityByFreedom
I agree. Just saying it isn't evidence for future big plan success. I'm glad
some people are optimistic for it. I wonder what will happen to all these
goals if / when the next recession hits. But that's more of my cynical view
coming in. You keep being you and I'll be me ;-)

------
loufe
The costs of tunneling are like FAR more expensive than most think. Breaking,
excavating, and supporting rock is slow, time and cost heavy, and precarious
work. While this is an interesting concept, unless there are serious advances
in rock boring techniques (personal opinion: there are none coming) this will
never approach fruition. I would suggest anyone interested in further research
look into the "Big Dig" of Boston and the staggering costs and challenges it
faced.

Good luck, Elon. It'll be another moonshot company if you can pull it off.

~~~
astrodust
Seattle's Bigger Dig is also worth studying:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaskan_Way_Viaduct_replacemen...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaskan_Way_Viaduct_replacement_tunnel)

Sending rockets to another solar system would be cheaper than the tunnels
depicted in this video. I'm not even kidding.

Where is all that material going to go? There's so many tunnels there you
could build a small mountain with it. Maybe he can team up with some sea-
steading outfit and build a small continent off the shore of San Francisco.

You'd need three or four orders of magnitude reduction in tunnelling costs to
make that anywhere near affordable, and even then you'd still have
unbelievably complicated logistical issues. How much concrete do you need for
those tunnels? What about ventilation? Safety procedures? Flood control? A
single one of those could cost upwards of a billion dollars and I'm not sure
there's a lot of cost savings by doing more of them, the complexities don't
scale that way.

The more you dig, the more you're likely to hit something _expensive_ you're
going to have to pay to fix.

~~~
tcoppi
Somehow I think Elon Musk has made it through the middlebrow dismissal phase
of this if the concept has made it this far(to include actual digging in
SpaceX's parking lot even).

~~~
rhino369
Musk could also be bullshitting to help get funding to create a boring machine
that is just twice as good as what we have now. That would be a very
profitable company and would reduce subway costs, etc.

Musk's a sales technique to promise the moon (Mars really) and then use the
cash to build a revolutionary but realistic company.

SpaceX isn't going to colonize mars, but its putting satellites in orbit.

~~~
SEJeff
People said moving phonebooks to the internet was stupid. Then he founded
Zip2. People said moving banking to the internet was stupid/insane. Then he
founded x.com which merged with and became what we now know as Paypal. People
said he couldn't possibly make rockets from scratch that go to space. Then he
did it. People also said he wouldn't land rockets on boats. Then he did it.
Then they said he would never refly a "launch proven" rocket. Then he did.

As absolutely insane as his goals are, betting against him overall tends to be
a losing bet. I'd be careful about what you think SpaceX "isn't" going to do.
If it is technologically possible, they will do it. Period.

~~~
danderino
There's people who will think any issue is stupid, but by no mean did the vast
majority of people think those ideas were stupid. I particularly don't recall
anyone saying reusable rockets were a bad idea.

And X.Com didn't become Paypal. Paypal became Paypal. Paypal was already
developed before the merger and it was not Musk's idea.

------
shouldbworking
Did anyone else notice that cars being lowered leaves a giant fucking hole in
the middle of the street?!

This is a marketing fluff video untouched by engineers

~~~
ythn
Someone needs to edit the video so you see a pedestrian falling down the shaft
and breaking their neck

~~~
Fricken
There's a sidewalk I walk down, it's quite narrow and runs along a
shoulderless road with a steady stream of cars whizzing by at 50 miles an
hour. I think to myself 'how much more or less dangerous is this than walking
along the edge of the Grand Canyon? One misstep and I'm toast. One misstep
from one of those cars and I'm toast.'

We have a hardwired respect for heights, but at no time in our evolutionary
history did we ever have to deal with the kind of speed cars move at. So we
look at a 10 foot deep unprotected hole in the ground and instantly think
'Hey, that's a hazard', but we don't give nearly enough consideration to
speed, and as such 2 million people each year who are killed and injured in US
motor vehicle accidents, and we just sort of shrug our shoulders.

~~~
MattRix
Reminds me of this image:
[http://i.imgur.com/mE7uGoA.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/mE7uGoA.jpg)

------
AlexandrB
I don't get it. Much of the USA is faced with crumbling infrastructure and a
lack of money for maintaining that infrastructure. How is creating a network
of powered tunnels - which are much more expensive to maintain than surface
roads - going to interact with this economic reality?

This seems like technology that addresses mostly fun, theoretical problems -
like traffic optimization, not ugly, practical ones like tight municipal
budgets and urban sprawl.

~~~
jrockway
I am not sure the poor state of existing infrastructure precludes someone from
building their own new infrastructure. Public transportation outside of the US
is often run by private companies, and they make plenty of money.

Even in the US, passenger rail is typically run by the government or
government-like bodies, while freight rail is just private companies. I don't
think there's an intrinsic reason for that, it's just how it is. (More like,
people with goods to transport are willing to pay, but people with only
themselves to transport aren't. Or we see public transportation as a "public
good" that's worth subsidizing, but of course the government super subsidizes
the road network too.)

The fact that your local politician doesn't want to allocate public funds to
shoring up a collapsing bridge doesn't mean that Elon Musk can't spend his own
money to build his own bridge (tunnel in this case), right?

~~~
wcummings
Many US passenger rail systems were private but stopped turning a profit and
were "nationalized".

~~~
peterwwillis
They stopped turning a profit because the government regulated their profits
(after throwing money at them hand over fist, which was naturally exploited)
and then federalized it when it fell apart when they decided finally to go to
war.

During World War I, regulation prevented the rail industry from properly
responding to an uptick in rail demand for exports to fuel the war's various
foreign factions (ship capacity had been greatly reduced by German
submarines). After the rail companies asked for a rate increase in order to
help deal with the increased traffic (which was rejected), the President
seized the rail network in order to sidestep the debacle and get their exports
out.

The rails were de-nationalized when the war ended 2 years later. After that,
the use for passenger travel steadily declined as automobile and bus
transportation grew, and the rails never recovered (except during WWII). In
1971, when the entire network was about to collapse, the government created
Amtrak. Amazingly, most of the network is still limited in capacity and speed
due to regulations from 1947. And most of the improvements in the system have
come since 2000. Any subsidies that could have upgraded the network or
increased capacity or efficiency over a period of 80 years went into building
highways and airport control towers (but _not_ more efficient public buses or
light rail).

Of course, Amtrak still leased its rail lines from the railroads, so the old
rail companies became the new landlords and freight providers, while Amtrak
serviced passengers. Amtrak basically cut passenger service and available rail
lines in half, with whole corridors becoming freight-only. Later Amtrak bought
bankrupted railroad track, and currently something like 25% of the rails
Amtrak travels are owned by it.

The parent is half-correct. The freight customers don't have the same needs as
the passengers, and "more convenient" methods of transportation exist for
them, but for some reason the government demands that passenger rail remain
(for the next big war?) so it got bailed out and nationalized.

------
andrewem
I have to give Elon Musk credit - the average person would be hard-pressed to
come up with even a single laughably impractical mode of transportation, but
he's got two.

~~~
TillE
Hyperloop looks insanely good in comparison. Like ideally it's just an upgrade
on trains. This is some bizarre daydream.

~~~
notahacker
On the other hand, investments in better boring technology produces a lot of
valuable real world construction industry IP for pretty conventionally _dull_
projects that happen to involve underground travel (as well as potentially
being useful for his Mars and megacity dreams). Millions of people travel on
underground railways and drive through hillsides every day. Whereas most
innovations necessary to develop relatively-less-unsafe means of propel people
at high speed through long distance above-ground vacuum tubes are kind of
predicated on the assumption that people might actually travel in a way
similar to his concept sketch.

Ignoring the marketing video, it's easy to see why he's potentially going to
spend more engineer time and money on the boring technology and schemes for
building big swooping curvy tunnels through prime metropolitan real estate
whilst being happy to "open-source" the idea of firing people through metal
vacuum tubes for others to work on.

------
dankohn1
The essence of The Boring Company is the same as the business plan behind
SpaceX: people assume that an existing industry (tunnel development, rocket
launches) is reasonably well run and operating at something of a local
optimum. But it turns out that there are order of magnitude (i.e., 10x)
improvements available when Musk is able to assemble a sufficiently capable
team to focus on it.

I would suggest that tunnelling is a _more_ fertile opportunity, given that
there had already been a bunch of rocket startups that had tried and failed
over the last couple decades. Tunneling today is _insanely_ expensive. Here's
a superb article from Matt Yglesias at Vox on the $2.2 B per km Second Avenue
Subway: [http://www.vox.com/policy-and-
politics/2017/1/1/14112776/new...](http://www.vox.com/policy-and-
politics/2017/1/1/14112776/new-york-second-avenue-subway-phase-2) . Other
countries are already achieving costs of $100 M per km or less.

Now, does the car carriage from the video make perfect sense? I'm skeptical.
But Musk has never been slavishly faithful to the original conception of his
ideas. He gets started and then iterates, and so far the results have been
awfully impressive.

~~~
pnathan
I would love to see a cheap tunnelling technology in the US. Musk certainly
has experience dropping the costs of technology, and I would guess that a well
designed private subway system might be profitable after a time in some US
cities. Would. Love. It.

------
fudged71
I can't get over how impossibly dumb this idea is. It's a clever fantasy but
it doesn't seem practical at all, from a cost or safety perspective... has he
given a "first principles" talk about why any of this makes sense? By the time
a system like this is built, all cars will be autonomous, so the self-driving
sleds will be entirely redundant and it just becomes a super expensive road
with no safety escapes.

Autonomous ground travel optimization, hyperloops, and air travel all work
together to make a seamless system that make this seem redundant.

~~~
Namrog84
why is it impossibly dumb?

> from a cost or safety perspective

Maybe that is why he is pursuing it, is because maybe he can help reduce the
cost and safety. Just look at how much he is going to reduce the cost of
rocket launches and landing them is far safer. And to me that is a far harder
challenge than making underground transit cheaper and safer.

> By the time a system like this is built, all cars will be autonomous

I think even if we all switch to traveling pods, this doesn't JUST solve a
transportation problem. It solves underground expansion problems.

That tunnel could alleviate 'autonomous pod traffic' in dense areas. OR
perhaps it could be used to build underground cities (tube cities) or (tube
storefronts). Or perhaps just improved and accessible infrastructure for a
city to utilize more expandable tunnels instead of the tiny ones we have now.
(If they made boring significantly cheaper/safer).

Just remember there is more to underground boring than just transportation.
And your 2 reasons why it won't work is likely the very 2 things they are
trying to address.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ateh7hnEnik](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ateh7hnEnik)

------
dmix
Toronto really needs this. We have a raised express way that's right in front
of our harbourfront and it makes the whole area noisy and ugly, blocking what
should be a great view towards (great) Lake Ontario. Most importantly it takes
up a ton of very valuable real estate.

A huge amount of condo development has been done right next to it and having
lived in one the noise is a real problem. Living on the south-end of the
highway towards the water almost feels like being cut off from the real city

You basically have to keep your window closed most of the time otherwise it's
a constant drone. Night time is the worst as it goes quiet then occasionally a
truck will come by and wake you up. The higher up you live the better, but
that still leaves about half the units close to it.

So not only would it open up a lot of new property development but also
significantly increase the value of existing properties.

The city has been considering burying the highway underground similar to
Boston's tunneling project. But the Boston one ended up going billions over
budget, so it is not an easy thing to do.

If they can bring the price down dramatically and perfect the concept I'm sure
we'd be one of the first consumers for the tech.

~~~
hourislate
Toronto is one of the most dysfunctional cities in NA. They can't even add a
new subway line or additional stops. They have no problem closing down every
major high way in the City for a marathon every weekend during the summer or
the Molson Indy causing massive traffic issues.

The City Council is inept so good luck hoping they could ever have the insight
to agree to something like this. , so I really doubt they will ever be capable
of implementing a solution to the traffic congestion, noise, etc.

~~~
sanswork
Toronto has enough space that LRT makes way more sense financially than
subways but Ford ruined LRT in the minds of almost everyone.

Even GO could cut down a lot of traffic if they'd just add more parking lots
on the edge of the city and make it all day two way. When I use to live north
of the city there were 3 trains into Toronto in the morning on the Stouffville
line and 3 trains back at the end of the day and if your schedule didn't fit
them exactly then you had to drive to Finch and hope for a parking spot or
drive in.

~~~
MattRix
GO Transit has done exactly what you said over the past few years, they've
been adding way more trains and way more parking lots.

~~~
sanswork
Yeah, they added like Mount Joy and Linconville on the Stouffville line. I
think they are almost ready for two-way service on that line as well. Then all
they need to do is figure out how to do it for less than $20/day.

------
yongjik
Ever been to New York or a similar city and watched people pouring out of a
subway station at 8:30 am?

Now imagine every one of them is sitting in a sedan that is delivered out of
an elevator, one by one.

According to Wikipedia, "Times Square–42nd Street/42nd Street–Port Authority
Bus Terminal" station has 206,247 riders on each weekday on average. If we
have 100 elevators which can transport a car every five seconds, it will take
172 minutes to move all of them.

With more realistic numbers (an elevator usually doesn't go down and come back
in five seconds) it will be more than a day.

------
namesbc
This is a solved problem. It's called trains.

Visit Switzerland and you'll see that it is superfluous to build all this
expensive infrastructure just to stick your personal car on a train.

Riding in a train is bigger, way more comfortable, and much cheaper.

------
Someone
I would think that elevator has less capacity than a tunnel entry would have.
The video compensates for that by having multiple such elevators, closely
spaced, that presumable share an on-ramp. I'm not convinced that gives you
enough capacity, because each car being lowered on that on-ramp blocks traffic
for quite a while.

Also, entering this system leaves a big hole in the street where the carriage
was. Before another car can enter, a new carriage must be brought up from
below. That decreases capacity even further, except for the ideal situation
where that carriage always carries a car. In the less than ideal sitautin,
there's the added problem of getting that replacement carriage in place at
just the right time (for example, at the end of the day in a business
district)

------
lopespm
I have profound respect of Musk's perseverance and courage to tackle difficult
problems, coupled with a great vision of the future. This project however, as
it was presented, strikes me as a bit off the mark.

I lived in a dense city with good public transportation and good bike and
pedestrian lanes. To get around the city and its surroundings, I would mostly
use my bike. It was incredibly fast to find a parking spot and to get from
point A to point B. Other times, I would use the integrated public transport
system (bus/train/tram) if wanted to go somewhere further in less time. I had
options, flexibility and much more freedom than I would if I used/owned a car.
Not only that, but my quality of life was way higher than that in the suburbs.
Not having a car made a huge difference: more physical activity, less monetary
burdens and the piece of mind acquired by not thinking about its maintenance
and care.

This takes me to my second point: passenger cars are mostly useful in sparse
areas, like the suburbs. In dense areas it makes less sense to have a personal
cocoon for transportation. Although the boring company's tunnels are
underground, that same energy and investment would be better suited in a
public transport alternative, like a subway. This subway would transport
people and their bikes, and this could serve as a push for the street level
pedestrian, bike and public transport infrastructures to get better.

------
blueintegral
Now what if we add an Uber-like component to this and let people share/carpool
together to reduce the number of cars above and below ground? Instead of tires
that wear out, we could use steel on rails! Aaaand, we just re-invented the
subway.

------
Animats
The Disney version of this concept: [1]

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0q_oP9TPD4&t=2479](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0q_oP9TPD4&t=2479)

~~~
Animats
I thought Disney wouldn't want that shown much any more. But no. It's on a big
display screen at Disneyland for the queue at Autopia.[1] Nuclear reactor
scene and all.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uA82TQmMUvU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uA82TQmMUvU)

------
Houshalter
City streets have more than enough space for fast transpiration. We just don't
use them efficiently. Congestion is a tragedy of the commons. It could be
trivially solved by putting a high tax on cars using city streets. Then the
only vehicles on the street would be those that transport multiple people or
valuable goods. And they would have free reign with minimal congestion. (Also
maybe put an extra tax on nonelectric vehicles, because there's much less
justification for using them in a city.)

If you are willing to build entirely new infrastructure, like this project,
there is _so much_ you can do. The main reason self driving cars are taking so
long is because they have to be able to do everything a human driver can do.
Which is very hard. If you build tracks and sensors into the road itself, it
could be much easier. You could have a city filled with fleets of small
automated electric people movers.

~~~
gavinpc
A game I play with my kids when we're waiting at street corners is to count
the vehicles' occupancy. Spotting anything > 1 is like scoring points.

We don't take the car without an explicit reason: we're late, it's far away,
we're hauling stuff, it's raining.

But this is Oklahoma, and as soon as you're a block from the OU campus,
pedestrians are seen as freaks. Young guys yell at you from pickup trucks.
(It's not just me; I have confirmed this with other people over the last 12
years.)

We need electric cars, but we also need a cultural change. We drive, and I
don't want to judge people for driving. But I wish it were seen as a fallback,
rather than a default.

------
kristianc
Oh jeez I wish someone could just invent some kind of underground mass
transportation system able to efficiently transport lots of people from place
to place in built up metropolitan areas. That'd be awesome. We could call it a
'Metro' or something.

------
sid-kap
If anyone's looking for a good source of information on transportation costs,
I highly recommend
[http://twitter.com/MarketUrbanism](http://twitter.com/MarketUrbanism) and
[http://twitter.com/2AveSagas](http://twitter.com/2AveSagas). They cut through
the BS of the mainstream media and politicians on transportation policy and
give really intelligent opinions, particularly on zoning/land use and on the
US's ridiculous transit costs.

(A lot of it is complaining about the ridiculous cost of New York's Second
Avenue Subway, and complaining about how the media won't even mention that its
cost was 3-5 times more per km than similar routes in London, Paris, and
elsewhere in Europe. @MarketUrbanism also has a few other ticks:

* He aggressively argues that train systems in the US should save money by getting rid of conductors.

* Also, he argues that US buses should use Europe-style fare policing (with ticket inspectors) rather than requiring people to swipe as they board the bus.)

They're snarky and a bit hard to undeedia won't even mention that its cost was
3-5 times more per km than similar routes in London, Paris, and elsewhere in
Europe. @MarketUrbanisrstand to the uninitiated, but they grow on you. I've
learned a lot from them.

~~~
klarrimore
We have fare policing on express busses here in NYC.

------
convivialdingo
Not that tunnels are a boring idea, but if you handed me a couple of billion,
I think we could solve public transportation using ultralight above ground
systems. I would base it on a roller coaster type design using single or dual
tracks suspended by high load anchored polls.

The car weights would be kept to a minimum, allowing tracks and supports to be
sized much smaller, lowering cost and design requirements. The average car
would weight less than a bus, and could travel at very high speeds.

Existing trains and subway systems are based off of hundred-year old freight
train systems which were designed to transport thousands of tons of weight.
This has a huge cost for subway and commuter train design. A modern subway
train costs millions of dollars, weighs multiple tons, and is an immense
engineering task.

By engineering a total target track and car weight of a few tons per spacing
instead - this system would be far cheaper and easier to maintain.

Passenger cars would be designed to hold only a dozen people, and cars would
be linked or unlinked as needed to increase capacity and efficiency. This
design also allows the system to maintain extra cars of varying sizes to
manage variable rider capacity. Rather than time tables, the system would run
based on rider demand, maintaining a slight over-capacity to handle peaks.
This is no different than the typical Uber-type demand based system.

On the typical street, such systems would only utilize a few square feet of
space per block. They could also utilize existing utilities and would require
minimal space for stations. Trains would exit the main track to prevent
stalling the main rails while boarding passengers.

This system could also be extended to long-hail service as well into suburbs,
or perhaps across states, It wouldn't have nearly the same difficulties of
property right of way, environmental impact, and NYMBY - as it essentially has
about the same impact as a typical electrical infrastructure. It could also be
placed along existing roads and bridges to quickly build out the system.

Anyway - just an idea.

~~~
unityByFreedom
Sounds better than drilling through rock to me.

------
ben_w
The whole thing is sufficiently bizarre that I just have to assume it's an
excuse to develop something more useful.

If that something is cheap autonomous mining that can be sent to Mars to build
a colony before anyone arrives, or a sneaky way to make very large underground
nuclear bunkers that always have a surprisingly large number of random
ordinary people in them, or just that Elon knows about a major valuable
mineral deposit that nobody else is aware if yet, great. But if this really is
just some self-driving pods that attach to your car and take you around at
relatively high speeds, I don't see the "while underground" doing much for the
congestion.

------
ThrustVectoring
So it's roll-on roll-off rail, with one car per train rather than running on a
schedule. Loading and unloading is also parallelized through elevators (though
it'd likely be far better to build a ramp down to a station. Basically it'd be
an underground angled parking lot, except the parking spots can put themselves
on rails and go somewhere else.)

------
jacquesm
What we really need to do is to figure out ways that reduce the need for all
this transportation. When you look at it from a distance almost none of it
makes sense. The only travel that really needs doing is people working with
physical stuff, moving the goods themselves around and leisure travel (and
that one is definitely not a must but it is hard to make a stand-in experience
that is comparable to the real one). Most commuting is - or rather should be -
totally useless.

~~~
agumonkey
Robots doing physical work, people discussing strategies in conf room with
collaborative tools. Problem solved ?

~~~
clock_tower
Dense cities and narrow streets would solve the same problems with fewer
technical demands. Look up New World Economics and "Really Narrow Streets";
the author provides a blueprint of sorts for traditional cities with minimal
commute/transport expenses.

~~~
agumonkey
this ? [http://newworldeconomics.com/corbusier-nouveau-3-really-
narr...](http://newworldeconomics.com/corbusier-nouveau-3-really-narrow-
streets-with-high-rises/)

~~~
closeparen
Why wouldn't you at least have right-of-way for two wheeled vehicles? People
are _so_ much more efficient on bikes than on their feet.

------
edpichler
My opinion: moving a problem to other place you do not solve the problem.

We have too much cars, millions of people, each driving a ton of steel to move
from place to place alone. Cars on the underground is not a good solution.

What world needs is automated and intelligent transport, and for the masses.

~~~
legolas2412
Automated intelligent transport for the masses. Subway trains you say?

Americans hate those.

~~~
edpichler
Subways are expensive and complicated in some terrains, but woks pretty good I
think, don't you?

PS: Hiperloop also seems a good solution for long travels. PS: Each solution
is better for a specific problem. Automated cars seems promise to small and
medium cities.

------
anonymous_iam
Is it just a coincidence that Musk's main competitor in the space business is
called "The Boeing Company"? I don't think so.

~~~
joshmanders
The Boring Company isn't a jab at Boeing, it's a generic name for a company
that bores holes in the ground... Ya know.. Tunnels?

------
vmasto
Kinda off topic with what this is about but I have a few technical questions
regarding the website (which is just a logo and a YouTube video embed on a
white background):

\- Why is it built with React? \- Why does it need to load so much JavaScript?
\- Why does it need to load a custom web font? (There's exactly zero text from
what I see). \- Why does it need a CSS grid framework?

~~~
collinmanderson
Yeah, it's amazing how much code is on that page. Really? How many font
weights are you pulling in? 5? Is there _any_ text on that page? :)

It actually looks like it was made using a GoDaddy website builder.
[https://builtwith.com/boringcompany.com](https://builtwith.com/boringcompany.com)

I suppose they don't really need a perfect website at this point.

------
gregpilling
If I recall, this whole idea started as a result of traffic on the 405 or
something.

This idea is only useful if it could deliver traffic volumes at meaninful
percentage of the current 405 throughput.

wikipedia says "The freeway's annual average daily traffic between exits 21
and 22 in Seal Beach reached 374,000 in 2008" .

So how many car elevators to do 10% of that? How many car elevators to move
37,000 vehicles per day? Assuming a 1 minute cycle time, that would be 25
elevators running 24/7 evenly, with no rush hour (obvious unrealistic).

I think it is a scale problem, much like 3D printers won't upset the economics
of high speed injection molding anytime soon.

~~~
jws
Looking from the other direction, say an elevator can handle 60 cars an hour,
so given staggered commutes it might serve the needs of 100 drivers. If having
elevator access let you cover most of your commute at 100mph, what would that
be worth? Multiply by 100 drivers, and 10 more to get from annual revenue to
capital expense and I'd say million dollar elevators are no impediment at all.

------
throwaway2016a
When I heard about Boring Company I kind of just assumed it would be used for
underground hyper loops. This feels kind of wrong.

~~~
astrodust
Hyperloop at least has the right idea: Building above-ground is vastly less
expensive than tunnelling.

~~~
throwaway2016a
My thought process was...

Hyperloops are round + tunnels are round = Boring Company

Putting cars through the tunnels is not what I first expected.

~~~
astrodust
It's the sort of thing a guy who owns a car company would do, not someone
who's actually trying to solve a transportation problem.

~~~
Spivak
Or a person who actually understands what people want in a transportation
solution. Nobody outside of city planners and environmentalists take the
train/bus solution seriously because it's such a lifestyle downgrade from
cars.

~~~
astrodust
If you're in a city that's not explicitly designed around cars, a car is a
total hassle. America's gone all-in on cars, but even then the current
generation is abandoning them and instead doing something crazy: Living close
to where they work.

A car is a massive investment of time, money, and emotional capital that an
increasing number of people are simply unwilling to make.

------
hxta98596
Interesting idea but very weird video. A couple thoughts:

1\. "Boring Company" is such a great, funny and fitting name for a tunneling
startup. FYI there are people who get so excited about a name they think is
just perfect (or title for book or name for a yacht...) that they pursue
creating it even though they aren't seriously into the idea. See: the better
the name of the yacht, the less the owner uses it...

2\. Agree with other comments the video verges on embarrassing. I don't think
it helps Musk's cause much...Unless: (A) he subscribes to "there's no such
thing as bad publicity" and/or (B) Musk in fact wants other entrepreneurs to
see his crazy ideas as a catalyst to start their own copy-cat companies
working on the same issue usually with their twist. He has made public
comments (especially around the time when he open-sourced his patents) that
support both (A) and (B) being true. See: all the new space, solar and
hyperloop like companies that started in Musk's wake.

3\. I don't think we should blindly give big-thinking entrepreneurs the
benefit of the doubt. That has gone very poorly recently and historically. But
I think we/the public/government regulators can support innovation and keep an
eye on big-thinking well-funded entrepreneurs so they don't do something f'ing
stupid full of negative externalities and tragedies of commons and tyrannies
of small decisions etc...

4\. This particular form of new tunneling as seen in the video might not
happen. I hope it doesn't as there are serious engineering and public safety
issues. But Musk has a point about needing to dig! AND Musk thinks very long
term (the guy is working on going to Mars). Earth only has so much land, as
human population increases, especially around cities, we can only build up or
down. Both should probably be tried. I remember when Jeff Bezos said Amazon
wants to try to deliver your packages by drones, and that Amazon also is out
destroy the American economy. Ok he didn't say the second thing. But as for
drones, people went nuts on both sides he said that but it's going forward.
What if Musk's tunnels started off smaller, focused on delivering packages
into and across cities, so not huge tunnels for people but more like conveyor
belts for deliveries? There is a need for that or there will be soon. Would
that be more palpable and would there be less averse reaction?

Have a good, _relaxing_ weekend to all!

------
bcheung
Telecommuting is a lot cheaper and easier.

Also, what is the point of those rails? Seems like self-driving cars would be
much easier and require a lot less.

I think the robotic conveyer belt style design like seen in movies like iRobot
would be cheaper and more convenient. Plus, having it so people don't walk to
their cars means you don't have to worry about theft in parking garages as
much either.

~~~
desdiv
>Also, what is the point of those rails? Seems like self-driving cars would be
much easier and require a lot less.

That was my first reaction as well. I think it might have to do with there
being no way of expelling the exhaust gas. As long as even just 1% of the cars
using the tunnel are fossil fuel powered their exhaust will poison the whole
system (carbon monoxide can fuck you up at even just 50 PPM).

They could limit the tunnels to just self-driving electric cars though.

------
ares2012
It's a great video, but one of the most impractical ideas I've ever seen. It
would be cheaper to buy more buses and install congestion charges (fees to
drive in cities during peak times).

~~~
Spivak
So you want to reduce traffic by making the roads less enjoyable and more
expensive to drive on? Not exactly the type of solution I would like be
excited about.

------
brosky117
The tracks were surprising until I thought about all the idiots I encounter on
regulars roads. Then it made perfect sense.

~~~
_coldfire
Metal on metal also has a fraction of the rolling resistance.

~~~
gsnedders
Though it looks like they're still rubber-wheeled with a guide-rail down the
centre rather than steel-wheel on a pair of running rails.

------
placeybordeaux
This seems pretty similar to Musk looking at everyone throwing away rockets
and deciding to do something about it, however if you look at Seattle's big
dig the cost of the machine was only 80 million out of 4.2 billion. He's going
to have to find significant price reductions beyond just reusing a boring
machine.

------
buzzybee
If you go and do something like that, why have the car at all?

Edit: To be a little less snarky, multi-modal transport of this form has been
considered; it's one of the ways in which PRT systems have been proposed. But
those systems don't also say "and now we build the highway underground."

~~~
wvenable
It solves the last mile problem -- same problem we have fiber installation.
You can build fast transport hubs but you can't get right from door to door.

------
datahack
Well if you figure a mile of urban freeway in an urban area is an easy 5
million per mile which makes it about a thousand bucks a foot. That doesn't
include annexation or planning, just construction.

A tbm can make a tunnel for 19k a foot in the right environment
([https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-high-tech-low-cost-world-
of...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-high-tech-low-cost-world-of-tunnel-
building-1461549887)), but that cost is dropping as more and more tbm projects
since 2000 have driven the costs down.

So basically it's 20x as expensive to bury a highway as it is to build one on
the surface.

Ok.

But, when you look deeper, in urban areas there just aren't rights of way
available to put new highways, and so you have huge slow costs that grind out
projects. In addition, if you can find a place to put one, they are...
ready... usually public infrastructure.

This is a _private highway_... private highways are a good idea. Take a look
at [https://mises.org/library/privatization-roads-and-
highways](https://mises.org/library/privatization-roads-and-highways)

This is a bet on free market roads. That is a big bet, but goodness it's not a
naive one.

I feel like Elon has some kind of cache of historic photos and documents from
the late 60s and early 70s that he is just pulling pages out of.

Anyways, 20x more expensive is _very doable_ and these roads could operate
profitably in urban areas (and that's the opening, current cost). Oh, and the
son of a gun bought a used tbm, which will save gobs of the cost. Oh, and it's
for a ton of jobs (the cost of acquiring the Tbm is a large part of the cost
of tunnels), and there is going to be a glut of tbm inventory in coming years.

Add it all up, and it sure isn't a "dumb idea" in some kind of intrinsic,
obvious fashion.

Seems like a good bet actually.

------
otto_ortega
This is impractical in SO MANY levels...

Sorry Elon, I support 99% of your ideas, this one belongs to the other 1%...

------
simplehuman
Stupid naive question. If Musk cares so much about environment and all that,
why not just build proper public transport for the bay area?

~~~
ryanwaggoner
I think he's motivated by the idea of building systems that enable other
systems that wouldn't be possible otherwise.

Examples would be the gigafactory, his comments about how Tesla is not
learning how to build cars, but learning how to build car factories, etc. The
approach with SpaceX wasn't "OK, let's build a rocket system that can get to
Mars." Instead it was "OK, let's build a company that has a repeatable and
sustainable launch business that can drive down cost and drive up efficiency
over time, so that getting to Mars won't be a near-impossible problem
anymore."

Building a one-off public transit system in the Bay Area, with all the current
technological, regulatory, and social headaches, doesn't really offer many
opportunities to improve things, does it? Elon isn't God; he can't magically
overcome all the factors that cause the Bay Area to have bad transit today,
just like he couldn't magically start colonizing Mars in 2004.

So building a new class of technologies to bore tunnels much more quickly,
safely, and cheaply seems like it enables a whole new set of opportunities to
make the current transit problems more tractable. It creates a whole new set
of opportunities for transportation that simply don't exist today.

I'm tired, so forgive me if that isn't clear, just what's running through my
head.

------
dynjo
Whether Elon Musk can deliver on all of his ideas is almost an moot point. The
important thing is that he is inspiring an entire generation to think outside
the box and to believe that they really can change things.

For that alone he gets my gratitude.

------
sxates
It seems crazy, but there's also some appeal in the idea of opting out of all
the legacy infrastructure. If we could rebuild our roads from scratch today to
serve a vehicle for the 21st century, what would we build? Probably something
like this - standardized vehicles on automated roadways with built in electric
connections that enable unlimited long-distance high-speed travel (though we'd
just build this into cars instead of using 'carriers').

But it does seem pretty far out that we'd have tens of levels of tunnels for
all this underground traffic. Hyperloops seem more plausible.

~~~
wahern
Hyperloop would seem even _more_ plausible if we were able to lower the cost
of tunnel construction. Likewise, traditional mass transit and other
infrastructure (power, telecom, sewage) could be significantly cheaper with
improved tunneling technology.

If Elon Musk wants to spend--or convince others to spend--billions of dollars
innovating tunneling construction, then I'll enthusiastically support whatever
vision motivates him.

It's like if a kid decides to clean his room so the aliens can land their
spacecraft, then by all means, let's get ready for the aliens!

~~~
tgarma1234
Sorry I know that post quality is important and everyone should strive to make
important points that move the conversation forward but at the same time I
have to say "let's get ready for the aliens" really made me happy. Funny.

------
rhcom2
Isn't this a solution that becomes outdated with self driving cars?

~~~
bartwe
I think this is actually more of a fix for the problems with self driving
cars, specifically: other traffic. By creating a new category of
infrastructure the selfdriving parts can be far more reliable and simple.

------
tim333
While this looks very cool I'm not sure how the economics would work out. The
UK-France channel tunnel for instance which transports cars fairly rapidly
through a 31 mile tunnel cost $21 bn to build and the tickets aren't cheap
(~£100 single) which works if the competition is a ferry but may not if it's
just driving a bit. Maybe Musk will figure how to bring down the cost a few
times.

I would have thought semi self driving cars platooning would be a cheaper and
more practical way to beat the jams.

------
nprecup
I do like the idea of coupling self-driving car technology with taxi service
and underground highways. When it comes to urban environments, automobiles and
associated infrastructure takes up an enormous amount of the available space.
It hurts resident's quality of life in many ways (noise, pollution, traffic,
stress, less green space, etc). This is one of the reasons I am totally on
board with investing heavily in mass transit underground (super excited that
Seattle is finally getting their act together on this, which is my home). If
the cost of developing underground transport infrastructure is driven down
enough by this venture, we could improve traffic flow and reclaim some of the
space on the surface as space for people, not cars. Couple that and a future
with clean energy for cars and when using a self driving car service is more
convenient than owning a car, we could create a transportation system that can
get you anywhere, quickly, efficiently, and without transfers.

Self driving car services would allow us to reclaim huge portions of cities by
reducing the need for parking spaces everywhere we go, and make driving safer.
Tunnels for highways could replace interstates that cut cities in two, as well
as provide more flexible routes. Electric cars could make our cities
healthier. I think I see what Elon is trying to do...

------
ggoss
My bet: it's all about the lithium. The Gigafactory (located near a large
domestic lithium cache) will soon consume a large fraction of the world's
lithium output, and currently, Tesla is completely dependent on other
companies to mine it.

My question: will the debris Musk will need to transport away from the next
"beta-test" city happen to contain large quantities of lithium? Or will his
current suppliers have a new source of (too-good-to-refuse) industrial
machinery?

------
reubenswartz
By the time you could conceivably build some of these tunnels, the Teslas and
most other cars will be at least somewhat self-driving. (Since you're in
tunnels, the problem gets a lot simpler, with on/off the real tricky parts.

I would have thought you'd say where you wanted to go, and if you had enough
battery to get there, the car would just drive itself in the tunnel,
eliminating the need for a whole other wheeled, motorized sled to move a
wheeled, motorized vehicle.

------
chrismealy
A subway, but you have to be in a car to use it. Brilliant.

------
jarboot
I thought this was satire until I came to the comments.

------
elorant
You know, we have something like that and it's called Metro.

------
walrus01
Advancements in boring technology for small stuff (1.5 meter diameter utility
tunnels) would also be a game changer in major urban areas. If you need to do
cut and cover trenching to install vaults/manholes and duct for underground
fiber in a major city nowadays, a several km distance project can run anywhere
from $400 to $1000 per meter or more. Traffic closures, street closures,
flagging, shoring of excavations, moving big construction equipment around on
flatbed trailer in urban cores, etc.

To the extent that at $800/meter, a 4 km fiber path could cost $3.2m.

A bored small diameter service tunnel sized lined with concrete sections
(basically a mini version of what the Bertha TBM in Seattle has just finished
boring), sized to accommodate small electric carts that could be shared by
multiple cables stuck to walls would be a game changer.

------
ziikutv
Here's a question for those way smarter than me. Why is there a need for a
platform?

Some pros: \- If its a shitty, poor regulated car.. this will lead to more
safety \- Avoid adding extra gear (software/hardware) to the car

Cons: \- Size restriction \- Clean up and Maintenance \- How do you ensure the
car is in the platform securely?

~~~
edko
Also: according to the video, entry is quite free. How will they prevent some
terrorist asshole from causing major damage with a car full of explosives?

~~~
ziikutv
Yes. This is also a concern. Also people are usually fucked up. How will I
know that some idiot wont jump out of his damn car during this?

A restriction would be to simply have all windows and doors locked but this
can be circumvented in older cars. Perhaps a restriction would be to cover the
entire car in some sort of a housing. This will lead to the size constraints I
described earlier.

So all in all, a lot of safety concerns with this but I am confident Musk has
something up his sleeve. Something like this is a raging yes to one of his two
questions; (Yes - "[Will this do good]" | Maybe - "[Is it tractable]" ). I
think a solution like this is great if we have a blank slate, which will be
the case on Mars.

Edit: Spelling and grammar.

~~~
tsao
Only Teslas will be allowed?

~~~
ziikutv
Even tesla a [will] havr different sized models.

Sedan, the new one that's in backlog, truck that is being unveiled in
September, etc.

I also do not think he will convince any municipality to allow boring of a
network just for tesla. I also do not think he is that close minded.

------
sonnhy
This seems like a premium service, because you have to choose your destination
somehow, and here comes some device that you have to install in your car (I'm
referring to some kind electronic toll collection + navigation system). Also,
the amount of people using this service has to be limited somehow. As the
technology is presented in video, the input/output of the carriages is quite
limited. Also, what about the rush hours? Everyone wants to get in, to go
faster, so queue will be created, waiting for their turn. What will happen
when more people, than the exit queue can handle, want to get out on the same
exit/area? You will be redirected to another exit, far away as much as how
many people wanted to get out in that area.

------
stuaxo
If he does bring down the cost of tunnelling, I hope we get a lot more tunnels
for trains.

If he has any sense he would be bidding for these projects too.

It would be great if by default we could get bigger tunnels (if crossrail were
bigger then we could get double deck train in the future for instance).

------
tzs
This is very confusing. There is nothing on the site but the video, and the
video doesn't explain who they are and whether this is a serious project or
just a design concept, and so on.

I think that this is a case where a secondary source submission, such as this
one [1] to a TechCrunch story about this, is better than the primary source
source submission, because the TechCrunch story actually tells us what the
hell we are looking at. I think the moderators goofed by deciding that this
submission was the one that should win.

Anyway, it's an Elon Musk company, and he talked about it at a recent TED
talk.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14222545](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14222545)

------
quux
Given the time, cost, and complexity of Boston's big dig[1]; I'd be very
surprised if there's a way to do this practically.

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

------
theprop
I feel this could be useful as a kind of underground super-highway for some
cities i.e. I need to get from one end of the city to the other end without
stopping somewhere in between. Tunnels can get built today as opposed to
drones or flying vehicles which are at least several years away. It could
probably help traffic in some large cities.

If it could be done inexpensively and quickly it's interesting.

Some sort of a cross-country vacuum tube type tunnel that could let you go
from NYC to LA in 15 minutes would be amazing and I think closer to the
original hyperloop idea, but ridiculously expensive and engineering-wise
beyond the initial goals of this project.

------
bmuppireddy
I was just wondering if building bridges is more feasible idea than digging
tunnels. Bridges will be easier to maintain, costs relatively cheaper,
relatively easier to setup and we already have more experience in building
bridges.

------
OrwellianChild
Don't fully get the benefit of moving cars on rails vs. moving cars on
wheels... Higher fixed costs to power the rail vs. just letting cars auto-
drive with internal propulsion. What am I missing?

~~~
goodcanadian
Or how about moving trains on rails?

I am of two minds about self driving cars. From a technology point of view, I
think its great, but I don't really see what problem they solve that would not
be better solved by ubiquitous public transportation (trains, mostly). Now,
Musk wants to carry cars on sleds through tunnels under LA? Why not just build
some damn trains?

EDIT: the real news is that he wants to improve boring machines which is not a
bad goal. There will be more and more tunnels regardless of what you actually
put in them, so faster, more efficient boring is a worthwhile goal.

~~~
jitix
It's about the last mile connectivity. People don't want to walk/uber from
home to the train station and from the train station to work. Having a car on
rails solves this problem.

~~~
mynameisvlad
When public transport is ubiquitous, the last mile is really just that, a
mile, tops (in urban environments). The difference between public transit
somewhere like Japan, where everything is linked and you have intermodal hubs
efficiently connecting higher speed and lower speed transit and what we have
in US cities is staggering. It's downright easy to cross the entire country in
the span of a few hours, only stepping foot outside for the very short walk to
the nearest metro. Then you usually just have metro -> shinkansen -> metro,
all connected to eachother, to get to where you have to go. You might need to
change your metro once, but that's hardly an inconvenience when the
connections are in the same building and you just walk a few feet from one
platform to the next.

Compare that to Seattle, where my friend got lost trying to get from the light
rail to the incredibly slow train up to Vancouver because they're several
blocks apart. And then had to do the same on the Vancouver end for the same
reason. To make matters worse, the train between the two cities is actually
slower than the train between Tokyo and Hiroshima, with roughly 3x the
distance.

------
yueq
Why does it even need the rails when the cards have autopilot built-in???

------
termie
I wonder if you could make a big drill out of hundreds of hot swappable high
torque Tesla motors that were intelligently geared and well mounted. Hot
swapping battery packs from the underside of a car via automation was
demonstrated years back by Tesla so learnings there could be used. Tesla uses
a bunch of widely available 18650s for their packs and benefit from that same
modularity, and I imagine big cost savings there for a drill that size even
with a great deal of breakage in the array of motors.

------
spudley
Check out the absolute lack of any pedestrians and cyclists in the street
scenes. That tells you everything you need to know about the value of this
video (pretty much zero).

------
cerebrum
Where is the advantage to the tried and tested metro? Transporting individual
vehicles instead of people is much more complex, costly and will require more
maintenance.

------
yy77
Musk might probably not want to build a full network but just one or two
tunnels for his own convenience and grab some more focus and investment as
well.

------
mikojan
In germany this is called a subway. We also fixed the problem with the queue
and people being required to bring their vehicle to use this vehicle.

------
marcell
Engineering aside, how does this work out legally? How does a company get
permission to dig tunnels under Lps Angeles, or any other American city?

------
perteraul
Musk launches companies like designers post on Dribbble.

Too bad that only a small % of them really get developed - really love his
creative consistency though.

------
Reason077
Why the "pods"? Wouldn't it make more sense for self-driving electric vehicles
(which can safely maintain separations from other traffic and travel at high
speed on a narrow track) to use their own propulsion?

Apparently the concept behind The Boring Company is to reduce the cost of
tunnelling, but surely the "pods" would add a great deal of cost to this
system.

~~~
irfanka
Because not all vehicles are self driving.

~~~
Reason077
They _will_ be, though. It's reasonable to restrict tunnel access to
appropriately equipped vehicles. Why jump through expensive hoops to support
classic cars which can still use surface streets anyway?

------
yourapostasy
It would be interesting if TBC commercialized a subterrene [1], and drove down
costs of building underground structures to a tenth or hundredth of current.
But commercial mobile nuclear power is unfortunately not available.

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

------
ChuckMcM
As a backup you could always sell them as automated parking lots while you
were working on the tunnels. Because I'm odd in that sort of way, I imagine
the tunnel as an infinite tape and the entrance/exit ramp as a place where you
can read or write the tape. Now if you could just force the cars to either
forward or backward on demand ...

------
idlewords
This is the kind of idea you come up with when you spend too long inhaling
exhaust fumes on the 405.

[http://articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/25/local/la-me-ln-
elon-...](http://articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/25/local/la-me-ln-elon-
musk-405-freeway-20130425)

~~~
huangc10
I don't know why you got so many down votes. That's EXACTLY how Elon Musk came
up with the Boring Company.

------
nlh
Side note/tangent: I think this is closer to what "flying cars" look like in
the future vs. what's being attempted lately (which are really just
increasingly small lift-based aircraft.)

Replace the underground rails with above-ground "rails" (perhaps electromagent
based, when there's enough power to do so.)

------
JepZ
The funny thing about Elon is, that the lower the general chances for a
successful undertaking are, the higher are the chances that he will succeed.

I'm just not sure if the entrance to the boring market is a high-risk venture.
But at least the idea of building an underground network under existing cities
is a very ambitious project.

------
vtange
What if the tunnels themselves are congested? Wouldn't it mean a line of cars
surface-side waiting for their turn?

~~~
tmalsburg2
Exactly. A transportation infrastructure operates most economically when its
capacity is (close to) maxed out. Since demand is variable it will inevitably
happen that the capacity is sometimes not enough (as in overbooked flights).
Traffic jams are the result. So what this system is doing is moving traffic
jams underground or, as you say, to the on-ramps. What have we gained?

------
kirian
When I heard about this previously I wondered if it's a way of developing
tunnel boring technology and expertise that would ultimately be useful on
Mars. Underground tunnels and spaces are likely to be useful for a Mars colony
and Musk is trying to figure out a way to get someone to fund it here first.

------
kirykl
Where's everyone going in this automated universe? To the work from home
office? To the online store?

------
Tiktaalik
The experts are panning this idea.

[http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/elon-musk-
ted...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/elon-musk-ted-
vancouver-2017-1.4090459)

------
webwalker
Anyone else notice the mess of CSS and HTML? The document fully downloaded
almost 900kb. In hosting costs alone this could have been down with bare
fraction of that and supported 20x more traffic for the same cost. Anyway.
Love the idea :D

------
senthilnayagam
If you ignore the boring and tunnel part. A autonomous high speed contraption
to carry cars, yes human driven cars including the fuel driven ones is the
actual innovation. This will definitely work in many cities now itself.

------
jeshwanth
Elon should do AMA on Boring company to answer many questions and confusions
here.

------
TD-Linux
The rails are a rather interesting vote against batteries. Previously, the
hyperloop designs were all gung-ho about loading batteries, however that's not
shown here, implying third rail power.

------
xxgreg
I like the idea of putting cars underground, because then you can build a
human focused city above. But the video shows an urban wasteland of
aboveground high-speed traffic and no people. WAT?

------
orf
How about... mass transit. You know, not needing to dig giant big tunnels and
build the infrastructure to ferry individual people in huge cars around
underground, because the roads are too congested with individual people in
huge cars.

Dig big tunnels to ferry trains with people underground. Works pretty well.

~~~
hoprocker
_This_ is the thing. Why on earth would you build this insane network to ferry
one person in their car, the displacement of which could probably move 8
people using the same footprint. I think they throw that idea a laurel at the
end, where a more people-pod-like vehicle is getting lowered in the same
manner.

~~~
tropo
If the system doesn't move your car, then you need two cars and parking for
both of them. Park your first car, use the system, then get into another car
that you have previously left waiting for you.

Unless there is a stop at every home and business, you'll be needing cars. You
might as well transport them.

~~~
orf
Or you could walk a little bit between stops.

------
london888
I can't see how the economics of this would make it viable.

------
megablast
What a huge waste of resources for individual transport options.

------
rb808
On the downside, LA traffic sucks but at least you get the sun shining in.
Spending your whole commute in tunnels seems a depressing way to live, even if
its shorter.

~~~
jitix
That's your opinion. Getting stuck in a traffic jam on a hot sunny day is very
displeasing to me. I'd rather move fast through a tunnel.

Edit: fixed typo

~~~
astrodust
So what you're saying is you'd rather get stuck in line waiting for tunnel
access instead of actually driving to where you're going?

Based on that video it looks like the cycle time on those platforms is pretty
limited. There's a fixed number of them circulating at any time. You'll be
stuck waiting for one to pop up even if you're second in line.

If you're tenth? Get out a magazine.

------
dflock
Genius marketing/PR - just look at this huge thread ;)

------
dahart
The Boring Company:

...solving the hole problem

...it's underground

...making tools to take you down

------
adamsea
What they don't show you is the dome keeping the air in, as this is the future
society which Elon Musk will build on the moon.

------
gens
I'd like to see them try to do that beneath my city.

PS I am ashamed of the current top comment (despite not having anything to do
with it).

------
niyazpk
This looks like a cool (probably impractical) way to recharging the car on the
go. No more delays to re-charge the battery.

------
jaimex2
My guess is Space X came across a way to make tunnels really fast and cheaply.
Now to interconnect the world underground.

------
jpswade
Interesting concept, but big, deep holes in the road seem like a health and
safety nightmare.

Look forward to seeing the next iteration.

------
Flemlord
If successful, I assume this will be used to drill underground hyperloop
tunnels. That's obvious, right?

------
renega3
Obviously a terrible idea, but a mining/tunnel building company would be a
reasonable outcome.

------
rmm
As someone who has been in the UG mining industry for the past decade. This is
very interesting.

------
akhilcacharya
I'm still waiting on this to be revealed to be a part of the new Nathan For
You season.

~~~
strgrd
This is 100% Nathan For You.

------
dafidof
Where do you get the energy to make this and then to maintain this? Entrophy?
Hello?

------
partycoder
I wonder why having to transport a car and not just the passengers themselves.

~~~
bamboozled
He is a car salesman ?

------
amelius
Curious: how many solar panels do you need to drive a tunnel boring machine?

~~~
tmalsburg2
Why is that interesting?

------
carapace
Bollards around the elevators; the car-cars should connect into trains.

------
agjacobson
Ridiculously wasteful. Not needed. Optimize "self-driving in packs with
prefiled flight plans." No new infrastructure required.

------
musesum
Maybe car tunnels are a gateway to terraforming small moons.

------
panabee
besides google, what are the best sites for learning about the challenges of
underground mapping and the current state-of-the-art?

------
fiatjaf
This is not boring at all. Finally someone found a way to monetize tunnels.

Someone is pointing to problems that seem obvious, I can see a lot too, but
they've solved monetization.

~~~
objclxt
I can't quite tell if you're being sarcastic or not. If you are, credit to you
as you fooled me.

------
wireedin
What happens to those holes once the car is lowered into the tunnel by those
carriers? Can I pedestrian just jump into the hole and then sue the boring
company?

------
Mattasher
Giant hole opens up in street with no gate around it. Have they actually spent
time thinking about this or is this a joke?

~~~
devopsproject
there is cool new technology called a "barrier" that could be used

~~~
Mattasher
Indeed. They might want to have included that in the video if they were
suggesting this as an actual project and not a toy vision.

~~~
devopsproject
This is a mock up. Do you seriously think they forgot to ask the question
"what about the giant hole in the ground"? lol

------
brentm
I love it

------
accountyaccount
This is the dumbest thing I've seen him produce. Reliable rapid public transit
is better in dozens of ways.

~~~
Analemma_
... except in the crucial way of "getting people to buy more Teslas", which is
the metric Musk is most concerned about.

~~~
Spivak
Yeah, proposing a massive engineering and infrastructure effort with an insane
upfront cost in order to be the exclusive provider of the commodity trains for
a few years until other manufacturers lobby for manufacturing rights is the
_real_ business venture here.

------
Arizhel
Instead of using all this space and energy to move cars around, it'd make more
sense to just have small pods for 1-2 people, and transport the people around
from point to point.

There's already a project to do just this, called SkyTran. It never gets any
attention.

------
lightedman
This is not likely to work in SoCal. Our geology and prolific and scattered
mineral/gas reserves simply would not allow for it. Maybe elsewhere, but not
down here.

------
frik
This looks totally like a copy cat of old school books about electric cars and
the future.

So nothing special at all, people had such visions for some decades.

Funny thing is projects like "Hyperloop", "Boring Company", etc all are
already tried many decades ago in various places around the word, just
marketed under a different name e.g.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube)

------
devopsproject
this solves the "last mile" problem since your car will be at your destination

------
EJTH
Makes more sense than the hyper loop to be honest...

~~~
aphextron
I'm pretty sure cheap and efficient tunneling would be a prerequisite for the
hyperloop

------
bbcbasic
Just... wow! How did they generate that monstrosity of a html document?

------
givinguflac
The monorail!

------
outsidetheparty
"The Grimdark Slotcar Company"

------
thunderstrike
This doesn't seem feasible at all. Especially the overview shot of the
underground network, like it's all open air. Definitely wouldn't be possible
like that under a major city.

~~~
tbabb
Pretty sure that's a cutaway view.

------
wireedin
What happens to those holes once the carrier lowers the car into the tunnel?
Can I, pedestrian, just jump in there with the intention of discovering the
future and then sue the Boring company? Well jks aside future is getting here
sooner than we think.

------
mandeepj
Whenever I am stuck in traffic, I am thinking about how can we have no traffic
jams at all. My idea is similar to this but not in tunnels. I think we can do
it on earth. Just have an elevated freeway that is reserved for this type of
traffic where road is like a conveyor belt. I hope you got the idea.

~~~
yoz-y
Auto piloted cars could easily reap the "conveyor belt" advantage if they were
the only type of vehicle allowed on the road.

