
Elon Musk's Boring Company Begins First Tunnel - Dangeranger
https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/12/15629754/elon-musk-boring-company-tunnels-watch-first-route-la
======
arcticbull
I definitely think this is cool tech, and it's going to be amazing to see this
whole setup work once completed.

I do have to wonder, this seems like it a largely over-engineered solution to
the problem of moving people -- wouldn't it be more practical to put a train
down there? This still requires individuals own cars, so it does nothing to
reduce costs, promote equality and seems to just move the traffic problem from
the downtown core to the outlets of the tunnel. Am I missing something?

It feels like LA really needs public transit.

~~~
backpropaganda
If you'd ask the people in 1900s, they'd say the "right solution" is faster
horses.

Public transit SUCKS. And I don't understand why people are pretending that it
doesn't. Space efficiency and throughput are not the only important variables
here. How about freedom? Once I take that train and reach my work, what if I
have to go somewhere nearby work?

There's a reason cars exist. In your imaginary world, trains might be better
than cars, but in the real world, cars are way better, even in those higher
culture societies with planned cities like Scandinavia. Cars exist there too.
Why? Because they do solve _some_ problem, which I'd imagine could be comfort,
freedom, privacy, hygiene, and many others I'm sure.

~~~
Johnny555
_Once I take that train and reach my work, what if I have to go somewhere
nearby work?_

Then you walk or take a train there?

You may say "But my area doesn't have good transit", but if you're going to
spend billions of dollars building relatively low capacity car tunnels, you
could spend those same billions to build higher capacity transit.

The car only offers a certain type of freedom. When you take a train (or cab)
from work to go across town to meet friends for dinner/drinks (since you don't
want to drive during commute traffic or try to find parking in a busy
downtown), why should you have to make that same trip all the way back to your
office just to get your car so you can drive home? Just hop on a train from
the restaurant and go directly home.

At least that was my biggest discovery when I first moved to an area with good
transit -- without the car I had a lot more freedom to go where I wanted and
didn't have to structure my activities around where I parked my car. Also I
didn't have to pay for (and protect) a $20,000+ car and the transit pass was
less than the monthly car insurance alone.

~~~
avn2109
>> "... you could spend those same billions to build higher capacity transit."

Former tunnel boring engineer here.

This is true, but the real elegant solution is to _build everything closer
together_ by an order of magnitude, thereby raising the number of destinations
in an N minute walking radius and _eliminating the need for tunnels._ If your
urban design depends on cars-in-tunnels, it's a "code smell" that you've made
a grievous system-scale architectural error.

We should keep building cities the way people did for thousands of years, with
mostly little 10-foot wide (building-face-to-building-face) streets and a very
few larger boulevards. This is how Venice works. This is how Tokyo works. This
is how lower Manhattan works, and it's awesome. LA's streets are probably ~100
ft between building facades, on average, so we could infill a bunch of little
narrow streets of buildings in each one, raising destinations-per-acre by ~an
order of magnitude or maybe more.

This destroys demand for transit by inspiring a modal shift to pedestrianism,
and now you have a much smaller problem to solve. You can take all the tax
revenue from the new buildings in your newly-densified city, and the money you
saved on paving/traffic lights/street upkeep, and use it to build a real
12-trains-per-hour, quad-tracked, express-and-local service, 24 hour subway.
Elon's Boring company can dig the tunnels for these if you want.

If you have money leftover you can build through-core commuter rail, that
comes from the northern suburbs and goes through downtown out the other side
to the southern suburbs, with a one-seat ride. If you still have money
leftover you can give it to the homeless or something; under no circumstances
should anyone ever spend money on putting cars in tunnels, which is one of the
all time dumbest ideas and a prodigiously ugly solution to a prodigiously ugly
problem.

~~~
geezerjay
> We should keep building cities the way people did for thousands of years,
> with mostly little 10-foot wide

To do that, first you need to forget about all best practices and problems
that have been fixed and issues regarding quality of life and even safety.

No one bothers building little 10-foot wide streets because that's an
appalingly bad idea. Slums aren't known for their quality of life, and no
emergency service can pass through 10-foot wide streets.

You're a former boring engineer talking about issues that you know nothing
about.

~~~
avn2109
People bother to build little narrow streets all the time in non-slum areas,
and their emergency services work fine. It just doesn't happen in North
America.

------
bgentry
_“Planning to jack this up to a factor of ten or more,” Musk writes in the
caption. Not quite sure what that means, but it sounds pretty badass. Jack
away, Mr. Musk._

Since this writer didn't bother doing any research before compiling Musk's
Instagram posts, he's talking about the speed. He plans to run the boring
machines much faster than has been done traditionally, and do so continuously.
That's why he made the joke about the snail.

Source: Musk's recent TED talk, which was pretty fun to watch.

~~~
rory096
Very sloppy article

> _This video shows the first in what Musk proposes to be a citywide network
> of underground tunnels_

That video is clearly in the Hyperloop competition track.

~~~
dmix
The tunneling project is unrelated to Hyperloop (or at least not directly
related). The new proposed project is in the IG video description:

> This is a test run of our electric sled that would transport cars at 125 mph
> (200 km/h) through the tunnels, automatically switching from one tunnel to
> the next. Would mean Westwood to LAX in 5 mins.

Musk released a video of a new concept of underground tunnels moving vehicles
in cities this past month.

~~~
rory096
Regardless, that sled is in the mile-long track they built for the competition
they held. They may not have depressurized it, however.

The actual tunnel is just a starter currently, as Musk said. They're only now
putting in the TBM.

~~~
Robotbeat
Right, both the sled and the track/tunnel are left over from the student
Hyperloop competition.

Hyperloop was kind of a brainstorm of Musk to get around traffic. But now that
he has a track and a sled, he figured what the hey, don't even really need the
vacuum part just for travel within a city. Just need to scale up a bit (maybe
a factor of 3 in each dimension from the existing sled) and get good at
tunneling and you can get fast travel within a spread-out city without
bothering with the harder engineering problems that a Hyperloop would require.

Hyperloop still a good idea for faster travel, but as far as an initial step,
this tunnel system seems pretty straightforward (except for fast tunneling and
permits for tunneling, etc) and gets Musk to his goal of getting around the
traffic problems of LA.

------
socrates1998
I hate to admit that this is the 20th time I read "Boring Company" and thought
"Why did he name it that, it doesn't seem boring at all."

Regardless, pretty cool if he can get it to help with LA traffic.

~~~
mrfusion
It's genius. The media loves a good pun. You can probably triple your pr and
headlines if you make it easy for journalists to feel clever and have a fun
headline.

------
niftich
The article alludes to speculation about permits, but Dennis Romero writing
for the LA Weekly in February [1] noted that at the time, permits for a small
pedestrian tunnel were not granted -- albeit required by state law. That's in
addition to a filing required by the City of Hawthorne to allow for a 30-day
public hearing period; it was the City that informed SpaceX to contact the
state regulators.

I'd like to see more reporting on whether these permits were obtained after
all.

[1] archived at [http://archive.is/zgAMq](http://archive.is/zgAMq)

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Symmetry
Ok, so the center of LA to Culver City is 16 km via Google Maps. A snail goes
at 1 cm/s. So 18 days of boring assuming everything works out. That's actually
super fast.

~~~
mark212
at my company, we only run our snails 8 hours per day and they get an hour for
lunch.

(And the tunnel is LAX to Culver City-Westwood-Sherman Oaks, not downtown.
There's already a train that runs downtown to LAX. LAX to Westwood is 18.2 km
on the roads per google maps)

~~~
tylerflick
> There's already a train that runs downtown to LAX

I'm assuming you're talking about the Green Line connecting with the Blue
Line?

The Green Line doesn't stop at LAX. It stops outside of the airport, leaving
passengers to take a cab for the last mile. Not to mention you have to hop a
connection to the Blue Line, which doesn't stop at Union Station.

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blakesterz
Every time I see this thing I can only think about earthquakes. I am
absolutely certain they've planned and thought about this and engineered the
heck out of it, that being said... I can not imagine that being in one of
these things during a _big_ earthquake is going to be very nice.

~~~
infodroid
"Earthquakes tend to have the biggest effect on the surface, like waves on
water. That's why LA can have a (lame, but getting better) subway."

[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/824300186834898945](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/824300186834898945)

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awjr
I'd really like to see him get this right, but I think the volume of people,
not cars, that needs to be moved would indicate a better use of this
'solution' would be almost be a horizontal elevator system where people
request a route and board a passing carriage that stops to pick them up/or is
sitting empty on the street waiting to be used.

Enabling the delivery of cars into the heart of cities when many cities are
trying to remove them seems a bit backwards, but the idea of a transit system
which dynamically delivers people where they need to be. That I get.

If the boring is cheap enough, I can see this being a good transport solution
for suburbia to get people quickly and efficiently into a city.

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sriram_sun
A tunnel between Austin - Houston - Dallas would decrease traffic in Austin
quite a bit I think... and would be good boring practice!

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btilly
What happens when an earthquake causes his tunnel to no longer being aligned
all unexpected like?

There are challenges with working in a seismically active zone. I'm sure he
has thought about it. I'd be curious what answers he came up with.

~~~
Retric
Faults don't suddenly show up for no reason out of the blue. So, the
traditional solution is to treat fault lines as a special case and design for
some shifting over the useful life of a tunnel.

~~~
btilly
The route the article suggests is likely to encoutner a lot of existing fault
lines. For example there is one running through LAX itself, and a series that
run through Santa Monica.

See
[http://www.cccarto.com/faults/la_faults/](http://www.cccarto.com/faults/la_faults/)
for a map of the bigger ones. (A lot of little fracture zones are not shown
there.)

Boring a tunnel through an active fault line still seems risky to me.

------
excalibur
> Elon Musk’s new video of his underground tunnel project will make you
> nauseated

> ‘Warning, this may cause motion sickness or seizures’

People are getting sick just watching a video of the thing, and Musk's plan is
to strap them all onto it. Brilliant.

~~~
kinkrtyavimoodh
The actual tunnel will not have these continuously flashing lights.

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JoshGlazebrook
Hopefully it has better luck than big bertha in Seattle. God what a mess that
project turned into, but the last I've heard she is almost done with the
tunnel.

~~~
pchristensen
She's finished digging, and they're disassembling her to take her out of the
tunnel now.

[https://seattle.curbed.com/2017/5/10/15612548/bertha-
tunnel-...](https://seattle.curbed.com/2017/5/10/15612548/bertha-tunnel-
boring-machine-disassembly)

~~~
JoshGlazebrook
Is there an actual eta on the opening of the tunnel?

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SAI_Peregrinus
I'm in the US, not in NYC. I use public transit (and my bike) exclusively. The
most annoying thing about public transit is cargo handling. With a car you can
buy groceries for a month. Or make a trip with several stops buying errands.
Etc. With bike/bus I'm limited to what I can carry. That's a lot less than
what can fit in a shopping cart / trunk˙.

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ju-st
Are they still using Herrenknecht TBMs?

------
dgudkov
I didn't see many comments saying that it's nothing else that just a high-
speed underground railroad. As any other railroad it can transport not just
cars, but passengers, goods and whatnot. It's basically a general-purpose
subway.

------
anotheryou
How do you handle vibrations at 10x the speed? Isn't that a big issue for
houses above?

~~~
Theodores
F=ma

Build your vehicle with 'bicycle technology' instead of 19th century
technology, the weight goes down and the vibrations are solved too.

With 'bicycle technology' there are no crumple zones, there is very little
steel and that is 'high tensile' steel rather than the hefty steel that you
get on railways. Deluxe materials such as carbon fibre and the more
interesting alloys of aluminium are used on bikes that, at the same price
point, were made of more common materials a generation ago. Even though
bicycles are old fashioned, they are up there and beyond F1 and other
'performance engineering'.

I would bet that the liner for a Tesla 'frunk' weighs more than most bicycles,
plus on regular vehicles there is a lot of cruft that you just wouldn't have
if you had to push it yourself.

I am not suggesting for one moment that Elon makes all of these tunnels for
bicycles, however, you do not need to make a vehicle massively heavy (e.g. 50
tonnes) to get it to adhere to the train tracks.

Seems Japanese trains weigh a fraction of what American trains do:

[https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/tabl...](https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/table-
of-train-weights/)

I am sure that if Elon and co. thought about doing what the Japanese do on the
train weights but '10x' the weight would be fine. There is no easier way to
get speed - F = ma - plus there is important safety considerations, people get
killed by heavy vehicles, deaths by being hit by a bicycle (e.g. as a
pedestrian) are out there with freak events, improbable but possible.

~~~
anotheryou
Thanks for the detailed reply! That was kind of par of my question and
interesting to read, but I actually referred to the booring head. It said he
wants to increase booring by 10x.

I now read elsewhere he does not want to stop booring while putting in the
supporting wall, so he'll advance continiously, but I doubt that's what takes
so long.

~~~
Theodores
My perspective is London where you do get basements rumble with the trains
below, we did have Crossrail put in with a lot of disruption to existing
infrastructure being more of a problem than the ground shaking to pieces. They
did have a very large TBM and they also had to weave through and around a lot
of other tunnels beneath the ground. A lot of lasers above ground made sure
things did not subside, which was a bigger problem than the rumbling, which is
a one time thing. With the aforementioned basement situation there is a rumble
every few minutes.

------
newsat13
Where does elon find money for all his ideas? He seems to innovate at
breathtaking pace.

~~~
donatj
Well he's worth an estimated 15 billion, a lot of which if I understand is
from his involvement with PayPal

~~~
Robotbeat
Almost none of it is from Paypal any longer (except as seed money for other
ventures). He got about half a (EDIT: significantly less than a quarter)
billion from Paypal and invested it split into Tesla and SpaceX. I think he
owns most of (or close to most of) SpaceX, which is worth at least $10B, plus
a bunch of shares of Tesla (but definitely not near half), which is worth over
$50B.

So I'd say his networth now comes from (very) roughly 50:50 Tesla and SpaceX.
Paypal money is long gone.

He borrows money against his shares to fund projects like this without
diluting control.

~~~
acover
He got about a quarter of a billion.

He almost went bankrupt in ~2008.

Edit: my correction of a correction needs to be corrected

> In October 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for US$1.5 billion in stock, of
> which Musk received US$165 million.

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

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freddealmeida
This is interesting if not over engineering. I hope it comes to fruition.

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11thEarlOfMar
I can't seem to get past the notion that this is an elaborate hoax.

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mrfusion
I was actually just musing at how easily tree roots "tunnel" through the
ground. I'm wondering if there's a way to replicate that in a new kind of
boring machine.

~~~
anotheryou
well they compress the soil between the roots and are a bunch of thin things.
You'd need to liquify the humans before you shoot them through.

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chrisbrandow
Whose electric sled was this? Hyperloop?

