I still don't understand why people (or cities) are excited about the Boring Company when subways and other forms of public transportation have existed for hundreds of years, and are much more efficient at their job (solving traffic).
Because the people who are excited about the boring company clearly do not understand anything about how a typical subway functions. For the cities, they do know better, they often compared these projects against the cost of rail transit, they just got fleeced by Boring company that straight up made up numbers apparently about project costs with no intention to deliver. Like it would be a comparison of a 1 billion dollar light rail or a supposedly 48 million dollar underground right of way, that's damn attractive for cities.
The United States spent a century with the heavily promoted ideal being a world where each adult drives everywhere. The concept of induced demand ensuring congestion was understood for almost that long but the image was popular, especially starting in the 1950s when de jure segregation in cities had to be replaced with de facto segregation in suburbs.
Boring tunnels, like self-driving cars, offers the appealing vision of saying you can remove a lot of daily misery with this one relatively cheap technology and won’t have to make any deeper changes.
Even in San Francisco. The amount of people the Bay Bridge serves in congested rush hour traffic (14,000 people one direction) is just half the people the Transbay tube serves inside BART trains (27,000 one direction).
Without the Transbay tube you’d need 2 more bay bridges to accommodate the additional traffic, and there is no way you could fit all those cars on the San Francisco streets, not even if they rebuilt the waterfront highway.
Those people are a very small minority of Americans, and I never said "all Americans", but rather "Americans who can't imagine life without cars", which is probably most of them.
