Elon Musk is getting serious about digging a tunnel under Los Angeles | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk is getting serious about digging a tunnel under Los Angeles

businessinsider.com

67 pointspaulsutter73 comments

If you're taking the time to build a tunnel, might as well put a subway in it. Come to NYC (or London or Paris or ....) and Chicago and see real subways are a much better use of building tunnels. If NYC, Boston, DC, SF, Philly, all have subways, why not LA?

It is a much greener solution than using electric autos which after all, must be charged with electric power which is often carbon-based.

Subways are also far faster than using automobiles during much of the day but especially during Rush hour. Much of the NYC subway system is powered by Hydro Quebec. As stated earlier, much of even electric autos are charged by electric power generated with carbon-based fuels (e.g., natural gas).

Building a subway in LA would have a much lower carbon footprint than building a tunnel for cars.

Trump comes from NYC, and while he probably doesn't take the subway, he might likely understand the importance of them.

    If NYC, Boston, DC, SF, Philly, all have subways, why not LA?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Line_(Los_Angeles_Metro)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Line_(Los_Angeles_Metro...

Well, that's great!

So why does Musk want to build a car tunnel? He should want to build an additional subway tunnel. The city of LA should be encouraging more transport that lessens global warning, not encourage it. As stated previously, much of the electric power in California (and elsewhere) is generated by carbon-based fuels, so electric cars are really adding to global warming.

My understanding is that building subways in LA is costlier and more labor-intensive than in a lot of the cities you mentioned, but the subway system is currently undergoing a massive expansion in LA.

The main difficulties are the fault lines: Subway lines have to be meticulously planned to avoid the dozens of faults as well as other areas that are susceptible to major movement.

http://www.cccarto.com/faults/la_faults/

LA does have a subway now. It's not the greatest, but to their great credit they are aggressively expanding it.

LA's traffic problem is the sheer volume of traffic.

If you introduce another pipe, that pipe will immediately get saturated.

LA has a TON of infrastructure, tons of long, expansive 6 lane highways, HOV lanes, Express lanes, tons of wide boulevards with 2-3 lanes in each direction.

LA is massive on a scale people don't realize - it's not as crazy as when you go to Manhattan for the first time because it's not built up. But spend some time there and you will be impressed by how big that city is. Think of the suburb you grew up in - big parking lots, wide streets, strip malls.

LA is like a giant, oversprawled suburb with 16MM+ people in the metro area.

Not saying we should just say screw it and give up, but the answer here isn't more roads or highways or tunnels.

It's things like uber, public transporation, car shares, things that get cars off the road.

Self driving cars may also help fix traffic issues. With fewer accidents, cars able to communicate with each other, and no overly aggressive or timid driving to cause slow downs, an entirely full freeway might be able to flow at high speed.

For sure - I've always wondered what the theoretical maximum of a road system is vs it's practical maximum.

That is, how many cars can a system accommodate where the cars drive perfectly, vs how many cars driven by humans a highway can accommodate.

I wonder if this analysis has been done somewhere.

Self driving cars might actually make traffic worse because people can live farther away where houses are cheaper because now they can work or sleep during their commute. This means any given section of road will have more cars on it because people have to travel farther.

There will also be cars driving around with no drivers. So even more cars!

    If you introduce another pipe, that pipe will immediately get saturated.

Not if you price it high enough, which is what makes this all potentially profitable.

You're onto a solution that doesn't require spending billions on digging: Price roads comprehensively.

There are just too. many. damn. cars. Just run the numbers. In the LA area there are 16 million people. National average is 2 cars for every 3 people. That's over 10 million cars. If we take that an average parking space is 7 feet by 15 feet, that's 105 square feet per space. 10 million spaces is 1 billion square feet. That's 36 square miles. That's literally a square 6 miles on a side--just to park the cars once. There is probably 3 times that many spots in LA, when you consider that every place a car goes it needs a spot. That's over 100 square miles just to park cars. That's not even to drive them!

Get the cars off the road, get them the hell out of the city, take back that parking space and road space, and replace it with taxis, trains, subways, trams, bicycles, busses, and literally _everything_ else but cars. The last thing LA needs is another freeway, above or below ground.

This is also one of these situations where a picture is worth a lot of words: http://wearetraffic.org/sites/default/files/images/Bike_Car_.... Depicted that way, one immediately and intuitively understands why 100 people in cars are so much harder to move than 100 people in other modalities.

You're forgetting parking structures with multiple floors. Still a lot though.

"It's things like uber, public transporation, car shares, things that get cars off the road."

Or things that literally get cars off the road, like flying cars.

I feel like Elon has done some vetting on this before just jumping into it.

Yeah Musk needs to start listening to transportation experts and read about Induced Demand.

> It's things like uber, public transporation, car shares, things that get cars off the road.

I agree about some, but Uber? Doesn't Uber do the opposite of take cars off the road? Every Uber (or Zipcar) ride is a missed opportunity to take public transportation. (Where that would have been an option.) Plus, extra cars are on the road between rides.

Uber and ZipCar may take cars out of people's garages (remove the need for car ownership) but that's a different thing.

I live in a city with a good subway system. My co-workers and I can ride it for free because our company buys us unlimited passes. But I see them still paying for Uber rides themselves out of laziness for trips they could use public transportation for.

I think the idea with Uber and cabs in general is you can take a train most of the way and then a cab to your end destination. In fact it would be cool if Uber built trains into their software so you could just say where you were going and it would offer cab-train-cab as an option.

A problem in long tunnels, is that accidents brings nightmare scenarios [1]. This is one of the reasons why cars are loaded on trains in the Eurotunnel. I also hope they do proper traffic simulations that take into account the Braess’ paradox.

My guess is that there are probably a host of other lower hanging fruits they may be able to take to reduce traffic before boring tunnels. One such thing is parking space markets, you wouldn't know, but a lot of the traffic in congested cities is actually caused by cars looking for parking.

Furthermore, In NYC, I believe traffic could be significantly reduced by simply enforcing violations for cars blocking intersections. At rush hours, some intersections on the roads leading to bridges and tunnels are constantly blocked by cars, trucks, buses etc.

A lot of the traffic can also be reduced by developing smarter traffic grids, where lights are not simply programmed on time intervals. And developing the unrealized potential of friendlier cities for bike.

In a lot of these ideas, the problems are not necessarily technical but rather governance.

Finally, self-driving cars will allow better carpooling and car-sharing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Blanc_Tunnel#The_1999_fir...

As for the weather thing he's touting, maybe cheaper to just enclose existing highways with a solar panel helmets.

“traffic could be significantly reduced by simply enforcing violations for cars blocking intersections” this, a thousand times this

Maybe the only cars which will be able to use these tunnels will be Teslas with autopilot that they're convinced will not have accidents?

LA is building out subways and light rail. But it's definitely still too slow.

Since there's so much sprawl, it would seem that a spoke and hub system would be most likely what needs to happen, with a few hubs.

Imagine a mass transit vehicle that can hit 100+ mph between union station and LAX? The biggest thing to ensure is that once you exit LAX or wherever that spoke ends that there is infrastructure to hold that type of capacity.

Imagine, union station to LAX in 5-8 minutes. Elon's commute might be slightly longer as he would have to take a surface street from that hub to his end location.

Have the hubs at the densest areas and have spokes for them.

Santa Monica<->Sherman Oaks Santa Monica<->LAX LAX<->Union Station Santa Monica<->Union Station Union Station<->Pasadena Union Station<->Burbank etc. etc.

Each hop taking just a few minutes due to the speed and no stops in between.

Honest question: How can he get all the required permits in such a short amount of time?

(Unless, of course, the usual processes are being overridden by a presidential order.)

I imagine there are two factors at play here:

1. Since digging takes time, you really only need the permits where you are actually digging. So if you start on a piece of land you largely control, or can quickly get permits for, you could theoretically bore until where you need the next permit.

2. For all these permits, you would apply for them in parallel, so you don't really need 100% of the permits for the entire length of the tunnel to start.

So if you start on a piece of land you largely control, or can quickly get permits for, you could theoretically bore until where you need the next permit.

It's not quite that simple - you may largely control the land you're tunneling under/through, but when you remove a large amount of soil, the surround ground may shift or you can affect water tables and those can cause issues for adjacent parcels and structures. Spoil removal (meaning muck trains and/or dump trucks to haul away dirt) will also affect adjacent properties through dust and noise.

Unless he owns hundreds of acres of property, any tunneling activity will cause issues that will come up through the permitting process. And if he does down hundreds of acres of property, why not just build a surface road?

Theoretically, yes, but you wouldn't want to dig significant parts of the tunnel before you're certain to get the rights to finish it, either. Imagine negotiating with a land owner for the rights to dig the last 10 meters of tunnel, somewhere in the middle of already built parts stretching over kilometers. That owner probably will be able to get 50% of the completed tunnel in exchange for those rights.

That's what eminent domain laws are for.

Hah! Caltrans couldn't even get the 710 extension tunnel beyond environmental studies and it had the support of most of the east side of metropolitan Los Angeles! A town of fewer than 30,000 people has been fighting progress on that freeway since the 1960s [1] and in the last few years Caltrans, finally admitting defeat, began selling off all the homes it bought along the planned route. If a few upper-middle class lawyers with a single town's annual budget can fight off one of the busiest freeway extensions in decades, Elon Musk has no hope for getting permits for a much bigger tunnel project.

Judges are the ones who decide final right of way, not Presidents.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_710#The_South_Pasad...

I can't find the article. But it had a great solution. In California, we have a system for paying tolls automatically. Called FasTrak, you install a device in your car and when you pass a toll booth it deducts the amount required. Super easy.

The idea was that we should implement a micro toll system for all freeways. During peak hours the charge is maybe $2, during off-peak there's still a charge but it's maybe $0.50. Even major streets would have small tolls of 5-10 cents. This helps in two ways. Many people are weirdly resistant to paying even small fees to things (see $0.10 bag tax). and would maybe just stay home. This hopefully would encourage people to ride public transportation, which is now funded by the tolls.

Yeah, it's a great solution if you don't value your privacy. /s

I mean "big brother" is already watching everyone via "freeway traffic cameras" Public transportation is what I'm pushing for.

California has a lot of rural areas that lack even AmTrak or Greyhound service, let alone full-blown public transportation networks. Applying this to all highways would put an undue burden on those living in such areas (including a significant chunk of California's immigrant population) without actually doing much good congestion-wise (since these rural stretches of I-5 and such aren't usually congested to nearly the same degree as, say, LA or San Francisco or Sacramento).

This might work in cities, though, but if the alternative (public transit) is not even slightly cheaper than paying the toll, folks are probably just going to pay the toll (especially with a system like FasTrack, where they just drive through a sensor rather than having to pay physical money).

Wouldn't this be a regressive tax?

In the LA area, this would have the effect of putting a lot more traffic onto surface streets, I think. Seems to me it would be a better idea to increase fuel taxes.

Every time I visit LA I wonder how the rich and famous survive there. The traffic is so maddening, I just can't think of any "Pro" that would counter the Con of traffic. And I live in OC, where traffic is bad enough already.

If you're sufficiently rich/famous, you can probably afford a helicopter or some other aircraft to bypass road traffic entirely.

At the very least, rich/famous people can likely hire personal drivers to worry about that stress for them.

It's their career in LA that makes them rich and famous.

Nobody's mentioned the San Andreas fault yet. Surely that's a pretty good reason not to fill a tunnel with people?

Or is a tunnel actually a much better place to be during an earthquake?

"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

This is about as audacious as the great wall of Mexico. In mastering Trumponomics, Musk has demonstrated himself to be a quick study.

He announced 'The Boring Company' on Twitter a day after the inaugral Trump-tech billionaires meeting in Novemeber, and the announcement fell flat in every corner of the internet I peruse, in spite of Musk's rabid fanbase. People thought it was a joke. It's apparently less of a joke now.

I was thinking the announcement might be more aimed at Trump than anything else. There's no way he can just just digging in a month - you'd need heaps of permits etc. But if pres Trump latches on they could push legislation through.

In the US, major infrastructure projects are routinely much, much more expensive [1][2][3][4][5] than anywhere else.

Without details, I'm skeptical of how Musk intends to solve this problem. Of course, he doesn't have to. If he merely intends to absorb as much PPP/government spending as possible -- like partially does now with SpaceX -- then it could still be a sound business model. This works out rather well for the likes of other infrastructure companies like Fluor, Skanska, Strabag, and many more -- companies that are hardly household names, but form consortiums to construct just about every major infrastructure project we have today.

I wouldn't put it Musk to try to explore using as minimal human labor as possible and deploy completely automatic Tunnel Boring Machines, enabling him to underbid everyone and win contracts. Then with a few projects under his belt, and a few construction journals writing about his company's innovations, his company will achieve name recognition on a level that few construction companies have. This will confer prestige to projects he's worked on, potentially making it an non-negligible selection criteria, especially in countries where prestige and demonstrating being on the cutting-edge is held in high regard.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-08/why-u-s-i... [2] http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/06/how-much-bang-... [3] https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/us-r... [4] https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/comp... [5] http://theweek.com/articles/449646/why-expensive-build-bridg...

You'd need some legislation to let a private company crack ahead and build without the usual political and union restrictions. It seems silly that this sort of construction costs 3x as much as in Spain say.

I don't think people fully understand yet the potential of self driving cars and AI traffic management to massively increase the density and flow rates on highways.

I'm fairly certain it will be quite easy to double the density while simultaneously quadrupling the existing flow rates - with much better improvements coming later.

Which means right now we are at the "peak delay" point for the next hundred years or so.

As a Bostonian for much of my life the thought of any sufficiently large tunnel project is cringe inducing.

Maybe he can call it "The Bigger Dig"?

Edit: Context for anyone who doesn't get the joke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig

... and traffic is still horrible.

... and traffic is still horrible.

Compared to pre-big dig days? It's not even close. Boston traffic has mostly normal rush hour periods now. I can get from Somerville to Braintree in 30 minutes during peak periods. That same trip could have taken 60-90 minutes during the elevated artery days. It was often faster to take 128 and go around Boston to get from the north shore to the south shore rather than take 93 though Boston.

If Musk can get the permits for this sort of project in any reasonable time frame he's even more of a genius than we thought.

I suspect, however, that the main objective for this plan is to get in with Trump and his apparatus. If Musk makes himself known as one of the president's prized elite job-making businessmen, it generates another layer of defense against the various attacks SpaceX and Tesla have been under recently.

Self-driving electric cars are especially well suited to tunnels. Self driving means higher capacity (higher speeds and less space between cars), fewer accidents, narrower lanes (better tolerances than humans), and electric means less tunnel ventilation needed. Cost per passenger mile should be considerably lower than existing tunnels. Even better if you can bring technological deflation to tunnel construction.

electric means less ventilation needed

Ventilation isn't just for exhaust fumes, it's also needed for fire fighting. A tunnel geared for self-driving electric fans won't make much of a difference there (look at subway tunnels for example).

so when this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleportation#Science says "It is not possible to teleport macroscopic objects such as human beings, ..." does it mean impossible per laws of physics or that we can't do it with today's technology? Because if it's the latter, let's say it costs 1T to develop the tech to do so, I'm betting the ramification would be > 1T to the overall economy almost overnight (communication and transportation are the biggest drivers of several things, one of which is the economy, IMO).

So awesome. And maybe the tunnels will only allow self-driving electric cars :)

How does a tunnel eliminate traffic? That doesn't make any sense.

I'm not a civil engineer but I'd say it works because you distribute the traffic?

Before building the tunnel:

- city = 100% traffic

After building the tunnel:

- city = 50% traffic

- tunnel = 50% traffic

Edit: seems to be a "traffic flow" problem, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_flow

Isn't this similar to adding lanes to freeways? I was always under the impression that actually makes traffic worse, like this article suggests: https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/

We can let traffic get so bad it reaches an equilibrium that stiffles the growth of the region by preventing movement, or continue to expand capacity indefinitely.

It's more like adding a new road. You can't "change lanes" between the tunnel and the freeway.

I'm a complete novice when it comes to road infrastructure so I really have no idea. But I always thought the argument was expanding road capacity just caused more people to consider using it and it always naturally expanded to the point of congestion regardless of size. I'd think a road plus a tunnel would have a similar effect.

have you ever been in a traffic accident on the freeway? It blocks up every lane. Whereas a completely different route can still proceed unaltered. Also, splitting up the traffic should theoretically reduce accidents.

Sure, but in my experience accidents are very rare compared to the total. I don't live in LA, and my evidence is anecdotal, but I'd be willing to bet that overall accidents have minimal impact on a road's throughput.

The LA freeway system never completed its original rational design. As a result a vehicle must take a round-about path to get from one place to another.

Musk's tunnel would be a direct express route between popular endpoints.

Maybe he plans on privatizing the tunnels? Those willing to pay can use the tunnels, the rest use public roads.

Will the tunnel go from Space X to Elon Musk's house?

How did you guess!?! Industrial espionage I say!

Nah, he has the Falcon 9 for that

Elon isn't very clear about what he is going to use these tunnels for. I would not be surprised if he was thinking bigger than cars and put a hyperloop in it. Digging the tunnels will take a lot of time so in theory he could wait for a working version of a hyperloop.

What about all the oil under there?

For reference: https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2014/08/the-urban-oil-fiel...

Probably a joke? I saw a 60 Minutes(?) episode a few decades ago about how people in LA(California?) loved their cars. There was no way you were getting them out of their cars and into mass transit.

At least they're finally adding some mass transit with the light rail. Give it 3 or 4 decades and LA will be livable without a car.

[Update]

I wasn't implying that Elon was going to build mass transit. Simply pointing out that people are paying for poor choices made decades ago.

Since, I've already been downvoted to the max, I can simply point out that stupid decisions made decades ago by won't be fixed by building more roads. In fact, it's probably a really bad idea.

http://laist.com/2016/08/11/la_hasnt_gotten_smog_this_bad_si...

Isn't this article about "car tunnels", not public transport transit tunnels?

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