Elon Musk's Boring Company Begins First Tunnel
theverge.com
theverge.com
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.
Whether the car pod or the transit pod make the most sense is largely irrelevant at this phase. The system can (and seems to be planned to?) use both at the same time. So if a bunch of people want to pay to use this for their cars, then it can be used with cars. If people want to use this as a more responsive subway, then it can be used that way as well. They just configure the little pods one way or another, 98% of the system (tunnels, elevators, track, vast majority of the pod, etc) remains the same either way.
I actually kind of suspect that enclosed pods will be used for both, since otherwise you have to worry about debris flying off of cars (like those dumb little flags, dirt, and drinks accidentally left on the roof) and hitting pods behind.
Personally, my favorite mode of transport in a city is bikes mixed with public transit. This system seems to work well with both.
But the point of a pod-based system like this is that you can let the market decide which exact mix makes the most sense. If people are willing to pay to transport their whole car, then why not let them? Or why not have just passenger pods? The system is designed to be expandable to arbitrary numbers of pods and tracks, so there needn't be any reason you couldn't do both.
Today, when buses get their own lane, service reliability increases for the buses. What you could say is that the current system of roads benefits single-occupancy vehicles and that this, as a private solution, would force people to pay the true costs. But quite frankly there will likely be subsidies for this, especially because Elon Musk seems to view this as a way to reduce car travel times for himself, which leaves us with the same problem as we had before.
2) Weather. Inclement weather limits when you can drive on roads and how fast as well as reducing safety dramatically and reduces capacity.
3) Speeds. Can't safely go 125mph on a road unless you have a LOT of space to accelerate. Even on the autobahn, this is pretty dangerous.
Tunnels are 3D and do not take up space from other things, deconflicting the tension between single-occupancy vehicles and buses (and other modes of public transport). And small tunnels (gas, water main, electrical and telecomm conduit, storm sewer, and sanitary sewer) are already ubiquitous, going under basically everyone's property and in multiple levels. This is especially so in large cities, when the size of those existing tunnels can approach what Musk envisions.
If you could somehow dramatically lower the cost of tunneling (and tunneling in particular, not trench-and-covering, which disturbs the surface), then you could do transport much more efficiently.
New York City shows what a great subway system is like and how tunneling enables efficient transport in spite of huge densities. But it's 100 years old, and for whatever reason (labor costs, safety, etc) we simply could not afford to build another system like it nowadays.
Subway trains are often engineered to specification, so if you have a tunnel of a particular size the manufacturer can make a train for it.
The precursor to the modern subway was a strange pneumatic system that would fit in that tunnel as well: http://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/Beach_Pneumatic_Transit
- Logistically, it is difficult to get a cement truck into a small tunnel, as each truck would need to back out of the tunnel. You end up offloading into smaller cement trucks that can turn around, which is the headache that the Eglinton LRT tunnels is dealing with now
- Need space for a level floor, conduits/tunnel infrastructure and evacuation walkways
- Air flow. The rail car is an effective cork. Small tunnels require more ventilation and draw more power to push that air being compressed around -- unless the underlying truck is going to be propelling itself via the air
Barcelona's system is apparently the new gold standard for how it should be done [1]
They were able to build it out at ~$39 million/km[2]
[1] http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=1866842 [2] https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/comp...
Seems like you missed this part.
[1] http://www.lamag.com/driver/mark-your-calendars-all-the-metr...
The biggest problems I have with LA's public transit have nothing to do with a lack of lines.
LA's public transit is unreliable -- sometimes the scheduled bus just doesn't show up and you have to wait ~45 mins for the next one. Hope you didn't have a meeting scheduled! London by comparison has GPS on all their buses, so you know precisely how far away they are and how long they'll take to reach you.
But more importantly, LA's public transit is not terribly safe/comfortable. I'll never take the train after dark again after a homeless person had a psychotic break and threatened (in a very serious way) to kill me. Gang members are a common sight. They need security on the trains themselves.
"the problem of moving people" on Mars.
the exceptions are people who can't afford to drive, and people who just happen to live and work in convenient spots.
The right solution is as you state public transit, which is more space efficient at moving people than cars.
Fake environmentalist love Elon - no reason why they won't like this.
By the way, why does Singapore grade Tesla as a super-polluter category?
Those darn fake environmentalists. They're right up there with the scotsmen of the "no true" variety.
Eliminating the busiest roads and removing traffic jams, seems to be the main goal, i suppose
I assure you, in most places outside of the US, public transport does go to last mile pretty well.
Not only that, it takes significantly longer than going by car. I think Elon Musk brings the best of both worlds by reducing travel time and avoiding busy roads/traffic jams ( no need to build it on the countryside) and if you want. You can return by night. Also, in Belgium, all our roads have severe traffic jams. The tunnels could reduce traffic jams on normal roads. Records break year after year with no solution ahead. ( and yeah, our governement invests a lot in public transport. It isn't profitable now and it will never be profitable -- heavily subsidised)
No public transit is affordable at night over a long distance. Almost everything happens by daytime.
I'm not saying public transport is bad, but it's not cost-effective if you want it everywhere / everytime.
This could really be the solution, it's genius. The cost of the tunnels would be paid back in a short time, only because roads are less jammed.
Stop forced integration in cities.
As soon as you eliminate housing projects, housing wavers, rent control, etc., and allow the market to deal with housing naturally, suburbs become obsolete.
However, so long as governments provide cheap or free housing to criminals, dropouts, homeless, and those who in an earlier age we would have sent to sanitariums and rest homes, people are going to flee to safer areas; thus, suburbs.
I suppose you could also keep existing housing policies in place, but step the police presence WAY, WAY up, and get significantly harsher on criminals committing even minor offenses. Rudy Giuliani did this in NYC, and New York was able to be wildly diverse, yet also very low crime and a nice place to live. But I'm not sure the will is there in L.A. for a "tough on crime" approach.
- convenient as taxi while being fast as subway trains. - less likely to crash. - easier to estimate transportation time.
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.
However, you want a train every 3 minutes in both directions and 2 train lines per stations. Which takes a lot of effing trains, but means your average wait time is 3 minutes per trip, and you generally only need to use 2 trains to get to any point in the city.
Also, you want a nice layer of cabs for short hop trips.
So, yea that's one way to lower the average wait time, but again just sending more trains and the system becomes more stable.
If I need to make 2 trains each way with an max of 15 minutes of wait time each. Then I need to add 1 hour of padding to cover that worst case over the day or risk being late. Further, if anything happens that can go well past 1h of just waiting. Cut that to a daily 12 minutes 'worse case' makes a massive difference.
If you have to go somewhere near work, walk, bring a bike, or Uber. But chances are, there's a tube stop less than a 10 minute walk away.
The problem isn't public transit. The problem is its implementation.
I'm about to double my rent and halve my square footage to get away from BART. It has noting to do with reliability and everything to do with standing on a crowded moving vehicle for 90 minutes a day.
Modern cars are palatial. Even the best (fast, frequent, good coverage, reliable) train systems are squalid and cramped when they are needed most.
"Your commute is too comfortable, let's make it miserable" doesn't win elections.
The BART is renowned example of how not to design and implement a mass transit system.
Furthermore, the reason why BART sucks is not because it's a mass transit system. It's because the service has no capacity to meet demand and fails to cover the urban area.
Once cars are fully autonomous and become cheaper, faster, and more efficient than current forms of public transportation, current low speed trains and buses will become unused and obsolete. Except for the hyperloop and air travel, I see any investment in public transit infrastructure (trains, buses, subways - hell even parking lots!) to be a complete waste of money. In the 10 years it would take to build a new train through a city, cars will make it completely useless.
Aside from the haphazard and oblique bus scheduling routes, the ride itself is jarring and agnozing. Unnecessary repeated montoned annoucements bombard your trip with sudden jerking stops.
Of course, the homeless and drug addicted use the bus and trains for temporary shelter. The train has even more mind numbing announcements with a ridiculous annoucement system that could be replaced by screens.
And if you want to go anywhere beyond one bus route, your trip time will be 3 to 4 times that of driving.
We're supposed to commend those who take public transist, but the City of LA doesn't care. Corrupt, incompetent, indifferent -- whatever it is, they don't have a clue what they are doing.
The problem is not the public transit, the problem is how homeless, drug addicted or mentally ill people are treated in the US.
Fix this and suddenly public transit will be viable again...
The homelessness thing is a much bigger problem. Shelters are always full, and even if you do have a job, rent is totally out of control, and the wait for section 8 housing is >a decade in some places. It's not surprising that people end up on the streets, and yet rich people in this country want to further cut back on social safety nets while offering ever more subsidy to the wealthy. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/09/magazine/how-homeowner... discuses this.
You state this as if it is inevitable, but I don't see this as true. Take, for example, the density in cities in, say, China. If we took everyone who took the buses and the subway trains and moved them out to cars today, Shanghai would be a perpetual traffic jam.
In addition, you have pedestrians to deal with at surface level, which of course will slow cars down. The laws of physics also dictate that things must slow down during things like turns, and when you exit the tunnel. Unless we create dedicated interchanges and acceleration and deceleration lanes... That already exists and it's called a highway. Traffic is rarely made slow on the highway because of the cars traveling on it or the number of lanes, it's made slow by the cars wanting to get off and slowing down. Yes, you can make the cars move faster, but the bottleneck is precisely where the cars decelerate, even today. I fail to see how making a bunch of tunnels solves the issue.
Even if you fix the Two Second Rule by perfect automation, you still need order of magnitude more space.
In cities where public transportation is expected, places you want to go tend to be clustered better, so you can walk/bike/bus/train to several things at once.
"Location location location" has to consider foot traffic.
Nonsense. Just because some people are unable to exercise their rights it doesn't mean that others should not, let alone that those rights suddenly become mere privileges.
You should try your best to improve the life of everyone around you, not drag down those who are better off just to force them into everyone's misery.
This makes coverage gaps in public transport less obvious or problematic than in the US. Cities modernized around the car are best traveled theough by car.
There are a lot of European cities and even whole countries including fairly developed ones with pretty shitty public transport.
You also need to check the walkability of many cities. In Europe it's better in the center of old cities but gets pretty bad, in the US the cities tend to sprawl much more especially newer cities like LA. You won't have a highway crossing a city in Europe in the US it's much more common.
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.
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.
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.
That's what we have in Europe and it doesn't solve anything.
I only works when the size (diameter) of the city is small. Then a single point in the centre of the city can irrigate the whole city. And a point to point transportation between the centres of several such cities is highly efficient.
But cities have spread, so now the problems are the same as in the USA, except that when the city keeps repeating the same pattern of density while spreading, it makes those problems even worse (infrastructures are more saturated, because there are more people using them and because they are smaller and rarer). Dense or not, your job is nowadays unlikely to be in the same part of the city and generally not in the same suburb either.
There is no benefit in having density on a wide area. What worked when the city was built (or slowly developed into) and was 1-2 km wide was challenged when it grew to 3-5 km wide, and stopped working now that the city is 10-20km wide.
The denser the area, the slower the transportation: be it cars, buses, trains, bicycle, foot, whatever: everything moves slower in dense areas. And there is only so much that happens to be closer and more or less compensates the loss of speed. The rest suffers the density slowdown penalty in full.
I very often read Americans here, who write the same thing you did. It sounds like you all think there is a magic bullet: densification of your suburbs and suburb-like urbanisation. Let me tell you that if you densify this way, you won't solve anything, you will even make everything worse, for you will concentrate more people everywhere around the centre, in a neverending slick of density, and all those people will need or want to commute to other neighbourhoods daily, and you won't be able to offer efficient mass transit for most O-D in those newly densified areas.
You often have a rose-tainted view of European and Japanese urbanisation. Problem can have a different nature, or a different reason, but they exist as well and are as important.
The kind of low to mid-density area that can support everyone owning a car is not the kind of high-density area that can afford to pay billions of dollars for high-speed car tunnels.
If you want to use your car, use it outside of the city, don't displace housing in the city so you can park your car for the 22 hour a day you're not using it.
I may find it very convenient to drive every where in my 40 foot motorhome so literally all of my stuff is with me at all times, but that's not going to happen.
My take is that the only people who ever claim that it's a bad idea happen to be US citizens who have been conditioned to see a car as a sort of extension of their own body and even a social tool, and don't have any first-hand contact with working mass transit systems operating in urban areas.
The rest of the world knows that a working mass transit network greatly improves quality of life in multiple aspects of everyone's life. Anyone who experienced the metro system in cities like Berlin or Paris or Madrid, with a city-wide network criss-crossing the city with stops every 300-500 meters and trains passing by each 2-10 minutes, knows that it works well and does wonders to everyone's life and even personal disposable income.
I assure you there's a lot of people like me.
By the way "citizens who have been conditioned to see a car as a sort of extension of their own body and even a social tool" describes me, half my friends and most of my colleagues pretty well.
"US citizens", "don't have any first-hand contact with working mass transit systems operating in urban areas" don't apply so much to us. We're consultants and I assure you. We have first hand experience with mass transit systems in every EU capital, half the US state capitals, and a lot of others.
And none of them match having your own car. Most of us have a choice taking mass transit systems or doing an hour plus of being stuck, going almost walking pace, on the highways. When traveling public transport tends to be the easiest to find, more reliable and quickest way to quickly get to your hotel. Taking a car into a plane, while possible, is sadly not within budget limits for travel. Taxis are, but opinions are divided on them. I think they're generally more trouble than they're worth, and they make you miss all the stuff you want to look at.
I suppose my main reason is that I can actually shop where I want, and take useful quantities of food, supplies etc plus all my work stuff home with me. There is no way to do that with public transport. Aside from the comfort, this actually saves a lot of money, and more generally even allows for more economic opportunity (due to reasonable and speedy access to more goods. I help organize a music mini-festival. That's not doable without a car, mostly because I can go get needed things quickly).
Second reason is that while public transport, where it works, only connects the spokes with the hub. It does not connect neighboring small cities in any useful way, if at all. Even if public transport has connections, they run 4-5 times per day. And they're mostly empty, so every time the public transport bigwigs play with the schedule (every 6 months in France) we live in fear (or my kids do anyway), if the connection will still be there or they won't be able to visit their friends.
Public transport is -barely- tolerable to connect people to their jobs. It is unusable for almost anything else. Not even for regular groceries. Not for going to IKEA and get some furniture. Not for having a party at a friend's place. And so on and so forth ... And please don't start the argument that it's cheaper. It is not, as soon as you consider how much more a car lets you do, and that public transport just isn't a replacement.
Electrical bikes help. Or at least, they're better than bikes and sometimes more useful than cars.
He wants to travel faster and doesn't want to deal with congestion, and so he comes up with this zany idea for cars on sleds in tunnels.
Maybe the real problem here is the car. Car oriented infrastructure simply doesn't scale well as demand increases.
His solution is going to run into all the same issues of induced demand just the same as highway expansion has.
What if people refuse to use the train because it's scary, dirty, stinky, etc.? What if you could re-imagine trains where everyone can bring their own private mini-car and add it to the train? Then the car can be private, clean, luxurious, cheap, or whatever the owner wants. Would people adopt it then?
Yeah. that's pretty zany. As long as I'm not forced to pay for it, why criticize? I'm curious to see which zany idea out there proves itself.
Musk is providing ammo for persons that oppose public transit spending for political and idiological reasons that can be used in the political arena to argue to decrease public transit spending and slow down or stop implementation of public transit expansion.
Because the "private mini-car" isn't as space efficient as just having one person. Space efficiency is a major point of public transportation, and the "scary, dirty, stinky" aspects can and have been solved in other parts of the world like Europe and Asia. What public transport advocates are worried about, I think, is that just like freeways, we are potentially going to create an enormous strain on the surface road system... the cars are going to have to come out of the tunnels some time, after all, right?
Cars scale in smaller increments than most public transit and that is important areas that are not densely populated or during off-peak periods. You can build a nation/culture around public transit, but the path dependencies with the US are pretty deep at this point.
>Car oriented infrastructure simply doesn't scale well as demand increases.
Self-driving cars scale in very different ways than piloted cars. The biggest problems with piloted cars is accidents, congestion and parking. All of these problems fundamentally change with self-driving cars. What Musk is building is self-driving car infrastructure.
What buses pick up a single person? They are far more efficient than cars precisely because they can move many people on optimal routes.
I imagine if you measured by passenger mile they don't account for a lot of public transport, but they are the transport of last resort for quite a lot of people.
[1] http://www.mtr.com.hk/en/customer/main/performance_201407.ht...
Though driving can be fun, I’ve much preferred commuting in the subway to having to drive to and from work every day. I think there is some snob element in different impressions of public transportation. People go to coffee shops when they have coffee machines at home and in their office, because they enjoy the social aspect. Perceptions of public transportation are influenced by wait times and how they are treated by transportation employees, but probably more importantly by whether the other riders look like their coworkers and peers.
Transit sucks in the US because we don't invest in it, and our land use regulations are largely hostile to anything that isn't a car.
Convincing Americans that public transit sucks should be studied as one of the greatest PR coups of the 20th century.
:/
"...what if I have to go somewhere nearby work?"
I work in a metro core area. I can walk to anything within 5 mins. Even in my residential neighborhood everything is a 15 min walk. It's actually faster by bike since I can avoid traffic issues.
This is some ranty stuff. Of course cars solve a problem, but so do buses, trains, etc..
As to tunnel exits, the goal is not to have 3 or 4 exits per city but hundreds. Even single lane roads can send vastly more people than any one building needs the problem is the longer the roads the more buildings you need to serve. So, his solution is to have multiple layers of grids under the surface.
I don't think it does. It's a moving platform, many different things can sit on a flat platform. In the CG video, they even showed something that looked more like a bar than a car on one.
For bonus points, your vans could be autonomous.
Or, you could, you know... complain that tunnels aren't a complete solution.
To be successful, this will have to adapt to a variety of cars and could carry other car-like things. It could be pretty modular system.
Because speaking from someone that Uber's 10 times a week, rode busses all throughout college, I gotta say, I really really like car ownership.
There's no smells. There's no weird homeless people. I don't have to wait 45 minutes for the next bus to show up. I don't have to schedule a ride to go to the grocery store. The same vehicle takes me from the city to the rural areas. The driver doesn't cancel on you if you're destination is not far enough away. (Uber) I don't experience surge fees. (Uber) I don't have to cross 3 different types of transportation to get from point A to B.
Well, you would probably have to switch trains/buses to go to a rural area, but those rural areas are very well served so you wouldn't mind.
I have lived in New Delhi for 20 years, in Singapore for 5 years and in SF/Berkeley for 10 years.
Public transit in SF Bay area is horrible. You are right... it smells because of the homeless riding it all day, and service times are bad, and its quite expensive too.
Even New Delhi's metro is nicer and cleaner than the BART / Caltrain (because its newer but also because the company keeps it clean).
Singapore's public transit system is out of this world. Its absolutely amazing. Clean, efficient, reasonably priced, etc.
It was a shock to me when I landed in the "greatest country on earth" to see such a pathetic public transport systems.
I brought a motorcycle after my first year in US. We have 2 cars now, not only because we like the cars, but precisely because we would like to avoid the public transport.
However, people who have seen good public transport would always vote for that. I would love to see a Singapore like public transport in the US. I loved it and would give up 1 of our cars for that (still need 1 car to head out to Yosemite). But alas, I don't see that happening in the US because US people have not seen good public transport.
I don't know--have you ridden busses in LA? You have to walk to the bus stop, wait, ride the smelly bus, possibly transfer, walk to your final destination, carry your heavy bags. It's terrible, no one who can afford a car will use it.
If you want to improve public transit you have to solve the last-mile problem, which is expensive. You can't afford a bus every 5 minutes for 1 person to ride. Alternately you can take an Uber, which is very similar to driving your own car.
People who are putting down this project because it's not public transit should consider that public transit has been around for decades. It works in some cities (NYC, Tokyo, etc.) but not in others (LA, Bay Area). We need a new solution, and having it car based for last-mile makes a lot of sense.
Edit: Example, a 20 minute car ride takes ~50 minutes with a transfer using public transit in LA: http://goo.gl/1s6cxL
It's like saying: "The world would be so much better if everyone could just learn to juggle 9 balls." Not only is the premise that juggling saves the world problematic, but there's a huge barrier of entry just to prove it could work.
I don't think it's unreasonable to say that if Elon successfully revolutionizes boring technology, it might be better to use it on a really good public transit system. And it's an especially important conversation if his fully realized tunnel network would make a later subway system more difficult/impossible even if people wanted one.
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.
>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.
> 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.
The actual tunnel is just a starter currently, as Musk said. They're only now putting in the TBM.
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.
Regardless, pretty cool if he can get it to help with LA traffic.
I'd like to see more reporting on whether these permits were obtained after all.
[1] archived at http://archive.is/zgAMq
(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)
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.
kind of like the tesla roadster begat the model S begat the 3 (supposedly).
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.
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.
See 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.
> ‘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.
https://seattle.curbed.com/2017/5/10/15612548/bertha-tunnel-...
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...
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.
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.
I get that it was presumably a reference to the song 'King of the Road', but since the rest of the story had nothing to do with being a hobo, I'm unsure of the author's intent.
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.
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.
Paypal was sold in 2002 for like 1.5 billion to Ebay, and Musk had like 10% of the shares.
He does however own something like 25% of Tesla. Thats about 12.5 billion.
https://www.inverse.com/article/31478-spacex-settles-underpa...