The Boring Company FAQ
boringcompany.com
boringcompany.com
- Smaller diameter tunnels. 14' is suggested. This is slightly larger than the deep London Tube lines.
- Electrically powered TBMs. Those exist. However, often the business end of the machine is hydraulically powered. Musk is probably thinking of going all electric, at least for the cutter head. After all, he has lots of experience with high-torque electric motors.
- Do cutting and tunnel ring assembly simultaneously. Some TBMs already do that. Those exist; they're called double-shielded TBMs.
Issues glossed over:
- Soil variability. Very different techniques are required for different soils. Sometimes the soil has to be "conditioned", adding something to make it solid enough it can be drilled through.[1] This is the biggest practical problem in tunneling. Too much water is the usual problem.
- The back end. TBMs are long machines. The front end does cutting and ring assembly. The back end, which can be several hundred feet long, is mostly material handling. There's usually a two-track narrow gauge railroad behind the TBM, carrying ring segments forward and dirt backwards. It's constantly being extended with new track sections. That's part of the TBM's job.
Here's a good overview of TBMs design, from Machine Design.[2]
[1] http://www.therobbinscompany.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/... [2] http://www.machinedesign.com/archive/art-digging-hole
The largest part of the problem to solve here for the US is not the technology of tunneling. It's the process of engineering and building infrastructure like this that seems to become way more expensive in the US compared to places like Spain. I do believe he could reduce costs by vertically integrating the whole thing. But then we should ask why don't we do that anyway?
The figure is way out. Crossrail in London has a $20 billion total budget (£15b GBP), with 26 miles of tunnel[1]. But the tunnel is only part of the project, several billion is being spent on new regular track and station rebuilds, so the tunneling figure is really closer to $15 billion.
That's about $570 million per mile, but the Crossrail tunnels are just shy of 50% bigger in diameter than what Musk wants to build (20.5' vs 14'). And as the FAQ says, "reducing the diameter in half reduces tunneling costs by 3-4 times".
LA's tunnel might be costing $1B/mile, but how much of that cost is actual construction versus bureaucracy and mismanagement?
The closest thing is the Regional Connector project, which will be 1.9 miles of light rail and has a budget of $1.8B. But that's the entire project budget. Tunneling costs are only part of it; it's hard to find a finely grained budget, but total construction (including four new underground stations) is budgeted at $1.2B here [1], which is still "just" $600M/mile.
[1]: https://mtadash.mlmprojectservices.com/projects/5773#/cost
But that project was building a subway including station directly below a riverbed.
Because with trains you never build just a tunnel - there are train stations, escalators leading in and out, ticketing booths/machines, electrical work to power all that fun stuff, connectors to existing depots so that maintenance workers can come and service the cars and the engines.
His idea is closer to Madrid, which has dug tunnels to relieve the city streets of the traffic. The tunnels themselves are very unassuming and look like onramps and underground parking garage entrances.
Everything about Musk's idea seems absolutely terrible. If America had better trains and subways, it could move massive amounts of people. Train automation is a solved problem, and currently implemented in cities around the world. There is absolutely no possible way in any reality where individual car/pod transport could even approach the capacity of real mass transit:
http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-sol...
Americans need to get over our wasteful individualism, our "alone time" in cars and realize you can read a book, watch a movie or do something not involving driving on real public transport. Buses need to stop being just a means of transport for the poor.
That's why public mass transport was created and was so successful in the big cities. US big automotive destroyed most of this working infrastructure in the last century (E.g. Los Angeles, Houston, ...) but it's still cheaper to build mass transport than to support individual transport. Just ask a New Yorker or a foreigner.
Tunnels are a hazard for individual traffic. That's why pods do help. But trains are still preferred.
It's a good alternative idea to build long range tunnels. He is right. But the focus needs to be mass transport, not individual. It's a matter of costs.
Tunnels are great parking structures. Cars on sleds provide a great interface to said parking structure. Heck, NYC has automated parking structures with car elevators and sleds. The only imagination required is not having to dig a big hole down to the depth of the lowest level of the garage first.
You could rent your car back to the system to use as a lounge for people who want to travel but didn't bring a car to get on the network. Saves you parking costs, maybe an operator could work out paying you for that.
But for big cities trains are much better and cheaper.
Another problem is that all those people have to walk to and from the end station.
A "packet switched" system of sending individual cars at high speed solves both those problems, and going just by my gut feel, should have a quite high throughput too.
People are walking from the station to these giant office towers in central London. The walk from the Tube station to the office must only take 5-10 minutes, total. My gut feeling says the throughput won't be high specifically because you'll have 800 or so people trying to get out at the same place at roughly the same time.
Where mass transit struggles is in getting people from one arbitrary spot to another at an arbitrary time.
Then I sat at an intersection one day and counted how many individuals were being moved through two lanes of regular car traffic vs how many came through on the light rail.
I was shocked by how inefficient regular traffic is.
So now MY gut feel is that without any technological breakthrough, this sort of system would already be starting with an order of magnitude disadvantage: which is to say, shockingly inefficient compared to allready available technology and solutions...
There is a delay between each car which after 20 cars really adds up.
How would that work? Now it's true that there won't be any delays caused by drivers not paying attention, but unless the cars will go 125 mph with only a couple meters of space between them (eep!) the cars will require a non-zero delay "off the line" to allow them to spread out as they gain speed.
How fast they can fork and merge is more interesting, and I dare not have an opinion about that.
Furthermore, a solution that leverages personal vehicles is slightly more viable for a private sector company. Telsa can continue to promote their car sales without that having a negative effect on the Boring Company.
This idea that a company can replace our entire existing infrastructure with a train/bus system is just purely impractical. There is the solution that seems the most obvious (current public transit), and then there is the one that is actually viable from a business perspective.
I don't get it, where does that come from anyway? I mean America's mostly a country of immigrants; most inhabitants' forefathers, only a couple generations ago, abandoned everything they know to build up a new life. If that's not change, then IDK what is.
I think that at one point it's not about what they want - having the option even to drive anywhere is a luxury a lot of people don't have - it's what's practical. Driving in New York isn't practical, so people take the tube - regular services, high capacity, etc. There's no way a tunnel system with individual cars, which will have a much lower capacity than a regular road, will be able to compete, neither on cost nor capacity.
Of course, if you're rich then it doesn't matter. I'm sure it'll work in SF, where there should be plenty of people that can afford it.
Let's:
* replace tipping with a minimum wage which helping working people get out of poverty
* make checks obsolete
* etc.
> Driving in New York isn't practical, so people take the tube
The what now? I think you'll find it's actually called le Métropolitain
Uh? What? Please explain - are you expecting everything to go fine the first time, because in the history of the world, that almost never happens.
- Eliminate small coins
- Move to metric in a practical sense rather than just officialThe best answer I have: the more people are individualistic, the more difficult it is for them to coordinate. Big changes like fundamental infrastructure require collective buy-in, and when you have lots of self-interested individuals who stand to gain by introducing friction into the process, costs skyrocket.
The alternative ends of the spectrum (it's not 1D) of that is more social people (dream utopia, I don't know where it exists, if at all) and more authoritarian control (easiest way to coordinate people is to have someone unilaterally decide for them).
That's an excellent answer and I think you are right. Car culture is a big deal in the US and I think the perceived independence it represents is part of the reason why.
The tunnels obviously don't make sense in places that have well established train systems, but a lot of places don't have that. Often in America, the only 'practical' way to get around is using a personal vehicle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_Rail_(Los_Angeles_County...
Depends what his goal is. Currently getting from A to B in a car at a certain time involves traffic jams.
If his goal is to get from A to B most efficiently in a car then it's one of the best ideas.
If his goal is get people from A to B via any mode of transport, perhaps trains. But he owns a car company, so that's not exactly in his interest.
Also with cars it's truly A to B. Not A to subway/carpark, wait, travel, walk to B.
In most European cities, if you get off at train station, you're in the midst of (or very close to) the city center, office locations, touristy walking sites and plenty of choices for retail or food.
In the US once you get off at the train station, well, you're at the train station, and now need a car to go anywhere you actually need to go. NYC and SF are likely to be the only exception - train stations as close as LA or San Jose are fairly sparse and have limited connections.
You can run the fastest most frequent train you can handle, and California in fact is building one between Borden and Corcoran, but the "step 2" in US cities generally involves getting a car.
EDIT: embellishment due to baq, this tends to be true of cities which developed before the car revolution of the 50's and 60's. For example, my city has a pretty poor average walkability score, but for where I live in the city core, it is very walkable since it is the older part of the city.
Portland should probably join that list.
This lesson seems to have been lost for some reason but infrastructure is to be built first, destinations second. Much of the New York City Subway system, like in the Bronx, was built through farmland. Once the infrastructure was built, destinations (dense residential) was built. It has to work that way. It's not practical to expect there to be any destinations available when the subway opens- people need a few decades to rearrange themselves.
I think in the original video, they showed a pod with a group of commuters.
For what its worth, it hints that those sleds will also become public transit platforms as well - "if one adds a vacuum shell, it is now a Hyperloop pod" - but Musk will want to call it something cool like an Urban Hyperloop instead of just a subway.
So this is something I've been trying to address all thread, so excuse me picking your comment.
You can only create a public transit platform by having _dedicated_ infrastructure. We know this because cities like London and Paris (and not-so-big Vancouver) all have mostly-to-fully automated trains with 90-second headways between each train at rush hour. This basically means that if once a train pulls out of the station, the next one pulls in mere seconds later. These trains are usually packed to the gills. Even one single-occupancy vehicle would decrease the overall efficiency of that system.
Heck, you can create a tunnel in each which sled contains one bus and it'd still be less efficient than the London Tube because the whole thing will take up more space, physically (these trains squeeze in every last passenger). This is what Seattle tried to do with the downtown bus tunnel and they're evicting all the buses there in favor of light rail.
I think it will always make sense for subway trains in dense city cores, but I think the discussion about dedicated rapid transit is hampered in more suburban areas because of the whole notion that we have to fit in cars into rapid transit corridors, or else it's not worth it. But this ends up making buses less reliable and gives them their crappy reputation (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_bunching).
Grade-separation is absolutely necessary for good rapid transit.
The tunnels themselves are very unassuming
Ventilation, as a very critical entity, comes to mind. Also safety features are extremely critical. I live in a country with lots of tunnels and essentially every longer auto tunnel has additional tubes that are under pressure, for example. That's required if you suddenly have a burning vehicle in the middle of a narrow tube.
While car tunnels don't need to be sexy from an optical perspective there's a ton of necessary infrastructure and safety features, which aren't immediately obvious.
Maybe this changes when we all go electric, but I really don't see that happening anytime soon.
Sure. Why didn't we have electric cars before tesla? Why didn't Boeing or Lockheed Martin make reusable rockets?
Alan Kay said something[1] recently that has been bouncing around my head for the past few days. He said that many people think darwinian processes (like the economy) optimize. "One my degrees is in molecular biology, and I can tell you, any biologist would say they're absolutely not optimized. The whole point is to fit into some niche in an environment. And if the environment isn't the right kind of environment evolution isn't going to give you something interesting".
In the context of the economy, if there's no innovation, and not enough competition, and no new players entering a market, I don't think its all that surprising that the existing companies might stop reaching to be more efficient.
It seems strange to think that companies would leave money on the table, but in older industries I think this is exactly what happens. The money just requires too much organizational churn for their corporate appetite.
The more I think about organizations the more I they seem to be the key players preventing change to me. (Which is not necessarily a bad thing)
Business says: We had this great idea, now let's freeze everything in time and let's make money of this snapshot forever, because who knows when we'll find gold again.
Entertainment industry likes to do that especially.
Darwinian processes are near-perfectly optimized ... for an extremely local maximum. Once there, they fail to make jumps to much better nearby maxima.
If you look at a somewhat larger scale, where there are better maxima available, then the correct conclusion is that they are absolutely not optimized.
There's a huge difference between "exploit in the now" and "exploit, but still be viable in a billion+ years".
A great example of this is me; I'm pretty amazing; I can move around my environment, make a living to a sufficient degree to cover costs of food and shelter, and somehow even have a fiancée and manage to keep another organism alive & fed. However I'm not an expert at everything, I'm pretty bad at most sporting based things (even compared to other, existing humans; not some theoretical concept of perfection), and I spend about a third of my life doing nothing (sleeping), despite this not necessarily being required (e.g. Dolphins can sleep half their brain at a time, allowing them to avoid this inefficient downtime).
Somewhat related: it was interesting when my kids were born; they both had to be C-sectioned. I asked the obstetrician about it, and yes, bigger heads are becoming more and more common because mother+child no longer just die when they do occur. We really are removing selection pressures!
I'm not sure you are accepting the basic principle, which is that evolution is not in any way optimization (not that the evolutionary process is not "optimized").
See something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherian_runaway
Also Giuseppe Longo's work on randomness as a cause of organizational complexity in evolution: http://montevil.theobio.org/en/system/files/articlepdf/Longo...
It's only when the environment changes (rise of mammals post dinosaur-extinction) or the organisms themselves change environment (Darwin's finches) that you get the rapid rates of evolution to find the new optimumm.
Some obvious analogies of these two situations in tech are the rise of the Internet (Microsoft did change, but struggled), and the rise of the smartphone (Apple came from nowhere to a position of dominance).
This is probably true, but it's also deeply heretical for believers in market efficiency.
Von Braun originally proposed reusable boosters, although he had in mind a parachute system with a water splashdown. A recovery system for the Saturn V was considered, but it would have added time to the schedule, and the "man/moon/decade" goal would have been at risk.
Mostly because batteries sucked. Small electronics drove most of the research to improve them.
I guess Tesla vehicles are market leading in several ways, but they aren't a generation ahead of what anyone else can do or anything like that.
But sure, no one is out there doing anything other than Tesla.
And I think I am giving credit where credit is due. Battery research made a lot of progress, Tesla used the resulting batteries to make nice electric vehicles. I mean, they have a battery partner and all that jazz.
But what if the cost were a tenth as much? I posit that for a city of 500,000 - 1,000,000 it might become practical to have subways and that radically changes the transit equation.
So I am very bullish on Musk bringing down the cost of tunneling. It all depends on how low he's able to reduce the cost.
If smart and motivated teams can't do something, can anyone?
With something like soil, maybe they figure the technology will be useful even if it only services projects with easy terrain and environments and avoids areas with swamps.
Actually, the story is that Musk made it up on a whim while stuck in L.A. traffic, founded the company the same day and bought a used drilling rig which started digging in the Tesla parking lot.
Really the main difference is that someone without money and follow through would've just sat in traffic and complained.
Yes, of course, now that he has money, connections, and a powerful reputation, that makes it easier for him to do things. But he created the money, connections, and power by being able to do things even when he had none of them.
And in general - entrepreneur "origin" stories are often bullshit - useful to get go PR, that's it.
You might want to look at them closer. Hyperloop and ET3 are very different from a technical perspective, even though they're superficially similar.
ET3 tubes need 1/1,000,000th of an atmosphere to mitigate the sonic boom, and that makes the pumping requirements exceedingly hard (requiring multi-stage pumping with turbo- and cryo-pumps). That also means ET3 has a higher top speed, assuming you can secure the right-of-way to satisfy the minimum curve radius.
Hyperloop tubes use 1/1,000th of an atmosphere, chosen because it's the lowest pressure achievable with purely mechanical pumping. They then route air around the pod, allowing them to approach the speed of sound despite the fact that air has to speed up as it squeezes around the pod (aka the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kantrowitz_Limit).
So ET3's pumps see basically the same differential pressure, but 1,000x more volume needs to be pumped per m^3 of air that leaks in. This means the Hyperloop requires less pumping power, fewer pump units, uses only cheap mechanical pumps, and can tolerate more air leakage than ET3. This is a big win, since the tube is the expensive part.
let's judge the outcome - or lack of it - when they fold or succeed.
Cities of 500000 inhabitants which have a subway exist. See
My family is from Lausanne and I spent a few months studying in Rennes–the size and density plus the metro system makes these cities really pleasingly 'human scaled' in my view. Walking-first center city areas with lots of restaurants/shops, easily accessed from less dense areas by metro+good bus systems+intercity train, but small enough overall to not feel sprawling.
Traffic is often massively asymmetric so you can just reverse the direction it travels at noon.
It seems plausible that keeping a conveyor belt in good service is cheaper than keeping a fleet of railway cars is. It's also significantly less hassle as you don't need to figure out where to put railway cars when they get the end of the track. Finally it's costs would scale fairly linearly with distance, making short belts totally doable in a way that short railway systems are not.
The natural throughput of the system will be high. Like a new car on the belt every x seconds, where x is not a big number, seems totally plausible.
Those aren't new either, but not common for urban transportation.
It would be interesting I guess if they combined it with the Hyperloop concept, board the tube system in the city, transition to a (cheaper?) above-ground vacuum tunnel system at a transit station.
But it's all very science-fiction and, if anything, it's not going to be cheap. Like, at all.
At least it's a commercial project, not something a government has to pay for.
It may be expensive - but you only have to build each tunnel once.
There's a startup that got some hype recently for flying an electric airplane between London and Paris - when as someone commented on the HN story [0] you can just take the Eurostar through the tunnel - which is electric and takes just as long and doesn't cost any more.
When it's all said and done, Elon is a car salesman and entrepreneur, I guess that's why?
There are obvious benefits of being able to come and go as an individual instead of relying on public transit.
Hygiene, safety, and storage all pop to my mind.
I think it's move polivalent to transport vehicles (personal or mpv) that way the last 1-5 miles can be resumed by the vehicle and they don't have to stop everywhere (which is the main crutch of trains), you want to cover as much area and not have "why don't you stop near my house" syndrome.
there's also nothing stopping bicycle riders from using the system provided there are seats to strap into and goggles to wear.
Now I know why big companies do those reading comprehension tests...
He didn't say that was a benchmark at all. He explicitly said that was one of the highest costs for tunnels.
> with some projects costing as much as $1 billion per mile
A few reasons off the top of my head:
- flexibility; car infrastructure is much more flexible than train infrastructure
- incremental construction - cars already exist, you're only solving the problem of moving them around (building train infrastructure means building more trains with additional train-supporting infrastructure and more railroads outside of tunnels)
- meshes well with electrification of car transportation
- allows to reduce fossil fuel polution with minimum impact on people's habits - instead of asking someone to start using trains, you just ask them to drive into a tunnel, and for the duration of tunnel transit, the pollution (and fuel costs) magically disappear
- related, it's easier do incremental changes than all-out revolutions
- R&D in efficient boring could be of vital importance to future Mars colony
- last but not least, electric PRT system (aka. "packed-switched" public transport) could be, and probably will, incrementally implemented with self-driving electric cars; this again meshes nicely with that future (benefits of PRT over other forms of public transit are a longer topic)
Presumably whether this system is privately or publicly operated, there would be a major toll associated with its use. So the ask isn't just "drive into a tunnel", it's "drive into a tunnel and pay $$$", compared with a new subway line integrated with the existing mass transit system (trains and buses) and under the same fare.
Because people have opinions on trains. So instead of building train tunnels you debate it for 20 years in town halls and NIMBY protests and nothing changes.
This is clearly a hack around that issue. The article mentions a Hyperloop several times, that's the ultimate goal here.
Anecdote, I don't have a lot of mileage (pun unintended), but every girl I've ever dated did not have license, and neither do I, and I am 27. I live alone and bike and bus ride for the most part.
[0] http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-millennials-c...
There is the possibility of increased urbanization and improvements to self-driving car technology will make it economically feasible for car ownership to be unnecessary for most, but I highly doubt that happens within the millennial generation. Probably the next one.
In Europe, that would be true, but I think in Southern California he can charge exorbitantly per car and people will pay it.
A public transportation network's usefulness is roughly quadratic in proportion to its size, because it needs to cover both your origin and your destination. A small subway system is nearly useless, because even people who live or work near it probably don't live and work near it. You can mitigate this to an extent with busses, taxis, letting people park at stations, etc., but there's still a lot of friction.
By carrying cars, these tunnels will act as an extension of the road network, which almost certainly covers your origin and destination already. The tunnel part doesn't need to serve the ends, it just needs to exist somewhere in the middle to be useful.
If you build one subway line, it's pretty much "great, let's finish the system so we can have something useful." If you build one Boring Tunnel, it would be immediately useful for anyone whose car trips are vaguely in that direction.
I'm really skeptical it'll all work out, but I don't think it should be thought of as a lame subway.
Unfortunately, they don't allow it during rush hour due to space constraints, so it's not nearly as useful as it could be.
What's the throughput of cars on electric sleds through tunnels?
Crickets...
A tunnel for cars is different. Even a single and relatively short tunnel is useful and people would probably pay something for access. This means you would start making money on the investment quite quickly.
I agree that trains are the right thing to do, but that is much larger project and likely too big to be an option for private company.
Just learning how to build tunnels is interesting from that respect.
The reason that isn't stated is because Musk likes to create projects around a "purpose" and business plan for them to succeed (even if they are retro-fitted - that is, he decided first that it would be important to tunnel, and then arrived at the "why tunnels on earth").
edit: not a new thought. some other commenters already pointed this out. I read those after posting this.
Good points. And beyond the technical aspects, there's a lot that the FAQ doesn't say about the service:
- How do you tell your sled where to go? Does it always go to the same place? If so, do you merge lanes? If you merge lanes, wouldn't there be jams there? If instead you build many parallel tunnels, don't you remove the gains you had from building smaller tunnels, by having many more tunnels?
- How is it meant to compete on price or human bandwidth with subways? Surely at 200 km/h you need to maintain space between sleds in case one fails. Plus, the sleds are not large, which limits human bandwidth. Finally, if you have lots of tunnels (at least one for each origin/destination, instead of subways with many stops), you will need to maintain and repair that infrastructure, which will require service tunnels and backup tunnels, which adds to the cost.
Another thought: they don't mention how they'll design the tunnel network yet. My guess is that it will be backboned by double circular tracks (one for clockwise driving, the other for anticlockwise), from which you have regular exit/entrance ramps at each stop. The circularity would avoid having a terminus where everyone slows down.
Still, any design would have a maximum capacity corresponding to how fast vehicles can exit in the worst case, if they all suddenly decided to leave at the exact same stop.
The tunnels are still pretty big, and the sleds could be 10' wide and 10' vertical if the tunnel ID is 14'. That's pretty comparable to a subway or bus, and the increased distance between the sleds is made up for by the increased speed.
the giant ipad on the dashboard of your tesla, or your phone otherwise.
>If you merge lanes, wouldn't there be jams there? If instead you build many parallel tunnels [etc]
because if the increased speed, one lane is the equivalent of about 2.5 highway lanes in terms of throughput per hour. Regarding safety distance, I think you can actually safely achieve smaller spacing with a roller-coaster style mechanism than with tires on asphalt. I would say that as well is a 2x throughput multiplier. So parallelization seems largely unnecessary.
>How is it meant to compete on price or human bandwidth with subways?
ok so take an 8 car subway train with 40 people per car on a 10 minute interval. 8 * 40 * 6 = 1920 people per hour travel from A to B.
then take sleds each containing a car with 2 people, paced 300ft apart traveling at 125mph. that is 2 people * (125mph / 0.0568182mi) = 4400 people per hour
I think 300 ft is for 75 mph. Using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braking_distance, the distance at 125 mph is 55 m/s * 55 m/s / (2 * 1 * 10 m/s2) = 150 m = 500 ft, resulting in 2 people * 125 mph / 0.09 mi = 2.8 khumans/h.
(On the demo video, their vehicles look like they are tire-on-asphalt.)
Also, subways have a typical capacity closer to 30 khumans/h in dense urban areas (https://www.thoughtco.com/passenger-capacity-of-transit-2798...).
Also, the concept video shows multi-user pods. If you pack them as full as a rush hour subway, you could probably equal or exceed a subway's throughput.
Melbourne's light rail E-class trams have a carrying capacity of 64 seated: 146 standing. They can regularly mix with pedestrians. The E class is the "big" one at about 40 seconds:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmBlZ4xpS5Q
Melbournes older, 6 car trains have a crush capacity of ~1526. Seatwise they have ~500-600, with a standard target capacity of about 800 (above that the extra variance/numbers people start to complain about overcrowding).
Seen here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AfbBVXGJzY
Now, those old trains aren't the newest, and they're single-decker and not the biggest or double-decker like sydney's, and they're not the bestest like some of the asian fully-auto metros.
But, my point being is that by the numbers before we start getting too crowded, our quite average older 6 car trains have point in time comfortable capacity about 2-3 times more than your 8 car subway estimate. Hell, three of our light rail vehicles regularly move the numbers of your 8-car subway.
But wait...
We've not actually accounted for the trips accurately, because if a train runs the full length of its track only carrying its estimated point in time comfortable capacity, the carriages would be quite empty: the total passengers using a train aren't its point-in-time-carrying capacity, but how many get on and off between all the stops along its path. That goes for light rail too. So to find the actual number of people moved by train or light rail, you generally have to multiply the carrying capacity by some additional multiple.
On the other hand, private vehicles generally, in practice have a person per vehicle estimate UNDER 2 (barring geography, time, purpose variances), meaning your estimate is overly optimistic for the cars, and out by about an order of magnitude for the rail vehicles.
I was not being facetious when I made another comment in this thread when I said I was shocked by how inefficient private vehicles were when I actual went down to the intersection and started counting how long it took them to move say 100 people (equivalent of 1 of our trams), nor am I being facetious when I say not only that this is likely a problem with an already known solution, but a problem where The Boring Companies apparent solution is starting with a rough order-of-magnitude efficiency penalty.
I'm honestly a bit...feel like I'm taking crazy pills...that people are talking about the proposal of putting private individual vehicles on rails...in tunnels.
The problem is that most US cities are completely unwalkable, so you need a car once you hop out of the station, or you need an incredibly large subway system.
This is being proposed for LA initially, which is one of the most sprawled, least walkable cities in the US.
I wish we had more walkable cities here.
The express subways are spaced out a little more, closer to 8 or 10 minutes, depending on the line.
here is LA for instance, about 10 minutes average during rush hour https://media.metro.net/documents/5a366ef8-2013-4d21-8e6d-e7...
From where?
Tesla was forced into that technology. The original Roadster had a two-speed transmission and an air-cooled motor. The huge jolt on the transmission when it shifted during acceleration wore it out in months. So Tesla had to develop a motor with a wider power range that would fit in the original space. That forced them to liquid cooling. Previously, liquid cooling an electric motor was considered unnecessary complexity; just make it a little bigger and use air cooling. Now, it's common for electric cars and is being used for electric powered aircraft.
I suspect having mini TBMs which go ahead of the main machine, boring small tubes would be an effective way to give feedback on what's coming up; avoiding nasty surprises / helping to prepare ahead of a change of soil type.
It is well-mapped. LA used to have an oil industry, with oil wells all over the city. So the underground has been explored and studied by the oil industry. UCLA has been studying Los Angeles area geology since the 1920s.
Exploring horizontally has been done for a few projects that lack vertical access. Eurotunnel drilled the service tunnel first. Some mountain tunnel projects in Japan did horizontal test bores. You can't do this directly ahead of the main TBM without interfering with the main dig.
This pre-bore provides three great advantages:
1) Ventilation of the tunnel during the enlargement is greatly simplified
2) You have a very sensible saving on explosives (if explosives are used) or however faster excavating times (because a large part of the amount of explosive is needed to "start" the demolition of the rock, i.e. pull the center "core" out)
3) From the pre-bore you can (when you encounter problematic terrain) drill radial holes for consolidation of the surrounding terrain (though cement injection or other similar techniques)
If the final diameter is TBM excavated as well, #1 advantage above is only partial, #2 is almost non-existing while of course #3 remains, BUT, you cannot make the pre-bore much smaller than the 3/3.6 m diameter as otherwise it would be only useful as a geo prospection mean, as it wouldn't be practical to use it for anything else, and there would surely be issues (for smaller diameters) with ventilation.
AND the other bad news are that - more or less and as a first approximation - a TBM has an operative tunnelling speed of roughly 400 m/month that is almost independent from the diameter (while a traditionally excavated tunnel is more around 100 m/month without pre-bore and 120/130 m/month with the pre-bore), so while it may make sense (of course a lot of factors are involved), if you have a 4 Km tunnel to make a pre-bore that will add roughly 12 month to your 50-60 months project excavation time (traditional), it won't make much sense unless for other very particular considerations to add those same 12 months to the 12 months a full face TBM would take.
What is often done on full face excavated tunnels with TBM is prospection holes (horizontal, drilled from the face of the TBM) in the 30-50 m range, to explore what lies ahead in the immediate future.
Too much water won't be a problem on Mars... where I think the end-game here is for Musk on why he's learning how to build tunneling machines.
"To solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic, roads must go 3D"
The word "must" is a very strong one here, there are other options:
* Reduce the amount of travel that people need to do (remote work, online shopping).
* Reduce the density of cities (enabled by remote work or longer commutes with better internet access).
* Increase public transport options (higher passenger density).
* Encourage cycling.
I feel like only somebody who lives in LA would make the "must" assertion and not think about all the other options... oh wait:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/b/6e27fcba-309d-494e-b...
Add a congestion charge or tolls, and a proper public transport network. The solution is not more roads, it's fewer cars.
Dirt roads are extremely cheap and have been around forever. That doesn't make them the best choice in a modern society.
A cable tramway is one option for an aerial system. The load-bearing capacity of a 15mm steel cable is impressively high, and it can be strung along pylons.
Not that you'd want to bolt street cars to such a system, but it's an example of a possible people-mover that doesn't require persuading a multiple-kilometers-long bolus of solid granite it'd prefer being elsewhere.
Whilst I'm aware that Musk's premise here is that he can be the boringest guy ever, I'll note that the Gotthard Base Tunnel, in Switzerland, required 17 years of excavation to extend 35.5 km.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel
Tunnel systems can also give rise to some interesting cascade failure modes. Cab-forward deisel locomotives aren't generally considered a risk factor, until they are. Summary of an accident report, here, five souls lost to bad design of stock and tunnel, inadequate maintenance, poor judgement, and panic response:
I have ridden on the Nozomi and it's a fantastically smooth ride. There are indicators of the current speed on the wagon passage doors and it is incredible when it achieves 270+ km/h and everything is passing by so quickly, and yet you can drink your beverage from a cup just fine, just like in an airplane :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio#Farebox...
Doesn't this just mean that they are expensive? I heard complaints about how expensive Tokyo's subway is. Reducing price and propping the system with tax can be a better approach in the long term, because that can encourage more people to use public transit and reduce demand for costly highways.
(Also, one could argue that the freedom to move around at an affordable price is a basic service the government should strive to provide, although I'm sure some people will regard such an idea as socialist nonsense.)
Since employers always pay for commuting costs a regular working person spends very little on train tickets day to day. Me and my wife spend about $100 per month between us. With our companies paying a further $70 per month for each of us for our passes to work.
But the MTR actually was subsidized by the government, which let MTR Corporation develop the land above the subway to make malls and stuff, which they make even more money on. Presumably some of this profit gets reinvested into the system itself.
0: http://www.mtr.com.hk/en/customer/tickets/octopus_fares.html
You could argue, perhaps, that the price is expensive relative to what Japanese people earn, but from my impression it was a very effective and reasonably priced public transportation system.
Beyond the price, Tokyo Metro is almost always on time and pretty clean, and generally the delays happen late at night (the delays are only for a minute or two). Having been here for over a month, I've only experienced one daytime delay that lasted more than 30 seconds.
you don't really want more people in Tokyo metro, at least not in peak hours
The newer the subway lines in Tokyo are fun because they have to built in under the others (as referenced in the FAQ), you can tell you're on a new line when you descend down flights and flights of stairs.
Also people have to accept having a highway right next to their window: https://thumb1.shutterstock.com/display_pic_with_logo/141562...
Yes they would. If you took the existing surface street network and made it 100% buses and/or ground-level trains you could accomodate current subway and road capacity with room to spare, even before you reclaimed all the space currently used for car parking. Private cars are an astonishingly inefficient use of space, and taxis are barely any better.
> The listed alternatives are all nice, but none of them allow you to move at 125+ mph.
We don't need to though. There's no conceivable need for a city to accommodate more people than could live within a 30-minute commute at current speeds if we were willing to build at the high densities that are actually possible.
... and buses are even worse.
NYC works because of trains and as a proponent of train travel and public transportation (except buses) I believe they have indeed solved many problems with their diverse rail network.
Buses are a canard - they are the minimum viable public transport option that were pried out of suburban taxpayer hands and presented to poor urban (usually black) riders by planners who didn't care about public transportation at all.
This ruse has gone on so long that in 2017, well meaning (and brainwashed) proponents of public transportation see buses as one of the core components of a transport network. Wake up. This is false. You need subways and trains.
Well-functioning transit in cities that prioritize it use very few buses and they use them for weird stopgap or edge cases (or emergencies). BRT is a farce[1]. You should be demanding real, not fake, investment in transit networks. You should be demanding trains.
[1] To be fair, I have seen two very functional BRT models - both in very specific (and wealthy) environments: VelociRFTA in Aspen and Hop/Skip in Boulder. In both cases, however, a well-designed rail corridor would be even better.
London buses have a capacity of 80 to 130 people and are often full. How can that be worse than 60 to 110 cars for each bus? Even at half the capacity (single deck) you use the space way more efficiently than cars.
Now if you live in a city where the planning was botched, the transit routes made inefficient, and poorly targeted at ghetto areas that's a different problem. In fact you'd probably have the same problem if the same routes were done by trains.
Buses are just a way to transport a lot more people than cars and I can't see how that's a problem...
What's baffling to me is that, in addition to "real" light rail, Seattle is also building out a network of street-level trains. These trains barely carry more passengers than an articulated bus, are subject to the same traffic issues as the buses since they don't have a dedicated right of way, cost way more than adding bus lines, and their tracks create significant hazards for cyclists. I could be wrong, but it seems like this is an example of "buses = bad; trains = good" thinking gone awry.
You can't clean a hotel or flip a burger remote.
Public transit has failed to solve the problem despite a 100-year head start.
Cycling... in LA...
I don't think the Boring Company is trying to solve the gridlock. They will, however, provide an option for those who can afford to pop down into a Teslalane [sic] for a trip to the airport. And that's fine. It's [Teslalanes] infrastructure that ultimately helps the city thrive until the time that the land use patterns rebalance. There will always be traffic - but it won't always have the same overall impact.
So the question here really is "which would improve LA more: tunnels that carry trains, or tunnels that carry carts that hold single cars?"
There is plenty of strong evidence that shows adding additional road capacity increases overall traffic. I'm not sure that adding ways to move cars around faster wouldn't have the same impact, versus a train.
I take objection to this because, aside from other cities where public transit is the norm, the interurban system in LA [0] was dismantled, partially because it was forced out by cars that increased congestion to the point that streetcars could no longer run on time, and partially because of car companies advocating that buses could replace the streetcars (they didn't).
Things don't exist in a vacuum, and LA decided to make itself a city where you could only be comfortable getting from place to place inside a car.
Public transit SOLVED the problem 100 years ago in the US. And then it was sabotaged by the big automakers.
I think American Individualism sabotaged Public Transit when it realized it could avoid the public by using automobiles.
If the boring company solves issues with personal travel then cities like LS will become less dense. There's a reason urban sprawl didn't exist before the car.
Easier, yes. Cheaper, no.
> At some point the holes could cause collapses.
The risk is extremely low, and car accidents have caused a vastly greater number of deaths than any other form of transportation.
> There's also water mains and other hazards and obstacles.
Pretty sure there were some pretty massive hazards with flying too.
> Sounds dangerous.
Which a lot of people said about flying as well. And it's vastly safer than a car.
And also a huge waste of energy on an ongoing basis. An aircraft has to continuously expend energy on fighting the gravity.
> the problem with digging is that many people live and work and drive right above where you dig.
The FAQ addresses that by noting that below ~2 tunnels height, people wouldn't even notice.
Nope. Denser cities are both more efficient and more walkable.
How do the sleds preclude developing public transport? Why wouldn't we see mini-vans pick people up from homes or community hubs and then use the tunnels to take an express route to the CBD? Or larger sleds that accommodate a bus or truck sized pod? If these HOV pods avoided a congestion charge, there would be an incentive to use them.
Obviously drivers and their cars will fill any space given to them, and cycling tunnels might be too expensive, but hopefully a change in traffic flow and parking availability would make room and safety for cycling above ground.
Imagine buses with good cycling storage so you could ride to the hub, board a bus, zip to the CBD, alight and ride the last few kilometres to your destination.
Entrenched interests will fight it for a time, but it wouldn't surprise me if these guys could make it happen.
Intersections can only be solved with 3d roads, by eliminating overlaps. The bigger the city, the more artery roads you need with uninterrupted flow, and they eventually choke each other. Build tunnels and you can have point-to-point connections without choking off local flow.
Reducing the number of drivers can't fully solve gridlock because at some point you have to hit a long light when you try to move from a high flow to low flow area. The only way to avoid that is with onramps and elevated freeways, but you can't build enough of those.
Every point you brought forward is also true for subways, but it's again at least an order of magnitude more space-efficient than sending cars through tunnels.
The worst part is that this had been foreseen and warnings have been made but nothing is done to deal with it.
Additionally, public transport often interferes with regular road traffic, making the problem worse. The solution is to use an elevated train (Chicago) or subways. So now you're back at 3D.
And biking in a low-density city isn't a practical solution.
I live in San Francisco and I assert that: To solve the soul-destroying practice of driving from (north of golden gate bridge) to SFO, roads must go 3D (tunnel).
You may not be aware of this, but if you need to go to SFO from Marin (or anywhere north of the city) you need to drive through small residential neighborhoods, stopping at up to 12 stoplights. It's incredibly wasteful of time and gas and degrades the lives of everyone involved. You find yourself stopped in traffic on a four lane boulevard in front of a single family home with a yard. That's how you get to SFO.
San Francisco desperately needs a tunnel from the GGB to SFSU/ParkMerced.
After Hurricane Sandy, it took almost a week to reopen the subway tunnels.
I can just imagine the kind of kinetic force that'll occur if a sled carrying a car slams into a section that has a few feet of water.
Airflow and humidity are other concerns. Airflow is necessary to keep passengers safe. Controlling humidity is important for keeping the infrastructure from degrading more quickly.
Any good paints or fabrics or metamaterials that could be used as a tunnel liner that only allow water to wick in one direction (from tunnel internals to surrounding soil)?
More like a few years collectively - a section of the G was closed every weekend for many months, the R was closed for a year, the L closes in 2019 for over a year.
Thermodynamically impossible without an input of energy. FWIW.
Ventillation to exhaust waste heat is a major concern.
From discussions of net-zero housing in Alaska (Thorstein Chlupp), my understanding is that water tends to flow from hot to cold -- it will condense along a cold surface. A condenser + sump system where some engineering mechanism keeps the inner tunnel wall from remaining at equilibrium temperature with the interior, might work, though how cold that would need to be to keep humidity manageable would be a question. Routing the cold-side air ducts such that they waste heat to the subsurface and draw heat from the tunnel wall might be one approach. Further cooling through water (fresh, sea) is another possibility, though both present significant issues, scarcity of fresh in Los Angeles, and general nastiness of sea,
(The only time this may be untrue is when dealing with very small things like remote sensors, where running a wire might actually be more expensive than harvesting the microwatts needed locally. But this is a fraction of a fraction of a percent of total system needs.)
In some ways, this is the inverse of an evaporative cooler, where the incoming air is saturated with moisture to lower its temperature before being vented to a warm space to be cooled ("swamp coolers" are best suited to dry climates, and have humidity issues). Here, instead, cool (possibly chilled) air could be ducted through the warm space, with the intent of condensing moisture onto the ductwork (for drainage by other means) prior to being vented into the space.
You're trading cooling capacity (condensing water warms the cold air supply) for humidity control.
I'm not trying to imply that this is practical, only that a latent energy flux might exist.
Check valves absolutely do consume energy. Something has to resist the spring forcing them closed, or they would never open. They are convenient in that their energy is sourced from the very thing they are controlling, but they are energy-consuming devices.
There are easier ways to get moisture out of a tunnel though.
This has just made me wonder what happens in emergencies or system failures. Are the tunnels wide enough to open your door or climb out a window? How far apart and numerous are emergency exit hatches? Is there off-grid emergency lighting (e.g. battery-backed)?
There would be few things more upsetting than your sled coming to a halt, inside a dark tunnel, and being unable to get out of your car. It would activate the same part of your brain that fears being buried alive.
The air inside the volume of a coffin can last you a few hours. Unless you are literally shoulder to shoulder with no other air, your oxygen will last as long as you need.
... unless there is a fire:
"Most drivers rolled up their windows and waited for rescue. The ventilation system in the tunnel drove toxic smoke back down the tunnel faster than anyone could run to safety. These fumes quickly filled the tunnel and caused vehicle engines to stall because of lack of oxygen. This included fire engines which, once affected, had to be abandoned by the firefighters. Many drivers near the blaze who attempted to leave their cars and seek refuge points were quickly overcome."[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Blanc_Tunnel#1999_fire
>... The Boring Company is investigating technologies that will recycle the earth into useful bricks to be used to build structures... These bricks can potentially be used as a portion of the tunnel lining itself, which is typically built from concrete. Since concrete production accounts for 4.5% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, earth bricks would reduce both environmental impact and tunneling costs.
I called it. :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14224261
No surprise there. CSEB is an entirely different material from regular old compressed earth block, which itself is entirely different from uncompressed earth. Squeezing out the empty space and adding a binder (cement) makes it all one solid piece as strong as concrete. Uncompressed earth is just... dirt.
It's like saying, "Concrete roads won't work. How do we know? Because gravel is an ingredient of concrete, and gravel roads suck."
What happens if a sled gets stuck? What would be the procedure and response time for getting the right personnel down there?
What failsafes are in place for disasters? What if the power grid went offline or there was a flood?
How do you prevent human error? What if people left their gas vehicles on and there was a toxic level of carbon monoxide in the tunnels? What if people jumped or accidentally fell onto a sled while it was descending?
As for point B you can have doors or what not around the sled. But if people really want to commit suicide by sled there's nothing stopping them. What stops someone from jumping off a bridge with a highway below?
The thing is, we're all MUCH more comfortable with the danger we're familiar with, than the danger we're unfamiliar with. Imagine if planes were just being introduced today - what are the edge case scenarios? What happens if there's mechanical failure at 30,000 feet? What happens if there's turbulence, lightning, birds, volcanic ash? What happens if the pilot is suicidal? What happens if... But we really don't care, do we? Air transport is familiar.
I'm not saying the dangers of new tech aren't important - they're very important; but keep in mind that while the idea of suffocating after a crash or malfunction in a hyperloop tube/tunnel will feel significantly more perilous than any misfortune that may befall you on a plane simply because a plane's risks are now familiar.
When we look back at how planes came of age, it seems like people were idiots to get on them (I recently read about the de Havilland Comet... it disintegrated in mid-air like 3 times in a year - don't quote me on that, but it was bad). Did it have to be so bad? No; of course some disasters could have been avoided with better oversight and accountability, but nonetheless, in the face of risk, the new tech provided such great advantages that its risks were accepted. It's fair to be aware of the way new tech can fail, but we shouldn't dismiss a tech simply because it can't "prevent human error" 100% of the time, or be perfectly immune to failure of any sort.
If we can introduce a new tech that has failure properties similar or better to current tech, but that adds significant value to everyday life, we're netting a very positive gain. We shouldn't let fear any failure prevent us from pursuing new tech, just like we shouldn't let fear of stubbing our toes prevent us from walking.
Without understanding edge case scenarios, we cannot make claims like these. Maybe these tunnels really will be more perilous than planes. Or maybe not. The whole point of asking the 'what if' questions is to clarify these issues.
Airplanes have been studied intensely enough that we know the rates and modes of failure. It's worth pondering the same for new technologies as well.
The innovation here is in digging the tunnels, not their operation.
Actually, this claim isn't based on any particulars of any scenario. It's simply a common human cognitive pattern. We will readily accept a familiar risk over an unfamiliar risk, even if the unfamiliar risk is less risky. We all readily jump in our cars every day despite the statistical fact that car-miles are quite deadly when compared with alternatives like bus-miles, train-miles, or plane-miles.
We're also likely to underestimate the magnitude of a risk when we have some perceived sense of control. Most drivers believe they are above average - so the risk of accidents is undervalued (due to ego). On planes, the risk of harm is overvalued because passengers have no sense of control in failure scenarios.
Like I said, we SHOULD understand how new tech can fail. We ALSO need to be careful about the biases with which we approach a new technology and aware of what we're expecting from it. We tend to overvalue the ways in which a new tech can introduce unfamiliar harm, while undervaluing the ways in which a new tech can remove familiar harm that's currently taken for granted (hence, undervalued). This presents policy/planning problems that can inhibit introduction of society-benefiting innovations. This does not mean that conservative approaches to deploying new tech are wrong - far from it: conservative adoption is responsible - it simply points out that our natural human biases tend to maintenance of the status quo.
My point is that, quite simply, we need to be as realistic and comprehensive in our establishment of the benefits a new tech could introduce, as well as the risks, in order to have a balanced perspective of its overall value.
The deepest mines in the world are around 12,000 feet deep. This is about 6x the height of the tallest building in the world (2000 feet tall).
Imagine, thus, putting in a tunnel at what would be every 5th floor of a skyscraper and that you could fit 6 skyscrapers underground...that allows for approximately 150 stacked tunnels! Excessive of course but possible!
Edit: The more I think about it, the worse it seems. Compare how much space is eaten out of the road above for a few cars... per minute?...to go up/down to this tunnel vs. how many a stairwell could take up/down to the subway. Even if the car's were relatively crammed close together in the tunnel, I can't imagine it would be anywhere near the density you could fit on subway trains. The economics of this make no sense.... unless you consider that this will be something that only the incredibly elite will be able to afford. The majority of people in rush hour LA traffic will remain stuck there, the rich will go down I guess.
Indeed. The problem always fundamentally reduces to geometry, and the only way to solve it is to increase density.
People always say, "we can just build more tunnels", but you'll just end up with congestion at interchange and entry/exit points, just like on freeways today. And the more tunnels you build, the more it takes for the operating company to recoup the costs, meaning higher fares to use the tunnels.
Best case scenario, this company reduces the cost of developing rail transit. Likely scenario, we just get the same awful freeway situation but below. Worst-case scenario is the unfortunate situation you described.
I also wonder if, because of the smaller diameter of the tunnels, a network of self-driving buses doesn't make more sense to deploy in these tunnel networks.
"In addition to consumer vehicles,... high passenger-density urban transport... in the early stages of development at Tesla and should be ready for unveiling next year. With the advent of autonomy, it will probably make sense to shrink the size of buses and transition the role of bus driver to that of fleet manager... It would also take people all the way to their destination. Fixed summon buttons at existing bus stops would serve those who don't have a phone. Design accommodates wheelchairs, strollers and bikes."
> This freedom-supporting tech also thwarts the tyranny inherent in public transit (schedules, robbing your life with all the waiting, limited load carrying capacity, forced interactions with antisocial individuals, etc.)
Funny you don't mention the tyranny inherent in single-occupancy vehicles: Robbing your life having to find parking. Paying to park your car (if you live or work downtown). The antisocialness of sitting in your car for 1-2 hours a day with just NPR as your only friend. The inherent inflexibility of SOV travel, where your car carries just 20% of the designed capacity most of the time. And finally, the infrastructure that has to be built to support cars, driverless or not, zipping around everywhere, making it harder to walk or bike to where you want to go.
The idea of public transit being redefined as 6-8 passenger vehicles you get paired with at the bus stop that then use the tunnel network to decrease transit time for those who need to use public transit is also absent from your retort. As is the honesty about the typical case for public transit, non-peak. This case in the tunnel system suddenly realized for a fraction of the cost because vehicles are on-demand instead of driving a mostly empty big ass bus (or light rail car) on a route according to a schedule. It's basically for public transit what streaming is for TV.
Also, all of the things you describe as "tyranny" are actually choices, making them "freedom", the opposite of "tyranny". I've lived in Los Angeles for almost 35 years and I've never chosen a 1+ hour commute, though you are free to if you choose. I also don't choose to go to the parking insane areas. Again, your choice. But there is little choice with current public transit solutions. You go where they tell you when they tell you and that's that. And don't forget your mandatory sampling of the, I'll put it nicely, culture du jour.
Your impression of mass transit seems to be very biased due to the american fuckups with them.
I don't think all those people stuck at I-680 have a deep love of staring at the next car's bumper for two hours every day. Re-branding it as "freedom" doesn't make the experience particularly palatable.
It's cheaper, faster (the time spent on the car elevator is a massive reduction in efficiency for Musks system), and you don't have to own or clean a car.
Go visit Tokyo someday, and try their mass transit.
Reading this, the first thing that comes to mind is daily traffic in the city.
Rush hours are scheduled. You spend so much time waiting at lights, in traffic jams, etc. The roads are congested due to inherent capacity limits. And you're forced to interact with antisocial individuals speeding, texting, making dangerous lane changes, etc.
30 to 40 thousand people are killed every year in car crashes [in the US alone]. Millions are injured. I think I'd rather take my chances with the occasional "antisocial" person on public transit. Of course, given the ubiquity of cars and the massive (socialized) infrastructure to support them, they are useful sometimes.
There's also the fact that in many place you're practically forced to own a car (or at least are convinced that you absolutely need one (or two)). How is that not "tyrannical"?
It sounds like the Boring company is mostly interested in providing the capability to make small tunnels cheaply. The car sled thing is just one possible way to use the tunnels, but if some city wants to do something different with them that's up to them.
Free-Market people have long advocated for a liberalisation of buses and taxis. Uber has help breaking the Taxi monopoly, but the Bus regulation still stand. Eventually somebody will attack Uber because of too much ridesharing and accuse them of breaking the laws against private buses.
This is not very convincing. Solving congestion by building more roads isn't exactly a new idea. Its track record isn't that glorious either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
Not to sound too negative but how about some evidence on why it will work this time?
These guys are quite ambitious in the scale of the tunneling they want to do.
there's no reason this system couldn't carry a bus.
musk markets to the elites first, then uses that to subsidize the mass market solutions.
And this reminds me of Musk's Hyperloop whitepaper, where he estimated it would cost 10 billion to run an evacuated tube from LA to SF, which was ridiculous. There's all this reality that he failed to factor in to his calculations, and once you've addressed the full costs relative to people moving capacity, all of the sudden Hyperloop doesn't look so great compared to conventional high speed rail, and his Boring concept starts looking more and more like conventional subway.
That avoids the need for big central stations (other than the ground-floor lobby, of course, but there's no way around that for a building -- a street transport system isn't limited to a single point of entry).
Express vs. Local was actually borrowed from that concept.
Think about what will actually work, what is actionable. Getting rid of cars is completely unactionable. Tunnels are. So Elon does tunnels.
Replacing existing cities with new ones is non-trivial.
The tunnel is being planned to be 14 feet wide, which is how it suddenly becomes viable. That's around two 'stabilized electric sleds' in one tunnel.
Current freeways are 8+ lanes and you'll have to consider how the specifics of group travel are going to be worked out.
Can anyone who've done their own research comment on the throughput once there are interconnected tunnels?
It's not just one tunnel...
It'll obviously be more efficient to dig a wider tunnel than multiple tunnel on a single route. So, unless I'm wrong, to me it looks like it'll only be one tunnel, with one track to and one track back.
How many people do you think can be transported in a direction in a 'sled' in one lane? I'm talking about one point to another point throughput not the complete network. I'm betting the numbers will be very underwhelming.
Bart says at peak commute it does 60,00 per hour. Maybe other systems do better, but those BART trains are full.
Yeah, but that's 33,000 cars per hour without any of the cars stopping to exit the tunnels. The trains used in BART and other public transit systems can very easily exceed 60+mph already, but they don't because they have to stop, bringing down the average speed of the system.
BART, by the way, does 28000 passengers per hour per direction in the Transbay Tube (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transbay_Tube). You can probably fit over 200 people into a BART train car at absolute crush capacity.
Of course the sleds in an operating system would not be absolutely packed together. This was just a Fermi estimation to get some idea of the flow rate the parent comment was wondering about. Looks like max rates would vary from somewhat worse than trains to much better.
The sleds would be automated so that when one wants to exit the others would give it enough space to do so without problems. Another Fermi estimation could be done to get an idea of how long the exit tunnel would need to be for a sled to stop given a range of deceleration rates.
I think Musk is on the right track but that his biggest hurdles may be social and political in the USA. Maybe China or India will want to try it out (or the Swiss).
[1] https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/2016Factsheet_...
On first look at your calculations the flaws I find are these:
1. 125mph is a very, very optimistic number in my opinion. In reality I think anywhere near 100mph is what I would expect.
2. You can't fit 50(!) people in a 20ft x 6.5ft 'sled' for hours. If something goes wrong, they'll trapped in a tunnel with no escape to surface for hours!!!
3. The numbers might make financial sense if you cram them with theoretical people at peak hours. But the thing is, most of the day (and night) those sled will mostly be empty. So you can only count the sleds to be used close to their limit for a couple hours a day morning and night.
4. You can't just daisy chain 33k sleds along the track. As I've said before, one malfunction would possibly wreck havoc in the system. Which can actually lead to people's death. Think of them as you would an airplane, but you can't land in an emergency like you can in an airplane
5. This is close to what @so33 said. The last couple miles and the first couple miles will be very congested because people slow down, and getting off them would take time and many stations. The only way to remove bottlenecks would be to make lots of places to easily disembark, which would increase the costs.
I really doubt one person on a lane can be faster than a freeway with 4+ lanes (in one direction) no matter how fast it is going.
Another thing you'll have to consider is that there will be a logistical problem at the exit stops if you want to take advantage of all the high speeds being talking about. I'm talking about passengers getting stopped off there.
There have to be atleast X/2 get-in/get-out stops for people to climb into the sleds or there will be a bottleneck. (Considering X is the throughput for the amount of time it take a passenger to embark/disembark)
(If you're taking about intra-city travel)
Building these tunnels would be very, very inefficient compared to say building another road over the current roads.
I'm not from LA but I believe the major traffic occurs at rush hour, and short stretches of roads are really the problem. So finding out the hotspots and mending them would do much better than digging out lots of tunnels under heavily populated areas.
Another point is that in intra-city travel, high speeds cannot really be taken advantage of, so they'll basically travel at subway speeds. Now, subways as you see are already filled up if you take a look at New York. How do you think a one man car would fare compared to that?
(off topic) Again, I'm a fan of musk, but to me, this seems similar to the 'Put man on Mars' argument because that's where we have to be in a couple centuries. Rather than that, putting money towards colonizing harsher places on earth like deserts or Antarctica would be money much better spend IMO.
You can only layer so many roads above ground. But as said in the post, tunnels have no such limit. 100 years from now one could imagine a very thick subterranean transportation network. The interchange and routing problems I'd guess are solvable iteratively over the course of decades, since you have a lot of free space to work in with minimal constraints once you are deep enough to allow "forking" the network as you build more advanced technology.
Slapping two freeways together is not strategy that lands you ultimately in that future, but starting on the problem building cheaper tunnels is.
We've already put the R&D into roads, and the cars that run on them. Routing problems have also been solved. No matter that feedback loop, it wouldn't get cheaper than laying a road.
It's true that you can build many tunnels, but why? Congestion is really a problem in inner city roads. I rarely hear of any congestion in freeways, and I have to say, expanding to a couple more lanes sounds a lot more viable.
There are other methods. Public transport on trains of course or more high tech maybe semi self driving cars platooning ( http://www.tech-faq.com/vehicle-platooning.html ) which could almost be done with present tech.
I can imagine them at parties:
"So what do you do for a living?"
"Our company is trying to win a race from a snail."
"Hahah-- wait you're serious? What kinda company is that?"
"The Boring Company."
However since either way digging tunnels will be expensive, it seems inefficient to try to do this for cars. It would be more reasonable to just build a better subway system. Especially if in the future there will be automated fleets of self-driving cars waiting for you at each subway stop...
[1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/1/14112776/ne...
Classic Musk snark. Love it.
Nahh.
Some of your other points make too many assumptions of maintaining a status quo. E.g. automated cars will make sharing schemes more feasible. You can either hop on an uber-like car to get home, or lease your car out in the 96% of the time it sits idle.
Unfortunately (depending on the right price) I think this will make car travel more attractive compared to other forms of transport. One can think of a lot of sharing schemes - individual cars, minibuses, or large busses like we have today - with different price points. Overall costs of motorized travel is likely to fall. So I would think that overall we will see that vehicle use will go up (at the expense of walking on foot, for example) and use of parking lots will go down. In fact if traffic wasn't as cyclic as it is one wouldn't need any parking lots at all.
Also, if you can really get to the 130 or so MPH in the tunnel, then travel time will not be such an issue.
The main fallacy of the whole initiative, however, is that it is based on status quo of the structure of cities. Compare the urban sprawl of a post-WW2 US city with those of a medieval town. The main difference was that travel was slower, and faster travel was incredibly expensive (mostly unreachable due to lacking technology). It led to a much more efficient use of resources. If anything we need to redesign our cities based on these old principles in order to reduce overall resource consumption.
But I'm a bit worried about the thought process in the intro:
> A large network of road tunnels many levels deep would fix congestion in any city, no matter how large it grew (just keep adding levels)
this is untrue in the general case. Notably, if everyone wants to drive to the city center, then there will be congestion, because at one point you must get to the destination.
It's not just volume, but throughput that causes congestion.
When the traffic flow isn't spread out nicely, your traffic can only go as fast as the weakest link.
You know what has higher throughput than cars? trains
It seems a bit odd to be proposing very high maintenance infrastructure at a time when the US is famously facing a huge problem in not being able to afford maintenance for its existing infrastructure.
The Internet cable in a very narrow tunnel under the public street in front of my house is owned by a private company.
Does the Boring Company own them? The municipality? How does one go about getting permission to tunnel below property owned by other entities?
Anyone from Boston can tell you that's not true. I don't think this sort of hyperbole helps the case for tunneling.
Let's say that the shaft is 20m height and let's allow 2 meters for each car. We could get ~ 10 cars "stored" in the elevator, but if it takes one minute to load and unload the car it will take ~10 minutes for the car to get to the tunnel. One shaft will be able to load only 60 cars/hour. This will not solve any traffic problems and it actually may make the traffic around the shafts worse (depending on how many cars are waiting to go into the tunnel, and how large "the Boring Station" is.
There are two solutions either load/unload cars faster - possible but unlikely, or have more elevators connected to each tunnel. The problem with the second solution is that these cars have to safely join the rest of the cars that are currently in the tunnel.
If you have 10 elevators, each unloading one car a minute, you would need a system that allows one car to join the traffic every 6 seconds. If the cars are traveling at 125mph the sleds would need to have a pretty good acceleration to get to that speed as quickly as possible, or you would need longer adjacent tunnels.
Tunnels are known for quite the opposite: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/us/11cnd-boston.html
Yesssss.
A large network of highways many lanes wide would fix congestion in any city, no matter how large it grew (just keep adding lanes).
They missed an important FAQ, Will this tech increase bank heists?
Leaving that aside, I believe the logistics about getting the cars on and off board of the electric sled will (in most scenarios) defeat the gains on speed once the cars are inside the tunnel.
For public transportation it may be a good idea, IF they are able to deliver all those technological breakthroughs...
Also, is 14 feet small enough for some people to get claustrophobic feelings?
He's said again and again his true goal is to colonize Mars and everything until then is to get to that goal.
What happens when he does get there? Can be claim it? Become President? Or an area of it?
heh, sorry Miami, Orlando, Tampa and I'm sure many others.
Change the rules of the road.
Our roads can move far more cars per unit time than they do now. This is easy to see if you drive around Los Angeles for a fair amount of time. I drive the 405 corridor with some frequency and I can say it has gotten worst over the last few years.
Yet, the one common theme you see every day consists of these characteristics:
- Cars driving everywhere at whatever speed they want
- Cars driving slowly on the left
- "Synchronized" driving, where two cars drive equally slow side-by-side
- People who can and want to drive faster have to zig-zag through traffic
- The carpool lane is inhabited by people who do nor carpool
Just because a car has more than one person it doesn't mean they are
carpooling.
- The carpool lane has buses going slow and sometimes (often) empty
- No penalty for slowing down when going uphill and causing backup
If I were to generalize, the rules of the road are not designed or evolved to optimize flow. You can't even say they are optimized for safety because there is nothing safe about a moron going 55 on the fast lane while people are swerving all over the place to get around him.
What we need is a new mentality: Caltrans and CHP need to work together to optimize flow, not get in the way of it. The carpool lane is a disgrace. It takes-up 20 to 25 percent of the road's capacity for no gains whatsoever. We need a layered system where slow drivers get out of the way and don't impede others. I am not saying go full autobahn but there's merit to the idea that slow drivers should not be allowed to impede others. I've watched the 405 grind to a halt because of a few (two or three) drivers who manage to lock-up an area. It always gets worst before it gets better.
Tunnels? Sure. But first fix the real problem.
This is where self driving cars might do an amazing job. We will be able to extract far more capacity out of the existing infrastructure by increasing speeds and layering them from right to left.
I hope these guys do a great job!
What about flooding?
Measuring and avoiding ground settlement consumes an enormous amount of engineering and contracting resources in every urban tunneling job.
Flooding too can lead to work stoppages or long delays. You should have seen the Queens Bored Tunnels and Structures Project after Hurricane Sandy. It was pretty soupy.
Source: Was a tunnel boring engineer in NYC, where we had an abundant supply of both buildings and groundwater.
> Tunneling R&D. In the United States, there is virtually no investment in tunneling Research and Development (and in many other forms of construction). Thus, the construction industry is one of the only sectors in our economy that has not improved its productivity in the last 50 years.
Yes, tunnels can flood, if they are below the water table. Good pumps can fix that problem. Again, the Chunnel being Exhibit A - it hasn't flooded, yet.
Usually it's really hard to understand what a company is doing from their web page because it's hidden behind so much meaningless marketing speak "We help you solve problems and be awesome!".
Perhaps they aren't fully aware of the volume disturbed soil takes up. Logistics of moving it could be a cost not necessarily considered.
Also SpaceX is killing it. I'm not a Musk fanboy but IMO he's 2/3 right now in the companies he's working on and Tesla still has a decent shot of bringing that back to 3/3
I am pretty sure the neighbours of the Copenhagen metro construction sites would wholeheartedly disagree.
Interesting. No chance of large commerical vehicles in tunnels at that size.
I question this. Does anyone know why/how The Boring Company came to this conclusion?
If I have a choice of an autonomous emergency parachutte -deployed landing done by my mid-air broken aircar, and being stuck in the heart of Earth with no air and very high temperature literally feeling like a needle in someone's body, I chose the falling cars.
so... nothing like the tube then? :P
Houston has, arguably, worse traffic than LA
That just means you need to dig deeper!
Houston had a working public mass transport system, but big automotive pressure/corruption destroyed it. That's why Houston is unique. The mayor is elected every two years, because corruption is so rampant.
The now widest highway worldwide, the I10 to Katy once had a railroad track in the middle. They even had a star system and park & ride before WW2.
> Houston is too big
Sounds like a job for Musk, to be quite honest. He's pretty good at driving down costs.
> corruption
Now there's a statement I can, sadly, agree with. :(
Bring it to X; after you figure out how to deal with the super cool and unique geographical features of X!
Bluntly, because I would imagine because he realizes that he is going to die eventually, and has a limited amount of time to do the things he wants to do.
Also, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Core for prior art /s
If you put a nuclear reactor underground, you have to pump water back up. This takes a lot of energy. Whereas, electrical energy travelling through cables is not affected by gravity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-_xfTUs3R0
(These things are pretty inefficient, but it'd be a way to wrap SpaceX into this new company along with Tesla.)
there is no way this is even close to being correct. For a point of comparison, "Airlines account for about 2 percent of global emissions".
just how much concrete does this guy think is being produced. come on. He probably misreported a figure that said concrete production accounts for 4.5% of all construction-related greenhouse gas emissions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_concre...
It seems to say that the reason for this is that it must be heated to absolutely insane temperatures, which is, obviously, energy-intensive.
5% is huge though. I still have trouble believing it. I wish I could see a pie chart with the major sources of CO2 emissions. After things like cars, planes, factories, POWER GENERATION, etc, I would have thought those were the major ones.
if you Google "pie chart of co2 emissions" it's hard to see where just concrete fits in. Oh well.