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Comment by paulsutter | Hacker News Reader

Boring Company has a bigger potential impact on transportation than Uber or Google even dream about.

At 200kph, with no traffic, all that empty land near San Rafael or beyond the Berkeley tunnel can be minutes away from downtown San Francisco. This could be a huge impact on housing and our everyday life.

The transcontinental railroad was paid in part through land grants to the railroad[1], for parcels along the route. That land was instantly valuable once the railroad was completed. Real estate could be a bigger part of Boring Company profits than user fees.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Transcontinental_Railroa...

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What real estate? The railway companies got land grants because nobody (well, except the Native Americans...) owned the land they built on. The Boring Company is going to be drilling under already owned land no matter where it goes...

They could option or purchase land, and decide the route of the tunnel based on what they're able to obtain. That puts them in a position to capture value. It could also increase regulatory competition among localities.

I thought they didn't even need to own the land to build tunnels as long as they do it at the right depth?

I think the parent was saying that they would buy parcels of land where they planned to build stations, and then profit when that land appreciated due to the presence of the station.

The term they're using in Australia when politicians waffle on about an East Coast high-speed rail system that's never going to happen is "value capture".

This was, in large part, the original rationale for BART. You'd drive a few miles from your suburban home to the nearest station, and then take the train under the bay and get off near your office downtown.

But then jobs in the bay area became much less concentrated in downtown SF, and those massive parking lots in faraway BART stations went underutilized.

>those massive parking lots in faraway BART stations went underutilized

Have you been to a BART parking lot recently during a weekday morning? Even the stops furthest out on the PBP line have nearly completely full lots.

Good luck if you use the North Concord station, whose parking lot is going away altogether.

I wonder if this isn't more an effect of the poorly engineered BART still taking as long or longer than cars in most situations vs the specific location of the jobs.

Also, first/last mile is still a bear.

I think the killer combo is self driving cabs for first/last mile, plus rail for intercity travel. Push a button 15 minutes before you want to leave, a cab sits outside your home for up to 30 minutes, you get a warning before each transit sync moment, hop in the cab, get dropped off directly at the platform, get picked up at the designation platform and then dropped at your destination.

It's basically optimal in terms of carbon, throughput, and convenience. Maybe total transit time is no better than a personal car, but you could punch through traffic so at peak times it would be better. And with high speed rail, it could beat personal car even in off peak... At least for some geographies. Obviously if you're not near rail it won't be an improvement in Transit time.

>I think the killer combo is self driving cabs for first/last mile, plus rail for intercity travel.

Millions of tech nerds daily grinding through a hellish commute so they can spend the day sitting in front of a computer. 99% of them doing nothing that they couldn't just as easily do from a computer at home.

Clearly optimized transportation is the best solution here.

Something something... better horses.

Isn't that Musk's (with Boring + Tesla) whole game plan? The demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5V_VzRrSBI, I think is pretty explicit about that. The difference is that you own the 'cab' and you don't have to time any 'transit sync moment'.

If I'm not mistaken you are basically thinking of a circuit-based network (with ad-hoc 'datagrams') while Musk seems to be going for a completely datagram based network. It's an utterly genius idea, at least from a theoretical standpoint (I have no knowledge of the economic aspect).

Yeah, this would definitely be more optimal than the current situation. I commute from SF to PA and would take the Caltrain except for the fact that first/last mile are as long (by bike, too expensive by parking/uber) as just driving to PA from my apartment.

What?

There's currently 4 year waiting lists for many of those massive parking lots in faraway bart stations.

What BART parking lots are underutilized? My understanding is that all but the furthest stations fill between 6 and 7am. I wasn't willing to get up early enough to participate in the park-n-ride model. (Cynically, my office gives lots of credit for staying late, but no one is here to see you get in before 10 or so). Were there stations I missed?

Even if a really far-flung station is, say, 3/4ths utilized now, won't the next decade or two of housing development create more users to fill those spaces?

Interestingly or apropos, BART are looking into a second Transbay tube to fix the Transbay tube bottle neck (headway during peak times is like one minute and they can't add more cars to the trains).

If cheap enough they could bore a second one from SF to the East Bay and an additional from the Peninsula to the Fremont area. to east-west commutes in the south bay.

Pure fantasy would be to have direct point to point routes consisting of the SF-Oakland-SJ triangle with outward spurs from the respective terminuses.

Transportation is only a part of the puzzle. Where would you fit more millions of people in downtown San Francisco?

The upside of this is decentralization, not more concentration.

Where would you fit more millions of people in downtown San Francisco?

In buildings. It's really not that hard: https://www.vox.com/a/new-economy-future/urban-sprawl-housin... or http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/05/03/silicon_valle... . It's just illegal, right now, to build the buildings that people want to occupy. Make it legal and lots more people will live in SF and environs.

Singapore is the city to study. They build massive underground connections, malls, transport etc as they grow. They have massive setbacks to the buildings which allow for it to have a crap ton of trees and plants all between buildings... they plan to double their population and are building smartly.

But, as with any city - the income disparity and the cost of living is high - but all cities need affordable labor as well as economic opportunity.

"Where would you fit more millions of people in downtown San Francisco?"

What has led you to believe this is a difficult problem? The impediments to density in San Francisco are regulatory. At Brooklyn's density the city would have 1.6 million people. At Paris's density? 2.5 million.

I deliberately chose those places because they're not dominated by skyscrapers.

People talk about the "housing crisis" using the language of natural disasters. But this is just people deciding not to build more housing. No more or less.

I'm not sure where this notion that cities run out of space comes from. We've always had high land utilization in cities. But the cities still grow, they grow by replacing low density residences with higher density residences. So forth and so forth. If a city can't grow by building up then that's most likely a zoning issue.

Decentralization is not an upside, we should be _more_ concentrated, not less. It's much more efficient.

The result is both decentralization /and/ concentration.

Streets and parking are a huge waste of space, so higher concentration will be better livability (less noise, pedestrians can own the surface, and let's face it, streets full of cars are ugly)

streets and parking are a waste because we dont stack them or require that every building include at least three levels of parking as the bottom of each building...

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