Comment by mozumder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mozumder | Hacker News Reader

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I don't know why they're doing this, except out of pure tech-broism. It's obviously not financially viable.

Let's say it realistically costs $150 million a mile for the project (about average for tunnel boring - it'll actually be a lot more on the east coast due to it being solid rock and expensive labor, but let's be realistically optimistic). At 250 miles, that's $37.5 Billion right there. Let's be ridiculously generous and finance this over 50 years. Over 50 years, that's $750 million/year. Or, $2million/day. At $60/ticket, you need 34k daily riders.

And that's only for building the tunnel. I haven't even factored in operating or finance costs, nevermind the millions of other expenses that this needs. Stations are normally the most expensive part of a system, for example, and a station in NYC might cost $1 billion by itself.

Is this going to get 34,000 daily riders paying $60/ticket to NYC? I can see that happening with $10/ticket, but not at $60/ticket. For comparison, the entire DC Metro system itself has about 800k daily riders with about $5/trip.

And then you have the stupid HyperLoop concept itself, which hasn't even been invented yet. It's based on small single-car vehicles, which may carry a couple dozen people at most. Already you can see capacity issues: To get 34,000 people a day 24-7, you need 1400 fully-packed rides a day, or one every 6 seconds. You're not going to get single-vehicles to share a track every six seconds. You're already capacity limited. How do you even slow down? Ingress/egress?

And the concept itself is horrific: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNFesa01llk

Like WTF people? How are there adults that believe any of this garbage?

If you know anyone in your company that believes in this, just fire them on the spot. Make examples out of them. There's no excuse for this.

Stick with what works: high-speed rail, which can transport a thousand people or more in one trip and doesn't need some dumb vacuum tube. This is the real competition for this.

Larry Hogan has failed Maryland.

And Elon Musk is the worst thing to happen to tech.

Musk uses Boring Co. to gain knowledge in building tunnels. They bought an old machine, use it, learn what is working, what needs to be done better, and then probably build their own custom machine to lower cost per km. This knowledge of building tunnels will also come in handy for the other part of his grand plan: Colonizing Mars.

Surely there must be people who have extensive knowledge on tunneling already?

Musk's argument is that basically no one is doing the R&D to apply modern technology to tunneling. Which I don't know about that when it comes to tunneling but I think Musk proved this to be true with electric cars.

Also I'm sure the Boring Company is hiring people with experience in tunneling since that's what every company does. Hires people with experience in the field.

I'm not sure why you thought no one was doing EV research when GM actually produced and sold the EV1 before Tesla?

The EV1 was either a setup or government Pork. You put all the troublemakers on a project and then kill it and get the stink of failure all over them. And you get money from the government at the same time.

The only real benefit that came from the EV1 was the Toyota Prius. Because Toyota thought the US was serious about The Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles and they built the Prius to compete.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partnership_for_a_New_Genera...

Didn’t know at the time they would be the only ones to show up...

EV1 ones stopped being made in 1999.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1

Yes, after the EV1 was an unexpected smash hit in the marketplace, GM went on to be the #1 vendor of electric cars for the next decade! Musk completely ignored that.

> And Elon Musk is the worst thing to happen to tech.

I would say the worst are the people who religiously believe everything he says, independent of any constraints or consideration of reality. I think he does undeniably accomplish some pretty amazing stuff, but that doesn't make me blind to his more idiotic ideas.

My favorite symptom of Elons delusions of grandeur so far, is his announcement to wanting to utilizing rockets as a means for intercontinental transportation, "London to New York rocket flights in 29 minutes". Maybe we can find some volunteers for a few test flights in a falcon 9? [http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-41441877]

People religiously believing anything are annoying, but how are people believing in tech a little too much "the worst thing to happen to tech"? Surely there are much better candidates for that?

I find this blind unwarranted defense of elon that happens constantly every time his name is mentioned in an even remotely critical context, just increasingly annoying. I guess the smug hipsters found their new steve jobs. Literally the worst person happening to tech was probably larry ellison though.

What is special about the Musk approach is how he manages to inspire people to work hard towards a common goal. It isn't entirely rational but it does seem to work.

Obviously Musk is starting an attempt to do to tunnelling what he has already arguably done for rocketry and is attempting to do to EVs: commoditize the technology and drive down costs by radically re-thinking the engineering and design of the systems involved.

Your entire post lacks vision because it assumes fixed costs. Also, where did you get the $150M/mi from anyway? Your whole post seems to stem from a fixed number you pulled out of thin air.

The people that believe in this are the ones that lack vision.

When you have vision, you're supposed to look at the complete system, not just the parts you conveniently like.

You're supposed to understand where the problems are, not just where the benefits are.

People that don't understand systems don't have vision.

The Boring Companies FAQ [1] states they want to bring tunneling cost below 100 million/mile. Since they make substantially smaller tunnels than traditional projects, this seems feasible.

Suppose they can do it for $75 million/mile. That gives us tunnelling costs of $250 billion, or about 1 million a day if financed for free over 50 years.

If we assume he wants to move sledded cars instead of passenger vehicles, a ticket price of $120 per transported car seems reasonable to me. That means he needs about 8300 cars/day, or on average 6 per minute. Transporting cars should also cuts down on station costs.

If he wants to transport passengers, at ten per hyperloop vehicle, $60 per person, that's one full vehicle per minute, not that far from some subway lines.

It's doable, but far fetched. I consider his plan to put humans on Mars within 7 years more realistic (but only very slightly so). But in any case people trying is not the worst thing to happen to tech, it's the essence of tech.

1: https://www.boringcompany.com/faq/ ($1 billion/mile reduced by factor >10)

You're also probably going to need 2 tunnels these tubes are monodirectional.

Yes, my calculation is one-directional. Two directions just doubles both costs and profits (and is probably necessary to make it appealing, and for fire safety reasons).

The bigger problem is that I casually listed average vehicles per minute, but in practice you likely have barley any traffic at night and four times the average during peak hours.

Also "finance over 50 years for free" is a giant stretch. Even at a theoretical 0% interest rate the opportunity cost makes this much more expensive in reality.

lol why would anyone want to transport their car into the middle of Manhattan?

So they can conveniently leave Manhattan and return or vice versa using their car without much hassle.

People might begin storing vehicles in buildings more often in places like Manhattan if any of this stuff works. You then leave Manhattan with your car by linking into the transport tunnels, driving wherever you please from there. It wouldn't be difficult to add floors to new buildings just for automated vehicle storage, with a tunnel linked right to a given building that has vehicle storage.

If I'm from Pennsylvania and I want to go to Manhattan for a weekend, I put my car on a sled, go into Manhattan via tunnel, park my sled/car in building storage linked to a tunnel, then do whatever in Manhattan. Then reverse the process for leaving. Dramatically more convenient than the way things are now.

Maybe it ends up making more sense to have the bulk of vehicle storage just outside of expensive real-estate zones, so the sleds into Manhattan are multi-person carriers instead. Then you take a multi-person carrier sled back to wherever you stored your vehicle. Either way.

I liked your analysis, but it hinges on the $150 million per mile figure. Is there any data to back that up, or any reason you chose that figure? Is there any reason to believe that Boring Co's technology could lower the cost?

OP's method [1] works better backwards. Assuming 250 miles (l) financed interest-free for 50 years, we find an implied ticket price (p) of the cost per mile (c) divided by the quantity 73 times daily ridership (c / 73 r). Generalised, we get (l c) / (18250 r) = p.

New York City and Washington, D.C. are 229 miles apart [2]. The Acela has ridership of 3.47 million per year [3], or about 951 on average per day. Acela tickets cost no less than $99 [4]. Plugging in we find the cost per mile can be no more than $7.5 million.

That is 30% the cost per mile of the cheapest tunnel, the Shanghai River Crossing, and 5% the cost per mile of the median tunnel in Figure 5 [5]. On the other hand, the Falcon 9's list price [6] per pound to low-earth orbit is about $1,230. That's approximately 70% to 85% cheaper than the competition [7].

Naturally, you'd charge less than $99 and hope for more than a thousand daily riders. The trick is finding routes for which the price elasticity of demand is high, i.e. where reducing the ticket price by 1/2 generates more than a 2x demand boost.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15519733

[2] https://www.travelmath.com/drive-distance/from/New+York,+NY/...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acela_Express

[4] http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/Amtrak-Lowers-Acela-...

[5] https://tunneltalk.com/TunnelTECH-Apr2015-Arup-large-diamete...

[6] http://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities

[7] http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_VyTCyizqrHs/S9IabKEr1nI/AAAAAAAAHb...

I don't buy the parent's arguments, but the $150m figure isn't too far from what Musk has pitched [1]:

> Currently, tunnels are really expensive to dig, with some projects costing as much as $1 billion per mile. In order to make a tunnel network feasible, tunneling costs must be reduced by a factor of more than 10.

So, a factor of 10 is $100m, but we don't know what "or more" means at this point.

[1] https://www.boringcompany.com/faq/

I am looking at projects record in my region and seeing around $60m per kilometer for a “simple cars” road tunnel. And this is when the Chinese have done it. Perhaps for an high tech tunnel such as this one, $150m per mile is a modest estimate

I think a lot will depend on maintenance and staff costs. If those costs are kept low then there will be little marginal cost per additional mile travelled. In that scenario it would make sense to keep the tunnels as heavily utilised as possible by heavily cutting prices when traffic is low. Perhaps we will see freight running at night or even trash being moved out of cities. Having a low cost option could create new opportunities that have not been considered yet and help pay the bills. Running constant traffic twenty four hours per day changes things.

We're talking about infrastructure projects here. You need to calculate more than just ticket sales.

For society there are many more benefits (many of them measurable in dollars). But in this project Maryland doesn't pay a cent, and if that becomes a trend then the only thing that determines the viability of financing this are ticket sales.

And you have to compare that to established infrastructure projects, like high-speed rail.

It far more then $35b. But again. This is a bubble era. Most of it will vanish in few months.

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