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Comment by newfocogi | Hacker News Reader

I think Musk's quip that most people would want their own personal flying taxi, but no one wants their neighbor to have one, is pretty insightful. As building density increases and our structures continue to scale in the third dimension, our transit system needs to as well and going down instead of up appears much less disruptive/dangerous. Of course, only time will tell what wins out - it won't necessarily be the most efficient option, as history of transit systems has demonstrated.

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People don't want to be underground for extended periods. If I were building an autonomous world from scratch, I'd want to design it so people are always above ground but "things" travel below ground.

There's an Amazon patent for an underground delivery system via tunnels that would mitigate against some problems that autonomous cars will bring. Once we have fully autonomous cars that don't need people, most cars on the road won't have anyone in them. Rather than pizza delivery people, shipping delivery, etc -- even something like "oh let me send my friend a key to my apartment while I go on vacation."

It will completely take over the roads unless we do something drastic. So send THAT traffic underground. We are going to need traffic lanes for "stuff." Let somebody commuting to work see the sun during their commute.

Edit: One thing I'd add is that New York and other places used to have a basic version of this - a series of pneumatic tubes that connected the city. There's a city in the U.S. that does trash via pneumatic tubes. I don't think that's the ideal delivery system for other reasons, but worth pointing out that this isn't an entirely new idea. Here's a map: https://untappedcities-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/up...

People drive through long tunnels or ride on subways every day. Being underground is not a problem.

I used to take the DC Metrorail to work. Being above ground is absolutely nicer than being below ground if you've got the choice. I looked forward to the parts of that train commute that were above ground. There was even a part where we would come out of the tunnel and I'd look behind me to view the Washington Monument. It was great, especially at night.

I would rather take a short trip underground as the alternative to a long trip above ground, given the option.

When I need to get from A to B, I just want to be there quickly. I can enjoy the surface of the Earth on my own time.

My specific point was about how to address a coming traffic crisis, sorry if that was unclear. I'm suggesting that 90% of traffic will be unaccompanied "stuff" and that moving it underground will free up traffic for people above ground. So either way, we're both talking about getting from A to B more quickly.

I'm sure there will be a need that arises for more tunnels for people, too. But I think the place to START and allocate resources is tunnels for stuff since that's where the problem will come from.

I think that we should consider total underground transportation as a design goal. Even if we reduce, say, the highway traffic by 90%, the remaining 10% will still deal with weather conditions, peak usage times, and bottlenecks such as construction or traffic accidents.

There are plenty of reasons to move people underground rather than above, along with goods. My personal interest in this is that a scalable 100% underground transportation system would make for a better model for life on the moon or Mars than anything we currently have on Earth.

Besides, traveling underground doesn’t have to be a dreary, dystopian experience. If we moved people in rectangular structures resembling elevators, we could cover the floor and ceilings with LCD screens, so instead of feeling like you’re inside an elevator, you could set the screens to show a panorama of the city you’re in, or the Swiss Alps, or if you throw a camera and microphone in there, you could attend a meeting while you’re on your way to that meeting.

Even if we get goods moving off the roads, personal transportation still has enormous costs. Just ask any American who has had to choose between paying high rent to live close to work, or buying a car to commute further away from their lower-rent home.

Driving doesn't fit into such a world view. Driving through a long tunnel never lasts up to 30 minutes, and tunnel lengths are never such that if your car got stranded, walking out on foot to reach the surface would challenge people with small children.

Subways are categorically a different animal. Of lesser endurance than light rail networks, the excess of amount of time spent within them is due to unintended delays and speed limits that draw out travel times. Spending more than 45 minutes on a subway trip is often viewed as unhappily inconvenient and/or an error.

> Driving through a long tunnel never lasts up to 30 minutes, and tunnel lengths are never such that if your car got stranded, walking out on foot to reach the surface would challenge people with small children.

Aside from unusual traffic delays, you are probably right about the 30 minutes thing (the longest road tunnel is just over 15 miles long), but it also has no emergency exits other than the ends, and the maximum 7.6 mile trek to an exit with both ends clear (and, a fortiori, the longer possible exit journey if not starting at the middle but a near end exit is not possible) are likely to challenge people with small children. LLP

OTOH, if I can commute to work underground in less than 5 minutes, but it takes me 20-30 minutes above ground, why not use that space above ground to build out more places where humans will actually "be"?

e.g. Convert roads in cities to pedestrian/bicycle only traffic, or add housing.

What I'm suggesting is that traffic is going to be almost entirely "stuff" in the future and that it creates a crisis that we will need to address. The idea is that when we think of traffic today, we're obsessed with moving people. But that's not what most traffic will be in the future... 90% of it will be deliveries of goods of different kinds.

Maybe that's wrong. But I don't believe so. But I'm not arguing that it's wrong to ever have tunnels for moving people.

Can you elaborate why/how you think most traffic will be "stuff" instead of people? Is everyone going to stop working and never go more than a couple of miles from home?

I don't see this happening anytime soon. While some office jobs can be transitioned to work from home that does not account for the majority of workers even.

Could write a lot here, but it's not that people will travel less but that we'll ship more stuff. Basic idea is that as the cost of shipping goes down, we should expect to see much more of it. And for a variety of reasons I see shipping costs just being decimated in the next couple decades.

Musk might have a point -but he's got his own blind spots. Sky scrapers create efficiencies by packing large numbers of people densely- they all have to go to one place, but in total they take up less real estate. Musk's contention is to transport people to these highly dense areas, rather than increasing the density of the vehicles we transport people in turn, instead we stick with low density vehicles, but do far more journeys.

It'd be like having a city where all the offices are sky scrapers but all the houses are detached bungalows. It'd be nuts. As office buildings get bigger and more efficient you get housing blocks that are bigger and more efficient and you get transport that's bigger and more efficient - trains and buses, not just more cars and more roads.

We will go up not down. The only limitation is legal, not technical nor economic. Working through the regulations will take a bit of time but is already underway with the FAA’s pilot programs. The problem people are missing in the industry is that it took years for the FAA to lay out the infrastructure and rules for the national airspace. It will take time to work this out for autonomous drones, which will operate on a much larger scale. Cities and states will play a key role. It’s not going to be a VFR free-for-all with collision avoidance, but very much mimic class-A airspace but between 200-400’ and will be fully autonomous. As an F-18 pilot, I use to hate drones, but I’ve been converted. We are at the palm pilot point for UAS. Musk’s comment about noise is correct, but that is solvable and no reason to go back in time and try to dig our way out of our transportation and infrastructure problems. Imagine a world with bridges on demand. Drones enable that future not tunneling machines.

We already went down. Tens of millions of people use underground metros every day all over the world.

Who wants to look up to the sky and rather than a beautiful sunset see a thousand drones? There's a word for that: pollution.

I think going underground is also much more difficult economically. You don't just have to build, but remove first. You don't have to do that in the sky. And that's why most buildings that even do go into the ground don't go very far. It gets harder to dig. You can't scale the same way down that you can up. If it was cheaper they'd do it.

> going down instead of up appears much less disruptive/dangerous.

How so? Messing with the ground under tall buildings seems a lot more dangerous than messing with the airspace around them.

In the air, cars can drive on a 3d axis, have no way to see road signs, and are more likely to fall on top of other cars if they're lucky enough not to get into an accident with one already in the air.

Compare this to a tunnel, which has controlled routes, is out of the way of road-way cars, and if made properly will never collapse on itself. That's how.

Also, (and almost totally unrelated) Azimov predicted tunnels for autonomous vehicles in his Daneel Olivaw books.

Mind you, he also predicted "rolling roadways", like a big conveyor belt instead of trains.

The Roads Must Roll was Heinlein.

Asimov ran with it in Caves of Steel. But credit where credit is due.

Elevated roadways would be far easier to build than tunnels.

Not a structural engineering expert, but beyond a certain depth for tunnels (depending on soil type I believe) there isn't a structural risk to buildings above, especially at the tunnel diameter sizes suggested by Boring co.

With airspace you have several problems - noise, collisions, crashing on whatever is below.

Having said that, I think we'd all love a safe, electric VTOL vehicle. I don't think they would be allowed in densely populated areas though, same as drones above a certain weight.

Seems to me Uber like point to point vehicles that are cheaper then helicopters could be useful in large cities.

However I agree, personalized flying cars for everybody are a fantasy.

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