Elon Musk's Solution for Dodger Stadium Traffic Is Full of Holes

> If people want to try to fix traffic themselves and all they need from the public is permission, why should we stop them?

Public safety, regulation/oversight of construction in city limits. It's also IMHO naive to think Musk will fund this himself and not ask the city to foot the bill.

They need more than permission, they need the government to give them exclusive use of property (including, if necessary, acquiring property for them by way of eminent domain.)

It seems Musk went the usual hype wave way. Once it was cool to like things he does. Now it is cool to hate what he does.

It's not helping that his behavior on twitter reinforced that trend but it was one already before that.

In other words, its a solution to absolutely nothing. In fact, it's worse than nothing: it's just Elon bloviating another half-assed idea that he takes no responsibility for.

The real problem with The Boring Company is the fact that anyone takes it seriously as a form of mass transit. The damn idea is crowding out real solutions while we indulge Musk’s pipe dream.

"The result is that the tunnel would have negative value to the region. As a transportation service based on how Musk wishes to construct and operate it, it has practically no value. But in the event of upzoning in West Los Angeles, the tunnel would complicate any possibility of rail under Sunset connecting Hollywood with Downtown. Metro may even need to acquire and demolish Musk's tunnel, or else dig under the tunnel, which would complicate intermediate stations in Silver Lake and Echo Park."

Except it sucks as a demo.

TBC is basically proposing a variation of Personal Rapid Transit. The main theoretical virtue of PRT is that it provides a point-to-point mass transit system; its main theoretical issue is that it is low capacity for the cost of its infrastructure. Demos should showcase strengths; if you're proposing improvements to technology, you should highlight your ability to overcome previous limitations.

This proposal does not highlight its capabilities, and gives ample room to excuse failures. It is planned to be single track: capacity will be utter trash. Point-to-point is pointless when there's only two points.

Of course the worst aspect is that the one-way, bursty nature means you need to have someplace to store the cars at each endpoint. It's not bad at a stadium, which is naturally going to be a massive dead space, but the other terminus is supposed to be a metro station. Either you're going to need to build a massive underground cavern (at which point boring a second tunnel and deadheading cars to empty space would be much cheaper [1]), or you're going to have to dedicate surface space to car storage--at a metro station, where logic dictates you should be having high density for commercial/residential purposes.

[1] The cost of subway lines is heavily dominated by the stations that need to be dug along the route. I haven't sized out dimensions, but it's not unreasonable to assume the necessary car storage is going to be larger than an underground mezzanine.

A tunnel bore is relatively cheap. Musk cites the costs of $1 billion/mi. subways, but that is a very malicious bait-and-switch. The tunneling cost for those subways come out to around $100-150M per track-mile of tunnel, and I suspect that includes the standard tunnel accoutrements: drainage, airflow, lighting, etc. Much of those accoutrements are invariant to the tunnel diameter, to a first approximation.

Tunnel-boring itself has some costs, but most of those don't scale as fast as cross-sectional area. Cutting head replacements and the ultimate spoil disposal are the only things I can think of that do. The TBM itself, and the tunnel shielding are going to scale linearly with circumference. Things like the power systems, spoil recovery, or manpower costs for manning the TBM are going to pretty much be invariant with size (assuming the size is generally the same magnitude).

All totaled, you'd expect the costs to scale somewhere around linearly with diameter/radius.

The same applies to boring company, if they can dig tunnels so cheaply, they would become tbm suppliers or contractors, not an end to end solution.

Metro rail connects some of the densest residential (South LA, Koreatown/Mid-Wilshire, Mid-City, Palms, Hollywood) and commercial (Long Beach, Pasadena, Koreatown, Hollywood, Downtown, Santa Monica) districts of the region.

Prioritizing Metro rail construction to bring people to POIs like LAX or the Rose Bowl for what amounts to a handful of trips a year per person would be a waste. Better to serve trips people make nearly every day, like commuting to work or school and going shopping.

I watched the boring compny video and all he says is that his concept have been known before him.

Yes, duh. But he was the first to make them usable as commercial products by making them 10x cheaper.

Anyone can make a costly prototype of something, but the challenge is making it actually profitable and commercial.

Not sure why we give credit to Musk for SpaceX's success, given that it's his COO (Gwynne Shotwell) that is responsible for all of its operational success in the past few years. Case in point: despite Musk micromanaging Tesla, it's failed time after time to hit its self-imposed benchmarks; meanwhile--at Space X, where Musk has minimal management oversight, they've met and exceeded self-imposed and external benchmarks ahead of schedule.

Evidence strongly suggests that the Musk MO is the wrong MO, and he should let the professionals who know what they're doing handle things.