If it turns out to be more expensive than they think, they'll find out soon enough, without cost to taxpayers.
If it works, it won't carry much traffic, but it's proof of concept and people will have fun trying it. And Boring Company will be able to do something more ambitious with better proof of their claims.
"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."
Which I'm sure is right around the corner, guys.
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.
Trains. Lots of trains. Inside tunnels. On the surface. On elevated tracks. That interconnect in a network so you can get from anywhere to anywhere. On trains.
> and why aren't they gaining traction?
Because everytime someone points out mass transit is a solved problem, has been for over 100 years, everyone responds somehow saying "that's unrealistic!" or "eww gross you want me to sit next to someone else!"
Train transfers are a pain in the ass. I live a block away from a rail station and only use it when going to the absolute heart of downtown. Even then I drive as close as I reasonably can and take the train for the last 3 miles. It saves me at least an hour round trip vs taking the train the whole way.
It works fairly well here in The Netherlands. The country is flat but it does have cold winters (two weeks of snow/ice and two-three months of close-to-or-under-freezing temperatures).
Whenever I have worked within cycling distance (15km or somewhere with a viable train connection) I've cycled all year round.
It would work in a city such as New York (which has a similar climate to here); the metro is already great for the bulk of the journey and bikes/e-bikes would work great for the last part. You'd just have to replace the cars.
Are you thinking areas like Florida and Texas? I can see biking being tough in the hot/humid summer but wouldn't something like an electric scooter (where you're just standing there) be fine?
Hell look at the sheer irrational hostility Google Bus faced - despite its sole purpose being to get the Googler traffic they were complaining about off the road. The cure is clear but they don't want to take their medicine.
The thing about contributing to public goods is that it benefits everybody. The problem with building private solutions is that even-if it has some public good (e.g. replacing many cars with one bus) it still creates an us-vs-them situation where mere mortals cannot take advantage of the Google bus.
I fully support improved public transit and good governance but it isn't Google's job to support it but the transit's job to support everbody and make the additional taxes worth it. Why should Google pay? They already get their share and it is up to the city and its residents to decide to use it that way. The public transit option always has to compete with private regardless of what the delusional gatekeeper attitude. Not to mention flexibility - if Google wants to bus their people to a convention instead of the usual routes they can.
Resentment is still an absurd case of sour grapes. Especially given the resistance to public transit infastructure expansion for fear it may bring them in contact with poor and minorities, housing expansion for it may change the facade from when they got their or devalue their absurdly inflated nest egg from artificial property tax stagnation. I bet anything the same people would flip out if they were told they couldn't use their private vehicles on public roads yet they want to do the same thing to Google buses. After they themselves vetoed alternatives.
Lets face it - the area's biggest root problem is an entitlement issue. It is one thing to want corporations to pay more taxes, it is another to stop every possible solution and then screech like howler monkeys over solutions that don't harm them. By all means hold corporations accountable for misconduct but this is just irrational. Other areas have been trying anything to replicate their success and failing. As an outsider it is painful to watch an already objectively great area squander their potential for further improvement and act so damn bratty and crazy.
As proof it only goes so far because each site is different, but it's a step towards justifying their claims.
As for crowding out, I haven't seen any other mass transit projects delayed because of them. Have you?
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.
If not, I guess we'll see. This project isn't big enough to prove what you want, but it'll prove some basic competence if it works.