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Comment by traditionalist | Hacker News Reader

Why doesn't Musk take his business elsewhere where he's welcome? I can imagine LA being a nightmare for this sort of project. He needs a place where bureaucracy is thinner and people are actually excited about everything new.

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He's building us an express loop in Chicago: https://www.boringcompany.com/chicago/

They're even paying for the whole thing, I think most residents here are excited about it.

I don't think many people in Chicago even know about it, and experts don't think it'll happen at all. I'll believe it when I see it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/16/us/chicago-tunnel-elon-mu...

I'll take the opposite side and wager that few people in Chicago know about it and that it will never be built.

The Boring company also plans to build a loop from DC to Baltimore, and it will also be self-funded.

https://www.boringcompany.com/eastcoast/

Everyone with a new transit option plans to demo it between DC to Baltimore. The two cities are close enough to each other that a new company could fund the demo largely by itself. But the real hope is to convince government to extend it to go between DC and NYC, which is where the real market opportunity is, and, naturally, being the first to develop the technology, the initial company is the sole supplier. So plans to build something from DC to Baltimore should be taken with a grain of salt.

Musk says a lot of things. He is really amazing at getting press attention for himself. Ask Buffalo how Musk promises regarding the solar roof factory have gone so far...

Ahead of the job numbers he promised https://www.wgrz.com/mobile/article/news/tesla-shares-new-jo... . I will say that project is going very well.

Per your own link, Tesla has not yet satisfied the requirement. Tesla needs to hire 500 workers by April 2019, and so far has only hired 400. The other 400 were hired by Panasonic and don't get counted towards Tesla's total. Based on the abysmal/lack of solarroof sales in the past year, it's unlikely they'll need 100 new workers in the next 5 months.

Or how many Solar Roofs have been sold. I think 3 years in, they're still in the single digits.

Speaking as a Chicago resident, I don't think there's much enthusiasm (or opposition) for the project. It's not the kind of thing you'd take if you lived in the city: after all, it's a $25 express ride from the airport to the Loop. Most Chicagoans live out in the neighborhoods.

One thing that kinda shocked me was how limited its capacity was. The Blue Line "L" train actually has something like 10x the throughput despite being extremely slow (45 minutes vs 12). I don't know if that's a design limitation of the technology or if that's all the demand they anticipated. It makes me worried it's not scalable.

I'm pretty sure it's because he lives there. Not only does it make it easy for him to be involved, but it sounds like he really hates LA traffic and really wants to bypass it for his own personal benefit. He announced the company saying "Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging..." and the proposed route happens to be convenient for him: https://www.fastcompany.com/40500593/elon-musks-tunnel-throu...

But it just parallels the 405.

LA is excited about many things, but a pointless tunnel to nowhere that can't fit any reasonable amount of traffic while permanently forestalling any options that could--that's the kind of boondoggle that people get excited to oppose. Elon's still proposing to build a Dodger Stadium tunnel. While similarly pointless from a traffic perspective (a single bus would get more people to the game in 20 minutes than the proposed Loop system would in an hour), it at least has the possible use of being a tourist destination and justifying its existence in that fashion. (And due to the nature of the geology between the proposed end points, a mass transit rail option of the scale Metro normally operates on that pathway is unfeasible.)

Isn’t that exactly what he’s doing? It says the issue has been settled amicably and they’re looking elsewhere.

Also, how do you define “welcome”? A single lawsuit doesn’t mean much about overall endorsement.

Because he lives in (or very near) LA.

Good question, I imagine because you need the big city, the traffic volume, and potential users to justify the cost of doing such a big project.

The Boring Co isn’t giving up on LA entirely.

This was just one test tunnel. They have already succeeded on their other 2 mile test tunnel (Dodger Stadium) and are working to extend that.

Minor nitpick: the 2 mile test tunnel is in Hawthorne (starts at spacex HQ, goes under W 120th). And they stopped it a bit early (possibly because they planned or predicted that this extended route wasnt gonna happen, but that's speculative). Dodger Stadium is their next plan in LA but they haven't started it yet.

The tunnel initial capacity will be 1400 people per day and maybe 2800 later. This is 3% of average game attendance.

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-dodger-stadium-...

https://twitter.com/erinscafe/status/1034456203890372609?lan...

This was a great Twitter thread on the public interest in a LA tunnel

Importantly, that 1400 people is per day, as in...the entire day. A single bus can take 50-60 people in 30-40 minutes (roundtrip), so a dozen buses could transport more people to the game in an hour than the Elontunnel in an entire day.

Metro runs between 12 and 24 shuttle buses to Dodgers games (based on anticipated attendance) starting about 2 hours before to about an hour after the game ends, for a theoretical capacity of 3600 people on the low end and 17,000 on the high end over the course of the game.

Any suggestions? China comes to my mind, but that comes with a whole other can of worms.

India has a lot of potential, unlike China much of the infrastructure needed for the population still does not exist.

A connection from Mumbai to New Mumbai under the sea like NYC comes into mind. The problem is i doubt given the experimental nature (still) the govt. will be bold enough to try it

Dealing with the politics of getting anything done in India will make the dealing with the people in LA look simple and trouble free. India is a mess because of the government policies, bureaucracy and corruption. I strongly feel if India has a dictatorship like China for let’s say a 20 year period, they could far exceeded the enconmoy of China.

China and Japan have solutions to mass transit. They really don’t need disruption because they’re directly in competition with The Boring Company in terms of exporting their high speed train tech.

China doesn't really need novel technological approaches when they have the political capital and power to just successfully do things the old ways. Moreover, they have an understanding of acceptable losses and human casualties that is more in line with attitudes prevalent when most of European and US basic infrastructure was initially constructed, compared to the extremely safe working conditions now expected in the west.

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