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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

It seems sort of shortsighted to block a tunneling company on environmental grounds. In the long term, cheap tunneling would be fantastic for the environment. Most of what we consider the biosphere is on the surface, and to the extent that there's life in the tunneled area, by volume tunneling isn't going to be significant for a long time. (Volume is much larger than surface; in general, areal intuition fails miserably for volume.) Being able to tunnel places instead of running roads over things and such would be great.

(If indeed anyone can get too worried about potential rock-living life, since it is conspicuously lacking in anything you could call "cute".)

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They didn't block it on any known Environmental grounds, CEQA exists to insure major infrastructure projects evaluate many options and attempt to find the most environmentally friendly option. In this particular case, it was almost certainly not building a low capacity tunnel for small vehicles and cars, but to build the already planned metro rail line without having to add engineering complexity to maneuver around a privately owned and built tunnel.

I'd also add that the use of concrete in tunneling does have a large environmental impact as well (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_concre...), so cheap tunneling wouldn't necessarily improve the environment in any clear way. The best solution for the environment will always be electric powered rail lines that are at grade, although that would be a poor choice from a transportation planning stand point.

> In this particular case, it was almost certainly not building a low capacity tunnel for small vehicles and cars, but to build the already planned metro rail line without having to add engineering complexity to maneuver around a privately owned and built tunnel.

A metro rail line can't transport a car, so point-to-point transit is out, as is any semblance of privacy. Why are you so quick to devalue these advantages?

If Musk can build a tunnel profitably, he should be able to do it, even if the opinion of people like you, mass transit would be preferable. Musk isn't willing to fund mass transit, but he is willing to fund a tunnel, so all you get by blocking the tunnel is neither mass transit nor a tunnel. Congratulations!

He can’t build it profitably, or at least without going through the environmental impact review that every other project of this scale must pass. Do you really think the hole digging is the bottleneck for every other underground project?

How much infrastructure is getting built under the current review process? The current process is just a fig leaf for everyone getting a NIMBY veto. California ought to be ashamed of its technological paralysis.

It's not a technological problem. If people get unhappy when Facebook "moves fast and breaks things" in its mission to "connect the world", then people should be just as cautious when it comes to construction projects that impact miles of public infrastructure and thousands of private homes.

Sure I mean bad (insert bad thing) things are bad. And a risk to private homes should stop a project. But I can’t find any proof that there’s a risk here. Tunneling is really safe.

Then why is Boring declining to take part in the EIR process?

You’d probably have to ask Elon Musk. I also haven’t read the lawsuit so I don’t know what specifically the homeowners wanted investigated. California law basically gives veto power to any homeowner for anything, so why bother trying to be innovative there in the first place? I think the software industry only evolved there because nobody had figured out how to regulate a bit yet.

California software companies are still subject to the same taxes and standard of state employment laws.

California's high speed rail has been subject to the same scrutiny and legal threats. Was Boring/Musk completely ignorant of well-known past precedent and hurdles when they claimed they could build a transportation project for much cheaper? As recently as 1 month ago, Musk still thought and publicly claimed that the tunnel "opens Dec 10": https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1054164838430064640

I think Elon Musk knows that if there's something big to be gained for society the laws can be modified. For instance Tesla only worked because the Obama administration kind of bent the laws of economics by securing a huge loan to the company.

> California law basically gives veto power to any homeowner for anything

No, it doesn't.

> But I can’t find any proof that there’s a risk here.

Of course not, Boring pulled out rather than go through the process that would evaluate any risks.

> Tunneling is really safe.

Then there was no reason to avoid environmental review.

In theory there’s going to be a high speed train built between SF and LA. Not convinced it can happen, or should happen at the price these property owners have made the project incur.

9 miles of infrastructure is getting built right this second under the current review process.

https://www.metro.net/projects/westside/

> How much infrastructure is getting built under the current review process?

The environmental review process doesn't stop a lot of infrastructure getting built, people prioritizing public spending on other priorities does.

> The current process is just a fig leaf for everyone getting a NIMBY veto.

No, it's not.

> California ought to be ashamed of its technological paralysis.

Perhaps, but CEQA isn't the source of the problem, to the extent there is one.

There is an actual big boy tunnel getting built on The Westside right this second. No waiting on Musk's bullshit required.

Because the purpose of mass transit is to increase throughput, a super highway tunnel for cars will just lead to more congested streets around the entrance the same way wider highways have done.

Tunneling does have deleterious effects. After all, the biggest targets of the environmental movement are those companies who make gigantic interconnected tunnels that most people know by the name of mines. (Granted, it's the ore processing that does develop the most ire, but the handling of spoil has been implicated in several disasters such as the Aberfan disaster).

The first major issue of tunnels is that you have to put all of the stuff that you dug up somewhere, and the usual methods of dumping (such as the nearest coastline) aren't very environmentally-friendly. There are also some other issues you can find going underground--radon emissions come to mind.

The other key thing to analyze is the effect of the entire project. The Boring Company isn't selling better tunneling technology, they're selling a form of transit. (And it's pretty clear that Musk is personally interested in speeding up single-occupant vehicle as opposed to improving mass transit). The standard environmental impact analysis compares different approaches to see which one would minimize negative impacts. Quite frankly, the proposed Loop transit system is a very space-intensive, low-throughput system, which makes it a pretty poor option for the environment in comparison to standard subways.

But unless you’re going to the same destination mass transit isn’t ideal. If there are enough shared routes, and the cost advantage of shared transportation add up to a big enough benefit than it works. But my ideal transport is teleporting, which I think a subterranean hyperloop pod is closer to.

The concept of Loop is basically yet-another-repackaging of personal rapid transit. And the operational history of personal rapid transit has essentially shown that it sounds good in theory but doesn't work that well in practice.

The real problem is that the suburban ideal of detached single-family homes combined with low-density commercial parks is not an environmentally-friendly way of living, and when you try to scale it up, what you get is an unavoidable mess of traffic that has no real solution. If you care about moving people, the first thing you want to do is get people out of their cars; and that means that you need to concentrate one of the endpoints (invariably workplaces) to allow people to walk to their destination at that point. The land use policies are going to have to change if you want to be environmentally-friendly, and anyone who promises a way around that is selling you a fantasy.

These tunnels could solve the traffic problem. That is the whole point. They can be stacked to great depth to get traffic congestion to zero. People are willing to pay for this and it is only our ignorance and stupidity getting in the way of at least trying. The point of cities is that one has a huge number of people you could potentially interact with. With horrible traffic, this is not the case. With mass transit, you can only go certain places at certain times.

Just call a tunnel with automatic pods in them mass/public transit (that is what it would be) and fell good about a better future for all of us.

> They can be stacked to great depth to get traffic congestion to zero.

No, they can't. How do you handle vertical circulation?

Also, the capacity of highways is absolute rubbish compared to trains. I've run the numbers before--you'd need about 10 times the number of tunnels with Musk's Loop proposal, and about 100x the number of stations to get the same kind of vertical throughput as you would with regular subways.

> Just call a tunnel with automatic pods in them mass/public transit (that is what it would be)

Loop is essentially (as I've said) personal rapid transit. PRT is definitely public transit, but every PRT system has generally found that the "mass" part is rather hard to achieve.

The problem with this sort of thing is that it takes energy out of proven, working solutions to instead build technology that consistently hasn't lived up to promises. I might feel better about it if there were serious discussion as to why this system is going to succeed where others fail, but there has been absolutely nothing of that sort.

If personal rapid transit did work it would be better than a mass transit alternative. But I think it's pretty clear that surface streets and cars won't do this.

> In the long term, cheap tunneling would be fantastic for the environment.

Depends how the tunneling is done, surely? If it's haphazard and prone to problems or even collapse I doubt it's an environmental plus.

That could be said for any infrastructure project ever. If X isn't done right,it will be disastrous for the environment.

Yes it could be said for any infrastructure project, which is why nearly all of those projects are subject to environmental assessments.

> That could be said for any infrastructure project ever.

And that's why we have environmental review to vet infrastructure and similar projects before they get built.

> It seems sort of shortsighted to block a tunneling company on environmental grounds.

They didn't block a tunneling company on environmental grounds. A tunneling company gave up rather than risk even having an environmental evaluation of a potential tunnel.

> It seems sort of shortsighted to block a tunneling company on environmental grounds.

Probably. But this wasn't about cheap tunneling technology, it was about a specific proposed tunnnel.

I kind of want to send these ‘environmentalists’ pieces of asphalt because that’s what their actions here are going to cause the entire planet to be covered in.

It's like how a lot of environmentalists seem to be opposed to nuclear despite it being statistically safer than even solar (let alone wind or hydro) and much better for the environment than even natural gas (let alone coal).

By letting perfect be the enemy of good, they're leaving the environment worse off.

The people I know want America to take the economic hit of renewables, bring electricity prices to $0.25 per kWh so that we can show the world our moral superiority. It would limit our economy, but it's possible. The problem is that developing countries are adding fossil fuel power plants so fast that it would dwarf our reductions. I don't know if nuclear is the solution. But America needs to be bold enough to try.

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