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Comment by aeternus | Hacker News Reader

Article is pretty short-sighted. The overall goal of the Boring Company is to substantially decrease the cost, and increase the speed of building tunnels. This is something that benefits public transit.

Sure the initial demo where a slightly modified Tesla traveled through the tunnel is not practical, why does that matter?

The challenge is digging tunnels quickly and efficiently, even if hyper-loop tech does not come to fruition, efficient tunnel digging can be used with traditional high-speed rail tech. Compare the state of underground transit in the US vs. other countries, there is clearly substantial room for improvement here.

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> The overall goal of the Boring Company is to substantially decrease the cost, and increase the speed of building tunnels.

Good for it, but in the mean time a car tunnel would still have worse throughput than public transportation (less than two train's worth per day), rely on unproven technology (both for tunneling and moving the cars in a human-friendly way), and almost certainly not be financially viable (without massive subsidies).

Yes we need better public transportation, but there are well-established methods for effecting this. We just need to invest in them instead of Musk's poorly-conceived flamethrower company.

What are those well-established methods? The hyperloop was conceived by multiple SpaceX employees due to extreme disappointment with California's public transit proposal.

This is from the original Hyperloop paper:

> When the California “high speed” rail was approved, I was quite disappointed, as I know many others were too. How could it be that the home of Silicon Valley and JPL – doing incredible things like indexing all the world’s knowledge and putting rovers on Mars – would build a bullet train that is both one of the most expensive per mile and one of the slowest in the world?

We can do better.

If this is meant as an "initial demo" and not something which is usable or profitable, then why do it under 35 miles of (sub)urban land?

How much money would they save by doing it on/under cheaper land, with fewer lawsuits, easier access to the TBM should there be problems like 'Bertha' had in Seattle, etc.?

Shouldn't the "initial demo" be part of the "technical progress prior to the start of implementation" mentioned in the article?

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