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Comment by gamblor956 | Hacker News Reader

Boring Co uses old tech to build a tunnel the same way its been built for decades...but smaller...

This concept is not new at all, From what I understand the tunnel sizes proposed are barely bigger than the London Underground "tube" tunnels. (Glasgow's subway has even smaller tunnels too). Now, don't get me wrong, it worked quite well for London, but it's not exactly innovative.

It should also be noted that london's postal service also deployed 2ft-wide tunnels to cart mail through the city, which was launched in the late 1920s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Post_Office_Railway

That is the future of tunneling. If we had tech that could dig tunnels the size of a big tube this would be quite a big advancement. Shrinking the equipment seems to be one way forward for tunnel digging.

Deploy ants!

Big tunnels are more expensive because more dirt needs moving, the tunnel walls need to be thicker, and the tunnelling machine needs to be bigger and more powerful.

I'm not sure if this comment is supposed to be satire or not?

Boring Co is using a second-hand sewer tunnel boring machine. This isn't the future of tunneling, it's quite literally the distant past.

Modern mass transit uses bigger tunnels because bigger tunnels means more throughput. It's generally cheaper to dig two (parallel) big tunnels than a dozen smaller ones, since the fixed costs are such a large part of the expense.

This is the part that Elon doesn't understand: it's not all about opex. Capex matters to, and for infrastructure projects, capex dominates opex. (For example, if he hadn't wasted a billion on the dreadnought, i.e., capex, Tesla wouldn't be in the doldrums right now unable to fund its basic operating activities, i.e., opex.)

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