The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas
citylab.com
citylab.com
1. Electric cars for transport, Check.
2. Solar panels and batteries for power generation and storage, check.
3. Tunnel digging equipment for making underground bases and transport, check.
4. Satellite communications for an entire planet, check.
5. Then finally, the actual rockets to get us there.
Hopefully he will continue development to the point where the tech can be used on Mars.
I bring this up because I think it is important that Elon has some projects targeted at making the world better today, like PayPal, the Boring Company, and Starlink, some projects designed to avoid catastrophes a few decades from now, like Tesla and Solar City, and some projects designed to help humanity centuries from now, like SpaceX going to Mars. This is a very nice way of resolving the objection that Elon should focus on Earth's problems, which is to observe that you can both make the world a better place today while also working towards a brighter long term future.
I think that to the extent that Elon will inevitably serve as a role model, I want that part of the story to be told as well.
You forgot the most important one.
3) PayPal is a huge PR nightmare, a pseudo-bank that sits between legal boundaries whenever it needs to in order to maximize profit, screwing over thousands of folks -- many of them with small businesses that foolishly relied on them as a service. A successful service that everyone uses, and most people hate -- the customers are swept in by me-tooisms and forced participation.
If I were Musk, or I was a Musk evangelist , i'd stay far away from that 'accomplishment', as well.
He's not responsible for the entirety of the beast, but afaik he IS responsible for the viral aspects of their customer recruitment -- a method I feel is unethical from a monopolistic standpoint for a banking entity to participate in.
You can say PayPal is bad, but pretty much any company starting on that path run in many of the same issues.
on edit: changed I'm not sure if to I'm not sure that
Anyone can foist one's own unbridled ambitions, mixed in with a dash of lottery dreaming, tossed in with a bit of hubris, to come up with whatever the bright shiny future could be.
The company is more resilient than Oracle, it was left for dead for centuries, but it's still around.
I'm pretty sure I recall him mentioning electric vehicles and solar cells being important for mars, but I don't remember the interview.
Elon and SpaceX have been pretty explicit about Starlink as a system for funding the development of Mars transit vehicles and initial colony, though I'm sure a mini-Starlink around Mars would be in the long term plans.
I don't recall anywhere that Elon Musk has mentioned anything about The Boring Company being used for tunneling on mars, but the connection makes a lot of sense to me, as initial colony development would probably take place largely underground as a cheap radiation shield.
1. Electric cars were created with Earth in mind. Musk was, and probably still is, very interested in ways to help fix the climate issue, and that reason was mentioned explicitly.
2. Connected to 1, not to Mars.
3. I'm not sure what the motivation here is; the official one was that Musk was bored ( :) ) in traffic. It meshes with Tesla's business if properly integrated. That said, the utility of tunnels for Mars settlement seems so big that I'm pretty sure he had it in mind too.
4. No colonies in a nearby future will need a Starlink-scale planetary Internet network. I'm 100% buying the official version here: Starlink exists to generate revenue for further work on the Mars transportation system/BFR (whatever its current name; Starship I think?).
I really don't think these were part of a grand plan all along. But they're all ultimately relevant for Mars.
[0] https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/03/elon-musk-post-series.html
According to them, Bezos feels the same way. Amazon is basically a means-to-an-end, and that "end" is to get humanity into outer space, as an insurance policy in the event of a catastrophe on earth.
According to Bezos, Amazon is a means to an end, and that "end" is putting man in space.
If Bezos said something that spooked investors, that would be bad for Amazon, and what's bad for Amazon is bad for Bezos' long term goal:
Colonization of space.
Three week ago, Jeff Bezos said the following:
"But, Bezos said, if the Earth's population and energy consumption keeps expanding as it has, we will reach a point where every corner of the planet would need to be covered in solar panels to provide people with the quality of life the developed world has come to expect. "We will run out of energy on Earth," he said. "This is just arithmetic, it's going to happen ... If we move out into the universe, for all practical purposes, we have unlimited resources."
https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/10/tech/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-b...
What I have noticed as that Elon uses metric, and Bezos Imperial units, Imperial units in space just seems stupid to me.
For Hyperloop, he did too. And Hyperloop involve battery powered electric vehicles, tunnels and solar panels (on top). So indirectly, there is a connection.
He also made clear that colonizing Mars, or at least getting partway through is one of his life goals, if not his life goal.
There is definitely a connection. But following the progression, it seems like Mars isn't the reason he started these companies, but "how can I make it useful on Mars" is definitely a consideration.
This just sounds like some tortured narrative.
TBF he is targeting infrastructure. There's also: water, food, police, courts, legislature/executive, construction, clothing, computation, etc.
And then Little Elon started a little company during the dot com boom called Zip2 and sold it to Compaq for $300 million. Then X.com which led to PayPal. Then SpaceX, Tesla, and all the rest.
It’s anything but “silly”. It’s incredible, it’s aspirational, it’s undeniably impressive. I love that his goal is so audacious as to be entirely implausible, and he keeps taking step by tiny step toward to realization of his mission.
And even though the goal may be entirely pointless to 99.999% of humanity, the steps taken along the way are reaping tremendous benefits to our lives and those of future generations.
Back to TFA, again I think they are missing the significance of what Boring will be doing here. An underground autonomous system which otherwise would have cost hundreds of millions for $50 million risk free is a perfect win-win for Boring and Vegas. Boring gets a beautiful test bed for a whole array of new tech, and a marketing demonstration of what they can accomplish if all goes well. Vegas saved a boat load of money, and gets a tourist attraction to boot.
It’s sad hearing/reading all the comments that this is stupid, just build a train, etc. Because that misses entirely the point that while this deployment could be served by a train the bigger vision is not one that could be served by trains, and the whole point, like everything Elon does, is to take a step on the path toward the Big Vision in a way that provides incremental value that can be monetized in order to fund and drive future R&D.
In fact if the Russians had been willing to sell the dot com billionaire some rockets for his publicity stunt of getting a plant to Mars, SpaceX would have never been formed.
How do you think the boring company is going to be able to achieve these cost savings? If this system is otherwise going to cost hundreds of millions how the hell is the boring company going to achieve orders of magnitudes improvement?
2. Joy and sheer inspiration; why go to the moon, run a marathon, or compose a symphony? Joy and inspiration.
3. Potential to improve our own technology as we strive for the above points. Clear, clear evidence of this in parent's comment and after NASA's innovative tech.
It's irrelevant if you personally don't care, you don't have to do it. It seems there will be billions of dollars and thousands of willing individuals, you can sit back and relax while the rest of us explore the stars.
Even if the only appeal was the wild wild west and uncharted territory, what's wrong with that?
Look at what exploring the Moon has brought us, many unexpected innovations and inventions useful for life on earth.
As far as why describing Mars as Earth's backup plan rubs people the wrong way, I think it's a bit like Noah's Ark. While there is absolutely the cute story about the boat full of animals, and it does make for a good story, there's also the "meanwhile literally everyone aside from a minuscule elect ends up dying" bit. Which would be nothing but sour grapes if you didn't see people holding up the possibility of colonizing other planets as a mitigating factor that implies that we really shouldn't be quite so worried about all the environmental damage that's happening here on Earth. But you do.
Put it all together, and the complete narrative starts to sound like, "Sure, we're recklessly hurtling toward turning the planet into an inhospitable shithole for billions of people, but don't worry about that, because 0.00000005% of them are going to get to live on a completely different inhospitable shithole instead!"
Which, disclaimer, I'm not wanting to pan human space exploration. But I much prefer the "exploration for the sake of adventure and discovery" narrative. If that's not good enough, the ground to retreat to should be robots, not messianic fables for rich people.
Not to mention it's still unclear if it's physiologically possible for humans to survive long-term off planet Earth.
Some big urban areas already need to rely on interbasin transfers for their water supply: LA, NYC, San Diego, Mexico City, SLC, Denver. Tunnels for water would actually be a sensible and 'boring' pivot for the Boring Company.
I'm perfectly happy with all the people who are walking around and just staring at the clouds and looking at the stars and saying, "I want to go there."But I'm looking at the ground, and I want to fix the pothole that's right in front of me before I fall in. This is the kind of person I am. - Linus Torvalds
In fact living on mars might be the perfect preparation for what Earth might be like after climate change in a few hundred years time.
The technology generated by colonising Mars might help with climate change.
You cannot name one endeavor to get to Mars that doesn't have immediate byproducts that are incredibly useful to everyone on earth.
We explore. It is literally in our DNA. It's what makes us human. It's also why we outlive the neanderthals, who never left the geographic region they were "born" in.
[citation needed] I guess he was more inspired by the Michelson experiment and the Lorentz transformations.
> We'd give up our earth centric imaginations of time, gravity, and many other things.
Gravity works exactly like here (But you can jump higher). Time works exactly like here too (The length of the day and the year are different, it will be a problem to choose a good calendar, but it's already a mess here. Anyway, it's not a scientific or technological problem, people just don't want to change the calendar they are use to.)
Perhaps they will find a few new interesting cases for climate science an geology???
Also, these aren’t exclusive tasks. Everything that works for Mars also helps earth and in many cases specifically with climate change.
Just going to the Moon and living in low orbit has resulted in a ton of new technology.
Earth's biosphere has already had five (5) mass extinctions. Guess what happens to humanity if number six shows up before we colonize another planet? Mars is simply the closest option.
Of those 5 mass extinctions, did any of them make Earth less habitable than Mars is today? I'm genuinely curious.
Musk could be the sheriff of a colony in his very own space Western. People have worked hard their whole lives for much less.
Do you think the world would be better now if the British had just worked on improving Britain rather than settling in America?
I’m sure there were many people calling the settlers silly back then too.
I for one would have been happy for the Europeans to evolve for another 1000 years before they set foot in the Americas, in earnest, under the aspect of eternity.
I suspect quite a few Native Americans do...
And as others pointed out, America was already settled when Europeans arrived, so what innovation even occurred there?
- Electric cars: subsidies
- Solar panels: subsidies
- Tunnel: transport infrastructure
- Rockets: NASA/military contracts
Starlink looks more like a commercial project but it doesn't mean the government can't get interested. After all, the internet itself started as a military project.
There are missing pieces in both theories (Mars and government money), the biggest one being PayPal. And some of them don't fit perfectly. So chances are that we are just making stuff up.
Is there some universe in which entrepreneurs exit the electric car industry solely because the government starts offering consumers subsidies to buy them?
I don't like the hype around Elon Musk and I think Hyperloop is a borderline scam (I can detail if you want). However I also think the success of PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX are well deserved. With them the world is a better place and Elon Musk is a richer man, that's capitalism working as intended. That subsidies helped creating a company that makes nice electric cars and solar panels is the reason the subsidies exist in the first place.
My previous point wasn't a criticism.
The demo tunnel doesn't look to have sufficient ventilation or emergency exits in case of fire, car crash, etc.
They haven't addressed the ingress and egress congestion problems into and out of the tunnel. How can a single elevator go up/down to handle 1000+ cars per hour (4400 passengers per hour)? Basic math gives you 3.6 seconds for the elevator to go down, wait for the car to offramp, go back up, and wait for the next car to onramp.
These are some of the many reasons tunnels and subways get expensive. You can't just build a basic tunnel rigged with cars and say "problem solved" at 1/10th the cost.
There still might be some human ingress/egress issues to resolve.
If they can somehow address the insane tunneling infrastructure costs in the US, I don't really care what path they take to get there.
The amount of trouble people in the US are willing to through to avoid the solution every other developed country enjoys is really mind-blowing to me. Dig a tunnel, put some rails in it, and add some sort of a vehicle on top of those rails. Splitting up a cart to individual vehicles seems wasteful, impractical, and guaranteed to move less people. A perfect example of a "gadgetbahn": completely useless 10-15 years down the road, but it wastes city's money that could have been used for actual, viable alternatives that are in use everywhere else. But hey, at least it's unique.
Public transit seems really wasteful to me: empty busses running up and down the same main streets, people going out of their way to get to a train station, subway cars stopping in the track and blocking the passage of all other vehicles, all movement stopping at a certain time due to low demand... it’s a mess.
Again, from a physics standpoint the optimal solution to me would seem to be a variety of different size autonomous cars, with 100% occupancy, which can draft each other, and tunnels that allow you to go direct(ish) to your destination with an IP-like routing plan.
What am I missing?
Is there a city that you think is close to optimal so I can study it?
Cars, drive throughs, home delivery food. Its all tools for avoiding social contact.
Like, if I said I was planning on developing a wheel at 1/10th the cost of current wheels, I don't care that the wheel predates my innovation by millenia. I'm not attempting to _improve_ the wheel, I'm attempting to make it viable in an increasing number of contexts by lowering the cost.
The same is true of the Boring Company.
You can dismiss it as being unrealistic, or as the cost-savings not actually being there. But I don't understand being dismissive because we already have tunnels. Of course! If we didn't already have tunnels, we wouldn't be trying to make them cheaper!
The Boring Company's main plans, as can be evidenced by their communications (such as their FAQ) and their commitments and attempted commitments to build actual projects, is to pitch a radically new, 21st century mode of mass transit that is really just a variation of personal rapid transit (which has historically failed at being effective mass transit solution). The meaningful commitment to building cheaper is actually... to build narrower tunnels, that are unusable for any other purposes, since there's not enough room to put in high-capacity subway trains in the same tunnel.
Oh, and for good measure, tunnels are not why subways are expensive. It's station caverns and ancillary infrastructure (such as procuring more rolling stock for the extension) that consumes most of the cost of a subway, so it's not clear that cheaper tunneling would actually meaningfully reduce the cost of building new subways.
Agree that this evidences their short-term plans (1-5 years), but I actually think it's a poor-proxy of evidence of their long-term (5+ years) plans.
I mostly agree with you about their short-term plans, but my understanding (which could be wrong!) was that they had longer-term plans, of which the proposed tunnels are stepping-stones and learning opportunities towards.
Though, I'll readily acknowledge that the evidence I have for their long-term plans is thin (mostly some interviews with Elon Musk about The Boring Company, and having seen similar developments at SpaceX), so if the counter-argument is that the long-term plans aren't well-enough evidenced to be worth considering, I wouldn't disagree.
I also think it's totally reasonable to argue that those long-term plans aren't realistic or a likely potential outcome.
> Oh, and for good measure, tunnels are not why subways are expensive. It's station caverns and ancillary infrastructure (such as procuring more rolling stock for the extension) that consumes most of the cost of a subway, so it's not clear that cheaper tunneling would actually meaningfully reduce the cost of building new subways.
I don't know that I agree with this. Tunneling is definitely a significant cost whenever it happens under a city. For example, the SR99 tunneling project in Seattle cost ~$2.1B dollars to build (https://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Projects/Viaduct/Budget), and that doesn't involve any station caverns or rolling stock. It does, obviously, involve the highway finishings and road connections, but tunneling is a significant expense whenever it is required.
The video linked has Elon saying specifically that they have an industry-standard TBM that they used for the Hawthorne test tunnel. There is no improvement there. They have 2 more machines they are building that are expected to be large improvements over the tunnel status quo for that given size of tunnel they are constructing.
Again, the improvement is not in the tunnel size... they are building their own TBMs, trying to get them to be faster at tunneling than the existing machine that they have.
What if you actually reduce track / signaling / control / facilities cost massively by virtue of using self-powered autonomous vehicles? Then the math could start making a lot more sense.
Imagine a city that is crisscrossed with multiple direct metro lines. Design for extremely frequent departures, which likely means smaller carriages.
We should be designing our transit systems to be faster and better than car-based travel.
Fixed-guideway transport infrastructure (trains, busways) and dedicated structures (tunnels, bridges, airports, etc) come with high capex that must be borne by the builder. One advantage of road-based transport over rail-based transport is that the road is already there and will (often) already be built and expanded by the government just to allow private vehicles to come and go -- it's multipurpose -- while any other mode of transport requires this infrastructure to be purpose-built and maintained for the transport mode itself. That costs.
The premise of Boring Company is that by building smaller tunnels, they can build them much more cheaply. Commutes could be more efficient, and city traffic reduced substantially if people could take tunnels across the city instead of drive.
Do you have a reference for that? My understanding was that over the long term the goal was to develop cost savings through better boring machines themselves, not through just by reducing the cross-sectional area of the tunnel.
I thought they were starting with smaller cross-sectional areas and working their way up as they developed machines, but by understanding of the end-goal of The Boring Company was to be able to build large tunnels at 1/10th the cost of current processes.
In hard rock you can use drilling and blasting across long sections rather than just the leading edge. Alternatively, a TBM needs to remove significantly less material.
So a tunnel system which moves public transport trains does not compare in utility with a system which can move personal cars. Did you just ignore this fact?
The result is called a bus or a train.
Alternatively, use token ring. If you have a separate tack for cars to get up to speed, and really trust your hardware and your software, a car can simply slip into an empty 10m gap between cars, and slip out of it onto a side track to decelerate when it approaches its destination.
Comparing apples to apples, it's competitive, and that's an achievement in itself, but they haven't proven anything like the savings he claimed.
That's a recurring theme with Musk's hype. It's great that he's taking a fresh look at these things, and in some cases he's found some genuine efficiencies, but the expectations he puts out is that the rest of industry is locked down into hopelessly obsolete and inefficient methods. That's just not true, but it's a very appealing story.
Yes, there are many problems left, however every start-up faces a number of problems. They're basically just lining up to build an MVP, or perhaps that was the previous tunnel and LVCC is the beta version.
In either case, they have a CEO famous for his marketing and overly optimistic promises. If this wasn't an Elon Musk venture, I doubt it'd be getting over-hyped and blasted as much as it is.
The most galling part to me is that I can't see how they make the mandated 4400 people/hr limit. That requires 26 second headways between vehicles (assuming that 4400 people/hr is a bidirectional capacity, not unidirectional), and I don't see them getting station dwell times low enough to permit those headways--airport people movers usually run around 30-45 second dwell times.
They posted a video 2 years ago that has 6 million views that shows how this works in the first 30 seconds. It was all over the news when it was posted:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5V_VzRrSBI#t=0m13s
It'll work on the basis of tunnel on-ramps merging into the main tunnel, just like highways or train stations.
When I read stuff like this I'm flabbergasted. The cost of maintenance for tunnels is almost certainly higher than that for surface roads. That's not to mention additional considerations like always-on lighting (no free light from the sun) and poor access to businesses (so the roads still have to exist in some form). Tunnels only make sense in a few high-density urban centres, where the alternative would be elevated highways. Otherwise they're a great way to create a municipal budget time bomb when big repairs have to take place.
Pros would include avoiding the freeze thaw cycle that destroys roads in much of the country. Tunnels could also allow pollution mitigation to take place if internal combustion engines were used, which is simply impossible on open highways.
Cons include an obviously higher initial capital expenditure.
I suppose we need to get down to a cost per person moved metric over something like 30 years to more objectively compare.
as i understand it, the high costs of transportation projects are a political problem not an engineering one. well-run subway projects have been completed at $50-100 million per mile, while most such projects in the US are 5 to 10 times that. that's attributable not to sticter safety standards or excessive land costs or public agencies being inefficient, even if those things do contribute at the margins. it's because so many constituencies laden these projects with deadweight costs (lawsuits, foot-dragging, overcharging, kickbacks, etc.).
while his engineering leadership is exceptional and that contributes to lowering costs, elon adeptly sidesteps much of those constituent ladenings, perhaps through careful choice of goals and projects and sheer force of will. for all his faults, he seems to have the right blend of vision, skill, money, charisma, and motivation to bring these projects to completion without a lot of deadweight loss.
so the boring company's technological advances just won't translate to cost reductions generally in underground transportation projects. even if a project uses the boring company for the tunneling, the large infrastructure contractors will find ways to extract their generous slice of pie. we need political/social/economic solutions to reduce these costs, not technological ones.
Won’t let me build a wire across your property—-no problem, I’ll go wireless...as an example
sure, but what technology could be applied in this case?
for instance, projects are often underbid and then overcharged over time, whether it's fixed bid or time and materials. fixed bid incentivizes subcontractors to cut corners. time and materials billing incentivizes subcontractors to be inefficient. and subcontractors find ways to cheat.
people have tried complicated incentive systems to fix this issue (a kind of technological solution), but they seem to have mixed results (that is, not much better, for a lot more complexity in tracking and apportioning compensation).
even if you could build a machine to monitor all the workers and perfectly pay them based on quality and efficiency, such dystopian conditions would most certainly meet heavy resistance.
i mean, i love tech, but who'd want a machine controlling their lives?
A big problem with tunnels has traditionally been land rights (less so than with highways/but still a problem). If your tunneling costs are 10-100x lower, suddenly landowners who would otherwise try to extract exorbitant prices have a lot less leverage because you have more freedom in where you build the tunnels and entry/exit points.
What we should be doing is moving humans up: we should be building sky ways between buildings. Someone on foot (I'll allow wheelchairs) is not very heavy and doesn't take much space: the amount of infrastructure needed to support them is not nearly as expensive as moving cars to a different level. The skyway also allows for heating and air conditioning, something humans like.
When the distances get long we can put in a moving sidewalk if we want. However, for the most part when distances get long humans should move back to ground level and catch a bus/train.
Thus I'm proposing get humans off the ground level - we have the technology to make this convenient today. The cost is not very high and it solves a lot of congestion problems on the street.
I'm not at all convinced that this design can scale.
Think of it as one of those people movers they have at some airports.
The only point of difference I can see is that it's going to be more on-demand (though that's been done before), and it's going to be cheap.
I'll think of it as a people mover once they show us a vehicle that isn't an existing Tesla model.
Even accounting for the cost, I think many would still argue that it was worth it, replacing a highway system that divided the city with a walkable network of parks that effectively connects different neighborhoods like financial district <-> north end, along with a new series of (underground) highways that provided improved traffic flow.
Before and after photos: https://imgur.com/JbgPur6
If the cost issue were solved, what would be the reason not to do it?
(I suppose it taking well over a decade to complete construction is an issue, but presumably new technology could improve that as well.)
I feel like that's a very very heavy lift.
Lots of things would be great "If the cost issue were solved".
The unit cost of construction in the US is routinely double, or even triple the cost of comparable projects in other Western countries.
Most of those buildings next to what used to be the highway are at most 10-20 stories. A 60 story skyscraper was finished in Boston this year for $700[1].
So to a first approximation they could have had a full 2-3 blocks of parks around 15 new such skyscrapers to get the same building space after demolishing most of the buildings seen in the foreground on that picture, and have come out even on floor area.
They'd then have had had $12 billion left over to elevate the highway and put that elevated highway in a tunnel to cancel out the noise before they got to to $22 billion.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Seasons_Hotel_%26_Private...
Comparing skyscraper build costs to tunnel build costs is meaningless.
Noise isn't the only factor. The bigger issues are division of the city, and the urban blight that is common under and around elevated highways.
The cost overruns were due to the usual things: mistakes that were expensive to correct, graft, and corruption. If you can solve those things, great. But I don't think the presence of those things should invalidate the need for truly valuable projects that make cities much more livable.
So no, comparing skyscraper cost to tunnel cost is absolutely meaningful, because if you want to increase green space one way is to spend an exorbitant amount of money digging a highway into the ground, another is to demolish 5 blocks of 10 story houses, build one 50 story skyscraper, and get 4 blocks of public park as a result.
Urban blight around elevated highways isn't some law of nature, it's just a zoning problem, and one that's a lot cheaper to solve than digging the highway into the ground.
https://www.king5.com/video/news/local/seattle-tunnel-lesson...
What did the Big Dig do that a better central artery with more decks wouldn't?
The whole "highways are ugly" argument really is mostly from/for upscale people who don't want their view ruined. Very few people who actually has to use or live/work near the infrastructure really cares all that much about it's presence. It's just a fact of life. Heck, if you painted it like something interesting everyone would stop caring in a couple years (i.e. same thing that happened to the rainbow natural gas tank on the side of I93).
Putting stuff underground is expensive and complicated compare to building above ground.
That's really, really not true. And "it's ugly" isn't the argument usually presented, either - it's that it's a tremendous waste of space.
Move all the roads underground and you can reuse that land. Maybe for a park, but also maybe for high-density housing that will make things more affordable for everyone.
Note: if this was the article's original title and, as sometimes happens, they changed it, then none of this applies. Usually it's just the NYT who do that though.
"Las Vegas to Elon Musk: Tesla Tunnel? We'll Take 2 - CityLab"
And keep in mind that the NYC Subway and the London Underground are NOT a good example of a modern mass transit system.
For instance, SpaceX originally insisted on parachute recovery of their Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 rockets. They tried, and it didn't work. But they switched to powered landing as some others had demonstrated (DC-X and Masten Space Systems and Armadillo Aerospace), and they massively succeeded.
Elon is perfectly willing to pivot to what works after exhausting other options.
I see a similar development with the Boring company. They have dug their first demonstration tunnel. So they have a basic handle on tunnel digging. Doing so they made valuable experiences and claim to have improved their digging machine already significantly. Digging the Las Vegas tunnel is going to add much more experience to it and means, the company is a working business. They might not have a good idea yet, what to drive through the tunnel, but I am sure, they will come up with something. At the first presentation, they drove a Model X with guiding wheels attached at like 40mph. That was nice, but not great. Now they made a new video - they have redone the tunnel floor and now a Tesla reaches 127 mph just driving on autopilot through the tunnel. If everything else is worked out, I am sure there will be a custom vehicle driving through these tunnels, which optimizes throughput.
reminds me of the quote with an odd past:
> You can depend on Americans to do the right thing when they have exhausted every other possibility.
With butt loads of public money?
The contract posted on the LVCVA website projects an
operating capacity of 4,400 passengers per hour using
“autonomous electric vehicles at high speeds,” which
might include a Tesla Model X or Model 3, or another
Tesla chassis converted into a 16-passenger shuttle.
The only way this can work with Model 3s or similar will require a loading/unloading experience similar to the Test Track ride at Epcot in Disney World, including the line and the numerous staff helpers to make sure you are buckled in.
Combine that with also needing to move those people down to the station and back up to their destination, and the likelihood that any of the three stations are in a location you already are or want to be, I'm not sure how useful this is going to be.
If you don't split the track to allow unloading, you have 26 seconds to disembark 16 passengers, embark 16 more passengers, and then clear the platform in enough time to allow sufficient safety margin for the car immediately behind you. Station dwell times (essentially the time from train is fully stopped to time it starts accelerating, and therefore not including the last bit) are upwards of 30 seconds and much likelier to be close to a minute, which can't be done in sufficient time. Especially because full capacity cars generally require more time at stations, and I have to imagine that modified Teslas that can fit 16 people aren't going to be quick to navigate.
If you have multiple platforms at each station to accomodate the long station dwell time, maybe it could be done, but I suspect that it'd blow out their construction budget because of the extra space needed.
That sort of routing is also significantly improved by having smaller, independent vehicles (well, once the number of stops goes up) - sort of like the Personal Rapid Transit setup at WVU. [0]
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgantown_Personal_Rapid_Tran...
I have a quibble with this. The cars will have to be loaded at that rate, but they will not have to unload and load the same car in that time frame. Also, if the platform can fit multiple vehicles at a time, it gives them significantly longer to unload/load. Picture like a gondola or high speed chairlift at a ski hill - you unload on one side of the end loop, load on the other, and you're unloading/loading multiple cars at a time.
And high speed chairlift capacities easily reach thousands of passengers per hour
Is that crazy? It doesn’t seem crazy to me. Busses don’t wait 6 minutes at a stop.
BART does 1-2 minute transfers.
Your idea that it would need attendants seems to be based on the assumption that cars must depart synchronously (because one slow party can hold up the entire system). But you’re missing the whole point of the Loop design: many on-ramps and cars can join into the express tunnel asynchronously.
Most times it rained or snowed in New York City when I lived there, New Jersey Transit and PATH would have problems because of the issues of weather on outdoor trains. It only affected NYC's subway when there was flooding (which also affected NJT and PATH).
The fascination with tunnels is that they're a much more ergonomic way to build infrastructure for the humans that have to live near them.
In contrast in Berlin, the areas with elevated subway belong to the most desireable living areas, e.g. the U2 in Prenzlauer Berg:
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&biw=1047&bi...
Or check out the lovely bridges above Gleisdreieck-Park:
https://www.google.com/search?q=berlin+u-bahn+gleisdreieck+p...
I think the main issue in the NYC metro area is that the offending trains/platforms do not seem to take noise pollution (let alone neighborhood flavor) into account at all. The result is that the platforms and trains are unfortunately more like alien oppressors than helpful neighbors.
It's also worth pointing out that today's Berlin is enjoying the fruits of an unique opportunity to rebuild their urban infrastructure post-ww2 (Gleisdreieck was an industrial train yard, for example). Much of the city was leveled, and then shortly thereafter occupied by East/West Germans with fiscally-backed ideological incentives to compete over who could build the most impressive X "for the people".
Lessons learned: Maybe we should tear down NYC, split each borough in half down the middle, and give one half of it to liberals and the other half to conservatives?
As to weather, Chicago has tons of it and manages fine: https://chicago.curbed.com/2019/1/31/18204627/chicago-cold-w...
(Well, that's the ground-level light rail — Metra — that does that)
Tbf, the reason people use it for those purposes is because they are the most sheltered, out-of-the way places available.
When they stop being available, that activity moves to the next most sheltered, out-of-the-way place available.
They are way cheaper if you can build them. Look at how long it's taking Seattle to build ST3 (although it's going to be amazing when the Redmond corridor opens; I agree).
America needs good transport now, in many more cities. Musk's tunnel ideas are just really impractical and will cost the tax payers more than the benefits of other types of standard/existing rail.
Here (in the US) I've only ever seen 1) homeless people, 2) garbage, or 3) graffiti (and not the good looking stuff).
Even though I was 25 floors up with "soundproof" windows, it was jarringly noisy at all times of the day and night because of the way the sound waves travel up a building.
If we had a Robert Moses of transit, then it could happen, just like the highways happened. There are no Robert Moseses of transit. Now the best we can do for new lines is shadow the highways.
Elevated lines like in Chicago also seem very uncommon now, I suspect they aren't actually that great? They certainly take a lot of maintenance and don't have great trip times. I think putting an incredibly large and heavy vehicle on metal stilts isn't a good approach. There have been people who want to instead put relatively light vehicles on stilts [1], with many benefits, but that's been met with almost no interest from people who can make these things happen. (Personally I think it's a missed opportunity.) Though in a sense what's being built here is along those lines, but underground.
https://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-so...
Public transport also forces you to see people every day. Even this very bare minimum interaction is vitally important. It changes the way we see and treat people.
There was an executive at Lehman Brothers who had a private elevator he used from his condo to take him to a car with a private driver, which took him to another elevator that took him to his office. Most days he could go from home to work without interacting with a single person. That changes the way you see and treat people, and we need less of that.
It’s not about being anti-social. Here in the Annapolis area (which has 200,000 people, with 40,000 in Annapolis itself), people commute from the Annapolis suburbs to jobs in the southern Baltimore suburbs or in Baltimore. They’d take a train if there was one, instead of sitting in I97 traffic But the volume of commuters comes nowhere near justifying building one. (Many Metro lines, though at capacity in the downtown core, are desolate in even the relatively urbanized suburbs of MD). A cheap, fast, point-to-point transit solution, that you could string up along an existing highway median or below one, would revolutionize transit because it would actually address peoples’ needs outside the tiny minority.
You're answering a question no one is asking. Cars and taxis (and imagined self-driving cars) get people from where they are to where they want to go. Roads are capable of serving any trip, and with a reasonable travel time. If transit could serve most trips then transit could be successful. Start from there, and see if you can work backwards to traditional rail mass transit. I don't see it happening, but maybe I'm missing something.
I am not an expert but I don't see how digging tunnels is cheaper than building a raised platform, they both seem pretty expensive.
No, they don't. They add a massive amount of noise and other pollution to the city, and block light and air, turning normal city streets into seedy alleys. (Ex: Wabash before the recent renovation)
They seem a lot cheaper to build and maintain than tunnels
Build, probably. Maintain, no. The elevated structures require a ton of maintenance that is ongoing constantly because they're exposed to weather, vandals, and other external forces.
I suspect you've never been in a subway tunnel and noticed all the grime and dirt spewed all over the walls and ceiling by electric trains.
Noise isn’t much higher once you’re even a block away
Now I know you've never been in a city with an elevated train system. I once lived nine blocks away from an elevated train, and I could hear it all day and all night.
And light and air is a matter of setbacks
You can't set back a building that's already built, and you can't take away air rights from a property owner without massive compensation.
There is more light standing right under an L track than in NYC
More is not the same as optimal. Why should any of the public's light and air be removed if it's not necessary?
It is possible to build elevated rail that is much quieter than Chicago's and NYC's systems, so Chicago shouldn't be held up as an example of how noisy elevated systems have to be.
And it is necessary. The alternative to a cheaper above-ground line isn’t a subway. Usually, it’s no rail at all.
The noise is the thing. In New York you can stand directly over a subway station and not even know it, in Chicago you always know when you're with in a few blocks of a line.
Elevated rail is not inherently noisy, but the majority of examples in the US are. This is why people are against them. If we could fix the noise problem, this could be the optimal solution. I personally think it is possible.
"So often you won't even notice."
I say this without commenting on the actual financial viability, since that is very much a matter of debate and I'm tepidly optimistic on it at best.
The upscale crowd doesn't like the audio/visual clutter.
There's nothing tunnels do that well planned overhead infrastructure can't do more cheaply (at the cost of being audible and visible).
Edit: Since I'm being down-voted, other than being less offending to the eyes/ears of non-users, what do tunnels do that overhead infrastructure doesn't?
Quantity ≠ quality.
Asian cities already have amazing subway systems that just work so much better than surface streets. The biggest improvement would be to have express lines that only visit every ~10th stop. Financial viability due to massive ridership make these possible in Asia, lower tunneling costs could make them viable elsewhere.
Here's how to win with public transit: Build it where people want to go. Amazing how difficult that is.
Twins ballpark / transit hub (not there at time of construction but it helps that it is now), downtown, Vikings Stadium, Airport, MOA... pretty obvious and useful route. Then to the U and St. Paul.
After that is is a question of what direction out to the burbs you reach out to, and then the next, and so on.
Granted that doesn't mean your idea is bad or anything. I do wonder how many people would change their routine for a "temporary" bus line... not sure they would.
Minneapolis used to have a guaranteed ride home (might still do, I don't live there anymore) to cover people who took the bus somewhere, but had to work last.
So... it's a... subway
What a coincidence, that's pretty useful for oil too.
The market uses money to burn oil to burn money to burn oil.