Sounds like a less-scalable metro system, a technology that predates this "innovation" by a century or so.
So if they actually built a subway it would cost... about the same as a subway. That's not to say that US subways aren't crazy expensive to build compared to Europe, Asia etc. - but that's more to do with legal issues (industrial relations etc.), business structures, and possibly corruption, rather than the technology.
Further, when the Boring underground car-train "stops", and parties leave the train, those cars still demand that same space, just on the surface. With mass transit carrying pedestrians and cyclists, you need much less room on "integrate" passengers coming out from the underground, with local traffic on the surface.
If Boring gives up on the personal vehicle folly, and can build a smaller, cheaper, but equally safe tunnel for mass transit, great. But they seem preoccupied with letting people keep their cars.
How many people are you expecting to take their bikes on the subway on the Vegas strip?
[0] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-c...
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.
You could maybe save on OSHA concerns if you can somehow slash the number of people employed, but you'd need to get rid of a LOT of people before you see enough gains from that to make this a game changer.
Elon's whole deal around transit is utterly uninformed about anything urban planning.
Experts (including those who have studied foreign mass transit in detail) are at a loss to fully explain why the US's tunneling costs are so out of whack compared to other countries. Sometimes, when expert systems seem to have failed, it's a useful exercise to throw everything out (i.e. be "utterly uninformed") and learn from scratch by trying. They may fail anyway, but it's worth a shot.
Sometimes, the naive intern will find a solution because of their own naïveté. (And even then there are lots of practical things that will need to be relearned, at great pain.)
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?
I'm rooting for Elon with all my heart to cut down the costs of digging tunnels, but everything else about this is just ludicrous.
Cars, drive throughs, home delivery food. Its all tools for avoiding social contact.
Oh, I know precisely the reason: there's no viable alternative in place.
It might surprise you to learn that other countries were in that same situation and aren't anymore. When there's something more efficient, reliable, and cheaper to use, people tend to prefer that.
But of course, you'd first have to step outside of the US to see what a viable alternative even looks like. Judging by your first and last sentence, I'm willing to bet you haven't.
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 Boring Company claims in its FAQ that the Second Avenue Subway cost "more than $1 billion per mile" (it doesn't mention it by name, but it's the only thing it could be referring to). The actual cost (from http://web.mta.info/capitaldashboard/CPDMega.html) is $415 million for 2 miles of 2 pairs of tunnel, with track work being another $364 million. The three new stations cost $649 million, $802 million, and $821 million--each more than the cost of all of the tunnel work.
Is this a different loop from the LVCC Loop mentioned in the article? The LVCC Loop seems pretty clearly to fall fairly far outside the "mass transit" system, so it must be a different project you're referring to.
> The Boring Company claims in its FAQ that the Second Avenue Subway cost "more than $1 billion per mile"
Definitely agree that one of the hallmarks of Elon Musk's companies are exaggerated claims about their own abilities and about the competition. I've been impressed by his ability to deliver on some of the bold claims that he has made (even if he fails to do so on a claimed timeline), but also disappointed by his readiness to exaggerate faults in other products / solutions.
Still, if the end-result is to be to reduce tunneling costs from $415M for 2 miles down to $200M for 2 miles, that's a pretty significant result. It wouldn't be nearly as dramatic as the original goal, but still a huge improvement that would make tunneling more viable in a larger number of cases.
I think the theory is that these mega train stations where thousands of people walk through every hour to embark/disembark is one vision of transit, one which can serve an extremely dense metropolis, but also one which is terribly difficult to expand and maintain, as we see in NYC.
Now maybe the future is that people coming into and through the city are stopping at waypoints at the outskirts and switching on to subways which run at a fixed schedule and carry masses of people in long convoys to fixed destinations, where they then have to transfer to buses or walk to their destination. Carrying luggage or packages or even just keeping children close in these environments is stressful and requires vigilance.
Alternatively, a fully autonomous transport can pick up someone or some family at their door, and bring them directly to their destination. It can carry your luggage in the trunk. It has seats for all your party and is quiet enough to carry on a conversation or work. It plays the music you want as you go. Etc... Most importantly it works on a dynamic schedule and can accommodate any arbitrary pickup and drop off point non-stop. You can pay for different classes of service, different capacity, maybe even different transit speeds.
These are fundamentally different modes of transportation. Boring is not trying to lower the cost of fixed point mass transit hubs, nor are they going to iterate in their idea until they end up building a subway. I think it’s important to admit that fixed point transport hubs are not in fact the ultimate solution to all personal transit.
For the [rather large] share of transport which is done in personal vehicles, wouldn’t it be incredible to have a solution that’s better than the massive cost of surface roads and surface parking everywhere you look?
Edit: http://web.mta.info/capitaldashboard/MajorProjects/MajorProj... works as a link to just the information table, without the entire page.
> For the [rather large] share of transport which is done in personal vehicles, wouldn’t it be incredible to have a solution that’s better than the massive cost of surface roads and surface parking everywhere you look?
I generally care about mass transit, and it becomes pretty obvious that if you care about mass transit, you have to get people out of the massive wastes of space of single-occupancy vehicles. The problem I see with solutions like the Loop is that they're pitched as trying to replace mass transit, and there's no consideration given to the fact that storing empty personal vehicles takes lots of space that don't exist in dense cities, or, in places such as Kansas City where SOV transit is preferred, creates massive dead zones of parking that deadens the appeal of the area.
Personal transport is absolutely essential for the vast majority of people. Whereas public transit in most cases is not sufficient to live car-free, and ridership continues to plummet as a result which drives up costs [1].
The promise of autonomy, coupled with EVs designed for 1 million mile duty cycles opens up the possibility for personal transport to be significantly more efficient, and ecological than mass transit.
If you can do all that and put the majority of it underground, I’d say it’s revolutionary.
[1] - https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/08/how-america-k...
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.
The problem is that it's hard to carry more people into a tunnel than a metro train (excepting forcing everyone to become pedestrians). The proposed replacement for metro trains is so capacity inefficient that you're going to spend more building parallel tunnels, and you'll probably have an even more egregious problem of vertical circulation. Vertical circulation is already an issue of concern on the busiest passenger systems, and trying to move heavy, bulky, low-capacity personal vehicles is far more difficult (requires far more space) than packing pedestrians as current systems do.
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.
And if I start to think about the practical problems, like breaking up part of the tunnel before widening it, it quickly seems like building a new one might be more efficient.
Here the are filling the tunnel and using a TBM. https://www.newcivilengineer.com/farnworth-tunnel-widening/1...
Widening an existing tunnel without interrupting traffic is still possible like: https://www.rocksoil.com/pdf/233_r.pdf. Though with increased costs.
However, this changes for under sea tunnels which are segments placed down and thus can’t really be widened.
That and the cost vs benefit is not considered worth it.
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?