The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done
teslarati.com
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I think tunnels are the future though for cities. But I'd prefer trains to be running in them, or roads that only allow electric public transport.
Edit. In 1988 they started work on the Channel Tunnel UK to France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel - I am still in awe that they did this! I like the vision, bean counters be damned. If he made a tunnel like that it'd be news.
You can of course submit any tunneling articles/media you think are interesting.
Just look at the abundance of Atlas Obscura articles -- few are tech based.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_tunnel
Massively cool cutting edge technology, even before Elon involvement. ;-)
There is also a huge amount of interesting videos on Youtube about these projects, all the way from the initial tunnel boring/blasting all the way to final outfitting (imagine installing rails & electric equipment in a 57 km long tunnel - no wonder it took 6 years of multi shift daily work, etc.).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikan_Tunnel
>>A 2002 report by Michitsugu Ikuma described, for the undersea section, that "the tunnel structure appears to remain in a good condition." The amount of inflow has been decreasing with time, although it "increases right after a large earthquake".
It's because Elon is loved in the tech circle.
Being both attracts way more interest and engagement than one or the other.
The boring company is more of a personal effort by Elon due to his hatred of LA traffic.
Elon has a lot to learn about induced demand.
>If the transport system exceeds public travel needs, there will be very little traffic.
Sure. But... it would take an enormous amount of development to make this happen, because so many people are going to want more space if they can have it with still a <1hr commute. So more sprawl, leading to more pressure on the new network, lather, rinse, repeat...
For all the talk of walkable neighborhoods, if you gave people the choice of a 30min walk-and-subway commute in a 5-story condo building vs a 30min new-car-tunnel point to point commute with a 2000sqft house on a private parcel of land, you're going to have a lot (not everyone, but a lot) of people picking the latter.
Best case it's going to, for a long time, until we reach steady state, still just be a repeat of the "build roads, watch sprawl" cycle of the last century, just with potential to build even more roads by being able to continually go deeper (but is this that much easier than vertical overpasses and such?).
Isn't it easier to persuade local residents to support a tunnel under their area than an above-ground structure in their area?
Individual point-to-point transport systems are great. We just need to find a way to reduce the bad externalities of cars (pollution, traffic deaths, non-walkable cities/town, traffic congestion, taking up surface space). Elon Musk is working on three of these with Tesla and the Boring Company.
There aren't enough tunnels in the world to dig your way out of traffic problems. The more roads you make the more traffic you get.
Toll roads just increase the already staggering cost of owning a car, marginalizing even more people.
What about not doing that and instead investing in alternatives?
I'd argue that a lot of people don't want to drive a car, they want to get to their destination. Where options other than driving are available, then they weigh cost/convenience to make their decision.
My view isn't that cars travel is innately evil, or that building roads is always terrible - but that so much more money is spent on building more roads than on public transit options.
For some reason we ignore the last 60+ years of evidence to show that building more roads doesn't lead to reduced traffic. It's simply not possible to build out roads fast enough to beat the rise in traffic.
If you build public transit options that get people between locations they want to travel, ensure that it's run on time, clean, and affordable - then people who already drive will evaluate that cost/convenience function for themselves and decide that public transport is actually better. This results in much reduced road traffic.
people want more fast, affordable, on-demand, point-to-point private transportation. "induced demand" tells us we're woefully under-providing that demand. we're very far from the desired equilibrium point in nearly every metro area. elon seems to understand that better than a pithy quip might indicate.
along with mixed-use-as-default along transportation corridors, i would prefer more underground trains, dedicated busways, and small personal transport infrastructure (for electric bikes, scooters, etc.) in our cities (particularly in LA), but every effort, including the boring company's, that addresses that overwhelming demand helps.
If you had to pay for road access, you could easily set the price to where demand meets supply, and all roads would have well flowing traffic 24/7.
But of course "induced demand" happens when the price is $0. The same would occur for bread, phones or pianos at that price point.
To make up for that, we can charge people at the entrance point. But charging people time is basically impossible, so money is used instead.
The fact of the matter is that it's absurd to transport people in a dense environment 25'x10' apart, one at a time, all going back and forth to the same exact two places five days a week for 40+ years. Trains let you fit way more people in a given area, people who are already heading the same direction, and therefor offer more space for a city to be a city rather than a place for infrastructure.
Until we get to a point where people are able to move easily with high capacity transit, it's irresponsible to waste precious political will to build with the intention of providing low capacity transport for those who can afford a $30k+ car.
that's accounted for in the foot-second metric. by a (very) rough calculation, we'd only need to double road foot-seconds to alleviate most congestion. that's very expensive, since most of these roads would have to go underground or be elevated, but not impossible (elon is trying to do just that for teslas).
i'm not advocating we double our roads, however. i'm just refuting the pithy notion that it's impossible to meet the supposedly insatiable demand implied by "induced demand" arguments.
but yes, let's build way more public transit and smaller personal transport networks (along with taller, mixed-use buildings)! it's definitely more efficient and can be less expensive and stressful.
How capacity is provisioned from A to B influences how people choose to move and, over the long term, build homes/workplaces.
Induced demand does not suggest that supply is less than demand - it implies that demand is "flexible" to meet any supply conditions. There is overwhelming evidence of this at work over 50 years and across continents.
As a consequence, the argument is not "why bother?" but rather - "build it in a way that scales". For urban areas, private transport doesn't scale well.
that's the exact interpretation i'm refuting.
of course supply is less than demand. that's because the price of using roads is (perceived to be) zero, but the cost of construction on the supply side is high (and increasing, relative to inflation). it's impossible to meet the demand for free when costs are high.
my point is that this mispricing is a political and cultural choice, not an economic one explained by "induced demand". by using an economic concept for a non-economic market, we fall prey to misinterpreting and misadvocating.
we need to make the price of private transport much more transparent (e.g., real-time pricing) and rein in costs (land prices, legal/regulatory costs) so that we can make better choices in allocating our precious and limited resources (toward more mass transit for example).
(real-time pricing should also be progressive so that roads aren't just for rich people.)
Market demand, induced and otherwise, is a good thing, if the externalities are also addressed. That's basically Musk's whole business model.
The easy availability of roads leads to more people driving since it's the more effective option, which in turn leads to more traffic. Eventually the system reaches equilibrium where it's busy enough that other alternatives are more desirable.
Time and time again predictions of apocalyptic traffic doom have failed to manifest when roads are removed. The traffic just goes away largely because the traffic was an artifact of the roads being there in the first place.
People are highly adaptable. They take the path of least resistance. If that path is a road, they take it. If you make the road bigger, it reduces resistance and becomes busier.
Would traffic flow become infinitely fast if we removed them all?
Conversely, would it become infinitely slow if we paved every square inch of land in sight?
It's almost as if such simplistic models are worse than useless, huh.
I'd say that it's more like taking models to extremes is useless.
If your doctor says that you're consuming too much salt it is increasing your risk of a range of diseases, you don't turn around and say "But salt is necessary for the function of life, I can't just cut it out entirely!". The answer, as with most things - is somewhere in between.
With our current set of transport options - a mix of transport options are going to be optimal. The specific mix is going to depend entirely on the area and traffic patterns.
The only problem is cost. For a city to out build unmet demand they would need to get to add several dozen layers of road, one on top of another (that is bridges over bridges for 12 layers). Nobody would seriously propose building such a thing. If we had it the mobility of the city would allow people to accomplish more things in the city than they can today.
And if your number is low - you are not counting deferred maintenance which is huge in these systems
And rail has otherwise struggled in the US.
The amtrak story is not great. I've tried to use them repeatedly, and outside of northeast corridor it is cheaper to fly then to take them anywhere. Let that sink in, the cost to get you up in air, and FLY is cheaper than rolling along on low friction rails. When you say why is it hard to understand that rail is cheapest it's because folks KNOW that things like buses are MUCH MUCH cheaper.
This is ignoring the absolutely stupid cost to build one mile of rail tunnel.
Mass transit rail has hardly "struggled" in the US - it has high usage and conflating the distinction between mass transit rail and long distance rail is disingenuous when considering the usecases of Musks tunnels.
http://superexcavators.com/news/super-excavators-consult-mac...
There is no evidence of any improvements or innovations.
> He also drew upon the 67-year-old contracting company’s expertise to get going, with an ultimate goal of developing ways to dig tunnels faster
Not evidence I agree, but not entirely inconsistent with improvements.
Buying an of-the-shelf product and reverse engineering it, before building ones' own, is a very valuable step.
Haven't seen anything covered about what they've built or how it compares with anything else on the market.
https://tunnelinsider.com/everything-we-know-about-the-borin...
https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-the-boring-company-tunne...
I'd say the largest value add about Elon Musk is his ability to create a reality distortion field to convince large swathes of people to follow his dream.
I'm actually not being critical of Musk here. Jobs did this and you can see how transformative certain technologies have been as a result.
What you don't seem to understand is that the battery tech's problems currently are not the chemical process or format of the cells, but the volume. The volume of cells that we are able to produce. This is a major bottleneck of electric cars. It is not just some minor problem, it is a great fundamental problem.
This is also why tesla can churn out hundreds of thousands of cars with battery only, and with range of hundreds of miles, and where practically all other manufacturers in this price range are only able to do hybdrids with small batteries. This is not coincidence, this is because tesla has a gigafactory and those others do not and are subject to volume problems in the outside battery production chain.
So no this is not only about vision, Tesla (whether Musk himself or his engineers) identified a real problem, and engineered a real solution - the gigafactory.
> So no this is not only about vision, Tesla (whether Musk himself or his engineers) identified a real problem, and engineered a real solution - the gigafactory
So, Musk identified a problem (manufacturing batteries at scale), found a vendor with a solution (Panasonic) and sold it under the name Tesla.
Do you see my point now?
Not really, what is your point?
Every car manufacturer uses parts sourced from other companies - software, parts of engines, whole engines, whole gearboxes, complete modules, raw materials... That's how the industry works...
> and engineered a real solution
So, which is it? Did he outsource the parts like every other company or did he engineer a solution?
So not sure why you would focus on that superficial difference here, like what are you trying to prove? I don't understand your point. Elon Musk has a lot of results behind his companies to prove that he can engineer and a good ratio of technical terms and numbers he can spur off the top of his head in an interview to prove that he is not even mainly marketer, his brain is in engineering, he knows the technical stuff deeply down to revision numbers and decimal points and can give you an educated opinion on technical matters. So this shows you that he is indeed an engineer, not sure if that's your point even though?
Let's put it in perspective: London is covered by a network of small tunnels dedicated to cart mail around by autonomous vehicles. The tunnels were opened almost a century ago.
Musk has not proposed any improvements to the expensive parts of tunneling.
Versus an electric train. Theoretically, since the energy is transported into the tunnel via power lines, wouldn’t fire suppression and ventilation systems be cheaper since they wouldn’t need to handle so much stored energy potential (via batteries) traveling through a tunnel?
To answer your question: He’s not building subway tunnels. It’s tunnels for Tesla vehicles.
From the perspective of the city, the ROI of a subway train is high.
From the perspective of an individual, the ROI of using my own car in a tunnel, exactly when I want to, without parking, waiting, embarking, smelling the vagrants, disembarking, walking or getting a cab, ... Priceless!
What about everyone else and their cars?
My corrections in CAPS.
I don't think I need to say more, it should be obvious way tunnels for cars are a bad idea.
Weird then that he didn't ask the individual to pay for it.
Because if you keep downvoting every statement that you don’t agree with, that’s what you’ll soon have!
Simply using private funds without numerous contractors can decreases costs by an order of magnitude with no technological improvements.
NYC only has a big subway system because it gobbled up all the failing private railways over the years. LA used to have the largest rail transportation network in the world, it was private, and it too failed to turn a profit and failed. Transportation runs at a loss.
This is false. The biggest cost to tunnels is moving and replacing utility lines (power, internet, sewage, water, etc.) that were not properly recorded by private entities when they constructed their buildings.
It's precisely where government bureaucracy was involved that tunneling is the cheapest, because then moving and replacing the utility lines can happen all at once instead of over the course of months as the tunneling machine bores into them, and bureaucracy can coordinate road closures, utility shutoffs, etc.
Also, private entities use subcontractors not because bureaucracy requires it but because it lets them delegate out responsibility for areas in which they do not have competence for less than the cost of developing such competence in-house. It's simply the way the construction industry works. Even Joe Blow Contractor rebuilding someone's bathroom will hire contractors to do specific parts of the rebuild (like the plumbing, or the tiles). Another example: the SoFi Stadium in Inglewood has hundreds of subcontractors, and is fully privately funded.
It's not where technology has advanced, per se, but where he can find a niche that provides an excuse to not be constrained by existing burdensome regulation, or where he can shape and use regulation as a competitive advantage. So far this has mostly been by advances in tech, but the tech isn't necessarily the key component to the formula.
In the case of the boring company, I suspect the initial plan was the same (a la hyperloop), but have 1) discovered hyperloop is not cost feasible, 2) discovered that the same skills for negotiating regulation is itself a major advantage in subsurface construction, and 3) can use the Elon marketing hype machine to overcome NIMBY opposition, whether that be publicly or via politically (whereas people generally view mega construction companies as untrustworthy, and these companies are unlikely to be able to sway public opinion, except by maybe buying politicians.)
It's sort of an Uber approach to dodging rules, but in markets that limit competition by being relatively capital and knowledge intensive.
Not quite. The company has standard COTS tunneling equipment but an above par and well financed marketing and propaganda machine. That's it.
And hyperloop is another bullshit story as well.
Honestly as a 5 year old you are not going to get it.
This is multi levelled. Some people just like Elon. But what's really however interesting is how Elon is changing manufacturing. It's like a new Kanban
But it's not 5 year old stuff. I'd just say,
I know all the other kids like rockets and think they are cool to watch take off, but tunnels are pretty cool to watch too.... and so are processes but that's adult stuff for now kido (and give them a wink)
I know I was eternally annoyed at how much adults underestimated me growing up.
Saying it's adult stuff to children is demeaning and can temper enthusiasm and is a bad habit to get into.
Tunnel boring is a complex, multi-faceted civil engineering discipline with a large number of well-funded firms that are aggressively competing and innovating. In this space Elon is utterly insignificant.
The ELI5 version is: "Elon thinks he can dig tunnels faster and cheaper than anyone else, but so he's failed to demonstrate he can create even one useful tunnel. The only reason he's doing this is because he hates traffic and thinks that driving in a private tunnel will make it easier to get to work on time."
20 years ago you could have said much the same thing about Elon Musk and rocketry.
I guess if we're being pedantic, he also didn't bootstrap Tesla.
That doesn’t mean it doesn’t sometimes happen, but at this point there’s no evidence that the Boring Company is really doing anything particularly novel at this point...
SpaceX was also not really novel. Their engine, construction method and most things were pretty standard and not very impressive.
He has a knack for attracting nice attention and generally is a great marketeer for his brands and himself as a brand.
He's also great at extracting government funds.
> Does Elon dig them faster or more cheaply or something?
> Otherwise do I submit this to HN? https://www.sydneymetro.info/tunnelling
Someone already did [1] but it didn’t attract much interest.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/under-wraps-sydney-s-fir...
The fact is that megaprojects basically never come in anywhere near their schedule or budget. That's because of a selection bias. When you crunch the numbers honestly, megaprojects come out as a terrible on a cost-benefit or ROI analysis. The ones that get built are built by people who choose to ignore the honest figures in favour of the shiny, optimistic ones. Et voila, another farce.
There are lots of other factors, but that's the core one that precedes the others.
Houses typically go according to plan because so many of the processes and parts are standard. Even large mansions can go according to plan if you have good management (note that cheap management is rewarded for change orders and thus will ensure things don't go according to plan while better management will see that if they don't make a minor change now things won't go according to plan latter.
We do have ships, rockets, and a few other things that don't need wheels (tough they tend to have wheels of some form inside), but the wheel itself is still just incremental improvements on that first one way back...
[0] Best example of this sort of logic that I have seen implemented is painting the golden gate bridge, just one properly sized and experienced crew painting from one end to the other and back again without the boondoggle.
Otherwise every 20 years they would need to hire, train, then fire 200 painters for a 6 month-long paint job project. 200 painters, managers, and etc. who will invariably be less experienced with the finer points of painting said bridge since they don't do it every day.
The Project Production Institute take a similar view: that instead of modeling a project as a fixed thing, you focus on it as a production process.
That's before adding other factors such as increase regulation, inflation and good ol' corruption.
If all the businesses along the block you are trenching through back then went under... so fucking what?
If your 24/7 jackhammers kept all the block up the whole night you’d tell them to take a hike.... etc, etc, etc.
If turns out if you care about any or all of those things, your costs go up. Back then it was all just negative externalities that got foisted on the neighborhoods around them. Think of the negative externalities causes by our interstate highway system. Good luck building that now! It literally divided entire neighborhoods. The entire thing would be require to go into a tunnel under the city. No way would people tolerate that shit now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Avenue_Subway#Construct...
It seems that China does not suffer from this "cost disease", but I don't know any real facts.
We also have more complicated, and are dependent on, soft and hard power structures to access and use capital. A great place to start looking into these issues is Bent Flyvbjerg at Said, Oxford
[0] http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/new-york-infrastructu...
It has been my experience -- which some more "keepin it real" journalism concurs with -- that New York's outlandish infrastructure costs, as well as the majority of the USA's public projects, are primarily due to two main agents:
1. White collar bureaucracy
2. Blue collar "bureaucracy"
Both parties -- and the multitude of agents that operate within them -- are all too able to align their "piece" of the project towards their own interests.
These interests very much involve time and money.
For money, it's simply rerouting costs. And for time, it's "making one's mark," by misallocating resources to personally-enriching matters, that do not benefit the project as a whole, and usually hinder it.
It's late, and I'm not at 100% to go into detail, but surely this is well-known already?
I take the argument about selection bias from Brent Flyvbjerg, who has been studying megaprojects for a fair while now. He calls it "survival of the unfittest"[0].
A similar resource is Merrow's Industrial Megaprojects[1], which is based on a large dataset of such efforts. He identifies many factors in project overruns, but essentially notes that most projects start off with fanciful estimates that will never be met. For a book about petrochemical plants, bridges and power stations, it's a fun read.
[0] https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1409/1409.0003.pdf
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Industrial-Megaprojects-Concepts-Stra...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
I am not French, I don't live in France, I don't speak French and I am not particularly interested in tunnels or rails. And probably that's why it's the first time I hear about this. But I am not American either, and I don't live there, but I have read about the expensive few mile extension of a subway line in the Upper East Side of Manhattan and the failed attempts to build a high speed train between LA and San Francisco hundreds of times.
A project of that scale in one of the largest Western capitals goes relatively unnoticed outside of France mainly because of language.
Think about what else is lost. I bet there are thousands of businesses, and lots of culture which never get noticed mainly because of language.
Remarkably complacent view, and undermined by the fact that other channels will report on this stuff, but not the BBC. The point is firstly that the signal to noise used to be far higher in the UK - I've been watching it for 40 years - I know what I'm talking about - and secondly that it's extremely unlikely I'm going to learn anything new from Stormzy's poorly informed opinions. And yet the latter is prioritised over the former.
If you think the willingness of a news organization to publish something depends on how newsworthy it is, I guess all I can do is respond by quoting the Daily Mail Song:
Pop stars take drugs
Teen boys wear hoods
Sports stars have sex
Bears shit in woods
But that's still English news. I guess I can quote something else:
> the more lurid, titillating, sensational, or nationalistic, the better. Even the distinguished Xinhua News Service is not immune from this sort of thing. I couldn't help but chuckle when the podcast host Scott Peters worried whether or not the American press corps' obsession with non-stories like Kim Kardashian and Bruce/Catelynn Jenner would give it [Xinhua] a strategic advantage in the contest to control global media narratives. My guess is Mr. Peters doesn't read Xinhua too often. If I had few dollars [for] every time Xinhua placed a photo collage like "Beautiful Female Soldiers From All Over the World," "Singer Valen Hsu Poses For Fashion Shots," "Sleeping Babies With Their Cutest Pets," on their front page...
( http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2015/07/chinese-journalis... )
Newsworthiness is something that can force news organizations to begrudgingly give up space they would rather have allocated to -- going back to the song -- their photo feature on schoolgirl skirt styles. If you're watching the news because you're hoping to learn something, you're making a blatant category error; that's not what the news is for.
And "civil war in Africa" fits tabloid desires perfectly; it's lurid and violent, drawing readers or watchers, without being at all surprising or important.
Something like BBC news world or The Times will generally cover the more important global events.
It's amazing how he creates companies and solutions on a whim that revolutionize complete industries.
It takes longer to complete an environmental impact review to do a major project than it did to build the Golden Gate. And that's just one of several major red tape & time hurdles that didn't exist in 1933.
> According to CEQ, the average length of a full-blown Environmental Impact Statement is currently 600 pages and takes 4.5 years to conclude. US federal agencies prepare approximately 170 such assessments per year.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/09/white-ho...
Planning/zoning will kill you, it's simply illegal to build most types of houses in most of the US. There was a recent blog post about this I can't find, but it outlined all the houses that exist that are now practically illegal. For example, mixed use where there's a business on the ground floor. Or building 3 stories in a 2-story zone. Or having an ADU. The list is endless. In fact my current town just made it illegal to build single family units next to multi-family (with a buffer), and we only have two places in the town where you're allowed to build office space. Retail is slightly better, there are three places that's okay.
If you get through planning, then permits will kill you. The permits to demolish our place (different town!) were more than buying a new house. I'm not kidding.
If you get through permits then good luck with inspections.
What musk is doing with tunnels is what the entire tech industry is doing: working in a zone with a lot less rules. It's illegal to make a building but you can make any website you want. Though that is going away too, it'll get regulated to death eventually and you can already see it starting to happen with data and privacy laws.
The main escape from all this, as far as I've been able to find, is Texas. It's apparently still legal to build things there.
Just the whole GDPR compliance and showing the cookie alert is a PITA if you're going to run any small online business. And it will get much worse.
It seems to me like building a house is more like a doing a complex tree fitting problem then actual design.
[1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/1/14112776/ne...
Channel Tunnel suffered significant delays and additional costs for instance because the brackets supporting cable and pipe runs needed to be taken down after everything had been installed because of a latent design defect and replaced.
Imagine how long it takes to pull 20+km of cable off the wall.
Also, compared to other construction sites, tunnels are a different beast, you often need to transport huge amounts of materials, people and equipment long distances to get to your work-front (and back again). It might be a straight line, but it's still far.
As much as I love the Channel Tunnel (my father was an engineer on it and I grew up during the construction) the actual outrun cost benefit ratio just isn't there. Extra ferries probably would have been more economical.
Yes it is exactly that. A lot faster and much cheaper. Please watch the initial boring company presentation, the motivation is presented like in the first minutes. It is not like they are trying to hide anything, they are very open about what is new with their technology.
The old quote about rich people using public transit applies : my personal preference is to live in an (european) city with a great public transport system.
This all just seems like subways from first principles but probably worse.
I think putting cars in these tunnels is silly and that subways are obviously the best answer personally, but I'm also watching two new light rail lines being put in next to my house. It does not seem quick (though they're elevated). It'd be lovely if those tracks were somehow underground faster and cheaper than above ground.
I'm happy enough it's finally happening, but if it could be done economically in a way that reclaimed the land the rail lines are on to make a park or more housing? And without trains driving by my windows on both sides? Maybe the boring machine itself is somehow better than what we dig tunnels now.
In SF, they spent years surveying, moving utilities, excavating stations, etc., dug the actual tunnel in (IIRC) a year, and have spent subsequent years finishing all of the other stuff that makes it more than a hole in the ground.
[*] About their property values
Maybe the whole thing could have been done in half the time without public meetings, but that’s neither here nor there. The work of moving utilities and keeping sinkholes from forming in downtown SF is still incredibly complex, and seems to me to make up the bulk of the schedule.
Don't believe the hype that this is "under a city." It's under a bunch of parking lots, which have little to zero underground utilities or other infrastructure.
It's not like they're burrowing under New York. But it might be good practice.
And we understandably should be wary of any innovation in processes.
Because often it is just cutting corners for safety and reliability.
Even if you had ideal conditions or an amazing new TBM that goes through any material, you're still dealing with a machine that scrapes at rocks for miles on end. The parts that do the digging need constant replacement, underground, on the inconvenient side of the boring machine, and even if you did the actual digging faster that'd mean repairing it even more often.
I think the only time it's moving close to high-rises again is over by the University.
Edit: I believe they went so deep because of the volume of glacial deposits in this area. Otherwise they would have been going through gravel. That made building the stations a bit of a pain (the Beacon Hill station still has chronic problems with water. It smelled like a moldy towel for a long time).
He’s trying to parlay his life’s work into civilization on Mars. Everything he’s investing time and energy into has uses here, today, but the prize he has his eye on is not here.
Does making a tunnel boring machine lighter or smaller have advantages? Sure, if the machines get used to dig more than one tunnel then a more portable design will begin to develop. But nobody is worried about paying well over $1000/lbs to move the damn thing. And nobody is worried about how big a parachute you need to land it in Martian atmosphere without breaking it.
Knowing Musk, he isn’t spending time on this plan if it does nothing for his dream. Therefore there’s a connection. What might that be? What would digging large holes have to do with sending people to an environment with barely any atmosphere and massive sandstorms? Oh.
I expect solving that problem will take ages. If he starts now he might have some major progress by the time he’s gotten a few missions to Mars. By the time habitat management is a problem he may have something that is pretty crazy but not insane.
I also expect that when spending another $1000/lbs on cutting surfaces represents a net savings, you’ll see him working with some pretty bizarre and exotic materials. What that would be will come as a surprise to me, since I haven’t paid any attention to materials science since about the time they started making synthetic diamond.
Or maybe tunneling speed simply isn't the bottleneck so no one ever tried going faster. If it takes 3 months to dig out the tunnel but 6 months to fit it out then you've gained nothing.
But nobody wants to be the one who signs off on "long sections of major roads closed for months at a time over a period of several years".
Sure you can. I ride such a line every week day.
True about the most direct route, but having uncontested right of way tends to make a big difference in travel times. And in grid layouts, where you want to go is closely aligned to how you get there.
The big advantage is creating tunnels with a smaller diameter, allowing them to dig much quicker. So much space is wasted between each subway car that a large diameter isn't necessary.
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/why-its-so-ex...
It's not comparable to real mass transit systems used on the scale of a city and the length of the tunnel means that the public really can't view the cost of this as comparable to the cost of a real Subway system tunnel or road tunnel.
The relevance of the project for TBC is that they're going to learn from it, but for the rest of us it's really not going to be that interesting.
The Strip itself could use the whole length of the tunnel, so whatever this is connecting to is going to be more limited then it might sound from the article.
It still sort of amazes me that CES hasn't collapsed under its own weight. Comdex did. CeBIT finally did. I thought it was finally going to happen about a decade ago when Microsoft pulled out; that's the usual "emperor has no clothes" moment. But it kept on going.
Here's the list of big conventions this year:
CES: 175,000 people
Automotive Aftermarket Show: 160,000
ConExpo-Con/Agg: 129,000
National Association of Broadcasters: 103,000
MAGIC (fashion/makeup, I believe): 78,0000
International Builders Show: 68,000
Shooting, Hunting & Outdoor Trade Show: 61,000
World of Concrete: 60,000
National Mining Association: 50,000
Las Vegas Market, Winter: 50,000
Las Vegas Market, Summer: 50,000
ASD Market Week Winter: 46,000
Mr. Olympia: 45,000
ASD Market Week Summer: 44,000
Nightclub and Bar Show: 39,000
Audiovisual and Integrated Experience: 38,000
RECon: 37,000
Of those I listed, only the Automotive Aftermarket show is also at the Sands.
The expansion isn't to handle larger shows, it's to handle more large shows simultaneously.
Also not listed is the NFR Rodeo which is big enough to be held at the UNLV stadium, plus the expo center, plus over a dozen hotels. I think that one is around 103,000 people.
"LVCC Loop will connect the LVCC New Exhibit Hall with the existing campus (North/Central/South Halls). Three stations locations (see map below) will offer convenient access between key LVCC destinations and nearby transportation connections."
Getting around Vegas in general is a pain. What transportation systems there are aren't integrated. And individual casinos/conference centers are so sprawling that, as this project shows, you practically (or do) need transit systems just to get around a single property.
ADDED: The Boring Company page shows "conceptual future expansion" to a ton of other locations. Those other locations include Los Angeles so I'll leave it to readers to judge how realistic those are.
It also says that they’re 6 football fields in: 1800 ft. This is only 35% of the stated mile length for the tunnel. Under what metric is this tunnel or project 50% complete?
https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/conventions/boring-co...
So I think the Teslarati article just rounded 4,300 feet up to "a mile" (=5,280 feet). 1900/4300 = 44%.
Musk as a company leader means a lot. I’m sure a lot of other people had the idea for a “Tesla” before there was Tesla. Or the idea of self-landing rockets.
There's no difference between a tunnel and a tunnel.
In the case of Boring, a tunnel is a tunnel, but if they can make them cheap and fast, that opens up a bunch of possibilities for improving transit.
The "if" in this sentence is doing a lot of work.
With SpaceX, it's very clear how they're getting the >10X cost efficiencies. Rockets are massively expensive to build, and instead of building a new one for each launch and throwing them away as part of the mission, SpaceX is reusing each rocket many times. Their next-gen architecture BFR will be reusable dozens of times. So it's super obvious how SpaceX is putting things into orbit cheaply.
This is not true at all for tunnel construction, though. SpaceX is using largely the same technology (tunnel-boring machines) and is going to have all the same problems going through permitting, land acquisition, entrance/exit construction, etc., same as anyone else. It's not clear at all what fundamental advantage they have that would allow them to do this stuff much more cheaply.
Several things come to mind:
1. There are lots of places with lower density than city centers, but higher density than suburbs that would benefit massively from underground transportation.
2. Smaller tunnels running everywhere will be very useful for package delivery! John McCarthy (the man that gave us LISP) explains it in detail here: http://jmc.stanford.edu/commentary/future/delivery.html
3. Let's not discount the strong likelihood of further cost reductions. The Boring Company has made huge strides already, with further cost and speed gains to be had from a TBM they are designing and building from scratch: https://www.teslarati.com/boring-company-line-storm-tunnelin...
I might be biased given where my friends work, but how do you know that calling it a "marketing ploy" isn't an overly-cynical view of things? After all, Musk sees more cost reductions coming, and his track record has been pretty good (if a bit late at times).
I also have some questions for you that I hope can resolve things:
1. Do you believe it is possible to do better than the infrastructure projects in other countries that you cite?
2. Do you agree that it would be a good thing if they succeed in making tunnels far cheaper than they are anywhere else in the world?
Finally, I hope that my tone does not come across to you as being negative in any way. I do not mean to sound strident, overconfident, or for any of the above to come across as a put-down. I mean no harm!
It was so bumpy that multiple journalists got motion sickness and puked during the demo rides.
As for LA, you've had ample opportunity to expand your subway system over the past decades to solve this problem, it's just never actually been done. It's not clear how Boring Company changes anything. I would love to be wrong about this, but I'm not seeing it.
It turns out the expensive part was not the digging. It was moving undisclosed utility lines and building the stations. Moving undisclosed utility lines is almost singlehandedly the reason the regional connector and Crenshaw lines are over budget.
And subways have relatively few surface interfaces compared to what you'd need to build to move the same amount of people in cars. Come to Manhattan and look at the massive, multi-block entrances to the Lincoln Tunnel, Holland Tunnel, Midtown Tunnel, etc. You're talking billions worth in real estate acquisition costs, demolition, and construction just to build a new tunnel entrance in the city, completely ignoring the tunnel cost itself.
And these tunnels move fewer people per day than the most-used subway stations, which are easier to integrate into the urban environment because you only need to build stairways and a couple elevators, not massive ramps and road connections for vehicles.
Well, certainly Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning had the idea for Tesla before Musk was involved.
I think it makes total sense. Rail is so much more complex when compared to an electric bus.
In London I have a thousand options, and every single one of them is clogged at 6 pm. People stay extra hour at work because there is no way for them all to get home.
Imagine having real bike lanes (and not getting killed) where you'd be able to use e-bikes and e-scooters. Imagine pooling electric car with your neighbour in a Boring tunnel. Even when it's slower you are not a sardine in a sweaty, hearing-damaging tube.
Bikes/scooter are last mile transport, sure, you can squeeze another 10% capacity out of them or whatever. Maybe another 10% from car pooling. That's it. The only way to get more throughput on the surface is to replace cars with buses. The only way to get more throughput underground is to expand the tube. It does not need to be sweaty or ear damaging, in Prague our metro is really nice, and so is the one in Madrid.
The boring tunnel is basically useless, a hundred of them will move less people than a single tube line.
There is no space in central megacities for cars and the sooner you people realise that, the sooner we can start solving the problem.
I guess it makes sense to listen in when someone who has shown to be more than a one hit wonder tries to do more of these things.
Also, I think the point here is the hypothetical way that cars can be moved in the tunnels which makes the smaller size still useful.
In short: Small autonomous vehicles instead of big subway cars means you can change the model from one of big stations with big heavy trains that must speed up and slow down constantly to let people in and out, to one with smaller pods that go directly from a specific origin to a destination, travels mostly entirely at their top speed, never have to slow down for stops or other vehicles, etc.
Also, the tunnels for this can be smaller and therefore exponentially cheaper to dig.
Here is an analysis of why Musk's tunnels are ridiculous. I used to believe in them too, so you can trust that this completely changed my opinion. Facts are more important than magic, people.
https://vitalvegas.com/elon-musks-tunnel-project-is-underway...
Big Bertha - 3.5 years, ~1.75 miles, 1.5 m/yr
Boring - .15 years, .35 miles, 2.33 m/yr
edit: Oops I accidentally misunderstood your questioning. Surely that must be miles per year.
But I will note that "m" is used in the common distance-over-time unit of mph.
That's a little more than 1 mile/yr, an average number that includes overhead like moving the TBMs between the different boring sites. And the cutting surface area (which multiplies linear speed to give material removal rate) is (20/14)^2 = 2.04 times bigger for Crossrail than the Boring Co. machines.
Why not compare against a tunnel borer of the same size?
The world's fastest tunnel borer of that size was for the tunneling of the blue mountains (described here: https://www.therobbinscompany.com/the-worlds-fastest-tbm/). That was more than 25 years ago and even at it's average speed over the whole project, it was doing 1800ft 4 times faster than Boring company's "amazingly fast" borer.
A more typical example boring through very hard rock does ~700 ft per month: https://www.therobbinscompany.com/midhalton/
Or how about a larger tunnel w/ 160gal/s of water inflow doing 1600ft in a month: https://www.therobbinscompany.com/gerede-breakthrough/
If there's something special about the Boring company (unlikely) it's definitely not its boring ability. They just buy a used boring machine and they don't even have the expertise to do anything interesting with it.
Rockets were a small enough niche that there were improvements possible if someone invested in them. It isn't clear if such improvements are even possible. (meaning they might be)
Big Bertha dug under the downtown of a city with existing tunnels and utilities. The Las Vegas tunnel is mostly under parking lots with no obstructions.
> With a typical minimum depth of 30 feet, The Boring Company tunnels are well beneath most utilities, which are typically less than 10 feet below the surface. In circumstances where a utility is located deeper, the tunnel depth is increased accordingly.
I've been to the site. I've seen the machines and the pit. I have no doubt about what I've seen.