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Comment by ipqk | Hacker News Reader

The Boring Company is a failure. He's had many other failures within companies: automated driving, Tesla solar panels

Though he's the CEO of SpaceX, it's really run by Gwynne Shotwell.

You look at his wikipedia, and there's like 10 different things he's currently involved with, so yes, he looks like a guy that gets bored and moves on the other things.

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The Boring Company is not a failure. It's actually a major success, for Tesla. It successfully led a generation of politicians and journalists think that there's no need for public transportation, that Elon Musk will solve all our infrastructure needs. It's a modern day GM Streetcar.

> successfully led a generation of politicians and journalists think that there's no need for public transportation

What makes you believe this? And that Musk was responsible for it?

It's not far fetched when he brought back the hyperloop in fashion to kill USA high speed rail.

https://i.redd.it/n76d16xg94h91.jpg

California high speed rail (the only real attempt at high speed rail in the US) didn’t need Musk to kill it, it killed itself due to incompetence in building quickly and affordably. This is a shame, because an actually affordable, working high speed rail system in America would be amazing, but won’t happen until we learn how to build again quickly and affordably in America. And who knows how to do that? Elon Musk!

I don't think it makes sense to compare a giant, multibillionaire organization like Twitter to something like the Boring Company, which was never really intended to be a main venture.

I would wait for the first product to launch before pronouncing a company dead, which should be fairly soon: https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/traffic/officials-aim-to...

They already launched a "Loop" in Vegas, and it's a small tunnel with manned taxis running in it, operated by the city. And it took longer from project start to inauguration, per mile, than the Channel tunnel linking the UK and France.

That’s false.

The LVCC Loop started boring in 15 November 2020 and opened to the public on 15 April 2021 - so 5 months, for the 2.7km. The Channel tunnel began construction in June of 1988 and opened for freight trains in June of 1994, so 72 months for the 50.4km.

So, the LVCC was built at 0.54 km/month, while the Channel tunnel was buildlt at 0.7 km/month.

Which part is false?

Isn’t it expected that a longer tunnel would take less time to build per mile than a shorter one? That just seems obvious. Just like how a 2000 square foot house isn’t going to take twice as long to build as a 1000 square foot house.

Not really - especially when that longer tunnel is an international project and is being drilled under the sea, not a straight line in a desert.

Now calculate km per month per dollar.

I didn't say anything about cost in my initial post. Still, you're right that the cost difference is hugely in favor of the LVCC tunnel if we only look at length.

However, if we look at freight+people crossing the tunnels, the Channel tunnel surely wins again - it may be roughly 10 times more expensive per km, but it carries orders of magnitudes more, by rail + by car.

Why would the boring company be a failure?

I expect creating tunnels 20 years from now as important as right now.

Traffic jams are not going away magically, but automation can bring the cost of creating tunnels down, which can increase the total market significantly.

Time is helping the company (just like other projects Elon has started), so there's no rush to scale up and turn profit.

How are tunnels solving traffic jams?

Not solving but alleviating, by rerouting transiting traffic through bypass routes underground. For example, in Washington DC:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9th_and_12th_Street_Expressway...

But does rerouting traffic through other bypasses actually alleviate traffic?

> Motorways and bypasses generate traffic, that is, produce extra traffic, partly by inducing people to travel who would not otherwise have done so by making the new route more convenient than the old, partly by people who go out of their direct route to enjoy the greater convenience of the new road, and partly by people who use the towns bypassed because they are more convenient for shopping and visits when through traffic has been removed

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

Do look at the "Studies" section of the same article, too.[1] It is far from established that induced demand outweighs the capacity increase from road construction.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand#Studies

Mayors of big towns are clearing city centers from cars and making them walkable again anyways (at least in Europe, I don’t know how it is being done in other places). If tunnels are the shortest path to get from one part of the city to another (like in Zurich), cars will use them.

A traffic network's purpose is to move people from point A to point B. If you double the lanes and they fill up, you've doubled the throughput. If traffic doesn't move any faster, it's because the old traffic jams were a bigger problem than was visible. You've still alleviated the issue by allowing twice as many people to reach their destination in the same amount of time.

There's an argument that assumes that building more lanes does not increase the number of people who travel, only the number of people who choose to do so by car. Then with fewer lanes, the same number of people still get from A to B but on bicycles or using public transport instead of cars.

These photos illustrate it well:

https://www.streetroots.org/news/2015/04/03/streets-are-ever...

Less cars on the road solves traffic jams. Not more roads. Traffic jams are insane, we see a single person sitting alone in a 3+ ton box idling his time and instead of seeing how absurd it is, we want to make bigger roads for more almost empty boxes. Nuts. The solution to traffic jams is excellent public transportation and last mile mobility. Not more roads and definitely not tunnels.

Tunnels don't really solve the problem well - they cost too much for what they do, and don't even do it well. Public transport (specifically expanding trains + e-bikes) is a much better, easier and already available solution.

The Boring Company takes machines made by other companies, and digs tunnels that anyone with those machines can dig to provide a solution that is largely impractical.

Pretty easy to get rid of traffic jams actually, you just get rid of the cars. Never been stuck in traffic in places where there aren't cars.

So throw the baby out with the bath water? Great plan.

In cities? Yes. You start preferencing more space efficient modes of transport, and traffic jams go away, while transport time decreases. If you’re going to put a tunnel with fixed access points under a city, it makes a lot more sense to run trains than private cars.

If you’re going to have a 4 lane road reserve two of the lanes for super high capacity vehicles (busses).

Traffic jams are a byproduct of the limits of physics. Once you reach a certain density it is simply impossible to provide enough private car parking and lane capacity.

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