Elon Musk’s Boring Company Ghosts Cities Across America | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk’s Boring Company Ghosts Cities Across America

wsj.com

105 pointsdanso70 comments

I still don't understand why people (or cities) are excited about the Boring Company when subways and other forms of public transportation have existed for hundreds of years, and are much more efficient at their job (solving traffic).

Because the people who are excited about the boring company clearly do not understand anything about how a typical subway functions. For the cities, they do know better, they often compared these projects against the cost of rail transit, they just got fleeced by Boring company that straight up made up numbers apparently about project costs with no intention to deliver. Like it would be a comparison of a 1 billion dollar light rail or a supposedly 48 million dollar underground right of way, that's damn attractive for cities.

It was very cathartic to see the traffic jam in the LA boring loop.

"He Fixed Traffic" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p8NiM_p8n5A

man that would make me totally claustrophobic trapped in the car

That tunnel is way to narrow, what happens in the event of an emergency or breakdown?

That's probably going to be a very rare scenario. It is not as if Teslas spontaneously catch on fire out of nowhere

Then you are evidently not paying attention: https://www.vice.com/en/article/884kvk/why-the-us-sucks-at-b... or https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgym5j/heres-how-the-us-can-....

Costs are currently prohibitive and we're suffering terrible, self-inflicted wounds in the form of costs.

So the solution is to build a system with all the same flaws, but loses every benefit offered by traditional public transit systems?

The US is obviously bad at public transit, but the solution isn't to build tunnels for cars.

You say that like it's obvious, but to Americans who can't imagine life without cars, it just isn't.

I think that is not entirely true. I'm sure everyone in Chicago, Boston or New York understands how many cars it would take to replace public transit.

And how much space they'd need to clear in their cities to make room for those cars.

Even in San Francisco. The amount of people the Bay Bridge serves in congested rush hour traffic (14,000 people one direction) is just half the people the Transbay tube serves inside BART trains (27,000 one direction).

Without the Transbay tube you’d need 2 more bay bridges to accommodate the additional traffic, and there is no way you could fit all those cars on the San Francisco streets, not even if they rebuilt the waterfront highway.

https://youtu.be/HbZXtSnabWc?t=226

Those people are a very small minority of Americans, and I never said "all Americans", but rather "Americans who can't imagine life without cars", which is probably most of them.

The United States spent a century with the heavily promoted ideal being a world where each adult drives everywhere. The concept of induced demand ensuring congestion was understood for almost that long but the image was popular, especially starting in the 1950s when de jure segregation in cities had to be replaced with de facto segregation in suburbs.

Boring tunnels, like self-driving cars, offers the appealing vision of saying you can remove a lot of daily misery with this one relatively cheap technology and won’t have to make any deeper changes.

It's even worse than you think: "Boring says it can improve tunneling speeds with fully electrified machines and by digging continuously, rather than stopping to assemble sections of the tunnel wall"

Boring Co has so few people who know what they're doing that they don't even know why tunnel walls are built continuously as the tunnel is bored. (Hint: it's done to avoid cave-ins!)

Boring Co's "speed improvements" are literally just from ignoring the safety considerations and logistics behind why their competitors all do things the way they do.

This is like crypto re-discovering financial history, except that Boring Co's mistakes could literally kill someone. And I hope Elon's in the tunnel when the walls finally collapse on this face.

Now that I live in a city with a good train system (Chicago), a plan to alleviate traffic in large cities by boring tunnels for more cars sounds incredibly inefficient, and clearly driven by Musk's incentive to sell cars.

Don't get me wrong, I live in the Loop and don't own a car, but when I rent one, Lower Wacker Drive is kind of magic... (I think it helps that GPS doesn't work down there so lots of people are scared to use it).

There's no way to alleviate traffic in large cities with cars; it just isn't possible as long as you require everyone to have a car. Making roads wider just brings more cars as people move farther away and have to drive more, making more traffic and more calls to make more and wider roads, etc.

And you would have to create parking space for all those cars. Cities have very expensive land. I suppose you could turn central park into a parking lot.

Even that wouldn't work, because then how do you get from Central Parking Lot to the building in Manhattan that you want to go to? To many NYC car-friendly, you need to demolish most of the buildings so you can put huge parking lots around the ones that remain. Then the roads won't be wide enough, so you'll need to demolish more buildings to make wider roads. Pretty soon, there won't be anything there besides roads, parking lots, and a handful of buildings, and no one will want to go there, they'll want to go someplace else that has more buildings and things to do, and then the traffic in that place will be too much and people will complain.

Edit: To make NYC car-friendly...

Maybe Boring Co. isn't ready to scale to multiple cities at once. They did accept the Vegas 29 mile tunnel deal and have completed four stops of it, starting with the convention center:

https://www.dezeen.com/2022/07/01/vegas-loop-boring-company-...

Even in that case instead of the original high speed skates allowing your car to go 600mph in the tunnels, it's taxis going 35 MPH in tunnels... so underwhelming.

Max allowed 10 months ago was 40 MPH and the reasoning is the tunnels are connected to each other with off areas where they connect.

Nobody wants to trust drivers doing 90 MPH with vehicles ahead at an absolute stop trying to get out at their connection area.

Guanajuato will throw all y’all for a real loop, then.

There's little need to go 600 in a stretch of just a mile or two. The tunnel has a limited length and is nowhere close to finished. The 600 mph figure was quoted by hyperloop, which is a proposal by Musk but not an actual business owned by him. Boring Co is building tunnels for electric cars. They will not have a top speed of 600 at any point. Certainly if hyperloop tech gets built at practical scale in the future and if tunnels are needed for parts of it, it would make sense to use boring co for that leg. But the original design of hyperloop was above ground in elevated tubes.

From Reddit,

> Originally, TBC submitted an unsolicited proposal to build a tunnel for the county. This tunnel would cost $45 million (fixed). TBC pitched the idea, and the board was sold, but wanted to expand the project. They split it into 3 phases, the first of which would be environmental impact assessments and other project management tasks. This was awarded to another contractor (not TBC), who designed a system involving a 24 foot diameter tunnel, effectively shutting TBC out of bidding (TBC uses 12 ft diameter tunnels). It is this project, designed by another contractor and completely unrelated to the thing TBC proposed, that blew up to a $500 million estimate. Part of the contract was that this company who did the proposal would also oversee the engineering of the final project, which is something TBC presumably wasn't interested in so they didn't bid.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BoringCompany/comments/z75yc0/comme...

Paywall seems to be down on this article. Here's the first grafs/opening anecdote for convenience:

> ONTARIO, Calif.—The unsolicited proposal from Elon Musk’s tunnel-building venture arrived in January 2020. To the local transportation authority, it felt like finding Willy Wonka’s golden ticket.

> Officials had started planning for a street-level rail connection between booming Ontario International Airport and a commuter train station 4 miles away, with an estimated cost north of $1 billion. For just $45 million, Mr. Musk’s Boring Co. offered to instead build an underground tunnel through which travelers could zip back and forth in autonomous electric vehicles.

> Dazzled by Boring’s boasts that it had revolutionized tunneling, and the cachet of working with the billionaire head of EV maker Tesla Inc., the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority dumped plans for a traditional light rail and embraced the futuristic tunnel.

> When it came time to formalize the partnership and get to work, Boring itself went underground—just as it has done in Maryland, Chicago and Los Angeles. Boring didn’t submit a bid for Ontario by the January 2022 deadline.

> The six-year-old company has repeatedly teased cities with a pledge to “solve soul-destroying traffic,” only to pull out when confronted with the realities of building public infrastructure, according to former executives and local, state and federal government officials who have worked with Mr. Musk’s Boring. The company has struggled with common bureaucratic hurdles like securing permits and conducting environmental reviews, the people said.

> “Every time I see him on TV with a new project, or whatever, I’m like: Oh, I remember that bullet train to Chicago O’Hare,” said Chicago Alderman Scott Waguespack. Boring had backed away from its proposal for a high-speed tunnel link to the airport there.

> Mr. Musk and Steve Davis, president of Boring, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Ha, forgot about all this. The Chicago one seemed perfect for Boring Co. They already did the complicated expensive stuff - the stations were built and sit "ready". An electrical substation is there - unlimited power available on-site. All they need are the tunnels. And if Boring Co can't manage that, what can they do?

They already did the complicated expensive stuff - like build it. It's called the blue line.

Nothing has ever been more obviously fake than that tunnel, when a functional 24h subway already runs the exact route and then some.

an express system to and from the airport would be nice, sort of like the heathrow express

blue line to the loop is a lot of stops and takes almost a hour

would people actually use it/is it worth it? who knows

Jalopnik had an article supposing Musk’s Hyperloop was just a ploy to subvert California's high-speed rail project.[1] Hanlon's razor seems applicable here, but that's not necessarily more flattering for Boring. Seems like a case where the hard part of deploying underground infrastructure in major metropolitan areas isn't actually digging through the dirt.

[1] https://jalopnik.com/did-musk-propose-hyperloop-to-stop-cali...

As an example for your last point, boring the tunnels for London's Elizabeth Line (Crossrail) began in May 2009 and was finished by June 2015. But the line didn't open until May 2022.

Amsterdam is infamous. A swamp with centuries old buildings that are classed as monuments.

But on the positive side: subway systems are long term projects. After a few decades everyone but historians will have forgotten the cost and hardships. I'm sure Crossrail will be used by millions of people every year.

Peoe need to stop waving around Hanlon's Razor. Ya know, if you'd just let stupidity qualify as malice like it should, maybe there'd be an actual decrease in the amount of it that goes unresolved.

I feel like stupid is at least quantifiable. We just tolerate a lot of stupid.

> subvert California's high-speed rail project.

HSR is doing a fine job subverting itself. Even if it completes in the optimistic case of 20 years, autonomous electric vehicles are likely to be mainstream. Some possibility of electric planes capable of the SFO/LAX route. With CA's push to renewables and electric vehicles, CO2 differences aren't likely to matter.

HSR will be the slower, lower end, option at a higher price just like Amtrak is now.

I think it's fine to doubt whether HSR will exist. But if the plans are built as designed it will take about three hours from San Francisco to LA: it's hard to imagine any autonomous vehicle matching that speed. Similarly, the problem with flying from SF to LA isn't the choice of plane fueling, it's the hassle of going to the airport and passing through security.

Even eliminating the security and the getting to the airport, there's still the wait to check a bag if you have to check one, the wait to board the plane, the need to be on the plane 15 mins before takeoff or they seal the doors, the wait for everyone to get their stuff out of the overhead when the plane lands, then if you are checking a bag, at the end the wait to get your bag again if it shows up at all. Not to mention it could all go south at any moment, maybe the plane lands at LAX, but then an LAX happens and the pilot says there isn't a gate yet so you twiddle your thumbs on the tarmac for another 45 mins. Oh and then the fact that no airline wants to be straight with you with ticket pricing being dynamic and the whole experience of trying to time buying your ticket at the proper time. Its like they've all taken a playbook from ticketmaster, or maybe satan.

I've never heard of Satan being as evil as Ticketmaster. I think this is insulting to Satan.

I think its even more optimistic to assume autonomous vehicles are likely to be mainstream, much less in 20 years. They don't even exist yet, meanwhile high speed trains are proven 70 year old technology. Electric cars have been out for over 10 years now and they aren't even taking over.

>The unsolicited proposal from Elon Musk’s tunnel-building venture arrived in January 2020

>Boring didn’t submit a bid for Ontario by the January 2022 deadline

Doesn't seem surprising while the world was in the grips of covid with an uncertain end date.

the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority dumped plans for a traditional light rail

The key purpose of Boring Co pretending to be interested in building in Ontario was always to torpedo this project.

https://archive.ph/mMXqb

Whatever. Let them work things out in Las Vegas first before getting into complicated paperwork-heavy projects elsewhere. Anything in California is ultimately going to go to the bidder with the most experience navigating CEQA bureaucracy.

But they offered to do it, wtf? Not being asked.

They didn't submit a bid.

It's fairly typical for the bidding process to be designed to favor political allies - we saw this in the space industry prior to SpaceX for example.

Behind paywall, but I believe it has already been leaked that this was Elons way of sabotaging public infrastructure projects that he considered a danger to his car company.

Elon seems so paranoid. No potential Tesla customers are going to see the california high speed rail project and say that because of this project they are now out of the market for a Tesla which they will mainly be using for sub 20 minute trips around town.

> Elon seems so paranoid.

Honestly, I would just call him malicious, not paranoid. He has made it clear that he hates public transport, as in the idea of using it (in that it is crowded and such...). This is of course funny because we all know that Musk has never in his life used a regular city Bus or even a train. I think it is safe to assume that he would do something like this not for monetary profit, but simply out of spite.

We are talking about a guy that pays tens of thousands of dollars just for the attempt to discredit and harass a rescue diver he doesn't like... [1]

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-16/musk-reve...

> we all know that Musk has never in his life used a regular city Bus or even a train

I’m skeptical, and this CNBC article quotes Elon refuting it:

> According to Musk, he does, in fact, "actually love trains, most subways and London buses." From https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/21/elon-musk-versus-twitter-on-...

"Of course I love you baby, I would never cheat on you! Don't worry about that bill for a horse!"

This has not been 'leaked', somebody wrote an opinion piece asserting it to be the case without any serious evidence.

Elon told his biographer that he came up with hyperloop to kill plans for California high speed rail.

No he didn't. In fact you can read a whole article with that biographer where he disagrees with the article.

What Elon actually said is that if California (in his opinion the most advanced place in the world) would invest so much in a system, it should be world leading and novel.

I think Musk is wrong about that and Hyperloop isn't actually better then HSR but there is no reason to just make up a conspiracy.

It's an interpretation from this excerpt of his biography:

https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1167410460125097990

The actual biographer disagrees with the opinion of that author.

And being for cancellation (something money people want) of HSR is not the same 'hyperloop was made up as grift to get HSR canceled.

>And being for cancellation (something money people want)

"ἡ γλῶττα λανθάνουσα τὰ ἀληθῆ λέγει"

- Μένανδρος

I’m consistently surprised when people don’t evaluate Elon musks companies (sans Twitter which IMO was a bipolar mania induced fiasco) in the only lens that matters - the creation of the end to end infrastructure for building a persistent colony on mars. The boring companies only purpose is to provide the tools for living on a planet with no magnetosphere. The rest of this is just how to secure funding and apply R&D in preparation.

It’s not like he’s not been transparent about this.

Sadly he’ll be too busy conducting code reviews on check mark images to succeed in his vision.

You're consistently surprised that people don't evaluate Musk's companies based on his unrealistic pipedream of a Martian colony instead of their real worth (or damage) to the public?

That is surprising, indeed.

No, he's surprised that people don't look at Musk's actions with those companies based on his unrealistic pipedream.

There is nothing illogical about assuming someone may be somewhat crazy and then looking at their actions stemming from their crazy motivation.

Saying that's "the only lens that matters" is a specific value judgement. Other people can value other things like the viability of that vision, competence to achieve it, impact of the means used along the way, financial return of the intermediate steps, entertainment value of incidental shitposting, etc etc.

Other people aren't required to use your values to evaluate whether they consider a venture successful and you aren't required to use theirs. FWIW I don't know why that would be a surprise to you.

Further musk doesn't strike me as particularly honest in his self-representation. Saying things isn't quite the same as transparency; it can nearly be in cases where the speaker is especially trustworthy but I don't see that to be the case here.

When you’re judging his motivations I posit your value system matters not at all. His motivations are his motivations regardless of your values.

Yes and his motivations per se are not available to us to scrutinize. His explanation of his motivations are one piece of information we have about them among many others. Choosing to dismiss all the others in favor of that single piece of information is a choice you can make, yes. But it's not the only choice, not the most "pure" or neutral or correct. You could weigh the man's word so highly, value it such that, you personally need no other information. But then we're back where we started.

We already have the technology to make tunnels. Boring Co's tunneling machines are all machines they purchased from other companies and mildly customized.

News flash: all boring machines are customized on site to the specific needs of each project. Boring Co wasn't even the first company to modify their boring machine to use electric power. They were just the only ones to brag about doing something that many others have already done.

Boring Co hasn't even managed to learn how to use the machines it has. Its tunnels are still the roughest in the industry; they're considered so rough that a number of industry-standard processes and add-on equipment (such as retaining-wall rigs) won't even work in Boring Co's tunnels because they're so poorly bored.

And Musk's BS about wanting to go to Mars is just that. Marketing BS that makes nerds think that he has a plan and a vision and it's really just smoke-and-mirrors to get you to ignore all the details that show he doesn't actually give a rat's ass or know what he's doing.

What was used in the four Vegas tunnels for the retaining walls?

For someone that doesn’t know what he’s doing he’s successfully built a pretty successful rocket company that’s developing the heavy lift capabilities for going to mars, an EV company - important on a planet without plentiful hydrocarbons, planetary communication systems, and a bunch of other companies that are components for that vision. It’s hard to point to where the BS lies - with every rocket launch he gets one step closer to that BS I guess?

I’m no Elon fan boy, I think he’s frankly dangerous, but I don’t doubt for a second how serious he is and how methodically he is executing his idea of colonizing mars. Whether he will be successful or not, it’s hard to dispute he’s advanced that cause more than any one person has.

I’d note the success of boring company has nothing to do with the motivation for creating the company.

> Boring Co's tunneling machines are all machines they purchased from other companies and mildly customized.

What company did they purchase Prufrock from?

That's not the only thing that matters. And it is probably a thing that doesn't matter at all to the customers of those companies.

Sorry maybe my phrasing wasn’t clear. Matters to him and why he makes the companies he does.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com