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Comment by eiiot | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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

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.

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.

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