Musk’s Boring Company Ghosts Cities Across America
wsj.com
wsj.com
Unfortunately, a lot of these efforts sound similar. And it looks like Musk has managed to do what he’s best at. Get even more government money directed towards his companies.
I think hyperloop was primarily motivated by his hated of HSR - his many complaints well documented- basically for the insane cost he felt it would end up at - something better could be done or tried
Interstate I-69 costs more than CA HSR, has been plagued with problems, and has been under construction for more than 30 years and yet you don’t see the frothing negative coverage of that like you do CA HSR because in our country cars are normal and trains are the weird things we need to scrutinize to death.
This video is some nice coverage of this:
> The first Japanese Shinkansen train went over budget by 100%, but nobody remembers that anymore. Instead they talk about how wonderful the Shinkansen trains are.
HSR is at 300% of original budget without even a credible schedule for completion of that original plan -or- source of funding.
Long-distance "high speed" rail is going nowhere in CA without constraints on air travel, especially short-hop flights, that includes taxation for environmental consequences. Nobody flying the Bay Area or Sacramento - L.A. corridor is going to spend 4X as much to spend double the time in transit.
I do wonder if for 100 billion we could have done automated bus or cargo lanes - or even just tried a few interesting ideas out.
The ballot summary was literally written by the ballot authors to avoid a more neutral party writing it
> Instead they talk about how wonderful the Shinkansen trains are.
Merely slapping on the name "high speed" doesn't make it so.
Can you elaborate on that? Because the train is designed to go 220mph, and if that's "the slowest in the world" then I don't really care. I also read that it needs to slow down to 110mph in some sections, but again that isn't necessarily an issue unless it has to do that all the time.
The French TVG route from Paris to Lyon is 243 miles and takes 1 hours and 59 minutes, an average of 121 mph. So if our train travels 220mph sometimes and 110mph sometimes and the French TGV averages 121 mph on longer routes, then I'd say we're in the ballpark of building French TGV style trains in California, which sounds great to me!
It sounds like this "slowest in the world" claim is another soundbite without context used to make the project look bad.
CA HSR (slowest HSR train in the world): Projected $40 b. Currently $105 b.
I think it will end north of $160 b. So that's 4x which further from 1.9x than 1.9x is from 1x.
I don't think they'll meet the other targets. But if you want to have fun, I'll have someone meet you in SF and we can make a deal: On the day CA HSR opens, I'll give you $80 (supposed LA/SF fare) times 20 and you can give me 20 LA/SF tickets over that first year. We can put it on longbets.org
Now it will travel slower within city limits in the Bay Area and Los Angeles as it shares a corridor with non-high speed trains, but that is not unheard of in other networks around the world.
As for the 2.5x over-budged, it is well known that the initial cost estimates were too low. The current rising of the estimate is largely due to inflation. This will keep happening while the project remains under-funded (which is precisely what the ill intentioned hyperloop idea was meant to do). I very much doubt that it will rise to 160 billion USD though (that is unless it remains unfunded for another decade or two).
The French TVG route from Paris to Lyon is 243 miles and takes 1 hours and 59 minutes, an average of 121 mph. So if our train travels 220mph sometimes and 110mph sometimes and the French TGV averages 121 mph on longer routes, then I'd say we're in the ballpark of building French TGV style trains in California, which sounds great to me!
It's weird seeing folks peddling fantasy land numbers here. Back in 2013 peer review board already said they were bogus, and it's only gotten a LOT worse.
For example, I think San Jose to SF have ALREADY been switched to shared tracks at ground level - tracks that are going to be mixed in with caltrain trips. Gilroy is going to switch to sharing some freight lines (100mph)? I'm sure down in Burbank / LA area similar give backs will occur.
This is all a major change from 220MPH which required elevated viaducts and 50 MILE (!!) turning circumferences! 220MPH actually WOULD be impressive but no chance of it. They've re-routed away from grapevine, they've added tons of stops. They've removed the dedicated trackways and rights of way (you CANNOT blast through downtown caltrain stops at 220MPH). They are going to in shared track situations (aka - Amtrak delays land for those like me who used to do amtrak).
All Environmental Impact Report/Environmental Impact Statement (EIR/EIS) have been approved between LA and SF with the exception of DTX between King and 4th to Transbay Transit Center in downtown San Francisco and between Palmdale to Burbank. The latter has Draft EIR/EIS that has a pretty clear strategy of maintaining 220 MPH (or close to it) mostly in tunnels under the San Gabriel mountains. So the strategy to reach the goal 2:40 is pretty sound^[1].
Now I would like to add that nothing here is a novel technology, there are plenty of build out systems worldwide with non-maglev trains maintaining a speed of 200 MPH or close to it, and even a handful of systems that maintain 220 MPH. The geography of the Central Valley even lends it self nicely to this with it’s flat surface and relatively straight lines between stations. The only novel thing here is maintaining a 220 MPH in several tunnels. However I don’t think this will be an impossible engineering challenge, and the EIR/EIS statements agree with that.
Also note that initial planning was for 200 MPH inside those tunnels, but after the preferred alternative of shared 110 MPH corridor between Gilroy and San José was approved, then it was decided to increase the speed in the tunnels to 220 MPH to make up the lost time. I think this was a good decision as you say, the challenges of building a fast corridor within city limits are probably greater then the challenges of going really fast inside tunnels. And as hinted the trains will only blast through caltrain stops at a max speed of 110 MPH, not 220 MPH.
I do want to emphasize the fact that the approved EIR/EIS has on the credibility of the project achieving its goals (this goes into concerns you raised in your other post). This means that interested parties had their chance to scrutinize every aspect of the plan, that includes engineering challenges as well as civic challenges (including right of way acquisition). I do agree that the property acquisition has proven difficult in the Central Valley (particularly around construction packages 1 and 2-3). This is in no small part down to the amount change orders and difficulty of utility relocations along the right of way. My understanding is that the authority has learned from these challenges and is now forcing its contractors to finish all the advanced design before they begin construction on that segment. This should significantly reduce the number of change orders which would make it easier to acquire the needed parcels.
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1: There is a case for the DTX to actually slow things down (I very much doubt the trains will be traveling much faster then 50-60 MPH this last mile), but this will only be like a minute or two. So I will give you 2:42 hours is actually a likely final number.
However, I am somewhat curious about your certainty of the quality of this thing. I am willing to do the following on longbets.org:
- CA-HSR will not deliver regular service on IOS by current predicted 2029 date
- 10 years from now, budget estimates will be at least $160 b
We can pick terms at your convenience. I will commit a maximum of $10k to this through an intermediary who will meet you in San Francisco. If I lose, you get the $10k to a charity of your choice. If I win, you will donate to the charity of my choice 125 tickets (equal value at the CA-HSR-claimed $80/ticket) on CA-HSR for SF-LA.
10 years is a long time, and a lot can happen in that time. In 2017 there was an administration in the White House that was quite hostile to public infrastructure projects and withheld all the federal funding the previous administration had promised. For all we know there will be another administration like that in 2 or 6 years which does the same (or even more) to sabotage the project.
In 2018 a new CEO took over the project and took a hard policy against over promising. This is when we saw the initial operating segment being scaled back to only include Bakerfield to Merced by the end of this decade. Since then we’ve actually seen a lot truer projections which have come true. For example Construction Package 4 is almost complete and pretty much on time and on budget.
Project is still badly managed. This was in early 2021:
“It is beyond comprehension that as of this day, more than two thousand and six hundred calendar days after (official approval to start construction) that the authority has not obtained all of the right of way … ” wrote Tutor Perini Vice President of Operations Ghassan Ariqat to Garth Fernandez, the contracting chief at the state rail authority.
And that has only continued. They literally are asking Tutor to build on land they don't own, utility relocations have been going on for YEARS.
And the costs to now tunnel back to the coasts (long tunnels near seismic fault lines!). I don't think any plan is credible on that front. The rights of way as you get closer to SF and LA are going to be BRUTAL to get.
I think they already torqued the routing based on some kind of backroom deals.
Some NY Times excerpts below. I don't think the hyperloop folks were trying to any of these gimmicks, none of them served on boards that could do the horse trading.
“There were so many things that went wrong,” Mr. McNamara said. “SNCF was very angry. They told the state they were leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional. They went to Morocco and helped them build a rail system." Morocco’s bullet train started service in 2018.
...
The horse-trading in this case involved an influential land developer and major campaign contributor from Los Angeles, Jerry Epstein.
Mr. Epstein, who died in 2019, was a developer in the seaside community of Marina del Rey who, along with other investors, was courting the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors for a 40-year lease extension on a huge residential, commercial and boat dock development.
Mr. Epstein was also a member of the rail authority board, and he became a strong backer of Mr. Antonovich’s proposal for a Mojave Desert diversion on the bullet train.
“The Palmdale route was borne of a deal between Epstein and Antonovich, absolutely,” said Art Bauer, the chief staff member on the State Senate Transportation Committee, speaking publicly on the matter for the first time.
“If I get my lease, you get my vote was the deal,” Mr. Bauer said. Though Mr. Epstein was only one member of the board, his lobbying of other board members proved critical, he said. “Epstein got the votes. The staff didn’t get the votes. The staff didn’t want to go that way.”
Do you have a link to him talking about the hyperloop X HSR cancellation discussion?
Because he sells cars, so reducing demand for them is contrary to his interests (even if you believe his PR that he only is in the car business to develop tech abd raise money for Mars, losing the income stream hurts those interests.)
> Do you have a link to him talking about the hyperloop X HSR cancellation discussion?
Its from communications with his biographer, and recorded in the biography:
https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1167410460125097990?t=o...
And if we’re going to grant Musk’s stated motivations as true, he started Tesla to enable the transition to clean energy in transport, not just to make money for Mars. I could see why a criminally over budget and grossly over-schedule HSR project would not exactly be helpful to that aim.
> At the time, it seemed that Musk had dished out the Hyperloop proposal just to make the public and legislators rethink the high speed train. He didn't actually intend to build it. It was more that he wanted to show people that more creative ideas were out there for things that might actually solve problems and push the state forward. With any luck, the high speed rail would be canceled. Musk said as much to me during series of phone calls and emails leading up to the announcement. "Down the road, I might advise on a high speed rail project but right now I can't take my eye off the ball at either SpaceX or Tesla", he wrote.
> Its from communications with his biographer
He also mentioned it in the whitepaper (third paragraph).[2]
Musk was completely up-front with his disdain for that boondoggle. Can we not pretend like this was some deeply buried secret that had to 'leak' out?
[2] https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/hyperl...
That it was proposed as an alternatige to CA HSR wasn’t the point, that it was proposed only to derail with no intent to build even if successful in derailing HSR was.
(That it was decidedly nonserious in substance as a proposal, aside from questions of intent or technical practicality, deriving most of its cost savings by fantastic assumptions about land acquisition costs and locating its terminals far from the population centers it would notionally serve is also worth keeping in mind.)
Can we cool it with the loaded language? What's wrong with "Musk said"?
Even at the time, in Musk's introduction he mentioned the massively delayed and over-budget (and slowest in the world and the most expensive per mile!) California HSR. There was never any attempt to hide his opposition, so it's no secret to 'admit.'
Musk was also open and honest about the fact that that he didn't know if Hyperloop would work, but that we should at least try to invent new and better technology over this worst-in-the-world status quo. I'm surprised to find disagreement on Hacker News of all places.
Musk made Tesla one of the most recognised brands with a similar status recognition to (say) Mercedes while not spending a dollar on advertising because Musk himself is news.
The flamethrower, so many column inches.
Tweeting that he hated traffic and seemingly off-the-cuff that he was going to build tunnels and calling it "The Boring Company" So many column inches.
Recall that he literally hired a bunch of the Onion's writers at one point. What do they do?
Being a human headline works in America even if most of the coverage is disparaging. Trump is another obvious example in the way he took control of the Republican party (the way Bernie couldn't quite manage to take the Dems) seemingly against the headwinds of relentlessly negative coverage but loads of it.
Interesting to see how Musk's blow-hard approach is going to work with twitter now he seems like he's going to call out Apple's monopoly abuses like so many others (spotify, fortnite...) have tried but not really succeeded. Going P.T. Barnum all the way seems to be necessary in the USA. We can idle time by speculating on whether Musk is a blow-hard who failed upwards or whether he's clever enough to know it and use it, playing the Musk character for all it is worth. As far as Musk himself goes I'm not really a fan but that seems utterly beside the point.
Does the P.T. Barnum thing work with smaller businesses launching? How? Any examples?
A four lane highway costs $12M/mile, plus about $1.5M to resurface every 8-10 years. Each overpass bridge costs $8-20M.
That doesn’t include condemnation, etc.
Rail should just be rolled into the normal interstate capital funds. Separate the “meta” infrastructure from the trains and stations and more will get done.
Trains are a tough business because it’s such an old business.
I think you are giving CASHR too much credit here.
I think the primary innovation is business plan, ie limit scope by only bidding on things like small diameter, simple requirements, etc. Avoid projects that would lengthy and expensive study, etc. Public works projects tend to be insanely expensive and part of it is due to continual scope creep, which brings in more stakeholders which further increases scope and cost… in a continuous cycle until the project is canceled or, miraculously, is finished at ten times the budget.
Which kind of answers the objections raised in these articles. If cities are unwilling or unable to allow scope to be constrained to the capabilities of TBC’s tunneling tech, why should TBC bid on the project? Why blame TBC for that?
In this way, this kind of scope discipline is more reminiscent of foreign tunneling projects.
But we’ll see. TBC has not completed many tunneling projects, and companies must ultimately be judged on the basis of their output (although for companies in growth and innovation mode, that can require patience).
Wouldn’t this imply bidding for utility tunnels first?
Not an expert. But I thought the Boring Company's pitch was designing a better TBM. If today’s TBMs are state of the art, the Boring Company is another general contractor.
It sure seems they've oversold and underproduced though.
People thought Elon was "reality distortion field"ing SpaceX, too, but because COTS and CRS were fixed price, SpaceX was able to prove themselves. And for a while, SpaceX did struggle to meet launch rate, etc. But they ultimately DID deliver, so therefore they got paid (in cost plus, you can get paid simply for doing work, regardless of the project being completed) and now they dominate the entire industry in both price and reliability.
> Veterans of the tunneling industry note that tunnel-boring machines have been electrified for decades, and that neither continuous construction of the tunnel lining nor digging in from aboveground is new.
And I'm not too sure how useful of a feature is it. Transit tunnels are useally built in places that are so built up that land is at a premium. They actually want the tunnel to start underground, because they want to install the station underground too.
So you have to build a shaft anyway.
And also, they are trying to minimize elevation changes for efficiency.
Porpoising doesn't help with any of that, if you need a slope of less than 2-3% inclination the machine will pass through a lot of potential infrastructure to surface and then dig down again. It doesn't make sense it'd save that much money considering that the expensive part of a project in developed land is that the land has a massive premium on it by being so productive.
We actually don’t need TBC to do this stuff. We COULD just have extreme restraint on scope and limit the stakeholder input as much as possible, like is more often the case in every country other than the US. But the incentives are all totally misaligned, bordering on corruption here in the US.
Are most TBMs electrified? Do most do continuous construction? Of the ones that do/are, how expensive are they?
Is there any documentation that this is the motivation? Why as detailed in the article does he then entice local governments by saying he can do it at an insanely low price and then never puts a bit in? Also in the article Musk said he could build the tunnel for $45M, but after the discussions with the city the price rose to $500M, so much for keeping costs in check.
>Which kind of answers the objections raised in these articles. If cities are unwilling or unable to allow scope to be constrained to the capabilities of TBC’s tunneling tech, why should TBC bid on the project? Why blame TBC for that?
Again where is the evidence, for that claim? He got the local government to cancel the light rail project because he said he could build it for more than a factor 20-30 less, after discussions that became a factor 2-3 and then they didn't even bid?
> But we’ll see. TBC has not completed many tunneling projects, and companies must ultimately be judged on the basis of their output (although for companies in growth and innovation mode, that can require patience).
Not many is quite an understatement. 2 is the actual number, one on the SpaceX property under some road (they actually cancelled a second planed one) and the Las Vegas one, which is probably the easiest case for tunnel boring.
>North Miami Beach officials want to use federal infrastructure money to pay Boring for a tunnel project to reduce traffic.
You can't build underground in South Florida! It's a literal version of this:
Tangential but this is crazy. A cursory search tells me high speed rail cost US $17-21m per km in China and US $25-39m per km in Europe in 2014, according to World Bank.[1]
[1] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2014/07/10/c...
> "The HSR network reached just under 38,000 km (24,000 mi) in total length by the end of 2020. The HSR building boom continues with the HSR network set to reach 70,000 km (43,000 mi) in 2035."
At that scale, costs per km would be expected to drop off on a steep curve, due to economies of scale, distribution of initial investment costs over more km of rail, etc.
I heard that compensation has been vastly scaled back since a year or two ago, but I don’t know the details.
That said the Ontario cost certainly still feels high.
The ongoing construction of the new broadway extension for Vancouvers skytrain system is even more costly. They are also building around 4 miles, and the estimated cost is 3 billion CAD (https://www.infrastructurebc.com/projects/projects-under-con...).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China
I'm not sure why Musk is the focus of this article either - isn't Warren Buffet & Berkshire-Hathaway the primary railroad owner in the USA today? Not exactly interested in upgrading the infrastructure or QoS on their own dime, are they?
They need to get more exciting that that.
Add fog machines to make the experience even more mysterious, scary, and exciting.
Imagine how much more throughput you could get out of the system this way!
It's an interesting trade-off. They hit the target throughput. Its done. What's not to love on this project?
Tokyo, NYC and London all run subway trains during peak hours within 2 mins. That’s almost certainly better than what the Boring loop achieves.
And these are subway systems. What you would run would be an autonomous light rail system with 1-2 cabins like you see running in airports all over the world.
Slightly off-topic: The current Tokyo subway system has the unfortunate property that it turns off between midnight (~0) and early morning (~5). The Loop thing wouldn't have this likely, but I don't understand why Tokyo does this, especially for the trains that don't have a driver.
literally all of it
If you count time waiting in traffic, I bet trains have better latency...
If the throughput is lower, the latency is necessarily higher because you'll be waiting on the dock longer for a car to pick you up.
They are paraphrasing Elon's intentions. And even the paraphrase sounds like HSR's cancellation would be some nice bonus on top of whatever Hyperloop is trying to achieve, not the primary goal.
If society should really do these things is not for him to dictate via Twitter.
Exhibit A: https://twitter.com/michaelmalice/status/1595994522886234112
Exhibit B: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1597058841396797440
Despite his ridiculous antics, I'm cautiously optimistic.
Exhibit C: Musk does exactly that. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1597285572699074560
Social media either makes it clear the general public is of immense restraint or too confused to know they don’t really owe carrying around in their heads any of this gibberish and could set aside the assigned work queues and focus on the ignored ones, like infra and healthcare. The government will respond to a populace with twice as many guns as people in a hurry at the slightest whiff of public comity.
Please save us, Musk! … the great white savior complex. Still seeking a high minded savior suggests confused by all the gibberish and noise which is intentional but often ends up being uncontrollable. The code gets deciphered and the old masters get outplayed at their own game. Gen Z grew up digesting this gibberish. I’m hopeful they’re inoculated against it.
I doubt Musk is really a high-minded savior figure. If he's just doing this to make money then that is fine by me.
The public is very aware they don’t deference to any particular individual. Musk, or you. At the end of the day twice as many guns as people in this country.
Those non-NPCs either continue to vote for the people treating them this way and/or continue to behave as if their authority over them is legitimate.
Qualified truth is relative. This is all generic language. You’re hardly saying anything novel. You’re no further beyond the edge of human understanding than I am.
You see it as I “played myself” I see it as you’re another meat bag over stimulated by their own awareness.
> a man that promised to build something cheaper and better
In fact, Musk explicitly went out of his way to say that he was not promising to build it himself.
He said — paraphrasing — "I'm too busy to do this and it might not even work, but maybe someone else can work on it and succeed, so I'm giving away the idea for free."
That it happened is not somehow an argument for paying less attention to tunnel digging projects either (the LCT was done at around peak "NSW government gives stupid handouts to private companies for our infrastructure").
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2005-11-02/balcony-collapses-int...
Regulators didn’t force Musk to claim advances which were already common in the field.
Regulators didn’t force Musk not to ask why everyone else charged more.
Regulators didn’t force Musk not to do any research about legal requirements.
There are valid questions about why American infrastructure projects cost so much more than the rest of the world but that doesn’t mean that Musk’s problems are the fault of anyone but him. He’s good at marketing but as we’ve seen he only turns a profit where he can get a government guarantee and has a team managing his instincts to avoid him screwing up that gravy train on a whim.