Is there anything in the public evidencing the Boring Company advancing the state of the art for TBMs [1]?
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.
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.