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Comment by dr_dshiv | Hacker News Reader

What’s the status on the Boring company? That seemed promising. But I recognize that, in America, the issue is not a lack of technology but rather the political will.

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Why did it seem promising to you? To me it looked like a worst of both worlds combination between cars and subways.

The Boring Company has dug exactly one 1.7 mile tunnel in it's entire existence. It's not a serious player in the space.

> What’s the status on the Boring company? [...] the issue is not a lack of technology

Iterative hardware development can take time. A brief search suggests: Using the Prufrock-2 version TBM, the Las Vegas Convention Center loop has picked up a couple of nearby hotels, and work has started on the first long extension, 3 km south along Paradise Rd to near the airport (1-2 years). Prufrock-3 is being exercised tunneling around the Tesla Giga Texas factory[1]. Prufrock-4 is nearing completion, and -5 is in design.

[1] https://x.com/boringcompany/status/1801326343000322099

The boring company was a play to ensure California doesn't bother with its owned rapid transit systems. Much like hyperloop.

I wouldn't say it's lack of political will. It's more that we are so excessively bureaucratized and regulated that it just takes more political will to get the same thing done because it will be stuck for years getting regulatory approval.

Too much bureaucracy is often at fault, but seems very unlikely in this particular case. Are all the other countries mentioned in the article less bureaucratized or regulated? There seems to be a strong correlation between countries that have good public transit and invest heavily in public transit and countries that are perceived as having too much regulatory red tape (EU, East Asia). If that's the case, how could this possibly be the problem here?

According to the chart in the article the EU seems to be building at about the same pace as Russia, so I'm not sure it is a great example for the success of bureaucracy. And is East Asia particularly bureaucratic? The idea that I get is that building a train line over there isn't going to be held up for years in environmental review and lawsuits, but I could be wrong.

Bureaucracy is universal. American issues arise from the idea that public transit is for the poor, and from the loss of expertise.

If you want good transit, it must be for the people who vote. Otherwise they will vote to make it bad to save tax money. Branding public transit as the affordable option is a guaranteed recipe for failure.

Transit projects must also be small enough that the entity responsible for them always has several projects running in parallel. Once you stop building, you will quickly lose expertise, and subsequent projects will be more difficult and more expensive.

The presence of bureaucracy is universal, but the amount of it and how fast it moves varies massively.

That is the epitome of lack of will. After the last major earth quake on LA,major highways were destroyed into and around down town LA. Those were repaired in less than a month.

When there's a will to get it done, it gets done. When her isn't, planning and permitting takes a butt load long time.

They've made a very slow car tunnel (for a single make of car only!) under Las Vegas with basically a COTS tunnel boring machine.

Never moved beyond "mars tunnel research" or "excuse to delay subways," depending on how cynical you are. It's on life support in the form of totally necessary tunnel projects at other Elon Musk companies.

"Excuse to delay" is not a cynical read at all.

> Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it.[1]

He knew it would delay CA-HSR and political will for it nearly died.

1. https://time.com/6203815/elon-musk-flaws-billionaire-visions...

I was curious whether this was true but it seems made up. The source is this part of his biography by Ashlee Vance. The actual quotes only support that he thought CA HSR was mediocre, which is what made him want to suggest something better. The idea that it was a tactic to delay HSR independently of a better project existing is just the biographer's speculation and isn't supported by his words.

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

Note also that the excerpt in this tweet omits the subsequent page, which discusses how Musk began taking the project more seriously after being surprised by the amount of public interest. You can find the biography on libgen.

What a spiteful way to blow a ton of money

That's sorta Musk's primary operating mode. See also: the whole Twitter purchase fiasco (for a recent example), or the expensive lawsuit against the actual co-founders of the larger, more-successful tech company that bailed out his failing startup as a favor to him but didn't stroke his ego enough on titles (for a "this has always been his way" example)

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