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Comment by leetharris | Hacker News Reader

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Indeed! I think the Vegas loop has immense potential. There are many ways we can iterate on this concept. Perhaps we can use bigger cars, in a bus like shape to transport more people at once. Or we could remove the batteries to save cost and weight and supply the cars with an external power source. There is immense potential here and I believe this will revolutionise transport.

The Boring Company’s mission is in its name. Better boring tools. The Teslas running around inside it are dumb, but that’s almost the point: it’s a PR project. We wouldn’t be talking about it if it were a train.

From what I can tell, TBC has failed to revolutionize tunnel-boring machines to date.

But that just shows they didnt really do anything. While european and other companies are building extremely long rail tunnels, this company built a short single-lane car tunnel with LEDs...

That's what I thought too. Boring equipment that could dig tunnels for extremely cheap. Don't know the current status, but I didn't think it was set up like picturing set of interconnected tubes like, for instance, the interwebs.

> From what I can tell, TBC has failed to revolutionize tunnel-boring machines to date.

Also, if you look at those Vegas tunnels, they’re just wide enough for a single car. Every single subway system in the world has better tunnels than that, and many of them have existed for well over a century.

The BC “mission” seems to be marketing hype that’s not quite as bad as “Mars colony”, but it’s still very far in the future at best.

Cost. The boring tunnels are basically free to the city. Just permission to build. Look up SF or NYC or Seattle cost per tunnel mile.

That's just financial structuring. The tunnels still have a cost to build, which I'm guessing is unknown since BC is private. It's received on the order of a $1 billion in funding, though, which might give some idea of just how much those tunnels cost.

Cost to the customer is not just financial structuring. It is how much you have to pay.

How did you reach the conclusion that it is a PR project? Since Elon Musk is pushing ahead to colonize Mars - and Martian cities will probably be built underground - it is just as likely that he is using this company to develop one of the critical technologies for interplanetary expansion.

love how you're slowly working your way to describing a train, I think most people around the world would agree is the optimal solution here

OP is being extremely sarcastic.

my bad, I am absolutely struggling to detect it anymore on anything pertaining to Elon

so, a subway?

Sounds like you got the joke.

Yes the thing that costs insanely more and only used by 10% of people. Also subsidised by government and is source of crime and disease.

everybody knew and voiced their knowledge before, during, and after the Vegas tunnel that Boring Co and the Hyperloop were just bad concepts. You didn't need to waste money to try it, because it's not new tech. It's a tunnel. It's a solution to traffic. It's for riders, not drivers. But instead of calling it a train and therefore being _lame_, you slap a fresh coat of paint on it with _self driving cars_ and _insane_ promises you could never deliver on.

Calling out snake oil, for being snake oil, and lamenting that it sucks all the oxygen out of the room for _real_ , _serious_ technology and progress? That's a good thing.

Ok, so they should build a train/subway. Who has done this? Is anyone doing it? If not, why?

Should we stop all other projects that are short of the perfect solution?

This is why I use the phrase "sucking all the oxygen out of the room" where the proverbial oxygen is funding:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail#Hyp...

Musk literally admitted he wanted to block progress on new rail projects, and the Hyperloop was his PR project to do so. Snake oil.

There are many people who want new train infrastructure. Musk is not one of them.

I can almost hear the sea lion barks from here.

Not self driving cars. The Las Vegas loop has human drivers.

As someone who works enthusiastically on new ground breaking technology... a dumb idea is a dumb idea - and when we pour this many resources into a dumb idea it prevents us from funding good ideas.

This tunnel has been used as a continued excuse for NIMBYism to block an extension of the monorail which is the actual solution that Las Vegas needs. In fact, the entire boring company appears to, after the fact, have been an effort dedicated solely to derailing SoCal high speed rail efforts.

They aren’t just trying shit in the real world, they are literally boring holes into it causing significant harm to people and the environment.

Can you list the significant harm to people and the environment? I read the article and I'm struggling to find anything.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26184164-tbc-state-l...

Looks like its mainly related to waste water and not cleaning up after themselves.

this is the news blog for a tech incubator. there is an awful lot of snake oil in this sector, and which is pushed hard here, and an awful lot of high-end talent here, too.

which means the snake oil tends to be called a lot.

“All this” refers to 800 violations damaging the environment.

Yes. There has been a distinct cultural shift. Some of it is politics for sure, but this forum is generally less optimistic about the future and technology than 2012-2016

Is the technological innovation in the room with us right now?

What technology and progress has the boring company enabled?

A breakthrough in tunnel cost and speed per meter. Have you read into this at all or is this just another snarky comment?

Almost every bored tunnel project has unique constraints. Lots of breakthroughs could be achieved by ignoring regulations and external considerations. This is not innovation or a particularly interesting result.

This 'breakthrough' appears to have mainly been achieved by ignoring health and safety regulations. Not so impressive.

I've seen Musk and TBC make those claims, I haven't seen evidence from the industry that they're actually having an impact.

Ignoring environmental regulations to externalize costs, apparently.

They're not being held back by anti-progress haters, they're just straight-up ignoring the environmental agreement they voluntarily signed.

When companies have complete disregard for public welfare and dump the cost onto everyone else, that damage needs to be part of their value equation.

FTA -

>That agreement, signed by a Boring executive in 2022, was intended to compel the company to comply with state water pollution laws. Instead, state inspectors documented nearly 100 alleged new violations of the agreement.

This is a fleet of sometimes-self-driving vehicles following a nearly straight route in a closed environment with very few variables.

There's little to describe "progress" or "technology" in this.

Apparently the Vegas loop cars are all driven by a human driver currently.

People laugh at the Boring Company precisely because what is not doing anything meaningfully new, and what it is doing is worse than every other comparable system. There’s no “progress” there that makes any sense.

Car tunnels are neither "progress" nor "technology" lol

Proper rail-based public transit has existed for centuries and its miles ahead of this.

It's possible to be pro-progress while being anti-this specific thing. In particular, Elon Musk came out and admitted that he hates trains and busses and admitted that he just made up Boring Co to distract from giving money to them. The Boring Co tunnels in Vegas are a boondoggle and not even well designed (whether that's due to lack of funds or stupidity or corruption, who knows!). The problem is the opportunity cost. The millions that went into the Vegas tunnels could have gone into improving the existing monorail system, but instead there's this stupid thing.

The tunnels are cool and the technology is neat. I'm not in charge of anything, but no thanks.

Here's where I'm coming from: https://youtu.be/VPjODKUxV5g

In the last 50 years, well before Elon was involved and supposedly sabotaging all this great subway progress, how many new subway projects in America were started and successfully finished?

Maybe Elon's solution is a requirement to make ANY progress because the other ones have stalled out?

I would love a subway. Here in Austin, they proposed a bunch of new trains and subways for billions of dollars. We all voted yes and funded it. After a multi-year study, they revised it to about 1/10th the scope and doubled the cost. It still hasn't materialized.

Do you all realize the problem here?

I don't know who "you all" is. What I'm saying is that that the money spent on the Vegas tunnels could have been better spent on the monorail system. I'm not in charge of anything though, so me saying that doesn't affect anything.

> Was that Musk too? Or is overregulation destroying our ability to innovate?

Texas isn't known (to outsiders like me, at least) as burdening itself very much with regulations. It's possible that a blue city like Austin might apply extra regulation over state regulation, but still, are you sure that overzealous regulation is what prevents Texas from building transport? I would have tought complacency, nimbyism, corruption. But not regulation.

If you're right then it's pretty much game over for America, isn't it? Because almost all other states have even more regulatory pressure, right?

>> Making infrastructure is hard, so making dumb infrastructure that doesn't work is better.

Not really following if you're making some other point here.

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