On the downside, LA traffic sucks but at least you get the sun shining in. Spending your whole commute in tunnels seems a depressing way to live, even if its shorter.
The Boring Company [video]
51–60 of 800 posts
Re: The Boring Company [video]
#52The costs of tunneling are like FAR more expensive than most think. Breaking, excavating, and supporting rock is slow, time and cost heavy, and precarious work. While this is an interesting concept, unless there are serious advances in rock boring techniques (personal opinion: there are none coming) this will never approach fruition. I would suggest anyone interested in further research look into the "Big Dig" of Boston and the staggering costs and challenges it faced.
Good luck, Elon. It'll be another moonshot company if you can pull it off.
Re: The Boring Company [video]
#53I don't get it. Much of the USA is faced with crumbling infrastructure and a lack of money for maintaining that infrastructure. How is creating a network of powered tunnels - which are much more expensive to maintain than surface roads - going to interact with this economic reality? This seems like technology that addresses mostly fun, theoretical problems - like traffic optimization, not ugly, practical ones like ti…
[deleted]
Re: The Boring Company [video]
#54When I heard about Boring Company I kind of just assumed it would be used for underground hyper loops. This feels kind of wrong.
Re: The Boring Company [video]
#55Don't fully get the benefit of moving cars on rails vs. moving cars on wheels... Higher fixed costs to power the rail vs. just letting cars auto-drive with internal propulsion. What am I missing?
The rolling friction of rails is really really low. And couple that with removing driver variability out of the equation and it makes some sense.
Re: The Boring Company [video]
#56Did anyone else notice that cars being lowered leaves a giant fucking hole in the middle of the street?! This is a marketing fluff video untouched by engineers
Someone needs to edit the video so you see a pedestrian falling down the shaft and breaking their neck
Re: The Boring Company [video]
#57Now what if we add an Uber-like component to this and let people share/carpool together to reduce the number of cars above and below ground? Instead of tires that wear out, we could use steel on rails! Aaaand, we just re-invented the subway.
Re: The Boring Company [video]
#58On the downside, LA traffic sucks but at least you get the sun shining in. Spending your whole commute in tunnels seems a depressing way to live, even if its shorter.
That's your opinion. Getting stuck in a traffic jam on a hot sunny day is very displeasing to me. I'd rather move fast through a tunnel.
Edit: fixed typo
Re: The Boring Company [video]
#59Giant hole opens up in street with no gate around it. Have they actually spent time thinking about this or is this a joke?
then the vehicle on a tray is accelerated up to high speed inside a tunnel without its axles or body being secured onto the carrier. Then a vast network of these tunnels is somehow posited. I don't think reality was one of the constraints applied to this concept.
> without its axles
electric hub motors would work here quite easily.
Re: The Boring Company [video]
#60The costs of tunneling are like FAR more expensive than most think. Breaking, excavating, and supporting rock is slow, time and cost heavy, and precarious work. While this is an interesting concept, unless there are serious advances in rock boring techniques (personal opinion: there are none coming) this will never approach fruition. I would suggest anyone interested in further research look into the "Big Dig" of Bos…
> unless there are serious advances in rock boring techniques
I'm pretty sure Elon Musk doesn't enter a market unless he intends to do just that.
Edit: I got downvoted a bit but it is his MO. He takes things that are expensive and makes them cheaper. For what it's worth though, I do think the tunnels in that video are ridiculous.