61–70 of 800 posts
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 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…
Sending rockets to another solar system would be cheaper than the tunnels depicted in this video. I'm not even kidding.
Where is all that material going to go? There's so many tunnels there you could build a small mountain with it. Maybe he can team up with some sea-steading outfit and build a small continent off the shore of San Francisco.
You'd need three or four orders of magnitude reduction in tunnelling costs to make that anywhere near affordable, and even then you'd still have unbelievably complicated logistical issues. How much concrete do you need for those tunnels? What about ventilation? Safety procedures? Flood control? A single one of those could cost upwards of a billion dollars and I'm not sure there's a lot of cost savings by doing more of them, the complexities don't scale that way.
The more you dig, the more you're likely to hit something expensive you're going to have to pay to fix.
Did 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
I 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…
But seriously, Elon Musk appears to be dating hot and crazy at the moment. Let's just let him get through this phase of his bucket list so he can get back to being visionary once he realizes why one should never marry hot and crazy.
Don'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?
Or how about moving trains on rails? I am of two minds about self driving cars. From a technology point of view, I think its great, but I don't really see what problem they solve that would not be better solved by ubiquitous public transportation (trains, mostly). Now, Musk wants to carry cars on sleds through tunnels under LA? Why not just build some damn trains? EDIT: the real news is that he wants to improve borin…
Don'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 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.
Dig big tunnels to ferry trains with people underground. Works pretty well.