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The Boring Company [video]

boringcompany.com

531–540 of 800 posts

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#531
The essence of The Boring Company is the same as the business plan behind SpaceX: people assume that an existing industry (tunnel development, rocket launches) is reasonably well run and operating at something of a local optimum. But it turns out that there are order of magnitude (i.e., 10x) improvements available when Musk is able to assemble a sufficiently capable team to focus on it.

I would suggest that tunnelling is a more fertile opportunity, given that there had already been a bunch of rocket startups that had tried and failed over the last couple decades. Tunneling today is insanely expensive. Here's a superb article from Matt Yglesias at Vox on the $2.2 B per km Second Avenue Subway: http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/1/14112776/new... . Other countries are already achieving costs of $100 M per km or less.

Now, does the car carriage from the video make perfect sense? I'm skeptical. But Musk has never been slavishly faithful to the original conception of his ideas. He gets started and then iterates, and so far the results have been awfully impressive.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#532

It's amazing to me the amount of negativity directed toward his projects and the millions of reasons people give for why they "won't work" (not necessarily on HN, but at least on general news websites). I'm starting to believe the only difference between those who start their own companies and those who don't is that the latter convinces themselves that it is impossible, never builds anything, and from their own lack…

It's possible to start your own company and still think Musk's ideas are foolish. People are giving millions of reasons why they won't work not because they are haters, but because there are millions of reasons why they won't work.

I think it's both, actually. There's lots to criticize and there's also lots of hate/jealousy/whatever.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mostly because they live/work in areas that aren't dense enough to have good last-mile public transit, and they don't want to deal with transfers. Well, suburbanization was a totally dumbass move. Maybe instead of building tunnels, we could be rebuilding cities. We could be designing them to be attractive enough that people would want to live there.

You'd have to get the government to stop building roads... which of course is seems crazy to most people. But the consequences are all around us.

Yeah. Going from rail to roads was another dumbass move.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#534
Ever been to New York or a similar city and watched people pouring out of a subway station at 8:30 am?

Now imagine every one of them is sitting in a sedan that is delivered out of an elevator, one by one.

According to Wikipedia, "Times Square–42nd Street/42nd Street–Port Authority Bus Terminal" station has 206,247 riders on each weekday on average. If we have 100 elevators which can transport a car every five seconds, it will take 172 minutes to move all of them.

With more realistic numbers (an elevator usually doesn't go down and come back in five seconds) it will be more than a day.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#535

Since this is a thread about Elon Musk, transportation infrastructure, public transportation, and urban design, and because HN has a sort of affinity for the Robert Moses story (The Power Broker was one of 'aaronsw's favorite books), this seems like a particularly on-point Twitter thread to read after the video: https://twitter.com/EmilyGorcenski/status/858022699112824832 You might not agree with all/any of it but I…

The Power Broker is one of my favorite books and I agree that Moses was ultimately a despicable man, who made NYC a much worse place to live to withholding funding for transit while pouring money into road building in a hopeless attempt to deal with the congestion he was causing.

However, I think the tweetstorm misses that it is poor and middle class people who are most hurt today by inadequate transit, and one thing that would have an enormous effect is an order of magnitude drop in tunneling costs.

My other post " rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14225045> links to a look at why the Second Avenue Subway's $2.2 B per km costs are 20x higher than other cities. A technology that drops tunnelling costs will be great for the poor, and thankfully, I do not believe the news media (with all of its flaws) would ever allow someone like Moses (or Musk) to operate the way he did today.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#536

It's amazing to me the amount of negativity directed toward his projects and the millions of reasons people give for why they "won't work" (not necessarily on HN, but at least on general news websites). I'm starting to believe the only difference between those who start their own companies and those who don't is that the latter convinces themselves that it is impossible, never builds anything, and from their own lack…

'The millions of reasons people give for why they won't work' are so important and useful not only for the development but for other possible innovations. They should be welcomed. And I think there are no causation and correlation between thinking reasons that make it impossible and starting a company.

I'm sure Elon Musk is browsing Hacker News to find out what blind spots he has, that only Javascript programmers can see.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#538

It's amazing to me the amount of negativity directed toward his projects and the millions of reasons people give for why they "won't work" (not necessarily on HN, but at least on general news websites). I'm starting to believe the only difference between those who start their own companies and those who don't is that the latter convinces themselves that it is impossible, never builds anything, and from their own lack…

edit: don't feel like arguing. Best of luck to Musk.

You don't have an argument.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#540
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you raise a fence around it (stored on the sides, underground of course), or slide a roof in (once again, stored below the surface) to prevent anyone from going in even if they wanted to. This doesn't sound like a biggie to me.

The ongoing maintenance of tens of thousands of sliding doors, elevators, and retracting fences sounds like a biggie to me.

Every subway contains a whole bunch of sliding doors that open and close every single stop.
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