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The Boring Company [video]

boringcompany.com

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Re: The Boring Company [video]

#621

Post by i386 »

tinym wrote: post #134
tuacker wrote: post #117

I feel like everything Elon Musk undertakes with his companies is just one huge Mars Beta Test. - SpaceX: Obvious, got to get to space somehow - Tesla: Build cars/machines to run on something that is guaranteed to exist on Mars (the sun) vs. Oil - Gigafactory: How to build batteries 101 - Solar roof: While Earths environment may not be as harsh as Mars you still learn something, and improve solar panel production in…

By the time we've learned how to live on a planet as inhospitable as Mars, maybe we'll know how to make a home on Earth.

That kind of attitude gets you nowhere very quickly. Why do _anything_ better?

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#622

Post by wcoenen »

saosebastiao wrote: post #569
closeparen wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running at the proposed 100+ mph should provide the necessary throughput (and actually require seating - have fun with those g s while standing).

The problem is that there are diminishing throughput returns to velocity. You need massive amounts of duplicated track for that to be feasible...on and off ramps for every entrance and exit. On and off ramp lengths grow exponentially relative to target velocity. That might be fine for long distance travel, where on and off ramps can be concentrated in few locations...urban travel not so much.

> On and off ramp lengths grow exponentially relative to target velocity

Centripetal acceleration on a curve with radius r is (v^2/r) so it seems that it grows quadratically, not exponentially.

Exponential growth would mean that the v appears in an exponent in the formula.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#623

Post by unityByFreedom »

convivialdingo wrote: post #615

Not that tunnels are a boring idea, but if you handed me a couple of billion, I think we could solve public transportation using ultralight above ground systems. I would base it on a roller coaster type design using single or dual tracks suspended by high load anchored polls. The car weights would be kept to a minimum, allowing tracks and supports to be sized much smaller, lowering cost and design requirements. The a…

Sounds better than drilling through rock to me.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#624

Post by leadingthenet »

nickjarboe wrote: post #567
mirimir wrote: post #515

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.

When a city in America is destroyed by a nuclear explosion, Americans will re-learn why suburbia was so popular. Hopefully this won't happen for a long time and we will have a good stretch of city living. I love cities, but having millions of people concentrated enough to be killed by a single device; this is very different world than the one humans evolved in.

Are you serious?

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#625

Post by zuron7 »

mozumder wrote: post #604
mcbutterbunz wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to explain how he messed this one up?

Because you are now more dependent on private cars for transport. Why would you use this instead of a system where you take a neighborhood bus to the local transit station & shopping center where you can pick up a light rail to the closest subway station, where you take the express train downtown to the high-speed rail station, where you take that to visit the next state for the day? No cars, and you can sit and read…

If I'm not wrong, there's actually a scheme for Tesla owners to rent out their cars while not in use(still in development). So, I envision these tunnels as part of his broader vision of having mass transit for everyone, except the biggest thing being that the mass transit need not have time tables. That's the worst thing about mass transit. Having to plan your day completely around it. Fine for the most of us, but isn't going to end private transport. I totally see the vision he has. It's a 30 year game he's playing, not a 5 year one.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#626

Post by robocat »

Veratyr wrote: post #600
athenot wrote: post #445

This looks really cool. However, boring through rock is the most expensive way to connect 2 places. It only makes sense if the land features or purchase value require it. Fundamentally, this is about short-circuiting the regular road network and establishing a managed packet network that can bypass congestion. Interestingly, that's also the value proposition of public transit, though it also runs into issues of cost,…

> But what if busses operated on their own dedicated network? But if you're building a dedicated network in a major city, why on earth would you limit it to buses? Even with a dedicated network, I don't believe buses can be as fast, comfortable or quiet as rail. I spent a lot of time in Melbourne, Australia and the trams there are fantastic. You can barely hear them when they're operating so they do a lot to decrease…

Rail fails in a serious earthquake. Large infrastructure can take years to return to operation after disasters.

Even buses are useless during/after disasters in my experience (avoiding legal liability, lack flexibility to mitigate problems, inability to publish changes etc).

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#627

Post by terryf »

mozumder wrote: post #613
terryf wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would you use this instead of a system where you take a neighborhood bus to the local transit station & shopping center where you can pick up a light rail to the closest subway station, where you take the express train downtown to the high-speed rail station, where you take that to visit the next state for the day? No cars, and you can sit and read a book or take a nap or enjoy the view if you wanted to. I'll t…

Those things aren't free, though. You're paying $500-$1000/month for the luxury of doing those things, compared to the $100-$150 cost of a monthly transit pass. When you consider the costs, cars just don't have the appeal they used to, and you can spend money elsewhere that'll make you just as happy if not happier, especially as more services orient themselves to remove cars from the picture, such as Amazon & grocery…

Yes, of course they aren't free. I also live in a house, that's more expensive than an apartment because I like it more this way.

I often don't buy the cheapest food, but the food that I like.

I don't want to force cars on anyone - it should be an individual choice of course. What I'm saying is that there are a lot of reasons people want to own cars.

It's the choice between working with the existing system to make it better versus demanding that everyone adapts to a new system that you claim is better.

Maybe it is, but getting the whole world to change at once to a completely different and in many ways harder system is very un likely to happen.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#628

Post by sonnhy »

This seems like a premium service, because you have to choose your destination somehow, and here comes some device that you have to install in your car (I'm referring to some kind electronic toll collection + navigation system). Also, the amount of people using this service has to be limited somehow. As the technology is presented in video, the input/output of the carriages is quite limited. Also, what about the rush hours? Everyone wants to get in, to go faster, so queue will be created, waiting for their turn. What will happen when more people, than the exit queue can handle, want to get out on the same exit/area? You will be redirected to another exit, far away as much as how many people wanted to get out in that area.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#629

Post by dzink »

Xcelerate wrote: post #377

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…

Society or a company of people operates like an organism at scale - it can get sick with the slightest imbalance of resources, so its collective experience builds antibodies to protect itself. If this was an idea for a portable gadget, it would probably be welcomed, but the underground tunnels and the risks that come with them (collapses, maintenance, infrastructure shifts, ecological impact) are scaring people. California's central valley and a lot of building foundations have been moving up and down with the drought and rains of late. Now imagine that happening with a mesh of concrete tunnels carrying people underneath.

That said, to assume feedback against one project is a testament to lack of entrepreneurial spirit, rings about as true as claiming people who don't like Justin Bieber are deaf.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#630

Post by makomk »

mmanfrin wrote: post #127
pnathan wrote: post #85

This is very, very wasteful compared to actual mass transit. A subway network is much more effective at delivering people. If he's looking for mega-good, Musk would do significantly better to drop a full subway network. edit: tunnelling is a broadly solved problem. It's difficult, expensive, slow, etc. But there's no engineering reason why a hole in the ground can't happen. Musk might be able to drive some significan…

If he's looking for mega-good, Musk would do significantly better to drop a full subway network. Like Hyperloop?

Hyperloop was a completely infeasible design that Musk quite openly had no intention of building. It mainly seemed to exist as a tactic to attack actual planned public transport expansion in the Bay Area, which Musk compared it unfavourably to based on figures that didn't add up.
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