An automated electric tunneling system that can recycle material into building components sounds incredibly useful to prep mars for colonies.
The Boring Company FAQ
31–40 of 472 posts
Re: The Boring Company FAQ
#32This does not answer the most obvious and important question: why not invest in public transport? It's boring but it will work.
This IS public transit. Public transit without the last mile (or in LA, the last 5 miles) problem. This freedom-supporting tech also thwarts the tyranny inherent in public transit (schedules, robbing your life with all the waiting, limited load carrying capacity, forced interactions with antisocial individuals, etc.)
Re: The Boring Company FAQ
#33Doesn't a tunnel under a building significantly increase the chances of the building falling down? What about flooding?
No clue why this is downvoted, these are valid concerns.
Measuring and avoiding ground settlement consumes an enormous amount of engineering and contracting resources in every urban tunneling job.
Flooding too can lead to work stoppages or long delays. You should have seen the Queens Bored Tunnels and Structures Project after Hurricane Sandy. It was pretty soupy.
Source: Was a tunnel boring engineer in NYC, where we had an abundant supply of both buildings and groundwater.
Re: The Boring Company FAQ
#34This is FANTASTIC! It's important to understand how massive the Earth is (even though it's a pinprick when compared to the sun). You can EASILY go 3-D or deep. The deepest mines in the world are around 12,000 feet deep. This is about 6x the height of the tallest building in the world (2000 feet tall). Imagine, thus, putting in a tunnel at what would be every 5th floor of a skyscraper and that you could fit 6 skyscrap…
What's an earthquake like when you are on the 12th (or is it -12?) floor of an underground building?
That's among the safest places to be. There's a whole section about it if you read the article linked at the top of the page.
Re: The Boring Company FAQ
#35This does not answer the most obvious and important question: why not invest in public transport? It's boring but it will work.
Indeed, strange how that's not mentioned at all. Or whether any transportation engineers have evaluated what kind of traffic reduction would occur from using all these tunnels for a subway system instead of just moving a few cars around. Edit: The more I think about it, the worse it seems. Compare how much space is eaten out of the road above for a few cars... per minute?...to go up/down to this tunnel vs. how many a…
>Even if the car's were relatively crammed close together in the tunnel, I can't imagine it would be anywhere near the density you could fit on subway trains.
Indeed. The problem always fundamentally reduces to geometry, and the only way to solve it is to increase density.
People always say, "we can just build more tunnels", but you'll just end up with congestion at interchange and entry/exit points, just like on freeways today. And the more tunnels you build, the more it takes for the operating company to recoup the costs, meaning higher fares to use the tunnels.
Best case scenario, this company reduces the cost of developing rail transit. Likely scenario, we just get the same awful freeway situation but below. Worst-case scenario is the unfortunate situation you described.
Re: The Boring Company FAQ
#36I'm rather surprised that "are you boring yet?" isn't in the FAQ.
Re: The Boring Company FAQ
#37Doesn't a tunnel under a building significantly increase the chances of the building falling down? What about flooding?
No, it doesn't. If it did, buildings in NYC would be falling down left and right. Heck, I hear they even put them under entire bodies of water!
Yes, tunnels can flood, if they are below the water table. Good pumps can fix that problem. Again, the Chunnel being Exhibit A - it hasn't flooded, yet.
Re: The Boring Company FAQ
#38This does not answer the most obvious and important question: why not invest in public transport? It's boring but it will work.
It costs 1 billion dollars a mile to dig subway tunnels in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Improving tunnel digging technology would help bring those costs down. The American solution to every problem is to spend more money as money is the universal and only sufficient remedy to all problems. Eventually, you run into a situation where spending more money makes things worse such as with health care. Sometimes it's bett…
San Francisco's new Central Subway drilled two bores at a cost of about 150M/mi. What makes these projects insanely expensive is not the tunnel, it's the stations.
Re: The Boring Company FAQ
#39Doesn't a tunnel under a building significantly increase the chances of the building falling down? What about flooding?
No clue why this is downvoted, these are valid concerns. Measuring and avoiding ground settlement consumes an enormous amount of engineering and contracting resources in every urban tunneling job. Flooding too can lead to work stoppages or long delays. You should have seen the Queens Bored Tunnels and Structures Project after Hurricane Sandy. It was pretty soupy. Source: Was a tunnel boring engineer in NYC, where we…
An engineering study of ground subsidence and how to avoid it, vs "the building falling down" are two very different things.
Re: The Boring Company FAQ
#40"This is not a new concept, as buildings have been constructed from Earth for thousands of years including, according to recent evidence, the Pyramids."
Classic Musk snark. Love it.