Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Boring Company FAQ

boringcompany.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 472 posts

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#151

Post by djsumdog »

prostoalex wrote: post #131
erentz wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this is all very odd and everyone is lapping it up. He claims to want to reduce tunneling costs by a factor of 10, but starts by quoting a very high benchmark of $1 billion per mile which is quite easy to beat. Then he reduces diameters to something much smaller than all the expensive mega projects, into the range of something where technology is well established and costs are already 1/10th of his quoted $1 bil…

> But then for some reason the solution has to involve putting cars into these tunnels. If what he thinks he is on to is viable with cars in those tunnels, it's even more viable with trains carrying 1,000 passengers each coming every 3 minutes. So why aren't we building these subways with trains? Because with trains you never build just a tunnel - there are train stations, escalators leading in and out, ticketing boo…

But even with the stations, escalators and everything else, you're talking about orders of magnitude between trains and cars. London during peak hour has trains arriving less than 1 min 30 sec apart. They move an absolutely insane amount of people. Singapore's trains are entirely automated and arrive at Everything about Musk's idea seems absolutely terrible. If America had better trains and subways, it could move massive amounts of people. Train automation is a solved problem, and currently implemented in cities around the world. There is absolutely no possible way in any reality where individual car/pod transport could even approach the capacity of real mass transit:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-sol...

Americans need to get over our wasteful individualism, our "alone time" in cars and realize you can read a book, watch a movie or do something not involving driving on real public transport. Buses need to stop being just a means of transport for the poor.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#152

Post by imron »

inetknght wrote: post #24

Building tunnels in California and LA is great and all. But I'd like to see him do it in Houston, honestly, where common knowledge ( cough ) says that you can't dig deep in Houston because it's a swamp. Houston has, arguably, worse traffic than LA

> you can't dig deep in Houston because it's a swamp.

That just means you need to dig deeper!

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#153

Post by CodeWriter23 »

yongjik wrote: post #99
CodeWriter23 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

I do love the "freedom" of driving to Lake Tahoe once a year or so, but it's a patently silly adjective for describing people commuting between two fixed points (home and work), at a fixed hour, five times a week. Which is what all these urban traffic ideas are trying to solve, basically. I don't think all those people stuck at I-680 have a deep love of staring at the next car's bumper for two hours every day. Re-bra…

Hmmmm....if only there were a proposed way to increase the speed for those poor souls from 8MPH to 125MPH.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#154

Post by flashman »

deftnerd wrote: post #41

I'm more interested in the nuances of tunneling, like how they'll handle water seepage and flooding. Flooding is actually a huge problem with climate change causing larger and more frequent major weather events. After Hurricane Sandy, it took almost a week to reopen the subway tunnels. I can just imagine the kind of kinetic force that'll occur if a sled carrying a car slams into a section that has a few feet of water…

> Airflow is necessary to keep passengers safe.

This has just made me wonder what happens in emergencies or system failures. Are the tunnels wide enough to open your door or climb out a window? How far apart and numerous are emergency exit hatches? Is there off-grid emergency lighting (e.g. battery-backed)?

There would be few things more upsetting than your sled coming to a halt, inside a dark tunnel, and being unable to get out of your car. It would activate the same part of your brain that fears being buried alive.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#155

Post by arcticbull »

This feels a lot like the Shanghai Maglev [1]. Gets you between the airport and part of downtown for a relatively high fee. Built because they could, and wanted to show off. Not particularly useful, but cool. It'll be interesting to see what this turns into in reality.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Maglev_Train

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#156

Post by abakus »

Make these tunnels cycling only, and sell electric bikes specially designed for such tunnels, and provide resting/charging stations in the tunnel. Higher throughput, even smaller tunnels.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#157

Post by wilonth »

Andrenid wrote: post #47
i_am_olo wrote: post #10

Then he will figure out that he can produce electricity with the geothermal vertical tunnels! And will merge the Boring Company with Tesla like he did with Solar City!

In the future I assume Tesla, Space X, Boring Co, etc will all become Mars Corp. He's said again and again his true goal is to colonize Mars and everything until then is to get to that goal. What happens when he does get there? Can be claim it? Become President? Or an area of it?

He will become the Elon of Mars http://imgur.com/a/yhvDH.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#158

Post by maxander »

prostoalex wrote: post #131
erentz wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this is all very odd and everyone is lapping it up. He claims to want to reduce tunneling costs by a factor of 10, but starts by quoting a very high benchmark of $1 billion per mile which is quite easy to beat. Then he reduces diameters to something much smaller than all the expensive mega projects, into the range of something where technology is well established and costs are already 1/10th of his quoted $1 bil…

> But then for some reason the solution has to involve putting cars into these tunnels. If what he thinks he is on to is viable with cars in those tunnels, it's even more viable with trains carrying 1,000 passengers each coming every 3 minutes. So why aren't we building these subways with trains? Because with trains you never build just a tunnel - there are train stations, escalators leading in and out, ticketing boo…

The Boring Company isn't just looking to build tunnels either- there's going to be a bunch of interesting infrastructure to get cars onto those electric sleds and operating them, and that'll need maintenance and access and etc too.

For what its worth, it hints that those sleds will also become public transit platforms as well - "if one adds a vacuum shell, it is now a Hyperloop pod" - but Musk will want to call it something cool like an Urban Hyperloop instead of just a subway.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#159

Post by arcticbull »

elihu wrote: post #110
HappyTypist wrote: post #4

This does not answer the most obvious and important question: why not invest in public transport? It's boring but it will work.

Because the decision whether or not to invest in public transport is a political one. A private company can't force society to allocate more tax money to public transport infrastructure. It can, however, provide more attractive infrastructure options, which seems to be what the Boring company is trying to do.

It could just build transit though couldn't it? Instead of sleds? Private companies operate passenger and freight rail networks, especially in the UK to my understanding.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#160

Post by rmason »

erentz wrote: post #74
Animats wrote: post #61

So, the key ideas are: - Smaller diameter tunnels. 14' is suggested. This is slightly larger than the deep London Tube lines. - Electrically powered TBMs. Those exist. However, often the business end of the machine is hydraulically powered. Musk is probably thinking of going all electric, at least for the cutter head. After all, he has lots of experience with high-torque electric motors. - Do cutting and tunnel ring…

Yeah this is all very odd and everyone is lapping it up. He claims to want to reduce tunneling costs by a factor of 10, but starts by quoting a very high benchmark of $1 billion per mile which is quite easy to beat. Then he reduces diameters to something much smaller than all the expensive mega projects, into the range of something where technology is well established and costs are already 1/10th of his quoted $1 bil…

One of the reasons that subways are built only in very large cities is that you need a very high population density to make it worthwhile because of the cost of digging the tunnels.

But what if the cost were a tenth as much? I posit that for a city of 500,000 - 1,000,000 it might become practical to have subways and that radically changes the transit equation.

So I am very bullish on Musk bringing down the cost of tunneling. It all depends on how low he's able to reduce the cost.

Post reply on HN