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The Boring Company FAQ

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Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#181

Post by flukus »

sAuronas wrote: post #89
discodave wrote: post #48

The old strategy of hiding your outlandish claim in an assertion in the first sentence! "To solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic, roads must go 3D" The word "must" is a very strong one here, there are other options: * Reduce the amount of travel that people need to do (remote work, online shopping). * Reduce the density of cities (enabled by remote work or longer commutes with better internet access). * Incre…

Cities like LA will become denser over time. It might seem counterintuitive but increasing density alleviate traffic (people walk). You can't clean a hotel or flip a burger remote. Public transit has failed to solve the problem despite a 100-year head start. Cycling... in LA... I don't think the Boring Company is trying to solve the gridlock. They will, however, provide an option for those who can afford to pop down…

> Cities like LA will become denser over time.

If the boring company solves issues with personal travel then cities like LS will become less dense. There's a reason urban sprawl didn't exist before the car.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#182

Post by a_d »

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…

Maybe the explanation for glossing over some of the obvious hindrances (that you and several other commenters wisely point out) is that these projects are not conceived out of an organic need or to problem-solve issues - even though they are projected as such...but, these are projects that are born out of some (unpublished) masterplan/roadmap for learning to establish a colony on Mars.

Just learning how to build tunnels is interesting from that respect.

The reason that isn't stated is because Musk likes to create projects around a "purpose" and business plan for them to succeed (even if they are retro-fitted - that is, he decided first that it would be important to tunnel, and then arrived at the "why tunnels on earth").

edit: not a new thought. some other commenters already pointed this out. I read those after posting this.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#183

Post by BurningFrog »

djsumdog wrote: post #151
prostoalex wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mas…

One problem is that trains only move an insane amount of people that are all going the same way.

Another problem is that all those people have to walk to and from the end station.

A "packet switched" system of sending individual cars at high speed solves both those problems, and going just by my gut feel, should have a quite high throughput too.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#184

Post by picosat »

djsumdog wrote: post #151
prostoalex wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mas…

The American obsession with "alone time" is exactly why Musk's idea is the only effective way to relieve the traffic problem. Americans are adverse to change, and the result of this is a solution needs to leverage our existing infrastructure. Putting the cars on sleds allows people to keep the luxury and flexibility of personal cars without requiring a lifestyle shift.

Furthermore, a solution that leverages personal vehicles is slightly more viable for a private sector company. Telsa can continue to promote their car sales without that having a negative effect on the Boring Company.

This idea that a company can replace our entire existing infrastructure with a train/bus system is just purely impractical. There is the solution that seems the most obvious (current public transit), and then there is the one that is actually viable from a business perspective.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#185

Post by [deleted] »

djsumdog wrote: post #151
prostoalex wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mas…

[deleted]

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#186

Post by so33 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #183
djsumdog wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mas…

One problem is that trains only move an insane amount of people that are all going the same way. Another problem is that all those people have to walk to and from the end station. A "packet switched" system of sending individual cars at high speed solves both those problems, and going just by my gut feel, should have a quite high throughput too.

>One problem is that trains only move an insane amount of people that are all going the same way. Another problem is that all those people have to walk to and from the end station. A "packet switched" system of sending individual cars at high speed solves both those problems, and going just by my gut feel, should have a quite high throughput too.

People are walking from the station to these giant office towers in central London. The walk from the Tube station to the office must only take 5-10 minutes, total. My gut feeling says the throughput won't be high specifically because you'll have 800 or so people trying to get out at the same place at roughly the same time.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#187

Post by cel1ne »

josephg wrote: post #148
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 we should ask why don't we do that anyway? Sure. Why didn't we have electric cars before tesla? Why didn't Boeing or Lockheed Martin make reusable rockets? Alan Kay said something[1] recently that has been bouncing around my head for the past few days. He said that many people think darwinian processes (like the economy) optimize. "One my degrees is in molecular biology, and I can tell you, any biologist w…

Off topic:

The more I think about organizations the more I they seem to be the key players preventing change to me. (Which is not necessarily a bad thing)

Business says: We had this great idea, now let's freeze everything in time and let's make money of this snapshot forever, because who knows when we'll find gold again.

Entertainment industry likes to do that especially.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#188

Post by ajdlinux »

cel1ne wrote: post #187
josephg wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But then we should ask why don't we do that anyway? Sure. Why didn't we have electric cars before tesla? Why didn't Boeing or Lockheed Martin make reusable rockets? Alan Kay said something[1] recently that has been bouncing around my head for the past few days. He said that many people think darwinian processes (like the economy) optimize. "One my degrees is in molecular biology, and I can tell you, any biologist w…

Off topic: The more I think about organizations the more I they seem to be the key players preventing change to me. (Which is not necessarily a bad thing) Business says: We had this great idea, now let's freeze everything in time and let's make money of this snapshot forever, because who knows when we'll find gold again. Entertainment industry likes to do that especially.

The phrase "exploitation versus exploration" seems appropriate here.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#189

Post by yetihehe »

arcticbull wrote: post #146
benliong78 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Living in another crowded city, Hong Kong, perhaps I can offer some perspective: We have tons of elevated tools highways and bypasses aimed at reducing traffic, the problem is all these elevated roads needs to go around a lot of tall buildings. Going underground with subway already provides us with better solution to a lot more of our traffic problem. What the boring company's proposing isn't all that different from…

That's the difference though, they're not talking about putting tons of people down there, they're talking about putting a small handful at a time (at most) by using cars. It appears much less efficient.

They talk about ALSO putting cars. There will be pods for transporting people, like in subways.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#190

Post by stevewilhelm »

simonh wrote: post #179
lorenzorhoades wrote: post #168

I think people are missing the strategic importance here. Tesla is going to be in the game of self driving cars. Once self driving cars happens, there is no longer going to be anyone who buys cars, they will simply hail a ride using the self-driving Telsa(Uber, Lift, Google) network. Soul-Crushing-Traffic is going to be optimized heavily, using certain algorithms and the inter connectivity of the cars. However, one H…

I don't see how the tunnels can be commercially viable just carrying Teslas. That's a tiny fraction of traffic. Apart from anything else I can't see cities granting permits for exclusive tunnel systems like that, which don't benefit the broader public.

> cities granting permits for exclusive tunnel systems

The Internet cable in a very narrow tunnel under the public street in front of my house is owned by a private company.

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