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The Boring Company FAQ

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Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#271

Post by xpaqui »

cft wrote: post #58
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…

Musk is proposing a technology. You are proposing social(ist?) ideas.

Is socialism the new communism? I once saw a socialist on the street didn't eat my children.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#272

Post by ACow_Adonis »

elif wrote: post #214
espadrine wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Issues glossed over: Soil variability. … The back end. Good points. And beyond the technical aspects, there's a lot that the FAQ doesn't say about the service: - How do you tell your sled where to go? Does it always go to the same place? If so, do you merge lanes? If you merge lanes, wouldn't there be jams there? If instead you build many parallel tunnels, don't you remove the gains you had from building smaller tu…

>How do you tell it where to go? the giant ipad on the dashboard of your tesla, or your phone otherwise. >If you merge lanes, wouldn't there be jams there? If instead you build many parallel tunnels [etc] because if the increased speed, one lane is the equivalent of about 2.5 highway lanes in terms of throughput per hour. Regarding safety distance, I think you can actually safely achieve smaller spacing with a roller…

Using actual numbers:

Melbourne's light rail E-class trams have a carrying capacity of 64 seated: 146 standing. They can regularly mix with pedestrians. The E class is the "big" one at about 40 seconds:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmBlZ4xpS5Q

Melbournes older, 6 car trains have a crush capacity of ~1526. Seatwise they have ~500-600, with a standard target capacity of about 800 (above that the extra variance/numbers people start to complain about overcrowding).

Seen here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AfbBVXGJzY

Now, those old trains aren't the newest, and they're single-decker and not the biggest or double-decker like sydney's, and they're not the bestest like some of the asian fully-auto metros.

But, my point being is that by the numbers before we start getting too crowded, our quite average older 6 car trains have point in time comfortable capacity about 2-3 times more than your 8 car subway estimate. Hell, three of our light rail vehicles regularly move the numbers of your 8-car subway.

But wait...

We've not actually accounted for the trips accurately, because if a train runs the full length of its track only carrying its estimated point in time comfortable capacity, the carriages would be quite empty: the total passengers using a train aren't its point-in-time-carrying capacity, but how many get on and off between all the stops along its path. That goes for light rail too. So to find the actual number of people moved by train or light rail, you generally have to multiply the carrying capacity by some additional multiple.

On the other hand, private vehicles generally, in practice have a person per vehicle estimate UNDER 2 (barring geography, time, purpose variances), meaning your estimate is overly optimistic for the cars, and out by about an order of magnitude for the rail vehicles.

I was not being facetious when I made another comment in this thread when I said I was shocked by how inefficient private vehicles were when I actual went down to the intersection and started counting how long it took them to move say 100 people (equivalent of 1 of our trams), nor am I being facetious when I say not only that this is likely a problem with an already known solution, but a problem where The Boring Companies apparent solution is starting with a rough order-of-magnitude efficiency penalty.

I'm honestly a bit...feel like I'm taking crazy pills...that people are talking about the proposal of putting private individual vehicles on rails...in tunnels.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#273

Post by jlebrech »

schiffern wrote: post #255
jlebrech wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there's nothing stopping a specially sized bus from using the system or cyclists (if they adapt it right.)

The video on their homepage shows a cyclist on a "minibus" pod at 0:45. https://i.imgur.com/2QkC5YK.png

nice catch

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#275

Post by prawn »

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…

Why are you assuming that there won't be minivans on the sleds? Or a larger format sled that can accommodate a bus-sized transport or a mid-size truck?

I think in the original video, they showed a pod with a group of commuters.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#276

Post by prawn »

falsedan wrote: post #223
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Americans are adverse to change I don't get it, where does that come from anyway? I mean America's mostly a country of immigrants; most inhabitants' forefathers, only a couple generations ago, abandoned everything they know to build up a new life. If that's not change, then IDK what is. I think that at one point it's not about what they want - having the option even to drive anywhere is a luxury a lot of people don…

> I don't get it, where does that come from anyway? Let's: * replace tipping with a minimum wage which helping working people get out of poverty * make checks obsolete * etc. > Driving in New York isn't practical, so people take the tube The what now? I think you'll find it's actually called le Métropolitain

  - Eliminate small coins
  - Move to metric in a practical sense rather than just official

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#277

Post by Gravityloss »

How can a company produce something coherent like this?

Usually it's really hard to understand what a company is doing from their web page because it's hidden behind so much meaningless marketing speak "We help you solve problems and be awesome!".

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#278

Post by TeMPOraL »

lucb1e wrote: post #166
catmanjan wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just imaging a 150 way 3-d lane merge at the other end :O

When imagining a 150 way merge I can't help but feel like it'll pollute enough to make nearby trees crumble in a matter of days. 150 ways at approximately 1 car per second (a very full highway) and 1.1 people per car (I hardly know anyone who carpools), there's 150 1.1 120 = ~20 000 people every two minutes. Trains can operate at the same frequency, carry a few thousand each and pollute a lot less -- heck, electric o…

Musk's idea was that gas-powered cars would not be driving through tunnels themselves, but on electric sleds, which makes the tunnels as non-stinky as with electric trains.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#279

Post by ascorbic »

Tomminn wrote: post #174
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…

I think the sled idea is really interesting. Imagine a conveyor belt like you have in airports. Except it moves cars at 150 mph through an underground tunnel instead of people at 15mph. Traffic is often massively asymmetric so you can just reverse the direction it travels at noon. It seems plausible that keeping a conveyor belt in good service is cheaper than keeping a fleet of railway cars is. It's also significantl…

Generously assuming that it averages 150mph, and very generously assuming 1.5 people per car and estimating from the video a gap between sleds of 40m gives a capacity of around 9,000 pax/hr per line. The Tube in London has trains with around 900 pax capacity, and they run at around 90 second intervals at peak time, giving 40 trains per hour and 36,000 pax/hr.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#280

Post by nickik »

arcticbull wrote: post #159
elihu wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At least for Buses this is highly regulated in the US. I would assume the same is true for everything else.

Free-Market people have long advocated for a liberalisation of buses and taxis. Uber has help breaking the Taxi monopoly, but the Bus regulation still stand. Eventually somebody will attack Uber because of too much ridesharing and accuse them of breaking the laws against private buses.

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