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The Boring Company FAQ

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Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#291

Post by johnlbevan2 »

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…

For the soil variability, is that hit when the TBM gets to a bad patch, is some kind of geophys carried out beforehand, or are there probe TBMs?

I suspect having mini TBMs which go ahead of the main machine, boring small tubes would be an effective way to give feedback on what's coming up; avoiding nasty surprises / helping to prepare ahead of a change of soil type.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#292

Post by flashman »

hwillis wrote: post #218
flashman wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 unabl…

Air isn't really a problem. A person breathes about .5 cubic meters of air per hour, so 100 people trapped for 6 hours will go through 300 cubic meters of air. The diameter of the tunnel being 14', that air supply would take up 68' of tunnel lengthwise. And that's one breath, the air can be breathed many times before the co2 level becomes too high. The air inside the volume of a coffin can last you a few hours. Unles…

I know that. I also know that I'd probably panic in that situation.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#293

Post by Turing_Machine »

tedsanders wrote: post #139
Turing_Machine wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been building tunnels for a lot longer than they've been building planes. They are extremely well-understood. The innovation here is in digging the tunnels, not their operation.

Then by all means, go ahead and answer @atarian, not me. His or her questions didn't seem straightforward to me, but perhaps you or someone else knows better.

You are the one who is suggesting that there are vague, ill-defined risks involved in this "new" technology.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#294

Post by rurban »

Already__Taken wrote: post #261
rurban wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. And the biggest problem is what to do with all those cars in the city. It's an enormous waste of space to park all those cars, besides the enormous hazards of the moving cars, not being to be able to walk. It destroyed cities. That's why public mass transport was created and was so successful in the big cities. US big automotive destroyed most of this working infrastructure in the last century (E.g. Los A…

If there's a tunneled transport infrastructure with cars moving around on sleds, you just need a few mile length tunnels off in nowhere and you've made a robot parking garage. You could rent your car back to the system to use as a lounge for people who want to travel but didn't bring a car to get on the network. Saves you parking costs, maybe an operator could work out paying you for that.

Yes, you could do that in midsized cities with underdeveloped public transport. Because there you would need a car, esp. when buying bigger stuff.

But for big cities trains are much better and cheaper.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#295

Post by Angostura »

cel1ne wrote: post #217
Angostura wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not businesses - that's humans. Or do you apply for a new job every two weeks whenever you see a higher salary advertised?

More precisely it's humans when they form a bunch / organization ;).

NO, I'm saying that even individuals are conservative in that they will tend to stay with an existing job, locale or speciality even when an alternative could potentially offer better returns. I don't check the job listings every day.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#296

Post by lmm »

aninhumer wrote: post #284
prostoalex wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. In most European cities, if you get off at train station, you're in the midst of (or very close to) the city center, office locations, touristy walking sites and plenty of choices for retail or food. In the US once you get off at the train sta…

Yes, and station location is an aspect in which US trains could be made better, by building new ones.

There is no right place for a train station in a sprawling city. An effective train station needs a certain amount of stuff within walking distance, which is only possible if the city is built that way.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#297

Post by johnlbevan2 »

Confusion wrote: post #203
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…

I think both the 'people' Kay refers to and Kay himself are right. It just depends on the scale you're looking at. Darwinian processes are near-perfectly optimized ... for an extremely local maximum. Once there, they fail to make jumps to much better nearby maxima. If you look at a somewhat larger scale, where there are better maxima available, then the correct conclusion is that they are absolutely not optimized.

Wouldn't Darwinian processes produce "just barely good enough" solutions? i.e. once you're at the stage where things are good enough to survive long enough to reproduce, evolution doesn't play much of a role.

A great example of this is me; I'm pretty amazing; I can move around my environment, make a living to a sufficient degree to cover costs of food and shelter, and somehow even have a fiancée and manage to keep another organism alive & fed. However I'm not an expert at everything, I'm pretty bad at most sporting based things (even compared to other, existing humans; not some theoretical concept of perfection), and I spend about a third of my life doing nothing (sleeping), despite this not necessarily being required (e.g. Dolphins can sleep half their brain at a time, allowing them to avoid this inefficient downtime).

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#298

Post by lmm »

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.

The throughput will be tiny because cars take up so much space. http://humantransit.org/2012/09/the-photo-that-explains-almo...

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#299

Post by Turing_Machine »

kuschku wrote: post #231
Turing_Machine wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elevator engineers sometimes handle this problem by having "express" elevators that travel between distant floors and "local" elevators that operate between nearby floors. That avoids the need for big central stations (other than the ground-floor lobby, of course, but there's no way around that for a building -- a street transport system isn't limited to a single point of entry).

Congratulations. You just reinvented the concept of local busses connecting subway stations within of a few blocks to the local area. Express vs. Local was actually borrowed from that concept.

I haven't "reinvented" anything. I was pointing out how elevator engineers solve the problem.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#300

Post by lmm »

zild3d wrote: post #79
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…

If NYC didn't have a third dimension for transportation (subway and trains), no amount of busses and bikes would fix the soul-destroying traffic. The listed alternatives are all nice, but none of them allow you to move at 125+ mph. We should be able to get to our destination faster, not just with a bit less soul-destruction. Remote work is of course not for every or even most professions, and I don't see why it would…

> If NYC didn't have a third dimension for transportation (subway and trains), no amount of busses and bikes would fix the soul-destroying traffic.

Yes they would. If you took the existing surface street network and made it 100% buses and/or ground-level trains you could accomodate current subway and road capacity with room to spare, even before you reclaimed all the space currently used for car parking. Private cars are an astonishingly inefficient use of space, and taxis are barely any better.

> The listed alternatives are all nice, but none of them allow you to move at 125+ mph.

We don't need to though. There's no conceivable need for a city to accommodate more people than could live within a 30-minute commute at current speeds if we were willing to build at the high densities that are actually possible.

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