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The Boring Company FAQ

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Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#301

Post by hnnsj »

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…

Reduced density of cities leads to longer distances and higher transportation needs, and less than ideal utilization of public transport. So that's counter-productive.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#302

Post by mrsuprawsm »

rmason wrote: post #160
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…

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 tu…

Many European cities of such sizes already do have subways.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#303

Post by patkai »

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…

Alan Kay should remember that evolution includes random mutations that get you out of local extrema, and "interesting" recombinations. The rate of these is maybe low, but there are examples where large organizations renew themselves this way. But I agree with the conclusion that this is slow and unreliable.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#305

Post by Symmetry »

factsaresacred wrote: post #225
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…

> Everything about Musk's idea seems absolutely terrible. Depends what his goal is. Currently getting from A to B in a car at a certain time involves traffic jams. If his goal is to get from A to B most efficiently in a car then it's one of the best ideas. If his goal is get people from A to B via any mode of transport, perhaps trains. But he owns a car company, so that's not exactly in his interest. Also with cars i…

This system applies to moving people just as much as moving cars. But for political reasons it makes sense to emphasize the extent to which this is about car owners.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#306

Post by kaybe »

theprop wrote: post #21

This 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…

I think it's rather scary how thin the mantle is in many places. The oceanic crust is just above 10km deep, I'm sitting on something like 15km. That's.. not a lot. I can cycle that in less than an hour.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#307

Post by [deleted] »

Danieru wrote: post #289
yladiz wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only costs that much if you're staying far away or going pretty long distances. I stay in a station pretty far from Central Tokyo (past Kita Senju on the Tobu line) and to get to somewhere like Ginza costs less than 400 Yen, which is about $3.75. However, a chunk of that cost is due to Tobu, and if I was staying in Kita Senju or Ueno my trip would only be about 200-250 Yen.

If you are going from Kita Senju to Ginza then you would be using the Hibiya line. That trip will cost 195yen. Which is the same price for going all the way down to Roppongi where Google is. The Tokyo Metro and Toei lines tend to only have two or three prices depending on distance. This is why going two and three stations almost always costs the same. Since employers always pay for commuting costs a regular working p…

[deleted]

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#308

Post by Robotbeat »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #285
factsaresacred wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everything about Musk's idea seems absolutely terrible. Depends what his goal is. Currently getting from A to B in a car at a certain time involves traffic jams. If his goal is to get from A to B most efficiently in a car then it's one of the best ideas. If his goal is get people from A to B via any mode of transport, perhaps trains. But he owns a car company, so that's not exactly in his interest. Also with cars i…

also what about safety? If there is an accident then you will have a huge pile of cars/sleds crashing into each other; How do you get injured out of a narrow tunnel? What about fires? What about ventilation (in case of fire) ? These are all problems of tunnels, now the narrow tunnel makes these problems more difficult to deal with.

No, you'll have at most one. The cars will be networked and by having a vertical rail will be able to brake very quickly.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#309

Post by mwexler »

What a great title. Before clicking, I fully expected to see things like "Why should I keep working here?" and "Will anything, ever, happen here?" and other questions about working in a boring, mind numbing job... Real topic is much more important, but still, I think we also need a real "Boring Company" FAQs list.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#310

Post by Tepix »

bigbugbag wrote: post #282
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…

There's another obvious solution, wait a few years and the end of cheap oil will fix traffic. Then the countries that built themselves around roads, cars and cheap oil will face larger issues (mostly US and Australia IIANM). The worst part is that this had been foreseen and warnings have been made but nothing is done to deal with it.

If you wait a few years you'll have electric cars that are independent of cheap oil. And there will still be traffic. Perhaps it will no longer be soul-destroying because you'll be able to watch a movie, take a nap or get work done on your PC in your self-driving car.
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