341–350 of 472 posts
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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.
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I've got confidence in them too. I think internet commenters are far too quick to overlook the fact that Musk is not going to push forward a venture like this without loads of research from a team of really smart people. It's not like it's just the one Elon with a fantasy about tunnels. It'd start with a bunch of talented people brainstorming and then, early in the process, they'd surely be speaking with really knowl…
> Musk is not going to push forward a venture like this without loads of research from a team of really smart people. It's not like it's just the one Elon with a fantasy about tunnels. It'd start with a bunch of talented people brainstorming and then, early in the process, they'd surely be speaking with really knowledgeable people who know the industry and pitfalls. Actually, the story is that Musk made it up on a wh…
And in general - entrepreneur "origin" stories are often bullshit - useful to get go PR, that's it.
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> Musk is not going to push forward a venture like this without loads of research from a team of really smart people. It's not like it's just the one Elon with a fantasy about tunnels. It'd start with a bunch of talented people brainstorming and then, early in the process, they'd surely be speaking with really knowledgeable people who know the industry and pitfalls. Actually, the story is that Musk made it up on a wh…
OK, it'd start with a user frustrated by a problem, then go to brainstorming with colleagues/employees/peers/friends and then go to industry experts and hires with direct experience. ;) Really the main difference is that someone without money and follow through would've just sat in traffic and complained.
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> 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…
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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…
> 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. A few reasons off the top of my head: - flexibility; car infrastructure is much more flexible than train infrastructure - incremental construction - cars already exist, you're only solving the problem of moving them around (building train infrastructure means b…
Presumably whether this system is privately or publicly operated, there would be a major toll associated with its use. So the ask isn't just "drive into a tunnel", it's "drive into a tunnel and pay $$$", compared with a new subway line integrated with the existing mass transit system (trains and buses) and under the same fare.
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> you can't dig deep in Houston because it's a swamp. That just means you need to dig deeper!
No, the ground water level is ~2m. This is a swamp, tunnels would be too expensive. And Houston is too big. Houston had a working public mass transport system, but big automotive pressure/corruption destroyed it. That's why Houston is unique. The mayor is elected every two years, because corruption is so rampant. The now widest highway worldwide, the I10 to Katy once had a railroad track in the middle. They even had…
> Houston is too big
Sounds like a job for Musk, to be quite honest. He's pretty good at driving down costs.
> corruption
Now there's a statement I can, sadly, agree with. :(
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What's an earthquake like when you are on the 12th (or is it -12?) floor of an underground building?
That's among the safest places to be. There's a whole section about it if you read the article linked at the top of the page.
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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…
Cities of 500000 inhabitants which have a subway exist. See
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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.
That's a nice way to put it. My personal opinion is that Darwinian processes are certainly optimization algorithms, they are just not necessarily optimizing for the same thing as what we might think. As an example, survival is a long-term game. I'm sure there were more aggressive adaptation strategies that went for the local minima and succeeded in the short term, only to be surpassed by the more "patient" algorithms…