One question I don't see answered in the FAQ is "Who owns the tunnels?"
Does the Boring Company own them? The municipality? How does one go about getting permission to tunnel below property owned by other entities?
The Boring Company FAQ
351–360 of 472 posts
Re: The Boring Company FAQ
#352Earlier 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.
In my opinion autonomy is key. Big organizations like to talk a big game that they empower their employees to take risks. Yet most of the time they default to the status quo. It's culturally there or not.
Re: The Boring Company FAQ
#353I love how Elon is just fucking going for it. No time to waste.
I've been a little skeptical of Tesla lately but I love how quickly The Boring Company has gone from a tweet that seemed more like a joke than a real plan, to a hole in the company parking lot, to now actually working on prototypes and real plans.
Also SpaceX is killing it. I'm not a Musk fanboy but IMO he's 2/3 right now in the companies he's working on and Tesla still has a decent shot of bringing that back to 3/3
Re: The Boring Company FAQ
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> you just ask them to drive into a tunnel 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.
I suppose you could let people buy monthly tickets the same way they do for public transit, and handle the rest the same way automated ticketing of speeding is handled.
Re: The Boring Company FAQ
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There's a paper out there with the title "Cognition is not computation; evolution is not optimization". I haven't read it! I'm not sure you are accepting the basic principle, which is that evolution is not in any way optimization (not that the evolutionary process is not "optimized"). See something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherian_runaway Also Giuseppe Longo's work on randomness as a cause of organization…
The important bit is evolution is not optimizing for things humans understand. If you say evolution is optimizing for more copies of your DNA fragments your closer to the truth than saying 'fitness' in larger contexts. Don't forget there is more biomass in single celled organisms than single celled organisms. In terms of 'fitness' that does not seem like progress.
Re: The Boring Company FAQ
#356So, 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…
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
In Europe, that would be true, but I think in Southern California he can charge exorbitantly per car and people will pay it.
Re: The Boring Company FAQ
#357So, 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…
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…
An interesting aspect of carrying cars rather than trains is that it makes an incomplete network far more useful.
A public transportation network's usefulness is roughly quadratic in proportion to its size, because it needs to cover both your origin and your destination. A small subway system is nearly useless, because even people who live or work near it probably don't live and work near it. You can mitigate this to an extent with busses, taxis, letting people park at stations, etc., but there's still a lot of friction.
By carrying cars, these tunnels will act as an extension of the road network, which almost certainly covers your origin and destination already. The tunnel part doesn't need to serve the ends, it just needs to exist somewhere in the middle to be useful.
If you build one subway line, it's pretty much "great, let's finish the system so we can have something useful." If you build one Boring Tunnel, it would be immediately useful for anyone whose car trips are vaguely in that direction.
I'm really skeptical it'll all work out, but I don't think it should be thought of as a lame subway.
Re: The Boring Company FAQ
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a Quartz piece about how Musk conceives all of his ventures that goes into some detail about the considerations behind The Boring Company, but the issue you mention is one of the ones where the technology still needs to advance, I believe.
Would you mind linking that article? It seems interesting but I can't find it!
Re: The Boring Company FAQ
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
I think your assumptions are not valid. Subways usually go much more often than once per 10 minutes.
In the US?
Re: The Boring Company FAQ
#360> out of sight and won't fall on your head
Tunnels are known for quite the opposite: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/us/11cnd-boston.html