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The Boring Company FAQ

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Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#361

Post by rsync »

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…

"I feel like only somebody who lives in LA would make the "must" assertion and not think about all the other options..."

I live in San Francisco and I assert that: To solve the soul-destroying practice of driving from (north of golden gate bridge) to SFO, roads must go 3D (tunnel).

You may not be aware of this, but if you need to go to SFO from Marin (or anywhere north of the city) you need to drive through small residential neighborhoods, stopping at up to 12 stoplights. It's incredibly wasteful of time and gas and degrades the lives of everyone involved. You find yourself stopped in traffic on a four lane boulevard in front of a single family home with a yard. That's how you get to SFO.

San Francisco desperately needs a tunnel from the GGB to SFSU/ParkMerced.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#362

Post by BanzaiTokyo »

yongjik wrote: post #126
sien wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also by going underground. Tokyo's metro is fantastic and one of the few globally that has more than 100% farebox recover ratio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio#Farebox...

> more than 100% farebox recover ratio Doesn't this just mean that they are expensive? I heard complaints about how expensive Tokyo's subway is. Reducing price and propping the system with tax can be a better approach in the long term, because that can encourage more people to use public transit and reduce demand for costly highways. (Also, one could argue that the freedom to move around at an affordable price is a b…

> because that can encourage more people to use public transit

you don't really want more people in Tokyo metro, at least not in peak hours

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#363

Post by ancientworldnow »

Robotbeat wrote: post #314
kuschku wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The throughput of "car directly after car" is about 10 times lower than that of a railway with a frequency of 90 seconds.

How about bus pods directly after bus pods? It'd be comparable or even higher (20 passengers/pod).

Congratulations, you just reinvented the train.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#364

Post by njarboe »

patkai wrote: post #303
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…

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.

And the rate of random mutation varies, influenced by evolution. Eukaryotes even have two sets of DNA, mitochondrial and regular, with very different mutation rates. The complexity of biology, I think, is greatly underestimated by most.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#365

Post by futun »

erentz wrote: post #74
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…

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…

Not to mention that (like other Musk projects) scalability is a huge issue.

What's the throughput of cars on electric sleds through tunnels?

Crickets...

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#366

Post by shadeless »

luca_ing wrote: post #349
rmason wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Cities of 500000 inhabitants which have a subway exist. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%BCrnberg

It's worth mentioning that the smallest city with a rapid transit system (2 metro lines, 28 stations) has a population of only 135,629.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lausanne

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#367

Post by ambicapter »

mikeash wrote: post #357
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…

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…

I was thinking the other day how sweet it would be if it was easy to take your bike on the subway.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#368

Post by shiftpgdn »

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.

There will be no end to cheap oil in the next 50 years. As demand decreases due to electric cars we'll see nearly 30-40% of the use of crude oil going away. The world has absolutely massive reserves of crude.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#369

Post by thatwebdude »

inetknght wrote: post #24

Building tunnels in California and LA is great and all. But I'd like to see him do it in Houston, honestly, where common knowledge ( cough ) says that you can't dig deep in Houston because it's a swamp. Houston has, arguably, worse traffic than LA

X city is important, too!

Bring it to X; after you figure out how to deal with the super cool and unique geographical features of X!

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#370

Post by pjc50 »

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…

> It seems strange to think that companies would leave money on the table, but in older industries I think this is exactly what happens.

This is probably true, but it's also deeply heretical for believers in market efficiency.

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