391–400 of 472 posts
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In the US?
In NYC, yes. During rush hour, the local subways come every 5 minutes at most. I think a safe estimate is about 15 trains every hour. The express subways are spaced out a little more, closer to 8 or 10 minutes, depending on the line.
here is LA for instance, about 10 minutes average during rush hour https://media.metro.net/documents/5a366ef8-2013-4d21-8e6d-e7...
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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…
> 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…
Mostly because batteries sucked. Small electronics drove most of the research to improve them.
I guess Tesla vehicles are market leading in several ways, but they aren't a generation ahead of what anyone else can do or anything like that.
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With the capacity in mind, this project will end up having much lower throughput than a regular road, even when taking congestion in mind - unless they build dozens of parallel tubes, in which case the costs will become very, very large. I also don't see it becoming a long-distance alternative, again because tunneling is a slow and long process. It would be interesting I guess if they combined it with the Hyperloop c…
I'd guess 1 lane at 200km/h without stopping is ~7-10 lanes rush hour traffic.
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> 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.
I'm no starry-eyed admirer of The Boring Company, but it's funny how many peoples' argument here seem to be: "The Boring Company's plan to alleviate traffic congestion is flawed and non-optimal. It would make more sense to replace American cities with high-density ones and build mass transit instead".
An automated electric tunneling system that can recycle material into building components sounds incredibly useful to prep mars for colonies.
Have you ever read up on Mars lava tubes? The idea of using them to start colonies makes a lot of sense to me.
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…
Too much water won't be a problem on Mars... where I think the end-game here is for Musk on why he's learning how to build tunneling machines.
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While this article[0] demonstrates that numbers have improved slightly for actual car ownership as millenials age, it still contains other tidbits and statistics (like the having driver's license by 18 stat at 60% vs. 80% in 1980) that reflect views on car ownership amongst millenials today. Anecdote, I don't have a lot of mileage (pun unintended), but every girl I've ever dated did not have license, and neither do I…
Don't make the mistake of making macro predictions based on a niche segment. I think generally people aren't "interested" in car ownership; they are interested in fulfilling their transportation needs as best as possible. Car ownership just happens to fulfill that the best right now. There is the possibility of increased urbanization and improvements to self-driving car technology will make it economically feasible f…
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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…
"The air inside the volume of a coffin can last you a few hours. Unless you are literally shoulder to shoulder with no other air, your oxygen will last as long as you need." ... unless there is a fire: "Most drivers rolled up their windows and waited for rescue. The ventilation system in the tunnel drove toxic smoke back down the tunnel faster than anyone could run to safety. These fumes quickly filled the tunnel and…