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Boring Co. Drops LA Westside Tunnel Plan

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Re: Boring Co. Drops LA Westside Tunnel Plan

#181

Post by quotemstr »

zjaffee wrote: post #150
nimbius wrote: post #53

For those not familiar with LA's private property rights, they are some of the strictest in the nation. The 710 freeway, originally designed and intended to go all the way from long beach to pasadena, has successfully been litigated for fifty years to prevent it from ever doing so. heavy truck traffic has to exit to surface streets to continue to the city or route around it using the 101. trucks are prohibited on the…

Why are you saying this like it's a bad thing? Transportation development has time over time been proven to work best when decisions are made by consensus rather than by letting central authorities and monied interests do whatever they think is right. Had this never happened, LA would have far worse pollution problems than it does today, and NYC would be completely overrun with highways.

Has a consensus-based approach been proven "best"? New York would be much worse off today if not for Robert Moses ramming through much-needed and innotative infrastructure. Consensus, in practice, amounts to giving everyone the power to veto massive projects, and widespread veto power leads to paralysis and weakness. You need strong central authority to actually make decisions and get things to happen.

Re: Boring Co. Drops LA Westside Tunnel Plan

#182

Post by mips_avatar »

njarboe wrote: post #156
blondie9x wrote: post #35

Musk can do better than this. We need real subways and trains for transit. We do not need another express freeway lane that's underground. This is just adding more room for cars. Building on the existing approach of solving traffic by adding more lanes. This will not help Los Angeles nor America as a whole shift away from car dependency.

These tunnels can have a bunch of buses running in them next to each other (ie a train). Cars are great. When there is no congestion you get fast point-to-point transportation at any time. We should work on making this mode of transportation better, not trying to kill it. Make the cars more energy efficient, underground roads to fix the noise and land use problems, make them automatic to reduce deaths, etc. Would you…

I don’t think this should be so downvoted. I think there’s a bunch of people on this thread downvoting anything that’s pro-tunnels.

Re: Boring Co. Drops LA Westside Tunnel Plan

#183

Post by danso »

mips_avatar wrote: post #177
danso wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a technological problem. If people get unhappy when Facebook "moves fast and breaks things" in its mission to "connect the world", then people should be just as cautious when it comes to construction projects that impact miles of public infrastructure and thousands of private homes.

Sure I mean bad (insert bad thing) things are bad. And a risk to private homes should stop a project. But I can’t find any proof that there’s a risk here. Tunneling is really safe.

Then why is Boring declining to take part in the EIR process?

Re: Boring Co. Drops LA Westside Tunnel Plan

#184

Post by messick »

quotemstr wrote: post #164
zjaffee wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't block it on any known Environmental grounds, CEQA exists to insure major infrastructure projects evaluate many options and attempt to find the most environmentally friendly option. In this particular case, it was almost certainly not building a low capacity tunnel for small vehicles and cars, but to build the already planned metro rail line without having to add engineering complexity to maneuver around a…

> In this particular case, it was almost certainly not building a low capacity tunnel for small vehicles and cars, but to build the already planned metro rail line without having to add engineering complexity to maneuver around a privately owned and built tunnel. A metro rail line can't transport a car, so point-to-point transit is out, as is any semblance of privacy. Why are you so quick to devalue these advantages?…

There is an actual big boy tunnel getting built on The Westside right this second. No waiting on Musk's bullshit required.

Re: Boring Co. Drops LA Westside Tunnel Plan

#185

Post by messick »

quotemstr wrote: post #168
danso wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He can’t build it profitably, or at least without going through the environmental impact review that every other project of this scale must pass. Do you really think the hole digging is the bottleneck for every other underground project?

How much infrastructure is getting built under the current review process? The current process is just a fig leaf for everyone getting a NIMBY veto. California ought to be ashamed of its technological paralysis.

9 miles of infrastructure is getting built right this second under the current review process.

https://www.metro.net/projects/westside/

Re: Boring Co. Drops LA Westside Tunnel Plan

#186

Post by mips_avatar »

danso wrote: post #183
mips_avatar wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure I mean bad (insert bad thing) things are bad. And a risk to private homes should stop a project. But I can’t find any proof that there’s a risk here. Tunneling is really safe.

Then why is Boring declining to take part in the EIR process?

You’d probably have to ask Elon Musk. I also haven’t read the lawsuit so I don’t know what specifically the homeowners wanted investigated. California law basically gives veto power to any homeowner for anything, so why bother trying to be innovative there in the first place? I think the software industry only evolved there because nobody had figured out how to regulate a bit yet.

Re: Boring Co. Drops LA Westside Tunnel Plan

#187

Post by zjaffee »

quotemstr wrote: post #181
zjaffee wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you saying this like it's a bad thing? Transportation development has time over time been proven to work best when decisions are made by consensus rather than by letting central authorities and monied interests do whatever they think is right. Had this never happened, LA would have far worse pollution problems than it does today, and NYC would be completely overrun with highways.

Has a consensus-based approach been proven "best"? New York would be much worse off today if not for Robert Moses ramming through much-needed and innotative infrastructure. Consensus, in practice, amounts to giving everyone the power to veto massive projects, and widespread veto power leads to paralysis and weakness. You need strong central authority to actually make decisions and get things to happen.

The entire premise of things happening cannot in this day and age be something that involves screwing over the working class as has been the case with the vast majority of urban planning decisions historically, abet is also something that is starting to get better now.

I cannot understand how so many of my fellow Americans love to talk about the merits of democracy, but when it comes to large scale capital projects, either public or private, people suddenly hate democratic decision making. Moses sized power completely ignoring the democratic process, and had musk built these tunnels, he'd have done the same.

Re: Boring Co. Drops LA Westside Tunnel Plan

#188

Post by readhn »

bbeekley wrote: post #80
readhn wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

would you be ok with tunnel being built under YOUR house (that you own and worked/will be working for for the rest of your life) without consulting with you FIRST?

Yes, as long as it gets the necessary permits and green-light from my elected officials. The canceled tunnel was planned to go in about a block from where I currently live and I was excited for it. It wasn't even going to be under Brentwood (the northern terminus was about 2.5 mi away from the nearest edge). The hypothetical question for the plaintiffs might better be: would you be ok with a tunnel being built betwee…

>>Yes, as long as it gets the necessary permits and green-light from my elected officials.

This. all im saying.

Re: Boring Co. Drops LA Westside Tunnel Plan

#189

Post by jcranmer »

njarboe wrote: post #156
blondie9x wrote: post #35

Musk can do better than this. We need real subways and trains for transit. We do not need another express freeway lane that's underground. This is just adding more room for cars. Building on the existing approach of solving traffic by adding more lanes. This will not help Los Angeles nor America as a whole shift away from car dependency.

These tunnels can have a bunch of buses running in them next to each other (ie a train). Cars are great. When there is no congestion you get fast point-to-point transportation at any time. We should work on making this mode of transportation better, not trying to kill it. Make the cars more energy efficient, underground roads to fix the noise and land use problems, make them automatic to reduce deaths, etc. Would you…

> I wonder why so many people have this car hate?

Cars are one of the least space-efficient transportation option imaginable. In an urban environment, space comes at a premium. At the same time, car infrastructure is quite heavily subsidized. Finally, there is a very large car lobby that absolutely abhors the idea of spending a dime on anything that's not cars such that talking about mass transit is equated with a war on cars. (And quite frankly, you sound much closer to that end of the spectrum).

> When there is no congestion you get fast point-to-point transportation at any time.

Following on the above point I made about space-inefficiency... it's impossible to allocate enough space in cities to prevent such congestion. And tunnels don't help because it means you have a vertical circulation problem, which is a problem that we struggle to solve with conventional mass transit systems already, and it's even harder with cars.

Ultimately, the reason why people like me are so against Loop is because we see it as Musk doing to car owners what Trump does to coal miners: sympathize with their plight, blame it on completely the wrong thing, and then peddle fantasies that he'll be able to make it better.

Re: Boring Co. Drops LA Westside Tunnel Plan

#190

Post by yellowapple »

mips_avatar wrote: post #123
jerf wrote: post #19

It seems sort of shortsighted to block a tunneling company on environmental grounds. In the long term, cheap tunneling would be fantastic for the environment. Most of what we consider the biosphere is on the surface, and to the extent that there's life in the tunneled area, by volume tunneling isn't going to be significant for a long time. (Volume is much larger than surface; in general, areal intuition fails miserab…

I kind of want to send these ‘environmentalists’ pieces of asphalt because that’s what their actions here are going to cause the entire planet to be covered in.

It's like how a lot of environmentalists seem to be opposed to nuclear despite it being statistically safer than even solar (let alone wind or hydro) and much better for the environment than even natural gas (let alone coal).

By letting perfect be the enemy of good, they're leaving the environment worse off.

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