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The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

citylab.com

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Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#91

Post by jcranmer »

ncallaway wrote: post #82
michaelleslie wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a less-scalable metro system, a technology that predates this "innovation" by a century or so.

I don't understand this comment at all. The Boring Company's main plans aren't to create new and novel tunnels. The Boring Company's goal is to create cheaper tunnels. Like, if I said I was planning on developing a wheel at 1/10th the cost of current wheels, I don't care that the wheel predates my innovation by millenia. I'm not attempting to _improve_ the wheel, I'm attempting to make it viable in an increasing numb…

> The Boring Company's main plans aren't to create new and novel tunnels. The Boring Company's goal is to create _cheaper_ tunnels.

The Boring Company's main plans, as can be evidenced by their communications (such as their FAQ) and their commitments and attempted commitments to build actual projects, is to pitch a radically new, 21st century mode of mass transit that is really just a variation of personal rapid transit (which has historically failed at being effective mass transit solution). The meaningful commitment to building cheaper is actually... to build narrower tunnels, that are unusable for any other purposes, since there's not enough room to put in high-capacity subway trains in the same tunnel.

Oh, and for good measure, tunnels are not why subways are expensive. It's station caverns and ancillary infrastructure (such as procuring more rolling stock for the extension) that consumes most of the cost of a subway, so it's not clear that cheaper tunneling would actually meaningfully reduce the cost of building new subways.

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#92

Post by _Microft »

snazz wrote: post #79
calgoo wrote: post #67

I love watching all of Musk's projects, as every single one can be connected to Mars colonization. 1. Electric cars for transport, Check. 2. Solar panels and batteries for power generation and storage, check. 3. Tunnel digging equipment for making underground bases and transport, check. 4. Satellite communications for an entire planet, check. 5. Then finally, the actual rockets to get us there. Hopefully he will cont…

Has he specifically called out the connection or is this your pet conspiracy theory? It doesn’t seem too far off, to be honest.

I came to the same conclusion by the way, so OP is not alone with this ;)

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#93

Post by jlmorton »

duxup wrote: post #26
perennate wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say that? Even accounting for the cost, I think many would still argue that it was worth it, replacing a highway system that divided the city with a walkable network of parks that effectively connects different neighborhoods like financial district north end, along with a new series of (underground) highways that provided improved traffic flow. Before and after photos: https://imgur.com/JbgPur6 If the cost…

>If the cost issue were solved I feel like that's a very very heavy lift. Lots of things would be great "If the cost issue were solved".

I agree it's a hard problem, but it's worth noting that the US has dramatically higher construction costs than any other peer.

The unit cost of construction in the US is routinely double, or even triple the cost of comparable projects in other Western countries.

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#94

Post by kelnos »

snazz wrote: post #79
calgoo wrote: post #67

I love watching all of Musk's projects, as every single one can be connected to Mars colonization. 1. Electric cars for transport, Check. 2. Solar panels and batteries for power generation and storage, check. 3. Tunnel digging equipment for making underground bases and transport, check. 4. Satellite communications for an entire planet, check. 5. Then finally, the actual rockets to get us there. Hopefully he will cont…

Has he specifically called out the connection or is this your pet conspiracy theory? It doesn’t seem too far off, to be honest.

There's a series of posts on WaitButWhy[0] about Elon Musk and his various companies and strategies. The level of Musk worship there generally rubs me the wrong way, but I think the conclusions are valid: the author also interviewed Musk one-on-one in 2015 and took a deep-dive into his businesses, so I would trust the author's conclusions. Essentially, Musk expects/worries that an extinction event (whether as a result of climate change, an asteroid impact, or whatever) will wipe out humanity on Earth, and believes that the best hope for our continued survival is to colonize other planets.

[0] https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/03/elon-musk-post-series.html

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#95

Post by spraak »

calgoo wrote: post #67

I love watching all of Musk's projects, as every single one can be connected to Mars colonization. 1. Electric cars for transport, Check. 2. Solar panels and batteries for power generation and storage, check. 3. Tunnel digging equipment for making underground bases and transport, check. 4. Satellite communications for an entire planet, check. 5. Then finally, the actual rockets to get us there. Hopefully he will cont…

The goal of Mars to me is silly. Mars is already worse off in terms of climate than Earth. Why not work to improve what we have? The only appeal I see is "uncharted territory" / wild west

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#96

Post by ncallaway »

jcranmer wrote: post #71
losteric wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk wants to re-engineering both tunnel boring and how we use tunnels - the latter may not pan out but the former is useful regardless of what gets run through the tunnel.

Not necessarily. The key cost savings that Musk envisions boils down to "build tunnels that are too small to put existing rolling stock in," which means that if the proposed personal rapid transit system turns out to be like every other PRT system and not work well, you're left with a tunnel that is too small to be useful for anything else.

> The key cost savings that Musk envisions boils down to "build tunnels that are too small to put existing rolling stock in,"

Do you have a reference for that? My understanding was that over the long term the goal was to develop cost savings through better boring machines themselves, not through just by reducing the cross-sectional area of the tunnel.

I thought they were starting with smaller cross-sectional areas and working their way up as they developed machines, but by understanding of the end-goal of The Boring Company was to be able to build large tunnels at 1/10th the cost of current processes.

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#97

Post by jcranmer »

Retric wrote: post #81
jcranmer wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. The key cost savings that Musk envisions boils down to "build tunnels that are too small to put existing rolling stock in," which means that if the proposed personal rapid transit system turns out to be like every other PRT system and not work well, you're left with a tunnel that is too small to be useful for anything else.

Making an existing tunnel wider is vastly cheaper than building an equivalent tunnel from scratch. Simply knowing the soil composition makes a huge difference. In hard rock you can use drilling and blasting across long sections rather than just the leading edge. Alternatively, a TBM needs to remove significantly less material.

But more expensive than building the tunnel the right size to begin with, when you take into account the cost to build the too-small tunnel in the first place.

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#98

Post by X6S1x6Okd1st »

Robotbeat wrote: post #85
fabioborellini wrote: post #27

Maybe Elon should visit Europe or Asia and check out an underground mass rapid transit system or two. They have two orders of magnitude larger capacity. And even their capacity is finite. And keep in mind that the NYC Subway and the London Underground are NOT a good example of a modern mass transit system.

I've noticed that Elon Musk's projects often start off in the wrong direction, but evolve in a way that works ultimately. And that's what matters. For instance, SpaceX originally insisted on parachute recovery of their Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 rockets. They tried, and it didn't work. But they switched to powered landing as some others had demonstrated (DC-X and Masten Space Systems and Armadillo Aerospace), and they mas…

> Elon is perfectly willing to pivot to what works after exhausting all other options.

reminds me of the quote with an odd past:

> You can depend on Americans to do the right thing when they have exhausted every other possibility.

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#99

Post by Someone »

Traster wrote: post #64
ryantgtg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, there isn't a offramp/onramp in the latest design scheme. When Boring Company first unveiled the design, it had elevators that moved vehicles from grade-level to the tunnel. The vehicles then locked into a track. Then after reaching an "exit" the vehicle is brought back to the surface so the driver can continue the journey within that same vehicle. But they recently scrapped all that.…

Well it's a concept I'm sure all of us are familiar with, if you want 10Gbps of throughput you can have a 32 bit bus at 322MHz or 64 bit bus at 161MHz. So if you want a tunnel with 10 cars/second you need one tunnel with at a speed of 10 cars/second or you need 10 lanes of 1car/second. That's really where my question is - the 125mph isn't what interests me, it's how you get a thousand cars (or people into cars) that…

You could increase packet size, and do one lane with (60 cars) every minute (as opposed to one car every second).

The result is called a bus or a train.

Alternatively, use token ring. If you have a separate tack for cars to get up to speed, and really trust your hardware and your software, a car can simply slip into an empty 10m gap between cars, and slip out of it onto a side track to decelerate when it approaches its destination.

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#100

Post by the-dude »

Retric wrote: post #81
jcranmer wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. The key cost savings that Musk envisions boils down to "build tunnels that are too small to put existing rolling stock in," which means that if the proposed personal rapid transit system turns out to be like every other PRT system and not work well, you're left with a tunnel that is too small to be useful for anything else.

Making an existing tunnel wider is vastly cheaper than building an equivalent tunnel from scratch. Simply knowing the soil composition makes a huge difference. In hard rock you can use drilling and blasting across long sections rather than just the leading edge. Alternatively, a TBM needs to remove significantly less material.

Are you sure about that? Because I have never heard about a tunnel project which has been 'upgraded' this way ever.

And if I start to think about the practical problems, like breaking up part of the tunnel before widening it, it quickly seems like building a new one might be more efficient.

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