Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

citylab.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 397 posts

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

#141

Post by duxup »

bluGill wrote: post #135
stcredzero wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was Portland (it was somewhere in the Pacific NW) in the 90's had a "custom bus" running late at night. If you lived within 2 miles of a regular bus route, you could phone in a request, and a dispatcher would make up a new bus line for that night that would pick up everyone who called in.

For public transit to work this is important. In the early hours of the morning few people want to get around typically. However the fear that you cannot get around if you need to holds people back. However if I know that should I need to there is an option that isn't too expensive I'm likely try it. Minneapolis used to have a guaranteed ride home (might still do, I don't live there anymore) to cover people who took…

Yup it is still a thing!

https://www.metrotransit.org/guaranteed-ride-home

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

#142

Post by the8472 »

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.

yes. https://www.inverse.com/article/34451-elon-musk-s-tunnel-pro...

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

#143

Post by michaelleslie »

ryantgtg wrote: post #56
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.

Yeah, the joke is that next they'll release that the concrete tunnel road is subject to deterioration, so they'll shift to steel tracks. Then they'll realize that these individual vehicles should be linked together to allow for higher capacity. Then... then you have a subway.

https://twitter.com/boring_as_heck/status/872144967350632448... comes to mind

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

#144

Post by charlesju »

spraak wrote: post #95
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

I think it's more than a back up. A lot of the problems, like the original poster pointed out, to survive on mars, are solutions that'll greatly benefit us on earth.

You cannot name one endeavor to get to Mars that doesn't have immediate byproducts that are incredibly useful to everyone on earth.

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

#145

Post by niftich »

pesfandiar wrote: post #108
spraak wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Agreed. Let's first try and "colonize" places like Nevada. Getting safe drinking water to many major urban centres could become a challenging engineering problem in the upcoming decades, much more worthwhile to solve than living on Mars.

There are large parts of Nevada that could be 'reclaimed' (in the Bureau of Reclamation sense) without too much effort -- just a couple of well-placed dams, berms, and canals. Large parts of the state are in closed basins, from which the water just evaporates anyway, so using it first within the basin would make sense. Extensive projects like this were once the norm, but fell out of favor as the 1970s transitioned into the 1980s, feeling the impact of the environmentalist movement, the opposition of Jimmy Carter, and the failure of the Teton Dam.

Some big urban areas already need to rely on interbasin transfers for their water supply: LA, NYC, San Diego, Mexico City, SLC, Denver. Tunnels for water would actually be a sensible and 'boring' pivot for the Boring Company.

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

#146

Post by toephu2 »

spraak wrote: post #95
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

Musk has said Mars is the backup plan for earth. What if one day there is a disease or meteor that wipes out the entire human population on Earth? (e.g., see the dinosaurs)

Even if the only appeal was the wild wild west and uncharted territory, what's wrong with that?

Look at what exploring the Moon has brought us, many unexpected innovations and inventions useful for life on earth.

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

#147

Post by jcranmer »

ncallaway wrote: post #96
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.

> 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 an…

All of the innovations that are cited on The Boring Company's FAQ are things that are already done (e.g., reusing TBMs, or continually operating TBMs), or related to the "new" transit system and the virtues of narrower tunnels (which are overstated--at the size of tunnels we're talking about, cost tends to scale linearly with diameter, not cross-sectional area).

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

#149

Post by ryanbrunner »

Jimpulse wrote: post #111
spraak wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There's also mitigating the Great Filter: https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html

If you accept the great filter hypothesis to explain Fermi's paradox, wouldn't that make interplanetary exploration a bit pointless? Presumably many other civilisations would have been able to achieve the same thing, and they were still wiped out by the filter event.

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

#150

Post by SmirkingRevenge »

spraak wrote: post #95
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

There's a 100% chance of all life on earth going extinct, eventually, unless we colonize other planets.
Post reply on HN