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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

#151

Post by [deleted] »

toephu2 wrote: post #146
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

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.

[deleted]

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

#152

Post by Erlich_Bachman »

michaelleslie wrote: post #50
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.…

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

A lot of people really really like to travel in their individual vechicles instead of public transport. They like it so much that they spend a lot of money (a proxy for their own time and life energy), and deal with other problems like parking etc.

So a tunnel system which moves public transport trains does not compare in utility with a system which can move personal cars. Did you just ignore this fact?

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

#153

Post by tomjakubowski »

tntn wrote: post #129
ryantgtg wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That would be great. Subway costs are absolutely ridiculous, so it would be fantastic if the boring company decides to build exactly the same thing for much less.

It's not exactly the same thing. In the Boring underground car-train, each party of travelers takes up an entire car's or truck's worth of space. On a subway, each person takes up room for themselves and their belongings. Plus maybe a bicycle. You can move a lot more people at once in a subway.

Further, when the Boring underground car-train "stops", and parties leave the train, those cars still demand that same space, just on the surface. With mass transit carrying pedestrians and cyclists, you need much less room on "integrate" passengers coming out from the underground, with local traffic on the surface.

If Boring gives up on the personal vehicle folly, and can build a smaller, cheaper, but equally safe tunnel for mass transit, great. But they seem preoccupied with letting people keep their cars.

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

#154

Post by bdcravens »

dang wrote: post #17

The submitted title was "No, the Las Vegas 'Loop' Is Not the Future of Public Transportation". That broke the HN guidelines, which ask submitters to use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait, and not to editorialize. We remove submission privileges from accounts who post like this, so please don't. Note: if this was the article's original title and, as sometimes happens, they changed it, then none o…

Current title is "Elon Musk’s $49 Million Las Vegas Loop Makes Perfect Sense—for Las Vegas"

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

#155

Post by ricardobeat »

jcranmer wrote: post #91
ncallaway wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tran…

Maybe that’s part of the play? Here is a breakdown for subway costs: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DVW4_dgWkAAtjsE?format=jpg&name=...

What if you actually reduce track / signaling / control / facilities cost massively by virtue of using self-powered autonomous vehicles? Then the math could start making a lot more sense.

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

#156

Post by erentz »

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…

And: Hyperloop actually made sense when you put it in the context of mars. You want transport to link your distant colonies. By running it in tubes you protect it from the storms. And to top it off there’s an extremely low air pressure on Mars so you don’t need to evacuate the tubes like you did on the earthbound proposal. It made no sense on earth but sorta makes sense on Mars. I’m pretty sure this is where the idea was born.

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

#157

Post by _Microft »

netzone wrote: post #133
_Microft wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just that. The Boring Company wants to automate tunneling as much as possible (manual labour would be highly impractical in a spacesuit), speed it up and make it a continuous process. It also wants to power the boring machine by Tesla PowerPacks to remove the need for kilometers of cables. All of that seems suited not just for cheap tunneling but for Mars as well.

I guess mobile PowerPacks with solar panels? Just deploy a few thousand outside the tunneling area and then automate the battery switching. Could run it 24/7 without anyone ever going to Mars even.

That's how I understood. Instead of laying cables, the packs are moved back and forth between the charging site and the tunnel drilling machine.

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

#158

Post by munk-a »

ryanbrunner wrote: post #149
Jimpulse wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not really, it could be that the great filter is apathy and single world habitation for instance - maybe we've been really lucky in terms of asteroid collisions so far and putting our eggs in two baskets is the necessary step for survival.

We don't know what the filter is, so it's sensible to reject pessimism and just keep on trucking.

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

#159

Post by borkt »

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.

Also much, much easier to solve, and more than possible with existing technology. May require more clean energy but it can be solved.

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

#160

Post by hannasanarion »

Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #152
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.

A lot of people really really like to travel in their individual vechicles instead of public transport. They like it so much that they spend a lot of money (a proxy for their own time and life energy), and deal with other problems like parking etc. So a tunnel system which moves public transport trains does not compare in utility with a system which can move personal cars. Did you just ignore this fact?

The above comment pointed out that they abandoned the idea of moving personal cars, they will now have large proprietary vehicles that only travel within the tunnels and have seating for a bunch of people. Aka, trains.
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