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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

#211

Post by gok »

rayiner wrote: post #6

So what’s this fascination with tunnels? In Chicago, there are overhead elevated train tracks, and they work just fine. They seem a lot cheaper to build and maintain than tunnels. You can even build them over existing avenues. Why don’t we have more of that?

Old steel elevated tracks like the L are kinda crummy. You have to deal with weather both on the tracks and the stations, they darken whatever is below them, are incredibly loud, and wear out relatively quickly. Derailments can be catastrophic because trains fall from a great height (as happened in the Loop in 1977). Using concrete solves the noise problems, but requires more space and money.

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

#212

Post by qaq »

bongobongo wrote: post #197
zaroth wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Little Elon had a dream that he will one day walk on Mars. He thought to himself, well why can’t I? All I need is billions of dollars, and rockets (lots of rockets), and space ships, and renewable energy, and tunnels, and,... And then Little Elon started a little company during the dot com boom called Zip2 and sold it to Compaq for $300 million. Then X.com which led to PayPal. Then SpaceX, Tesla, and all the rest. It…

Yikes, dude. I'm sorry, but Elon Musk is just a guy with money. He's not a demigod. He's not a genius. He's not even a captain of industry. He's just a rich guy playing with money and and building a personal brand. I'm not saying that he doesn't have ideas, and that some of those ideas aren't the totally self-serving delusions of a rich dickhead, but a good many of them are, and I certainly don't want any part of "th…

"He's not a genius" thats pretty debatable statement he has very deep technical expertise in a number of fields that alone can easily qualify him as genius.

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

#213

Post by embwbam »

jimmaswell wrote: post #204
embwbam wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to live in a world where rich dickheads act more like Musk and do cool things. It's like living in a comic book. It's fun. But that's not our way forward. Forget the billionaires, we need to assemble, reinvest in our political system, and start building a better future from the ground up.

> But that's not our way forward. Forget the billionaires, we need to assemble, reinvest in our political system, and start building a better future from the ground up. Good luck with that. For now people like Musk and Gates are doing a pretty good job of things in various areas though.

I agree, it looks pretty hopeless sometimes, and I definitely appreciate what Musk and Gates are doing.

I’d highly recommend reading “Winners Take All”, as it completely flipped my opinion on this subject. The author argues that giving up and trusting rich philanthropists to fix things further undermines our faith in the political system, requiring us to give billionaires even more power. And it distracts us from the question of whether we should change the system to prevent individuals from having that much power in the first place.

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

#214

Post by btilly »

zaroth wrote: post #131
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

Little Elon had a dream that he will one day walk on Mars. He thought to himself, well why can’t I? All I need is billions of dollars, and rockets (lots of rockets), and space ships, and renewable energy, and tunnels, and,... And then Little Elon started a little company during the dot com boom called Zip2 and sold it to Compaq for $300 million. Then X.com which led to PayPal. Then SpaceX, Tesla, and all the rest. It…

This is a cool story. But the dream of Mars started later than that.

In fact if the Russians had been willing to sell the dot com billionaire some rockets for his publicity stunt of getting a plant to Mars, SpaceX would have never been formed.

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

#215

Post by austhrow743 »

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

"Uncharted Territory" / wild West is easily enough appeal to make it worth it.

Musk could be the sheriff of a colony in his very own space Western. People have worked hard their whole lives for much less.

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

#216

Post by prepend »

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

Mars is not full of people. Improving climate on Earth, means billions of people to deal with.

Also, these aren’t exclusive tasks. Everything that works for Mars also helps earth and in many cases specifically with climate change.

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

#217

Post by fhbdukfrh »

mymythisisthis wrote: post #201
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

Having a small group of people on Mars would be a great scientific boom. Einstein was inspired because as a patent clerk he worked across from the railway station and was very aware of time, time standards, physical trains. We'd give up our earth centric imaginations of time, gravity, and many other things.

They would spend all their time struggling to stay alive; no real science would ever get done. Look at the space station today. They're in a low earth orbit, completely dependent on resupply and accomplish very little other than siphon funding from unmanned exploration that actually leads to amazing breakthroughs because, "humans in space!"

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

#218

Post by r3bl »

bluGill wrote: post #181
r3bl wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk seems to really dislike the idea of public transport. There's an appeal in moving a large number of people from one side of the city to the other really fast, but with their cars!? The amount of trouble people in the US are willing to through to avoid the solution every other developed country enjoys is really mind-blowing to me. Dig a tunnel, put some rails in it, and add some sort of a vehicle on top of those…

Every city I've ever seen has a large amount of personal cars on the road. Sure some people in some cities ride in shared public transit, but don't try to pretend that there are not large amounts of people that for whatever reason don't. You might want to look closer to home and solving your own problems instead of attacking the US.

> but don't try to pretend that there are not large amounts of people that for whatever reason don't.

Oh, I know precisely the reason: there's no viable alternative in place.

It might surprise you to learn that other countries were in that same situation and aren't anymore. When there's something more efficient, reliable, and cheaper to use, people tend to prefer that.

But of course, you'd first have to step outside of the US to see what a viable alternative even looks like. Judging by your first and last sentence, I'm willing to bet you haven't.

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

#219

Post by Robotbeat »

naravara wrote: post #180
Robotbeat wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a bad thing? If they can somehow address the insane tunneling infrastructure costs in the US, I don't really care what path they take to get there.

Most of that extra cost comes from the legal fees around buying the land and getting permits to dig under it. A better tunnel borer doesn't address any of that. You could maybe save on OSHA concerns if you can somehow slash the number of people employed, but you'd need to get rid of a LOT of people before you see enough gains from that to make this a game changer. Elon's whole deal around transit is utterly uninforme…

Except it does seem to have addressed that. Even the dumb test tunnel seems to have been completed for far less than it should've taken, given the constraints you mentioned.

Experts (including those who have studied foreign mass transit in detail) are at a loss to fully explain why the US's tunneling costs are so out of whack compared to other countries. Sometimes, when expert systems seem to have failed, it's a useful exercise to throw everything out (i.e. be "utterly uninformed") and learn from scratch by trying. They may fail anyway, but it's worth a shot.

Sometimes, the naive intern will find a solution because of their own naïveté. (And even then there are lots of practical things that will need to be relearned, at great pain.)

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

#220

Post by rayiner »

efficax wrote: post #171
guruz wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a typical US problem to me. In contrast in Berlin, the areas with elevated subway belong to the most desireable living areas, e.g. the U2 in Prenzlauer Berg: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&biw=1047&bi... Or check out the lovely bridges above Gleisdreieck-Park: https://www.google.com/search?q=berlin+u-bahn+gleisdreieck+p...

L stops in chicago are also very desirable locations. The parent is greatly overexaggerating the problems with elevated trains

Seriously. Wrigleyville is a real slum what with the brown line cutting right through it, right? https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9485827,-87.6531626,3a,75y,2... (brown line runs right behind those houses).
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