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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

#291

Post by chrischen »

hoorayimhelping wrote: post #23
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?

Have you ever lived near an elevated train? They're not pleasant areas, especially compared to subway stations. The area under the tracks aren't very usable, except as a roadway and parking lots. They're loud as hell, people on the trains can see into your home, the spaces around the elevated tracks are great places for people to do drugs and have crusty hobo sex. These criticisms apply equally to elevated roads. Mos…

In Japan a lot of the areas under under train tracks or overpasses are converted to retail or business/restaurant spaces and coffee shops.

Here (in the US) I've only ever seen 1) homeless people, 2) garbage, or 3) graffiti (and not the good looking stuff).

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

#292

Post by mr_toad »

spullara wrote: post #166
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

We will eventually be wiped out by an asteroid strike no matter what we do.

Most species don’t last long enough to get wiped out by asteroids. I’d say that unless we evolve into something else, we’re unlikely to make it to the next big extinction event.

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

#293

Post by spullara »

mr_toad wrote: post #292
spullara wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will eventually be wiped out by an asteroid strike no matter what we do.

Most species don’t last long enough to get wiped out by asteroids. I’d say that unless we evolve into something else, we’re unlikely to make it to the next big extinction event.

We are done evolving naturally, at this point it would all be genetic engineering.

We can have our eggs in more than one basket this century as long as we put effort into it. That is plenty of time to avoid getting wiped by an asteroid in all likelihood.

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

#294

Post by Benjammer »

serf wrote: post #280
wurst_case wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason PayPal is ignored by most people is two reasons. 1. In its current form, it has less resemblance to what he wanted to do with it (its a better product because of this fact) and 2. He famously found the biggest hurdles for humanity and their solutions after selling PayPal and becoming a multi millionaire with nothing but time to spend it. Originally he wanted to put a mini greenhouse on mars as a media stun…

>The reason PayPal is ignored by most people is two reasons. You forgot the most important one. 3) PayPal is a huge PR nightmare, a pseudo-bank that sits between legal boundaries whenever it needs to in order to maximize profit, screwing over thousands of folks -- many of them with small businesses that foolishly relied on them as a service. A successful service that everyone uses, and most people hate -- the custome…

There's kind of a reason they're called the PayPal Mafia...

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

#295

Post by rayiner »

chrischen wrote: post #291
hoorayimhelping wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever lived near an elevated train? They're not pleasant areas, especially compared to subway stations. The area under the tracks aren't very usable, except as a roadway and parking lots. They're loud as hell, people on the trains can see into your home, the spaces around the elevated tracks are great places for people to do drugs and have crusty hobo sex. These criticisms apply equally to elevated roads. Mos…

In Japan a lot of the areas under under train tracks or overpasses are converted to retail or business/restaurant spaces and coffee shops. Here (in the US) I've only ever seen 1) homeless people, 2) garbage, or 3) graffiti (and not the good looking stuff).

Japan is in some respects a much freer country than the US. US zoning and building regulations would never allow something like that.

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

#296

Post by rayiner »

djsumdog wrote: post #248
ianbicking wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The El was built along with the city's expansion (often by developers who wanted to make new tracts of land accessible). That doesn't work for infill, where the intrusion and space the elevated tracks require aren't accounted for in current prices and expectations, and where right of way isn't established. If we had a Robert Moses of transit, then it could happen, just like the highways happened. There are no Robert…

Personal rapid transit is just a waste. You can transport A LOT of people by rail ... orders of magnitudes of people more than cars, even if you had a highway full of self driving cars all moving at 120kph. There's not even a comparison. Self driving and even personal transport does not compare to the capacity of standard rail stock: https://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-so... Public transport als…

Capacity comparisons are no good in isolation. Here in DC Metro is close to capacity for what it does (taking people into the downtown core). But 95% of people in the metro area don’t take the Metro, because it doesn’t go anywhere they want to go. These people are commuting from Loudon to Reston or DC to Bowie. Almost 90% of jobs in the metro area are outside DC proper as is the bulk of housing. In isolation, none of these commuting paths warrant a heavy rail line. The capacity advantage of standard rail stock is completely irrelevant to almost everybody’s commute.

It’s not about being anti-social. Here in the Annapolis area (which has 200,000 people, with 40,000 in Annapolis itself), people commute from the Annapolis suburbs to jobs in the southern Baltimore suburbs or in Baltimore. They’d take a train if there was one, instead of sitting in I97 traffic But the volume of commuters comes nowhere near justifying building one. (Many Metro lines, though at capacity in the downtown core, are desolate in even the relatively urbanized suburbs of MD). A cheap, fast, point-to-point transit solution, that you could string up along an existing highway median or below one, would revolutionize transit because it would actually address peoples’ needs outside the tiny minority.

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

#297

Post by rayiner »

britch wrote: post #261
ianbicking wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The El was built along with the city's expansion (often by developers who wanted to make new tracts of land accessible). That doesn't work for infill, where the intrusion and space the elevated tracks require aren't accounted for in current prices and expectations, and where right of way isn't established. If we had a Robert Moses of transit, then it could happen, just like the highways happened. There are no Robert…

How would elevation affect trip times? Is there a reason a subway would be faster than a raised platform? I am not an expert but I don't see how digging tunnels is cheaper than building a raised platform, they both seem pretty expensive.

This is purely anecdotal, but getting from the street to the platform is a lot faster on the L than say the DC Metro.

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

#298

Post by philwelch »

WhompingWindows wrote: post #114
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

1. Potential for finding evidence of life outside of the Earth, never mind scientific research into dozens of other topics. 2. Joy and sheer inspiration; why go to the moon, run a marathon, or compose a symphony? Joy and inspiration. 3. Potential to improve our own technology as we strive for the above points. Clear, clear evidence of this in parent's comment and after NASA's innovative tech. It's irrelevant if you p…

Colonizing Mars actually introduces challenges to knowing for sure whether any life is native to Mars as opposed to introduced from Earth. But then I’m more of an “O’Neill cylinders in Earth orbit” kind of guy.

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

#299

Post by stephen_g »

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.

At the moment, all the analysis I've seen points more towards the only reason it's cheaper being because of the smaller size of the tunnel (there's actually nothing novel about the boring machine, it's just a standard one that is used to build utility tunnels with some minor tweaks), and because they don't build (or don't take into account) things like station caverns, cross linking tunnels, ventilation/emergency egress, etc.

So if they actually built a subway it would cost... about the same as a subway. That's not to say that US subways aren't crazy expensive to build compared to Europe, Asia etc. - but that's more to do with legal issues (industrial relations etc.), business structures, and possibly corruption, rather than the technology.

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