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

311–320 of 397 posts

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

#311

Post by computerex »

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…

> An underground autonomous system which otherwise would have cost hundreds of millions for $50 million risk free is a perfect win-win for Boring and Vegas.

How do you think the boring company is going to be able to achieve these cost savings? If this system is otherwise going to cost hundreds of millions how the hell is the boring company going to achieve orders of magnitudes improvement?

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

#312

Post by breck »

clairity wrote: post #258
breck wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes technological solutions solve political problems. Won’t let me build a wire across your property—-no problem, I’ll go wireless...as an example

> "Sometimes technological solutions solve political problems." sure, but what technology could be applied in this case? for instance, projects are often underbid and then overcharged over time, whether it's fixed bid or time and materials. fixed bid incentivizes subcontractors to cut corners. time and materials billing incentivizes subcontractors to be inefficient. and subcontractors find ways to cheat. people have…

> sure, but what technology could be applied in this case?

A big problem with tunnels has traditionally been land rights (less so than with highways/but still a problem). If your tunneling costs are 10-100x lower, suddenly landowners who would otherwise try to extract exorbitant prices have a lot less leverage because you have more freedom in where you build the tunnels and entry/exit points.

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

#313

Post by greglindahl »

GuB-42 wrote: post #274
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…

While I don't discount Musk's obsession with Mars, the recurring pattern I see is government money. - Electric cars: subsidies - Solar panels: subsidies - Tunnel: transport infrastructure - Rockets: NASA/military contracts Starlink looks more like a commercial project but it doesn't mean the government can't get interested. After all, the internet itself started as a military project. There are missing pieces in both…

Winning a competition to ship cargo and then people to the space station is a bad thing?

Is there some universe in which entrepreneurs exit the electric car industry solely because the government starts offering consumers subsidies to buy them?

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

#314

Post by momokoko »

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?

If you've ever dealt with public transit planning, at least in the US, you'll see that often the budget is 50%+ simply real estate. The way land rights work in the US this actually cuts massive costs out of a project. Its not too dissimilar from how airplane travel beats trains on cost.

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

#315

Post by greglindahl »

dls2016 wrote: post #305
paulcole wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My theory is that he isn't even interested in Mars colonization. Like any great magician, it's just a misdirection.

I really can’t believe how many people on here take Musk seriously. Tesla is going bankrupt, there’s no evidence that SpaceX is profitable nor that reusable rockets will help in this regard and the Boring Co is a less funny take on Lyle Lanley (they have zero engineering insight as far as I can see).

One definition of a startup is that it's a company that's going bankrupt. HN is usually friendly to startups, while stock trading websites hate them.

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

#316

Post by baroffoos »

breck wrote: post #2

Yes, it is. With one that caveat that if it's built 10x cheaper than comparable tunnels, it is. Moving our roads underground is a vastly superior transportation system than we have today. It can be safer, better for the air, better for light and noise pollution, unlock vast amounts of land in our urban areas for parks, etc. I grew up near Boston during the big dig and the city is a drastically different place before…

How would tunnels be any better for air quality? You either vent all the toxic fumes to the surface or you kill everyone in the tunnel. Underground trains make far more sense than underground roads.

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

#317

Post by halter73 »

hnzix wrote: post #301
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

> 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? Earth's biosphere has already had five (5) mass extinctions. Guess what happens to humanity if number six shows up before we colonize another planet? Mars is simply the closest option.

The thing about the last five mass extinctions is they didn't involve a species so good at adapting the environment to serve its own needs that said species could colonize Mars.

Of those 5 mass extinctions, did any of them make Earth less habitable than Mars is today? I'm genuinely curious.

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

#318

Post by baroffoos »

r3bl wrote: post #101
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.

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…

Americans seem to avoid social contact at all costs. Yesterday there was a comment on HN where a user said they throw things out instead of selling them because they don't want to interact with understandable people who buy second hand items.

Cars, drive throughs, home delivery food. Its all tools for avoiding social contact.

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

#319

Post by discordance »

HALtheWise wrote: post #246
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…

I see this point get made often, but I'm not sure it is an insightful way to look at the world. Tesla cars are only barely related to Mars colonization, and PayPal is not really at all, which is a product conveniently ignored in your post. Even the SpaceX internet satellite constellation looks almost nothing like what internet access on Mars will be anytime in the forseeable future. It seems like a similarly strong a…

PayPal is the component that provided the initial funding for 1 - 5.

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

#320

Post by ianbicking »

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.

I should have been clearer, I meant general speed. The trains on traditional elevated tracks in Chicago are all pretty slow, and I think the solidity of the tracks is part of that. In comparison, the same trains on solid ground (e.g., the Blue line) run much faster.
Post reply on HN