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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

#331

Post by erikpukinskis »

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…

From a physics standpoint, what is your argument that a giant car with transfers to a number of smaller cars is more efficient than just using all smaller cars?

Public transit seems really wasteful to me: empty busses running up and down the same main streets, people going out of their way to get to a train station, subway cars stopping in the track and blocking the passage of all other vehicles, all movement stopping at a certain time due to low demand... it’s a mess.

Again, from a physics standpoint the optimal solution to me would seem to be a variety of different size autonomous cars, with 100% occupancy, which can draft each other, and tunnels that allow you to go direct(ish) to your destination with an IP-like routing plan.

What am I missing?

Is there a city that you think is close to optimal so I can study it?

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

#332

Post by ericd »

embwbam wrote: post #282
indigochill wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although I appreciate the sentiment, I actually think this is impossible. Some people are going to be inherently extremely ambitious. Those people will compete/cooperate and somebody's going to come out on top. Supposing you establish a system explicitly designed to stop this from happening, you need someone to enforce that system. Congratulations, you just created a role for the ambitious people to fight over.

There will always be people in power. But maybe it is better if those people are elected, and operate in view of the public

I’ve read the book you’re referring to. We absolutely should not try to prevent people from amassing enough individual power to do what Elon et al are doing. Bureaucrats are generally good at some things (eg reliably running services that are well known quantities and should be provided to everyone regardless of profitability), and generally awful at others (eg efficient innovation in new fields). You need a mix of both types to both run the world and keep it moving forward. I for one am very happy that sufficiently motivated and skilled people are sometimes able to amass enough resources to try crazy things like competing with each other to start orbital launch companies and deploy a world-wide network of thousands of communications satellites to break the government granted chokeholds a few telecom companies have on internet access.

For me, the main takeaway of the book was that we should stop revering consultants/MBAs and their process.

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

#333

Post by zaroth »

computerex wrote: post #311
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…

> 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?

For now, Boring company uses the $50mm to subsidize their R&D cost as they move up the “learning curve” toward the realization of an order of magnitude in cost savings.

I would guess the engineers at Boring have a list of a hundred things they think they could do differently that would lower overall cost. I imagine the biggest ROI is automation which removes humans from the vicinity and therefore the presumably huge cost of allowing humans to safely coexist with the machine while the tunnel is being dug.

Boring will surely spend a lot more than $50mm building this thing in Vegas. Investor dollars (which in this case I think is mostly checks from Elon) make up the rest. But rather than subsidizing glorified taxi rides like investors in Uber/Lyft where the learning curve is questionable, here the theory is there’s a lot of learning to be done in construction of a reusable and highly automated boring machine that isn’t just entombed in the tunnel at the end of the project.

I think the biggest cost savings initially is smaller bore tunnels using much smaller scale transport pods (e.g. reworked Model 3s).

Also, who else would be able to develop the custom small scale transport pods or the autonomous software that they will run on for just this project? Elon has access to all the Tesla IP as a starting point. They can build TM3s without the steering wheel or pedals pretty easily, and they already demo’d the software for driving in the tunnel.

Handling the pickup, drop off, and coordinating multiple vehicles I’m sure is not trivial but depending on exactly how they design the loading/unloading zones could be contained.

I’m just as interested as anyone in how they will be handling safety, and particularly what happens when a vehicle ends up stopped midway in the tunnel.

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

#334

Post by DMT-shitlords »

vntok wrote: post #164
whatshisface wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think nobody will bring their faith with them?

Precisely. Religions are in decline among the younger generations. By the time we go to Mars as a colonizing species, hopefully we won't bring "faith to a deity" with us.

Probably not going to go the way you're pulling for.

In case you haven't been paying attention, there's a lot of new age mysticism floating around that seems to take root in:

- hallucinogens (aka: entheogens)

- multidimensional realities

- interdimensional beings

- time travel

- psychic powers, like ESP

- out of body experiences

- paranormal reincarnation

- extra terrestrial meddling in the origin of life on earth

- CoSM artwork by Alex Grey

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

#337

Post by dahfizz »

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

Why did the aboriginals hollow out a tree and float across the ocean? Why did prehistoric humans walk all the way from Africa to the southern tip of America?

We explore. It is literally in our DNA. It's what makes us human. It's also why we outlive the neanderthals, who never left the geographic region they were "born" in.

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

#338

Post by rayiner »

gok wrote: post #327
rayiner wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Concrete adds a lot more bulk and makes them visually oppressive. I’ve always hated how they did the elevated Metro lines (hulking concrete structures high in the air, requiring climbing up long escalators with multiple mezzanines), versus the L lines which are organically integrated into the neighborhood.

The picture of Tokyo you posted elsewhere in this thread is a good example of concrete done well.

The Silver Line, by contrast: https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=e8lJzH...

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

#339

Post by mensetmanusman »

vntok wrote: post #164
whatshisface wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think nobody will bring their faith with them?

Precisely. Religions are in decline among the younger generations. By the time we go to Mars as a colonizing species, hopefully we won't bring "faith to a deity" with us.

In decline among young people who are not having replacement levels of offspring.

Social science has taught us religion imparts survival benefits (as does ‘politics’)

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