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The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

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Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#51

Post by yongjik »

nicehat wrote: post #46
jeromegv wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except this 10% of cost is just a marketing ploy by Musk to sell you the project. When you compare to the price of subways in Europe, this isn't any cheaper. North America is extremely bad at building cheap subways, but other places of the world have already achieved it.

How is this different from saying someone selling a fine bottle of wine for $2 in New York is scamming you, because you could get the same bottle for $2 in France... ?

If we can get good wine at $2 in France, a fine bottle of wine at $2 in NY is still a bargain. But a NY-based company saying they'll revolutionize wine industry by selling quality wine at $2/bottle, might be trying to scam you.

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#52

Post by m4rtink »

s_dev wrote: post #44
mc3 wrote: post #41

ELI5... why is digging a tunnel tech news? Does Elon dig them faster or more cheaply or something? Otherwise do I submit this to HN? https://www.sydneymetro.info/tunnelling . I think tunnels are the future though for cities. But I'd prefer trains to be running in them, or roads that only allow electric public transport. Edit. In 1988 they started work on the Channel Tunnel UK to France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

HN isn't exlusively for "tech news" but for anything that is of interest to nerds/intelligent people. You can of course submit any tunneling articles/media you think are interesting. Just look at the abundance of Atlas Obscura articles -- few are tech based.

While we are at it, I really recommend checking out all the base tunnel projects currently in progress or recently completed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_tunnel

Massively cool cutting edge technology, even before Elon involvement. ;-)

There is also a huge amount of interesting videos on Youtube about these projects, all the way from the initial tunnel boring/blasting all the way to final outfitting (imagine installing rails & electric equipment in a 57 km long tunnel - no wonder it took 6 years of multi shift daily work, etc.).

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#53

Post by reitzensteinm »

maxharris wrote: post #42
yongjik wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what if it's also tenth the capacity? According to the article this accommodates 4,400 people/hr. BART ridership is 411k/day, and (to pick a random example) Gangnam subway station in Seoul averages at 230k/day. And that's actual usage, not max capacity.

That's only a valid comparison if you take massive infrastructure projects head-on. There is no law of physics stating that these tunnels can't be used for other situations and purposes. Several things come to mind: 1. There are lots of places with lower density than city centers, but higher density than suburbs that would benefit massively from underground transportation. 2. Smaller tunnels running everywhere will b…

Do you have any citation for the "huge strides" TBC has made already? The only concrete numbers I've seen have been apples to oranges, either not normalizing for cross section area, or comparing just the cost of TBC digging to complete projects.

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#54

Post by ghaff »

nrp wrote: post #40
ghaff wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The expansion of the LVCC made me vaguely curious about what types of shows use it given that all the IT shows I'm familiar with use the Venetian/Sands or, if they're a bit smaller, The Mandalay Bay. I haven't been there since Comdex days. It looks as if it's things like Kitchen and Bath Builders, World of Concrete, etc. So maybe things that are more oriented towards a mega show floor and less to speaking rooms.

CES is the key one. It occupies all of LVCC and Sands, with spillover and unofficial meeting rooms taking up basically all of the strip. It's not clear what CES is going to do with another full hall though. The show is already kind of a mish-mash of industries.

I forgot about CES because I've never been to that one.

It still sort of amazes me that CES hasn't collapsed under its own weight. Comdex did. CeBIT finally did. I thought it was finally going to happen about a decade ago when Microsoft pulled out; that's the usual "emperor has no clothes" moment. But it kept on going.

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#55

Post by hobofan »

sambroner wrote: post #11

I don't know much about tunneling speeds, but this seems much faster than Big Bertha in Seattle although for a much smaller volume (the tunnel is narrower) and (I'm assuming) less complex location. Big Bertha - 3.5 years, ~1.75 miles, 1.5 m/yr Boring - .15 years, .35 miles, 2.33 m/yr

The two projects are on such opposite ends of the spectrum that it really makes them incomparable. Big Bertha was the second biggest boring machine ever built, and also in a risky location. On top of that it was built by a company with no experience in building boring machines anywhere close to its size.

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#56

Post by maxharris »

jeromegv wrote: post #38
maxharris wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you build the tunnel for a tenth the cost, that's a pretty big difference. The same budget lets you build ten times more infrastructure, which is quite badly needed! I live in Los Angeles and things are so bad here that often you simply can't see friends that live only a few miles away.

Except this 10% of cost is just a marketing ploy by Musk to sell you the project. When you compare to the price of subways in Europe, this isn't any cheaper. North America is extremely bad at building cheap subways, but other places of the world have already achieved it.

I personally know people that work at SpaceX (because my wife works there). Reusable rockets weren't a cheap marketing ploy. I don't have personal contact with anyone at the Boring Company, but it's located right across the street from SpaceX in Hawthorne, and I know that many of the people there are from SpaceX. In fact, I just drove past the test tunnel there this morning, as I dropped her off at work.

I might be biased given where my friends work, but how do you know that calling it a "marketing ploy" isn't an overly-cynical view of things? After all, Musk sees more cost reductions coming, and his track record has been pretty good (if a bit late at times).

I also have some questions for you that I hope can resolve things:

1. Do you believe it is possible to do better than the infrastructure projects in other countries that you cite?

2. Do you agree that it would be a good thing if they succeed in making tunnels far cheaper than they are anywhere else in the world?

Finally, I hope that my tone does not come across to you as being negative in any way. I do not mean to sound strident, overconfident, or for any of the above to come across as a put-down. I mean no harm!

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#57

Post by cjhopman »

sambroner wrote: post #11

I don't know much about tunneling speeds, but this seems much faster than Big Bertha in Seattle although for a much smaller volume (the tunnel is narrower) and (I'm assuming) less complex location. Big Bertha - 3.5 years, ~1.75 miles, 1.5 m/yr Boring - .15 years, .35 miles, 2.33 m/yr

Big Bertha is roughly 25x the size of boring company's tunnel borer. And, while your math it totally wrong for Big Bertha, it should be 0.5 miles/yr. But if you account for the 2 years that it wasn't running for repairs then it does end up at roughly 1.3 miles/yr.

Why not compare against a tunnel borer of the same size?

The world's fastest tunnel borer of that size was for the tunneling of the blue mountains (described here: https://www.therobbinscompany.com/the-worlds-fastest-tbm/). That was more than 25 years ago and even at it's average speed over the whole project, it was doing 1800ft 4 times faster than Boring company's "amazingly fast" borer.

A more typical example boring through very hard rock does ~700 ft per month: https://www.therobbinscompany.com/midhalton/

Or how about a larger tunnel w/ 160gal/s of water inflow doing 1600ft in a month: https://www.therobbinscompany.com/gerede-breakthrough/

If there's something special about the Boring company (unlikely) it's definitely not its boring ability. They just buy a used boring machine and they don't even have the expertise to do anything interesting with it.

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#58

Post by microtherion »

Jernik wrote: post #26
CydeWeys wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your units are confusing me. Meters per year? Surely they're faster than that?

They used miles and years right before that, so I'm not sure how it is confusing that m/yr is miles/year

"mile" is typically abbreviated as "mi".

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#59

Post by microtherion »

maxharris wrote: post #42
yongjik wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what if it's also tenth the capacity? According to the article this accommodates 4,400 people/hr. BART ridership is 411k/day, and (to pick a random example) Gangnam subway station in Seoul averages at 230k/day. And that's actual usage, not max capacity.

That's only a valid comparison if you take massive infrastructure projects head-on. There is no law of physics stating that these tunnels can't be used for other situations and purposes. Several things come to mind: 1. There are lots of places with lower density than city centers, but higher density than suburbs that would benefit massively from underground transportation. 2. Smaller tunnels running everywhere will b…

It appears that The Boring Company uses both off-the-shelf TBMs and their own designs (and, I think, also a customized off-the-shelf TBM). It would be interesting to learn which one they used here.

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#60

Post by irq11 »

neltnerb wrote: post #32
mdszy wrote: post #9

So they're halfway through digging the tunnel, not halfway through doing all the other things to make the tunnel actually as useful as musk is claiming. This all just seems like subways from first principles but probably worse.

Though if they really dug that much tunnel under a city in such a short time, maybe there's an actual innovation in a better way to make subway tunnels? I think putting cars in these tunnels is silly and that subways are obviously the best answer personally, but I'm also watching two new light rail lines being put in next to my house. It does not seem quick (though they're elevated). It'd be lovely if those tracks we…

Judging by the pace of the SF chinatown muni tunnel, the digging happens relatively quickly...the slow parts are the parts before and after the digging.

In SF, they spent years surveying, moving utilities, excavating stations, etc., dug the actual tunnel in (IIRC) a year, and have spent subsequent years finishing all of the other stuff that makes it more than a hole in the ground.

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