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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

#81

Post by saalweachter »

justapassenger wrote: post #45
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/…

> ELI5... why is digging a tunnel tech news? It's because Elon is loved in the tech circle.

Loved and hated.

Being both attracts way more interest and engagement than one or the other.

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

#82

Post by Lammy »

cordite wrote: post #77
danso wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there were an actual innovation in tunneling, I feel like they’d be able to give actual specific metrics to rebut critics who argue that it’s apples to oranges. But AFAIK the bottleneck in tunneling is not a mechanical engineering one.

What is the bottleneck

Depends where you're digging. Might be water table; might be existing infrastructure; might just be a certain type of rock.

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

#83

Post by njarboe »

astrodust wrote: post #68
xeromal wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea is to make it 10x cheaper and 14x faster. The boring company is more of a personal effort by Elon due to his hatred of LA traffic.

"Let's solve traffic by building more roads!" Elon has a lot to learn about induced demand.

If you believe that car travel must be innately evil, then induced demand is a problem with building more roads. More roads mean more people using them to do something they want to do. These tunnels will be toll roads, so if you just up the tolls you can have them not get jammed up. You then have a real idea of how much a tunnel can make and you can get people to invest in building more of them.

Individual point-to-point transport systems are great. We just need to find a way to reduce the bad externalities of cars (pollution, traffic deaths, non-walkable cities/town, traffic congestion, taking up surface space). Elon Musk is working on three of these with Tesla and the Boring Company.

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

#84

Post by Lammy »

irq11 wrote: post #60
neltnerb wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be fair, _everything_ takes unnaturally long to happen in SF due to all the ways a Very Concerned* Neighbor can tie any project up in approval meetings. https://forms.sfplanning.org/NeighborhoodNotification_InfoPa...

[*] About their property values

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

#85

Post by jjeaff »

retrovm wrote: post #39
neltnerb wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No, it's just a lot smaller. A 12-foot-wide tunnel is, shockingly, much cheaper than a 21-foot-wide tunnel. It also has essentially zero capacity, much like a hyperloop. If you want to punch useless holes in the earth, Elon Musk is your man without a doubt.

According to an analysis I saw on youtube somewhere, they were able to find companies that dig similar sized tunnels (Boring Co. is just using off the shelf tunnel digging equipment.) They were running comparable if not a bit slower than similar projects that have been done many times before.

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

#86

Post by worldsayshi »

altacc wrote: post #15

Isn't this just describing building a small but fancy subway system? Honest question: what's the novel "wow" factor that I'm missing?

I mean, neither the Tesla being an electric car or an iPhone being a smart phone were new things but they are changing/changed the landscape of technology.

I guess it makes sense to listen in when someone who has shown to be more than a one hit wonder tries to do more of these things.

Also, I think the point here is the hypothetical way that cars can be moved in the tunnels which makes the smaller size still useful.

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

#87

Post by hinkley »

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…

His goal is to somehow run a tunnel boring machine on Mars, right? He'll certainly be testing out new tech if that's the goal. These machines are magnificently heavy at present, aren't they?

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

#88

Post by ShorsHammer »

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/…

That Sydney Metro tunnel is coming in at nearly double the initial budgeted cost. It's over $1B per km of tunnel. Australian infrastructure projects are hardly something to be proud of.

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

#89

Post by gamblor956 »

dv_dt wrote: post #48
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/…

I think this follows Elons pattern of being able to find areas where the fundamental technology has advanced and is available, but the integration and step up to a new level hasn't been invested in yet. I think the Boring company basically made more efficient custom built tunneling equipment.

Musk never learned that most of the cost of subways is the stations and supporting infrastructure, not digging the tunnel itself.

Musk has not proposed any improvements to the expensive parts of tunneling.

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

#90

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

m4rtink wrote: post #52
s_dev wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in…

All very impressive. But most impressive to me is this:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikan_Tunnel

>>A 2002 report by Michitsugu Ikuma described, for the undersea section, that "the tunnel structure appears to remain in a good condition." The amount of inflow has been decreasing with time, although it "increases right after a large earthquake".

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