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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

#151

Post by CamperBob2 »

astrodust wrote: post #147
CamperBob2 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Induced demand = the product is actually being used . The hoary old cliché that says, "Building roads just increases congestion," is nothing more than an exercise in measuring the wrong thing. Market demand, induced and otherwise, is a good thing, if the externalities are also addressed. That's basically Musk's whole business model.

Infrastructure operates differently from a good or service where you have a multitude of often interchangeable selections. The easy availability of roads leads to more people driving since it's the more effective option, which in turn leads to more traffic. Eventually the system reaches equilibrium where it's busy enough that other alternatives are more desirable. Time and time again predictions of apocalyptic traffi…

So where are we on this particular rendition of the Laffer curve? Are we already fortunate enough to be at "peak road," right here and now? That seems unlikely, but I suppose it's possible. Or would it be best to either remove more lanes, or add new ones?

Would traffic flow become infinitely fast if we removed them all?

Conversely, would it become infinitely slow if we paved every square inch of land in sight?

It's almost as if such simplistic models are worse than useless, huh.

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

#152

Post by hourislate »

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/…

Toronto can't build a subway stop for under 1 billion. I would imagine someone like Elon could could dig a complete line with a dozen stops for 1 billion.

It's amazing how he creates companies and solutions on a whim that revolutionize complete industries.

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

#153

Post by flukus »

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…

> 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?

Or maybe tunneling speed simply isn't the bottleneck so no one ever tried going faster. If it takes 3 months to dig out the tunnel but 6 months to fit it out then you've gained nothing.

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

#154

Post by mikeyouse »

threeseed wrote: post #116
SECProto wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the Tesla Roadster was just a modified Lotus Elise. Buying an of-the-shelf product and reverse engineering it, before building ones' own, is a very valuable step.

But are they actually building their own ? Haven't seen anything covered about what they've built or how it compares with anything else on the market.

Yeah they are.. they have a few, their first was just off-the-shelf technology, the second is a hybrid, and their third one is apparently fully designed by Boring Co.:

https://tunnelinsider.com/everything-we-know-about-the-borin...

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

#155

Post by Gibbon1 »

astrodust wrote: post #148
njarboe wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-p…

The bad externalities of cars are numerous and extend well beyond those things you list, but primarily they create an astoundingly expensive barrier to being part of society and not someone who's left behind. There aren't enough tunnels in the world to dig your way out of traffic problems. The more roads you make the more traffic you get. Toll roads just increase the already staggering cost of owning a car, marginali…

A lot of this stuff, 'ride sharing', self driving cars, boring company tunnels, and electric flopters seems not like a way to solve societies transportation/congestion issues but to solve it for the small percentage of well to do people.

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

#156

Post by jeltz »

yongjik wrote: post #36
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.

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.

4400 is 4 full subway trains and the Stockholm subway can do 30 trains per hour on one track, so I think it is about 7 or 8 times the capacity.

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

#157

Post by chrisco255 »

hourislate wrote: post #152
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/…

Toronto can't build a subway stop for under 1 billion. I would imagine someone like Elon could could dig a complete line with a dozen stops for 1 billion. It's amazing how he creates companies and solutions on a whim that revolutionize complete industries.

What's amazing to me is that we built the Golden Gate bridge for $35 million in 1933 (would be $688 million in today's dollars) and it only took 4 years. The Empire State building was built in one year (1930). What happened to our ability to build massive structures quickly? Is it amazing that Musk can do things so quickly or is it just that we got so fucking slow on everything that it seems amazing?

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

#158

Post by irq11 »

Lammy wrote: post #84
irq11 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, that’s not a very useful comment. I realize it’s popular to blame NIMBYs for everything bad in SF these days (“NIMBY” is tech for “I’m not getting 100% of what I want, immediately!”), but your comment does nothing to address the substance of the observation: the digging was the fast part of the SF project.

Maybe the whole thing could have been done in half the time without public meetings, but that’s neither here nor there. The work of moving utilities and keeping sinkholes from forming in downtown SF is still incredibly complex, and seems to me to make up the bulk of the schedule.

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

#159

Post by mbesto »

SECProto wrote: post #102
threeseed wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually Musk leased an existing Canadian boring machine: http://superexcavators.com/news/super-excavators-consult-mac... There is no evidence of any improvements or innovations.

And the Tesla Roadster was just a modified Lotus Elise. Buying an of-the-shelf product and reverse engineering it, before building ones' own, is a very valuable step.

And Tesla's Gigfactory is a JV with Panasonic and partially funded by taxpayers.

I'd say the largest value add about Elon Musk is his ability to create a reality distortion field to convince large swathes of people to follow his dream.

I'm actually not being critical of Musk here. Jobs did this and you can see how transformative certain technologies have been as a result.

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

#160

Post by triggercut »

incompatible wrote: post #126
jacques_chester wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The MTA's Second Avenue line in New York comes out to more than AU$2Bn per km, on my reckoning (US$2.6Bn/mile). It's the current world champion for expensive holes. The fact is that megaprojects basically never come in anywhere near their schedule or budget. That's because of a selection bias. When you crunch the numbers honestly, megaprojects come out as a terrible on a cost-benefit or ROI analysis. The ones that ge…

But it's just a subway tunnel, which have been built in cities since the 19th century. Is it really so much harder to do such "megaprojects" in the 21st century, with the vastly better equipment now available?

There are a raft of issues. The construction industry has not significantly benefited from large technological advancements that other industries have over the last century and is still human labor dependent. Wages have increased, we've decided it's not ok to kill people anymore, unions have removed exploitation in the immediate supply chains.

We also have more complicated, and are dependent on, soft and hard power structures to access and use capital. A great place to start looking into these issues is Bent Flyvbjerg at Said, Oxford

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