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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

#191

Post by MiroF »

privateSFacct wrote: post #130
int_19h wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But rails were invented for a reason - they're drastically more efficient. So doesn't this just trade lower upfront costs for much higher operational costs (in energy consumption per mile travelled)?

I hope this is a joke, but if not please look into the cost and timeliness of subway maintenance costs by unionized workforce’s dealing with things like switching and signaling equipment - your claim is that this is drastically more efficient than some car mechanics? And if your number is low - you are not counting deferred maintenance which is huge in these systems

Yes, even counting "unionized workforce" cars cannot even remotely compete with mass transit rail on a per capita cost. Why is this so hard for people to understand?

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

#192

Post by ericd »

prawnsalad wrote: post #178
drcross wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're bad mouthing someone who regularly lands rockets on ships in the ocean and has bootstrapped the first electric car company. I think Elon deserves the benefit of the doubt here.

I'm a fan of Elon but he did not bootstrap the first electric car company. Electric cars have been around since the 1800s with a resurgence in the late 1900s. Musk got into electric cars in the 2000s.

I think if we're being charitable, it's pretty clear that they meant no major electric car companies. And there were no major car companies on the scale of early Ford before early Ford.

I guess if we're being pedantic, he also didn't bootstrap Tesla.

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

#193

Post by MiroF »

chrisco255 wrote: post #157
hourislate wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

NIMBYs happened

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

#194

Post by stephen_g »

drcross wrote: post #142
astrodust wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon's making bold claims about how he's going to disrupt the tunnelling industry but so far the results are unimpressive to say the least. Tunnel boring is a complex, multi-faceted civil engineering discipline with a large number of well-funded firms that are aggressively competing and innovating. In this space Elon is utterly insignificant. The ELI5 version is: "Elon thinks he can dig tunnels faster and cheaper tha…

You're bad mouthing someone who regularly lands rockets on ships in the ocean and has bootstrapped the first electric car company. I think Elon deserves the benefit of the doubt here.

It’s actually a fairly common trap to fall into - having expertise in one area and assuming you can jump into a completely different field and revolutionise it.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t sometimes happen, but at this point there’s no evidence that the Boring Company is really doing anything particularly novel at this point...

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

#195

Post by elsonrodriguez »

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 wrote: post #35
elsonrodriguez wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also no difference between a rocket and a rocket, until you figure out how to make one cheaper than the other.

The difference between one that falls into the ocean and one that brings itself back down into orbit and lands safely is one is cheaper than the other?

I guess the better analogy is "an orbit is an orbit". We don't care about the orbit as much as we care about the rockets in the case of SpaceX, because what the rockets mean for our ability to explore space.

In the case of Boring, a tunnel is a tunnel, but if they can make them cheap and fast, that opens up a bunch of possibilities for improving transit.

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

#196

Post by bluGill »

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…

I know of some areas that would disagree with you: it is possible to out build demand, most rural areas have done it. I have driving 4 lane highways on a nice weekday where I could see for miles in either direction and there wasn't even one other car!

The only problem is cost. For a city to out build unmet demand they would need to get to add several dozen layers of road, one on top of another (that is bridges over bridges for 12 layers). Nobody would seriously propose building such a thing. If we had it the mobility of the city would allow people to accomplish more things in the city than they can today.

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

#197

Post by grp000 »

bluGill wrote: post #183
toasterlovin wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’ve been building houses for millennia and construction is still notorious for not going according to plan. One-off projects are just hard to get to go as planned.

Lesson: don't do one-off projects. Find a project that meets you needs, and copy it. Make minor tweaks to their design to fit your needs, but copy as much as possible. Houses typically go according to plan because so many of the processes and parts are standard. Even large mansions can go according to plan if you have good management (note that cheap management is rewarded for change orders and thus will ensure thing…

Guess we should have stopped at the wheel.

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

#198

Post by ofrzeta »

jacques_chester wrote: post #106
ShorsHammer wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Here's talk about $3.5Bn/mile for Long Island Rail Road, including reasons for exploding costs

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

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

#199

Post by bluGill »

maxharris wrote: post #56
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.

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 b…

1: yes I believe it is possible to better. However I also believe that many of the reasons those other countries do better than the US - as much a 7 times cheaper - are political and thus not something any manager can solve. Going from 4x more expensive than best world prices prices (LA is about 4x, NYX is about 7x) to 3.9x more expensive than world prices are possible - that is a drop in the bucket though compared to the 4x improvement possible by finding the real issues where are political.

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

#200

Post by bluGill »

drcross wrote: post #150
cjhopman wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (describ…

They are currently building their first prototype. It seems correct that you would build a few tunnels using conventional equipment to gain experience before setting your sights on improving the state of the art, or is there something I'm missing?

You are missing something: the companies that build tunnel boring machines already have engineers who know how to make the machines looking into the problem of making their designs better. It isn't clear that there is a significant improvement available.

Rockets were a small enough niche that there were improvements possible if someone invested in them. It isn't clear if such improvements are even possible. (meaning they might be)

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