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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

#221

Post by asdff »

pjkundert wrote: post #140
thedrbrian wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes it a lot worse. You can fit a load of people on a subway train versus a model s or x

You’ve got the wrong perspective. From the perspective of the city, the ROI of a subway train is high. From the perspective of an individual, the ROI of using my own car in a tunnel, exactly when I want to, without parking, waiting, embarking, smelling the vagrants, disembarking, walking or getting a cab, ... Priceless!

Spoken like someone who spends 4 hours on the 405 fwy a day, by choice.

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

#222

Post by vl »

thereisnospork wrote: post #214
bluGill wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Imo big infrastructure needs like roads and subways shouldn't be done on a project basis at all. For instance, NYC shouldn't bid and build out massive contracts for a few km of subway. They should own a boring machine and add 10-100m of tunnels a week, every week[0]. (numbers arbitrary) You can shake so much overhead around project start-up and shut-down and it will be a long time before NYC (nevermind someplace like…

But why there is a need to paint it all the time?

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

#223

Post by asdff »

clairity wrote: post #117
astrodust wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

induced demand is often (intentionally?) misunderstood as demand being literally insatiable (and by extension, "why bother?"), but really, we're just severly underserving the market, and there are very limited price signals we can rely on to understand the cost and value of a road foot-second (or meter-second). people want more fast, affordable, on-demand, point-to-point private transportation. "induced demand" tells…

On paper, when everything is just objects floating in gaseous infinite space, this makes sense. Once you begin to realize that a car takes space, this all falls apart. You can make the 405 100 miles wide to fit everyone across, but you'd loose the entire county in the process.

The fact of the matter is that it's absurd to transport people in a dense environment 25'x10' apart, one at a time, all going back and forth to the same exact two places five days a week for 40+ years. Trains let you fit way more people in a given area, people who are already heading the same direction, and therefor offer more space for a city to be a city rather than a place for infrastructure.

Until we get to a point where people are able to move easily with high capacity transit, it's irresponsible to waste precious political will to build with the intention of providing low capacity transport for those who can afford a $30k+ car.

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

#224

Post by danso »

duckymcduckface wrote: post #207
cordite wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the bottleneck

Geotech is a bitch. Soils aren't homogenous and vary a lot in both composition and characteristics. There are multiple types of TBMs that are designed to operate under very specific conditions, for example a soft rock/soil TBM excavates through different mechanisms than a hard rock TBM. One of the big problems in any excavation is you have no idea what's actually down there until you start working in it. The underlyi…

I’m not disagreeing with you (I know nothing about geotechnical), but I was thinking the bottleneck is all the bureaucracy and infrastructure factors, which don’t have mechanically scalable solutions. I’m assuming tunneling through Las Vegas is much different than tunneling in NYC or SF or even LA.

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

#225

Post by Dylan16807 »

OnlineGladiator wrote: post #49
Jernik wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's confusing because the way the units are represented is inconsistent.

You find the 'yr' confusing?

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

#226

Post by asdff »

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…

Recently there was squabble about the projected revenues of the LA olympics. The more recent figures were pessimistic, and naturally the media had their time writing pieces in different directions about this, blaming the city for incompetence and budget overruns, and the public formed their opinions and became ever more polarized. The reason why the figures had changed was simply that inflation had occurred over the years since the initial projection.

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

#227

Post by asdff »

jacques_chester wrote: post #139
incompatible wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A large fraction of NYC's subway system was built using cut-and-cover, which is much cheaper than the deep tunneling being used for projects like the Second Avenue line or the East Side Access. That's before adding other factors such as increase regulation, inflation and good ol' corruption.

I really don't understand the aversion to cut and cover these days. Whole blocks of street are routinely closed and resurfaced for long periods of time, especially if sewer work is involved. Businesses in urban environments aren't really reliant on the business from the street parking directly in front of their storefront anyway. Closing a couple blocks at a time wouldn't be all that bad, and it probably wouldn't take too long to throw a temporary grate for car traffic over the open cut anyway.

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

#228

Post by asdff »

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?

We can build a building like the empire state today in a year if we are willing to waste a half dozen lives in the process as well. In fact in some countries that's pretty much what's done.

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

#229

Post by asdff »

ericd wrote: post #192
prawnsalad wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

because gas was cheap and batteries back then couldn't go 400 miles and charge in 5 mins. had the economics been flipped, and there were stations on the side of the road with charged batteries for swapping, maybe elon would be forming a petrol sports car company about now.

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

#230

Post by marvin »

snifflumpus wrote: post #177
chrisco255 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you want a serious answer: try and build a house. I did. It will expose you to the bananas state of local government. Planning/zoning will kill you, it's simply illegal to build most types of houses in most of the US. There was a recent blog post about this I can't find, but it outlined all the houses that exist that are now practically illegal. For example, mixed use where there's a business on the ground floor.…

Honestly, this is a quite frightening comment. It's never been obvious to me that regulation for the sake of destroying competition is coming to tech. But now that you mention it, it's inevitable. And it will kill innovation.

Just the whole GDPR compliance and showing the cookie alert is a PITA if you're going to run any small online business. And it will get much worse.

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