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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

#271

Post by toasterlovin »

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…

Most houses are unavoidably one-off projects. The point of comparison would be an assembly line at a factory. Compared to that, most houses are one-offs; that particular design has never been built at that particular site by that particular group of people and contractors.

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

#272

Post by Erlich_Bachman »

mbesto wrote: post #270
Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And Tesla's Gigfactory is a JV with Panasonic and partially funded by taxpayers. What you don't seem to understand is that the battery tech's problems currently are not the chemical process or format of the cells, but the volume. The volume of cells that we are able to produce. This is a major bottleneck of electric cars. It is not just some minor problem, it is a great fundamental problem. This is also why tesla c…

> What you don't seem to understand is that the battery tech's problems currently are not the chemical process or format of the cells, but the volume. > So no this is not only about vision, Tesla (whether Musk himself or his engineers) identified a real problem, and engineered a real solution - the gigafactory So, Musk identified a problem (manufacturing batteries at scale), found a vendor with a solution (Panasonic)…

> Do you see my point now?

Not really, what is your point?

Every car manufacturer uses parts sourced from other companies - software, parts of engines, whole engines, whole gearboxes, complete modules, raw materials... That's how the industry works...

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

#273

Post by CydeWeys »

spookthesunset wrote: post #123
gamblor956 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LA has expanded its rail system quite dramatically in the past decade and will be opening a new rail line next year... It turns out the expensive part was not the digging. It was moving undisclosed utility lines and building the stations. Moving undisclosed utility lines is almost singlehandedly the reason the regional connector and Crenshaw lines are over budget.

That and building the stations. Tunneling is almost the “quick” part. Certainly almost never in the critical path.

And acquiring all the land to build the stations ...

And subways have relatively few surface interfaces compared to what you'd need to build to move the same amount of people in cars. Come to Manhattan and look at the massive, multi-block entrances to the Lincoln Tunnel, Holland Tunnel, Midtown Tunnel, etc. You're talking billions worth in real estate acquisition costs, demolition, and construction just to build a new tunnel entrance in the city, completely ignoring the tunnel cost itself.

And these tunnels move fewer people per day than the most-used subway stations, which are easier to integrate into the urban environment because you only need to build stairways and a couple elevators, not massive ramps and road connections for vehicles.

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

#274

Post by CydeWeys »

elsonrodriguez wrote: post #195
3fe9a03ccd14ca5 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> but if they can make them cheap and fast

The "if" in this sentence is doing a lot of work.

With SpaceX, it's very clear how they're getting the >10X cost efficiencies. Rockets are massively expensive to build, and instead of building a new one for each launch and throwing them away as part of the mission, SpaceX is reusing each rocket many times. Their next-gen architecture BFR will be reusable dozens of times. So it's super obvious how SpaceX is putting things into orbit cheaply.

This is not true at all for tunnel construction, though. SpaceX is using largely the same technology (tunnel-boring machines) and is going to have all the same problems going through permitting, land acquisition, entrance/exit construction, etc., same as anyone else. It's not clear at all what fundamental advantage they have that would allow them to do this stuff much more cheaply.

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

#275

Post by [deleted] »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #211
toomuchtodo wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can’t we call it passion and vision instead of “reality distortion field”?

Can we have passion and vison that doesn't need reality distorted and instead follows truth and the laws of physics and logic in our universe?

[deleted]

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

#276

Post by hinkley »

benhurmarcel wrote: post #237
hinkley wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Talk about premature optimization…

Have you not been following The Elon Saga?

He’s trying to parlay his life’s work into civilization on Mars. Everything he’s investing time and energy into has uses here, today, but the prize he has his eye on is not here.

Does making a tunnel boring machine lighter or smaller have advantages? Sure, if the machines get used to dig more than one tunnel then a more portable design will begin to develop. But nobody is worried about paying well over $1000/lbs to move the damn thing. And nobody is worried about how big a parachute you need to land it in Martian atmosphere without breaking it.

Knowing Musk, he isn’t spending time on this plan if it does nothing for his dream. Therefore there’s a connection. What might that be? What would digging large holes have to do with sending people to an environment with barely any atmosphere and massive sandstorms? Oh.

I expect solving that problem will take ages. If he starts now he might have some major progress by the time he’s gotten a few missions to Mars. By the time habitat management is a problem he may have something that is pretty crazy but not insane.

I also expect that when spending another $1000/lbs on cutting surfaces represents a net savings, you’ll see him working with some pretty bizarre and exotic materials. What that would be will come as a surprise to me, since I haven’t paid any attention to materials science since about the time they started making synthetic diamond.

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

#277

Post by clairity »

asdff wrote: post #223
clairity wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> "...realize that a car takes space, this all falls apart."

that's accounted for in the foot-second metric. by a (very) rough calculation, we'd only need to double road foot-seconds to alleviate most congestion. that's very expensive, since most of these roads would have to go underground or be elevated, but not impossible (elon is trying to do just that for teslas).

i'm not advocating we double our roads, however. i'm just refuting the pithy notion that it's impossible to meet the supposedly insatiable demand implied by "induced demand" arguments.

but yes, let's build way more public transit and smaller personal transport networks (along with taller, mixed-use buildings)! it's definitely more efficient and can be less expensive and stressful.

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

#278

Post by gamblor956 »

spectrum1234 wrote: post #181
gamblor956 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is completely wrong. The biggest costs to tunnels is bureaucracy. Simply using private funds without numerous contractors can decreases costs by an order of magnitude with no technological improvements.

The biggest costs to tunnels is bureaucracy.

This is false. The biggest cost to tunnels is moving and replacing utility lines (power, internet, sewage, water, etc.) that were not properly recorded by private entities when they constructed their buildings.

It's precisely where government bureaucracy was involved that tunneling is the cheapest, because then moving and replacing the utility lines can happen all at once instead of over the course of months as the tunneling machine bores into them, and bureaucracy can coordinate road closures, utility shutoffs, etc.

Also, private entities use subcontractors not because bureaucracy requires it but because it lets them delegate out responsibility for areas in which they do not have competence for less than the cost of developing such competence in-house. It's simply the way the construction industry works. Even Joe Blow Contractor rebuilding someone's bathroom will hire contractors to do specific parts of the rebuild (like the plumbing, or the tiles). Another example: the SoFi Stadium in Inglewood has hundreds of subcontractors, and is fully privately funded.

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

#279

Post by clairity »

rahulnair23 wrote: post #257
clairity wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you've missed the point, going by your second paragraph. How capacity is provisioned from A to B influences how people choose to move and, over the long term, build homes/workplaces. Induced demand does not suggest that supply is less than demand - it implies that demand is "flexible" to meet any supply conditions. There is overwhelming evidence of this at work over 50 years and across continents. As a conseq…

> "Induced demand does not suggest that supply is less than demand - it implies that demand is "flexible" to meet any supply conditions."

that's the exact interpretation i'm refuting.

of course supply is less than demand. that's because the price of using roads is (perceived to be) zero, but the cost of construction on the supply side is high (and increasing, relative to inflation). it's impossible to meet the demand for free when costs are high.

my point is that this mispricing is a political and cultural choice, not an economic one explained by "induced demand". by using an economic concept for a non-economic market, we fall prey to misinterpreting and misadvocating.

we need to make the price of private transport much more transparent (e.g., real-time pricing) and rein in costs (land prices, legal/regulatory costs) so that we can make better choices in allocating our precious and limited resources (toward more mass transit for example).

(real-time pricing should also be progressive so that roads aren't just for rich people.)

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

#280

Post by nathanvanfleet »

dv_dt wrote: post #73
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.

A line of that article says this: > He also drew upon the 67-year-old contracting company’s expertise to get going, with an ultimate goal of developing ways to dig tunnels faster Not evidence I agree, but not entirely inconsistent with improvements.

So you think the article is saying they have made improvements because it's the "ultimate goal" or something? This is kind of funny to me. The tech industry thinks it has a monopoly on the idea of improving efficiency or something?
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