Elon Musk is boring a tunnel to skirt gridlock • Hacker News Board

Re: Elon Musk is boring a tunnel to skirt gridlock

#101

Post by mrighele » Thu, Feb 16, 2017, 2:54 PM UTC

grey-area wrote: post #86

dahart wrote: post #68

We can't afford to maintain the surface roads & bridges we already built, and tunnels are more expensive and require more maintenance by like an order of magnitude. (I made that up, but I'm pretty sure it's right, to within an order of magnitude... but if tunnels are 1000x more expensive, then I'm wrong). I can admire someone who has the resources to exclude himself from the traffic problem instead taking action to t…

Cars and public transport are vastly different in capacity. A tunnel for cars is obviously a crazy idea but what if it carried some sort of pods that carried lots of people at once, maybe in a vacuum, at fast speeds?

We could even fill those pods with burritos [1] ! (Sorry, couldn't resist)

[1] http://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_t...

Re: Elon Musk is boring a tunnel to skirt gridlock

#102

Post by throwanem » Thu, Feb 16, 2017, 2:55 PM UTC

phlo wrote: post #92

throwanem wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not done at all. It just hasn't been favored in a few decades - if Chomsky is accurate, as the direct result of some impressively Gilded-Age-level corruption. Even Baltimore's relatively rudimentary system is excellent, if you don't mind using a bus or your feet to get to places the train alone doesn't reach. And as we leave fossil fuels behind, the incentives will realign around what some forward-looking people…

My preferred line of argument to overcome such assumptions: My time is too valuable to waste navigating a car through traffic, and hiring a driver (permanently or per-trip) woulnd't make financial sense. Yes, driving there may save you 10 minutes on a half-hour commute, but in the same time I'll get done 20 minutes of work/whatever.

My commute takes an hour over 20 minutes by car, and my organization hasn't shown enough interest in making me able to work remotely to issue a device approved for secure VPN access, so I can't really make that argument go. But it works well for those who can.

(I don't mind not having remote capability all that much, honestly. I've done the on-call 24/7 thing for enough years not to want to do it any more.)

Re: Elon Musk is boring a tunnel to skirt gridlock

#103

Post by intrasight » Thu, Feb 16, 2017, 2:55 PM UTC

tgb wrote: post #44

kavok wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A tunnel doesn't have to specifically be for cars. Could run busses, trains, etc.. More electric cars on the road though wouldn't output more pollution around the road.

Electric cars are a good match for tunnels: ventilating the tunnel enough for a whole lot of combustion engines to use is a real cost.

And if the tunnel was limited to electric cars (likely), then that would boost Tesla.

Re: Elon Musk is boring a tunnel to skirt gridlock

#104

Post by alex_duf » Thu, Feb 16, 2017, 2:55 PM UTC

If I can agree that building tunnels for public transport may be a good idea, building tunnels to encourage people to use their car doesn't sounds like it's taking humanity in the right direction.

I'd rather see disruption to encourage people to use their bicycle and walking. Granted American cities aren't build for that but it's never too late.

http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_speck_4_ways_to_make_a_city_mo...

Re: Elon Musk is boring a tunnel to skirt gridlock

#105

Post by XorNot » Thu, Feb 16, 2017, 2:55 PM UTC

dahart wrote: post #68

We can't afford to maintain the surface roads & bridges we already built, and tunnels are more expensive and require more maintenance by like an order of magnitude. (I made that up, but I'm pretty sure it's right, to within an order of magnitude... but if tunnels are 1000x more expensive, then I'm wrong). I can admire someone who has the resources to exclude himself from the traffic problem instead taking action to t…

The US can easily afford to maintain it's infrastructure. It would make money in doing so.

Expense is not the reason the US has infrastructure problems.

Re: Elon Musk is boring a tunnel to skirt gridlock

#106

Post by lmm » Thu, Feb 16, 2017, 2:55 PM UTC

grey-area wrote: post #86

dahart wrote: post #68

We can't afford to maintain the surface roads & bridges we already built, and tunnels are more expensive and require more maintenance by like an order of magnitude. (I made that up, but I'm pretty sure it's right, to within an order of magnitude... but if tunnels are 1000x more expensive, then I'm wrong). I can admire someone who has the resources to exclude himself from the traffic problem instead taking action to t…

Cars and public transport are vastly different in capacity. A tunnel for cars is obviously a crazy idea but what if it carried some sort of pods that carried lots of people at once, maybe in a vacuum, at fast speeds?

You couldn't make efficient pods while complying with US railroad regulations (the US high speed trains are the heaviest in the world because the laws basically require trains to be armoured. Comparison to the US love of SUVs left as an exercise to the reader). If you can find a way around those regulations that would work, but seems overcomplicated compared to just applying your way around those regulations to ordinary high-speed rail.

Re: Elon Musk is boring a tunnel to skirt gridlock

#107

Post by RodericDay » Thu, Feb 16, 2017, 2:56 PM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #70

RodericDay wrote: post #11

I've become completely disenchanted with Elon Musk over time. I used to be a huge fan and cheerleader, and enthusiastically pointed to him as inspiration. But slowly I started to realize that I was buying a lot into carefully crafted propaganda. The way SpaceX used lawyers to keep PSLV at bay, all the while Musk gassed on about free markets and competition made me a bit mad. Then he had that quip where he said he was…

Which anti-environment Republicans has he donated to? As for the rest, look at what he (or at least his companies) have actually done. Tesla has succeeded in making electric cars cool. Their stated mission is to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable transport, and given the many long-range EVs announced by major car companies in the past few years, I think they've already succeeded at that. SpaceX has succ…

Marco Rubio.

As per my last point, I don't know if Musk's "moonshots" will actually pan out. His businesses certainly are taking credit for just about everything that happens in tech, but I'm not convinced they're the ones leading the revolution.

Re: Elon Musk is boring a tunnel to skirt gridlock

#108

Post by Fricken » Thu, Feb 16, 2017, 2:56 PM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #31

adamjc wrote: post #2

I thought the current thinking was that building more roads means that there will be more roads to use, and therefore more cars on the road. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

Induced demand often happens, but certainly not always. It just depends on latent demand and network effects. More importantly, the appearance of induced demand is not a general argument against building roads! People get value out of getting to places. If we build road B intending to relieve congestion on road A, but road A stays just as congested, we nevertheless have enabled people to get places with road B that t…

Certainly people get value out of getting to places. If you walk a mile in Paris, there are like 50 places worth going to. If you walk a mile somewhere around the middle ring road surrounding Houston, there's nowhere worth going to. Scale back car use to something reasonable, make the places smaller, move them closer together, and that way we can have nice things again.

Re: Elon Musk is boring a tunnel to skirt gridlock

#109

Post by _ph_ » Thu, Feb 16, 2017, 2:56 PM UTC

Here in Munich, Germany, public transport in the city center is based on a very small number of tunnels for underground trains. There is one main tunnel for city traversal, and about 5 or so underground tunnels. Together they bear a large part of the commuters traffic. Currently, the construction for another large train tunnel is about to begin. From that perspective, one wouldn't need an extremely large number of tunnels to vastly enhance traffic across a dense populated area. So when Musk is building tunnels, they aren't direct replacements for highways. They are either train tunnels, or hyperloop tunnels, or if they are car tunnels, they are for autonomous electric cars, which are driving literally bumper to bumper across the tunnels. So they would carry much more traffic in a more organized way than the normal highway. So it all comes down to whether he manages to improve the boring process to a point where people would want to digg more tunnels as with current methods.

Re: Elon Musk is boring a tunnel to skirt gridlock

#110

Post by lmm » Thu, Feb 16, 2017, 2:57 PM UTC

Brakenshire wrote: post #95

jessriedel wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Induced demand often happens, but certainly not always. It just depends on latent demand and network effects. More importantly, the appearance of induced demand is not a general argument against building roads! People get value out of getting to places. If we build road B intending to relieve congestion on road A, but road A stays just as congested, we nevertheless have enabled people to get places with road B that t…

> More importantly, the appearance of induced demand is not a general argument against building roads! People get value out of getting to places. If we build road B intending to relieve congestion on road A, but road A stays just as congested, we nevertheless have enabled people to get places with road B that they would not otherwise have been able to reach. That increases utility. There are cases where this doesn't…

Right, so what we need to do is take into account value of space that roads will take up (that could otherwise be used for houses, businesses, parks...), and only build more roads if the value they produce outweighs the value they consume. That's not an induced demand issue though.