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The Boring Company FAQ

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Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#121

Post by advertising »

nihonde wrote: post #85
zild3d wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If NYC didn't have a third dimension for transportation (subway and trains), no amount of busses and bikes would fix the soul-destroying traffic. The listed alternatives are all nice, but none of them allow you to move at 125+ mph. We should be able to get to our destination faster, not just with a bit less soul-destruction. Remote work is of course not for every or even most professions, and I don't see why it would…

Tokyo is a much bigger city. They solved the problem by building elevated toll highways. Much simpler solution than digging new holes everywhere and keeping those silly carts running.

Parking is a bigger problem in tokyo if you drive, and the tolls are expensive.

The newer the subway lines in Tokyo are fun because they have to built in under the others (as referenced in the FAQ), you can tell you're on a new line when you descend down flights and flights of stairs.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#122

Post by advertising »

sAuronas wrote: post #89
discodave wrote: post #48

The old strategy of hiding your outlandish claim in an assertion in the first sentence! "To solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic, roads must go 3D" The word "must" is a very strong one here, there are other options: * Reduce the amount of travel that people need to do (remote work, online shopping). * Reduce the density of cities (enabled by remote work or longer commutes with better internet access). * Incre…

Cities like LA will become denser over time. It might seem counterintuitive but increasing density alleviate traffic (people walk). You can't clean a hotel or flip a burger remote. Public transit has failed to solve the problem despite a 100-year head start. Cycling... in LA... I don't think the Boring Company is trying to solve the gridlock. They will, however, provide an option for those who can afford to pop down…

Exactly. Cycling in LA is suicide.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#123

Post by Baeocystin »

bnegreve wrote: post #107
Baeocystin wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Any good paints or fabrics or metamaterials that could be used as a tunnel liner that only allow water to wick in one direction (from tunnel internals to surrounding soil)? Thermodynamically impossible without an input of energy. FWIW.

I'd like to know more about this. Check valves [1] do just this, and they work without energy input, what is the difference ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Check_valve

Something that can discriminate without energy input is a form of Maxwell's Demon. If you are unfamiliar, it's a lot of fun to learn about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon is a reasonable start.

Check valves absolutely do consume energy. Something has to resist the spring forcing them closed, or they would never open. They are convenient in that their energy is sourced from the very thing they are controlling, but they are energy-consuming devices.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#124

Post by nihonde »

suls wrote: post #112
nihonde wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tokyo is a much bigger city. They solved the problem by building elevated toll highways. Much simpler solution than digging new holes everywhere and keeping those silly carts running.

I wouldn't consider to daily commute problem as "solved" in Tokyo ..

Next to NYC, commuting in Tokyo is effectively trouble-free. It may be crowded, but it's also predictable when the crunch times will be. Trains are on time. Cars keep moving and don't block every intersection with incessant honking.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#125

Post by CodeWriter23 »

erentz wrote: post #74
Animats wrote: post #61

So, the key ideas are: - Smaller diameter tunnels. 14' is suggested. This is slightly larger than the deep London Tube lines. - Electrically powered TBMs. Those exist. However, often the business end of the machine is hydraulically powered. Musk is probably thinking of going all electric, at least for the cutter head. After all, he has lots of experience with high-torque electric motors. - Do cutting and tunnel ring…

Yeah this is all very odd and everyone is lapping it up. He claims to want to reduce tunneling costs by a factor of 10, but starts by quoting a very high benchmark of $1 billion per mile which is quite easy to beat. Then he reduces diameters to something much smaller than all the expensive mega projects, into the range of something where technology is well established and costs are already 1/10th of his quoted $1 bil…

He's trying to hit a price point. We're not completely allergic to the $20M freeway bridge that's about 100ft long, and comes with heavy upkeep costs over the long term. So, $100M per mile with Upkeep Lite™ sounds good when making conversation about the topic. Also the $1B/mile is the cost of the Purple Line extension in Los Angeles. Worst case cost no doubt. A real figure nevertheless.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#126

Post by yongjik »

sien wrote: post #118
nihonde wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tokyo is a much bigger city. They solved the problem by building elevated toll highways. Much simpler solution than digging new holes everywhere and keeping those silly carts running.

Also by going underground. Tokyo's metro is fantastic and one of the few globally that has more than 100% farebox recover ratio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio#Farebox...

> more than 100% farebox recover ratio

Doesn't this just mean that they are expensive? I heard complaints about how expensive Tokyo's subway is. Reducing price and propping the system with tax can be a better approach in the long term, because that can encourage more people to use public transit and reduce demand for costly highways.

(Also, one could argue that the freedom to move around at an affordable price is a basic service the government should strive to provide, although I'm sure some people will regard such an idea as socialist nonsense.)

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#127

Post by ktta »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #104
ktta wrote: post #98

Uhh, this isn't going to be the panacea many are making it out to be here. This will not come close to accommodating the current capacity of freeways. The tunnel is being planned to be 14 feet wide, which is how it suddenly becomes viable. That's around two 'stabilized electric sleds' in one tunnel. Current freeways are 8+ lanes and you'll have to consider how the specifics of group travel are going to be worked out.…

Well hang on. Do we understand the impact of, for example, just a single lane, one-direction tunnel with respect to rush hour traffic in LA? It's like a shunt. Sure, more is better, but we're not talking about replacing freeways. We're looking at a way to improve traffic.

(If you're taking about inter-city travel)

I really doubt one person on a lane can be faster than a freeway with 4+ lanes (in one direction) no matter how fast it is going.

Another thing you'll have to consider is that there will be a logistical problem at the exit stops if you want to take advantage of all the high speeds being talking about. I'm talking about passengers getting stopped off there.

There have to be atleast X/2 get-in/get-out stops for people to climb into the sleds or there will be a bottleneck. (Considering X is the throughput for the amount of time it take a passenger to embark/disembark)

(If you're taking about intra-city travel)

Building these tunnels would be very, very inefficient compared to say building another road over the current roads.

I'm not from LA but I believe the major traffic occurs at rush hour, and short stretches of roads are really the problem. So finding out the hotspots and mending them would do much better than digging out lots of tunnels under heavily populated areas.

Another point is that in intra-city travel, high speeds cannot really be taken advantage of, so they'll basically travel at subway speeds. Now, subways as you see are already filled up if you take a look at New York. How do you think a one man car would fare compared to that?

(off topic) Again, I'm a fan of musk, but to me, this seems similar to the 'Put man on Mars' argument because that's where we have to be in a couple centuries. Rather than that, putting money towards colonizing harsher places on earth like deserts or Antarctica would be money much better spend IMO.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#128

Post by Baeocystin »

dredmorbius wrote: post #102
Baeocystin wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Any good paints or fabrics or metamaterials that could be used as a tunnel liner that only allow water to wick in one direction (from tunnel internals to surrounding soil)? Thermodynamically impossible without an input of energy. FWIW.

It turns out that most transportation tunnels do in fact have a significant input of energy. Ventillation to exhaust waste heat is a major concern. From discussions of net-zero housing in Alaska (Thorstein Chlupp), my understanding is that water tends to flow from hot to cold -- it will condense along a cold surface. A condenser + sump system where some engineering mechanism keeps the inner tunnel wall from remaining…

While you're right, in that heat is an issue in tunnels, harvesting low-temperature-delta energy is incredibly inefficient. It is always better to source the needed electricity from a generator that is specifically designed for such.

(The only time this may be untrue is when dealing with very small things like remote sensors, where running a wire might actually be more expensive than harvesting the microwatts needed locally. But this is a fraction of a fraction of a percent of total system needs.)

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#129

Post by ChuckMcM »

Animats wrote: post #61

So, the key ideas are: - Smaller diameter tunnels. 14' is suggested. This is slightly larger than the deep London Tube lines. - Electrically powered TBMs. Those exist. However, often the business end of the machine is hydraulically powered. Musk is probably thinking of going all electric, at least for the cutter head. After all, he has lots of experience with high-torque electric motors. - Do cutting and tunnel ring…

In my fantasies I've got a microtbm which digs a 4" diameter tunnel over to San Jose right under MAE-WEST so that I can pull a fiber right to the Internet :-)

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#130

Post by Turing_Machine »

tedsanders wrote: post #29
astrocat wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd like to see more details about edge case scenarios. The thing is, we're all MUCH more comfortable with the danger we're familiar with, than the danger we're unfamiliar with. Imagine if planes were just being introduced today - what are the edge case scenarios? What happens if there's mechanical failure at 30,000 feet? What happens if there's turbulence, lightning, birds, volcanic ash? What happens if the pilot…

>I'm not saying the dangers of new tech aren't important - they're very important; but keep in mind that while the idea of suffocating after a crash or malfunction in a hyperloop tube/tunnel will feel significantly more perilous than any misfortune that may befall you on a plane simply because a plane's risks are now familiar . Without understanding edge case scenarios, we cannot make claims like these. Maybe these t…

People have been building tunnels for a lot longer than they've been building planes. They are extremely well-understood.

The innovation here is in digging the tunnels, not their operation.

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