151–160 of 206 posts
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He's building us an express loop in Chicago: https://www.boringcompany.com/chicago/ They're even paying for the whole thing, I think most residents here are excited about it.
Musk says a lot of things. He is really amazing at getting press attention for himself. Ask Buffalo how Musk promises regarding the solar roof factory have gone so far...
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> The difference is that in California, the people who don't want it largely outnumber the people who want it more than in most places. Measure R (2008, 67% in favor) and Measure M (2016, 71% in favor) both passed with supermajorities and raised Los Angeles taxes by billions to pay for rail and other public transit options. To me, that seems to indicate that the majority wants these kinds of projects.
The majority may want a few projects that cost relatively little, but they clearly don't want as much as people in other cities that spend more on public transit and have more public transit infrastructure per capita. In other words, I'm sure the majority is in favor of some public transit as an alternative, but the bar is far lower for being an alternative. Also, it goes without saying that LA County is not represen…
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The Boring Co isn’t giving up on LA entirely. This was just one test tunnel. They have already succeeded on their other 2 mile test tunnel (Dodger Stadium) and are working to extend that.
The tunnel initial capacity will be 1400 people per day and maybe 2800 later. This is 3% of average game attendance. https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-dodger-stadium-...
This was a great Twitter thread on the public interest in a LA tunnel
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But unless you’re going to the same destination mass transit isn’t ideal. If there are enough shared routes, and the cost advantage of shared transportation add up to a big enough benefit than it works. But my ideal transport is teleporting, which I think a subterranean hyperloop pod is closer to.
The concept of Loop is basically yet-another-repackaging of personal rapid transit. And the operational history of personal rapid transit has essentially shown that it sounds good in theory but doesn't work that well in practice. The real problem is that the suburban ideal of detached single-family homes combined with low-density commercial parks is not an environmentally-friendly way of living, and when you try to s…
Just call a tunnel with automatic pods in them mass/public transit (that is what it would be) and fell good about a better future for all of us.
Musk can do better than this. We need real subways and trains for transit. We do not need another express freeway lane that's underground. This is just adding more room for cars. Building on the existing approach of solving traffic by adding more lanes. This will not help Los Angeles nor America as a whole shift away from car dependency.
Would you ban a teleportation system that was energy efficient and insist people take trains and subways? Trains and subways are much inferior mode of transport compared to a functioning road system with vechicles. I wonder why so many people have this car hate? Scared of driving a car? They are dangerous and you have to pay attention to drive them, so that makes some sense to me. Some kind of socialist reason that people should be forced into contact with random other people. Sitting at home is what one should be doing instead of going places? Where did you get this idea that cars where some kind of evil device?
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The concept of Loop is basically yet-another-repackaging of personal rapid transit. And the operational history of personal rapid transit has essentially shown that it sounds good in theory but doesn't work that well in practice. The real problem is that the suburban ideal of detached single-family homes combined with low-density commercial parks is not an environmentally-friendly way of living, and when you try to s…
These tunnels could solve the traffic problem. That is the whole point. They can be stacked to great depth to get traffic congestion to zero. People are willing to pay for this and it is only our ignorance and stupidity getting in the way of at least trying. The point of cities is that one has a huge number of people you could potentially interact with. With horrible traffic, this is not the case. With mass transit,…
No, they can't. How do you handle vertical circulation?
Also, the capacity of highways is absolute rubbish compared to trains. I've run the numbers before--you'd need about 10 times the number of tunnels with Musk's Loop proposal, and about 100x the number of stations to get the same kind of vertical throughput as you would with regular subways.
> Just call a tunnel with automatic pods in them mass/public transit (that is what it would be)
Loop is essentially (as I've said) personal rapid transit. PRT is definitely public transit, but every PRT system has generally found that the "mass" part is rather hard to achieve.
The problem with this sort of thing is that it takes energy out of proven, working solutions to instead build technology that consistently hasn't lived up to promises. I might feel better about it if there were serious discussion as to why this system is going to succeed where others fail, but there has been absolutely nothing of that sort.
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And yet development should take the environment into consideration because it can have massive consequences. Those consequences are ultimately an externality of the development project and evaluating it in advance can help inform the true financials of the project.
I wonder whether those that were taking the environment in to consideration for the development thought beyond the project to what environmental impacts could be lessened by the project. I'm not a Musk fanboy, but if these tunnels will work the way he's suggesting, the amount of traffic that would be removed from the roads (and by extension, the pollution) would probably be a net benefit to the environment.
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>I think a lot of the frustration is that all this tunneling stuff seems like a huge distraction from what we KNOW works. If we know it works how come no one has done it? Traffic and congestion is a major issue in basically ever major city in the US (and probably the world), why the hate for attempted innovation? >The other thing about Elon is that one wonders how many clever people are toiling away on solving the wo…
To the best of my knowledge, you are correct that every US city is horrible in this regard. This was not by accident. To your comment "If we know it works how come no one has done it? " - 1) We have done it. Amsterdam fought like hell for it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuBdf9jYj7o . Now they have one of the finest cities in the world in which to move about. Copenhagen at rush hour handles loads of people well bec…
Also I really don't think this a resource drain. Before Elon there was basically no effort, and so if there was no Elon there would still be no effort. Also I would be shocked if there were more than like 150 people at Boring company.
Musk can do better than this. We need real subways and trains for transit. We do not need another express freeway lane that's underground. This is just adding more room for cars. Building on the existing approach of solving traffic by adding more lanes. This will not help Los Angeles nor America as a whole shift away from car dependency.