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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

#171

Post by mc3 »

fctorial wrote: post #161
BurningFrog wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take is that road access is severely underpriced. If you had to pay for road access, you could easily set the price to where demand meets supply, and all roads would have well flowing traffic 24/7. But of course "induced demand" happens when the price is $0. The same would occur for bread, phones or pianos at that price point.

Roads do have a price, and it does increase with demand. What is the worth of 10 minutes of your time?

Therefore more roads => more cars => same trip times. I could see that people would make decisions to take jobs where they travel by car, or choose to live further away etc. with more tunnels. That could be a good thing or bad, but yes the demand will increase, because people will find new reasons to get about if there is more road to do it on. Let alone business use of roads.

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

#172

Post by jellicle »

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!

> exactly when I want to

What about everyone else and their cars?

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

#173

Post by jeltz »

pro-duct wrote: post #3

This sounds comically obvious, but WOW that was fast. Really impressed that they are delivering on some of their promises, given Musk's history of over-optimism. Sincerely wishing them the best of luck, because if they can pull this off, there will be other cities making deals with them (please San Francisco I'm begging you)

They just used an off-the-shelf machine from another company. Modern tunnel boring machines are this fast.

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

#174

Post by SECProto »

Rexxar wrote: post #125
mc3 wrote: post #41

ELI5... why is digging a tunnel tech news? Does Elon dig them faster or more cheaply or something? Otherwise do I submit this to HN? https://www.sydneymetro.info/tunnelling . I think tunnels are the future though for cities. But I'd prefer trains to be running in them, or roads that only allow electric public transport. Edit. In 1988 they started work on the Channel Tunnel UK to France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

If you like tunnels, there will be 200km of tunnels built by 21 boring machines at the same time between 2020 and 2030 around Paris : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Paris_Express

Any detail specifically on the tunnels? That just mentioned 200km of track, but not whether above or below grade

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

#175

Post by paranoidrobot »

njarboe wrote: post #83
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.

If you believe that car travel must be innately evil, then induced demand is a problem with building more roads. More roads mean more people using them to do something they want to do. These tunnels will be toll roads, so if you just up the tolls you can have them not get jammed up. You then have a real idea of how much a tunnel can make and you can get people to invest in building more of them. Individual point-to-p…

> More roads mean more people using them to do something they want to do.

I'd argue that a lot of people don't want to drive a car, they want to get to their destination. Where options other than driving are available, then they weigh cost/convenience to make their decision.

My view isn't that cars travel is innately evil, or that building roads is always terrible - but that so much more money is spent on building more roads than on public transit options.

For some reason we ignore the last 60+ years of evidence to show that building more roads doesn't lead to reduced traffic. It's simply not possible to build out roads fast enough to beat the rise in traffic.

If you build public transit options that get people between locations they want to travel, ensure that it's run on time, clean, and affordable - then people who already drive will evaluate that cost/convenience function for themselves and decide that public transport is actually better. This results in much reduced road traffic.

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

#176

Post by spookthesunset »

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.

That and there was no EPA, no environmental design reviews, not much permitting, lax or zero safety standards (today it is a huge deal when somebody dies on a construction project... no so much back then). There was no ADA accessibility standards, no elevators or required wheelchair access, there was very little underground.

If all the businesses along the block you are trenching through back then went under... so fucking what?

If your 24/7 jackhammers kept all the block up the whole night you’d tell them to take a hike.... etc, etc, etc.

If turns out if you care about any or all of those things, your costs go up. Back then it was all just negative externalities that got foisted on the neighborhoods around them. Think of the negative externalities causes by our interstate highway system. Good luck building that now! It literally divided entire neighborhoods. The entire thing would be require to go into a tunnel under the city. No way would people tolerate that shit now.

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

#177

Post by snifflumpus »

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?

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. Or building 3 stories in a 2-story zone. Or having an ADU. The list is endless. In fact my current town just made it illegal to build single family units next to multi-family (with a buffer), and we only have two places in the town where you're allowed to build office space. Retail is slightly better, there are three places that's okay.

If you get through planning, then permits will kill you. The permits to demolish our place (different town!) were more than buying a new house. I'm not kidding.

If you get through permits then good luck with inspections.

What musk is doing with tunnels is what the entire tech industry is doing: working in a zone with a lot less rules. It's illegal to make a building but you can make any website you want. Though that is going away too, it'll get regulated to death eventually and you can already see it starting to happen with data and privacy laws.

The main escape from all this, as far as I've been able to find, is Texas. It's apparently still legal to build things there.

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

#178

Post by prawnsalad »

drcross wrote: post #142
astrodust wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon's making bold claims about how he's going to disrupt the tunnelling industry but so far the results are unimpressive to say the least. Tunnel boring is a complex, multi-faceted civil engineering discipline with a large number of well-funded firms that are aggressively competing and innovating. In this space Elon is utterly insignificant. The ELI5 version is: "Elon thinks he can dig tunnels faster and cheaper tha…

You're bad mouthing someone who regularly lands rockets on ships in the ocean and has bootstrapped the first electric car company. I think Elon deserves the benefit of the doubt here.

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.

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

#180

Post by paranoidrobot »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #151
astrodust wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Infrastructure operates differently from a good or service where you have a multitude of often interchangeable selections. The easy availability of roads leads to more people driving since it's the more effective option, which in turn leads to more traffic. Eventually the system reaches equilibrium where it's busy enough that other alternatives are more desirable. Time and time again predictions of apocalyptic traffi…

So where are we on this particular rendition of the Laffer curve? Are we already fortunate enough to be at "peak road," right here and now? That seems unlikely, but I suppose it's possible. Or would it be best to either remove more lanes, or add new ones? Would traffic flow become infinitely fast if we removed them all? Conversely, would it become infinitely slow if we paved every square inch of land in sight? It's a…

> It's almost as if such simplistic models are worse than useless, huh.

I'd say that it's more like taking models to extremes is useless.

If your doctor says that you're consuming too much salt it is increasing your risk of a range of diseases, you don't turn around and say "But salt is necessary for the function of life, I can't just cut it out entirely!". The answer, as with most things - is somewhere in between.

With our current set of transport options - a mix of transport options are going to be optimal. The specific mix is going to depend entirely on the area and traffic patterns.

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