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The Boring Company [video]

boringcompany.com

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Re: The Boring Company [video]

#201

Post by agumonkey »

jacquesm wrote: post #190

What we really need to do is to figure out ways that reduce the need for all this transportation. When you look at it from a distance almost none of it makes sense. The only travel that really needs doing is people working with physical stuff, moving the goods themselves around and leisure travel (and that one is definitely not a must but it is hard to make a stand-in experience that is comparable to the real one). M…

Robots doing physical work, people discussing strategies in conf room with collaborative tools. Problem solved ?

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#203

Post by clock_tower »

kolinko wrote: post #186
placeybordeaux wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'll have to look seriously at living underground on mars. It won't protect us from solar rays on the surface. One of the cheaper ways to protect yourself is to put a layer of rock inbetween you and the sun.

Perhaps if you're building a cellar. If you want to make a 10-story building - even in a virgin terrain, it's a complicated operation. Not to mention that you need to make the materials such that they resist a huge side pressure, water leaks and so on. Psychological costs are also costs.

Wide-open spaces, even enclosed ones, can reduce the psychological burden of confinement quite a bit -- there's a variety of Russian strategic-missile submarine with a swimming pool, for example. This subject also comes up frequently in SF (science fiction, not San Francisco, which has the opposite problem); there was some discussion of it on the "Atomic Rocket" worldbuilding guide, IIRC.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#204

Post by kolinko »

Tiktaalik wrote: post #194
bb88 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Musk would do significantly better to drop a full subway network. In the same way a road offers private and public transportation, a tunnel can do both. Why can't the car be a bus, say?

Because cars, which are relatively wasteful spacewise, create negative externalities on the public transportation by causing congestion, which resultantly makes public transportation less efficient.

Not an issue in automated underground systems really.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#205

Post by cbisnett »

ShannonAlther wrote: post #184
pnathan wrote: post #85

This is very, very wasteful compared to actual mass transit. A subway network is much more effective at delivering people. If he's looking for mega-good, Musk would do significantly better to drop a full subway network. edit: tunnelling is a broadly solved problem. It's difficult, expensive, slow, etc. But there's no engineering reason why a hole in the ground can't happen. Musk might be able to drive some significan…

> But there's no engineering reason why a hole in the ground can't happen. Depending on the specific location, there may very well be. Underground tunnels are vulnerable to earthquake-inflicted damage, for instance, and you would want to avoid repair as much as possible. Similarly, there may be environmental or conservatory reasons not to build tunnels, or reasons related to cost, or obstacles not yet encountered (th…

This is Elon's response to a Twitter users similar comment about earthquakes. I don't know enough about physics to say if he's just throwing things out there or if he already did some research.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/824300186834898945

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#206

Post by webwalker »

Anyone else notice the mess of CSS and HTML? The document fully downloaded almost 900kb. In hosting costs alone this could have been down with bare fraction of that and supported 20x more traffic for the same cost. Anyway. Love the idea :D

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#207

Post by Tiktaalik »

dmix wrote: post #19

Toronto really needs this. We have a raised express way that's right in front of our harbourfront and it makes the whole area noisy and ugly, blocking what should be a great view towards (great) Lake Ontario. Most importantly it takes up a ton of very valuable real estate. A huge amount of condo development has been done right next to it and having lived in one the noise is a real problem. Living on the south-end of…

Just tear down the Gardiner and build public transit everywhere. The traffic will evaporate as people change their behaviour, just as we've seen in Paris and other jurisdictions that have removed road capacity. https://pricetags.wordpress.com/2017/03/30/paris-road-closur...

There's no need for this absurd fantasy tech. We can solve our transportation problems with the very basic tools we already have.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#208

Post by djsumdog »

nostromo wrote: post #162
pnathan wrote: post #85

This is very, very wasteful compared to actual mass transit. A subway network is much more effective at delivering people. If he's looking for mega-good, Musk would do significantly better to drop a full subway network. edit: tunnelling is a broadly solved problem. It's difficult, expensive, slow, etc. But there's no engineering reason why a hole in the ground can't happen. Musk might be able to drive some significan…

The video shows some sort of shuttle using the track. Those could be small busses or even public transport. http://imgur.com/a/Wv8YD In effect, this is a subway system. It's an underground rail system. The major difference is that you have a mixture of public and private passenger vehicles and smaller vehicles.

It's still incredibly wasteful compared to a real subway. The amount of people a real mass transit system can move is orders of magnitude above tons if individual little cars:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-sol...

..not to mention all the energy required to move each of those vehicles compared to a train that can move hundreds of more people in a similar space.

Americans need to get over all their train/bus hate. Other countries love mass transit. Many Americans try to shoot down any attempt to even put in a small system (small systems can grown) and kill off attempts to grow existing systems (see the Seattle Green Line).

Self driving cars can work great in Europe, where there is tons of transport and you just need to solve the last leg (or where self-driving trucks are rented just to move large items). In America we have massive gridlock due to a lack of rails and that needs to be fixed before self driving tech will fix anything.

Re: The Boring Company [video]

#210

Post by eli »

kolinko wrote: post #200
gsnedders wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But can you get a moving block signalling system such that they can follow each other with minimal separation? Until you can do that, a real train will always win at people/hour due to the fact that you can have more people per consist as ultimately the signalling challenges are comparable and you can therefore have comparable separation.

With all my sympathy for metro - in many American cities it will never be good enough due to extensive suburbs. In places where land is cheap, and there are single family houses, cars will be the most efficient way to commute for years to come. We'll switch to self-driving electric cars, but still.

Commuter rail is a thing. DC's metro goes a dozen miles outside the city in all directions and the MARC train goes further.
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