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Elon Musk is boring a tunnel to skirt gridlock

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Re: Elon Musk is boring a tunnel to skirt gridlock

#251

Post by erikpukinskis »

Fricken wrote: post #108
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…

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.

I think this is indeed the solution, and European cities figured it out a long time ago.

However, there is a usability problem on the municipal level: if you're starting from scratch, which aspects of the European city do you build first, in what order, so as to build utility slowly without causing planning problems and without spending a bajillion dollars up front?

Re: Elon Musk is boring a tunnel to skirt gridlock

#252

Post by erikpukinskis »

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…

Have you looked at a map of Boston? How could you not have horrible traffic?

Re: Elon Musk is boring a tunnel to skirt gridlock

#253

Post by rwhitman »

criddell wrote: post #192
rwhitman wrote: post #184

I don't understand how he gets away with digging that big of a hole in the ground in Los Angeles County without some serious assessment and permit filing being done first. The rock is very soft and we have earthquakes here. It took decades to approve the subway line down Wilshire Blvd. I'm assuming SpaceX gets special permission to do anything it wants, but it's still very surprising that they can just start digging…

According to the article, you don't need a permit to dig on your own property. He's going through the process you describe for when he hits the property line.

So, I talked to an engineer for a neighboring SoCal city...

He said there's typically a grading and demolition permit needed, structural engineer needs to sign off on the integrity of the pit, earthquake assessment, Dig Alert for utilities etc. But because he's Musk, SpaceX likely gets fast tracked for permits from the city of Hawthorne.

Found some details on the nitty gritty of it: http://www.dailynews.com/business/20170130/elon-musks-tunnel...

Re: Elon Musk is boring a tunnel to skirt gridlock

#254

Post by abduhl »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #249
abduhl wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I look forward to his major technological advances, especially in the fields of property and easement acquisition, third party impacts and claims, and environmental and safety regulations. Hopefully Elon's advances aren't the same as the cure for AIDS: http://southpark.cc.com/clips/164373/they-found-a-cure-for-a...

> I have stopped commenting on any tunnel related > Elon topic due to people refusing to believe my > experience and expertise when it does not align > with what Elon Musk and his team of "experts" > have said or published in their desk studies. I think you may be misreading the response here. When you write comments in a snarky way (as you did in the parent of this comment) it completely obscures your information to…

I used to post reasonable and non-snarky comments like this. I stopped doing it after about the fourth or fifth time that the commenters responding to my posts told me that I clearly had no idea what I was talking about and was uninformed because they had read the Hyperloop white paper. This literally only happens in Musk related threads.

Your profile says you work in machine learning - imagine if every thread you posted in about machine learning you were told that you were an idiot because someone had read I, Robot and the AI in that doesn't match your idea of ML so of course you're wrong.

So I just try not to post in most tunneling related topics, especially those related to Musk, any more unless I see something interesting (like your original comment for this whole thread noting that nobody here knows anything about tunneling). When I do find something interesting I try to respond honestly and directly, as you can see with my other responses in this thread; however, the GP comment here offers nothing to the debate other than basically saying "Elon is a superhero".

I would not be surprised if others in their respective fields take a similar approach in other cult of personality topics (Uber, Elon, Apple, etc.).

Re: Elon Musk is boring a tunnel to skirt gridlock

#255

Post by quotemstr »

quotemstr wrote: post #219
mikeash wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spot on with the "still creating value" stuff. With most things, creating more so more people can have it is seen as good. With roads, it's somehow seen as bad. It makes sense if the roads have negative externalities, like noise, or ugliness, or pollution, or destroying pedestrian access. But none of that applies to tunnels used by cars running on clean energy.

> somehow seen as bad I've noticed a certain utopian streak in some urban planning enthusiast communities --- one that's not compatible with the automobile as the primary mode of personal transportation. The general thinking seems to be, "$PROPOSAL reduces the number of cars on the road? Good!" Back when I lived in Buffalo, NY, there was a group of people who'd write editorials in The Stranger (the local alternative…

Gah. Buffalo's alternative weekly is Artvoice, of course. The Stranger is Seattle's. Mental wires crossed.

Re: Elon Musk is boring a tunnel to skirt gridlock

#256

Post by [deleted] »

Fricken wrote: post #108
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…

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.

[deleted]

Re: Elon Musk is boring a tunnel to skirt gridlock

#257

Post by loceng »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #250
shabble wrote: post #93

My laymen's understanding (from various documentaries & articles) is that the expensive part of tunnel construction is managing the transitions between different materials. Boring through hard rock might be slow, but hitting pockets of mud, loose rock and other things (especially when unexpected) can seriously mess up the works, and cause massive delays due to machine damage or reassessment and reinforcement/collapse…

> big TBMs are heavily bespoke systems specifically built for their planned route, and it's not unusual to just scrap them after the job is done. Would you say, they are expensive powerful machines built for a single use to be thrown away? Where much of the expense is due to the lack of re-usability? I wonder if Elon Musk has any experience with anything like that.

There's no space in Elon's exciting master plans for this boring company..

Re: Elon Musk is boring a tunnel to skirt gridlock

#258

Post by tclAmockingbird »

abduhl wrote: post #254
ChuckMcM wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have stopped commenting on any tunnel related > Elon topic due to people refusing to believe my > experience and expertise when it does not align > with what Elon Musk and his team of "experts" > have said or published in their desk studies. I think you may be misreading the response here. When you write comments in a snarky way (as you did in the parent of this comment) it completely obscures your information to…

I used to post reasonable and non-snarky comments like this. I stopped doing it after about the fourth or fifth time that the commenters responding to my posts told me that I clearly had no idea what I was talking about and was uninformed because they had read the Hyperloop white paper. This literally only happens in Musk related threads. Your profile says you work in machine learning - imagine if every thread you po…

> I would not be surprised if others in their respective fields take a similar approach in other cult of personality topics (Uber, Elon, Apple, etc.).

I no longer read the comments for things relating to medical testing, my professional field, and I try my best to avoid medicine generally.

It to me feels like many commenters are somewhat clueless on the topic, and many others have strongly held opinions that lack foundation. It's a frustrating environment to comment within: it takes a lot of energy to write a thoughtful comment that can fill in missing domain knowledge for an earnest reader, and subsequently demoralizing to have a popular frequent poster on this website to dismiss my comment with snark because they consider themselves to be informed in this area. My comments became gray. I deleted the password to my account when that happened and rarely post since, the frustration is not worthwhile.

Re: Elon Musk is boring a tunnel to skirt gridlock

#259

Post by didgeoridoo »

loceng wrote: post #257
erikpukinskis wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> big TBMs are heavily bespoke systems specifically built for their planned route, and it's not unusual to just scrap them after the job is done. Would you say, they are expensive powerful machines built for a single use to be thrown away? Where much of the expense is due to the lack of re-usability? I wonder if Elon Musk has any experience with anything like that.

There's no space in Elon's exciting master plans for this boring company..

Puns aside, it's fun to speculate how this fits in to SpaceX (will need lots of deep tunnels on Mars for habitation and protection from radiation) and Tesla (ventilating tunnels is much easier if the only cars using it are exhaustless).

Or, he's just completely mad.

Re: Elon Musk is boring a tunnel to skirt gridlock

#260

Post by Robotbeat »

ziedaniel1 wrote: post #151
Robotbeat wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not possible. At some point, your tunnel starts collapsing under the pressure and the great heat makes tunneling incredibly difficult. The deepest we've ever gotten on Earth is the Kola Superdeep Borehole (a Soviet project) that got 12km deep. On Mars, with the lower gravity and cooler center, we may get about triple that before reaching similar constraints in pressure and temperature. But no way you can get…

Wow, can I read more about the circum-planetary superconductor idea somewhere? I thought this sort of thing wouldn't work because superconductors lose superconductivity once currents get too high, as you mention.

I'm working on a blog post.
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