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The Boring Company FAQ

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Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#311

Post by noobermin »

Touche wrote: post #287
erentz wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you're missing the point. Of course trains are better. So why don't we have more trains? Because people have opinions on trains. So instead of building train tunnels you debate it for 20 years in town halls and NIMBY protests and nothing changes. This is clearly a hack around that issue. The article mentions a Hyperloop several times, that's the ultimate goal here.

As interest in car ownership drops as the Millennials age and take the older generations' place, that problem may fix itself.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#312

Post by noobermin »

prostoalex wrote: post #242
djsumdog wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But even with the stations, escalators and everything else, you're talking about orders of magnitude between trains and cars. London during peak hour has trains arriving less than 1 min 30 sec apart. They move an absolutely insane amount of people. Singapore's trains are entirely automated and arrive at Everything about Musk's idea seems absolutely terrible. If America had better trains and subways, it could move mas…

> If America had better trains and subways, it could move massive amounts of people. Train automation is a solved problem, and currently implemented in cities around the world. In most European cities, if you get off at train station, you're in the midst of (or very close to) the city center, office locations, touristy walking sites and plenty of choices for retail or food. In the US once you get off at the train sta…

For many cities, not just NYC and SF, but yes, it is true only for major cities.

EDIT: embellishment due to baq, this tends to be true of cities which developed before the car revolution of the 50's and 60's. For example, my city has a pretty poor average walkability score, but for where I live in the city core, it is very walkable since it is the older part of the city.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#313

Post by arikrak »

Costs can be reduced greatly even without any technological innovation. NYC and LA spend ~10x more per km of subway than what some European cities spend. (E.g. NYC's $2.2B/km vs. Paris's $230M / km. [1]) So try to replicate what foreign cities are doing and you get significant savings.

However since either way digging tunnels will be expensive, it seems inefficient to try to do this for cars. It would be more reasonable to just build a better subway system. Especially if in the future there will be automated fleets of self-driving cars waiting for you at each subway stop...

[1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/1/14112776/ne...

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#314

Post by Robotbeat »

kuschku wrote: post #224
Tomminn wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the sled idea is really interesting. Imagine a conveyor belt like you have in airports. Except it moves cars at 150 mph through an underground tunnel instead of people at 15mph. Traffic is often massively asymmetric so you can just reverse the direction it travels at noon. It seems plausible that keeping a conveyor belt in good service is cheaper than keeping a fleet of railway cars is. It's also significantl…

The throughput of "car directly after car" is about 10 times lower than that of a railway with a frequency of 90 seconds.

How about bus pods directly after bus pods? It'd be comparable or even higher (20 passengers/pod).

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#315

Post by Tepix »

bobsil1 wrote: post #11
HappyTypist wrote: post #4

This does not answer the most obvious and important question: why not invest in public transport? It's boring but it will work.

Tunnels are needed on Mars, as are EVs, batteries, solar and reusable methane rockets. Mars atmosphere is too thin for heavy aircraft.

It just occured to me that to use something like Hyperloop on Mars you don't even need a closed tube... it'd be like a normal (airtight) train.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#316

Post by jqueryin »

My theory is that these tunnels are truly being built to support the Hyper Loop. It's only a matter of time before they acquire one of the companies that did all of the R&D work.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#317

Post by DanBC »

Tepix wrote: post #315
bobsil1 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tunnels are needed on Mars, as are EVs, batteries, solar and reusable methane rockets. Mars atmosphere is too thin for heavy aircraft.

It just occured to me that to use something like Hyperloop on Mars you don't even need a closed tube... it'd be like a normal (airtight) train.

Dust on Mars is electrostatically charged. Moving a train through clouds of that dust sounds suboptimal.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#318

Post by icc97 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #206
erentz wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

With the capacity in mind, this project will end up having much lower throughput than a regular road, even when taking congestion in mind - unless they build dozens of parallel tubes, in which case the costs will become very, very large. I also don't see it becoming a long-distance alternative, again because tunneling is a slow and long process. It would be interesting I guess if they combined it with the Hyperloop c…

It's not science fiction, it's just drilling holes in the ground vs waiting for flying cars.

It may be expensive - but you only have to build each tunnel once.

There's a startup that got some hype recently for flying an electric airplane between London and Paris - when as someone commented on the HN story [0] you can just take the Eurostar through the tunnel - which is electric and takes just as long and doesn't cost any more.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13930880

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#319

Post by Robotbeat »

espadrine wrote: post #232
elif wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How do you tell it where to go? the giant ipad on the dashboard of your tesla, or your phone otherwise. >If you merge lanes, wouldn't there be jams there? If instead you build many parallel tunnels [etc] because if the increased speed, one lane is the equivalent of about 2.5 highway lanes in terms of throughput per hour. Regarding safety distance, I think you can actually safely achieve smaller spacing with a roller…

> take sleds each containing a car with 2 people, paced 300ft apart traveling at 125mph. that is 2 people (125mph / 0.0568182mi) = 4400 people per hour* I think 300 ft is for 75 mph. Using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braking_distance , the distance at 125 mph is 55 m/s * 55 m/s / (2 * 1 * 10 m/s2) = 150 m = 500 ft, resulting in 2 people * 125 mph / 0.09 mi = 2.8 khumans/h. (On the demo video, their vehicles look li…

The vehicles use a monorail, not asphalt. Both in the concept video and the actual prototype of the electric sled in a tube video.

Also, the concept video shows multi-user pods. If you pack them as full as a rush hour subway, you could probably equal or exceed a subway's throughput.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#320

Post by Touche »

noobermin wrote: post #311
Touche wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the point. Of course trains are better. So why don't we have more trains? Because people have opinions on trains. So instead of building train tunnels you debate it for 20 years in town halls and NIMBY protests and nothing changes. This is clearly a hack around that issue. The article mentions a Hyperloop several times, that's the ultimate goal here.

As interest in car ownership drops as the Millennials age and take the older generations' place, that problem may fix itself.

What do you mean by interest in car ownership?
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