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Boring Company cited for almost 800 environmental violations in Las Vegas

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Re: Boring Company cited for almost 800 environmental violations in Las Vegas

#321

Post by lo0dot0 »

paulsutter wrote: post #230
leakycap wrote: post #3

All this so a handful of passengers a week can wait for the extremely small pool of vehicles in a dusty hole

If you’re curious, this is a demo/experiment. The long term goal is tunnels so inexpensive that they can go 30 levels deep, letting us travel within cities at 200kph with no stop signs (even eliminate automobiles from the surface of cities) This will require considerable progress in tunneling r&d, which is their primary activity

Tunnels can recoup their cost easily if they are used massively by many people every day. Any reason why you are against building a subway / underground railway?

Re: Boring Company cited for almost 800 environmental violations in Las Vegas

#322

Post by lo0dot0 »

cedws wrote: post #199
leakycap wrote: post #3

All this so a handful of passengers a week can wait for the extremely small pool of vehicles in a dusty hole

I just hope there is never a battery fire down there, because there appears to be no evacuation tunnel or safety procedures. I don't think you can even get the car doors open in the tunnel.

Do the cars not have a trunk door on the back?

Re: Boring Company cited for almost 800 environmental violations in Las Vegas

#323

Post by DrewADesign »

simonsarris wrote: post #318
DrewADesign wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder what chemicals were involved. Probably nothing that you wouldn't find in any other construction site with heavy machinery. Fuel? Grease? It was a chemical to speed up grout curing. I don’t know which one. I looked up a few and they were corrosive petrochemicals with like 20-letter-long names and an acute health exposure rating of 4 on the MSDS. They also didn’t provide PPE or instructions on what PPE was n…

Parent comment was correct to say "Probably nothing that you wouldn't find in any other construction site with heavy machinery." Actually they're extremely common anywhere any kind of finish construction is involved, including DIY. Those kind of chemicals (including gasoline!) are in all the most common products like Watco Danish Oil floor finish that you can buy from home depot and use inside your home (and burn in…

Well, the chemicals listed in the original comment— fuel and grease— do not have the same acute health impact as the ones they were cited for, and if we’re going to be pedantic about it, I wouldn’t say grout curing accelerator is so common we could assume it would be at most construction sites with heavy equipment. You also don’t need to go any further than your convenience store to buy a bottle of drano, which can cause a lot more damage, a lot more quickly than many of the listed chemicals. It doesn’t matter. The precautions required for production workflows are completely different from home use or small projects. For example: I work in manufacturing. This past Wednesday two of our most experienced workers were applying a caustic glue from a squeeze tube onto a number of parts laid out in a table. One of the workers just happened to be turning his head when there was a small blowout in the crimped end of the other workers tube and it sprayed all over the side of the guy’s head and goggles. It hardened before he could wash it out of his hair, which he had to cut off, revealing a bunch of blisters on his skin where the glue touched. That’s a glue you can buy at Home Depot, but if he wasn’t wearing goggles, he’d have probably had serious eye damage. Two people quickly glueing dozens of things on a table is so much riskier than using that glue yourself for a home project.

These chemicals are being sprayed at high enough pressure to splash them, all day long, in enclosed spaces, in the presence of lots of other people. Even if it was bleach, that would require significant effort to protect the people in that environment from injury. They didn’t do that, the workers are human beings that deserved that, and that shouldn’t be minimized.

Re: Boring Company cited for almost 800 environmental violations in Las Vegas

#324

Post by tallowen »

jcotton42 wrote: post #241
tallowen wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing this, I had understood prior to this video that the combo of self driving tech + dedicated tunnels might have capacity that rival a light rail system like Seattle has but that's clearly not the case in the current system. I'm curious why more of the autonomous driving tech isn't being used in what I might have thought would be an "easier" place to do it.

> had understood prior to this video that the combo of self driving tech + dedicated tunnels might have capacity that rival a light rail system like Seattle has but that's clearly not the case in the current system Not to disparage, but how did you come to that conclusion? A train will always be able to fit more people/m^2 than several cars of equivalent length, due to things like ability to stand, not needing to hav…

> Not to disparage, but how did you come to that conclusion?

I did some math and you're clearly right. I think I imagined that with driver-less vehicles leaving much more frequently (10s per minute) one could catch up to the capacity of a small light rail system but that's clearly not the case. I had imagined that _maybe_ it could be an approach for a lower capacity system in the future.

My math as someone who is not knowledgeable in how to get this data is as follows:

In Seattle is running 4 car trains at 8 minute headways at peak which works out to 7500 people per hour at crush load (4 cars, 250 people per car, 7.5 times per hour). This would require 125 vehicles with 5 seats leaving every minute which is clearly impossible.

Looking at Portland's MAX, it looks like they often run 2 car service with 160 passengers of capacity each with service every 15 minutes so 1280 people per hour (2 cars, 160 per car, 4 services per hour).

1280 people per hour could be served by a 5 seat vehicle leaving every ~15 seconds. This I suppose is what I had expected would happen when I tried to imagine the best case scenario for this service.

Re: Boring Company cited for almost 800 environmental violations in Las Vegas

#325

Post by awesome_dude »

ETH_start wrote: post #60
awesome_dude wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Him being right, or wrong, is a bold call to make. But all he's saying is he wants to run his company the way tech entrepreneurs have been for a while - "It's better to ask forgiveness than permission" which they like because it's favored toward them, and, by the time a regulator has caught up, they have made a pile of money, or lost it all and gone.

For a different perspective, it's the difference between the kind of (pro-innovation) restrictions imposed on automobile companies versus those (anti-innovation) ones imposed on aircraft companies: https://fee.org/articles/how-the-faa-is-keeping-flying-cars-...

There's a couple of problems with that.

1. For some reason it only talks in terms of the USA, there's a whole world of manufacturers that could have stepped up to create flying cars if the market was interested.

2. There was, for a very long time, a thing called a "microlight" which allowed people to own their own snap private air craft (although not generally VTOL)

Re: Boring Company cited for almost 800 environmental violations in Las Vegas

#326

Post by tomhow »

miltonlost wrote: post #40
Seattle3503 wrote: post #35

The tricky thing about environmental regulations is that they are crafted and utilized by NIMBYs to block any infrastructure development. Even if, on balance, the infrastructure is a net positive. It's not clear if these violations actually represent a real environmental hazard or are more reflective of NIMBY degrowth sentiment.

[flagged]

> it's not clear if you know what environmental regulations are or if you are just shilling for polluting billionaires.

Please don't comment like this on HN. The guidelines ask us to "assume good faith" and avoid accusations of shilling. Commenting like this poisons discussions, and we're trying for something better than that here. Please observe the guidelines and make an effort to do better in future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Boring Company cited for almost 800 environmental violations in Las Vegas

#327

Post by tomhow »

leetharris wrote: post #169
abvdasker wrote: post #162

At this point we all know Musk only did this as part of his general "hyperloop" boondoggle to kill California high speed rail. Why do we have to continue to pretend this was anything other than an idiotic PR stunt?

[flagged]

> Ah yes, the hyperloop is what killed California high speed rail. If only it weren't for those few tweets, it would be successful and done by now.

Please avoid sneery swipes like this on HN. The guidelines ask us to do better than this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Boring Company cited for almost 800 environmental violations in Las Vegas

#328

Post by antonvs »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #299
antonvs wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From what I can tell, TBC has failed to revolutionize tunnel-boring machines to date. Also, if you look at those Vegas tunnels, they’re just wide enough for a single car. Every single subway system in the world has better tunnels than that, and many of them have existed for well over a century. The BC “mission” seems to be marketing hype that’s not quite as bad as “Mars colony”, but it’s still very far in the futur…

Cost. The boring tunnels are basically free to the city. Just permission to build. Look up SF or NYC or Seattle cost per tunnel mile.

That's just financial structuring. The tunnels still have a cost to build, which I'm guessing is unknown since BC is private. It's received on the order of a $1 billion in funding, though, which might give some idea of just how much those tunnels cost.

Re: Boring Company cited for almost 800 environmental violations in Las Vegas

#329

Post by stogot »

kstrauser wrote: post #186
leakycap wrote: post #3

All this so a handful of passengers a week can wait for the extremely small pool of vehicles in a dusty hole

When we were in Vegas for Def Con, one of the tube stations was next to one of the Las Vegas Convention Center entrances. I'd occasionally hang out there with friends, and once every half an hour or so, we'd see a lonely Tesla weave through the traffic cone path and disappear into the nethers. Based purely on my own observations, I'd guesstimate that station sees about 50-75 cars per day.

What does this cost to use?

Re: Boring Company cited for almost 800 environmental violations in Las Vegas

#330

Post by s1artibartfast »

antonvs wrote: post #328
s1artibartfast wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cost. The boring tunnels are basically free to the city. Just permission to build. Look up SF or NYC or Seattle cost per tunnel mile.

That's just financial structuring. The tunnels still have a cost to build, which I'm guessing is unknown since BC is private. It's received on the order of a $1 billion in funding, though, which might give some idea of just how much those tunnels cost.

Cost to the customer is not just financial structuring. It is how much you have to pay.
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