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The Boring Company FAQ

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Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#461

Post by Piskvorrr »

lmm wrote: post #458
BurningFrog wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they need any space between them as long as they're on the same path. They're parked on centrally controlled carriages. How fast they can fork and merge is more interesting, and I dare not have an opinion about that.

Centrally controlled trains are still required to be spaced out by their stopping distance. The only way this or hyperloop will do better than trains is through regulatory arbitrage.

Quite the opposite: the requirement to be spaced out by their stopping distance is regulatory arbitrage; if the design was "it might, in corner cases, crash and injure people, but who cares, they knew the risk", you could run trains far closer together (which happens all the time in manually controlled streetcars: tailgate the other tram and pray the guy in front won't slam the brakes).

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#462

Post by Piskvorrr »

CaptainZapp wrote: post #248
prostoalex wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But then for some reason the solution has to involve putting cars into these tunnels. If what he thinks he is on to is viable with cars in those tunnels, it's even more viable with trains carrying 1,000 passengers each coming every 3 minutes. So why aren't we building these subways with trains? Because with trains you never build just a tunnel - there are train stations, escalators leading in and out, ticketing boo…

The tunnels themselves are very unassuming I'd wager that there is a lot of hidden infrastructure in a tunnel, which carries cars compared to train tunnels. Ventilation, as a very critical entity, comes to mind. Also safety features are extremely critical. I live in a country with lots of tunnels and essentially every longer auto tunnel has additional tubes that are under pressure, for example. That's required if you…

Not just that. You need telematics (you don't want cars stuck in the tunnel - if a fire breaks out, it's a death trap), you need emergency exit/access tunnels, you need ventilation tunnels, and you need all of that to run in HA mode. "Just a hole in the ground" is a very simplistic view; but perhaps this is a thought-provoking way to put it, EM is known for some radical solutions.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#463

Post by Piskvorrr »

prostoalex wrote: post #131
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…

> But then for some reason the solution has to involve putting cars into these tunnels. If what he thinks he is on to is viable with cars in those tunnels, it's even more viable with trains carrying 1,000 passengers each coming every 3 minutes. So why aren't we building these subways with trains? Because with trains you never build just a tunnel - there are train stations, escalators leading in and out, ticketing boo…

Well, my city has dug tunnels to redirect ground traffic. Result: traffic on top abates for a few months, people notice, more of them start driving, now we have tunnels and the same level of surface traffic as before. Yay.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#464

Post by Piskvorrr »

kuschku wrote: post #221
tomjakubowski wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know where this "$1B/mile" just for tunneling figure comes from. That's certainly not the tunneling cost for any current subway extension project in Los Angeles: all-in (i.e. not only tunneling) estimates for the first phase of the Purple Line extension are at $2.8B for 3.9 miles of heavy rail subway; the full Purple Line Extension is estimated at $6.3B for 9 miles of heavy rail subway. The closest thing is t…

In one of the subway projects in Hamburg, a cost of 1.1 billion EUR per kilometre was reached. But that project was building a subway including station directly below a riverbed.

Well, that's some adverse conditions - a silt riverbed behaves quite like water, so you're actually building a submerged part of the city. Look at London's early tunnels and their cost overruns (and the maintenance due to leaks).

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#465

Post by lmm »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #461
lmm wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Centrally controlled trains are still required to be spaced out by their stopping distance. The only way this or hyperloop will do better than trains is through regulatory arbitrage.

Quite the opposite: the requirement to be spaced out by their stopping distance is regulatory arbitrage; if the design was "it might, in corner cases, crash and injure people, but who cares, they knew the risk", you could run trains far closer together (which happens all the time in manually controlled streetcars: tailgate the other tram and pray the guy in front won't slam the brakes).

Regulatory arbitrage is when you profit from a difference in regulations. If someone could figure out how to run a train but have it regulated as a car (with car-like safety properties) they would be able to run an extremely high-capacity service; I suspect this is Musk's gameplan.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#466

Post by nmeofthestate »

mangodrunk wrote: post #396
nmeofthestate wrote: post #376

I'm no starry-eyed admirer of The Boring Company, but it's funny how many peoples' argument here seem to be: "The Boring Company's plan to alleviate traffic congestion is flawed and non-optimal. It would make more sense to replace American cities with high-density ones and build mass transit instead".

Why is that funny? I see a proposal that requires cars as something that at best maintains status quo. A walkable/bikeable city seems far better to me than one that is made for cars. Roads are for cars instead of people. All that parking is for cars.

>Why is that funny?

Replacing existing cities with new ones is non-trivial.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#467

Post by jpalomaki »

erentz wrote: post #74
Animats wrote: post #61

So, the key ideas are: - Smaller diameter tunnels. 14' is suggested. This is slightly larger than the deep London Tube lines. - Electrically powered TBMs. Those exist. However, often the business end of the machine is hydraulically powered. Musk is probably thinking of going all electric, at least for the cutter head. After all, he has lots of experience with high-torque electric motors. - Do cutting and tunnel ring…

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…

In order to be useful trains need to form large network. Few mile subway route is not so interesting.

A tunnel for cars is different. Even a single and relatively short tunnel is useful and people would probably pay something for access. This means you would start making money on the investment quite quickly.

I agree that trains are the right thing to do, but that is much larger project and likely too big to be an option for private company.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#468

Post by Retric »

theoh wrote: post #449
Retric wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The important bit is evolution is not optimizing for things humans understand. If you say evolution is optimizing for more copies of your DNA fragments your closer to the truth than saying 'fitness' in larger contexts. Don't forget there is more biomass in single celled organisms than single celled organisms. In terms of 'fitness' that does not seem like progress.

Optimization implies "teleonomy", the idea that there's a goal toward which evolution is working, however obscure to us. The interesting question IMHO is whether such a goal exists, somehow expressed or implied by the laws of physics. Jeremy England's work on thermodynamic reasons for the emergence of configurations/mechanisms/organisms that are good at dissipating energy is an example of recent research that asks wh…

Not really. A fire's heat creates conditions under which fire more easily spreads by drying out the surrounding area. That's does not suggest needs / wants / goals etc it simply a statement of what happens in very specific circumstances. Further, while evolution might seem to be dissipating energy, oxygen + coal is a much larger reserve of energy than you get in similar environment without life.

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#469

Post by [deleted] »

rsync wrote: post #361
discodave wrote: post #48

The old strategy of hiding your outlandish claim in an assertion in the first sentence! "To solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic, roads must go 3D" The word "must" is a very strong one here, there are other options: * Reduce the amount of travel that people need to do (remote work, online shopping). * Reduce the density of cities (enabled by remote work or longer commutes with better internet access). * Incre…

"I feel like only somebody who lives in LA would make the "must" assertion and not think about all the other options..." I live in San Francisco and I assert that: To solve the soul-destroying practice of driving from (north of golden gate bridge) to SFO, roads must go 3D (tunnel). You may not be aware of this, but if you need to go to SFO from Marin (or anywhere north of the city) you need to drive through small res…

[deleted]

Re: The Boring Company FAQ

#470

Post by BurningFrog »

lmm wrote: post #458
BurningFrog wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they need any space between them as long as they're on the same path. They're parked on centrally controlled carriages. How fast they can fork and merge is more interesting, and I dare not have an opinion about that.

Centrally controlled trains are still required to be spaced out by their stopping distance. The only way this or hyperloop will do better than trains is through regulatory arbitrage.

They all change speed at the same time, so there is no need to space them out.
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