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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

#71
post #63

Tunnels are not a way to fix traffic - redesigning cities is. Our cities, and the society in general is so inefficient that it borders on crimes against humanity. What we need is smaller, more efficient, better designed cities.

And before the nay-sayers come in - no one is proposing destroying entire cities and rebuilding from the ground up. Now that we have that straw man out of the way we can start talking about transit (rail, bus, bike, walk) and the immense amount of space dedicated solely to single passenger cars and trucks.

Re: Elon Musk is boring a tunnel to skirt gridlock

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chomsky complains that catching a train from Boston to New York is not any faster than it was for him in the 50's; I'm not expert on US rail but it does seem to be behind if you compare to Europe and Asia's high speed rail networks.

He must've been writing before the Acela Express made its debut. But Boston and New York are close enough that I'd argue true high-speed rail isn't all that much needed. Which is good, because there's no way in hell our government-supported passenger rail monopoly could ever implement it. That's half the problem right there - nobody can compete with Amtrak because Amtrak can undercut everyone, so Amtrak's service can…

Acela Express is barely faster than the existing trains, because most of the track isn't high-speed capable. And I certainly wouldn't mind 1 hour service between northeastern cities... NYC to Boston is a bit shorter than the TGV main high speed trunk in France (Paris-Lyon, 300 km vs ~450), and DC to Boston is longer (630 km). Currently, Acela takes 3.5 hours NYC-BOS. TGV best case (300 km/hr) would shave a lot of time off there.

Amtrak is government supported to a very limited extent compared to road traffic. If rail maintenance was paid for by the government, like all road maintenance is, it would be substantially more competitive cost-wise with other forms of travel.

They're not terrible because they're sitting on a monopoly, they're terrible because their budget has been kept at barely life-support levels by congress.

Re: Elon Musk is boring a tunnel to skirt gridlock

#73
post #2

I thought the current thinking was that building more roads means that there will be more roads to use, and therefore more cars on the road. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

If you know 285 has an extra lane now, you'll go ahead and run that errand at a certain time that perhaps you wouldn't have otherwise. Fascinating stuff.

Re: Elon Musk is boring a tunnel to skirt gridlock

#75

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…

Do you happen to have any examples of where induced demand has not happened? My understanding is that it is pretty much guaranteed, especially in larger cities. I think New York's bridges and tunnels are the canonical examples of this. I say pretty much because I assume there must be cases where it didn't happen, but I am unaware of them.

The total number miles driven on roads will almost always go up when you build more roads, just like increasing the supply of apples will lead to more apples being eaten. (The rare exceptions would be if there are a fixed number of people taking a long circuitous route from A to B, and a shortcut road is built; then the fixed number of drivers would get there more directly, reducing the total number of miles driven.) What normally happens with apples is that the price of apples goes down when there is new supply, roughly analogous to a decrease in congestion (i.e., the "price", in their time, that drivers pay to use a road).

When people talk about induced demand as an argument for building roads, they are claiming that induced demand will mean that congestion on the existing roads will increase (or at least not decrease). Here you have to take into account that most places where you build roads are growing for exogenous reason, so it doesn't make sense to compare post-construction congestion to pre-construction congestion. You have to compare post-construction congestion to the counterfactual where no construction was done. When you do that, you find (my emphasis)

> for every 100 percent increase in capacity there’d be an eighty percent increase in travel, reflecting increased travel speeds and land use shifts along improved corridors. However, only around half the increases in speed and growth in building permits was due to the added capacity. Factors like employment and income growth accounted for the other half. Accordingly, the traffic gains that one can attribute to the added capacity is actually around half of eighty percent, or forty percent. This is substantially less than reported by past induced-demand studies.

http://www.uctc.net/access/22/Access%2022%20-%2004%20-%20Ind...

The answer to all of this is well known: dynamically price road usage to keep roads at max capacity without noticeable congestion. Then each new road built is pure benefit.

Re: Elon Musk is boring a tunnel to skirt gridlock

#76

I generally find Elon Musk to be an offputting individual, but I struggle to disagree with most of his ideas. In dense urban areas, skyrocketing property costs and the erosion of eminent domain have made mass transit expansion unsustainable in terms of time and money. Tunneling under it all has the potential to sidestep so many costs. To do so, of course, he'll need to reduce the costs of tunnel boring by an order of…

In what sense has eminent domain been eroded? Given that the Supreme Court ruled about ten years ago that eminent domain may even be used to make way for private enterprise it seems to me that it is quite powerful.

Re: Elon Musk is boring a tunnel to skirt gridlock

#77
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And solar panels. And electric vehicles..

Note though that solar panels are half as effective on mars given it's distance to the sun, nuclear is even more important on Mars than on Earth.

True, but there is a ton of open space on mars. They can just cover more area to make up for it. Plus the lack of real weather would make the solar panels more consistent.

Re: Elon Musk is boring a tunnel to skirt gridlock

#78
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think light rail is fantastic - in London we have the DLR which is fully automated (there is an assistant onboard who can override), and it's a thoroughly pleasant experience. We fondly call it the smallest rollercoaster :)

But it lowers property values close by, the noise is quite significant. So putting light rail in a tunnel would be the better option. If Musk can really lower costs, London would be a good client. I'm sure that if he could reduce construction costs for new tube lines by 80% (costs are mostly tunnels), there would be at least 4 new lines that could be approved quickly. After that, they'd still have money left over fro…

* lowers property values close by in some areas.

Here in Denver, property (and rents) near the light rail are very high value and expensive. I live in an apartment that is ideally located and let me tell you I could afford a very nice house out in the suburbs for the rent I pay.

edit: Additionally, the light rail here (very modern Siemens units) is orders of magnitude quieter than the major 6-lane streets and Interstate 25 running nearly parallel to rail.

Re: Elon Musk is boring a tunnel to skirt gridlock

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chomsky complains that catching a train from Boston to New York is not any faster than it was for him in the 50's; I'm not expert on US rail but it does seem to be behind if you compare to Europe and Asia's high speed rail networks.

He must've been writing before the Acela Express made its debut. But Boston and New York are close enough that I'd argue true high-speed rail isn't all that much needed. Which is good, because there's no way in hell our government-supported passenger rail monopoly could ever implement it. That's half the problem right there - nobody can compete with Amtrak because Amtrak can undercut everyone, so Amtrak's service can…

I've never had any issues with Amtrak's service. People forget that they're second-class citizens to freight on the track, so they're usually not to blame for being late and they're held back by the infrastructure, which is designed, owned, and maintained by freight companies.

I know it's accepted in the HN community to be down on government monopolies, but a quick glance at the privatization disaster of British Rail should be enough to convince even die-hard free market advocates that there's a place for Amtrak. It may not be efficient per se, but a democratically-accountable monopoly is certainly the most efficient model I've seen for passenger rail.

Re: Elon Musk is boring a tunnel to skirt gridlock

#80
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you happen to have any examples of where induced demand has not happened? My understanding is that it is pretty much guaranteed, especially in larger cities. I think New York's bridges and tunnels are the canonical examples of this. I say pretty much because I assume there must be cases where it didn't happen, but I am unaware of them.

Airports. Especially in Europe, many small cities built their own airports, hoping they'd get passenger traffic. Many of those are now closed or have to be sold off for a nominal amount, as flights concentrated on major airports instead of spreading out.

How many people commute by plane? It's not a good comparison.
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