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 they would not otherwise have been able to reach. That increases utility.
All of this applies to mass transit as well. The BART is currently at capacity during rush hour; if a parallel transit line was built, this would probably fill up with people without reducing congestion on BART, but it would still be creating value!
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?
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.
> My understanding is that it is pretty much guaranteed, especially in larger cities.
Induced demand can only happen when there is a non-trivial amount of people who have and use some other option. (NYC, for example, where there is a large subway network. A new freeway might convince some subway-users to switch, inducing demand)
For a city with no alternatives (like no meaningful public transit), it's impossible to induce traffic demand, because demand is already at 100%. Traffic still grows as population grows, but a person can only physically drive one car at a time, it's currently impossible to induce any higher demand than that.
> Do you happen to have any examples of where induced demand has not happened
"A year after the freeway opened, traffic volumes along parallel roads like 44th, 56th and 68th streets dropped 40–50%"
That's pretty typical for proper freeway construction/expansion. It's just that we stopped doing that 20-30 years ago, but population growth hasn't stopped in the meantime, so we're way behind on our urban transit infrastructure (all of it, freeways, rails, and public transit).
> For a city with no alternatives (like no meaningful public transit), it's impossible to induce traffic demand, because demand is already at 100%. Traffic still grows as population grows, but a person can only physically drive one car at a time, it's currently impossible to induce any higher demand than that.
This is not true. An example is Houston building a 26 lane highway only to lead to ~40 increased commute times [1]. Initially commute times decreased, but then the population felt they could move farther out into the suburbs, get a more affordable house, and still have the same commute time. Once enough people did this traffic times got worse.
It'd seem in that case it's not that demand increased but that people moved further way from their final destination so their commute time was increased.
It may very well be that the same people are still driving or wanting to drive, but simply by living further away the commute times have gone up.
If people travel further then demand has increased. It is strange how people think about congestion in terms of number of people rather than miles driven. A single car that hits several choke points on a 50 mile commute is causing far more congestion than a vehicle travelling 5 miles. Yet the users are treated exactly the same and never get any social pressure to reduce their demand.
There's no such thing as demand being at 100%, certainly not in this context. Demand is a curve. If the cost of driving decreases--i.e. less congestion, easer traveling--people will drive further and more often. It won't happen instantaneously, of course, but demand will adjust even if the population stays the same.
That doesn't mean the new road will fill up completely. There may be other constraining factors. But if a route was highly congested before expansion, you can bet demand will go up after expansion.
> "A year after the freeway opened, traffic volumes along parallel roads like 44th, 56th and 68th streets dropped 40–50%"
That doesn't tell you anything about the total volume of traffic. And in any event it's precisely what you'd expect to see. If a line at the checkout counter has 10 people in it and new counter opens up, expect about 5 people to immediately move over. But _also_ expect a few more people to join one or the other line now that they'll clear quicker.
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.
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.
We have one of those dynamic price roads around here. It starts out overpriced and goes up from there. It's basically the road for the 1%. Usage has been a quite a bit lower than the estimates so the taxpayers have been on the hook for lost profits.
I heard once that there was a government-managed construction project not featuring dynamic pricing, and that it cost much more than expected so the taxpayers were on the hook for the cost.
Maybe induced demand has always happened, in the sense of demand increasing when the product is more available. But it's plenty common for the amount that demand increases to be less than the amount of extra capacity available. Furthermore, is induced demand that bad? If you double the capacity and it again gets filled to the point of gridlock, well then at least twice as many people are now able to be in gridlock, which they apparently prefer to the alternatives.
The example of when induced demand is bad is when it causes increased pollution. In many parts of the world, there is a deliberate movement towards avoiding building too many roads, in order to decrease road use and therefore pollution levels.
However, a car sitting in traffic will produce much more pollution per mile than one travelling at 70mph on a clear road, so the thinking behind this may be flawed.
If the roads are free they fill up until gridlock makes them more painful than the alternatives. If you charge money then the expense becomes part of the cost/benefit calculation. It favors car pooling, rich people (who don't care about the price) and other people who urgently need to get somewhere during rush hour (who can pay the price that one time).
You can also just do car pool lanes, which has some similar benefits.
To be fair, for traffic, it's not necessarily the number of cars that's increasing. If everyone doubles the number of miles they drive, that will have a roughly equivalent effect. Car-miles is really the metric to watch here.
It's good in cases where you can eventually meet that demand. Say induced demand for broadband leading to more fiber optic cables being laid down.
However there isn't enough space in cities to ever meet demand. What needs to happen is a shift away from the single-car culture in America and towards mass transit.
City's tend to have a lot of latent demand. There are some highway segments outside of city's that get minimal usage after they where built but which then grew over time instead of the sudden surge due to latent demand ex: 81 in southern VA which now sees heavy use, but was fairly empty right after construction.
However, in the city case new roads with high latent demand you may see a shorted rush hour which is a very useful side effect.
It seems to me that an urban car tunnel would be the most likely thing to induce demand: it's useless for local traffic, and is so expensive that it's only going to built in places with lots of latent demand.
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.
> 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 they would not otherwise have been able to reach. That increases utility.
There are cases where this doesn't apply, though. For instance, building motorways into the centre of cities. Yes, it means more people can get to the centre, but now there are too many cars in the centre for anyone to move around, including much more efficient forms of transport like buses. In that case, the city is going to function better if the road was never built, and people adapted their behaviour, either to move out of suburbs closer to a higher density core, or to work outside of the central area, or to use public transport. Unless you can have some other form of regulation, for instance to enforce a minimum number of people per vehicle, then an influx of inefficient vehicles in terms of road space to utility, will clearly damage the efficiency of the transport system, and the ability for people to move around.
Right, so what we need to do is take into account value of space that roads will take up (that could otherwise be used for houses, businesses, parks...), and only build more roads if the value they produce outweighs the value they consume. That's not an induced demand issue though.
I would say that's a pretty clear example of induced demand and the problems arising from it. You build the motorway, people build low density suburbs outside the city to drive and take the motorway to commute into the centre, that delivers hundreds of thousands of cars into the centre which crashes the road-space efficiency of the central area, which damages not just the people driving into the centre, but also the people who live close in, who are using much more efficient and scalable forms of transport. If the motorway was never built, people would live in apartments instead, they'd use buses or trains, and walk, and you could have more people working and living in the city while maintaining a functional transport system, and higher utility as a result.
It's not just a question of the motorway filling up, and maxing out an increase in utility, the motorway filling up means that more efficient uses of the roads in the centre are prevented. There is benefit balanced against detriment, and it's perfectly possible (depending on the exact circumstances) that the detriment will be higher than the benefit.
> which crashes the road-space efficiency of the central area, which damages not just the people driving into the centre, but also the people who live close in, who are using much more efficient and scalable forms of transport.
More traffic on the central roads is induced demand, but as jessriedel said, that's likely a sign of added value. Cars from outside displacing cars from the centre should only happen when it's a net gain - the limited road space is being used by those who gain the most value from it. People who live nearby and use trains etc. are unaffected by traffic on the central roads and can live exactly as they would if the motorway hadn't been built. Cars displacing more efficient buses is a real issue, but a general one not really related to building motorways (an increase in local car traffic would cause the same issue), and can be solved with e.g. bus lanes, congestion charges...
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.
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 weekly) and various blogs demanding that the city or state tear down the "Skyway" (a large bridge for NY 5), rip up expressways, narrow roads, and so on. Buffalo is not a wealthy city. The city is lucky to have inherited this infrastructure from a more prosperous era; it'll need this infrastructure if it's to become prosperous again.
It would be ridiculous to spend millions destroying this infrastructure when the city can't even afford to remove condemned houses in abandoned sections of the city. Yet week after week, people would publish articles demanding that the city do just that. It was incredible.
The only explanation I have for this impulse is that these advocates of infrastructure removal were really motivated by an aesthetic romanticism, an impractical idea of what a city should be, and a general dispositional aversion to modernity generally and to internal combustion engines specifically.
This mentality drove me up a wall. The automobile is an incredibly useful invention. It's allowed billions of people a degree of personal mobility that our ancestors could only have imagined. That's why we use the things so much. We can talk about how to make automobiles more efficient. We can debate the best schemes for allocating space in limited public infrastructure to the most important uses. (I'm a fan of congestion charges.) But just railing against the existence of automobile traffic is ridiculous.
I share the aversion to internal combustion engines. Carcinogenic exhaust should be a deal breaker when buying a car. I find peoples romantic attachment to legacy technology to be perplexing.
Surely the total amount of resources dedicated to transport has increased, and potentially the number of people wasting time commuting. There needs to be some practical limit to how much "infrastructure" we build of all types. Especially in localities that are already completely dominated by roads and cars.
The problem is that people live increasingly elongated lives that lack a grounded sense of place or community. Whole neighbourhoods are just a nuisance in the way between place A and place B. What about place C that is stuck in the middle with the pollution, noise, and congestion?
That's the good thinking, but because it isn't intuitive it often gets kicked to the curb by bad thinking. More roads = less traffic, right? right? No?
One could also use tunnels to build subways and presumably Hyperloops. I wonder, though, about why big infrastructure projects so horrendously expensive, in America in particular.
There are developers, planners, consultants, politicians, unions, contractors, sub contractors, sub-sub contractors, and they're all out for all they can get. There are lawyers every step of the way. Nobody communicates well. Small hang-ups at the wrong place send the entire operation grinding to a halt. Can this be fixed? Is a big dumb tunnel digging operation the point of entry for infrastructure construction disruption in America? That would be nice. We're good at moving the bits around. We suck at atoms.
Or is Musk setting himself up to be the next Robert Moses? Someone with the capability to move mountains, but not terribly discriminating about whether or not a given mountain should be moved. Musk doesn't talk like someone who's ever had a discussion with an Urban planner about the real reasons as to why our transportation problems are problems.
US infrastructure construction costs are among the highest in the world. There appear to be multiple root causes including: extensive legal protections for private property owners, environment reviews and lawsuits, need to work across multiple government boundaries, labor laws, union work rules.
Tunnels will be required on Mars to shield from radiation. Getting a head start on the technology while on Earth only makes sense. Pretty much everything he plans is in perspective of having a dual use: will it be needed on Mars - SpaceX's true goal? I hate to say the word but, it's all about synergies.
If a restaurant started giving out free food, you wouldn't be surprised when more people than usual went to eat there.
Induced demand only happens when the road is underpriced. Any road can be made immune to induced demand by tolling at a price that reflects demand. Too much traffic? Raise the price. Looking a bit empty? Lower the price.
Car dependence is only common in the US because drivers do not pay the true cost of driving. Many people could not afford to drive if they had to pay market price to use roads and parking. By disconnecting the cost of transportation from its use, we have evolved a society that is overly dependent on transportation, and that is overly sensitive to increases in transportation costs. This applies to all modes - not just cars.
Then why build roads at all? If N + 1 means more traffic than surely N - 1 means less? So 0 roads, no traffic! Seriously though isn't this a related rates problem? Adding roads adds capacity and also induces demand. Are the two in lockstep? Can the capacity added be greater than the demand induced?
A tunnel doesn't have to specifically be for cars. Could run busses, trains, etc.. More electric cars on the road though wouldn't output more pollution around the road.
Infrastructure projects should respond to the density and context of the neighborhood. Don't build a low-throughput highway between high density Manhattan and high density western Queens or it'll immediately become congested. Build a train instead.
A bias toward highways in cities, which are inherently low throughput, has been the norm and also the problem over the last 80 years of urban infrastructure projects.
Induced demand is one of those things that always struck me as an abused concept. Yes, it happens, but it's impossible for it to be always true. New roads will attract more traffic, but only up to a point. There exist roads in the United States that aren't experiencing traffic jams at rush hour. If Induced Demand were a law, that wouldn't be true. So you can't just say that building new roads won't alleviate traffic, period. There are cases where it is true, and there are cases were adding new roads actually make traffic worse, but there are also cases where adding roads (or tunnels) will alleviate traffic.
One could view the US Interstate Highway System and its legacy of suburban sprawl as a massive, decades-long effort to reach that ceiling, but we don't appear to have run out of headroom yet.
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.
If Musk had talked with any expert in transportation at all he'd know that building a tunnel highway won't solve traffic problems in the long term.
Either:
A) He hasn't talked with any experts at all.
B) He doesn't believe the experts.
or C) He doesn't think inducing demand is a problem because he owns a car company.
If you move into a bigger house, your hallways will not fill up with more traffic. Currently humans are required at least 1 per car. Thus the housing and employment of those humans is more of a limiting factor on road demand, or perhaps car ownership or desire to drive somewhere, more so than availability of roads.
If roads are clearer, then people tend to move farther from work, which increases the number of cars on the road at any given time. Then the roads clog up again. Increased highway construction has been enabling people to move farther and farther out into exurbs (which people think will be nice places to live, and cheaper, but that turn out create rather shabby quality of life compared to walkable cities).
"(which people think will be nice places to live, and cheaper, but that turn out create rather shabby quality of life compared to walkable cities)."
"Shabby quality of life" by whose standards? The people who actually live there? I think not.
If life in the suburbs actually sucked, people simply wouldn't stay there. It's not like they're given a one-way exit visa when they leave the city. They could move back any time they wanted. But, as a group, they never do. The reason they don't is because they find the amenities found in the suburbs (in specific, safety, cleanliness, room for their possessions, privacy, and better schools) preferable to those found in the cities. "Preferable" here means preferable by their standards, which are not the same as those of a single 22 year old programmer, or a single 30-something art connoisseur, or...
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 mitigation.
AIUI many (most?) 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.
So, it's not immediately clear that speeding up the 'easy' part will have a huge impact on the overall outcome, if the bulk of the time & uncertainty is in the hard bits.
I wonder if there are any currently underused means of sensing some distance ahead get advanced warning of nasty transitions?
> 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.
I'm sure there are various ways the work spaceX has done on reuse could apply, perhaps in reliability engineering the most.
I recall a statement along the lines of 'we could reuse it, but if X, Y, or Z seriously fails in-situ, we'd spend at least as much as a new machine in trying to extricate and repair it. So we don't.'
No doubt bits of the machines are modular and can be salvaged and reused, but especially in urban tunneling, the initial bore access can be very tight, and machines are often assembled in-situ and could never be removed in one piece. That, and the sheer punishment they receive during operation makes an easy-to-dismantle design either more expensive or less performant.
Finally, my understanding is that the bulk of the cost (especially in overruns) has little to do with the TBM itself, but rather the delays incurred when the territory doesn't match the map.
So the solution would be to make a boring system capable of rapid reconfiguration to handle as many expected and unexpected regions as routinely as possible, rather than going for flat-out speed or ultimate machine reuse.
What I'm imagining is Elon creating a long skinny Tesla-style robot machine shop that takes in sensor data and sends progressively more useful robots in a queue down to the end of the mine. They take a turn and then head back in the other direction for refurbishment.
Over time generically flexible robots will tend to take up residence near the tip. Powerful motors probably stay there with a couple robots to bolt things in place and cycle through a supply of drill bits.
Eventually you can snip off a robust robot, and when it comes out the other end you can use it to seed a dig with a similar geological survey.
There's never a "product line" per se, just a fleet of tunneling robots with their own personalities.
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).
Agreed. It's probably all of the above ... He's reached a point where he has the resources and buy-in and where he understands that the time/cost to accomplish something huge that will support a holistic ecosystem is far outweighed by the value it brings to reduction in cost once at scale. He's not just shooting for the moon or the stars, he's aiming for the edge of the universe.
This is not correct. Most TBMs are advanced into a receiving pit or shaft, disassembled, and moved. Leaving tons of steel in the ground is not cost effective unless schedule is your main driver.
If uncertainty is such a big problem, aren't there any technology solutions for it? Can radar be used to tell the density of materials along the whole boring route?
I think radar is mostly impractical due to poor signal penetration into the sorts of material (and at the sorts of ranges) that would be useful.
Sonar or other acoustic-type seismic sensing (drill holes, place microphone/transducer array, fire small explosive shot, and analyse shockwave propagation) is more practical, but still slow (needs a lot of boreholes), not amazingly high resolution, and probably disruptive to the neighbours if you're in an urban environment.
Thinking aloud here (and for all I know, it already happens), something like using oilwell-drilling tech to push a narrow horizontal bore along the tunnel path, and then sending a semi-autonomous sensor robot to do these sorts of scans at regular intervals might be better than drilling the inspection bores from the surface. There's still a bunch of issues if you drill into a pressurised water or mud pocket, but hopefully less than if your 10m-dia main cutter hits same.
It's likely that Musk has a new technique in mind for tunnelling otherwise what's the point of going it alone?
What is the new technique? Well that would be laser drilling into the face on a slight downward slant; then fill that with liquid nitrogen. Wait for a half hour or so for things to freeze up and then smack the whole thing with a huge hammer and it'll all crack right open.
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 try and solve the whole problem for everyone. He could do what other billionaires do and buy a helicopter.
Still, the only way that tunnels can "obviously" solve the traffic problem is if they're so cheap that we can easily build more of them than we ever need -- and we can't currently do that with roads, even if we have the space. New York and Boston and other places have some tunnels, and also terrible traffic.
If we really do have the resources to take on an infrastructure project of this magnitude, wouldn't it be worth re-evaluating why we're driving, and reducing that instead? The problem with traffic is the traffic. If there wasn't all the traffic, there wouldn't be congestion, we wouldn't need more roads & tunnels.
The contractor end of a tunnel building project might be a good deal though. Convince enough people it's a good idea, and you've got big business for decades to come.
Yes and no. The US is rich enough to where, yes, we could raise taxes and fund infrastructure better.
At the same time, some forms of infrastructure have been over-built. We've demonstrated a massive preference for (wide) roads over walking/biking/transit, and it turns out supporting mostly single-occupancy vehicles as the default transportation mode is extremely expensive.
For example, take this blog post analyzing why a poor area of town is a better revenue generator than a more affluent area; part of the reason is that the older, poorer area just has narrower roads, which reduced upkeep costs: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/10/poor-neighborh...
It should go without saying, but having low-density design throughout our country drastically raises infrastructure costs. The roads needs to be longer (and wider), you need more miles of pipes, and electric wire, and fiber, etc.
If that's true, what is the reason? Is it because roads are public spending and not private development?
I guess I do have to clarify that saying we can or can't afford it is overloaded. We may have the money to do it and still not be able to afford it for a variety of reasons including politics and higher priorities. I think it's fair to say we can't afford it when we have debt and we're not fixing the problem. All the money we have is currently going to other things.
So how do we make money fixing it? If we would make money, why are we falling behind rather than getting ahead, if it was such a clear win economically, why aren't we doing it already?
This article implies that our current annual rate of return on highways is less than 10%:
FWIW, I also think it's fairly easy to look at the actual scale of existing infrastructure and come to the conclusion that the magnitude of the problem isn't something that billions or a trillion dollars will put a real dent in; it looks bigger than that to me just looking at these maps:
> FWIW, I also think it's fairly easy to look at the actual scale of existing infrastructure and come to the conclusion that the magnitude of the problem isn't something that billions or a trillion dollars will put a real dent in; it looks bigger than that to me just looking at these maps:
Those maps don't include America's water infrastructure, which is in need of a serious overhaul. The American Water Works Association estimates that the cost of restoring underground pipes will total at least $1 trillion over the next 25 years, without including the cost of constructing new infrastructure or repairing treatment plants.
The whole point is that he's working towards making tunneling cheaper. If he builds a cheaper tunneling machine, and a cheaper to operate tunnel via hyperloop, then what exactly are you complaining about?
Cars and public transport are vastly different in capacity. A tunnel for cars is obviously a crazy idea but what if it carried some sort of pods that carried lots of people at once, maybe in a vacuum, at fast speeds?
You couldn't make efficient pods while complying with US railroad regulations (the US high speed trains are the heaviest in the world because the laws basically require trains to be armoured. Comparison to the US love of SUVs left as an exercise to the reader). If you can find a way around those regulations that would work, but seems overcomplicated compared to just applying your way around those regulations to ordinary high-speed rail.
Perhaps, but in a tunnel you have to deal with preventing water leaks and pumping out ground water, maintaining ventilation systems, lighting, etc. Plus fixing things like potholes will be more costly in a tunnel.
Depends what you use tunnels for. Subway systems encourage density in cities. In a plane, you can see the Toronto subway lines based on the density around the stations. But new subways tunnels are the big expense that blocks more of then being built. (Though I've heard station construction also is a big cost). Dense areas lead to more walkers, less drivers, cheaper overall infrastructure.
It's not about having more infrastructure to maintain, it's about replacing the expensive stuff we have with efficient infra instead.
Yeah, totally. At least that's one way to look at it. There are multiple right answers. Lowering driving rates helps, flexible work hours helps, increasing public transportation helps. Any of these would diffuse traffic jams, and no there's no one single problem and no one single solution -- unless nobody drove at all.
But that's why building tunnels doesn't seem like the best first-line defense. It's expensive, and it's fixed and inflexible, and doesn't reduce demand. It could help, but it could also hurt unless tunnels are less expensive to build & maintain than roads.
I was trying to be playfully sarcastic by saying the problem with traffic is traffic. Most larger cities in the US, there's only a traffic congestion problem during rush hour, accidents, and road construction. (The city I live in does enough road construction every year, enough that it's widely considered to be a top contributing factor to traffic congestion.)
LA traffic, which is what the article referred to, is worse than that, it's density is getting high enough that traffic congestion lasts all day in some places, rush hour is not just slow but crushing, and accidents can and do routinely prevent tens of thousands of people from working. It does seem like there must be a large economic cost to LA's traffic.
Yeah, pursuing a culture shift that discourages pointlessly-standardized working hours and encourages remote work when possible might even have a tangible effect on traffic.
That said traffic is often one of those unfortunate predator-prey type dynamics, where congestion being reduced often encourages more folks to drive until the system returns to an (unfortunate) equilibrium...
Light rail solves urban congestion, too, and a city that doesn't already have a subway isn't all that likely also to be so densely involute that rights of way can't be secured for the trackage. Elevated electric trams are a thing, too, and require a much smaller ground footprint.
Not that I don't get what he's saying, and I do get that existing and well proven systems aren't sexy, but I feel like either of those is going to be an easier sell, and a much faster implementation, than an underground system. There's infrastructure down there! That's what "infra" means. Easier not to have to work around that, if you can.
There's reason why the US stopped investing in light rail.
>The social and physical construction of suburban America really was quite complex. It was a very elaborate system, and clearly a massive social engineering project that has changed US society enormously. [27] Incidentally, I don’t have a personal objection to suburbs, in fact I live in one, but suburbanization is a different question. [28] It starts back in the 1940s with a literal conspiracy. I mean a conspiracy that went to court. The conspirators got a minor pat on the wrist however.
>They were General Motors, Standard Oil of California and, I think, Firestone Rubber. The origins of suburbia reveal an attempt to take over a fairly efficient mass-transportation system in parts of California — the electric railways in Los Angeles and the like — and destroy them so as to shift energy use to fossil fuels and increase consumer demand for rubber, automobiles and trucks and so on. [29] It was a literal conspiracy. It went to court. The courts fined the corporations $5000, or something like that, probably equivalent to the cost of their victory dinner.[30]
>But what happened in California started a process that then expanded — and in many ways. It included the interstate highway system. That was presented as part of the defense against the Russians. It was launched under the Interstate Defense Highway Act of 1956, and was intended to facilitate the movement of people and goods, troops and arms, and, allegedly, to prevent overpopulation in specific areas that could become the focus of nuclear attack. [31] The slogan of defense is the standard way of inducing the taxpayer to pay the cost of the next stage of the hi-tech economy of course.[32] That’s true whether it be computers, the Internet or, as in this case, a car-based transportation system.[33]
>From the late 1940s, into and through the 50s, there developed a complex interaction between federal government, state and local government, real-estate interests, commercial interests and court decisions, which had the effect of undermining the mass transit system across the country. It was pretty efficient in certain areas. If you go back a century ago for example, it was possible to travel all around New England on electric railways. The first chapter of E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime documents it.[34] Subsequently, we saw the elimination of the mass transport system in favor of fossil fuel use, automobiles, roads and airplanes, which are also an offshoot of federal government.
The DFW area has built 90+ miles of light rail in the last 20 years (that's just under the total amount for the Bay Area which had older systems), and it is still expanding.
It's not my impression that light rail is done having regularly used the system
It's not done at all. It just hasn't been favored in a few decades - if Chomsky is accurate, as the direct result of some impressively Gilded-Age-level corruption. Even Baltimore's relatively rudimentary system is excellent, if you don't mind using a bus or your feet to get to places the train alone doesn't reach.
And as we leave fossil fuels behind, the incentives will realign around what some forward-looking people (and a few contrary oafs like me, too) are already doing - that is, using public transit for the bulk of daily travel, and keeping a car or using hire cars only on those occasions when public transit isn't well suited to a need for heavy haulage, or close timing, or the like.
And, honestly, I can't wait. I'm really sick and tired of people, in some cases colleagues, assuming that because I take the light rail, I must be impoverished, or barred from driving for medical or other reasons, or possessed of an unusually high tolerance of danger, or whatever.
Not that they're not well-meaning, and I do appreciate them looking out - but I find it an irritating set of assumptions to overcome, especially when it takes a solid year to get it through people's heads that yes I commute as I do by choice and preference and no I do not need anyone to organize any car pools and yes I own a car and no I'm not suffering some kind of privation that forces me to take the train every day.
Ironically, what really put it over was an offhand joke I made during one of these conversations, to the effect that it saves on gym membership because, when your commute involves three miles on foot, every day is leg day. Why it should be that that'd get the point across and put an end to the questions, I've no idea, but it works, so I'll take it. It'll be nice to see the use of public transit normalized a bit, among professionals, if only to make one a little less odd-man-out to use it.
My preferred line of argument to overcome such assumptions: My time is too valuable to waste navigating a car through traffic, and hiring a driver (permanently or per-trip) woulnd't make financial sense.
Yes, driving there may save you 10 minutes on a half-hour commute, but in the same time I'll get done 20 minutes of work/whatever.
My commute takes an hour over 20 minutes by car, and my organization hasn't shown enough interest in making me able to work remotely to issue a device approved for secure VPN access, so I can't really make that argument go. But it works well for those who can.
(I don't mind not having remote capability all that much, honestly. I've done the on-call 24/7 thing for enough years not to want to do it any more.)
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 suck as much as it likes.
(Which is not all that much, in the Northeast Corridor! What we have there may not be super fast, but it is reliable and comfortable. Everywhere else in the US seems a different story.)
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.
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.
Say what you will about BR privatization, but this[0] goes from London to Manchester in 2 hours (takes about 3 by road if you really push it on the M6 toll and M40). They also serve (overpriced) beer.
The British government still owns the rails and prioritizes passenger service, though, unlike the US. NR bought it back after Railtrack folded, if memory serves.
If Amtrak owned the rails and leased to freight, instead of the other way round, I imagine it'd have a similar level of service. As things stand, there's zero incentive for the track owners (freight companies) to update the lines for speeds higher than they can cheaply ship at.
FWIW, I live in Croatia and even we have tilting trains these days. It's downright embarrassing that the US is so far behind.
The basic problem with the US rail network is it's optimized for freight, especially outside the Eastern corridor. Who owns and maintains the network is probably less important than where it goes and the fact so many lines are single-track. If we wanted to put in a decent passenger rail network we're almost starting from scratch even using conventional trains.
It's "all of the above". Private, public, and quasi-governmental (public-private partnerships). The "public" side can be at any level: national, prefectural, municipal, etc.
I believe it's half-and-half. I think they fully privatized the JR regions that earn decent profits, but the government subsidizes/operates the less profitable regions. I honestly don't know much about it, though.
Acela is pathetic. For Boston to New York, it saves 30 minutes over the regular train, reducing the 4 hour journey to 3:30. I'd say that's close enough to casually describe as "not any faster," especially when many other civilized countries' trains cover that sort of distance in an hour or so.
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 from what they now plan to spend on Crossrail 2.
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.
Same in Baltimore, and our carsets are going on thirty years old. I live alongside both the light rail track and the interstate, which run mostly parallel here, and the latter is much noisier, especially when the crazy people on motorcycles use it for a racetrack.
There are relatively few residential areas very near our light rail, and those that are tend on the pricey side, although that may be more for other reasons than transit access. Where I live now is one of the few places you can live in easy walking distance of a station and pay less than $1k/mo in rent; on the other hand, my community has a poor reputation, mostly undeserved, for being a hive of drug dealers and "not our kind of people", by which is meant working-class black and white folks. A mile or so down in Clipper Mill, which is very much "our kind of people", one may confidently expect to pay $1600 or more a month to rent a tiny rowhouse, even if it's no closer to the Woodberry station than my current abode is to Cold Spring Lane.
The findings of most studies directly contradict this assertion. And, if I recall correctly, there's a strong correlation between urban density and light rail value add -- the denser the area, the more property values rise near new light rail lines.
This is false. The costs of modern underground railways like Crossrail are mostly stations (particularly those in the city centres where property is expensive).
Same! You actually get to meet people and have conversations with people like a normal human being instead of a filter-bubbled Internet habitué. And it's much easier to be in the world when you don't spend all your time
looking at it through panes of glass.
This is just a wild guess, but could there be more to it than just solving traffic problems? I mean, the best solution for a permanent settlement on Mars would be underground, as to shield from radiation etc. It's a funny thought, but it would make sense to aquire experience with large earth-moving operations to improve on the technology and study the feasibility.
Ah, the underground Mars colony. It was confusing to me as to why this was so relevant to SpaceX that they'd not only take away engineering resources from other projects, but also start ripping up their parking lot to experiment.
If you want to build a radiation-shielded settlement on Mars, the best bet is to dig. But how do you dig on Mars? Just as Tesla & SpaceX solve the question of electric power in space, this project starts to solves the underground colony question...
I doubt it. Public contracts would be the bulk, if not the overwhelming majority of their business. Just like with SpaceX, which relies heavily on NASA and USAF contracts.
I think it'll be neat to continue to use the word "earth" as a quaint anachronism in some long distant future. A great opportunity to explain to kids that humanity was once limited to a single astronomical body...
When I was a child and learned the name of our planet was Earth, I was extremely disappointed. How could we possible name our own planet after something as boring as 'dirt'?
This is a good idea, and I like to watch Elon be ambitious, but it's probably pretty annoying to work at SpaceX right now. One day you show up to work and, where you used to park your car, there is a giant hole in the ground. It's there because the CEO of the company you work for, who is already splitting his time between two companies, wants to put some of his energy towards a third unrelated company.
You are spending your time getting things into space and your CEO is literally heading in the opposite direction.
"A news report about three SpaceX employees who were hit by a car on Dec. 17 after leaving work. The incident occurred at 2:15 a.m. About three hours later, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk posted the following Tweets:
@elonmusk
Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging..."
Meh. He probably could have had a pedestrian bridge approved and installed by now for the same cost as the exploratory hole.
Or even built over a weekend, then deal with the consequences and approval process after. You can get a way with a lot when it comes to personal safety.
They've been trying to get a pedestrian bridge built for ages. They keep having trouble getting permission for it. The tunnel is basically Elon saying, "screw you, I'll find a way around your stupid NIMBY nonsense."
Couldn't have built it over the weekend. You'd have to block traffic on the street to do it. It's a busy street. Also, building a bridge reduces the height of things you can transport down the street. This sounds like a minor issue, but it's a major constraint for SpaceX as they start moving larger and larger rocket vehicles, even for short trips at night through LA to a sea port or the airport.
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.
Yes, I'm sure that's at least part of the reason why he's doing this. He's trying to "learn" about digging (and reaching 5x, 10x higher efficiency) by doing a (hopefully) profitable business around it first.
Here in Munich, Germany, public transport in the city center is based on a very small number of tunnels for underground trains. There is one main tunnel for city traversal, and about 5 or so underground tunnels. Together they bear a large part of the commuters traffic. Currently, the construction for another large train tunnel is about to begin. From that perspective, one wouldn't need an extremely large number of tunnels to vastly enhance traffic across a dense populated area. So when Musk is building tunnels, they aren't direct replacements for highways. They are either train tunnels, or hyperloop tunnels, or if they are car tunnels, they are for autonomous electric cars, which are driving literally bumper to bumper across the tunnels. So they would carry much more traffic in a more organized way than the normal highway. So it all comes down to whether he manages to improve the boring process to a point where people would want to digg more tunnels as with current methods.
I've become completely disenchanted with Elon Musk over time. I used to be a huge fan and cheerleader, and enthusiastically pointed to him as inspiration.
But slowly I started to realize that I was buying a lot into carefully crafted propaganda. The way SpaceX used lawyers to keep PSLV at bay, all the while Musk gassed on about free markets and competition made me a bit mad. Then he had that quip where he said he was "nauseatingly pro American" and that America was the biggest force for good the world had ever seen. Then he said he was a proud centrist and donated money to anti-environment republicans. And so on and so on. Accusing employees of shilling for unions. Misleading people about his level of technical expertise. Calling lane-assist "auto-pilot" for profit.
At some point I realized that his "brilliant" approach to tech was essentially promising elite people that they could be ultra-green, better than vegetarians and hippies, while keeping the luxuries of sports cars, mansions with solar shingles, and rockets to mars. You don't have to do anything other than express support for him, and you're already better than people making personal sacrifices for the environment. Amazing!
I now think of his "luxury-first" approach as "trickle-down environmentalism". And I think it will be about as successful as its economic counterpart.
You've managed to let cynicism overcome the actual good his companies do. We now have good electric cars, we now can launch stuff to space at a fraction of the price.
Assume that you're right and he's not that nice a person: still because of him we're now somewhere we would not be otherwise. I think what he brings to the table far outweight any thing like "doesn't like unions" or "is an opportunistic campaign donor".
> I've become completely disenchanted with Elon Musk over time.
There's your problem: being enchanted in the first place. The tech world likes to build these epic hagiographies of people who never asked for them and then huff when reality—inevitably—fails to keep up with the myth.
Flawed human accomplishes great things is the story of most of history's pioneers.
> The tech world likes to build these epic hagiographies of people who never asked for them
This is not true. These people, by the very nature of their positions as chiefs of well-known organizations, have to maintain near untarnished super-human public perceptions (at least to the people that support their organization/company/ideals). They ask for it by accepting the position in the first place. You don't think Elon has a PR team?
It's good advice to not let one's self to become enchanted with these sort of figures, but don't act surprised when other people fall for it. All those people wouldn't have their jobs if it wasn't effective.
> They ask for it by accepting the position in the first place.
The spotlight is thrust upon them, that's true. However I think equating leading tech figure with righteous human being is something we take as axiomatic. It may often be true, but don't be crestfallen when it's sometimes not.
Plus the scale tips over the course of one's career. Bill Gates spent decades crushing the competition before he took upon the task of eradicating disease.
Which anti-environment Republicans has he donated to?
As for the rest, look at what he (or at least his companies) have actually done. Tesla has succeeded in making electric cars cool. Their stated mission is to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable transport, and given the many long-range EVs announced by major car companies in the past few years, I think they've already succeeded at that. SpaceX has succeeded in building a remarkably cheap rocket, has recovered them in a way nobody else has done, and is making great strides towards reusing them (although we can't count reuse itself under the "already done" umbrella).
Does he have some weird opinions? Sure. Does he sometimes do bad things? Yep. But who doesn't? Unlike your typical billionaire, he at least has some pretty awesome achievements to balance that out.
As per my last point, I don't know if Musk's "moonshots" will actually pan out. His businesses certainly are taking credit for just about everything that happens in tech, but I'm not convinced they're the ones leading the revolution.
Thanks for the info on Rubio, I wonder what the reason was for that.
On the other stuff, my point was that a lot of his stuff has already panned out, so your point doesn't make sense to me. Sure, it remains to be seen if EVs will take over the world, and you could certainly argue that they aren't responsible for all these other manufacturers starting to build EVs, but the fact remains that they built a pretty great car, and managed to be the first successful American automotive startup in a century. It remains to be seen if SpaceX's reusability plans will pan out, let alone the crazy Mars stuff, but the expendable Falcon 9, and the landings, are already great achievements.
I had a similar epiphany about Apple. Basically corporations are all profit seeking entities and we shouldn't look to them to be our saviour. It's not really their agenda.
His company makes the quickest, safest family car ever made. His rocket company has greatly reduced the cost of getting into space. Now he wants to revolutionize tunneling. Maybe it's good that you separate the man from the great achievements of the engineers that actually design and build the great things.
It's not the CEO's job to be an engineer. Seems like Elon is doing his CEO job fabulously.
Serious question - keep aside flying cars and underground tunnels. We know materials science has advanced significantly over the past few decades. Why can't we figure out a way to suspend/elevate (using strong cables or beams) large tubes 40-50 feet above us -- at least along major arteries that are free and clear of buildings and other overhead structures.
Dedicated vehicles or conveyer belts or some such mode of transportation would ply in these tubes transporting people, with elevators to get people up and back down.
As compared to flying cars and tunnels, why wouldn't this be more cost-economical and speedier?
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.
I think we'll be seeing LA's subway development as a model for the future of infrastructure.
The big problem with urban highways is that if you build the highway first and do not include higher-density transit, the neighborhood develops in a suburb-esque highway fashion, as distance of the house/apartment from the highway exit doesn't make a huge difference in commute time, whereas a train commute requires you to walk that last leg.
The issue I imagine many planners are facing is "how do we build useful, medium to high density public transit that actually serves a decent amount of people?" And it's a hard problem, because the neighborhood layouts are designed for highways. New transit projects other than highways face opposition because they don't appear useful to most of the residents.
I went to LA recently and rode the subway a bunch, into Downtown LA and back out to my friend's more suburban apartment near Universal City. Once, I took an Uber and the driver pointed out to me all of the new higher-density residential development taking place around the edges of the urban core (and noted it improved the safety of the area dramatically, "people are walking around now! no more gangs!").
Basically, the neighborhood was reshaping toward a more transit-friendly environment after some useful public transit was implemented.
The current problem is convincing cities to fund transit lines when they seem to "go to nowhere useful". If LA continues to be successful at building subways, they'll provide a great piece of evidence and support for building new higher-density transit in other cities throughout the country.
Absolutely - LA is probably the primary example of "car driven development" and will be more difficult to re architect than eastern cities that predate high adoption of cars. I don't think there will ever be a hard transition from "everyone driving a car" to "everyone taking mass transit" - I see it as more of a gradual process. Part of that process is people demanding to drive less to do more of their day-to-day activities (which is difficult in extensively suburban areas).
I consider this as one of his least bright thoughts.
I really hoped he would come with a light rail with shuttles carrying (electrical) cars, containers etc.. This is a thought I had some 16 years ago in an attempt to solve traffic jams. I truly believe cars shouldn't drive on highroads. Unfortunately I don't have the contacts and financial power to even get close to the people who can accomplish this.
If we have a world wide network of light rail, carrying electrical cars etc.. at a speed of about 500 mph it would really be more environmental friendly, as it would be a serious competition for polluting aircrafts.
Imagine: Los Angeles -> San Fransisco in less than 1 hour, in your own car!
I think Elon is one of the single few people in the world capable to make a start with this.
The premise of what hes doing is "lets do it faster and cheaper"... If you could improve the boring process 10x, maybe people would look at digging tunnels in a completely new light!!!
For example, the real problem with rail is getting right-of-way. With a cheap boring machine - your plans wouldn't be as difficult. As Musk put it, you got to think in 3D....
Actually you should think in 4D. In the future all those tunnels require maintenance that is much more complex and expensive than maintenance for surface roads. If the US is not able to keep its roads in good condition (and in many places it's not), how is building more expensive roads underground going to solve the problem long term?
Roads need maintenance almost exclusively because of the weather - sun and rain, heat and cold. Underground, none of those things. We have tunnels today that are a century old with only minimal maintenance, right?
We have tunnels that are a century old which are in danger of complete failure. Underground structures tends to exacerbate issues with water intrusion and drainage, not to mention persistent problems with air quality (air can only diffuse effectively in 1 dimension, not 3).
Ok, so one thing I've noticed reading the 120 comments in this thread and the article is that literally nobody knows anything about boring, or tunnels. Musk knows nothing, he put someone in charge who knows nothing, the reporter knows nothing, and the commenters here even admit they are completely guessing and know nothing about boring/tunnels. I definitely don't know anything about tunnels.
It's a joke that came to life, and it's a pretty funny one, and I'm fairly confident Musk can make improvements, but I'd still like to know something about the whole process.
I assume someone here knows something about this, or at least can find out, so here's my wishlist:
- Has there been any improvement in boring in the last 50 years? The frequently-repeated statement that it hasn't improved would be quite shocking to me since at the very least I'd expect safety to improve.
- What are the maintenance costs of tunnels like as compared to surface roads?
- What are the big costs in the industry? The article hinted that Musk picked up a boring machine for 90% off $15MM, or $1.5MM, which seems extremely cheap given that even small size tunnels in urban areas can cost more than one -billion- US dollars per mile.
- Is there enough boreable space under our cities that this is doable? I know Musk says he wants to go deep, but even at very deep depths you run into problems of sand, boulders, geography, etc, etc.
Answering my own question, bit by bit: It looks like there have in fact been improvements in tunnel creation in the last 50 years. Examples:
- NYC Third Water Tunnel, under construction since 1970. 24 deaths, the vast majority of which were decades ago as safety improved. In fact, the first tunnels were blasted and drilled; the newer ones are made with a boring machine.
- St. Gotthard Road Tunnel, 1969-1980, just one lane in each direction and 2 deaths per mile. A comparable transportation tunnel today in the area is the Gotthard Base Tunnel, 0.2 deaths per mile.
- Older tunnels apparently caused thousands of workers to die due to silica exposure.
It also seems that tunnels are more dangerous than roads per mile by many orders of magnitude. For example, the aforementioned Gotthard Road Tunnel had over 875 accidents and 30 deaths in a span of just 24 years.
> For example, the aforementioned Gotthard Road Tunnel had over 875 accidents and 30 deaths in a span of just 24 years.
Pollution from congestion probably has at least a similar impact in terms of premature death and debilitating disease.
Edit. Down votes for stating that pollution from congestion causes premature death and serious health effects - yikes! Is that even a disputed fact? Google is full of academic papers on the very subject. The first result I see talks about congestion pricing having a massive impact in London. I would argue that congestion relief from the construction of tunnels would have a similar impact.
http://oem.bmj.com/content/65/9/620.short -
"Predicted benefits... were 183 years of life per 100 000 population... In London overall, 1888 years of life were gained."
I'm not surprised that people who design boring machines or design tunnels are not regular readers or commentators here on HN :-). Like Musk, I've felt that tunneling is under utilized (unfortunately I don't have the resources he has to bring to bear on it) but there is a wealth of information out there on the current state of tunneling. Three interesting projects that have a number of 'explainers' and various papers out there are the Channel Tunnel (the 'Chunnel'), the Gotthard Base tunnel in Switzerland, and the Seattle Alaskan Way Viaduct.
These three provide a useful survey level of understanding of the elements of building tunnels, the challenges to be met, and to some extent what is possible today.
Seattle is particularly instructive with regard to the impact on existing buildings vs depth and the challenges of fixing a tunneler mid-bore as it were. The Chunnel provides some great experience on depth and the ability to withstand pressure, and the Gotthard tunnel went through everything from sand to bedrock and speaks well to the ways of mitigating different materials. Taking the time to read the material on those three projects can certainly make you feel like you understand some of the issues.
Musk is correct in that there are a lot of things that are "well known" now by various engineering firms. For example producing pre-stressed wall sections so that a boring machine can leave behind tunnel instead of an unfinished hole. The process of supplying material and removing it, the build as you go narrow gauge rail lines for moving the tunneler and the material, and mitigation factors for different kinds of material (from rock to sand). There are practical considerations that aren't technological. For example you need ventilation. And that means a vent shaft to the surface periodically, and that means negotiating with people above the tunnel for access for that. Getting in and out of the tunnel is also its own challenge. If you want to let people drive their own cars in a tunnel you need a way to get in and get out, if you put a bus or a train in the tunnel you need stations where people can board. Those kinds of things, which involve negotiation with people who might not share, and might even resent, your vision seems to be the "hard" problem to the idea.
I design both boring machines and tunnels and am a regular reader on HN.
I have worked on tunnels ranging from the smallest to the largest, rock to soil, and all forms of construction.
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.
Awesome! I've got a question that I have not been able to answer. Seattle's "Big Bertha" is surplus once they finish the Alaska Viaduct project in a few months. What process could I use to establish whether or not one could use that machine locally? Assume I can get an inventory of all parts used in the machine. And a related question, is there a way to estimate the cost to retarget a used machine to a new mission?
I doubt Bertha will be purchasable given the litigation on the SR 99 job. I don't know what you would be able or want to use it for - it's 58.5 ft in diameter. It is unlikely that you will get an inventory of all the parts in the machine.
If you really want a machine then you would just call the contractor and ask them their price. You would likely have to pay for delivery.
The process to establish whether or not one could use that machine locally is just whether or not you have a job that needs a 58.5 ft diameter TBM set up the way theirs is. In other words, the process to establish whether or not one could use the machine again locally is basically to go through the design process for the tunnel (preliminary design, geotechnical exploration, laboratory testing, final design, etc.).
> I doubt Bertha will be purchasable given the
> litigation on the SR 99 job.
Can you say a bit more about this? I had reasoned that the litigation would make it more likely that Bertha would be purchasable as a way to offset costs/losses for the party that holds title to the equipment.
> I don't know what you would be able or want to
> use it for - it's 58.5 ft in diameter.
One of the longest bus routes in the Bay Area is the '22'. It travels up and down El Camino Real from San Jose to Palo Alto. El Camino Real keeps going north right up the peninsula to San Francisco. To the south it goes down to Gilroy. My proposal is to tunnel from the where it crosses Highway 152, up past Palo Alto and into Milbrae where there is both a CalTrain and BART station about 200' off of El Camino Real. My proposal would be to create bus stops along the way that took you up to the surface street of El Camino along the way. Then run bus service north south, with several different bus types "express", "local", "intercity", etc. The tunnel diameter can support four lanes of traffic (two in each direction) allowing for buses to pass one another and to support multiple schedules in the same tunnel.
Based on my evaluation of the Viaduct plan this plan would use it in substantially the same way.
Running a bit late here, but Bertha is widely considered by informed laypeople in Seattle to be the wrong solution: two smaller TBMs would have been better. The Big Bertha solution is widely considered to have been picked as a part of civic pride "a yuge tunnel!!!" rather than on engineering concerns.
I'd suggest looking at the Sound Transit "ST2" tunnel boring project, it's been massively simpler in execution.
Late indeed, is there even a tunnel in the ST2 project? Looking here: http://www.soundtransit.org/st2 was not bringing anything up with a quick parse. (search for tunnel, boring, underground all came up empty)
ST2 bored from Westlake to University of Washington, and is continuing out to the Northgate station. I'm slightly unsure how the "Eastlink" system plays out with ST2 - but they are boring around there.
That page reads like a man page, and the associated pdf's are worse! :-o
The soils vary quite significantly between the two projects with the soils up at Northlink being much more amenable to tunneling than those that plagued the SR 99 job at the start (and might at the finish).
Yeah, I've heard a bit about it, but I've not really heard enough to Know What I'm Talking About. My impression is the early phase of SR99 was running through infill from early Seattle and thus a significant amount of debris etc was involved in the problems getting Bertha going.
Do you know of any good resources on these projects for the transit / infrastructure geek who's willing to read technical information? Executive summaries and dog-and-pony documents only go so far. :)
You may be able to get the bid documents from the Owners (e.g. - WSDOT and SoundTransit) although I'm not sure. This would give you information on the soils and what the original consultants thought.
Anything past that probably hasn't come out yet since the jobs are aren't in a position where much has been published about them. If you want more information in general you can read conference proceedings (RETC, WTC, NATC).
Much of the deeper analysis and such isn't really accessible to the layman because it's really buried in the litigation.
SR 99 is likely your best bet between the two jobs because WSDOT has had an open book policy on the job. I think they've been too much of an open book, but that's neither here nor there.
Regarding the rest of your post, you would need to carry out a geotechnical investigation to see if the soils are amenable to a machine like Bertha. I would guess not, based on my experience in both areas, due to the differences in the geology.
What's the going rate for a used tunnel boring machine?
EDIT:
"New machines normally cost at least $15 million, but a decade of frantic subway construction in China has created a glut, and lightly used models can be had for 90 percent off sticker."
I could Kickstart a tunnel boring machine purchase. What a time to be alive.
Everything you have to say on this topic may be perfectly correct. But you have to remember that Musk has a habit of producing major technological advances that the all experts had previously agreed were simply impossible.
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.
> 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 the reader because they respond emotionally to the snark first. I truly believe that the number of people with your experience reading this is probably in the low single digits, so you have a tremendous amount to offer. It is easier to hear it if you put it out there with respect rather than disdain.
Had you phrased it like this
"The challenges are less technical and more in the political side of infrastructure, property and easement acquisition, dealing with spurious suits from third parties, and the ever present complex series of environmental and safety regulations. While I admire Elon's ambition and desire to get things done, these political issues have stymied projects literally for decades, and I can't see even his star power being able to defeat rampant NIMBYism."
It would be easier to hear your expertise in your writing.
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.).
> 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.
> This literally only happens in Musk related threads.
In my experience there are a number of people and companies that have advocates here. And they can be rather harsh when their world view is threatened. Many of my own most down voted comments are those that involve Google and its inability to make money on anything other than search advertising :-) I have also learned a lot from people who have been dismissive of my comments once I got them to help me understand where they were coming from. And that leads to this:
> 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.
The reason that is in my profile is so that when someone is wondering about my comment, if they check my profile they can see where I am coming from. I also put my gmail address there so that folks can email me if they really disagree and they sometimes do. I also look at people's profiles to see if that can help contextualize their comments. When there is nothing in the 'about' field I have no way of knowing what their experience is. And I realize that many people don't put information in their profile because they wish to maintain a level of anonymity which might allow them to comment more freely than their employer (or acquaintances) would appreciate. But the bottom line is that asserting a counter argument from an anonymous account is much weaker than asserting a counter argument from a non-anonymous account. Counter arguments posted by throw away accounts that were created just to post the counter argument have the least weight of all.
And that brings us to this:
> 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.).
When you're writing a comment there are things you can include which will inflame the discussion emotionally. The rhetoric term I find most useful for this are 'dog whistles'. Dog whistles being ultrasonic whistles that when you blow on them dogs can hear them but most people can't. Similarly in communication you can use a phrase or keyword that relates back to a particular group of people.
In your comment you call these "cult of personality topics" and that hits two interesting points. The first is that cults are, by and large, considered to be organizations which control their hapless members. The second is that personality is not a quantitative statement. "Fanboys", "Groupees", "Sycophants" are all negatively connotative words to describe someone who irrationally favors some topic or group.
The challenge though is that these people don't see themselves coming from that perspective, and they come by their admiration of founders or companies honestly. And it is important to recognize and acknowledge that someone can both admire Elon Musk's accomplishments and companies, without being "duped." And how you disagree can be just as important as what you disagree on.
So to wrap up, if you're comfortable with it, I recommend a bit of background/bio information in your profile to help people understand your expertise. When people comment with information you know to be incorrect, ask how they came to that understanding so that you can understand how to help them learn something new. And when people are dismissive of your expertise or your comments, help them learn by pointing them to the same sources and material you used to get to your understanding. Thanks to you I've got a copy of Dunn's "Fundamentals of Geotechnical Analysis" coming via inter-library loan. Until your comment I didn't have a name for the activity that analyzes the feasibility of tunneling projects, now I do. With that I can learn more.
Recognize that everyone here comes from a different background and have different levels of expertise. When someone disagrees with you or dismisses your comment take that as an opportunity to learn something new, not about about your area of expertise but about how to communicate it clearly to a non-expert.
There are two main problems with increasing depth: Rocks and water.
Rocks are the biggest. The ratio of rock to finer sediment increases with depth until bedrock is reached. This might be anywhere from 1 to 1000 meters depth but in most cities it's probably <30 meters average (less in hilly parts of town, more in river valleys etc).
Bedrock can be bored through and is quite strong, but it's slow and may be more expensive (although it could cut down on regulatory and post-boring structural reinforcement costs quite a bit).
Mixed soft sediment and large boulders are often trickier to deal with--the boring rate can vary wildly, and it's difficult ta maintain the proper rate balance between cutting and sediment removal. Remove too slow and things clog, remove too fast and the pressure becomes too low and voids can develop, which are then filled in by overlying sediment as the ground above collapses a bit.
Shallow seismic techniques could certainly be used for imaging/boulder detection some number of meters in front of the borer if it was built in right. But I don't know how useful it would be. Can they steer or reroute? Probably not much...
Water is a lesser concern but is still important. The water table is pretty shallow (<10 m almost everywhere) and tunnels need to be sealed. This is pretty straightforward, but I really wonder about LA during an earthquake with a deep transit tunnel (especially in winter when the water table is higher). What if a long tunnel's walls are seriously breached? Could it flood and drown passengers who may be blocked by debris etc?
« Is there enough boreable space under our cities that this is doable? I know Musk says he wants to go deep, but even at very deep depths you run into problems of sand, boulders, geography, etc, etc. »
Certainly out here in a much more karst [1] part of the country (I'm in Kentucky specifically) there's just about no way, from what I read, to bore under our cities without threatening the geologic stability of just about everything above it, because our cities are already essentially built "on top" of caves, caverns, and limestone hollows. Sinkholes are a real problem with sometimes deadly effects.
Tunnels in general here can be very expensive to cover survey costs and insurance. I am not a civil engineer, but I would assume there are probably maintenance tasks and costs that differ for this sort of geology.
If you're already on top of caverns, the tunnels might actually be able to stabilize and reinforce the ground. In theory... the actual digging would undoubtedly be complicated by caverns.
I can speak somewhat for the UK, but I assume the same can be said for most of Continental Europe, Japan and China where (deep) underground tunnels for have been around for a long time.
The deeper tunnels of the London Underground are "bored", that is a full circular profile is cut for the tunnel path. This is contrasted with the "cut and cover" method, which just digs a pit, builds a support structure, and covers it back up [1]. Cut an cover is not feasible for deeper tunnels, too much structure is required to hold up the weight of earth above you. Some of the older lines on the underground were dug this way; fun fact: You'll notice in NYC or Boston for example, that the subway stations are all square in their tunnel shape profile, and you can visibly see the support structures, that's because they are mostly not very deep, and used the cut and cover method. I'd be interested to know if any US cities have deeper tunnels? (Despite not being very deep, cut and cover is a very good way to quickly build mass transport for growing cities.)
The BBC has been doing programmes on the Underground for years, so there has been a steady steam of documentaries on this topic! I apologise if you can't get to any of these links:
^^ looks like this one is no longer available, except on Amazon. The Crossrail project website has some info on the show [2], and in general the Crossrail site tires to put educational info on there for the curious [3]
> I'd be interested to know if any US cities have deeper tunnels
Some NYC subway stations and lines were built with boring as opposed to cut and cover. 90% of the new 2nd Avenue line, for example, is planned to be bored[1]. Here[2] is an article with more details about the tunnel boring machine used -- the comments also have a lot of good discussion. Also, Los Angeles has done some boring for its new subway lines[3].
Only in the handful of most recently constructed stations (like the 2nd Ave line, or the new Hudson Yards extension of the 7 line). The overwhelming majority of the station network is 80+ years old and has no climate control.
The Washington Post has a good graphic [1] on which stations were cut-and-cover and which stations were bored.
You will find that most stations were actually cut-and-cover, with only the Red Line having bored segments: one starting from after Farragut North [2] and running until shortly after the Medical Center [3], and another starting as soon as it leaves the CSX Metropolitan Sub northwest of Silver Spring and continues until the terminus at Glenmont, although that station itself was built from the surface [4].
Also highly recommend the book 'The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro' [5]
The world's first tunnel under a river was completed by Brunel in 1843 and is still in use today by Transport for London for as part of the London Overground network (ignore the confusing naming - the Overground is like the Underground, but the service operates at longer intervals).
The Wikipedia page has a lot of detail about how it was constructed:
> I'd be interested to know if any US cities have deeper tunnels
The downtown portions of Chicago's Blue Line[1] and Red Line[2] were primarily dug using tunnel boring machines in the 1940s. Here's a better view of the tunnels being not square[3].
Edit: infographic of various tunnels under Chicago, many of which are even deeper than these bored ones[4]
> Musk knows nothing, he put someone in charge who knows nothing, the reporter knows nothing, and the commenters here even admit they are completely guessing and know nothing about boring/tunnels.
Musk didn't know much about rockets, electric cars and batteries but still managed to found and run the first private rocketry company, the first mass-market electric car and is responsible for the creation of the world's biggest battery factory. Not to mention Hyperloop, but there's no real product yet.
What Musk touches that eventually becomes gold, I believe - especially because his name and fame attracts talent that is willing to work extremely intense for his goals.
> - Has there been any improvement in boring in the last 50 years? The frequently-repeated statement that it hasn't improved would be quite shocking to me since at the very least I'd expect safety to improve.
New Austrian tunnelling method, although that's on the very edge of 50 years ago. Since then, I imagine there's been incremental improvements that aren't easily understood by people who don't work on TBMs (just like steam locomotives didn't really have any revolutionary technologies after Stephenson's Rocket, even though they clearly improved in the next 100 years).
> What are the maintenance costs of tunnels like as compared to surface roads?
More expensive, I imagine. You have more infrastructure to maintain. In addition to the road surface, you have to inspect and maintain the tunnel lining, ventilation, and drainage systems. Given that two of those are active systems, I doubt there's any real savings over the lesser deterioration from weather.
> What are the big costs in the industry? The article hinted that Musk picked up a boring machine for 90% off $15MM, or $1.5MM, which seems extremely cheap given that even small size tunnels in urban areas can cost more than one -billion- US dollars per mile.
TBMs are usually purpose-built. I suspect Musk's "cheap" boring machine is him picking one up after it's completed its project and no one has any use for it.
> - Is there enough boreable space under our cities that this is doable? I know Musk says he wants to go deep, but even at very deep depths you run into problems of sand, boulders, geography, etc, etc.
Most of the buried stuff in our cities are relatively shallow. After around 10-20 feet of depth, you can basically assume nonexistence of municipal utilities, which means the only obstacles are others trying to avoid such things. The real problem in geometry is trying to maintain egress and ingress capabilities, as well as maintaining maximum grades internally. Don't forget that you'll need emergency access tunnels and ventilation shafts for long tunnels (and, usually, if it's not long, it's not deep).
I talked a little about this last week. I think he wants the tech to bore a hole close to the core of Mars and set off a nuke. This would restart natural lava flow in Mars which would then create self sustaining magnetic field.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13598876
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 all the way to the core. Also, in order to melt the core, it'd take an insane amount of energy.
Mars' core is 6-21% of the mass of the planet. Mars has a mass of 6 * 10^23kg. Heat capacity of iron is 450J/(kg * degree C). To heat up the iron by 1000 degrees C (rough estimate of what'd be required, though even if this is off by an order of magnitude, it won't change the conclusion), you'd need to provide at least:
1000 * .06 * 6E23kg * 450J/kg = 1.62 * 10E28 Joules. That's equivalent to 3.9 * 10^12 Megatons of TNT. In other words, it'd take about a trillion H-bombs to do what you say. Not feasible, clearly!!!
Luckily, that's not required. You can simply build a superconducting cable around the planet. The ambient temperature is already near the critical temperature of some of our highest performing superconductors, but because the cable (or, likely, a series of large cables in parallel to keep the local field at the surface of the superconductor below the critical field strength) will be large, insulating it very well should not be a problem, and the energy needed to run the cryocoolers could be provided by solar panels installed on top of the cable. (Superconductors also can carry more current if you keep them colder, so it's usually a good idea to operate well below the critical temperature anyway.)
This would be pretty easy to do, easier than the initial terraforming steps (i.e. raising the surface pressure by melting/subliming the ice caps and heating the regolith via albedo modification, super greenhouse gases, giant space mirrors, or Musk's favorite pulsed fusion over the poles). The amount of material required isn't that high, either. And the cable can also provide a planet-circling electrical grid and can provide vast amounts of seasonal storage capacity (actually, multi-decade storage capacity), thus negating the need for grid-level storage on Mars (or actually, the grid would literally be its own storage mechanism!).
But all this is kind of besides the point: planetary atmospheres tend to do the actual heavy lifting of radiation shielding. Earth's atmosphere is far more important than our magnetic field in lowering the radiation dose on the Earth's surface. And while in absence of a magnetic field the atmosphere is slowly stripped, that process takes hundreds of millions of years.
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.
This is a bit odd considering that Musk knows that even a substantial minority of self-driving cars on the road would dramatically reduce traffic. Does he think we can deploy tunnels in every city before we can get to, say 25% self driving cars? I'm not saying there aren't other benefits to reshaping the urban landscape this way, but traffic is a problem he is already in the process of solving in a way that seems much more likely to scale to, well, anywhere, without having to do anything to existing infrastructure. And anyway, once we get to something like 25% autonomous cars, won't the safety revolution put pressure on the government to quickly phase out permits for human-driven cars?
I have to wonder how effective he will be at advancing tunnel boring using existing technology. From the article, it sounds like he has no figures of the cost breakdown on a standard tunnel boring project such as the fixed costs like moving and assembling the machine, or the variable costs like how much is spent on materials, labor, etc. Given that, I'm skeptical that he can bring down the cost of tunneling since this approach seems to eschew a first principals based approach to the problem. I'm guessing that he really just wants to be able to build a federally subsidized tunnel from LAX to the SpaceX office so he doesn't have to sit in traffic.
If I can agree that building tunnels for public transport may be a good idea, building tunnels to encourage people to use their car doesn't sounds like it's taking humanity in the right direction.
I'd rather see disruption to encourage people to use their bicycle and walking. Granted American cities aren't build for that but it's never too late.
that means changing the design of our cities, and ensure that people who can't use cycling or walking can make use of public transport and / or individual cars if necessary.
The vast majority of people could live in a situation where individual transportation isn't necessary. In fact, cities like London are showing it's possible, simply by making cars unaffordable.
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 a giant hole in the parking lot without some opposition
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.
By the time he could actually drill all of these tunnels, won't traffic/gridlock be a moot point. By the time it takes him to dig all these tunnels (10-15 years?) everyone will have self driving cars, ones that can network and move around trouble spots, that don't have to wait for stoplights, that don't randomly slam on the brakes causing an aberration of slow traffic in the middle of an otherwise steady stream?
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 magnitude. As the economist quoted in the article noted, though, the construction industry has been famously stagnant for decades. Commoditizing boring machines would bring down costs substantially. Speeding them up would also reduce costs. And if he gets costs down by a factor of two or more, he could be the preferred vendor for a truly massive market worldwide.
> the construction industry has been famously stagnant for decades
My guess is that the construction industry has not actually been stagnant, but rather the market/regulations have emphasized things other than speed/cost, such as:
- Environmental-friendliness (think of those lengthy environmental reviews that have to be done in advance of major projects)
- Labor-friendliness/safety of workers
- Higher quality construction w/r/t earthquake and fire safety
One thing that isn't as obvious at first is how tunneling traffic under a city can greatly increase the walkability of the city. Look at Boston after the Big Dig. Neighborhoods that were previously cut in half are coming back together. Downtown is seen as a desirable place to be. It's a big QoL improvement for a city.
I'm not sure if he will be able to bring the costs of tunnel boring down as much as you would like, but I'll hold out hope. At the very least he does have a flair for picking company names, "The Boring Company".
Not sure if the Big Dig is a great project to reference here, it went over budget by some 200% and many years. It was seen as one of the greatest civil engineering mistakes by the end. Sure it improved the QoL, but what other projects that take less than some 15 billion dollars can improve QoL just as much?
The Big Dig was one of the "cost-plus" projects mentioned in the article. The contract was for a guaranteed 7% profit on top of costs for design and construction. Is it any wonder that the construction company has zero incentive to do it efficiently or reduce costs! Overruns only bring benefits (more work, paid for by the state), and no downsides.
Another industry that loves their cost-plus projects is interestingly the traditional rocket launching business. Boeing and friends has for decades gotten used to massive cost-plus project contracts from the government for their launches, and is now feeling the pain of having to start to compete with Space X that operates at a magnitude or more efficiently and continues to drive down the price despite already being the cheapest.
There are lots of lessons to learn from the Big Dig - but I don't think one of them is that the eventual cost and time overruns were strictly necessary. Also: regardless of the implementation issues I think it is interesting to look at how it has affected Boston after completion. If only to identify any positive effects and see if you can work out how to achieve similar ones at lower cost.
You don't need a new tunnel and highway to fix neighbourhoods and improve walkability. There are plenty examples of cities that simply removed highways and didn't replace them with anything, instead relying on increased public transit options to continue to move people around the city.
Talking about underground transport, Musk, and potentially truck driver industry metamorphosis... I had this vision of underground transport network, but not for people, just for things.
It would have extremely simple, rail like or stupidly easy to Computer Vision track the lanes for big wagons of stuff.
It would make streets for human mobility 80% with occasional trucks and we could have automated Network of Things (NoT (c) agumonkey) below ground, at lower cost:
Interpolis is the worst place to start with your transportation networks.
1. We don't really have an interpolis transportation problem in most of the US. You jump on the interstate everything is fine. We've got freight rail, barges, and air freight. You only run into congestion when your poleis have grown together like between Boston and DC or around the Bay Area.
2. Your interpolis transportation networks are useless without first having an intrapolis transportation network. If your system just dumps people or packages at a depot in each city, they won't bother using it in the first place.
3. You trade the political challenges of building in the cities for the engineering challenges of building thing hundreds of miles long and the political challenges of building things that go through dozens of municipalities without benefiting any of them.
All good points. But intrapolis also reduces the value quite a lot in a way. There's a lot less stuff I'd buy from my city or even wide local area. And local stuff can be brought by foot or bike (depending on weight and size of course). Still it could be pretty cool to be able to pack a thing and push it down a tube like cashiers uploading money in the 70s.
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.
A close family member is an urban planner, and he blames a succession of legal challenges that have forced public entities to account for all sorts of value that the property could never actually attain. And, of course, the increase in number and density of holdouts has driven acquisition costs way, way up for large public projects, since time delays incur costs. Lawyers have learned that, even if the city/state makes a good offer, they can get a better one by grinding through the process slowly.
Eminent domain is a powerful (and easily abused) idea, but it's devilishly hard to strike the right balance between property owners' rights and the common good. At least on the West Coast, the scales seem to have tipped in favor of property owners.
Sure eminent domain remains legally powerful. But politically it has become more of a hot button issue in certain conservative circles who actively lobby against its use. And when eminent domain is used the takers have to pay fair market price so with the huge increase in urban real estate values over the past few years it's much harder to just find the money.
Given its frequency of use and the fact that since Kelo it can be used to the benefit of private businesses, I'd say it is very much politically powerful as well as legally powerful.
You don't think the decisions to remove people from their homes, which people to remove from their homes, and the price they should be paid for this major disruption to their lives is already a massively political issue?
The poorest among us are disproportionately affected by eminent domain, because their property is the cheapest and because they are least able to defend themselves. Kudos to the 'certain conservative circles' who are trying to defend those people and shame on anyone who tries to trivialize that battle.
Yes I think it's already a massively political issue. But there are more powerful and vocal people focusing on eminent domain for ideological reasons after Kelo. Before that it was easier to take advantage of poor property owners and kind of slide things through under the radar.
Not to mention all the accounting and legal shenanigans that can be used to pump up "fair market" value. Including the costs of arbitration if the seller doesn't feel the offer is fair. Which itself gets budgeted into the price...
I struggle to trust the motives of anybody who is so certain of so many things. Especially one who acts so impulsively. He's clearly very bright, probably brighter than most smart people, but he's not brighter than all smart people. Yet he frequently presumes to be, even boasting of being a "nano-manager". He has definitely bought into his own hype.
But when you have billions in the bank, I guess you can get away with that.
Bonus round: He's also surprisingly thin-skinned and petty. Oh, and he stuffs his boards with family members and cronies.
Thanks for the reply (and the subjectivity warning).
I agree that the hype, nano-managing, etc is offputting and all else being equal I probably would be very skeptical of such a person. That being said, he does seem to generate results, which makes me think of him as an anomaly that I can't categorize.
I have mixed feelings about the shades of nepotism. Hiring cousin Bob because he's your cousin irrespective of qualifications is definitely a bad idea; hiring cousin Stephanie who is qualified and you know you have a good relationship with where you can communicate and you can rely on them, is quite another. Disclosure: I've not read enough to have an opinion on if his family hires are Bobs or Stephanies - just playing devil's advocate.
> To do so, of course, he'll need to reduce the costs of tunnel boring by an order of magnitude.
That's easy. Construction projects these days are horribly expensive because the entrenched companies usually overcharge the state (and in some cases even private customers) and redirect that money into the coffers of corrupt officials (e.g. Odebrecht, http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/odebrecht-gigantischer...). Also, in most state founded projects there is no risk control or project management so companies end up fleecing the state - just look at the Berlin Airport for what happens when oversight, competences and reports are lacking. Not to mention that "pay by work hour" contracts almost automatically lead to slow work, overtime and delays because the state pays the losses of inefficiency compared to a contract "here's 20B €, build this tunnel, there won't be any additional money except in case of unforeseeable stuff like geological issues".
Musk on the other hand does not have these problems because he does not (neccessarily) need profit, or at least not illegal profits. Also, his companies are massively vertically integrated, which means that he won't get fleeced by suppliers, as well as horizontally integrated - I highly believe that the knowledge present in SpaceX can also be used for creating drilling rigs.
This is stupid. LA roads are jammed so Musk's big idea is to build even more expensive roads underground. The cult of personality around him is comical...
Two synergistic factors with Musk's other interests, that I'm surprised BW's deep-dive doesn't mention:
* zero-emission cars may make tunnel ventilation a much easier problem
* autonomous cars may far better utilize narrow tunnels (with clearances that'd be too accident-prone for human drivers)
Taken together, tunnels-for-autonomous-fully-electric-vehicles could be far more practical, for longer distances, than they've been for traditional cars.
I see this as a way he can easily skirt current road regulations. He can build these roads more suitable for self driving cars which would be a win for him.
Can somebody who is an engineer or is familiar with the tunneling process explain why boring machines are used for tunneling rather than explosives? It seems to me the primary energy costs of tunneling are associated with converting hard earth/boulders/bedrock into rubble and then transporting that rubble out of the tunnel. Thus explosives (if properly and efficiently delivered) could deliver far more energy than a boring machine in the same time period.
What I am proposing is that instead of using a boring machine to use some kind of mobile gun platform instead. The platform would analyze with GPR the best place to fire an explosive round (through the partially cleared rubble) into the untouched earth behind it. It would then analyze the placement of the round and (depending on the ability of the round to adjust the direction of the explosive charge) detonate to increase the tunnel size. The rubble would act as a buffer to lessen the effects of the explosion inside the tunnel. Rubble could be cleared by conventional means, although electric trucks would be superior from a toxic fumes perspective. Tunnel stability would have to be handled separately.
Appreciate any feedback on where I am going wrong. I am guessing there may be cost issues with the explosive, inability for rounds from the gun to penetrate very far or accurately into the earth or safety issues with explosives that would slow things down. The latter could be dealt with though if the gun platform and trucks were self-driving.
Mud, most of the tunnel boring machines dig through mud. Mud does not need any more fracturing, its quite easy to dig through as is. Its really hard to dig tunnels in it because it likes to collapse on top of you.
It's like why do you use a drill and screws to hang a picture instead of a handgun some 9mm's and a nail.
Isn't this the same principle that subway/bart trains in some cities use? He is right, it is time to increase apaption of this 50+ yr old idea and apply it to other modes of transportation. Not only you operate in 3D, there is less disruption to existing inhabitants and roads.
This is a good investment. Cities spend a lot of their budget on roads. A lot of cities are gridlocked with no room to widen existing roads. All he has to do is find a way to tunnel a little bit cheaper and he will find work for his tunnel machine.
Cool. With tunnels we could have a fresh start and build the network with electric, automatic vehicles supported as first class (or the only) citizens.
The article says, "Musk thinks flying cars are a dumb idea"
So we're not going to get a flying version of the Tesla? Darn.
It also says, "We have skyscrapers with all these levels, and we have a flat, two-dimensional road system,” he says. “When everyone decides to go into these structures and then exits them at the same time, you’re going to get jammed.” Tunnels, on the other hand, would represent a 3D transportation network."
He might be a smart guy but this tunnel idea is completely idiotic.
Digging tunnels is easy. Digging tunnels that can carry vehicular traffic, that meet safety standards, that don't disrupt the buildings above them, that don't shift or collapse due to seismic faults, that don't interfere with or collide into other infrastructure is hard.
Hating? No. But certainly disappointed and disillusioned.
With ethno-supremacist folks like Bannon and Miller having such high-level spots in the administration, and their executive orders targeting legal residents and immigrants based on nothing other than xenophobic and racist world-vews, folks like Elon can't expect not to get mud on their reputation when they help legitimatize the Trump administration's actions.
You can tweet all you want how much you deplore trumps policies but the only way you will change them is to get in front of his face and try and counter the dicks currently advising him.. Not a job I would want!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand