I see this point get made often, but I'm not sure it is an insightful way to look at the world. Tesla cars are only barely related to Mars colonization, and PayPal is not really at all, which is a product conveniently ignored in your post. Even the SpaceX internet satellite constellation looks almost nothing like what internet access on Mars will be anytime in the forseeable future. It seems like a similarly strong argument could be made that every Google product is designed for Mars colonization.
I bring this up because I think it is important that Elon has some projects targeted at making the world better today, like PayPal, the Boring Company, and Starlink, some projects designed to avoid catastrophes a few decades from now, like Tesla and Solar City, and some projects designed to help humanity centuries from now, like SpaceX going to Mars. This is a very nice way of resolving the objection that Elon should focus on Earth's problems, which is to observe that you can both make the world a better place today while also working towards a brighter long term future.
I think that to the extent that Elon will inevitably serve as a role model, I want that part of the story to be told as well.
The reason PayPal is ignored by most people is two reasons. 1. In its current form, it has less resemblance to what he wanted to do with it (its a better product because of this fact) and 2. He famously found the biggest hurdles for humanity and their solutions after selling PayPal and becoming a multi millionaire with nothing but time to spend it. Originally he wanted to put a mini greenhouse on mars as a media stunt.
>The reason PayPal is ignored by most people is two reasons.
You forgot the most important one.
3) PayPal is a huge PR nightmare, a pseudo-bank that sits between legal boundaries whenever it needs to in order to maximize profit, screwing over thousands of folks -- many of them with small businesses that foolishly relied on them as a service. A successful service that everyone uses, and most people hate -- the customers are swept in by me-tooisms and forced participation.
If I were Musk, or I was a Musk evangelist , i'd stay far away from that 'accomplishment', as well.
He's not responsible for the entirety of the beast, but afaik he IS responsible for the viral aspects of their customer recruitment -- a method I feel is unethical from a monopolistic standpoint for a banking entity to participate in.
PayPal is a nightmare but the reason is that banking and other innovation was so slow. Even if you don't like it, it still solved a massive problem in the internet, or at least made it more possible.
You can say PayPal is bad, but pretty much any company starting on that path run in many of the same issues.
I've said it before, but in the context of solar system colonisation the value behind Tesla is not the cars - it is the gigafactory. Developing a serious Human presence off-Earth necessarily requires highly automated heavy industry and manufacturing.
Anyone can foist one's own unbridled ambitions, mixed in with a dash of lottery dreaming, tossed in with a bit of hubris, to come up with whatever the bright shiny future could be.
Minor note (mostly since a lot of people don't know this): Musk did not start Tesla. He led investment in their Series A, became chairman of the board, and became actively involved with the company's operations, which allowed him to gain the title of "co-founder," but he was not involved with the company before then.
Look in my posting history and you'll see plenty of whining about Google (and other tech company's) bulk collection of data. This should give you a feeling why - someone actually looking at a post history is considered intrusive and overstepping a mark.
Let alone if that wasn't freely posted in public, but instead gathered surreptitiously and correlated from many sources over much time.
He is not really like Jobs at all. Jobs created nice end user devices and that pretty much all he did. Other then some personal things people like to focus much of their process and goals are vastly different.
Mars colonization involves building an entire industrial economy from scratch on top of an airless pile of rusty sand, so you can connect anything you want to it. The idea that a planetary satellite network would be a top priority for a place with no air and nothing to eat is also a curious one. Musk would be better off developing an interest in hydroponics and radiation shielding.
And: Hyperloop actually made sense when you put it in the context of mars. You want transport to link your distant colonies. By running it in tubes you protect it from the storms. And to top it off there’s an extremely low air pressure on Mars so you don’t need to evacuate the tubes like you did on the earthbound proposal. It made no sense on earth but sorta makes sense on Mars. I’m pretty sure this is where the idea was born.
I don't think he's mentioned it specifically for each of the things in the checklist.
I'm pretty sure I recall him mentioning electric vehicles and solar cells being important for mars, but I don't remember the interview.
Elon and SpaceX have been pretty explicit about Starlink as a system for funding the development of Mars transit vehicles and initial colony, though I'm sure a mini-Starlink around Mars would be in the long term plans.
I don't recall anywhere that Elon Musk has mentioned anything about The Boring Company being used for tunneling on mars, but the connection makes a lot of sense to me, as initial colony development would probably take place largely underground as a cheap radiation shield.
It's not just that. The Boring Company wants to automate tunneling as much as possible (manual labour would be highly impractical in a spacesuit), speed it up and make it a continuous process. It also wants to power the boring machine by Tesla PowerPacks to remove the need for kilometers of cables. All of that seems suited not just for cheap tunneling but for Mars as well.
I guess mobile PowerPacks with solar panels? Just deploy a few thousand outside the tunneling area and then automate the battery switching. Could run it 24/7 without anyone ever going to Mars even.
It's a pretty natural conclusion people frequently arrive at. That said, I don't think it's valid, as I don't believe it was all explicitly planned like that. In particular:
1. Electric cars were created with Earth in mind. Musk was, and probably still is, very interested in ways to help fix the climate issue, and that reason was mentioned explicitly.
2. Connected to 1, not to Mars.
3. I'm not sure what the motivation here is; the official one was that Musk was bored ( :) ) in traffic. It meshes with Tesla's business if properly integrated. That said, the utility of tunnels for Mars settlement seems so big that I'm pretty sure he had it in mind too.
4. No colonies in a nearby future will need a Starlink-scale planetary Internet network. I'm 100% buying the official version here: Starlink exists to generate revenue for further work on the Mars transportation system/BFR (whatever its current name; Starship I think?).
I really don't think these were part of a grand plan all along. But they're all ultimately relevant for Mars.
There's a series of posts on WaitButWhy[0] about Elon Musk and his various companies and strategies. The level of Musk worship there generally rubs me the wrong way, but I think the conclusions are valid: the author also interviewed Musk one-on-one in 2015 and took a deep-dive into his businesses, so I would trust the author's conclusions. Essentially, Musk expects/worries that an extinction event (whether as a result of climate change, an asteroid impact, or whatever) will wipe out humanity on Earth, and believes that the best hope for our continued survival is to colonize other planets.
Over a decade ago, when Amazon wasn't the powerhouse it is today, I dated someone who routinely interacted with Jeff Bezos.
According to them, Bezos feels the same way. Amazon is basically a means-to-an-end, and that "end" is to get humanity into outer space, as an insurance policy in the event of a catastrophe on earth.
Realistically, he's probably keeping a low profile because that's best for Amazon.
According to Bezos, Amazon is a means to an end, and that "end" is putting man in space.
If Bezos said something that spooked investors, that would be bad for Amazon, and what's bad for Amazon is bad for Bezos' long term goal:
Colonization of space.
Three week ago, Jeff Bezos said the following:
"But, Bezos said, if the Earth's population and energy consumption keeps expanding as it has, we will reach a point where every corner of the planet would need to be covered in solar panels to provide people with the quality of life the developed world has come to expect.
"We will run out of energy on Earth," he said. "This is just arithmetic, it's going to happen ... If we move out into the universe, for all practical purposes, we have unlimited resources."
You’d think if they were really keen on that they would see the value of working together, not seemingly antagonistically, mind you competition is good, to an extent.
What I have noticed as that Elon uses metric, and Bezos Imperial units, Imperial units in space just seems stupid to me.
For Hyperloop, he did too. And Hyperloop involve battery powered electric vehicles, tunnels and solar panels (on top). So indirectly, there is a connection.
He also made clear that colonizing Mars, or at least getting partway through is one of his life goals, if not his life goal.
There is definitely a connection. But following the progression, it seems like Mars isn't the reason he started these companies, but "how can I make it useful on Mars" is definitely a consideration.
What is special about 1, 2, and 4 specific to Mars colonization? Even 3. Like those things don’t even seem like the top of the list as the next things to tackle for planet colonization? (Is a Tesla the next important thing to tackle?) What about like food and environmental support since we can’t actually breath there?
The big missing part is facilities to enable sustained life on other planets such as Mars. We still pretty much have no clue how to engineer it right, and it does not seem that Musk or any of its ventures is working on it.
I really can’t believe how many people on here take Musk seriously. Tesla is going bankrupt, there’s no evidence that SpaceX is profitable nor that reusable rockets will help in this regard and the Boring Co is a less funny take on Lyle Lanley (they have zero engineering insight as far as I can see).
The goal of Mars to me is silly. Mars is already worse off in terms of climate than Earth. Why not work to improve what we have? The only appeal I see is "uncharted territory" / wild west
Little Elon had a dream that he will one day walk on Mars. He thought to himself, well why can’t I? All I need is billions of dollars, and rockets (lots of rockets), and space ships, and renewable energy, and tunnels, and,...
And then Little Elon started a little company during the dot com boom called Zip2 and sold it to Compaq for $300 million. Then X.com which led to PayPal. Then SpaceX, Tesla, and all the rest.
It’s anything but “silly”. It’s incredible, it’s aspirational, it’s undeniably impressive. I love that his goal is so audacious as to be entirely implausible, and he keeps taking step by tiny step toward to realization of his mission.
And even though the goal may be entirely pointless to 99.999% of humanity, the steps taken along the way are reaping tremendous benefits to our lives and those of future generations.
Back to TFA, again I think they are missing the significance of what Boring will be doing here. An underground autonomous system which otherwise would have cost hundreds of millions for $50 million risk free is a perfect win-win for Boring and Vegas. Boring gets a beautiful test bed for a whole array of new tech, and a marketing demonstration of what they can accomplish if all goes well. Vegas saved a boat load of money, and gets a tourist attraction to boot.
It’s sad hearing/reading all the comments that this is stupid, just build a train, etc. Because that misses entirely the point that while this deployment could be served by a train the bigger vision is not one that could be served by trains, and the whole point, like everything Elon does, is to take a step on the path toward the Big Vision in a way that provides incremental value that can be monetized in order to fund and drive future R&D.
This is a cool story. But the dream of Mars started later than that.
In fact if the Russians had been willing to sell the dot com billionaire some rockets for his publicity stunt of getting a plant to Mars, SpaceX would have never been formed.
> An underground autonomous system which otherwise would have cost hundreds of millions for $50 million risk free is a perfect win-win for Boring and Vegas.
How do you think the boring company is going to be able to achieve these cost savings? If this system is otherwise going to cost hundreds of millions how the hell is the boring company going to achieve orders of magnitudes improvement?
For now, Boring company uses the $50mm to subsidize their R&D cost as they move up the “learning curve” toward the realization of an order of magnitude in cost savings.
I would guess the engineers at Boring have a list of a hundred things they think they could do differently that would lower overall cost. I imagine the biggest ROI is automation which removes humans from the vicinity and therefore the presumably huge cost of allowing humans to safely coexist with the machine while the tunnel is being dug.
Boring will surely spend a lot more than $50mm building this thing in Vegas. Investor dollars (which in this case I think is mostly checks from Elon) make up the rest. But rather than subsidizing glorified taxi rides like investors in Uber/Lyft where the learning curve is questionable, here the theory is there’s a lot of learning to be done in construction of a reusable and highly automated boring machine that isn’t just entombed in the tunnel at the end of the project.
I think the biggest cost savings initially is smaller bore tunnels using much smaller scale transport pods (e.g. reworked Model 3s).
Also, who else would be able to develop the custom small scale transport pods or the autonomous software that they will run on for just this project? Elon has access to all the Tesla IP as a starting point. They can build TM3s without the steering wheel or pedals pretty easily, and they already demo’d the software for driving in the tunnel.
Handling the pickup, drop off, and coordinating multiple vehicles I’m sure is not trivial but depending on exactly how they design the loading/unloading zones could be contained.
I’m just as interested as anyone in how they will be handling safety, and particularly what happens when a vehicle ends up stopped midway in the tunnel.
> For now, Boring company uses the $50mm to subsidize their R&D cost as they move up the “learning curve” toward the realization of an order of magnitude in cost savings.
What makes the Boring company have the exclusive monopoly on R&D? There is billions of dollars available for R&D. If it was just a question of money anyone could idealize those cost savings. Your entire post is mere speculation. There is not a shred of actual fact based evidence to support anything you have said.
I'd like to live in a world where rich dickheads act more like Musk and do cool things. It's like living in a comic book. It's fun.
But that's not our way forward. Forget the billionaires, we need to assemble, reinvest in our political system, and start building a better future from the ground up.
> I'd like to live in a world where rich dickheads act more like Musk and do cool things. It's like living in a comic book. It's fun.
Not to nitpick, but if you were to go by the typical comic-book example most 'rich dickheads' end up being super-villains.
If the question is : Do I want the immensely rich to start moving the world around from under my feet with their unlimited resources in order to do 'Cool Things'?
A: No, I don't. 'Cool Things' is too loosely constrained a parameter to allow trillions of dollars to flow into unchecked. What happens when some ultra-rich individuals definitions of Cool Things involves morally unethical behavior?
> But that's not our way forward. Forget the billionaires, we need to assemble, reinvest in our political system, and start building a better future from the ground up.
Good luck with that. For now people like Musk and Gates are doing a pretty good job of things in various areas though.
I agree, it looks pretty hopeless sometimes, and I definitely appreciate what Musk and Gates are doing.
I’d highly recommend reading “Winners Take All”, as it completely flipped my opinion on this subject. The author argues that giving up and trusting rich philanthropists to fix things further undermines our faith in the political system, requiring us to give billionaires even more power. And it distracts us from the question of whether we should change the system to prevent individuals from having that much power in the first place.
Although I appreciate the sentiment, I actually think this is impossible.
Some people are going to be inherently extremely ambitious. Those people will compete/cooperate and somebody's going to come out on top.
Supposing you establish a system explicitly designed to stop this from happening, you need someone to enforce that system. Congratulations, you just created a role for the ambitious people to fight over.
I’ve read the book you’re referring to. We absolutely should not try to prevent people from amassing enough individual power to do what Elon et al are doing. Bureaucrats are generally good at some things (eg reliably running services that are well known quantities and should be provided to everyone regardless of profitability), and generally awful at others (eg efficient innovation in new fields). You need a mix of both types to both run the world and keep it moving forward. I for one am very happy that sufficiently motivated and skilled people are sometimes able to amass enough resources to try crazy things like competing with each other to start orbital launch companies and deploy a world-wide network of thousands of communications satellites to break the government granted chokeholds a few telecom companies have on internet access.
For me, the main takeaway of the book was that we should stop revering consultants/MBAs and their process.
That is a bold claim, for which you will need some pretty solid evidence.
An election is basically a popularity contest. Winning a popularity contests does not guarantee competence, reliability or even correctness of opinion.
We've got a couple of centuries of evidence that private individuals who stand to feel the effects of their choices are much better at conserving and rationing resources than elected officials.
If you make a list of the horrors of history and rank them from worst to mildest, you'll find that public officials (even in democracies) are much scarier than rich people operating private concerns.
Oligarchies are even worse. The point is that people who win elections, and political leaders in general, are a much more concerning threat than wealthy, powerful & unlikable business leaders.
I'd be quite happy if governments had less power. People aren't threatened by rouge business magnates in the same way as they are by rogue public policy.
A few years of bad public policy does much more damage than any businessman can in a decade. Voters & governments are seriously not good at technical questions like resource allocation. Businessmen will stop doing something if it isn't working, voters usually push on regardless long after it obviously makes no sense to do so.
Because I think we need to change the system so that unelected rich folks don’t have that much power. The more we legitimize their work the harder that will be. I’m all for them continuing their work in the meantime though. I’m doing a poor job explaining it. Defining check out the book I recommended. “Winners take all”
"He's not a genius" thats pretty debatable statement he has very deep technical expertise in a number of fields that alone can easily qualify him as genius.
>"He's not a genius" thats pretty debatable statement
Sure, it's debatable, but 'genius' is a non-standardized poorly defined opinion, anyway.
I don't care if he's a genius or he isn't. He's done very well for himself, and that's praiseworthy by itself without needing arbitrary titles stacked onto it.
Re: unelected, people like to use the phrase "vote with your dollar" around here, so maybe all the people who liked X.com/PayPal and now Tesla cars have "elected" him according to that sentiment.
1. Potential for finding evidence of life outside of the Earth, never mind scientific research into dozens of other topics.
2. Joy and sheer inspiration; why go to the moon, run a marathon, or compose a symphony? Joy and inspiration.
3. Potential to improve our own technology as we strive for the above points. Clear, clear evidence of this in parent's comment and after NASA's innovative tech.
It's irrelevant if you personally don't care, you don't have to do it. It seems there will be billions of dollars and thousands of willing individuals, you can sit back and relax while the rest of us explore the stars.
A dinosaur-killer sized asteroid strike would still leave earth far, far more habitable than mars is (there would at least be air and water) as would essentially any other conceivable natural or cosmic disaster.
I hadn't really thought about that before. But I still think the sudden, cataclysm still could render humans extinct on Earth even if Mars is a more difficult climate. Mars dwellers would have had a great deal of time to prepare for that environment. On Earth, it would be suddenly thrust upon them. This is also assuming that the Mars colony was at a point where it could exist without supplies from Earth.
I thought so too, until I read this New Yorker article [1].
It’s about a site in the Hell Creek formation that seems to show, in incredible detail, what happened in the first hour after the Chicxulub strike a couple thousand miles away.
It reset my ideas about Earth’s habitability after the impact.
It so happens, that the Sun's expansion will eventually consume most of the planets in the galaxy; of course, it will also be so cold long before that point humans won't be alive.
> It so happens, that the Sun's expansion will eventually consume most of the planets in the galaxy; of course, it will also be so cold long before that point humans won't be alive.
Colonizing Mars actually introduces challenges to knowing for sure whether any life is native to Mars as opposed to introduced from Earth. But then I’m more of an “O’Neill cylinders in Earth orbit” kind of guy.
And people are free to work on that. If Musk wants to take a shot at colonizing other planets, more power to him. We're blowing trillions of dollars on pointless wars or 'frivolous' entertainment, so even if you don't agree with his vision, Musk's efforts should be pretty far down on the list of things to criticise...
Musk has said Mars is the backup plan for earth. What if one day there is a disease or meteor that wipes out the entire human population on Earth? (e.g., see the dinosaurs)
Even if the only appeal was the wild wild west and uncharted territory, what's wrong with that?
Look at what exploring the Moon has brought us, many unexpected innovations and inventions useful for life on earth.
The meteor strike wiped out the dinosaurs, but not all life. Mars currently has no life. The strong implication is that, Earth post meteor strike would still be far, far, far more habitable for humans than Mars ever will be.
As far as why describing Mars as Earth's backup plan rubs people the wrong way, I think it's a bit like Noah's Ark. While there is absolutely the cute story about the boat full of animals, and it does make for a good story, there's also the "meanwhile literally everyone aside from a minuscule elect ends up dying" bit. Which would be nothing but sour grapes if you didn't see people holding up the possibility of colonizing other planets as a mitigating factor that implies that we really shouldn't be quite so worried about all the environmental damage that's happening here on Earth.
But you do.
Put it all together, and the complete narrative starts to sound like, "Sure, we're recklessly hurtling toward turning the planet into an inhospitable shithole for billions of people, but don't worry about that, because 0.00000005% of them are going to get to live on a completely different inhospitable shithole instead!"
Which, disclaimer, I'm not wanting to pan human space exploration. But I much prefer the "exploration for the sake of adventure and discovery" narrative. If that's not good enough, the ground to retreat to should be robots, not messianic fables for rich people.
What is the actual goal of environmentalism on earth?
If it is to preserve diverse species, then it absolutely makes sense to colonize other planets and spread the wide variety of plants, animals, and other organisms. The earth will eventually be burned up by the sun.
Let's keep a sense of perspective here. What the sun's going to be doing a billion or so years from now seems like a rather remote concern compared to entire countries being underwater in a few decades.
If interstellar space travel is ever practically attainable - and, FWIW, that is still a controversial subject - then humans absolutely will figure it out. Or rather, they will just so long as they manage to extend both their existential and economic trajectories far enough for it to matter. Ain't nobody gonna be able to develop that kind of technology from Mars; they'll be way too busy on more prosaic tasks, like repeatedly checking their domes for leaks.
> The meteor strike wiped out the dinosaurs, but not all life. Mars currently has no life. The strong implication is that, Earth post meteor strike would still be far, far, far more habitable for humans than Mars ever will be.
Sure, but nobody today is researching the technology to survive a post-dinosaur-meteor earth. If it gets developed at all that's due to our space programs and our desire to survive on the Moon and Mars. So unless we go there we won't survive the aftermath of that theoretical meteor.
Not sure about the ear thermometer or cordless tools, but I'm pretty certain we would have gotten the computer chip and satellite TV without sending a guy to the Moon.
Agreed. Let's first try and "colonize" places like Nevada. Getting safe drinking water to many major urban centres could become a challenging engineering problem in the upcoming decades, much more worthwhile to solve than living on Mars.
There are large parts of Nevada that could be 'reclaimed' (in the Bureau of Reclamation sense) without too much effort -- just a couple of well-placed dams, berms, and canals. Large parts of the state are in closed basins, from which the water just evaporates anyway, so using it first within the basin would make sense. Extensive projects like this were once the norm, but fell out of favor as the 1970s transitioned into the 1980s, feeling the impact of the environmentalist movement, the opposition of Jimmy Carter, and the failure of the Teton Dam.
Some big urban areas already need to rely on interbasin transfers for their water supply: LA, NYC, San Diego, Mexico City, SLC, Denver. Tunnels for water would actually be a sensible and 'boring' pivot for the Boring Company.
If you accept the great filter hypothesis to explain Fermi's paradox, wouldn't that make interplanetary exploration a bit pointless? Presumably many other civilisations would have been able to achieve the same thing, and they were still wiped out by the filter event.
Not really, it could be that the great filter is apathy and single world habitation for instance - maybe we've been really lucky in terms of asteroid collisions so far and putting our eggs in two baskets is the necessary step for survival.
We don't know what the filter is, so it's sensible to reject pessimism and just keep on trucking.
“The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space - each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.” -- Randall Munroe
And I postulate that "The universe is littered with one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic and game theory decision of having thousands of thermonuclear weapons pointed at eachother, hoping that MAD will make that whole bit of lunacy sensible." -- vkou
It's got about as much empirical evidence to back it as RM's postulate. (And a similar sample size of N=0)
Anyone care to get on the train for my pet issue, and get around to nuclear arms reduction, already?
The beauty of making arguments, based on observing experiments with a sample size of N=0, is that you can argue whatever the hell you want.
I'm perfectly happy with all the people who are walking around and just staring at the clouds and looking at the stars and saying, "I want to go there."But I'm looking at the ground, and I want to fix the pothole that's right in front of me before I fall in. This is the kind of person I am. - Linus Torvalds
I came here to say this. If Earth gets struck by a large object we might be glad (i) we have another planet and (ii) we have a way to survive on an otherwise uninhabitable planet that Earth has become.
In fact living on mars might be the perfect preparation for what Earth might be like after climate change in a few hundred years time.
The technology generated by colonising Mars might help with climate change.
I think it's more than a back up. A lot of the problems, like the original poster pointed out, to survive on mars, are solutions that'll greatly benefit us on earth.
You cannot name one endeavor to get to Mars that doesn't have immediate byproducts that are incredibly useful to everyone on earth.
Going to the New World was also silly for Europeans at the time. Everything was going to be more dangerous, more risky and life threatening. But pushing ourselves to go beyond risk is what makes humans progress in the long run. Going to another planet is a huge, difficult step forward. By all means everyone who goes there will be worse off, but think beyond their existence, 300 years in the future. It may become a pretty nice colony once we figure things out.
I think the analogy is poor, because the "New World" was abundant with resources. The new world of Mars is not, and nearly everything would need to be brought there.
Why did the aboriginals hollow out a tree and float across the ocean? Why did prehistoric humans walk all the way from Africa to the southern tip of America?
We explore. It is literally in our DNA. It's what makes us human. It's also why we outlive the neanderthals, who never left the geographic region they were "born" in.
Having a small group of people on Mars would be a great scientific boom.
Einstein was inspired because as a patent clerk he worked across from the railway station and was very aware of time, time standards, physical trains.
We'd give up our earth centric imaginations of time, gravity, and many other things.
> Einstein was inspired because as a patent clerk he worked across from the railway station and was very aware of time, time standards, physical trains.
[citation needed] I guess he was more inspired by the Michelson experiment and the Lorentz transformations.
> We'd give up our earth centric imaginations of time, gravity, and many other things.
Gravity works exactly like here (But you can jump higher). Time works exactly like here too (The length of the day and the year are different, it will be a problem to choose a good calendar, but it's already a mess here. Anyway, it's not a scientific or technological problem, people just don't want to change the calendar they are use to.)
Perhaps they will find a few new interesting cases for climate science an geology???
They would spend all their time struggling to stay alive; no real science would ever get done. Look at the space station today. They're in a low earth orbit, completely dependent on resupply and accomplish very little other than siphon funding from unmanned exploration that actually leads to amazing breakthroughs because, "humans in space!"
There is anything plenty of stuff that could irrevocably nerf the viability of Earth as a habitable world. Something will wipe out all remaining life on Earth eventually. A billionaire wanting to go to Mars makes more sense to me than a billionaire trying to build the world's biggest private yacht.
The moon might have been seen as similarly silly. US might much more easily have focused on nearer space with a greater ROI on the project itself. But apart from the geopolitical bragging rights, the technical constraints of a moon shot meant the development of all kinds of technologies that rippled outward through society. We see some of the same effects with the LHC. Its direct uses have limited (immediate) practical impact, but the technologies required to build it, harness & process those volumes of data, etc., have spurned on all sorts of more immediately practical innovations.
And if that had been the only benefit then of course the whole program would be questionable. You asked for examples for the moon program and LHC, and you were given them in ample supply. If they aren't satisfactory in budging your opinion, this flow of discourse puts the burden on you to say something intelligent, and cherry picking only a single, and perhaps least relevant example doesn't really accomplish that.
There's no lack of material demonstrating that NASA's accomplishments contribute more to the economy than they drain in tax dollars [0] and it's difficult to ignore the volume & leaps of technical advancements achieved by earlier missions. You clearly have a different view though, so perhaps sharing that in a constructive way would be more beneficial than posting shallow comments that obviously ignore the information you requested.
Mars at its best is far less hospitable than the most inhospitable places on Earth. With that said- Earth is still only one planet and it would be wise for us to spread out for survival and resources.
Totally agree. Mars seems a miserable place. I would prefer we sent probes to Europa, Enceladus and upper atmosphere of Venus first to see what’s going on there.
> The goal of Mars to me is silly. Mars is already worse off in terms of climate than Earth. Why not work to improve what we have?
Earth's biosphere has already had five (5) mass extinctions. Guess what happens to humanity if number six shows up before we colonize another planet? Mars is simply the closest option.
The thing about the last five mass extinctions is they didn't involve a species so good at adapting the environment to serve its own needs that said species could colonize Mars.
Of those 5 mass extinctions, did any of them make Earth less habitable than Mars is today? I'm genuinely curious.
The Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event is theorized to be a massive asteroid strike which "release[d] the equivalent energy of several million nuclear weapons detonating simultaneously" and killed off 75% of extant species.
Sure, the preppers will be gleefully LARPing Fallout from their bunkers, and a small percentage of humans would probably pull through. Maybe.
If we have a seed colony on Mars, it significantly de-risks human extinction from an asteroid strike. Elon is the ultimate prepper.
Personal opinion, Elon believes that the earth is going to be uninhabitable by us in fairly short order. Mars is a fantasy to develop life support tech for earth, knowing full well saving ourselves would have been out of the question.
Because being a multi-planet species is required for long term survival. Could be tomorrow or a hundred years from now, sooner or later there will be fifty mile diameter asteroid with our name on it.
Some find better ways to live on other planets, some find better ways to educate people how to live sustainably on this one, without fucking it up. It's all positive in my book.
And yet somehow Mars will [support us]? To me this is like having a car in need of repair (Earth) and instead finding some abandoned junker (Mars) rusting in the forest and saying "yes, I need that one!"
Precisely. Religions are in decline among the younger generations. By the time we go to Mars as a colonizing species, hopefully we won't bring "faith to a deity" with us.
There's plenty of other damaging ideologies to take their place. Look at the extremist 1% on either side of the left/right political divide for examples. Religion isn't a cause of negative ideological/extremism, it's a symptom of cognitive tendencies that give rise to it.
Most species don’t last long enough to get wiped out by asteroids. I’d say that unless we evolve into something else, we’re unlikely to make it to the next big extinction event.
We are done evolving naturally, at this point it would all be genetic engineering.
We can have our eggs in more than one basket this century as long as we put effort into it. That is plenty of time to avoid getting wiped by an asteroid in all likelihood.
It's a coin toss. America, as it came, came at a huge cost. And over the course of 300+ years, it was carried out in possibly the least ethical manner possible.
I for one would have been happy for the Europeans to evolve for another 1000 years before they set foot in the Americas, in earnest, under the aspect of eternity.
I meant it as in "the freedom to do what one wants", not so much literally. And even so, Mars has probably less resources than even the (physical) Wild West did. In another comment I made the analogy that Earth is like a car in need of repair, and Mars is a rusting junker in the forest - in far worse of a state than Earth, but somehow there is the desire to go there.
The settlers back then were not trying to settle a barren rock with no breathable atmosphere or heat. If Britain had tried settling Antarctica, things would have gone very differently.
And as others pointed out, America was already settled when Europeans arrived, so what innovation even occurred there?
Because you have zero karma. The right to negatively impact someone else's comment is predicated on having first positively contributed to numerous discussions.
While I don't discount Musk's obsession with Mars, the recurring pattern I see is government money.
- Electric cars: subsidies
- Solar panels: subsidies
- Tunnel: transport infrastructure
- Rockets: NASA/military contracts
Starlink looks more like a commercial project but it doesn't mean the government can't get interested. After all, the internet itself started as a military project.
There are missing pieces in both theories (Mars and government money), the biggest one being PayPal. And some of them don't fit perfectly. So chances are that we are just making stuff up.
Winning a competition to ship cargo and then people to the space station is a bad thing?
Is there some universe in which entrepreneurs exit the electric car industry solely because the government starts offering consumers subsidies to buy them?
It is not a bad thing. I will never criticize a company for making money or an entrepreneur for grabbing opportunities.
I don't like the hype around Elon Musk and I think Hyperloop is a borderline scam (I can detail if you want). However I also think the success of PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX are well deserved. With them the world is a better place and Elon Musk is a richer man, that's capitalism working as intended. That subsidies helped creating a company that makes nice electric cars and solar panels is the reason the subsidies exist in the first place.
Yes, it is. With one that caveat that if it's built 10x cheaper than comparable tunnels, it is. Moving our roads underground is a vastly superior transportation system than we have today. It can be safer, better for the air, better for light and noise pollution, unlock vast amounts of land in our urban areas for parks, etc. I grew up near Boston during the big dig and the city is a drastically different place before and after the Central Artery. The same is happening in Seattle now. The problem is the cost. If Boring Company can solve that (and he already has a history of doing comparable things in the rocket and battery industries) it very much is the future of public (and private) transportation.
The demo tunnel doesn't look to have sufficient ventilation or emergency exits in case of fire, car crash, etc.
They haven't addressed the ingress and egress congestion problems into and out of the tunnel. How can a single elevator go up/down to handle 1000+ cars per hour (4400 passengers per hour)? Basic math gives you 3.6 seconds for the elevator to go down, wait for the car to offramp, go back up, and wait for the next car to onramp.
These are some of the many reasons tunnels and subways get expensive. You can't just build a basic tunnel rigged with cars and say "problem solved" at 1/10th the cost.
Unless I'm misunderstanding you, there isn't a offramp/onramp in the latest design scheme. When Boring Company first unveiled the design, it had elevators that moved vehicles from grade-level to the tunnel. The vehicles then locked into a track. Then after reaching an "exit" the vehicle is brought back to the surface so the driver can continue the journey within that same vehicle. But they recently scrapped all that. In the current design, there is no locked track and the vehicles never leave the tunnel. This ensures that the tunnels only function with a proprietary vehicle.
There still might be some human ingress/egress issues to resolve.
Yeah, the joke is that next they'll release that the concrete tunnel road is subject to deterioration, so they'll shift to steel tracks. Then they'll realize that these individual vehicles should be linked together to allow for higher capacity. Then... then you have a subway.
That would be great. Subway costs are absolutely ridiculous, so it would be fantastic if the boring company decides to build exactly the same thing for much less.
At the moment, all the analysis I've seen points more towards the only reason it's cheaper being because of the smaller size of the tunnel (there's actually nothing novel about the boring machine, it's just a standard one that is used to build utility tunnels with some minor tweaks), and because they don't build (or don't take into account) things like station caverns, cross linking tunnels, ventilation/emergency egress, etc.
So if they actually built a subway it would cost... about the same as a subway. That's not to say that US subways aren't crazy expensive to build compared to Europe, Asia etc. - but that's more to do with legal issues (industrial relations etc.), business structures, and possibly corruption, rather than the technology.
It's not exactly the same thing. In the Boring underground car-train, each party of travelers takes up an entire car's or truck's worth of space. On a subway, each person takes up room for themselves and their belongings. Plus maybe a bicycle. You can move a lot more people at once in a subway.
Further, when the Boring underground car-train "stops", and parties leave the train, those cars still demand that same space, just on the surface. With mass transit carrying pedestrians and cyclists, you need much less room on "integrate" passengers coming out from the underground, with local traffic on the surface.
If Boring gives up on the personal vehicle folly, and can build a smaller, cheaper, but equally safe tunnel for mass transit, great. But they seem preoccupied with letting people keep their cars.
This article that we're discussing, about Las Vegas, involves dedicated vehicles, not personal cars. And one of them is a 16-person people mover. It is expected to have a low enough usage that that makes sense.
How many people are you expecting to take their bikes on the subway on the Vegas strip?
Subway cost in mismanged US are ridiculous.[0] Around the world, countries like Spain are already building tunnels for the claimed cost of an Hyperloop tunnel.
Most of that extra cost comes from the legal fees around buying the land and getting permits to dig under it. A better tunnel borer doesn't address any of that.
You could maybe save on OSHA concerns if you can somehow slash the number of people employed, but you'd need to get rid of a LOT of people before you see enough gains from that to make this a game changer.
Elon's whole deal around transit is utterly uninformed about anything urban planning.
Except it does seem to have addressed that. Even the dumb test tunnel seems to have been completed for far less than it should've taken, given the constraints you mentioned.
Experts (including those who have studied foreign mass transit in detail) are at a loss to fully explain why the US's tunneling costs are so out of whack compared to other countries. Sometimes, when expert systems seem to have failed, it's a useful exercise to throw everything out (i.e. be "utterly uninformed") and learn from scratch by trying. They may fail anyway, but it's worth a shot.
Sometimes, the naive intern will find a solution because of their own naïveté. (And even then there are lots of practical things that will need to be relearned, at great pain.)
I'm under the impression that their costs are cheaper right now because public agencies are eager to see a working test case and so exempted them from environmental clearance. I doubt that will still be the case when the scheme changes from "a single tunnel from Musk's home in Bel-Air to his work in Hawthorne" to "hundreds of stacked tunnels traversing the entire city." But I'm open to corrections.
Musk seems to really dislike the idea of public transport. There's an appeal in moving a large number of people from one side of the city to the other really fast, but with their cars!?
The amount of trouble people in the US are willing to through to avoid the solution every other developed country enjoys is really mind-blowing to me. Dig a tunnel, put some rails in it, and add some sort of a vehicle on top of those rails. Splitting up a cart to individual vehicles seems wasteful, impractical, and guaranteed to move less people. A perfect example of a "gadgetbahn": completely useless 10-15 years down the road, but it wastes city's money that could have been used for actual, viable alternatives that are in use everywhere else. But hey, at least it's unique.
From a physics standpoint, what is your argument that a giant car with transfers to a number of smaller cars is more efficient than just using all smaller cars?
Public transit seems really wasteful to me: empty busses running up and down the same main streets, people going out of their way to get to a train station, subway cars stopping in the track and blocking the passage of all other vehicles, all movement stopping at a certain time due to low demand... it’s a mess.
Again, from a physics standpoint the optimal solution to me would seem to be a variety of different size autonomous cars, with 100% occupancy, which can draft each other, and tunnels that allow you to go direct(ish) to your destination with an IP-like routing plan.
What am I missing?
Is there a city that you think is close to optimal so I can study it?
Try Shenzhen. Super low cost ubiquitous underground train transport, augmented with super low cost electric taxis and buses for last mile. Occupancy is very high, and trains go every few minutes. Metros stop going at night because the taxi and bus system has sufficient capacity to cover nighttime demand.
We try to avoid it in the US because it costs us 5-10x as much money to do it. If it cost Madrid $4.5 billion to build a two mile subway extension they wouldn’t do it either.
So the solution is to still build a tunnel... but smaller... and move hundreds of people through it really fast in separate, quite heavy vehicles with no possible way of escaping the tunnel when something goes wrong? And something will go wrong.
I'm rooting for Elon with all my heart to cut down the costs of digging tunnels, but everything else about this is just ludicrous.
Americans seem to avoid social contact at all costs. Yesterday there was a comment on HN where a user said they throw things out instead of selling them because they don't want to interact with understandable people who buy second hand items.
Cars, drive throughs, home delivery food. Its all tools for avoiding social contact.
Every city I've ever seen has a large amount of personal cars on the road. Sure some people in some cities ride in shared public transit, but don't try to pretend that there are not large amounts of people that for whatever reason don't. You might want to look closer to home and solving your own problems instead of attacking the US.
> but don't try to pretend that there are not large amounts of people that for whatever reason don't.
Oh, I know precisely the reason: there's no viable alternative in place.
It might surprise you to learn that other countries were in that same situation and aren't anymore. When there's something more efficient, reliable, and cheaper to use, people tend to prefer that.
But of course, you'd first have to step outside of the US to see what a viable alternative even looks like. Judging by your first and last sentence, I'm willing to bet you haven't.
Right, because there is no car traffic in London or Tokyo or Paris or Hong Kong or Berlin, even though they are all noted for having some the best public transit.
I have stepped outside of the US. I saw a lot of car traffic in Barcelona Spain. I saw a lot of car traffic in Frankfurt Germany even though I was only in the city for a few hours. My friends in Sweden got around by car for every trip when I visited them.
I don't understand this comment at all. The Boring Company's main plans aren't to create new and novel tunnels. The Boring Company's goal is to create cheaper tunnels.
Like, if I said I was planning on developing a wheel at 1/10th the cost of current wheels, I don't care that the wheel predates my innovation by millenia. I'm not attempting to _improve_ the wheel, I'm attempting to make it viable in an increasing number of contexts by lowering the cost.
The same is true of the Boring Company.
You can dismiss it as being unrealistic, or as the cost-savings not actually being there. But I don't understand being dismissive because we already have tunnels. Of course! If we didn't already have tunnels, we wouldn't be trying to make them cheaper!
> The Boring Company's main plans aren't to create new and novel tunnels. The Boring Company's goal is to create _cheaper_ tunnels.
The Boring Company's main plans, as can be evidenced by their communications (such as their FAQ) and their commitments and attempted commitments to build actual projects, is to pitch a radically new, 21st century mode of mass transit that is really just a variation of personal rapid transit (which has historically failed at being effective mass transit solution). The meaningful commitment to building cheaper is actually... to build narrower tunnels, that are unusable for any other purposes, since there's not enough room to put in high-capacity subway trains in the same tunnel.
Oh, and for good measure, tunnels are not why subways are expensive. It's station caverns and ancillary infrastructure (such as procuring more rolling stock for the extension) that consumes most of the cost of a subway, so it's not clear that cheaper tunneling would actually meaningfully reduce the cost of building new subways.
> The Boring Company's main plans, as can be evidenced by their communications (such as their FAQ) and their commitments and attempted commitments to build actual projects
Agree that this evidences their short-term plans (1-5 years), but I actually think it's a poor-proxy of evidence of their long-term (5+ years) plans.
I mostly agree with you about their short-term plans, but my understanding (which could be wrong!) was that they had longer-term plans, of which the proposed tunnels are stepping-stones and learning opportunities towards.
Though, I'll readily acknowledge that the evidence I have for their long-term plans is thin (mostly some interviews with Elon Musk about The Boring Company, and having seen similar developments at SpaceX), so if the counter-argument is that the long-term plans aren't well-enough evidenced to be worth considering, I wouldn't disagree.
I also think it's totally reasonable to argue that those long-term plans aren't realistic or a likely potential outcome.
> Oh, and for good measure, tunnels are not why subways are expensive. It's station caverns and ancillary infrastructure (such as procuring more rolling stock for the extension) that consumes most of the cost of a subway, so it's not clear that cheaper tunneling would actually meaningfully reduce the cost of building new subways.
I don't know that I agree with this. Tunneling is definitely a significant cost whenever it happens under a city. For example, the SR99 tunneling project in Seattle cost ~$2.1B dollars to build (https://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Projects/Viaduct/Budget), and that doesn't involve any station caverns or rolling stock. It does, obviously, involve the highway finishings and road connections, but tunneling is a significant expense whenever it is required.
I mostly follow mass transit and railway projects, so that's where my numbers are derived from. Considering that Loop is pitched as a new mass transit system, it makes sense to compare it to costs. Especially because Musk loves comparing it to the obscenely overpriced NYC Second Avenue Subway extension, so it helps to understand how much it actually cost.
The Boring Company claims in its FAQ that the Second Avenue Subway cost "more than $1 billion per mile" (it doesn't mention it by name, but it's the only thing it could be referring to). The actual cost (from http://web.mta.info/capitaldashboard/CPDMega.html) is $415 million for 2 miles of 2 pairs of tunnel, with track work being another $364 million. The three new stations cost $649 million, $802 million, and $821 million--each more than the cost of all of the tunnel work.
> Considering that Loop is pitched as a new mass transit system
Is this a different loop from the LVCC Loop mentioned in the article? The LVCC Loop seems pretty clearly to fall fairly far outside the "mass transit" system, so it must be a different project you're referring to.
> The Boring Company claims in its FAQ that the Second Avenue Subway cost "more than $1 billion per mile"
Definitely agree that one of the hallmarks of Elon Musk's companies are exaggerated claims about their own abilities and about the competition. I've been impressed by his ability to deliver on some of the bold claims that he has made (even if he fails to do so on a claimed timeline), but also disappointed by his readiness to exaggerate faults in other products / solutions.
Still, if the end-result is to be to reduce tunneling costs from $415M for 2 miles down to $200M for 2 miles, that's a pretty significant result. It wouldn't be nearly as dramatic as the original goal, but still a huge improvement that would make tunneling more viable in a larger number of cases.
I’m not seeing the numbers you quoted on the linked page, but I see a $2b project to add a 3rd rail to an existing 10 mile stretch (LIRR), $2.4b for a mile+ of new tunnels and a new station (Flushing), $10b for the East Side project which entails a massive new terminal and 10,500 ft of new tunnels....
I think the theory is that these mega train stations where thousands of people walk through every hour to embark/disembark is one vision of transit, one which can serve an extremely dense metropolis, but also one which is terribly difficult to expand and maintain, as we see in NYC.
Now maybe the future is that people coming into and through the city are stopping at waypoints at the outskirts and switching on to subways which run at a fixed schedule and carry masses of people in long convoys to fixed destinations, where they then have to transfer to buses or walk to their destination. Carrying luggage or packages or even just keeping children close in these environments is stressful and requires vigilance.
Alternatively, a fully autonomous transport can pick up someone or some family at their door, and bring them directly to their destination. It can carry your luggage in the trunk. It has seats for all your party and is quiet enough to carry on a conversation or work. It plays the music you want as you go. Etc... Most importantly it works on a dynamic schedule and can accommodate any arbitrary pickup and drop off point non-stop. You can pay for different classes of service, different capacity, maybe even different transit speeds.
These are fundamentally different modes of transportation. Boring is not trying to lower the cost of fixed point mass transit hubs, nor are they going to iterate in their idea until they end up building a subway. I think it’s important to admit that fixed point transport hubs are not in fact the ultimate solution to all personal transit.
For the [rather large] share of transport which is done in personal vehicles, wouldn’t it be incredible to have a solution that’s better than the massive cost of surface roads and surface parking everywhere you look?
> For the [rather large] share of transport which is done in personal vehicles, wouldn’t it be incredible to have a solution that’s better than the massive cost of surface roads and surface parking everywhere you look?
I generally care about mass transit, and it becomes pretty obvious that if you care about mass transit, you have to get people out of the massive wastes of space of single-occupancy vehicles. The problem I see with solutions like the Loop is that they're pitched as trying to replace mass transit, and there's no consideration given to the fact that storing empty personal vehicles takes lots of space that don't exist in dense cities, or, in places such as Kansas City where SOV transit is preferred, creates massive dead zones of parking that deadens the appeal of the area.
Boring + Autonomy is an attempt at a solution to the space inefficiency of personal transport.
Personal transport is absolutely essential for the vast majority of people. Whereas public transit in most cases is not sufficient to live car-free, and ridership continues to plummet as a result which drives up costs [1].
The promise of autonomy, coupled with EVs designed for 1 million mile duty cycles opens up the possibility for personal transport to be significantly more efficient, and ecological than mass transit.
If you can do all that and put the majority of it underground, I’d say it’s revolutionary.
I'm unsure where you are getting this from. If you watch their presentation for their test tunnel unveiling (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSIzsMlwMUY), it is fairly explicitly communicated that what they are attempting to do is increase the speed at which you can bore a tunnel, thereby decreasing tunneling costs. The rapid production of the tunnel is the product here.
The video linked has Elon saying specifically that they have an industry-standard TBM that they used for the Hawthorne test tunnel. There is no improvement there. They have 2 more machines they are building that are expected to be large improvements over the tunnel status quo for that given size of tunnel they are constructing.
Again, the improvement is not in the tunnel size... they are building their own TBMs, trying to get them to be faster at tunneling than the existing machine that they have.
What if you actually reduce track / signaling / control / facilities cost massively by virtue of using self-powered autonomous vehicles? Then the math could start making a lot more sense.
> What if you actually reduce track / signaling / control / facilities cost massively by virtue of using self-powered autonomous vehicles?
The problem is that it's hard to carry more people into a tunnel than a metro train (excepting forcing everyone to become pedestrians). The proposed replacement for metro trains is so capacity inefficient that you're going to spend more building parallel tunnels, and you'll probably have an even more egregious problem of vertical circulation. Vertical circulation is already an issue of concern on the busiest passenger systems, and trying to move heavy, bulky, low-capacity personal vehicles is far more difficult (requires far more space) than packing pedestrians as current systems do.
A more point-to-point metro system would be great. The airline industry has been embracing this change for quite awhile. People don't like a hub & spoke system and it doesn't make sense to take everyone to city center which just adds to the crowding and congestion, as many current metro systems do.
Imagine a city that is crisscrossed with multiple direct metro lines. Design for extremely frequent departures, which likely means smaller carriages.
We should be designing our transit systems to be faster and better than car-based travel.
The airline industry embraced point-to-point routing in part because it reduces their costs on inelastic infrastructure on the ground, and allows them to tailor their schedule around demand at the two endpoints rather than on maintaining a network. They pay-as-they-use for airport gates and lessened their spending on hubs.
Fixed-guideway transport infrastructure (trains, busways) and dedicated structures (tunnels, bridges, airports, etc) come with high capex that must be borne by the builder. One advantage of road-based transport over rail-based transport is that the road is already there and will (often) already be built and expanded by the government just to allow private vehicles to come and go -- it's multipurpose -- while any other mode of transport requires this infrastructure to be purpose-built and maintained for the transport mode itself. That costs.
Sure, I'm by no means suggesting deprecating roads. They still serve an important purpose and will always be important for the 'last-mile'. Roads however have significant constraints since you can only build them in two dimensions.
The premise of Boring Company is that by building smaller tunnels, they can build them much more cheaply. Commutes could be more efficient, and city traffic reduced substantially if people could take tunnels across the city instead of drive.
Musk wants to re-engineering both tunnel boring and how we use tunnels - the latter may not pan out but the former is useful regardless of what gets run through the tunnel.
Not necessarily. The key cost savings that Musk envisions boils down to "build tunnels that are too small to put existing rolling stock in," which means that if the proposed personal rapid transit system turns out to be like every other PRT system and not work well, you're left with a tunnel that is too small to be useful for anything else.
Well this tunnel is only a couple miles long. Put in some lights and humans can walk the whole length to get around. It seems like a moving sidewalk could be put into this tunnel.
> The key cost savings that Musk envisions boils down to "build tunnels that are too small to put existing rolling stock in,"
Do you have a reference for that? My understanding was that over the long term the goal was to develop cost savings through better boring machines themselves, not through just by reducing the cross-sectional area of the tunnel.
I thought they were starting with smaller cross-sectional areas and working their way up as they developed machines, but by understanding of the end-goal of The Boring Company was to be able to build large tunnels at 1/10th the cost of current processes.
All of the innovations that are cited on The Boring Company's FAQ are things that are already done (e.g., reusing TBMs, or continually operating TBMs), or related to the "new" transit system and the virtues of narrower tunnels (which are overstated--at the size of tunnels we're talking about, cost tends to scale linearly with diameter, not cross-sectional area).
Making an existing tunnel wider is vastly cheaper than building an equivalent tunnel from scratch. Simply knowing the soil composition makes a huge difference.
In hard rock you can use drilling and blasting across long sections rather than just the leading edge. Alternatively, a TBM needs to remove significantly less material.
Are you sure about that? Because I have never heard about a tunnel project which has been 'upgraded' this way ever.
And if I start to think about the practical problems, like breaking up part of the tunnel before widening it, it quickly seems like building a new one might be more efficient.
Almost every tunnel has a lining that makes widening prohibitive. Which is why the London Underground is forever stuck with small tunnels on the original lines.
But more expensive than building the tunnel the right size to begin with, when you take into account the cost to build the too-small tunnel in the first place.
A lot of people really really like to travel in their individual vechicles instead of public transport. They like it so much that they spend a lot of money (a proxy for their own time and life energy), and deal with other problems like parking etc.
So a tunnel system which moves public transport trains does not compare in utility with a system which can move personal cars. Did you just ignore this fact?
The above comment pointed out that they abandoned the idea of moving personal cars, they will now have large proprietary vehicles that only travel within the tunnels and have seating for a bunch of people. Aka, trains.
This looks like a first project for them. From the previous Boring Company presentation it is clear that the long-term vision includes a lot of tunnels for private cars.
It has basicly all the same infrastructure requirements of trains, thus inevitably, similar costs, but you give it a slick new label like "people mover" and suddenly the costs are cut 90%, but nobody builds "people movers" so the bullshittium can be heavily sprinkled everywhere.
Well it's a concept I'm sure all of us are familiar with, if you want 10Gbps of throughput you can have a 32 bit bus at 322MHz or 64 bit bus at 161MHz. So if you want a tunnel with 10 cars/second you need one tunnel with at a speed of 10 cars/second or you need 10 lanes of 1car/second. That's really where my question is - the 125mph isn't what interests me, it's how you get a thousand cars (or people into cars) that are stationary, and accelerate them up without having massive gaps between them.
You could increase packet size, and do one lane with (60 cars) every minute (as opposed to one car every second).
The result is called a bus or a train.
Alternatively, use token ring. If you have a separate tack for cars to get up to speed, and really trust your hardware and your software, a car can simply slip into an empty 10m gap between cars, and slip out of it onto a side track to decelerate when it approaches its destination.
A good metaphor, because as you increase bus size, the complexity of dealing with crosstalk increases. To achieve 10 cars / second one would have to size it more than 10 times, to include bypasses so that long distance traffic doesn't interfere with shorter distance.
From what I saw, the hyped Boring tunnel cost savings he demoed were by comparing the cost of the tunnel he had built to the cost of a complete station.
Comparing apples to apples, it's competitive, and that's an achievement in itself, but they haven't proven anything like the savings he claimed.
That's a recurring theme with Musk's hype. It's great that he's taking a fresh look at these things, and in some cases he's found some genuine efficiencies, but the expectations he puts out is that the rest of industry is locked down into hopelessly obsolete and inefficient methods. That's just not true, but it's a very appealing story.
It's mostly hype yes, what do you expect from a startup? The strongest premise is the tunnel diameter is smaller, therefore quicker and cheaper to build. There may be efficiencies to be gained through improved engineering of tunneling machines as well, given SpaceX and Tesla's innovations.
Yes, there are many problems left, however every start-up faces a number of problems. They're basically just lining up to build an MVP, or perhaps that was the previous tunnel and LVCC is the beta version.
In either case, they have a CEO famous for his marketing and overly optimistic promises. If this wasn't an Elon Musk venture, I doubt it'd be getting over-hyped and blasted as much as it is.
The price tag for the tunnel is pretty much what you’d expect at the low end of civil engineering costs, so there’s no room in the pricing if things start to go south. Musk’s entire premise is that there are magical inefficiencies in the commercial tunnel boring machines he’s purchased, and he assumes that spacecraft and automotive engineering expertise is sufficiently transferable to uncover those opportunities and redesign a considerably more efficient and cheaper machine. Oh, and using commercial automobiles will be faster, cheaper, and more pax-intensive than light rail solutions. I’m … skeptical. Let’s go with “skeptical” on this one.
Based on my ballpark guesses at the cost of the tunnel, I would be surprised if The Boring Company actually made any money on this. They're liable for all cost overruns, and they have to bear the costs of developing the custom Tesla car manufacturing and safety qualification themselves.
The most galling part to me is that I can't see how they make the mandated 4400 people/hr limit. That requires 26 second headways between vehicles (assuming that 4400 people/hr is a bidirectional capacity, not unidirectional), and I don't see them getting station dwell times low enough to permit those headways--airport people movers usually run around 30-45 second dwell times.
You're thinking in train terms. There's nowhere near 26 second headway between vehicles in busy tunnels near me - cars enter and exit the road from multiple sides before entering and the headway in the tunnel is much shorter. 30-45 second headway makes sense when your station stops blocks the entrance to the tunnel, which is the norm for rail systems, but not for car tunnels.
Wouldn't the obvious solution be to multiplex cars at each station? They could have twenty Teslas at each location for passenger pickup/drop-off, only entering the launch queue when all occupants are seated and restrained.
It is totally fair that what they have shown isn't ready to change the world, but at least give them credit for thinking about those problems and having innovative solutions. Electric motors vastly reduce ventilation requirements, autonomous vehicles under the control of the central system make it possible to evacuate most riders rapidly in the event of an emergency without leaving the cars, and having small vehicles going straight to your destination means there can be many more stations, decreasing the traffic at each one. All of these are fundamentally new technologies that aren't part of traditional subways, and if they can get them all to work, it will be a system with new and novel capabilities.
> ingress and egress congestion problems into and out of the tunnel[..]
They posted a video 2 years ago that has 6 million views that shows how this works in the first 30 seconds. It was all over the news when it was posted:
> Moving our roads underground is a vastly superior transportation system than we have today.
When I read stuff like this I'm flabbergasted. The cost of maintenance for tunnels is almost certainly higher than that for surface roads. That's not to mention additional considerations like always-on lighting (no free light from the sun) and poor access to businesses (so the roads still have to exist in some form). Tunnels only make sense in a few high-density urban centres, where the alternative would be elevated highways. Otherwise they're a great way to create a municipal budget time bomb when big repairs have to take place.
>The cost of maintenance for tunnels is almost certainly higher than that for surface roads.
Pros would include avoiding the freeze thaw cycle that destroys roads in much of the country. Tunnels could also allow pollution mitigation to take place if internal combustion engines were used, which is simply impossible on open highways.
Cons include an obviously higher initial capital expenditure.
I suppose we need to get down to a cost per person moved metric over something like 30 years to more objectively compare.
i really appreciate what elon musk is doing, but to be clear, he's not strictly trying to make tunneling cheaper for mass transit.
as i understand it, the high costs of transportation projects are a political problem not an engineering one. well-run subway projects have been completed at $50-100 million per mile, while most such projects in the US are 5 to 10 times that. that's attributable not to sticter safety standards or excessive land costs or public agencies being inefficient, even if those things do contribute at the margins. it's because so many constituencies laden these projects with deadweight costs (lawsuits, foot-dragging, overcharging, kickbacks, etc.).
while his engineering leadership is exceptional and that contributes to lowering costs, elon adeptly sidesteps much of those constituent ladenings, perhaps through careful choice of goals and projects and sheer force of will. for all his faults, he seems to have the right blend of vision, skill, money, charisma, and motivation to bring these projects to completion without a lot of deadweight loss.
so the boring company's technological advances just won't translate to cost reductions generally in underground transportation projects. even if a project uses the boring company for the tunneling, the large infrastructure contractors will find ways to extract their generous slice of pie. we need political/social/economic solutions to reduce these costs, not technological ones.
> "Sometimes technological solutions solve political problems."
sure, but what technology could be applied in this case?
for instance, projects are often underbid and then overcharged over time, whether it's fixed bid or time and materials. fixed bid incentivizes subcontractors to cut corners. time and materials billing incentivizes subcontractors to be inefficient. and subcontractors find ways to cheat.
people have tried complicated incentive systems to fix this issue (a kind of technological solution), but they seem to have mixed results (that is, not much better, for a lot more complexity in tracking and apportioning compensation).
even if you could build a machine to monitor all the workers and perfectly pay them based on quality and efficiency, such dystopian conditions would most certainly meet heavy resistance.
i mean, i love tech, but who'd want a machine controlling their lives?
> sure, but what technology could be applied in this case?
A big problem with tunnels has traditionally been land rights (less so than with highways/but still a problem). If your tunneling costs are 10-100x lower, suddenly landowners who would otherwise try to extract exorbitant prices have a lot less leverage because you have more freedom in where you build the tunnels and entry/exit points.
There's no magical new technology that will entirely subvert the political expense of this project, but they make it explicitly clear on the Boring Company website that they have vastly improved the mostly old and uninspired technology of the tunnel boring machine itself, which will save millions at least. So like, that answers your question.
Exactly! They didn't mention cost in the correct way in the article, only saying that it costs less because it's a small tunnel. Instead of addressing the possible cost savings from advances in tunnel digger technology that Musk hopes to achieve.
the first tunnels won't make as much financial sense as subsequent tunnels but they're have to start somewhere
I disagree. Cars should be at surface levels. Going below ground or above ground is too expensive: cars (and more importantly trucks which this tunnel doesn't cover at all) are heavy and so they need expensive infrastructure. We can have tunnels and overpass in places where required, but in general cars belong at surface level.
What we should be doing is moving humans up: we should be building sky ways between buildings. Someone on foot (I'll allow wheelchairs) is not very heavy and doesn't take much space: the amount of infrastructure needed to support them is not nearly as expensive as moving cars to a different level. The skyway also allows for heating and air conditioning, something humans like.
When the distances get long we can put in a moving sidewalk if we want. However, for the most part when distances get long humans should move back to ground level and catch a bus/train.
Trucks are large: they need bigger more expensive tunnels. It isn't that we cannot do it, it is just that tunnels are expensive, and the larger you make them the more expensive they become. While a car/truck less city sounds like a great idea, it isn't practical. There are a lot of goods that need to move around somehow for a city to work. While trains or horses could be used instead, both have issues as we get to the "last mile".
Thus I'm proposing get humans off the ground level - we have the technology to make this convenient today. The cost is not very high and it solves a lot of congestion problems on the street.
What's a comparable tunnel? Isn't the Vegas loop a single lane tunnel for personal vehicles? I can't think of other existing/planned tunnels that fit that description, aside from other Boring Co ones.
I'm not at all convinced that this design can scale.
It feels that way. As much as I want Mr. Musk to succeed, this doesn't feel any better than the dozens of other small people movers that have been around for half a century or more.
The only point of difference I can see is that it's going to be more on-demand (though that's been done before), and it's going to be cheap.
Even accounting for the cost, I think many would still argue that it was worth it, replacing a highway system that divided the city with a walkable network of parks that effectively connects different neighborhoods like financial district <-> north end, along with a new series of (underground) highways that provided improved traffic flow.
Oh my God, it actually became parks?! I lived there back in 2007 or so and had no faith whatsoever that the promises that the artery would be replaced with parkland once it was finished. My apologies to the government of Boston.
Ah okay, that makes sense (but parent comment was talking about Boring Company / other new technology potentially reducing cost in the future; though I'm also skeptical).
I think the issue isn't that the techniques used for tunnel boring are so expensive, but that other issues (mismanagement, corruption) end up costing a lot. I don't think The Boring Company is going to solve those problems. Certainly reducing costs through new technology is a good thing, but it's not the whole picture by a long shot.
That doesn't look worth it at all. It cost $22 billion and the result is a narrow 1-block park through the center of Boston.
Most of those buildings next to what used to be the highway are at most 10-20 stories. A 60 story skyscraper was finished in Boston this year for $700[1].
So to a first approximation they could have had a full 2-3 blocks of parks around 15 new such skyscrapers to get the same building space after demolishing most of the buildings seen in the foreground on that picture, and have come out even on floor area.
They'd then have had had $12 billion left over to elevate the highway and put that elevated highway in a tunnel to cancel out the noise before they got to to $22 billion.
It was absolutely worth it. I've visited that area back in the early-/mid-00s when the highways and construction were still there, and recently (was just there a few weeks ago, actually) after completion. It's night and day, and the new space is a huge improvement over the old.
Comparing skyscraper build costs to tunnel build costs is meaningless.
Noise isn't the only factor. The bigger issues are division of the city, and the urban blight that is common under and around elevated highways.
The cost overruns were due to the usual things: mistakes that were expensive to correct, graft, and corruption. If you can solve those things, great. But I don't think the presence of those things should invalidate the need for truly valuable projects that make cities much more livable.
Whether it's worth it isn't measured by whether it's a huge improvement, it's obvious to anyone with eyes that the current state is better. It's whether it could have been even better had the $22 billion been spent differently.
So no, comparing skyscraper cost to tunnel cost is absolutely meaningful, because if you want to increase green space one way is to spend an exorbitant amount of money digging a highway into the ground, another is to demolish 5 blocks of 10 story houses, build one 50 story skyscraper, and get 4 blocks of public park as a result.
Urban blight around elevated highways isn't some law of nature, it's just a zoning problem, and one that's a lot cheaper to solve than digging the highway into the ground.
Those existing buildings have people inside. Pulling them out to demolish the buildings and add new, taller, skyscrapers has significant costs I think you aren't factoring in. Like all those businesses inside have to relocate... which costs money.
How would tunnels be any better for air quality? You either vent all the toxic fumes to the surface or you kill everyone in the tunnel. Underground trains make far more sense than underground roads.
>I grew up near Boston during the big dig and the city is a drastically different place before and after the Central Artery.
What did the Big Dig do that a better central artery with more decks wouldn't?
The whole "highways are ugly" argument really is mostly from/for upscale people who don't want their view ruined. Very few people who actually has to use or live/work near the infrastructure really cares all that much about it's presence. It's just a fact of life. Heck, if you painted it like something interesting everyone would stop caring in a couple years (i.e. same thing that happened to the rainbow natural gas tank on the side of I93).
Putting stuff underground is expensive and complicated compare to building above ground.
> The whole "highways are ugly" argument really is mostly from/for upscale people who don't want their view ruined.
That's really, really not true. And "it's ugly" isn't the argument usually presented, either - it's that it's a tremendous waste of space.
Move all the roads underground and you can reuse that land. Maybe for a park, but also maybe for high-density housing that will make things more affordable for everyone.
Hi. I work near the infrastructure and I care about its presence or lack thereof. Fortunately the oppressively loud, reverberating steel structure is no longer a fact of life. When I walk through that area I am literally no longer in its shadow. https://ourdoings.com/brlewis/2008-05-14
The big dig is way more pedestrian friendly than multiple decks and pedestrian overpasses. And pedestrians are a huge positive for cities in so many ways.
The submitted title was "No, the Las Vegas 'Loop' Is Not the Future of Public Transportation". That broke the HN guidelines, which ask submitters to use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait, and not to editorialize. We remove submission privileges from accounts who post like this, so please don't.
Note: if this was the article's original title and, as sometimes happens, they changed it, then none of this applies. Usually it's just the NYT who do that though.
Maybe Elon should visit Europe or Asia and check out an underground mass rapid transit system or two. They have two orders of magnitude larger capacity. And even their capacity is finite.
And keep in mind that the NYC Subway and the London Underground are NOT a good example of a modern mass transit system.
I've noticed that Elon Musk's projects often start off in the wrong direction, but evolve in a way that works ultimately. And that's what matters.
For instance, SpaceX originally insisted on parachute recovery of their Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 rockets. They tried, and it didn't work. But they switched to powered landing as some others had demonstrated (DC-X and Masten Space Systems and Armadillo Aerospace), and they massively succeeded.
Elon is perfectly willing to pivot to what works after exhausting other options.
And he is iterating a lot. His designs usually are not finished, when they get used for the first time. The first F9 wasn't reusable and had much less power than the current block 5. But it was flying, good enough to sustain business and giving opportunity to learn and experiment. All the crashes while getting the landing right were of no consequence for the launching business. All the tests happened with rockets which had delivered their cargo.
I see a similar development with the Boring company. They have dug their first demonstration tunnel. So they have a basic handle on tunnel digging. Doing so they made valuable experiences and claim to have improved their digging machine already significantly. Digging the Las Vegas tunnel is going to add much more experience to it and means, the company is a working business. They might not have a good idea yet, what to drive through the tunnel, but I am sure, they will come up with something. At the first presentation, they drove a Model X with guiding wheels attached at like 40mph. That was nice, but not great. Now they made a new video - they have redone the tunnel floor and now a Tesla reaches 127 mph just driving on autopilot through the tunnel. If everything else is worked out, I am sure there will be a custom vehicle driving through these tunnels, which optimizes throughput.
I've read that Elon hates mass transit, which is why he's such a car enthusiast. So I don't think he'll be looking to existing solutions for inspiration.
The contract posted on the LVCVA website projects an
operating capacity of 4,400 passengers per hour using
“autonomous electric vehicles at high speeds,” which
might include a Tesla Model X or Model 3, or another
Tesla chassis converted into a 16-passenger shuttle.
There are two tunnels involved, so to manage to get 2,200 passengers through in one direction per hour, you're going to have to get 36 passengers out of whatever vehicles and 36 passengers into those same vehicles every minute.
The only way this can work with Model 3s or similar will require a loading/unloading experience similar to the Test Track ride at Epcot in Disney World, including the line and the numerous staff helpers to make sure you are buckled in.
Combine that with also needing to move those people down to the station and back up to their destination, and the likelihood that any of the three stations are in a location you already are or want to be, I'm not sure how useful this is going to be.
Put another way: if you assume 16-passenger shuttles, you have to have 26 second headways between cars in order to meet capacity.
If you don't split the track to allow unloading, you have 26 seconds to disembark 16 passengers, embark 16 more passengers, and then clear the platform in enough time to allow sufficient safety margin for the car immediately behind you. Station dwell times (essentially the time from train is fully stopped to time it starts accelerating, and therefore not including the last bit) are upwards of 30 seconds and much likelier to be close to a minute, which can't be done in sufficient time. Especially because full capacity cars generally require more time at stations, and I have to imagine that modified Teslas that can fit 16 people aren't going to be quick to navigate.
If you have multiple platforms at each station to accomodate the long station dwell time, maybe it could be done, but I suspect that it'd blow out their construction budget because of the extra space needed.
If they have to have multiple platforms at each station anyways, it might make sense to essentially have three lines - A<->B, B<->C and A<->C, instead of A<->B<->C - and only run direct. At least in that situation everyone would be getting off at each stop, which could simplify some things - and it naturally splits passengers into two platforms.
That sort of routing is also significantly improved by having smaller, independent vehicles (well, once the number of stops goes up) - sort of like the Personal Rapid Transit setup at WVU. [0]
> There are two tunnels involved, so to manage to get 2,200 passengers through in one direction per hour, you're going to have to get 36 passengers out of whatever vehicles and 36 passengers into those same vehicles every minute.
I have a quibble with this. The cars will have to be loaded at that rate, but they will not have to unload and load the same car in that time frame. Also, if the platform can fit multiple vehicles at a time, it gives them significantly longer to unload/load. Picture like a gondola or high speed chairlift at a ski hill - you unload on one side of the end loop, load on the other, and you're unloading/loading multiple cars at a time.
And high speed chairlift capacities easily reach thousands of passengers per hour
For comparison, the Wenhu Line [1], a generic medium-capacity rapid transit, transports 7500 passengers per hour. That's actual numbers, not peak-wishful-thinking-16-passenger-modified-Tesla-body-shuttle-times-Musk-factor numbers.
Let’s say there are 10 vehicles being loaded at a time. 16 passengers each is 160 passengers per cycle. That means vehicles can wait 6 minutes for loading on average. (Some can be slower because some will be faster)
Is that crazy? It doesn’t seem crazy to me. Busses don’t wait 6 minutes at a stop.
BART does 1-2 minute transfers.
Your idea that it would need attendants seems to be based on the assumption that cars must depart synchronously (because one slow party can hold up the entire system). But you’re missing the whole point of the Loop design: many on-ramps and cars can join into the express tunnel asynchronously.
So what’s this fascination with tunnels? In Chicago, there are overhead elevated train tracks, and they work just fine. They seem a lot cheaper to build and maintain than tunnels. You can even build them over existing avenues. Why don’t we have more of that?
Have you ever lived near an elevated train? They're not pleasant areas, especially compared to subway stations. The area under the tracks aren't very usable, except as a roadway and parking lots. They're loud as hell, people on the trains can see into your home, the spaces around the elevated tracks are great places for people to do drugs and have crusty hobo sex. These criticisms apply equally to elevated roads.
Most times it rained or snowed in New York City when I lived there, New Jersey Transit and PATH would have problems because of the issues of weather on outdoor trains. It only affected NYC's subway when there was flooding (which also affected NJT and PATH).
The fascination with tunnels is that they're a much more ergonomic way to build infrastructure for the humans that have to live near them.
I used to take the U2 at Eberswalder Straße regularly, and agree it's a lovely station and blends in nicely with the charm of the neighborhood.
I think the main issue in the NYC metro area is that the offending trains/platforms do not seem to take noise pollution (let alone neighborhood flavor) into account at all. The result is that the platforms and trains are unfortunately more like alien oppressors than helpful neighbors.
It's also worth pointing out that today's Berlin is enjoying the fruits of an unique opportunity to rebuild their urban infrastructure post-ww2 (Gleisdreieck was an industrial train yard, for example). Much of the city was leveled, and then shortly thereafter occupied by East/West Germans with fiscally-backed ideological incentives to compete over who could build the most impressive X "for the people".
Lessons learned: Maybe we should tear down NYC, split each borough in half down the middle, and give one half of it to liberals and the other half to conservatives?
The area under elevated lines is unusable only if you make it that way. Tokyo is great at using space below bridges and elevated lines: https://images.app.goo.gl/zpq5T3m5FPSr4eoN6.
Yes and Chicago's stock is super old. The Orange Line is newer and is also much quieter and smoother. New rail in America, elevated, can be pretty quite and enjoyable. I like living near trains personally. It's relaxing to watch them go by in the evening, while sipping on some whiskey or wine.
Your mind will eventually tune out the noise of a track. Our house was near a freight rail track that had a run all night. Never woke up after the first couple of days.
This is the first time I've ever heard of Metra referred to as "light rail". Metra uses enormous diesel locomotives and runs on freight rail ROW (for the most part)--there's nothing "light" about it.
To be fair, most European commuter rail does the same thing. They just use electric heaters, so it doesn't look like their tracks are on fire. Chicago was built up with a big natural gas infrastructure for some reason (like every home seems to have gas heat/dryers) so I guess it made sense to put gas heaters on the rails.
> The spaces around the elevated tracks are great places for people to do drugs and have crusty hobo sex. These criticisms apply equally to elevated roads.
Tbf, the reason people use it for those purposes is because they are the most sheltered, out-of-the way places available.
When they stop being available, that activity moves to the next most sheltered, out-of-the-way place available.
I love Chicago's elevated trains. There are plenty of people who live around them. I grew up next to a freight train track out in the boonies. You get use to it.
They are way cheaper if you can build them. Look at how long it's taking Seattle to build ST3 (although it's going to be amazing when the Redmond corridor opens; I agree).
America needs good transport now, in many more cities. Musk's tunnel ideas are just really impractical and will cost the tax payers more than the benefits of other types of standard/existing rail.
Apartments with windows opening directly onto El tracks are discounted in line with the unpleasantness. If you’ll put up a fight over an apartment building 2 blocks away casting a few hours of shade, you’ll definitely put up a fight over frequent clattering metal 2 feet from your bedroom window forming a permanent roof over the street.
I once lived on the corner of Lake and Wells, where the Brown, Purple, Green, Pink, and Orange line trains all transit a frog patch. (It is supposedly the busiest rail intersection in the world.)
Even though I was 25 floors up with "soundproof" windows, it was jarringly noisy at all times of the day and night because of the way the sound waves travel up a building.
The El was built along with the city's expansion (often by developers who wanted to make new tracts of land accessible). That doesn't work for infill, where the intrusion and space the elevated tracks require aren't accounted for in current prices and expectations, and where right of way isn't established.
If we had a Robert Moses of transit, then it could happen, just like the highways happened. There are no Robert Moseses of transit. Now the best we can do for new lines is shadow the highways.
Elevated lines like in Chicago also seem very uncommon now, I suspect they aren't actually that great? They certainly take a lot of maintenance and don't have great trip times. I think putting an incredibly large and heavy vehicle on metal stilts isn't a good approach. There have been people who want to instead put relatively light vehicles on stilts [1], with many benefits, but that's been met with almost no interest from people who can make these things happen. (Personally I think it's a missed opportunity.) Though in a sense what's being built here is along those lines, but underground.
Personal rapid transit is just a waste. You can transport A LOT of people by rail ... orders of magnitudes of people more than cars, even if you had a highway full of self driving cars all moving at 120kph. There's not even a comparison. Self driving and even personal transport does not compare to the capacity of standard rail stock:
Public transport also forces you to see people every day. Even this very bare minimum interaction is vitally important. It changes the way we see and treat people.
There was an executive at Lehman Brothers who had a private elevator he used from his condo to take him to a car with a private driver, which took him to another elevator that took him to his office. Most days he could go from home to work without interacting with a single person. That changes the way you see and treat people, and we need less of that.
Capacity comparisons are no good in isolation. Here in DC Metro is close to capacity for what it does (taking people into the downtown core). But 95% of people in the metro area don’t take the Metro, because it doesn’t go anywhere they want to go. These people are commuting from Loudon to Reston or DC to Bowie. Almost 90% of jobs in the metro area are outside DC proper as is the bulk of housing. In isolation, none of these commuting paths warrant a heavy rail line. The capacity advantage of standard rail stock is completely irrelevant to almost everybody’s commute.
It’s not about being anti-social. Here in the Annapolis area (which has 200,000 people, with 40,000 in Annapolis itself), people commute from the Annapolis suburbs to jobs in the southern Baltimore suburbs or in Baltimore. They’d take a train if there was one, instead of sitting in I97 traffic But the volume of commuters comes nowhere near justifying building one. (Many Metro lines, though at capacity in the downtown core, are desolate in even the relatively urbanized suburbs of MD). A cheap, fast, point-to-point transit solution, that you could string up along an existing highway median or below one, would revolutionize transit because it would actually address peoples’ needs outside the tiny minority.
"Personal rapid transit is just a waste. You can transport A LOT of people by rail ... orders of magnitudes of people more than cars"
You're answering a question no one is asking. Cars and taxis (and imagined self-driving cars) get people from where they are to where they want to go. Roads are capable of serving any trip, and with a reasonable travel time. If transit could serve most trips then transit could be successful. Start from there, and see if you can work backwards to traditional rail mass transit. I don't see it happening, but maybe I'm missing something.
I should have been clearer, I meant general speed. The trains on traditional elevated tracks in Chicago are all pretty slow, and I think the solidity of the tracks is part of that. In comparison, the same trains on solid ground (e.g., the Blue line) run much faster.
there are overhead elevated train tracks, and they work just fine
No, they don't. They add a massive amount of noise and other pollution to the city, and block light and air, turning normal city streets into seedy alleys. (Ex: Wabash before the recent renovation)
They seem a lot cheaper to build and maintain than tunnels
Build, probably. Maintain, no. The elevated structures require a ton of maintenance that is ongoing constantly because they're exposed to weather, vandals, and other external forces.
These are electric trains—what pollution? Noise isn’t much higher once you’re even a block away. And light and air is a matter of setbacks. Lake and Wells are hardly seedy alleys. There is more light standing right under an L track than in NYC.
I suspect you've never been in a subway tunnel and noticed all the grime and dirt spewed all over the walls and ceiling by electric trains.
Noise isn’t much higher once you’re even a block away
Now I know you've never been in a city with an elevated train system. I once lived nine blocks away from an elevated train, and I could hear it all day and all night.
And light and air is a matter of setbacks
You can't set back a building that's already built, and you can't take away air rights from a property owner without massive compensation.
There is more light standing right under an L track than in NYC
More is not the same as optimal. Why should any of the public's light and air be removed if it's not necessary?
> Now I know you've never been in a city with an elevated train system. I once lived nine blocks away from an elevated train, and I could hear it all day and all night.
It is possible to build elevated rail that is much quieter than Chicago's and NYC's systems, so Chicago shouldn't be held up as an example of how noisy elevated systems have to be.
Plus Chicago's is super old. Use the newer Orange Line and it's much quieter. The high speed intercity/commuter rails in The Netherlands are also super quiet (and massive!). They move a lot of people too!
I lived in Chicago more than twice as long, and directly in the Loop for 90% of that time, not out in the neighborhoods. I lived for a year directly next to the Lake/Wells junction. I know about L noise.
In like 3 replies you've went from "elevated trains are as good as subways" to "elevated trains are better than nothing".
The noise is the thing. In New York you can stand directly over a subway station and not even know it, in Chicago you always know when you're with in a few blocks of a line.
One thing I've noticed in Chicago and NYC is that the old steel elevated structures are extremely loud. However, the few locations in NYC that are made with much thicker concrete structures significantly reduce the noise.
Elevated rail is not inherently noisy, but the majority of examples in the US are. This is why people are against them. If we could fix the noise problem, this could be the optimal solution. I personally think it is possible.
Old steel elevated tracks like the L are kinda crummy. You have to deal with weather both on the tracks and the stations, they darken whatever is below them, are incredibly loud, and wear out relatively quickly. Derailments can be catastrophic because trains fall from a great height (as happened in the Loop in 1977). Using concrete solves the noise problems, but requires more space and money.
Concrete adds a lot more bulk and makes them visually oppressive. I’ve always hated how they did the elevated Metro lines (hulking concrete structures high in the air, requiring climbing up long escalators with multiple mezzanines), versus the L lines which are organically integrated into the neighborhood.
My understanding of tunnels fascination is to create a 3D transportation space to mirror the 3D work/living space of cities. Yes, EL trains add one layer. However, the idea behind the tunnels is that they can make 20 layers, if needed.
I say this without commenting on the actual financial viability, since that is very much a matter of debate and I'm tepidly optimistic on it at best.
The upscale crowd doesn't like the audio/visual clutter.
There's nothing tunnels do that well planned overhead infrastructure can't do more cheaply (at the cost of being audible and visible).
Edit: Since I'm being down-voted, other than being less offending to the eyes/ears of non-users, what do tunnels do that overhead infrastructure doesn't?
Yes it does! Cost directly affects how much transit you can build. If it didn’t cost New York 5x as much money to build a mile of track as it does London or Paris, New York could build five times as much track for the same fares/taxes.
If you've ever dealt with public transit planning, at least in the US, you'll see that often the budget is 50%+ simply real estate. The way land rights work in the US this actually cuts massive costs out of a project. Its not too dissimilar from how airplane travel beats trains on cost.
Not an expert, but often with big costly new things the main issue is that nobody dares. Or rather, nobody has the belief in the idea, resources and power to decide (think city officials).
If they can do this for 49MUSD then it’s a revolution. It’s a ridiculous amount of money for something like this. Just the management overhead of a project like this would cost millions, and the fact that it is short does not make it any easier. I will be very curious to see how they pull it off, and take the lesson whatever the outcome is.
I believe in Elon. He’s always late, but he mostly delivers. If he gets 10x faster instead of 14x and does it cheaper, it’s a huge boon to society (forces other companies to innovate). Cost disease for infrastructure is in my opinion the biggest drag against gdp and the economy.
The car itself may not be the future, but cheap tunnels and multi-car (let's call them trains) will be the future.
Asian cities already have amazing subway systems that just work so much better than surface streets. The biggest improvement would be to have express lines that only visit every ~10th stop. Financial viability due to massive ridership make these possible in Asia, lower tunneling costs could make them viable elsewhere.
Minneapolis did the right thing with its light rail: Going from the Airport, to downtown, to the Mall of America. When I was consulting in Minneapolis, getting from the Airport to the apartment I'd rented downtown was just a typical jaunt on public transit.
Here's how to win with public transit: Build it where people want to go. Amazing how difficult that is.
Yeah the first few lines are pretty obvious if you are smart about it.
Twins ballpark / transit hub (not there at time of construction but it helps that it is now), downtown, Vikings Stadium, Airport, MOA... pretty obvious and useful route. Then to the U and St. Paul.
After that is is a question of what direction out to the burbs you reach out to, and then the next, and so on.
If it isn't obvious the question shouldn't be asked. Just put in a Bus rapid transit system, and change the line every few months until you find a "line" that is profitable, then keep that line going for a few years to prove it works long term. Now you have real rider numbers to plug into the equation of if the line is worth it.
I'm not sure rider number experiments are really needed. At least in MN rider predictions were on the conservative side, but reasonable as far as predictors.
Granted that doesn't mean your idea is bad or anything. I do wonder how many people would change their routine for a "temporary" bus line... not sure they would.
I think it was Portland (it was somewhere in the Pacific NW) in the 90's had a "custom bus" running late at night. If you lived within 2 miles of a regular bus route, you could phone in a request, and a dispatcher would make up a new bus line for that night that would pick up everyone who called in.
For public transit to work this is important. In the early hours of the morning few people want to get around typically. However the fear that you cannot get around if you need to holds people back. However if I know that should I need to there is an option that isn't too expensive I'm likely try it.
Minneapolis used to have a guaranteed ride home (might still do, I don't live there anymore) to cover people who took the bus somewhere, but had to work last.
Back when I lived in Las Vegas, I had heard that the monorail didn't go to the airport because of lobbying/complaints from Taxi companies. If true, I suspect a tunnel would meet a similar fate.
The problem is that "the Strip" isn't a singular place; it's two lines of huge casinos on either side of Las Vegas Boulevard. Any transportation from the airport needs to more or less stop at each casino (or directly connect to something that does) to be useful.
YES! Instead of dumping how much money into this not-even-a-mile marking bullshit, how about finishing the damn monorail. Fucking taxi lobbies. I want to take a train from/to the airport!
While not revolutionary (or even all that evolutionary) it at least generates a bit of revenue while garnering more practical experience for Boring. I'm not really sure there's a future for Boring, but it is nice that an additional company is trying to improve mass transit.
I don’t see this doing $50M of good for easing congestion. I would prefer it if they’d commit to a much larger budget project connecting the airport to the convention center and several major hotels and casinos than this low density single lane tunnel.
> ...it will dig a pair of concrete tunnels, 12 feet in diameter and less than a mile long. The asphalt-paved tubes will be just wide enough for a single vehicle to drive down.
Please keep this sort of dross off HN, regardless of how you feel about $celebrity. Such discussions are low-information, and we're hoping for at least a bit better than internet default here.
1. Electric cars for transport, Check.
2. Solar panels and batteries for power generation and storage, check.
3. Tunnel digging equipment for making underground bases and transport, check.
4. Satellite communications for an entire planet, check.
5. Then finally, the actual rockets to get us there.
Hopefully he will continue development to the point where the tech can be used on Mars.