20 ms·

Elon Musk is boring a tunnel to skirt gridlock

279 points by davidiach 10y ago

adamjc 10y ago
I thought the current thinking was that building more roads means that there will be more roads to use, and therefore more cars on the road. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
- kavok 10y ago
  A tunnel doesn't have to specifically be for cars. Could run busses, trains, etc.. More electric cars on the road though wouldn't output more pollution around the road.
  - tgb 10y ago
    Electric cars are a good match for tunnels: ventilating the tunnel enough for a whole lot of combustion engines to use is a real cost.
    - intrasight 10y ago
      And if the tunnel was limited to electric cars (likely), then that would boost Tesla.
- Fricken 10y ago
  That's the good thinking, but because it isn't intuitive it often gets kicked to the curb by bad thinking. More roads = less traffic, right? right? No? One could also use tunnels to build subways and presumably Hyperloops. I wonder, though, about why big infrastructure projects so horrendously expensive, in America in particular. There are developers, planners, consultants, politicians, unions, contractors, sub contractors, sub-sub contractors, and they're all out for all they can get. There are lawyers every step of the way. Nobody communicates well. Small hang-ups at the wrong place send the entire operation grinding to a halt. Can this be fixed? Is a big dumb tunnel digging operation the point of entry for infrastructure construction disruption in America? That would be nice. We're good at moving the bits around. We suck at atoms. Or is Musk setting himself up to be the next Robert Moses? Someone with the capability to move mountains, but not terribly discriminating about whether or not a given mountain should be moved. Musk doesn't talk like someone who's ever had a discussion with an Urban planner about the real reasons as to why our transportation problems are problems.
  - nradov 10y ago
    US infrastructure construction costs are among the highest in the world. There appear to be multiple root causes including: extensive legal protections for private property owners, environment reviews and lawsuits, need to work across multiple government boundaries, labor laws, union work rules. https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-08/why-u-s-infrastructure-costs-so-much https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-08/why-u-s-i... http://www.citylab.com/work/2014/04/7-reasons-us-infrastructure-projects-cost-way-more-they-should/8799/ http://www.citylab.com/work/2014/04/7-reasons-us-infrastruct...
- mwill 10y ago
  Perhaps not a problem for Musk who also builds cars.
- TulliusCicero 10y ago
  Presumably the tunnels could also be used for transit, or maybe even walking/biking in some cases.
- AYBABTME 10y ago
  Tunnels will be required on Mars to shield from radiation. Getting a head start on the technology while on Earth only makes sense. Pretty much everything he plans is in perspective of having a dual use: will it be needed on Mars - SpaceX's true goal? I hate to say the word but, it's all about synergies.
- RichardHeart 10y ago
  If you move into a bigger house, your hallways will not fill up with more traffic. Currently humans are required at least 1 per car. Thus the housing and employment of those humans is more of a limiting factor on road demand, or perhaps car ownership or desire to drive somewhere, more so than availability of roads.
  - syberspace 10y ago
    Your hallways may not fill up with people, but all your new closets, cupboards, wardrobes, drawers and whatnot will fill up with "stuff"
  - ericd 10y ago
    If roads are clearer, then people tend to move farther from work, which increases the number of cars on the road at any given time. Then the roads clog up again. Increased highway construction has been enabling people to move farther and farther out into exurbs (which people think will be nice places to live, and cheaper, but that turn out create rather shabby quality of life compared to walkable cities).
    - Turing_Machine 10y ago
      "(which people think will be nice places to live, and cheaper, but that turn out create rather shabby quality of life compared to walkable cities)." "Shabby quality of life" by whose standards? The people who actually live there? I think not. If life in the suburbs actually sucked, people simply wouldn't stay there. It's not like they're given a one-way exit visa when they leave the city. They could move back any time they wanted. But, as a group, they never do. The reason they don't is because they find the amenities found in the suburbs (in specific, safety, cleanliness, room for their possessions, privacy, and better schools) preferable to those found in the cities. "Preferable" here means preferable by their standards, which are not the same as those of a single 22 year old programmer, or a single 30-something art connoisseur, or...
- jessriedel 10y ago
  Induced demand often happens, but certainly not always. It just depends on latent demand and network effects. More importantly, the appearance of induced demand is not a general argument against building roads! People get value out of getting to places. If we build road B intending to relieve congestion on road A, but road A stays just as congested, we nevertheless have enabled people to get places with road B that they would not otherwise have been able to reach. That increases utility. All of this applies to mass transit as well. The BART is currently at capacity during rush hour; if a parallel transit line was built, this would probably fill up with people without reducing congestion on BART, but it would still be creating value!
  - elbigbad 10y ago
    Do you happen to have any examples of where induced demand has not happened? My understanding is that it is pretty much guaranteed, especially in larger cities. I think New York's bridges and tunnels are the canonical examples of this. I say pretty much because I assume there must be cases where it didn't happen, but I am unaware of them.
    - tgb 10y ago
      Maybe induced demand has always happened, in the sense of demand increasing when the product is more available. But it's plenty common for the amount that demand increases to be less than the amount of extra capacity available. Furthermore, is induced demand that bad? If you double the capacity and it again gets filled to the point of gridlock, well then at least twice as many people are now able to be in gridlock, which they apparently prefer to the alternatives.
      - mnw21cam 10y ago
        The example of when induced demand is bad is when it causes increased pollution. In many parts of the world, there is a deliberate movement towards avoiding building too many roads, in order to decrease road use and therefore pollution levels. However, a car sitting in traffic will produce much more pollution per mile than one travelling at 70mph on a clear road, so the thinking behind this may be flawed.
- mason240 10y ago
  The idea that we shouldn't build infrastructure because it will get used is one of the more silly talking points out there right now.
  - Nav_Panel 10y ago
    Infrastructure projects should respond to the density and context of the neighborhood. Don't build a low-throughput highway between high density Manhattan and high density western Queens or it'll immediately become congested. Build a train instead. A bias toward highways in cities, which are inherently low throughput, has been the norm and also the problem over the last 80 years of urban infrastructure projects.
- foobarrio 10y ago
  Then why build roads at all? If N + 1 means more traffic than surely N - 1 means less? So 0 roads, no traffic! Seriously though isn't this a related rates problem? Adding roads adds capacity and also induces demand. Are the two in lockstep? Can the capacity added be greater than the demand induced?
  - paulddraper 10y ago
    Not only that, but the more hyperloops we have, the more overburdened they will be. </s>
- angry_napkin 10y ago
  If you know 285 has an extra lane now, you'll go ahead and run that errand at a certain time that perhaps you wouldn't have otherwise. Fascinating stuff.
- oftenwrong 10y ago
  If a restaurant started giving out free food, you wouldn't be surprised when more people than usual went to eat there. Induced demand only happens when the road is underpriced. Any road can be made immune to induced demand by tolling at a price that reflects demand. Too much traffic? Raise the price. Looking a bit empty? Lower the price. Car dependence is only common in the US because drivers do not pay the true cost of driving. Many people could not afford to drive if they had to pay market price to use roads and parking. By disconnecting the cost of transportation from its use, we have evolved a society that is overly dependent on transportation, and that is overly sensitive to increases in transportation costs. This applies to all modes - not just cars.
- Tiktaalik 10y ago
  If Musk had talked with any expert in transportation at all he'd know that building a tunnel highway won't solve traffic problems in the long term. Either: A) He hasn't talked with any experts at all. B) He doesn't believe the experts. or C) He doesn't think inducing demand is a problem because he owns a car company. None of these possibilities are very good looks.
  - jldugger 10y ago
    > C) He doesn't think inducing demand is a problem because he owns a car company. Just think how bad the smog would be on a car tunnel. Unless they limit it to zero emission vehicles....
- paulddraper 10y ago
  In economics terms, demand is a relationship between price and quantity demanded. Increasing the supply doesn't affect demand; it just changes the realized price and quantity to another place in the same demand relationship.
- artumi-richard 10y ago
  There has to be a ceiling to how much demand can be induced.
  - marssaxman 10y ago
    One could view the US Interstate Highway System and its legacy of suburban sprawl as a massive, decades-long effort to reach that ceiling, but we don't appear to have run out of headroom yet.
- tunesmith 10y ago
  Induced demand is one of those things that always struck me as an abused concept. Yes, it happens, but it's impossible for it to be always true. New roads will attract more traffic, but only up to a point. There exist roads in the United States that aren't experiencing traffic jams at rush hour. If Induced Demand were a law, that wouldn't be true. So you can't just say that building new roads won't alleviate traffic, period. There are cases where it is true, and there are cases were adding new roads actually make traffic worse, but there are also cases where adding roads (or tunnels) will alleviate traffic.
throwanem 10y ago
Light rail solves urban congestion, too, and a city that doesn't already have a subway isn't all that likely also to be so densely involute that rights of way can't be secured for the trackage. Elevated electric trams are a thing, too, and require a much smaller ground footprint. Not that I don't get what he's saying, and I do get that existing and well proven systems aren't sexy, but I feel like either of those is going to be an easier sell, and a much faster implementation, than an underground system. There's infrastructure down there! That's what "infra" means. Easier not to have to work around that, if you can.
- Synaesthesia 10y ago
  There's reason why the US stopped investing in light rail. >The social and physical construction of suburban America really was quite complex. It was a very elaborate system, and clearly a massive social engineering project that has changed US society enormously. [27] Incidentally, I don’t have a personal objection to suburbs, in fact I live in one, but suburbanization is a different question. [28] It starts back in the 1940s with a literal conspiracy. I mean a conspiracy that went to court. The conspirators got a minor pat on the wrist however. >They were General Motors, Standard Oil of California and, I think, Firestone Rubber. The origins of suburbia reveal an attempt to take over a fairly efficient mass-transportation system in parts of California — the electric railways in Los Angeles and the like — and destroy them so as to shift energy use to fossil fuels and increase consumer demand for rubber, automobiles and trucks and so on. [29] It was a literal conspiracy. It went to court. The courts fined the corporations $5000, or something like that, probably equivalent to the cost of their victory dinner.[30] >But what happened in California started a process that then expanded — and in many ways. It included the interstate highway system. That was presented as part of the defense against the Russians. It was launched under the Interstate Defense Highway Act of 1956, and was intended to facilitate the movement of people and goods, troops and arms, and, allegedly, to prevent overpopulation in specific areas that could become the focus of nuclear attack. [31] The slogan of defense is the standard way of inducing the taxpayer to pay the cost of the next stage of the hi-tech economy of course.[32] That’s true whether it be computers, the Internet or, as in this case, a car-based transportation system.[33] >From the late 1940s, into and through the 50s, there developed a complex interaction between federal government, state and local government, real-estate interests, commercial interests and court decisions, which had the effect of undermining the mass transit system across the country. It was pretty efficient in certain areas. If you go back a century ago for example, it was possible to travel all around New England on electric railways. The first chapter of E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime documents it.[34] Subsequently, we saw the elimination of the mass transport system in favor of fossil fuel use, automobiles, roads and airplanes, which are also an offshoot of federal government. https://chomsky.info/20131001/ https://chomsky.info/20131001/
thecolorblue 10y ago
This is a good idea, and I like to watch Elon be ambitious, but it's probably pretty annoying to work at SpaceX right now. One day you show up to work and, where you used to park your car, there is a giant hole in the ground. It's there because the CEO of the company you work for, who is already splitting his time between two companies, wants to put some of his energy towards a third unrelated company. You are spending your time getting things into space and your CEO is literally heading in the opposite direction.
- imron 10y ago
  > You are spending your time getting things into space and your CEO is literally heading in the opposite direction. On the other hand, boring technology is almost certainly going to play a key role in the colonisation of Mars.
  - mtgx 10y ago
    Yes, I'm sure that's at least part of the reason why he's doing this. He's trying to "learn" about digging (and reaching 5x, 10x higher efficiency) by doing a (hopefully) profitable business around it first.
  - asendra 10y ago
    And solar panels. And electric vehicles..
    - wolfram74 10y ago
      Note though that solar panels are half as effective on mars given it's distance to the sun, nuclear is even more important on Mars than on Earth.
      - pitt1980 10y ago
        is that true? how much effectiveness are you gaining with the thinner atmosphere?
RodericDay 10y ago
I've become completely disenchanted with Elon Musk over time. I used to be a huge fan and cheerleader, and enthusiastically pointed to him as inspiration. But slowly I started to realize that I was buying a lot into carefully crafted propaganda. The way SpaceX used lawyers to keep PSLV at bay, all the while Musk gassed on about free markets and competition made me a bit mad. Then he had that quip where he said he was "nauseatingly pro American" and that America was the biggest force for good the world had ever seen. Then he said he was a proud centrist and donated money to anti-environment republicans. And so on and so on. Accusing employees of shilling for unions. Misleading people about his level of technical expertise. Calling lane-assist "auto-pilot" for profit. At some point I realized that his "brilliant" approach to tech was essentially promising elite people that they could be ultra-green, better than vegetarians and hippies, while keeping the luxuries of sports cars, mansions with solar shingles, and rockets to mars. You don't have to do anything other than express support for him, and you're already better than people making personal sacrifices for the environment. Amazing! I now think of his "luxury-first" approach as "trickle-down environmentalism". And I think it will be about as successful as its economic counterpart.
- Synaesthesia 10y ago
  I had a similar epiphany about Apple. Basically corporations are all profit seeking entities and we shouldn't look to them to be our saviour. It's not really their agenda.
- RichardHeart 10y ago
  His company makes the quickest, safest family car ever made. His rocket company has greatly reduced the cost of getting into space. Now he wants to revolutionize tunneling. Maybe it's good that you separate the man from the great achievements of the engineers that actually design and build the great things. It's not the CEO's job to be an engineer. Seems like Elon is doing his CEO job fabulously.
- AYBABTME 10y ago
  You've managed to let cynicism overcome the actual good his companies do. We now have good electric cars, we now can launch stuff to space at a fraction of the price. Assume that you're right and he's not that nice a person: still because of him we're now somewhere we would not be otherwise. I think what he brings to the table far outweight any thing like "doesn't like unions" or "is an opportunistic campaign donor".
jankotek 10y ago
In US the administrative cost makes boring very expensive. Technology is already solved problem.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jonstewart 10y ago
Hi, my name is Bruno Tesch and I've developed this great new pesticide. Would the government be interested in sponsoring my research?
uranian 10y ago
I consider this as one of his least bright thoughts. I really hoped he would come with a light rail with shuttles carrying (electrical) cars, containers etc.. This is a thought I had some 16 years ago in an attempt to solve traffic jams. I truly believe cars shouldn't drive on highroads. Unfortunately I don't have the contacts and financial power to even get close to the people who can accomplish this. If we have a world wide network of light rail, carrying electrical cars etc.. at a speed of about 500 mph it would really be more environmental friendly, as it would be a serious competition for polluting aircrafts. Imagine: Los Angeles -> San Fransisco in less than 1 hour, in your own car! I think Elon is one of the single few people in the world capable to make a start with this.
- anonu 10y ago
  The premise of what hes doing is "lets do it faster and cheaper"... If you could improve the boring process 10x, maybe people would look at digging tunnels in a completely new light!!! For example, the real problem with rail is getting right-of-way. With a cheap boring machine - your plans wouldn't be as difficult. As Musk put it, you got to think in 3D....
  - AlexandrB 10y ago
    Actually you should think in 4D. In the future all those tunnels require maintenance that is much more complex and expensive than maintenance for surface roads. If the US is not able to keep its roads in good condition (and in many places it's not), how is building more expensive roads underground going to solve the problem long term?
    - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
      Roads need maintenance almost exclusively because of the weather - sun and rain, heat and cold. Underground, none of those things. We have tunnels today that are a century old with only minimal maintenance, right?
      - jcranmer 10y ago
metafex 10y ago
This is just a wild guess, but could there be more to it than just solving traffic problems? I mean, the best solution for a permanent settlement on Mars would be underground, as to shield from radiation etc. It's a funny thought, but it would make sense to aquire experience with large earth-moving operations to improve on the technology and study the feasibility.
- AYBABTME 10y ago
  Pretty sure he stated that being a large reason why they're doing that.
- wyldfire 10y ago
  s/earth/dirt/ ;)
  - itp 10y ago
    I think it'll be neat to continue to use the word "earth" as a quaint anachronism in some long distant future. A great opportunity to explain to kids that humanity was once limited to a single astronomical body... (The optimist in me is leaking out.)
    - btkramer9 10y ago
      When I was a child and learned the name of our planet was Earth, I was extremely disappointed. How could we possible name our own planet after something as boring as 'dirt'?
    - oblio 10y ago
      Heh... Horsepower. Candela. We have a lot of precedents ;)
- AJ007 10y ago
  It is also possible the tunnels could be privately financed and owned, which could have long term advantages for Tesla.
fiatjaf 10y ago
I bet all Elon Musk admirers will start hating him because he is getting along with Trump.
- jkelsey 10y ago
  Hating? No. But certainly disappointed and disillusioned. With ethno-supremacist folks like Bannon and Miller having such high-level spots in the administration, and their executive orders targeting legal residents and immigrants based on nothing other than xenophobic and racist world-vews, folks like Elon can't expect not to get mud on their reputation when they help legitimatize the Trump administration's actions.
- boznz 10y ago
  You can tweet all you want how much you deplore trumps policies but the only way you will change them is to get in front of his face and try and counter the dicks currently advising him.. Not a job I would want! At least Musk can say he tried.
thecrumb 10y ago
I see this as a way he can easily skirt current road regulations. He can build these roads more suitable for self driving cars which would be a win for him.
monodeldiablo 10y ago
I generally find Elon Musk to be an offputting individual, but I struggle to disagree with most of his ideas. In dense urban areas, skyrocketing property costs and the erosion of eminent domain have made mass transit expansion unsustainable in terms of time and money. Tunneling under it all has the potential to sidestep so many costs. To do so, of course, he'll need to reduce the costs of tunnel boring by an order of magnitude. As the economist quoted in the article noted, though, the construction industry has been famously stagnant for decades. Commoditizing boring machines would bring down costs substantially. Speeding them up would also reduce costs. And if he gets costs down by a factor of two or more, he could be the preferred vendor for a truly massive market worldwide. It might be his least crazy idea, honestly.
- joshmarlow 10y ago
  Pure curiosity - what do you find offputting?
  - monodeldiablo 10y ago
    SUBJECTIVITY WARNING! I struggle to trust the motives of anybody who is so certain of so many things. Especially one who acts so impulsively. He's clearly very bright, probably brighter than most smart people, but he's not brighter than all smart people. Yet he frequently presumes to be, even boasting of being a "nano-manager". He has definitely bought into his own hype. But when you have billions in the bank, I guess you can get away with that. Bonus round: He's also surprisingly thin-skinned and petty. Oh, and he stuffs his boards with family members and cronies.
    - joshmarlow 10y ago
      Thanks for the reply (and the subjectivity warning). I agree that the hype, nano-managing, etc is offputting and all else being equal I probably would be very skeptical of such a person. That being said, he does seem to generate results, which makes me think of him as an anomaly that I can't categorize. I have mixed feelings about the shades of nepotism. Hiring cousin Bob because he's your cousin irrespective of qualifications is definitely a bad idea; hiring cousin Stephanie who is qualified and you know you have a good relationship with where you can communicate and you can rely on them, is quite another. Disclosure: I've not read enough to have an opinion on if his family hires are Bobs or Stephanies - just playing devil's advocate.
redsummer 10y ago
The Boring Company's leader is called Steve Davis. Musk is obviously a keen student of Snooker lore.
6d6b73 10y ago
Tunnels are not a way to fix traffic - redesigning cities is. Our cities, and the society in general is so inefficient that it borders on crimes against humanity. What we need is smaller, more efficient, better designed cities.
- chadgeidel 10y ago
  And before the nay-sayers come in - no one is proposing destroying entire cities and rebuilding from the ground up. Now that we have that straw man out of the way we can start talking about transit (rail, bus, bike, walk) and the immense amount of space dedicated solely to single passenger cars and trucks.
  - Nav_Panel 10y ago
    I think we'll be seeing LA's subway development as a model for the future of infrastructure. The big problem with urban highways is that if you build the highway first and do not include higher-density transit, the neighborhood develops in a suburb-esque highway fashion, as distance of the house/apartment from the highway exit doesn't make a huge difference in commute time, whereas a train commute requires you to walk that last leg. The issue I imagine many planners are facing is "how do we build useful, medium to high density public transit that actually serves a decent amount of people?" And it's a hard problem, because the neighborhood layouts are designed for highways. New transit projects other than highways face opposition because they don't appear useful to most of the residents. I went to LA recently and rode the subway a bunch, into Downtown LA and back out to my friend's more suburban apartment near Universal City. Once, I took an Uber and the driver pointed out to me all of the new higher-density residential development taking place around the edges of the urban core (and noted it improved the safety of the area dramatically, "people are walking around now! no more gangs!"). Basically, the neighborhood was reshaping toward a more transit-friendly environment after some useful public transit was implemented. The current problem is convincing cities to fund transit lines when they seem to "go to nowhere useful". If LA continues to be successful at building subways, they'll provide a great piece of evidence and support for building new higher-density transit in other cities throughout the country.
aedron 10y ago
Cool. With tunnels we could have a fresh start and build the network with electric, automatic vehicles supported as first class (or the only) citizens.
dahart 10y ago
We can't afford to maintain the surface roads & bridges we already built, and tunnels are more expensive and require more maintenance by like an order of magnitude. (I made that up, but I'm pretty sure it's right, to within an order of magnitude... but if tunnels are 1000x more expensive, then I'm wrong). I can admire someone who has the resources to exclude himself from the traffic problem instead taking action to try and solve the whole problem for everyone. He could do what other billionaires do and buy a helicopter. Still, the only way that tunnels can "obviously" solve the traffic problem is if they're so cheap that we can easily build more of them than we ever need -- and we can't currently do that with roads, even if we have the space. New York and Boston and other places have some tunnels, and also terrible traffic. If we really do have the resources to take on an infrastructure project of this magnitude, wouldn't it be worth re-evaluating why we're driving, and reducing that instead? The problem with traffic is the traffic. If there wasn't all the traffic, there wouldn't be congestion, we wouldn't need more roads & tunnels. The contractor end of a tunnel building project might be a good deal though. Convince enough people it's a good idea, and you've got big business for decades to come.
- noja 10y ago
  Isn't the problem with traffic (in most places) that people are using the roads at the same time?
  - XaspR8d 10y ago
    Yeah, pursuing a culture shift that discourages pointlessly-standardized working hours and encourages remote work when possible might even have a tangible effect on traffic. That said traffic is often one of those unfortunate predator-prey type dynamics, where congestion being reduced often encourages more folks to drive until the system returns to an (unfortunate) equilibrium...
  - dahart 10y ago
    Yeah, totally. At least that's one way to look at it. There are multiple right answers. Lowering driving rates helps, flexible work hours helps, increasing public transportation helps. Any of these would diffuse traffic jams, and no there's no one single problem and no one single solution -- unless nobody drove at all. But that's why building tunnels doesn't seem like the best first-line defense. It's expensive, and it's fixed and inflexible, and doesn't reduce demand. It could help, but it could also hurt unless tunnels are less expensive to build & maintain than roads. I was trying to be playfully sarcastic by saying the problem with traffic is traffic. Most larger cities in the US, there's only a traffic congestion problem during rush hour, accidents, and road construction. (The city I live in does enough road construction every year, enough that it's widely considered to be a top contributing factor to traffic congestion.) LA traffic, which is what the article referred to, is worse than that, it's density is getting high enough that traffic congestion lasts all day in some places, rush hour is not just slow but crushing, and accidents can and do routinely prevent tens of thousands of people from working. It does seem like there must be a large economic cost to LA's traffic.
angry_napkin 10y ago
I get the feeling we're supposed to be breaking up with Elon Musk. Slowly of course.
emodendroket 10y ago
Uh-huh. I'm kind of tired of credulous reporters puffing up every idea that comes into this guy's head.
DonnyV 10y ago
I talked a little about this last week. I think he wants the tech to bore a hole close to the core of Mars and set off a nuke. This would restart natural lava flow in Mars which would then create self sustaining magnetic field. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13598876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13598876
- Robotbeat 10y ago
  That is not possible. At some point, your tunnel starts collapsing under the pressure and the great heat makes tunneling incredibly difficult. The deepest we've ever gotten on Earth is the Kola Superdeep Borehole (a Soviet project) that got 12km deep. On Mars, with the lower gravity and cooler center, we may get about triple that before reaching similar constraints in pressure and temperature. But no way you can get all the way to the core. Also, in order to melt the core, it'd take an insane amount of energy. Mars' core is 6-21% of the mass of the planet. Mars has a mass of 6 * 10^23kg. Heat capacity of iron is 450J/(kg * degree C). To heat up the iron by 1000 degrees C (rough estimate of what'd be required, though even if this is off by an order of magnitude, it won't change the conclusion), you'd need to provide at least: 1000 * .06 * 6E23kg * 450J/kg = 1.62 * 10E28 Joules. That's equivalent to 3.9 * 10^12 Megatons of TNT. In other words, it'd take about a trillion H-bombs to do what you say. Not feasible, clearly!!! Luckily, that's not required. You can simply build a superconducting cable around the planet. The ambient temperature is already near the critical temperature of some of our highest performing superconductors, but because the cable (or, likely, a series of large cables in parallel to keep the local field at the surface of the superconductor below the critical field strength) will be large, insulating it very well should not be a problem, and the energy needed to run the cryocoolers could be provided by solar panels installed on top of the cable. (Superconductors also can carry more current if you keep them colder, so it's usually a good idea to operate well below the critical temperature anyway.) This would be pretty easy to do, easier than the initial terraforming steps (i.e. raising the surface pressure by melting/subliming the ice caps and heating the regolith via albedo modification, super greenhouse gases, giant space mirrors, or Musk's favorite pulsed fusion over the poles). The amount of material required isn't that high, either. And the cable can also provide a planet-circling electrical grid and can provide vast amounts of seasonal storage capacity (actually, multi-decade storage capacity), thus negating the need for grid-level storage on Mars (or actually, the grid would literally be its own storage mechanism!). But all this is kind of besides the point: planetary atmospheres tend to do the actual heavy lifting of radiation shielding. Earth's atmosphere is far more important than our magnetic field in lowering the radiation dose on the Earth's surface. And while in absence of a magnetic field the atmosphere is slowly stripped, that process takes hundreds of millions of years.
sunjain 10y ago
Isn't this the same principle that subway/bart trains in some cities use? He is right, it is time to increase apaption of this 50+ yr old idea and apply it to other modes of transportation. Not only you operate in 3D, there is less disruption to existing inhabitants and roads.
shabble 10y ago
My laymen's understanding (from various documentaries & articles) is that the expensive part of tunnel construction is managing the transitions between different materials. Boring through hard rock might be slow, but hitting pockets of mud, loose rock and other things (especially when unexpected) can seriously mess up the works, and cause massive delays due to machine damage or reassessment and reinforcement/collapse mitigation. AIUI many (most?) big TBMs are heavily bespoke systems specifically built for their planned route, and it's not unusual to just scrap them after the job is done. So, it's not immediately clear that speeding up the 'easy' part will have a huge impact on the overall outcome, if the bulk of the time & uncertainty is in the hard bits. I wonder if there are any currently underused means of sensing some distance ahead get advanced warning of nasty transitions?
- nradov 10y ago
  Often the TBM is just left behind in a spur tunnel after finishing the main excavation. It would be too expensive to disassemble and remove.
  - abduhl 10y ago
    This is not correct. Most TBMs are advanced into a receiving pit or shaft, disassembled, and moved. Leaving tons of steel in the ground is not cost effective unless schedule is your main driver.
    - nradov 10y ago
      Thanks for the correction. I know there have been tunnels where TBMs were left behind but apparently that's less common than retrieval. http://www.nysun.com/new-york/after-work-done-drills-likely-will-be-buried/46894/ http://www.nysun.com/new-york/after-work-done-drills-likely-... http://www.madehow.com/Volume-6/Tunnel.html http://www.madehow.com/Volume-6/Tunnel.html
- tshannon 10y ago
  If uncertainty is such a big problem, aren't there any technology solutions for it? Can radar be used to tell the density of materials along the whole boring route?
alex_duf 10y ago
If I can agree that building tunnels for public transport may be a good idea, building tunnels to encourage people to use their car doesn't sounds like it's taking humanity in the right direction. I'd rather see disruption to encourage people to use their bicycle and walking. Granted American cities aren't build for that but it's never too late. http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_speck_4_ways_to_make_a_city_more_walkable http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_speck_4_ways_to_make_a_city_mo...
- paulddraper 10y ago
  Bicycles and walking are slower, more subject to weather conditions, and work for a smaller portion of the population.
  - alex_duf 10y ago
    that means changing the design of our cities, and ensure that people who can't use cycling or walking can make use of public transport and / or individual cars if necessary. The vast majority of people could live in a situation where individual transportation isn't necessary. In fact, cities like London are showing it's possible, simply by making cars unaffordable.
_ph_ 10y ago
Here in Munich, Germany, public transport in the city center is based on a very small number of tunnels for underground trains. There is one main tunnel for city traversal, and about 5 or so underground tunnels. Together they bear a large part of the commuters traffic. Currently, the construction for another large train tunnel is about to begin. From that perspective, one wouldn't need an extremely large number of tunnels to vastly enhance traffic across a dense populated area. So when Musk is building tunnels, they aren't direct replacements for highways. They are either train tunnels, or hyperloop tunnels, or if they are car tunnels, they are for autonomous electric cars, which are driving literally bumper to bumper across the tunnels. So they would carry much more traffic in a more organized way than the normal highway. So it all comes down to whether he manages to improve the boring process to a point where people would want to digg more tunnels as with current methods.
owenversteeg 10y ago
Ok, so one thing I've noticed reading the 120 comments in this thread and the article is that literally nobody knows anything about boring, or tunnels. Musk knows nothing, he put someone in charge who knows nothing, the reporter knows nothing, and the commenters here even admit they are completely guessing and know nothing about boring/tunnels. I definitely don't know anything about tunnels. It's a joke that came to life, and it's a pretty funny one, and I'm fairly confident Musk can make improvements, but I'd still like to know something about the whole process. I assume someone here knows something about this, or at least can find out, so here's my wishlist: - Has there been any improvement in boring in the last 50 years? The frequently-repeated statement that it hasn't improved would be quite shocking to me since at the very least I'd expect safety to improve. - What are the maintenance costs of tunnels like as compared to surface roads? - What are the big costs in the industry? The article hinted that Musk picked up a boring machine for 90% off $15MM, or $1.5MM, which seems extremely cheap given that even small size tunnels in urban areas can cost more than one -billion- US dollars per mile. - Is there enough boreable space under our cities that this is doable? I know Musk says he wants to go deep, but even at very deep depths you run into problems of sand, boulders, geography, etc, etc.
- sschueller 10y ago
  There has been a lot of improvements in boring. [1] [2] [1] http://www.lexpose.ch/2013/02/gotthard-base-tunnel-inside-swiss-innovation/ http://www.lexpose.ch/2013/02/gotthard-base-tunnel-inside-sw... [2] https://www.herrenknecht.com/en/products/core-products/tunnelling/gripper-tbm.html https://www.herrenknecht.com/en/products/core-products/tunne...
- owenversteeg 10y ago
  Answering my own question, bit by bit: It looks like there have in fact been improvements in tunnel creation in the last 50 years. Examples: - NYC Third Water Tunnel, under construction since 1970. 24 deaths, the vast majority of which were decades ago as safety improved. In fact, the first tunnels were blasted and drilled; the newer ones are made with a boring machine. - St. Gotthard Road Tunnel, 1969-1980, just one lane in each direction and 2 deaths per mile. A comparable transportation tunnel today in the area is the Gotthard Base Tunnel, 0.2 deaths per mile. - Older tunnels apparently caused thousands of workers to die due to silica exposure. It also seems that tunnels are more dangerous than roads per mile by many orders of magnitude. For example, the aforementioned Gotthard Road Tunnel had over 875 accidents and 30 deaths in a span of just 24 years.
ForrestN 10y ago
This is a bit odd considering that Musk knows that even a substantial minority of self-driving cars on the road would dramatically reduce traffic. Does he think we can deploy tunnels in every city before we can get to, say 25% self driving cars? I'm not saying there aren't other benefits to reshaping the urban landscape this way, but traffic is a problem he is already in the process of solving in a way that seems much more likely to scale to, well, anywhere, without having to do anything to existing infrastructure. And anyway, once we get to something like 25% autonomous cars, won't the safety revolution put pressure on the government to quickly phase out permits for human-driven cars?
rhinoceraptor 10y ago
What happens when there is an earthquake?
robotjosh 10y ago
This is a good investment. Cities spend a lot of their budget on roads. A lot of cities are gridlocked with no room to widen existing roads. All he has to do is find a way to tunnel a little bit cheaper and he will find work for his tunnel machine.
Paul-ish 10y ago
Interesting idea. If we move transit infrastructure underground, we could reclaim a lot of surface space for pedestrians and green spaces.
alexmingoia 10y ago
This is stupid. LA roads are jammed so Musk's big idea is to build even more expensive roads underground. The cult of personality around him is comical...
deleted 10y ago
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rwhitman 10y ago
I don't understand how he gets away with digging that big of a hole in the ground in Los Angeles County without some serious assessment and permit filing being done first. The rock is very soft and we have earthquakes here. It took decades to approve the subway line down Wilshire Blvd. I'm assuming SpaceX gets special permission to do anything it wants, but it's still very surprising that they can just start digging a giant hole in the parking lot without some opposition
- criddell 10y ago
  According to the article, you don't need a permit to dig on your own property. He's going through the process you describe for when he hits the property line.
  - rwhitman 10y ago
    So, I talked to an engineer for a neighboring SoCal city... He said there's typically a grading and demolition permit needed, structural engineer needs to sign off on the integrity of the pit, earthquake assessment, Dig Alert for utilities etc. But because he's Musk, SpaceX likely gets fast tracked for permits from the city of Hawthorne. Found some details on the nitty gritty of it: http://www.dailynews.com/business/20170130/elon-musks-tunnel-goals-may-be-too-lofty-even-for-the-eccentric-billionaire http://www.dailynews.com/business/20170130/elon-musks-tunnel...
ozborn 10y ago
Can somebody who is an engineer or is familiar with the tunneling process explain why boring machines are used for tunneling rather than explosives? It seems to me the primary energy costs of tunneling are associated with converting hard earth/boulders/bedrock into rubble and then transporting that rubble out of the tunnel. Thus explosives (if properly and efficiently delivered) could deliver far more energy than a boring machine in the same time period. What I am proposing is that instead of using a boring machine to use some kind of mobile gun platform instead. The platform would analyze with GPR the best place to fire an explosive round (through the partially cleared rubble) into the untouched earth behind it. It would then analyze the placement of the round and (depending on the ability of the round to adjust the direction of the explosive charge) detonate to increase the tunnel size. The rubble would act as a buffer to lessen the effects of the explosion inside the tunnel. Rubble could be cleared by conventional means, although electric trucks would be superior from a toxic fumes perspective. Tunnel stability would have to be handled separately. Appreciate any feedback on where I am going wrong. I am guessing there may be cost issues with the explosive, inability for rounds from the gun to penetrate very far or accurately into the earth or safety issues with explosives that would slow things down. The latter could be dealt with though if the gun platform and trucks were self-driving.
- jerven 10y ago
  Mud, most of the tunnel boring machines dig through mud. Mud does not need any more fracturing, its quite easy to dig through as is. Its really hard to dig tunnels in it because it likes to collapse on top of you. It's like why do you use a drill and screws to hang a picture instead of a handgun some 9mm's and a nail.
jsat 10y ago
To those interested in arguably the most ambitious boring operation in progress, behold, Bertha in Seattle: http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Projects/Viaduct/About/FollowBertha http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Projects/Viaduct/About/FollowBertha
gojomo 10y ago
Two synergistic factors with Musk's other interests, that I'm surprised BW's deep-dive doesn't mention: * zero-emission cars may make tunnel ventilation a much easier problem * autonomous cars may far better utilize narrow tunnels (with clearances that'd be too accident-prone for human drivers) Taken together, tunnels-for-autonomous-fully-electric-vehicles could be far more practical, for longer distances, than they've been for traditional cars.
blizkreeg 10y ago
Serious question - keep aside flying cars and underground tunnels. We know materials science has advanced significantly over the past few decades. Why can't we figure out a way to suspend/elevate (using strong cables or beams) large tubes 40-50 feet above us -- at least along major arteries that are free and clear of buildings and other overhead structures. Dedicated vehicles or conveyer belts or some such mode of transportation would ply in these tubes transporting people, with elevators to get people up and back down. As compared to flying cars and tunnels, why wouldn't this be more cost-economical and speedier?
viggity 10y ago
By the time he could actually drill all of these tunnels, won't traffic/gridlock be a moot point. By the time it takes him to dig all these tunnels (10-15 years?) everyone will have self driving cars, ones that can network and move around trouble spots, that don't have to wait for stoplights, that don't randomly slam on the brakes causing an aberration of slow traffic in the middle of an otherwise steady stream?
thrillgore 10y ago
So how is he planning on paying for all the TBM work involved? Make it a private toll road? That will totally work.
boznz 10y ago
Sorry Elon, you can't get away from Trump this way.. Now if you could get to Mars :-)
woodandsteel 10y ago
The article says, "Musk thinks flying cars are a dumb idea" So we're not going to get a flying version of the Tesla? Darn. It also says, "We have skyscrapers with all these levels, and we have a flat, two-dimensional road system,” he says. “When everyone decides to go into these structures and then exits them at the same time, you’re going to get jammed.” Tunnels, on the other hand, would represent a 3D transportation network." Now that makes some sense.
- astrodust 10y ago
  He might be a smart guy but this tunnel idea is completely idiotic. Digging tunnels is easy. Digging tunnels that can carry vehicular traffic, that meet safety standards, that don't disrupt the buildings above them, that don't shift or collapse due to seismic faults, that don't interfere with or collide into other infrastructure is hard. If tunnels were easy, if tunnels were the future, the clusterfuck of crazy that is the Seattle tunnel wouldn't have happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaskan_Way_Viaduct_replacement_tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaskan_Way_Viaduct_replacemen...
decker 10y ago
I have to wonder how effective he will be at advancing tunnel boring using existing technology. From the article, it sounds like he has no figures of the cost breakdown on a standard tunnel boring project such as the fixed costs like moving and assembling the machine, or the variable costs like how much is spent on materials, labor, etc. Given that, I'm skeptical that he can bring down the cost of tunneling since this approach seems to eschew a first principals based approach to the problem. I'm guessing that he really just wants to be able to build a federally subsidized tunnel from LAX to the SpaceX office so he doesn't have to sit in traffic.

279 points by davidiach 10y ago

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

kavok 10y ago
A tunnel doesn't have to specifically be for cars. Could run busses, trains, etc.. More electric cars on the road though wouldn't output more pollution around the road.
- tgb 10y ago
  Electric cars are a good match for tunnels: ventilating the tunnel enough for a whole lot of combustion engines to use is a real cost.
  - intrasight 10y ago
    And if the tunnel was limited to electric cars (likely), then that would boost Tesla.
Fricken 10y ago
That's the good thinking, but because it isn't intuitive it often gets kicked to the curb by bad thinking. More roads = less traffic, right? right? No? One could also use tunnels to build subways and presumably Hyperloops. I wonder, though, about why big infrastructure projects so horrendously expensive, in America in particular. There are developers, planners, consultants, politicians, unions, contractors, sub contractors, sub-sub contractors, and they're all out for all they can get. There are lawyers every step of the way. Nobody communicates well. Small hang-ups at the wrong place send the entire operation grinding to a halt. Can this be fixed? Is a big dumb tunnel digging operation the point of entry for infrastructure construction disruption in America? That would be nice. We're good at moving the bits around. We suck at atoms. Or is Musk setting himself up to be the next Robert Moses? Someone with the capability to move mountains, but not terribly discriminating about whether or not a given mountain should be moved. Musk doesn't talk like someone who's ever had a discussion with an Urban planner about the real reasons as to why our transportation problems are problems.
- nradov 10y ago
  US infrastructure construction costs are among the highest in the world. There appear to be multiple root causes including: extensive legal protections for private property owners, environment reviews and lawsuits, need to work across multiple government boundaries, labor laws, union work rules. https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-08/why-u-s-infrastructure-costs-so-much https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-08/why-u-s-i... http://www.citylab.com/work/2014/04/7-reasons-us-infrastructure-projects-cost-way-more-they-should/8799/ http://www.citylab.com/work/2014/04/7-reasons-us-infrastruct...
mwill 10y ago
Perhaps not a problem for Musk who also builds cars.
TulliusCicero 10y ago
Presumably the tunnels could also be used for transit, or maybe even walking/biking in some cases.
AYBABTME 10y ago
Tunnels will be required on Mars to shield from radiation. Getting a head start on the technology while on Earth only makes sense. Pretty much everything he plans is in perspective of having a dual use: will it be needed on Mars - SpaceX's true goal? I hate to say the word but, it's all about synergies.
RichardHeart 10y ago
If you move into a bigger house, your hallways will not fill up with more traffic. Currently humans are required at least 1 per car. Thus the housing and employment of those humans is more of a limiting factor on road demand, or perhaps car ownership or desire to drive somewhere, more so than availability of roads.
- syberspace 10y ago
  Your hallways may not fill up with people, but all your new closets, cupboards, wardrobes, drawers and whatnot will fill up with "stuff"
- ericd 10y ago
  If roads are clearer, then people tend to move farther from work, which increases the number of cars on the road at any given time. Then the roads clog up again. Increased highway construction has been enabling people to move farther and farther out into exurbs (which people think will be nice places to live, and cheaper, but that turn out create rather shabby quality of life compared to walkable cities).
  - Turing_Machine 10y ago
    "(which people think will be nice places to live, and cheaper, but that turn out create rather shabby quality of life compared to walkable cities)." "Shabby quality of life" by whose standards? The people who actually live there? I think not. If life in the suburbs actually sucked, people simply wouldn't stay there. It's not like they're given a one-way exit visa when they leave the city. They could move back any time they wanted. But, as a group, they never do. The reason they don't is because they find the amenities found in the suburbs (in specific, safety, cleanliness, room for their possessions, privacy, and better schools) preferable to those found in the cities. "Preferable" here means preferable by their standards, which are not the same as those of a single 22 year old programmer, or a single 30-something art connoisseur, or...
jessriedel 10y ago
Induced demand often happens, but certainly not always. It just depends on latent demand and network effects. More importantly, the appearance of induced demand is not a general argument against building roads! People get value out of getting to places. If we build road B intending to relieve congestion on road A, but road A stays just as congested, we nevertheless have enabled people to get places with road B that they would not otherwise have been able to reach. That increases utility. All of this applies to mass transit as well. The BART is currently at capacity during rush hour; if a parallel transit line was built, this would probably fill up with people without reducing congestion on BART, but it would still be creating value!
- elbigbad 10y ago
  Do you happen to have any examples of where induced demand has not happened? My understanding is that it is pretty much guaranteed, especially in larger cities. I think New York's bridges and tunnels are the canonical examples of this. I say pretty much because I assume there must be cases where it didn't happen, but I am unaware of them.
  - tgb 10y ago
    Maybe induced demand has always happened, in the sense of demand increasing when the product is more available. But it's plenty common for the amount that demand increases to be less than the amount of extra capacity available. Furthermore, is induced demand that bad? If you double the capacity and it again gets filled to the point of gridlock, well then at least twice as many people are now able to be in gridlock, which they apparently prefer to the alternatives.
    - mnw21cam 10y ago
      The example of when induced demand is bad is when it causes increased pollution. In many parts of the world, there is a deliberate movement towards avoiding building too many roads, in order to decrease road use and therefore pollution levels. However, a car sitting in traffic will produce much more pollution per mile than one travelling at 70mph on a clear road, so the thinking behind this may be flawed.
mason240 10y ago
The idea that we shouldn't build infrastructure because it will get used is one of the more silly talking points out there right now.
- Nav_Panel 10y ago
  Infrastructure projects should respond to the density and context of the neighborhood. Don't build a low-throughput highway between high density Manhattan and high density western Queens or it'll immediately become congested. Build a train instead. A bias toward highways in cities, which are inherently low throughput, has been the norm and also the problem over the last 80 years of urban infrastructure projects.
foobarrio 10y ago
Then why build roads at all? If N + 1 means more traffic than surely N - 1 means less? So 0 roads, no traffic! Seriously though isn't this a related rates problem? Adding roads adds capacity and also induces demand. Are the two in lockstep? Can the capacity added be greater than the demand induced?
- paulddraper 10y ago
  Not only that, but the more hyperloops we have, the more overburdened they will be. </s>
angry_napkin 10y ago
If you know 285 has an extra lane now, you'll go ahead and run that errand at a certain time that perhaps you wouldn't have otherwise. Fascinating stuff.
oftenwrong 10y ago
If a restaurant started giving out free food, you wouldn't be surprised when more people than usual went to eat there. Induced demand only happens when the road is underpriced. Any road can be made immune to induced demand by tolling at a price that reflects demand. Too much traffic? Raise the price. Looking a bit empty? Lower the price. Car dependence is only common in the US because drivers do not pay the true cost of driving. Many people could not afford to drive if they had to pay market price to use roads and parking. By disconnecting the cost of transportation from its use, we have evolved a society that is overly dependent on transportation, and that is overly sensitive to increases in transportation costs. This applies to all modes - not just cars.
Tiktaalik 10y ago
If Musk had talked with any expert in transportation at all he'd know that building a tunnel highway won't solve traffic problems in the long term. Either: A) He hasn't talked with any experts at all. B) He doesn't believe the experts. or C) He doesn't think inducing demand is a problem because he owns a car company. None of these possibilities are very good looks.
- jldugger 10y ago
  > C) He doesn't think inducing demand is a problem because he owns a car company. Just think how bad the smog would be on a car tunnel. Unless they limit it to zero emission vehicles....
paulddraper 10y ago
In economics terms, demand is a relationship between price and quantity demanded. Increasing the supply doesn't affect demand; it just changes the realized price and quantity to another place in the same demand relationship.
artumi-richard 10y ago
There has to be a ceiling to how much demand can be induced.
- marssaxman 10y ago
  One could view the US Interstate Highway System and its legacy of suburban sprawl as a massive, decades-long effort to reach that ceiling, but we don't appear to have run out of headroom yet.
tunesmith 10y ago
Induced demand is one of those things that always struck me as an abused concept. Yes, it happens, but it's impossible for it to be always true. New roads will attract more traffic, but only up to a point. There exist roads in the United States that aren't experiencing traffic jams at rush hour. If Induced Demand were a law, that wouldn't be true. So you can't just say that building new roads won't alleviate traffic, period. There are cases where it is true, and there are cases were adding new roads actually make traffic worse, but there are also cases where adding roads (or tunnels) will alleviate traffic.

throwanem 10y ago

Light rail solves urban congestion, too, and a city that doesn't already have a subway isn't all that likely also to be so densely involute that rights of way can't be secured for the trackage. Elevated electric trams are a thing, too, and require a much smaller ground footprint. Not that I don't get what he's saying, and I do get that existing and well proven systems aren't sexy, but I feel like either of those is going to be an easier sell, and a much faster implementation, than an underground system. There's infrastructure down there! That's what "infra" means. Easier not to have to work around that, if you can.

Synaesthesia 10y ago
There's reason why the US stopped investing in light rail. >The social and physical construction of suburban America really was quite complex. It was a very elaborate system, and clearly a massive social engineering project that has changed US society enormously. [27] Incidentally, I don’t have a personal objection to suburbs, in fact I live in one, but suburbanization is a different question. [28] It starts back in the 1940s with a literal conspiracy. I mean a conspiracy that went to court. The conspirators got a minor pat on the wrist however. >They were General Motors, Standard Oil of California and, I think, Firestone Rubber. The origins of suburbia reveal an attempt to take over a fairly efficient mass-transportation system in parts of California — the electric railways in Los Angeles and the like — and destroy them so as to shift energy use to fossil fuels and increase consumer demand for rubber, automobiles and trucks and so on. [29] It was a literal conspiracy. It went to court. The courts fined the corporations $5000, or something like that, probably equivalent to the cost of their victory dinner.[30] >But what happened in California started a process that then expanded — and in many ways. It included the interstate highway system. That was presented as part of the defense against the Russians. It was launched under the Interstate Defense Highway Act of 1956, and was intended to facilitate the movement of people and goods, troops and arms, and, allegedly, to prevent overpopulation in specific areas that could become the focus of nuclear attack. [31] The slogan of defense is the standard way of inducing the taxpayer to pay the cost of the next stage of the hi-tech economy of course.[32] That’s true whether it be computers, the Internet or, as in this case, a car-based transportation system.[33] >From the late 1940s, into and through the 50s, there developed a complex interaction between federal government, state and local government, real-estate interests, commercial interests and court decisions, which had the effect of undermining the mass transit system across the country. It was pretty efficient in certain areas. If you go back a century ago for example, it was possible to travel all around New England on electric railways. The first chapter of E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime documents it.[34] Subsequently, we saw the elimination of the mass transport system in favor of fossil fuel use, automobiles, roads and airplanes, which are also an offshoot of federal government. https://chomsky.info/20131001/ https://chomsky.info/20131001/

thecolorblue 10y ago

This is a good idea, and I like to watch Elon be ambitious, but it's probably pretty annoying to work at SpaceX right now. One day you show up to work and, where you used to park your car, there is a giant hole in the ground. It's there because the CEO of the company you work for, who is already splitting his time between two companies, wants to put some of his energy towards a third unrelated company. You are spending your time getting things into space and your CEO is literally heading in the opposite direction.

imron 10y ago
> You are spending your time getting things into space and your CEO is literally heading in the opposite direction. On the other hand, boring technology is almost certainly going to play a key role in the colonisation of Mars.
- mtgx 10y ago
  Yes, I'm sure that's at least part of the reason why he's doing this. He's trying to "learn" about digging (and reaching 5x, 10x higher efficiency) by doing a (hopefully) profitable business around it first.
- asendra 10y ago
  And solar panels. And electric vehicles..
  - wolfram74 10y ago
    Note though that solar panels are half as effective on mars given it's distance to the sun, nuclear is even more important on Mars than on Earth.
    - pitt1980 10y ago
      is that true? how much effectiveness are you gaining with the thinner atmosphere?

RodericDay 10y ago

I've become completely disenchanted with Elon Musk over time. I used to be a huge fan and cheerleader, and enthusiastically pointed to him as inspiration. But slowly I started to realize that I was buying a lot into carefully crafted propaganda. The way SpaceX used lawyers to keep PSLV at bay, all the while Musk gassed on about free markets and competition made me a bit mad. Then he had that quip where he said he was "nauseatingly pro American" and that America was the biggest force for good the world had ever seen. Then he said he was a proud centrist and donated money to anti-environment republicans. And so on and so on. Accusing employees of shilling for unions. Misleading people about his level of technical expertise. Calling lane-assist "auto-pilot" for profit. At some point I realized that his "brilliant" approach to tech was essentially promising elite people that they could be ultra-green, better than vegetarians and hippies, while keeping the luxuries of sports cars, mansions with solar shingles, and rockets to mars. You don't have to do anything other than express support for him, and you're already better than people making personal sacrifices for the environment. Amazing! I now think of his "luxury-first" approach as "trickle-down environmentalism". And I think it will be about as successful as its economic counterpart.

Synaesthesia 10y ago
I had a similar epiphany about Apple. Basically corporations are all profit seeking entities and we shouldn't look to them to be our saviour. It's not really their agenda.
RichardHeart 10y ago
His company makes the quickest, safest family car ever made. His rocket company has greatly reduced the cost of getting into space. Now he wants to revolutionize tunneling. Maybe it's good that you separate the man from the great achievements of the engineers that actually design and build the great things. It's not the CEO's job to be an engineer. Seems like Elon is doing his CEO job fabulously.
AYBABTME 10y ago
You've managed to let cynicism overcome the actual good his companies do. We now have good electric cars, we now can launch stuff to space at a fraction of the price. Assume that you're right and he's not that nice a person: still because of him we're now somewhere we would not be otherwise. I think what he brings to the table far outweight any thing like "doesn't like unions" or "is an opportunistic campaign donor".

jankotek 10y ago

In US the administrative cost makes boring very expensive. Technology is already solved problem.

deleted 10y ago

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jonstewart 10y ago

Hi, my name is Bruno Tesch and I've developed this great new pesticide. Would the government be interested in sponsoring my research?

uranian 10y ago

I consider this as one of his least bright thoughts. I really hoped he would come with a light rail with shuttles carrying (electrical) cars, containers etc.. This is a thought I had some 16 years ago in an attempt to solve traffic jams. I truly believe cars shouldn't drive on highroads. Unfortunately I don't have the contacts and financial power to even get close to the people who can accomplish this. If we have a world wide network of light rail, carrying electrical cars etc.. at a speed of about 500 mph it would really be more environmental friendly, as it would be a serious competition for polluting aircrafts. Imagine: Los Angeles -> San Fransisco in less than 1 hour, in your own car! I think Elon is one of the single few people in the world capable to make a start with this.

anonu 10y ago
The premise of what hes doing is "lets do it faster and cheaper"... If you could improve the boring process 10x, maybe people would look at digging tunnels in a completely new light!!! For example, the real problem with rail is getting right-of-way. With a cheap boring machine - your plans wouldn't be as difficult. As Musk put it, you got to think in 3D....
- AlexandrB 10y ago
  Actually you should think in 4D. In the future all those tunnels require maintenance that is much more complex and expensive than maintenance for surface roads. If the US is not able to keep its roads in good condition (and in many places it's not), how is building more expensive roads underground going to solve the problem long term?
  - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
    Roads need maintenance almost exclusively because of the weather - sun and rain, heat and cold. Underground, none of those things. We have tunnels today that are a century old with only minimal maintenance, right?
    - jcranmer 10y ago

metafex 10y ago

This is just a wild guess, but could there be more to it than just solving traffic problems? I mean, the best solution for a permanent settlement on Mars would be underground, as to shield from radiation etc. It's a funny thought, but it would make sense to aquire experience with large earth-moving operations to improve on the technology and study the feasibility.

AYBABTME 10y ago
Pretty sure he stated that being a large reason why they're doing that.
wyldfire 10y ago
s/earth/dirt/ ;)
- itp 10y ago
  I think it'll be neat to continue to use the word "earth" as a quaint anachronism in some long distant future. A great opportunity to explain to kids that humanity was once limited to a single astronomical body... (The optimist in me is leaking out.)
  - btkramer9 10y ago
    When I was a child and learned the name of our planet was Earth, I was extremely disappointed. How could we possible name our own planet after something as boring as 'dirt'?
  - oblio 10y ago
    Heh... Horsepower. Candela. We have a lot of precedents ;)
AJ007 10y ago
It is also possible the tunnels could be privately financed and owned, which could have long term advantages for Tesla.

fiatjaf 10y ago

I bet all Elon Musk admirers will start hating him because he is getting along with Trump.

jkelsey 10y ago
Hating? No. But certainly disappointed and disillusioned. With ethno-supremacist folks like Bannon and Miller having such high-level spots in the administration, and their executive orders targeting legal residents and immigrants based on nothing other than xenophobic and racist world-vews, folks like Elon can't expect not to get mud on their reputation when they help legitimatize the Trump administration's actions.
boznz 10y ago
You can tweet all you want how much you deplore trumps policies but the only way you will change them is to get in front of his face and try and counter the dicks currently advising him.. Not a job I would want! At least Musk can say he tried.

thecrumb 10y ago

I see this as a way he can easily skirt current road regulations. He can build these roads more suitable for self driving cars which would be a win for him.

monodeldiablo 10y ago

I generally find Elon Musk to be an offputting individual, but I struggle to disagree with most of his ideas. In dense urban areas, skyrocketing property costs and the erosion of eminent domain have made mass transit expansion unsustainable in terms of time and money. Tunneling under it all has the potential to sidestep so many costs. To do so, of course, he'll need to reduce the costs of tunnel boring by an order of magnitude. As the economist quoted in the article noted, though, the construction industry has been famously stagnant for decades. Commoditizing boring machines would bring down costs substantially. Speeding them up would also reduce costs. And if he gets costs down by a factor of two or more, he could be the preferred vendor for a truly massive market worldwide. It might be his least crazy idea, honestly.

joshmarlow 10y ago
Pure curiosity - what do you find offputting?
- monodeldiablo 10y ago
  SUBJECTIVITY WARNING! I struggle to trust the motives of anybody who is so certain of so many things. Especially one who acts so impulsively. He's clearly very bright, probably brighter than most smart people, but he's not brighter than all smart people. Yet he frequently presumes to be, even boasting of being a "nano-manager". He has definitely bought into his own hype. But when you have billions in the bank, I guess you can get away with that. Bonus round: He's also surprisingly thin-skinned and petty. Oh, and he stuffs his boards with family members and cronies.
  - joshmarlow 10y ago
    Thanks for the reply (and the subjectivity warning). I agree that the hype, nano-managing, etc is offputting and all else being equal I probably would be very skeptical of such a person. That being said, he does seem to generate results, which makes me think of him as an anomaly that I can't categorize. I have mixed feelings about the shades of nepotism. Hiring cousin Bob because he's your cousin irrespective of qualifications is definitely a bad idea; hiring cousin Stephanie who is qualified and you know you have a good relationship with where you can communicate and you can rely on them, is quite another. Disclosure: I've not read enough to have an opinion on if his family hires are Bobs or Stephanies - just playing devil's advocate.

redsummer 10y ago

The Boring Company's leader is called Steve Davis. Musk is obviously a keen student of Snooker lore.

6d6b73 10y ago

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

chadgeidel 10y ago
And before the nay-sayers come in - no one is proposing destroying entire cities and rebuilding from the ground up. Now that we have that straw man out of the way we can start talking about transit (rail, bus, bike, walk) and the immense amount of space dedicated solely to single passenger cars and trucks.
- Nav_Panel 10y ago
  I think we'll be seeing LA's subway development as a model for the future of infrastructure. The big problem with urban highways is that if you build the highway first and do not include higher-density transit, the neighborhood develops in a suburb-esque highway fashion, as distance of the house/apartment from the highway exit doesn't make a huge difference in commute time, whereas a train commute requires you to walk that last leg. The issue I imagine many planners are facing is "how do we build useful, medium to high density public transit that actually serves a decent amount of people?" And it's a hard problem, because the neighborhood layouts are designed for highways. New transit projects other than highways face opposition because they don't appear useful to most of the residents. I went to LA recently and rode the subway a bunch, into Downtown LA and back out to my friend's more suburban apartment near Universal City. Once, I took an Uber and the driver pointed out to me all of the new higher-density residential development taking place around the edges of the urban core (and noted it improved the safety of the area dramatically, "people are walking around now! no more gangs!"). Basically, the neighborhood was reshaping toward a more transit-friendly environment after some useful public transit was implemented. The current problem is convincing cities to fund transit lines when they seem to "go to nowhere useful". If LA continues to be successful at building subways, they'll provide a great piece of evidence and support for building new higher-density transit in other cities throughout the country.

aedron 10y ago

Cool. With tunnels we could have a fresh start and build the network with electric, automatic vehicles supported as first class (or the only) citizens.

dahart 10y ago

We can't afford to maintain the surface roads & bridges we already built, and tunnels are more expensive and require more maintenance by like an order of magnitude. (I made that up, but I'm pretty sure it's right, to within an order of magnitude... but if tunnels are 1000x more expensive, then I'm wrong). I can admire someone who has the resources to exclude himself from the traffic problem instead taking action to try and solve the whole problem for everyone. He could do what other billionaires do and buy a helicopter. Still, the only way that tunnels can "obviously" solve the traffic problem is if they're so cheap that we can easily build more of them than we ever need -- and we can't currently do that with roads, even if we have the space. New York and Boston and other places have some tunnels, and also terrible traffic. If we really do have the resources to take on an infrastructure project of this magnitude, wouldn't it be worth re-evaluating why we're driving, and reducing that instead? The problem with traffic is the traffic. If there wasn't all the traffic, there wouldn't be congestion, we wouldn't need more roads & tunnels. The contractor end of a tunnel building project might be a good deal though. Convince enough people it's a good idea, and you've got big business for decades to come.

noja 10y ago
Isn't the problem with traffic (in most places) that people are using the roads at the same time?
- XaspR8d 10y ago
  Yeah, pursuing a culture shift that discourages pointlessly-standardized working hours and encourages remote work when possible might even have a tangible effect on traffic. That said traffic is often one of those unfortunate predator-prey type dynamics, where congestion being reduced often encourages more folks to drive until the system returns to an (unfortunate) equilibrium...
- dahart 10y ago
  Yeah, totally. At least that's one way to look at it. There are multiple right answers. Lowering driving rates helps, flexible work hours helps, increasing public transportation helps. Any of these would diffuse traffic jams, and no there's no one single problem and no one single solution -- unless nobody drove at all. But that's why building tunnels doesn't seem like the best first-line defense. It's expensive, and it's fixed and inflexible, and doesn't reduce demand. It could help, but it could also hurt unless tunnels are less expensive to build & maintain than roads. I was trying to be playfully sarcastic by saying the problem with traffic is traffic. Most larger cities in the US, there's only a traffic congestion problem during rush hour, accidents, and road construction. (The city I live in does enough road construction every year, enough that it's widely considered to be a top contributing factor to traffic congestion.) LA traffic, which is what the article referred to, is worse than that, it's density is getting high enough that traffic congestion lasts all day in some places, rush hour is not just slow but crushing, and accidents can and do routinely prevent tens of thousands of people from working. It does seem like there must be a large economic cost to LA's traffic.

angry_napkin 10y ago

I get the feeling we're supposed to be breaking up with Elon Musk. Slowly of course.

emodendroket 10y ago

Uh-huh. I'm kind of tired of credulous reporters puffing up every idea that comes into this guy's head.

DonnyV 10y ago

I talked a little about this last week. I think he wants the tech to bore a hole close to the core of Mars and set off a nuke. This would restart natural lava flow in Mars which would then create self sustaining magnetic field. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13598876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13598876

Robotbeat 10y ago
That is not possible. At some point, your tunnel starts collapsing under the pressure and the great heat makes tunneling incredibly difficult. The deepest we've ever gotten on Earth is the Kola Superdeep Borehole (a Soviet project) that got 12km deep. On Mars, with the lower gravity and cooler center, we may get about triple that before reaching similar constraints in pressure and temperature. But no way you can get all the way to the core. Also, in order to melt the core, it'd take an insane amount of energy. Mars' core is 6-21% of the mass of the planet. Mars has a mass of 6 * 10^23kg. Heat capacity of iron is 450J/(kg * degree C). To heat up the iron by 1000 degrees C (rough estimate of what'd be required, though even if this is off by an order of magnitude, it won't change the conclusion), you'd need to provide at least: 1000 * .06 * 6E23kg * 450J/kg = 1.62 * 10E28 Joules. That's equivalent to 3.9 * 10^12 Megatons of TNT. In other words, it'd take about a trillion H-bombs to do what you say. Not feasible, clearly!!! Luckily, that's not required. You can simply build a superconducting cable around the planet. The ambient temperature is already near the critical temperature of some of our highest performing superconductors, but because the cable (or, likely, a series of large cables in parallel to keep the local field at the surface of the superconductor below the critical field strength) will be large, insulating it very well should not be a problem, and the energy needed to run the cryocoolers could be provided by solar panels installed on top of the cable. (Superconductors also can carry more current if you keep them colder, so it's usually a good idea to operate well below the critical temperature anyway.) This would be pretty easy to do, easier than the initial terraforming steps (i.e. raising the surface pressure by melting/subliming the ice caps and heating the regolith via albedo modification, super greenhouse gases, giant space mirrors, or Musk's favorite pulsed fusion over the poles). The amount of material required isn't that high, either. And the cable can also provide a planet-circling electrical grid and can provide vast amounts of seasonal storage capacity (actually, multi-decade storage capacity), thus negating the need for grid-level storage on Mars (or actually, the grid would literally be its own storage mechanism!). But all this is kind of besides the point: planetary atmospheres tend to do the actual heavy lifting of radiation shielding. Earth's atmosphere is far more important than our magnetic field in lowering the radiation dose on the Earth's surface. And while in absence of a magnetic field the atmosphere is slowly stripped, that process takes hundreds of millions of years.

sunjain 10y ago

Isn't this the same principle that subway/bart trains in some cities use? He is right, it is time to increase apaption of this 50+ yr old idea and apply it to other modes of transportation. Not only you operate in 3D, there is less disruption to existing inhabitants and roads.

shabble 10y ago

My laymen's understanding (from various documentaries & articles) is that the expensive part of tunnel construction is managing the transitions between different materials. Boring through hard rock might be slow, but hitting pockets of mud, loose rock and other things (especially when unexpected) can seriously mess up the works, and cause massive delays due to machine damage or reassessment and reinforcement/collapse mitigation. AIUI many (most?) big TBMs are heavily bespoke systems specifically built for their planned route, and it's not unusual to just scrap them after the job is done. So, it's not immediately clear that speeding up the 'easy' part will have a huge impact on the overall outcome, if the bulk of the time & uncertainty is in the hard bits. I wonder if there are any currently underused means of sensing some distance ahead get advanced warning of nasty transitions?

nradov 10y ago
Often the TBM is just left behind in a spur tunnel after finishing the main excavation. It would be too expensive to disassemble and remove.
- abduhl 10y ago
  This is not correct. Most TBMs are advanced into a receiving pit or shaft, disassembled, and moved. Leaving tons of steel in the ground is not cost effective unless schedule is your main driver.
  - nradov 10y ago
    Thanks for the correction. I know there have been tunnels where TBMs were left behind but apparently that's less common than retrieval. http://www.nysun.com/new-york/after-work-done-drills-likely-will-be-buried/46894/ http://www.nysun.com/new-york/after-work-done-drills-likely-... http://www.madehow.com/Volume-6/Tunnel.html http://www.madehow.com/Volume-6/Tunnel.html
tshannon 10y ago
If uncertainty is such a big problem, aren't there any technology solutions for it? Can radar be used to tell the density of materials along the whole boring route?

alex_duf 10y ago

If I can agree that building tunnels for public transport may be a good idea, building tunnels to encourage people to use their car doesn't sounds like it's taking humanity in the right direction. I'd rather see disruption to encourage people to use their bicycle and walking. Granted American cities aren't build for that but it's never too late. http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_speck_4_ways_to_make_a_city_more_walkable http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_speck_4_ways_to_make_a_city_mo...

paulddraper 10y ago
Bicycles and walking are slower, more subject to weather conditions, and work for a smaller portion of the population.
- alex_duf 10y ago
  that means changing the design of our cities, and ensure that people who can't use cycling or walking can make use of public transport and / or individual cars if necessary. The vast majority of people could live in a situation where individual transportation isn't necessary. In fact, cities like London are showing it's possible, simply by making cars unaffordable.

_ph_ 10y ago

Here in Munich, Germany, public transport in the city center is based on a very small number of tunnels for underground trains. There is one main tunnel for city traversal, and about 5 or so underground tunnels. Together they bear a large part of the commuters traffic. Currently, the construction for another large train tunnel is about to begin. From that perspective, one wouldn't need an extremely large number of tunnels to vastly enhance traffic across a dense populated area. So when Musk is building tunnels, they aren't direct replacements for highways. They are either train tunnels, or hyperloop tunnels, or if they are car tunnels, they are for autonomous electric cars, which are driving literally bumper to bumper across the tunnels. So they would carry much more traffic in a more organized way than the normal highway. So it all comes down to whether he manages to improve the boring process to a point where people would want to digg more tunnels as with current methods.

owenversteeg 10y ago

Ok, so one thing I've noticed reading the 120 comments in this thread and the article is that literally nobody knows anything about boring, or tunnels. Musk knows nothing, he put someone in charge who knows nothing, the reporter knows nothing, and the commenters here even admit they are completely guessing and know nothing about boring/tunnels. I definitely don't know anything about tunnels. It's a joke that came to life, and it's a pretty funny one, and I'm fairly confident Musk can make improvements, but I'd still like to know something about the whole process. I assume someone here knows something about this, or at least can find out, so here's my wishlist: - Has there been any improvement in boring in the last 50 years? The frequently-repeated statement that it hasn't improved would be quite shocking to me since at the very least I'd expect safety to improve. - What are the maintenance costs of tunnels like as compared to surface roads? - What are the big costs in the industry? The article hinted that Musk picked up a boring machine for 90% off $15MM, or $1.5MM, which seems extremely cheap given that even small size tunnels in urban areas can cost more than one -billion- US dollars per mile. - Is there enough boreable space under our cities that this is doable? I know Musk says he wants to go deep, but even at very deep depths you run into problems of sand, boulders, geography, etc, etc.

sschueller 10y ago
There has been a lot of improvements in boring. [1] [2] [1] http://www.lexpose.ch/2013/02/gotthard-base-tunnel-inside-swiss-innovation/ http://www.lexpose.ch/2013/02/gotthard-base-tunnel-inside-sw... [2] https://www.herrenknecht.com/en/products/core-products/tunnelling/gripper-tbm.html https://www.herrenknecht.com/en/products/core-products/tunne...
owenversteeg 10y ago
Answering my own question, bit by bit: It looks like there have in fact been improvements in tunnel creation in the last 50 years. Examples: - NYC Third Water Tunnel, under construction since 1970. 24 deaths, the vast majority of which were decades ago as safety improved. In fact, the first tunnels were blasted and drilled; the newer ones are made with a boring machine. - St. Gotthard Road Tunnel, 1969-1980, just one lane in each direction and 2 deaths per mile. A comparable transportation tunnel today in the area is the Gotthard Base Tunnel, 0.2 deaths per mile. - Older tunnels apparently caused thousands of workers to die due to silica exposure. It also seems that tunnels are more dangerous than roads per mile by many orders of magnitude. For example, the aforementioned Gotthard Road Tunnel had over 875 accidents and 30 deaths in a span of just 24 years.

ForrestN 10y ago

This is a bit odd considering that Musk knows that even a substantial minority of self-driving cars on the road would dramatically reduce traffic. Does he think we can deploy tunnels in every city before we can get to, say 25% self driving cars? I'm not saying there aren't other benefits to reshaping the urban landscape this way, but traffic is a problem he is already in the process of solving in a way that seems much more likely to scale to, well, anywhere, without having to do anything to existing infrastructure. And anyway, once we get to something like 25% autonomous cars, won't the safety revolution put pressure on the government to quickly phase out permits for human-driven cars?

rhinoceraptor 10y ago

What happens when there is an earthquake?

robotjosh 10y ago

This is a good investment. Cities spend a lot of their budget on roads. A lot of cities are gridlocked with no room to widen existing roads. All he has to do is find a way to tunnel a little bit cheaper and he will find work for his tunnel machine.

Paul-ish 10y ago

Interesting idea. If we move transit infrastructure underground, we could reclaim a lot of surface space for pedestrians and green spaces.

alexmingoia 10y ago

This is stupid. LA roads are jammed so Musk's big idea is to build even more expensive roads underground. The cult of personality around him is comical...

deleted 10y ago

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rwhitman 10y ago

I don't understand how he gets away with digging that big of a hole in the ground in Los Angeles County without some serious assessment and permit filing being done first. The rock is very soft and we have earthquakes here. It took decades to approve the subway line down Wilshire Blvd. I'm assuming SpaceX gets special permission to do anything it wants, but it's still very surprising that they can just start digging a giant hole in the parking lot without some opposition

criddell 10y ago
According to the article, you don't need a permit to dig on your own property. He's going through the process you describe for when he hits the property line.
- rwhitman 10y ago
  So, I talked to an engineer for a neighboring SoCal city... He said there's typically a grading and demolition permit needed, structural engineer needs to sign off on the integrity of the pit, earthquake assessment, Dig Alert for utilities etc. But because he's Musk, SpaceX likely gets fast tracked for permits from the city of Hawthorne. Found some details on the nitty gritty of it: http://www.dailynews.com/business/20170130/elon-musks-tunnel-goals-may-be-too-lofty-even-for-the-eccentric-billionaire http://www.dailynews.com/business/20170130/elon-musks-tunnel...

ozborn 10y ago

Can somebody who is an engineer or is familiar with the tunneling process explain why boring machines are used for tunneling rather than explosives? It seems to me the primary energy costs of tunneling are associated with converting hard earth/boulders/bedrock into rubble and then transporting that rubble out of the tunnel. Thus explosives (if properly and efficiently delivered) could deliver far more energy than a boring machine in the same time period. What I am proposing is that instead of using a boring machine to use some kind of mobile gun platform instead. The platform would analyze with GPR the best place to fire an explosive round (through the partially cleared rubble) into the untouched earth behind it. It would then analyze the placement of the round and (depending on the ability of the round to adjust the direction of the explosive charge) detonate to increase the tunnel size. The rubble would act as a buffer to lessen the effects of the explosion inside the tunnel. Rubble could be cleared by conventional means, although electric trucks would be superior from a toxic fumes perspective. Tunnel stability would have to be handled separately. Appreciate any feedback on where I am going wrong. I am guessing there may be cost issues with the explosive, inability for rounds from the gun to penetrate very far or accurately into the earth or safety issues with explosives that would slow things down. The latter could be dealt with though if the gun platform and trucks were self-driving.

jerven 10y ago
Mud, most of the tunnel boring machines dig through mud. Mud does not need any more fracturing, its quite easy to dig through as is. Its really hard to dig tunnels in it because it likes to collapse on top of you. It's like why do you use a drill and screws to hang a picture instead of a handgun some 9mm's and a nail.

jsat 10y ago

To those interested in arguably the most ambitious boring operation in progress, behold, Bertha in Seattle: http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Projects/Viaduct/About/FollowBertha http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Projects/Viaduct/About/FollowBertha

gojomo 10y ago

Two synergistic factors with Musk's other interests, that I'm surprised BW's deep-dive doesn't mention: * zero-emission cars may make tunnel ventilation a much easier problem * autonomous cars may far better utilize narrow tunnels (with clearances that'd be too accident-prone for human drivers) Taken together, tunnels-for-autonomous-fully-electric-vehicles could be far more practical, for longer distances, than they've been for traditional cars.

blizkreeg 10y ago

Serious question - keep aside flying cars and underground tunnels. We know materials science has advanced significantly over the past few decades. Why can't we figure out a way to suspend/elevate (using strong cables or beams) large tubes 40-50 feet above us -- at least along major arteries that are free and clear of buildings and other overhead structures. Dedicated vehicles or conveyer belts or some such mode of transportation would ply in these tubes transporting people, with elevators to get people up and back down. As compared to flying cars and tunnels, why wouldn't this be more cost-economical and speedier?

viggity 10y ago

By the time he could actually drill all of these tunnels, won't traffic/gridlock be a moot point. By the time it takes him to dig all these tunnels (10-15 years?) everyone will have self driving cars, ones that can network and move around trouble spots, that don't have to wait for stoplights, that don't randomly slam on the brakes causing an aberration of slow traffic in the middle of an otherwise steady stream?

thrillgore 10y ago

So how is he planning on paying for all the TBM work involved? Make it a private toll road? That will totally work.

boznz 10y ago

Sorry Elon, you can't get away from Trump this way.. Now if you could get to Mars :-)

woodandsteel 10y ago

The article says, "Musk thinks flying cars are a dumb idea" So we're not going to get a flying version of the Tesla? Darn. It also says, "We have skyscrapers with all these levels, and we have a flat, two-dimensional road system,” he says. “When everyone decides to go into these structures and then exits them at the same time, you’re going to get jammed.” Tunnels, on the other hand, would represent a 3D transportation network." Now that makes some sense.

astrodust 10y ago
He might be a smart guy but this tunnel idea is completely idiotic. Digging tunnels is easy. Digging tunnels that can carry vehicular traffic, that meet safety standards, that don't disrupt the buildings above them, that don't shift or collapse due to seismic faults, that don't interfere with or collide into other infrastructure is hard. If tunnels were easy, if tunnels were the future, the clusterfuck of crazy that is the Seattle tunnel wouldn't have happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaskan_Way_Viaduct_replacement_tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaskan_Way_Viaduct_replacemen...

decker 10y ago

I have to wonder how effective he will be at advancing tunnel boring using existing technology. From the article, it sounds like he has no figures of the cost breakdown on a standard tunnel boring project such as the fixed costs like moving and assembling the machine, or the variable costs like how much is spent on materials, labor, etc. Given that, I'm skeptical that he can bring down the cost of tunneling since this approach seems to eschew a first principals based approach to the problem. I'm guessing that he really just wants to be able to build a federally subsidized tunnel from LAX to the SpaceX office so he doesn't have to sit in traffic.