14 ms·

The costs of tunneling are like FAR more expensive than most think. Breaking, excavating, and supporting rock is slow, time and cost heavy, and precarious work.

• throwaway2016a 10y ago
  > unless there are serious advances in rock boring techniques I'm pretty sure Elon Musk doesn't enter a market unless he intends to do just that. Edit: I got downvoted a bit but it is his MO. He takes things that are expensive and makes them cheaper. For what it's worth though, I do think the tunnels in that video are ridiculous.
  • astrodust 10y ago
    And concrete production? And underground hazard detection? And coordination with city infrastructure? And...
    • 27182818284 10y ago
      Honestly though these same sentences came up around Teslas too. And battery production? And crash test safety? And coordination with NHTSA?
      • astrodust 10y ago
        People made electric cars before Tesla and they'll make cars after. People made rockets before SpaceX and they'll make them after. He's cut component costs on the Tesla by maybe 70%. On the SpaceX project it's more like 80% compared to the highest cost competitor. Both of these are huge achievements. The problem with tunnels is they're not cars, not rockets, not anything like he's ever done before. If he had a functioning Hyperloop system, if he'd proven he can build out infrastructure on a geographic scale and not just product from a factory I'd be more likely to agree with you. This is a bad idea, a bad project, and a total waste of time.
        • deleted 10y ago
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        • acchow 10y ago
          I really, really hope I get to see you eat your words in 30 years.
          • astrodust 10y ago
            I have to struggle to think of a dystopian future any more hellacious and soul-crushing than Musk's vision here. It's just tripling down on the concept of living a life centered around the car. Another step to eliminating all human interaction in the course of your daily life. If, by some stroke of genius and fluke of luck, this thing does get built it will go down in history as the most absurd thing ever constructed. Then perhaps a hundred years after it goes bankrupt someone will be drilling down there and hit a tunnel that nobody knew existed and re-discover its brief and absurd history just like Chicago has done with their own boring company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tunnel_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tunnel_Company
    • throwaway2016a 10y ago
      You could change... > And concrete production? And underground hazard detection? And coordination with city infrastructure? And... to... > And battery production, and driving hazard detection, and coordinating with the FAA and NASA, and rockets, and... It's not guaranteed success (not even remotely) but if I had to bet on anyone... You act like Musk does all the work himself. If he wanted to he could hire the best and brightest in each of those areas and they can work in parallel. I don't even know if the guy is a good engineer. But I'm pretty sure to have the success he has had he knows how to inspire them.
      • astrodust 10y ago
        I think he's gone one step too far on this project. Concrete is something that's necessarily expensive to produce, there's inescapable costs in the production cycle, so while he could probably make it 80% cheaper, he can't make it 99.9% cheaper.
        • throwaway2016a 10y ago
          I agree that video goes WAY too far. The tunnels in that video are absurd. I give way better odds of him actually sending people to Mars than building that absurd tunnel system. But he might succeed at something somewhere in between the tunnel he is boring in his parking lot and the video. Context: I lived in Boston during much of the Big Dig. Large tunnel projects scare the heck out of me as a tax payer.
          • astrodust 10y ago
            If he wants to get into the tunnelling business and start bidding on these "big dig" projects in various cities, I think he'll find some success. His engineering aptitude, his ability to think around problems, that's gotten him to where he is today. If he retreats from this and builds some kind of pneumatic tube system to transport goods, people, or whatever, he still might have a chance of a win. Those systems have been proposed, and in some cases actually built, and in many cases they've been great ideas. If he stubbornly insists on pursuing this batshit insane system of tubes he will fail, and he'll fail hard. There is not enough concrete in the world to make that many tunnels.
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• astrodust 10y ago
  Seattle's Bigger Dig is also worth studying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaskan_Way_Viaduct_replacement_tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaskan_Way_Viaduct_replacemen... Sending rockets to another solar system would be cheaper than the tunnels depicted in this video. I'm not even kidding. Where is all that material going to go? There's so many tunnels there you could build a small mountain with it. Maybe he can team up with some sea-steading outfit and build a small continent off the shore of San Francisco. You'd need three or four orders of magnitude reduction in tunnelling costs to make that anywhere near affordable, and even then you'd still have unbelievably complicated logistical issues. How much concrete do you need for those tunnels? What about ventilation? Safety procedures? Flood control? A single one of those could cost upwards of a billion dollars and I'm not sure there's a lot of cost savings by doing more of them, the complexities don't scale that way. The more you dig, the more you're likely to hit something expensive you're going to have to pay to fix.
  • tcoppi 10y ago
    Somehow I think Elon Musk has made it through the middlebrow dismissal phase of this if the concept has made it this far(to include actual digging in SpaceX's parking lot even).
    • astrodust 10y ago
      Somehow I think Elon, who's a pretty smart guy, has run out of challenges and is now resorting to trying crazier and crazier things. Next up: Elon's Space Elevator! Elon's Fusion Reactor! Elon's Teleporter!
    • rhino369 10y ago
      Musk could also be bullshitting to help get funding to create a boring machine that is just twice as good as what we have now. That would be a very profitable company and would reduce subway costs, etc. Musk's a sales technique to promise the moon (Mars really) and then use the cash to build a revolutionary but realistic company. SpaceX isn't going to colonize mars, but its putting satellites in orbit.
• phamilton 10y ago
  That's the entire point of The Boring Company. It's way more expensive than anyone expects. That's the problem they are trying to solve. The entire goal is "serious advances in rock boring techniques". That may be a lofty goal, but at least the message I got is that it is the one they want to reach.
  • bkeroack 10y ago
    It seems to me that there may be room for disruption. Currently every TBM (tunnel boring machine) is completely bespoke and is used for exactly one project and is then dismantled/recycled. They cost hundreds of millions of dollars each. I imagine there are relatively few manufacturers out there building TBMs. Actually in some ways it bears a resemblance to the spaceflight industry (expensive, custom-made, few players). Coincidence?
  • avn2109 10y ago
    >> "(personal opinion: there are none coming)" Former tunnel boring engineer here. There is a ton of room for innovation around tunnel boring machines built by the major manufacturers (primarily Herrenknecht and Robbins), around reliability, durability, ease of serviceability etc. I cannot emphasize enough how modern TBM's require an unbelievable amount of engineering attention, repair labor, spare parts infrastructure etc, similar to many super-early-stage fragile prototype technologies. Unfortunately TBM's are no longer early stage, but for some reason the technology is frozen at just-good-enough-to-barely-work." However I don't know if the economics will work out to fix any of these. Here are a couple of the big problems: * Most TBM's are semi- or fully-customized for a single job. This raises machine costs. It'd be better if there were only a small range of small-medium-large TBM's that work ~everywhere. * Most TBM's are fully assembled in the factory, smoketested aka turned on to make sure they work, disassembled and shipped to the job, then reassembled and used. This is not efficient, surely we can figure out a better way. * Most TBM's are entombed aka thrown away at the end of the job, because getting them out of the hole is expensive and difficult. * Changing the cutterheads is labor intensive and dangerous and requires highly trained very expensive humans, and it's slow. While you change the cutterheads, your billion dollar toy is sitting there doing nothing. * TBM architecture is highly dependent on geology. A slurry faced TBM that works in mixed soils is a totally different beast from a hard-rock TBM. It would be cool to have one machine that works in many geologies, perhaps with minimal or automated modifications. * TBM's require lots of care and feeding from a small army of humans. This raises job costs. * Topside support infrastructure such as slurry plants and ground freezing machinery comes from different vendors, often even from different countries. E.g. it's common to buy your topside slurry plant from the MS company, in France, while your ground freeze vendor might be Tachibana from Japan. Often each subsystem's engineers on site literally don't even speak a common language. Hilarity predictably ensues. Vertical integration would pay huge dividends here. Ideally Elon can mass-produce TBM's that just work out of the box for most jobs, and that are easier to work on. Then we can laugh him out of town for his stupid "put cars in tunnels" ideas and use his miracle machines to build sensible train tunnels.
• mrb 10y ago
  "unless there are serious advances" ...which is precisely what Musk is researching (bottleneck of boring machines): “We’re trying to dramatically increase the tunneling speed,” Musk says. “We want to know what it would take to get to a mile a week? Could it be possible?” See https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-02-16/elon-musk-is-really-boring https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-02-16/elon-musk...
• andrewprock 10y ago
  Maybe one day we could connect the individual pods, and even gasp route these "coupled cars" on rails above ground. I wonder if anyone has tried that yet?
  • badosu 10y ago
    That would be amazing! I wonder if car manufacturers wouldn't oppose it through some sneaky moves though...
  • namlem 10y ago
    Above ground rail isn't practical in urban areas. The video had silly car tunnels, but in practice, I'm sure the bulk of their business will be subway tunnels.
    • strange_quark 10y ago
      What? The Chicago L and NYC subways (both of which carry hundreds of millions of riders per year) have many, many miles of either at-grade or above-grade track.
• pveierland 10y ago
  Elon has stated that he believes it is possible to reduce tunnel creation speeds by 5 to 10 times, and that this is what they will work on doing: https://youtu.be/FPzpugrbwBE?t=120 https://youtu.be/FPzpugrbwBE?t=120
  • jodrellblank 10y ago
    possible to reduce tunnel creation speeds by 5 to 10 times He's going to involve the government? :|
• nostromo 10y ago
  > It'll be another moonshot company if you can pull it off. Your phrasing is interesting given that SpaceX announced sending two people around the moon next year. http://www.spacex.com/news/2017/02/27/spacex-send-privately-crewed-dragon-spacecraft-beyond-moon-next-year http://www.spacex.com/news/2017/02/27/spacex-send-privately-...
• hkmurakami 10y ago
  Anyone know what it's costing Tokyo Mwtro to keep digging tunnels at very large depths? They have great coverage yet they're still digging new lines.
  • ethbro 10y ago
    The issue with Tokyo is that the density supports metro expansions.
    • hkmurakami 10y ago
      Per distance costs should be theoretically comparable? (Regulation costs and labor coming to mind as drivers of cost differences)
      • ethbro 10y ago
        I was talking about the demand side / use more than the supply side / cost. But after a cursory examination of the statistics, Tokyo doesn't seem to have a measurably greater density by any common metric vs other cities. So I suppose my above was wrong. I'd guess the more reliable enablers are only sufficient density, coupled with good geology and a cooperating regulatory / permitting structure.
• pjc50 10y ago
  Not only the drilling, but the shoring up and walling of the tunnel. Also, people tend to be opposed to "move fast and break things" if they're likely to get buried under them.
  • ethbro 10y ago
    Until you remove the "they" by fully automating the system.
    • gpm 10y ago
      People also tend to object to "move fast and break things" when they, and their very expensive buildings, are on top of said things and get broken as a result.
      • ethbro 10y ago
        Point. Although I'd assume the majority of subway routes tend to be built under roads (also bad, but less terrible)? Not sure what the geology of San Francisco / California tends to be like, but I believe most of the Manhattan skyscrapers are anchored down to the bedrock. Which I'd expect would require cutting and reinforcing vs just "drill on through".
    • pjc50 10y ago
      Ultimately you want to put passengers in the tunnel, yes?
      • ethbro 10y ago
        From parent comment, I was guessing that the point of greatest risk would be during tunneling / initial bracing? Rather than final static bracing.
        • pjc50 10y ago
          I was thinking of the NATM failures: http://www.tunneltalk.com/images/laneCoveCollapse/Ref5-Heathrow-failures-highlight-NATM-misunderstandings-Shani-Wallis.pdf http://www.tunneltalk.com/images/laneCoveCollapse/Ref5-Heath... (which were during construction, but happened in "finished" sections, I believe. NATM applies a single pass of shotcrete to the cut rock surface)
• gsnedders 10y ago
  AFAIK, in many major cities, a major part of the cost of tunnelling is the fact we simply don't know where hundred-year old utilities are. And, hell, the fact that many cities aren't built on rock (e.g., London, Berlin, Moscow), so even if you can bore through solid rock you're probably not actually that well off: can you also bore through clay and gravel?
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• Geee 10y ago
  The whole process can be fully robotized, and the energy comes from cheap solar. It's not even a moonshot, it will happen. We will do even crazier things than this. In the future we will bore tunnels out of boredom.