9 ms·

Elon Musk's Boring Company Begins First Tunnel

154 points by Dangeranger 9y ago

ju-st 9y ago
Are they still using Herrenknecht TBMs?
bgentry 9y ago
“Planning to jack this up to a factor of ten or more,” Musk writes in the caption. Not quite sure what that means, but it sounds pretty badass. Jack away, Mr. Musk. Since this writer didn't bother doing any research before compiling Musk's Instagram posts, he's talking about the speed. He plans to run the boring machines much faster than has been done traditionally, and do so continuously. That's why he made the joke about the snail. Source: Musk's recent TED talk, which was pretty fun to watch.
- MikusR 9y ago
  It's silly to expect The Verge to do some actual fact checking/reporting.
  - Strom 9y ago
    A reasonable apporach to take, but The Verge does have a few proper journalists left. That work isn't sustainable with their ad model though, so most of their content (like this article) is written by the classic clueless copy-paste blogspam people.
- rory096 9y ago
  Very sloppy article >This video shows the first in what Musk proposes to be a citywide network of underground tunnels That video is clearly in the Hyperloop competition track.
  - dmix 9y ago
    The tunneling project is unrelated to Hyperloop (or at least not directly related). The new proposed project is in the IG video description: > This is a test run of our electric sled that would transport cars at 125 mph (200 km/h) through the tunnels, automatically switching from one tunnel to the next. Would mean Westwood to LAX in 5 mins. Musk released a video of a new concept of underground tunnels moving vehicles in cities this past month.
    - rory096 9y ago
      Regardless, that sled is in the mile-long track they built for the competition they held. They may not have depressurized it, however. The actual tunnel is just a starter currently, as Musk said. They're only now putting in the TBM.
      - Robotbeat 9y ago
        Right, both the sled and the track/tunnel are left over from the student Hyperloop competition. Hyperloop was kind of a brainstorm of Musk to get around traffic. But now that he has a track and a sled, he figured what the hey, don't even really need the vacuum part just for travel within a city. Just need to scale up a bit (maybe a factor of 3 in each dimension from the existing sled) and get good at tunneling and you can get fast travel within a spread-out city without bothering with the harder engineering problems that a Hyperloop would require. Hyperloop still a good idea for faster travel, but as far as an initial step, this tunnel system seems pretty straightforward (except for fast tunneling and permits for tunneling, etc) and gets Musk to his goal of getting around the traffic problems of LA.
arcticbull 9y ago
I definitely think this is cool tech, and it's going to be amazing to see this whole setup work once completed. I do have to wonder, this seems like it a largely over-engineered solution to the problem of moving people -- wouldn't it be more practical to put a train down there? This still requires individuals own cars, so it does nothing to reduce costs, promote equality and seems to just move the traffic problem from the downtown core to the outlets of the tunnel. Am I missing something? It feels like LA really needs public transit.
- robertfw 9y ago
  There was a snippet in the video of a purpose built passenger transport vehicle that could fill in the role of public transit: https://youtu.be/u5V_VzRrSBI?t=47 https://youtu.be/u5V_VzRrSBI?t=47
  - Robotbeat 9y ago
    Exactly this. There's absolutely no reason you couldn't use the system for public transit. Just need pods with an enclosure as shown in the video. It'd be way cheaper than sending your whole car. Whether the car pod or the transit pod make the most sense is largely irrelevant at this phase. The system can (and seems to be planned to?) use both at the same time. So if a bunch of people want to pay to use this for their cars, then it can be used with cars. If people want to use this as a more responsive subway, then it can be used that way as well. They just configure the little pods one way or another, 98% of the system (tunnels, elevators, track, vast majority of the pod, etc) remains the same either way. I actually kind of suspect that enclosed pods will be used for both, since otherwise you have to worry about debris flying off of cars (like those dumb little flags, dirt, and drinks accidentally left on the roof) and hitting pods behind. Personally, my favorite mode of transport in a city is bikes mixed with public transit. This system seems to work well with both. But the point of a pod-based system like this is that you can let the market decide which exact mix makes the most sense. If people are willing to pay to transport their whole car, then why not let them? Or why not have just passenger pods? The system is designed to be expandable to arbitrary numbers of pods and tracks, so there needn't be any reason you couldn't do both.
blakesterz 9y ago
Every time I see this thing I can only think about earthquakes. I am absolutely certain they've planned and thought about this and engineered the heck out of it, that being said... I can not imagine that being in one of these things during a big earthquake is going to be very nice.
- infodroid 9y ago
  "Earthquakes tend to have the biggest effect on the surface, like waves on water. That's why LA can have a (lame, but getting better) subway." https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/824300186834898945 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/824300186834898945
- tomjakubowski 9y ago
  Metro's subway tunnels survived the Northridge earthquake without suffering even a scratch.
- 6t6t6t6 9y ago
  Tokyo and other Japanese cities have massive underground metro networks and there are earthquakes every single day. Even during the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, there was not a single derailment.
pignut 9y ago
Monorail. Monorail. Monorail.
Symmetry 9y ago
Ok, so the center of LA to Culver City is 16 km via Google Maps. A snail goes at 1 cm/s. So 18 days of boring assuming everything works out. That's actually super fast.
- mark212 9y ago
  at my company, we only run our snails 8 hours per day and they get an hour for lunch. (And the tunnel is LAX to Culver City-Westwood-Sherman Oaks, not downtown. There's already a train that runs downtown to LAX. LAX to Westwood is 18.2 km on the roads per google maps)
  - tomjakubowski 9y ago
    What train runs downtown to LAX? The closest you could do today is take Blue from 7th/Flower to south central, transfer to Green and take that to the end of the line. And there's a 15-20 minute shuttle at the end of that before you're actually in the airport.
  - tylerflick 9y ago
    > There's already a train that runs downtown to LAX I'm assuming you're talking about the Green Line connecting with the Blue Line? The Green Line doesn't stop at LAX. It stops outside of the airport, leaving passengers to take a cab for the last mile. Not to mention you have to hop a connection to the Blue Line, which doesn't stop at Union Station.
- iamacynic 9y ago
  this is basically going to be a "rich west side and valley people can get to the airport really fast in their luxury cars" solution until they bootstrap it into a larger metro network. kind of like the tesla roadster begat the model S begat the 3 (supposedly).
JoshGlazebrook 9y ago
Hopefully it has better luck than big bertha in Seattle. God what a mess that project turned into, but the last I've heard she is almost done with the tunnel.
- pchristensen 9y ago
  She's finished digging, and they're disassembling her to take her out of the tunnel now. https://seattle.curbed.com/2017/5/10/15612548/bertha-tunnel-boring-machine-disassembly https://seattle.curbed.com/2017/5/10/15612548/bertha-tunnel-...
  - JoshGlazebrook 9y ago
    Is there an actual eta on the opening of the tunnel?
- tomjakubowski 9y ago
  LA Metro just finished using a (Bertha-scale, unlike this one) boring machine named Harriet to make tunnels on the west side for the Crenshaw/LAX line. They've just started using another one (Angeli) for the regional connector project in downtown.
btilly 9y ago
What happens when an earthquake causes his tunnel to no longer being aligned all unexpected like? There are challenges with working in a seismically active zone. I'm sure he has thought about it. I'd be curious what answers he came up with.
- Retric 9y ago
  Faults don't suddenly show up for no reason out of the blue. So, the traditional solution is to treat fault lines as a special case and design for some shifting over the useful life of a tunnel.
  - btilly 9y ago
    The route the article suggests is likely to encoutner a lot of existing fault lines. For example there is one running through LAX itself, and a series that run through Santa Monica. See http://www.cccarto.com/faults/la_faults/ http://www.cccarto.com/faults/la_faults/ for a map of the bigger ones. (A lot of little fracture zones are not shown there.) Boring a tunnel through an active fault line still seems risky to me.
- 6t6t6t6 9y ago
  I am answering the same in two different comments but, if you look at Japan, their major cities are all covered by huge metro networks and they have earthquakes daily.
newsat13 9y ago
Where does elon find money for all his ideas? He seems to innovate at breathtaking pace.
- donatj 9y ago
  Well he's worth an estimated 15 billion, a lot of which if I understand is from his involvement with PayPal
  - JackFr 9y ago
    Which of course makes the line from TFA 'Elon Musk, a man of means by no means,...' make no sense. I get that it was presumably a reference to the song 'King of the Road', but since the rest of the story had nothing to do with being a hobo, I'm unsure of the author's intent.
  - Robotbeat 9y ago
    Almost none of it is from Paypal any longer (except as seed money for other ventures). He got about half a (EDIT: significantly less than a quarter) billion from Paypal and invested it split into Tesla and SpaceX. I think he owns most of (or close to most of) SpaceX, which is worth at least $10B, plus a bunch of shares of Tesla (but definitely not near half), which is worth over $50B. So I'd say his networth now comes from (very) roughly 50:50 Tesla and SpaceX. Paypal money is long gone. He borrows money against his shares to fund projects like this without diluting control.
    - acover 9y ago
      He got about a quarter of a billion. He almost went bankrupt in ~2008. Edit: my correction of a correction needs to be corrected > In October 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for US$1.5 billion in stock, of which Musk received US$165 million. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - 9y ago
niftich 9y ago
The article alludes to speculation about permits, but Dennis Romero writing for the LA Weekly in February [1] noted that at the time, permits for a small pedestrian tunnel were not granted -- albeit required by state law. That's in addition to a filing required by the City of Hawthorne to allow for a 30-day public hearing period; it was the City that informed SpaceX to contact the state regulators. I'd like to see more reporting on whether these permits were obtained after all. [1] archived at http://archive.is/zgAMq http://archive.is/zgAMq
awjr 9y ago
I'd really like to see him get this right, but I think the volume of people, not cars, that needs to be moved would indicate a better use of this 'solution' would be almost be a horizontal elevator system where people request a route and board a passing carriage that stops to pick them up/or is sitting empty on the street waiting to be used. Enabling the delivery of cars into the heart of cities when many cities are trying to remove them seems a bit backwards, but the idea of a transit system which dynamically delivers people where they need to be. That I get. If the boring is cheap enough, I can see this being a good transport solution for suburbia to get people quickly and efficiently into a city.
sriram_sun 9y ago
A tunnel between Austin - Houston - Dallas would decrease traffic in Austin quite a bit I think... and would be good boring practice!
socrates1998 9y ago
I hate to admit that this is the 20th time I read "Boring Company" and thought "Why did he name it that, it doesn't seem boring at all." Regardless, pretty cool if he can get it to help with LA traffic.
- mrfusion 9y ago
  It's genius. The media loves a good pun. You can probably triple your pr and headlines if you make it easy for journalists to feel clever and have a fun headline.
chrisbrandow 9y ago
Whose electric sled was this? Hyperloop?
excalibur 9y ago
> Elon Musk’s new video of his underground tunnel project will make you nauseated > ‘Warning, this may cause motion sickness or seizures’ People are getting sick just watching a video of the thing, and Musk's plan is to strap them all onto it. Brilliant.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
  The actual tunnel will not have these continuously flashing lights.
mrfusion 9y ago
I was actually just musing at how easily tree roots "tunnel" through the ground. I'm wondering if there's a way to replicate that in a new kind of boring machine.
- anotheryou 9y ago
  well they compress the soil between the roots and are a bunch of thin things. You'd need to liquify the humans before you shoot them through.
freddealmeida 9y ago
This is interesting if not over engineering. I hope it comes to fruition.
anotheryou 9y ago
How do you handle vibrations at 10x the speed? Isn't that a big issue for houses above?
- Theodores 9y ago
  F=ma Build your vehicle with 'bicycle technology' instead of 19th century technology, the weight goes down and the vibrations are solved too. With 'bicycle technology' there are no crumple zones, there is very little steel and that is 'high tensile' steel rather than the hefty steel that you get on railways. Deluxe materials such as carbon fibre and the more interesting alloys of aluminium are used on bikes that, at the same price point, were made of more common materials a generation ago. Even though bicycles are old fashioned, they are up there and beyond F1 and other 'performance engineering'. I would bet that the liner for a Tesla 'frunk' weighs more than most bicycles, plus on regular vehicles there is a lot of cruft that you just wouldn't have if you had to push it yourself. I am not suggesting for one moment that Elon makes all of these tunnels for bicycles, however, you do not need to make a vehicle massively heavy (e.g. 50 tonnes) to get it to adhere to the train tracks. Seems Japanese trains weigh a fraction of what American trains do: https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/table-of-train-weights/ https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/tabl... I am sure that if Elon and co. thought about doing what the Japanese do on the train weights but '10x' the weight would be fine. There is no easier way to get speed - F = ma - plus there is important safety considerations, people get killed by heavy vehicles, deaths by being hit by a bicycle (e.g. as a pedestrian) are out there with freak events, improbable but possible.
  - anotheryou 9y ago
    Thanks for the detailed reply! That was kind of par of my question and interesting to read, but I actually referred to the booring head. It said he wants to increase booring by 10x. I now read elsewhere he does not want to stop booring while putting in the supporting wall, so he'll advance continiously, but I doubt that's what takes so long.
    - Theodores 9y ago
11thEarlOfMar 9y ago
I can't seem to get past the notion that this is an elaborate hoax.
SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
I'm in the US, not in NYC. I use public transit (and my bike) exclusively. The most annoying thing about public transit is cargo handling. With a car you can buy groceries for a month. Or make a trip with several stops buying errands. Etc. With bike/bus I'm limited to what I can carry. That's a lot less than what can fit in a shopping cart / trunk˙.
dgudkov 9y ago
I didn't see many comments saying that it's nothing else that just a high-speed underground railroad. As any other railroad it can transport not just cars, but passengers, goods and whatnot. It's basically a general-purpose subway.

154 points by Dangeranger 9y ago

Are they still using Herrenknecht TBMs?

“Planning to jack this up to a factor of ten or more,” Musk writes in the caption. Not quite sure what that means, but it sounds pretty badass. Jack away, Mr. Musk. Since this writer didn't bother doing any research before compiling Musk's Instagram posts, he's talking about the speed. He plans to run the boring machines much faster than has been done traditionally, and do so continuously. That's why he made the joke about the snail. Source: Musk's recent TED talk, which was pretty fun to watch.

MikusR 9y ago
It's silly to expect The Verge to do some actual fact checking/reporting.
- Strom 9y ago
  A reasonable apporach to take, but The Verge does have a few proper journalists left. That work isn't sustainable with their ad model though, so most of their content (like this article) is written by the classic clueless copy-paste blogspam people.
rory096 9y ago
Very sloppy article >This video shows the first in what Musk proposes to be a citywide network of underground tunnels That video is clearly in the Hyperloop competition track.
- dmix 9y ago
  The tunneling project is unrelated to Hyperloop (or at least not directly related). The new proposed project is in the IG video description: > This is a test run of our electric sled that would transport cars at 125 mph (200 km/h) through the tunnels, automatically switching from one tunnel to the next. Would mean Westwood to LAX in 5 mins. Musk released a video of a new concept of underground tunnels moving vehicles in cities this past month.
  - rory096 9y ago
    Regardless, that sled is in the mile-long track they built for the competition they held. They may not have depressurized it, however. The actual tunnel is just a starter currently, as Musk said. They're only now putting in the TBM.
    - Robotbeat 9y ago
      Right, both the sled and the track/tunnel are left over from the student Hyperloop competition. Hyperloop was kind of a brainstorm of Musk to get around traffic. But now that he has a track and a sled, he figured what the hey, don't even really need the vacuum part just for travel within a city. Just need to scale up a bit (maybe a factor of 3 in each dimension from the existing sled) and get good at tunneling and you can get fast travel within a spread-out city without bothering with the harder engineering problems that a Hyperloop would require. Hyperloop still a good idea for faster travel, but as far as an initial step, this tunnel system seems pretty straightforward (except for fast tunneling and permits for tunneling, etc) and gets Musk to his goal of getting around the traffic problems of LA.

arcticbull 9y ago

I definitely think this is cool tech, and it's going to be amazing to see this whole setup work once completed. I do have to wonder, this seems like it a largely over-engineered solution to the problem of moving people -- wouldn't it be more practical to put a train down there? This still requires individuals own cars, so it does nothing to reduce costs, promote equality and seems to just move the traffic problem from the downtown core to the outlets of the tunnel. Am I missing something? It feels like LA really needs public transit.

robertfw 9y ago
There was a snippet in the video of a purpose built passenger transport vehicle that could fill in the role of public transit: https://youtu.be/u5V_VzRrSBI?t=47 https://youtu.be/u5V_VzRrSBI?t=47
- Robotbeat 9y ago
  Exactly this. There's absolutely no reason you couldn't use the system for public transit. Just need pods with an enclosure as shown in the video. It'd be way cheaper than sending your whole car. Whether the car pod or the transit pod make the most sense is largely irrelevant at this phase. The system can (and seems to be planned to?) use both at the same time. So if a bunch of people want to pay to use this for their cars, then it can be used with cars. If people want to use this as a more responsive subway, then it can be used that way as well. They just configure the little pods one way or another, 98% of the system (tunnels, elevators, track, vast majority of the pod, etc) remains the same either way. I actually kind of suspect that enclosed pods will be used for both, since otherwise you have to worry about debris flying off of cars (like those dumb little flags, dirt, and drinks accidentally left on the roof) and hitting pods behind. Personally, my favorite mode of transport in a city is bikes mixed with public transit. This system seems to work well with both. But the point of a pod-based system like this is that you can let the market decide which exact mix makes the most sense. If people are willing to pay to transport their whole car, then why not let them? Or why not have just passenger pods? The system is designed to be expandable to arbitrary numbers of pods and tracks, so there needn't be any reason you couldn't do both.

blakesterz 9y ago

Every time I see this thing I can only think about earthquakes. I am absolutely certain they've planned and thought about this and engineered the heck out of it, that being said... I can not imagine that being in one of these things during a big earthquake is going to be very nice.

infodroid 9y ago
"Earthquakes tend to have the biggest effect on the surface, like waves on water. That's why LA can have a (lame, but getting better) subway." https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/824300186834898945 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/824300186834898945
tomjakubowski 9y ago
Metro's subway tunnels survived the Northridge earthquake without suffering even a scratch.
6t6t6t6 9y ago
Tokyo and other Japanese cities have massive underground metro networks and there are earthquakes every single day. Even during the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, there was not a single derailment.

pignut 9y ago

Monorail. Monorail. Monorail.

Symmetry 9y ago

Ok, so the center of LA to Culver City is 16 km via Google Maps. A snail goes at 1 cm/s. So 18 days of boring assuming everything works out. That's actually super fast.

mark212 9y ago
at my company, we only run our snails 8 hours per day and they get an hour for lunch. (And the tunnel is LAX to Culver City-Westwood-Sherman Oaks, not downtown. There's already a train that runs downtown to LAX. LAX to Westwood is 18.2 km on the roads per google maps)
- tomjakubowski 9y ago
  What train runs downtown to LAX? The closest you could do today is take Blue from 7th/Flower to south central, transfer to Green and take that to the end of the line. And there's a 15-20 minute shuttle at the end of that before you're actually in the airport.
- tylerflick 9y ago
  > There's already a train that runs downtown to LAX I'm assuming you're talking about the Green Line connecting with the Blue Line? The Green Line doesn't stop at LAX. It stops outside of the airport, leaving passengers to take a cab for the last mile. Not to mention you have to hop a connection to the Blue Line, which doesn't stop at Union Station.
iamacynic 9y ago
this is basically going to be a "rich west side and valley people can get to the airport really fast in their luxury cars" solution until they bootstrap it into a larger metro network. kind of like the tesla roadster begat the model S begat the 3 (supposedly).

JoshGlazebrook 9y ago

Hopefully it has better luck than big bertha in Seattle. God what a mess that project turned into, but the last I've heard she is almost done with the tunnel.

pchristensen 9y ago
She's finished digging, and they're disassembling her to take her out of the tunnel now. https://seattle.curbed.com/2017/5/10/15612548/bertha-tunnel-boring-machine-disassembly https://seattle.curbed.com/2017/5/10/15612548/bertha-tunnel-...
- JoshGlazebrook 9y ago
  Is there an actual eta on the opening of the tunnel?
tomjakubowski 9y ago
LA Metro just finished using a (Bertha-scale, unlike this one) boring machine named Harriet to make tunnels on the west side for the Crenshaw/LAX line. They've just started using another one (Angeli) for the regional connector project in downtown.

btilly 9y ago

What happens when an earthquake causes his tunnel to no longer being aligned all unexpected like? There are challenges with working in a seismically active zone. I'm sure he has thought about it. I'd be curious what answers he came up with.

Retric 9y ago
Faults don't suddenly show up for no reason out of the blue. So, the traditional solution is to treat fault lines as a special case and design for some shifting over the useful life of a tunnel.
- btilly 9y ago
  The route the article suggests is likely to encoutner a lot of existing fault lines. For example there is one running through LAX itself, and a series that run through Santa Monica. See http://www.cccarto.com/faults/la_faults/ http://www.cccarto.com/faults/la_faults/ for a map of the bigger ones. (A lot of little fracture zones are not shown there.) Boring a tunnel through an active fault line still seems risky to me.
6t6t6t6 9y ago
I am answering the same in two different comments but, if you look at Japan, their major cities are all covered by huge metro networks and they have earthquakes daily.

newsat13 9y ago

Where does elon find money for all his ideas? He seems to innovate at breathtaking pace.

donatj 9y ago
Well he's worth an estimated 15 billion, a lot of which if I understand is from his involvement with PayPal
- JackFr 9y ago
  Which of course makes the line from TFA 'Elon Musk, a man of means by no means,...' make no sense. I get that it was presumably a reference to the song 'King of the Road', but since the rest of the story had nothing to do with being a hobo, I'm unsure of the author's intent.
- Robotbeat 9y ago
  Almost none of it is from Paypal any longer (except as seed money for other ventures). He got about half a (EDIT: significantly less than a quarter) billion from Paypal and invested it split into Tesla and SpaceX. I think he owns most of (or close to most of) SpaceX, which is worth at least $10B, plus a bunch of shares of Tesla (but definitely not near half), which is worth over $50B. So I'd say his networth now comes from (very) roughly 50:50 Tesla and SpaceX. Paypal money is long gone. He borrows money against his shares to fund projects like this without diluting control.
  - acover 9y ago
    He got about a quarter of a billion. He almost went bankrupt in ~2008. Edit: my correction of a correction needs to be corrected > In October 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for US$1.5 billion in stock, of which Musk received US$165 million. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- 9y ago

niftich 9y ago

The article alludes to speculation about permits, but Dennis Romero writing for the LA Weekly in February [1] noted that at the time, permits for a small pedestrian tunnel were not granted -- albeit required by state law. That's in addition to a filing required by the City of Hawthorne to allow for a 30-day public hearing period; it was the City that informed SpaceX to contact the state regulators. I'd like to see more reporting on whether these permits were obtained after all. [1] archived at http://archive.is/zgAMq http://archive.is/zgAMq

awjr 9y ago

I'd really like to see him get this right, but I think the volume of people, not cars, that needs to be moved would indicate a better use of this 'solution' would be almost be a horizontal elevator system where people request a route and board a passing carriage that stops to pick them up/or is sitting empty on the street waiting to be used. Enabling the delivery of cars into the heart of cities when many cities are trying to remove them seems a bit backwards, but the idea of a transit system which dynamically delivers people where they need to be. That I get. If the boring is cheap enough, I can see this being a good transport solution for suburbia to get people quickly and efficiently into a city.

sriram_sun 9y ago

A tunnel between Austin - Houston - Dallas would decrease traffic in Austin quite a bit I think... and would be good boring practice!

socrates1998 9y ago

I hate to admit that this is the 20th time I read "Boring Company" and thought "Why did he name it that, it doesn't seem boring at all." Regardless, pretty cool if he can get it to help with LA traffic.

mrfusion 9y ago
It's genius. The media loves a good pun. You can probably triple your pr and headlines if you make it easy for journalists to feel clever and have a fun headline.

chrisbrandow 9y ago

Whose electric sled was this? Hyperloop?

excalibur 9y ago

> Elon Musk’s new video of his underground tunnel project will make you nauseated > ‘Warning, this may cause motion sickness or seizures’ People are getting sick just watching a video of the thing, and Musk's plan is to strap them all onto it. Brilliant.

kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
The actual tunnel will not have these continuously flashing lights.

mrfusion 9y ago

I was actually just musing at how easily tree roots "tunnel" through the ground. I'm wondering if there's a way to replicate that in a new kind of boring machine.

anotheryou 9y ago
well they compress the soil between the roots and are a bunch of thin things. You'd need to liquify the humans before you shoot them through.

freddealmeida 9y ago

This is interesting if not over engineering. I hope it comes to fruition.

anotheryou 9y ago

How do you handle vibrations at 10x the speed? Isn't that a big issue for houses above?

Theodores 9y ago
F=ma Build your vehicle with 'bicycle technology' instead of 19th century technology, the weight goes down and the vibrations are solved too. With 'bicycle technology' there are no crumple zones, there is very little steel and that is 'high tensile' steel rather than the hefty steel that you get on railways. Deluxe materials such as carbon fibre and the more interesting alloys of aluminium are used on bikes that, at the same price point, were made of more common materials a generation ago. Even though bicycles are old fashioned, they are up there and beyond F1 and other 'performance engineering'. I would bet that the liner for a Tesla 'frunk' weighs more than most bicycles, plus on regular vehicles there is a lot of cruft that you just wouldn't have if you had to push it yourself. I am not suggesting for one moment that Elon makes all of these tunnels for bicycles, however, you do not need to make a vehicle massively heavy (e.g. 50 tonnes) to get it to adhere to the train tracks. Seems Japanese trains weigh a fraction of what American trains do: https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/table-of-train-weights/ https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/tabl... I am sure that if Elon and co. thought about doing what the Japanese do on the train weights but '10x' the weight would be fine. There is no easier way to get speed - F = ma - plus there is important safety considerations, people get killed by heavy vehicles, deaths by being hit by a bicycle (e.g. as a pedestrian) are out there with freak events, improbable but possible.
- anotheryou 9y ago
  Thanks for the detailed reply! That was kind of par of my question and interesting to read, but I actually referred to the booring head. It said he wants to increase booring by 10x. I now read elsewhere he does not want to stop booring while putting in the supporting wall, so he'll advance continiously, but I doubt that's what takes so long.
  - Theodores 9y ago

11thEarlOfMar 9y ago

I can't seem to get past the notion that this is an elaborate hoax.

SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago

I'm in the US, not in NYC. I use public transit (and my bike) exclusively. The most annoying thing about public transit is cargo handling. With a car you can buy groceries for a month. Or make a trip with several stops buying errands. Etc. With bike/bus I'm limited to what I can carry. That's a lot less than what can fit in a shopping cart / trunk˙.

dgudkov 9y ago

I didn't see many comments saying that it's nothing else that just a high-speed underground railroad. As any other railroad it can transport not just cars, but passengers, goods and whatnot. It's basically a general-purpose subway.