12 ms·

Elon Musk’s Ideas About Transportation are Boring

141 points by Osiris30 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
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falcolas 9y ago
Underground freeways? Wow. I didn't realize that was the target of The Boring Company. I thought it was a start at making Hyperloop a thing. That would have (to me) made more sense than underground freeways. This is a scathing review, but I can't really find anything inaccurate in it. Perhaps I didn't try hard enough, but the thought of riding hundreds of miles underground doesn't make me enthusiastic about looking for ways to make it more real. I've seen what happens when Lithium batteries catch on fire, and I wouldn't want to be stuck in a tunnel when that happened.
- akgerber 9y ago
  Mostly-underground ultra-high-speed railways are nearing commercial implementation in Japan soon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen Experientially, it'll probably mostly be like a very long subway ride— but much comfier than the the tiny-tunnel, tiny-car Hyperloop, since at least you'll be able to go to the bathroom.
  - falcolas 9y ago
    That looks like a pretty cool project. My problem with tunnels is mostly related to being in a car: no room to stand, it's easy to be locked into the car in an accident, and nice big windows to let in the absolute darkness (or to "trap" you inside a reflection if you turn on your interior lights). That train is also looking to go about 2.5x faster than the Boring Tunnel cars, resulting in a much shorter trip.
- tfha 9y ago
  No I think it's generally right. The boring company seems like a really silly idea. It's an extension of a broken transportation system. Cities scale with busses and trains. For some reason, the boring company wants to scale a city with cars. You build this big expensive tunnel to get 1/10th or even 1/50th the throughput that you could get with a train system. Maybe that's not the California way though.
  - chrischen 9y ago
    It's because he owns a car company. You can pretty much throw any idea he has for transit out the window there. If he had his way, he'd probably put rentable self-driving cars back-to-back in those tunnels. It'll be like aluminum and steel train cars, except each one is a Tesla.
  - adventured 9y ago
    > Cities scale with busses and trains. You're missing that the boring premise is to utilize electric mass-transit units within the tunnels as well. That could dramatically scale the transit systems. It becomes a defacto variation of a subway system. Musk keeps pointing this out and it keeps getting ignored for some reason.
    - hacknat 9y ago
      Because it’s an absurd idea. He’a trying to solve an already solved problem with an inferior consumer solution. When you look at the commuter trains of the major metro areas you’ll notice some very well off people that could afford to drive, but choose to ride in a comfortable train and focus on reading or catching up on email. Driving is an inferior mode of transportation. And before you yell, “but driverless cars!” Consider that many folks don’t want to buy a car in some of these bigger metro areas or to pay for the parking to maintain one. For so many reasons, beyond technology, traditional mass transit is the superior option. I couldn’t care less whether Musk achieves his technological goals with the Boring Company. It’s hawking an inferior product even if he does.
    - namelost 9y ago
      Tunnels are dangerous. Elon is proposing to build really narrow tunnels that are hard to evacuate and then allow every random vehicle inside it. Yes it's on a sled but who is certifying that my fellow tunnelgoers' vehicles won't leak fuel, spontaneously catch fire, or find some other special way to kill me? Elon has some good ideas and some stupid ideas, this is of the latter category.
akgerber 9y ago
Elon Musk seems like a rich guy from the California suburbs interested in decarbonizing his lifestyle— a reasonably noble goal, but the California suburbs have a ton of issues totally unrelated to their ecological footprint— not least of which is that their car-dependent transportation system can't scale beyond a certain level of density without massive congestion. And preventing them from scaling beyond that density instead results in a profoundly broken housing market because everyone who wants to live in California is required to bid up a profoundly expensive patch of land. A modest improvement in road throughput from automation is nothing but a short-term solution, and might well make congestion worse because of the reduced time/attention cost of driving— potentially much worse, since people many more people could move into RVs occupying the only free land in coastal California, its roads. Elon Musk does not look like a smart guy when he rejects what clever outsiders who have been paying attention to these issues for years have to say and by calling them idiots— after all, he supposedly got into rocketry by devouring textbooks, not by getting angry during his commute. This graphic makes the point about why cars can never be a solution for mass urban mobility better than pretty much anything else: https://i.imgur.com/sCvRIEd.gif https://i.imgur.com/sCvRIEd.gif
- fartcannon 9y ago
  The first thought that came to mind when I looked at that gif is, "this is what 200 people in their detached homes look like, this is what 200 people in their condos look like, this what 200 people sharing a multi-bed dorm room look like."
- candiodari 9y ago
  Maybe it's just me but that picture makes the exact opposite point from what you're saying. It clearly points out that the difference between cars and other forms of transportation is linear. Public transportation doesn't scale this especially well, as anybody using public transport knows, but this article is a nice summary [1]. We all know what would happen to bus stops, stations, and generally to public places if people on buses actually had anywhere near the density "made possible" by public transport. It just won't work. While for instance, adding roads in the sky (ie. very long bridges) scales exponentially, for obvious reasons. As does just flying (flying, incidentally, is a lot more efficient than people think). People don't want this, for obvious reasons, but there comes a point in cities where we have no choice. Frankly, cities like depicted in "the fifth element" and "star wars" are the future. Probably more rails, less floating, but the general idea is where we'll be going. Doesn't even really matter if they have public or private transport. Given how fast public transport upgrades (even when absolutely required by the numbers of people they just refuse to upgrade for decades. Yes. Decades) and how comfortable it is, and add of course the fact that they just don't support the use cases cars enable (some of which, like an elderly or disabled person doing groceries, are absolute requirements) and you get to the point : private transport is far preferable to public transport. [1] http://www.uwgb.edu/DutchS/PSEUDOSC/MassTransit.HTM http://www.uwgb.edu/DutchS/PSEUDOSC/MassTransit.HTM
Osiris30 9y ago
Background info to the 'flame war' between Musk and Jared Walker (humantransit.org), which was the catalyst for this post, can be found here - http://humantransit.org/2017/12/elon-musk-responds.html http://humantransit.org/2017/12/elon-musk-responds.html
- deleted 9y ago
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- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
sidcool 9y ago
This is an opinionated blog, not necessarily wrong. But a bad idea implemented is sometimes better than a good one not implemented at all. And if you think I am a biased fan of Elon Musk, well you would be right.
- sundaeofshock 9y ago
  The problem is money. Implementing the bad idea means there won’t be money for the good idea. The bad idea also gains inertia, so it tends to stay around and worsen for decades (e.g. current auto-centric infrastructure).
  - rohit2412 9y ago
    Exactly! I'm Indian, and am tired of listening to the argument that India shouldn't build bullet trains, as hyperloops will obviously be real in 5 years. People think that hsr which will cost 80 billion dollars will be replaced by a maglev in pnuematic tubes for only 6 billion.
- kybernetikos 9y ago
  There's something of value to the energy and enthusiasm that Elon seems to be able to generate. Even if the initial version of the idea is dumb he may be able to iterate it until it's not, if he's creating more buy in and excitement than everyone else.
jimrandomh 9y ago
This article claims (1) that Elon Musk has no chance to achieve a 10x reduction in tunneling costs, and (2) that this reduction has already been achieved in other countries. This seems like a contradiction. If all his company does is catch up to the international state of the art, that will be a huge improvement for the US. And if he pretends that the 10x reduction in price is due to technological advancement rather than reducing profit margin and egregious waste, that will help city governments and competitors save face.
- frabbit 9y ago
  I wondered about exactly that point. Reading on, it seemed like one of his suggestions for cost-reduction was to drive down wages for workers. I would have thought he would have seen Musk as a kindred spirit there: "There appears to be a lot of union featherbedding in some American cities, but this is a political rather than technological problem; without such featherbedding, labor costs are not onerous."
- yiyus 9y ago
  There is an extra claim that clarifies the contradiction: Elon Musk is trying to achieve that 10x reduction reducing the tunnel diameter. The author argues this won't work. What I understood is that, if the company indeed was trying to catch up with the international state of the art, they could actually achieve their goal, but the problem is that Mr.Musk is not only ignoring it, but calling them idiots. So, I do not see any contradiction. But that is just how I interpret the article, I do not have a personal opinion in this issue.
  - jimrandomh 9y ago
    Prediction: The Boring Company's first tunneling machine will be small-diameter, and each subsequent one will be larger, similar to the scale-up from Falcon 1 to Falcon 9 to Falcon Heavy, simply because that's the right way to do the R&D. But it would be very bad salesmanship to say "the first TBM is really small because that was easier for us", so instead he talks about the benefits of being smaller.
njarboe 9y ago
"b) promises reducing tunneling costs by a factor of 10, a feat that he himself has no chance to achieve, and c) is unaware that the cost reduction he promises, relative to American construction costs, has already been achieved in a number of countries." So Musk, a person who owns and is the CTO of a company that can now land reusable rockets that were only dreamed about in science fiction a decade ago, won't be able to drop tunneling costs in the US by a factor of ten, when the author admits this is already done in other countries. Not sure this is worth reading past that part.
- hacknat 9y ago
  He’s specifically calling out the goal of reducing tunneling costs by accelerating the TBM. The other projects that have reduced costs have done so through boring old sound construction management practices (the article pointing out the labor and stations are actually the expensive parts of these projects, not the tunnel by itself). Also, if you read the rest of the article he literally predicts your response of appealing to the authoritative win of SpaceX as a completely invalid counter argument (and he’d be right, appeals to authority is on the list of logical fallacies, last I checked ;) ).
  - jakubp 9y ago
    Or perhaps the author of the article is doing armchair philosophy, whereas Elon Musk is the supposedly too optimistic doer who actually builds incredible stuff. (In the sense that Nassim Taleb distinguishes people who talk a lot and people accomplish stuff.)
  - njarboe 9y ago
    One can't prove a negative. The Boring company has a plan and a goal. Saying it can't be done is not useful or productive. There has not been much change in tunneling tech in the last 20 years and Musk seems to think it is possible to get some great improvements. He has done it in two other very different fields with SpaceX and Tesla. Creating a new technology is not about the logic of debates but doing things and failing over and over again, in a productive way, to get to success. Musk can access great people and large amounts of capital, thinks things out from first principles, doesn't believe in "safety first", and thinks tunnels could be of great value. Traffic (on car and trains) is killing our cities and nothing is being done about it. No new transportation infrastructure built in the Bay Area since 1980 except a few small BART extensions. We could put anything in these tunnels. Not sure why people are so worried that he is going to get some people together and try.
m3kw9 9y ago
The author has a bunch of numbers and stats written down which supports his claims but none of us would even bother to check up. Now the thing is do I trust what his guy says that Musk can’t actually do it or do I trust a man that has already built a working reusable rocket to space and made a few electrical vehicles? If Elon says he’s an idiot, i wouldn’t bet against that
bryananderson 9y ago
I am on the same page with everyone here about the problems with car-centered infrastructure, but I think perhaps we haven’t fully internalized the extent to which driverless, electric, shared vehicles will change this equation. It’s an entirely new paradigm - and even more so if cheap tunneling can be achieved. While Musk’s initial ideas about how to reduce the cost may be wrong, at least he’s trying to! His initial ideas about electric cars and rockets weren’t completely right either, because he was not an expert in those areas. He hired the most talented people in those fields and learned and changed over a period of years until he found what worked. It’s a good algorithm, and it helps to be wealthy so that you can survive the failures and dead-ends without running out of money. There are two arguments in the article: that Musk is going about solving the problem in the wrong way, and that he is solving the wrong problem altogether by trying to put cars in tunnels. The author may well be right about the first, but I think he/she is wrong about the second. Let’s think about everything that changes in a fully driverless, electric, shared, and tunnel-augmented vehicle ecosystem. No more greenhouse gas emissions directly from vehicles (and none at all once the grid is fully renewable). No more need to dedicate huge amounts of valuable land in our cities and suburbs to parking (cars can drive themselves to outlying areas to park or, better yet, can be shared). Dramatically higher throughput because the human mistakes that cause congestion can be avoided (I recommend CGP Grey’s video on the causes of traffic: https://youtu.be/iHzzSao6ypE https://youtu.be/iHzzSao6ypE ). Driverless cars could drive faster and closer together, especially if they can communicate with one another. Even more dramatic reduction in deaths and injuries as human error is removed from the equation. Far fewer cars are needed in a shared-vehicle ecosystem. Most privately-owned cars are idle nearly all of the time, but they still take up space. Sharing vehicles allows us to reduce the amount of infrastructure needed for cars. The average size of vehicles in the fleet can also be reduced. Right now people drive unnecessarily large vehicles because they might need the space a few times per year (annual family skiing trip, etc). These vehicles use up more energy and take up more space. In a shared-vehicle ecosystem, most of the vehicles can be something like a Smart ForTwo, with a smaller number of large vehicles that can be used by whoever actually needs them at any moment. A shared-vehicle ecosystem could also include something like a cross between a scaled-up UberPOOL and a scaled-down bus: a Sprinter van (or equivalent) could pick up and drop off a dozen or so commuters who live in area A and work in area B. This improves the density of the system. With affordable tunneling, freeways can go underground instead of destroying communities on the surface. This is one of the greatest evils of our car-centric infrastructure today, but with affordable tunneling we can abolish it. Train-based mass transit will always be desirable for high-traffic corridors because it can be made far more dense. And despite this article’s attempts to paint him otherwise, Musk agrees with this - he is in talks to build a Hyperloop between Washington and Baltimore, as well as a lower-speed mass transit “loop” in Chicago. However, trains will never be all that we need for transit, because they just can’t go everywhere. You will almost always need last-mile transportation at the endpoints, and there will always be routes that are not efficiently served by the train network. That’s where cars (or whatever we call the things they evolve into) come in. A driverless, electric, shared, and tunnel-augmented vehicle ecosystem is probably the perfect mass transit system.
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blindwatchmaker 9y ago
Tunnel costs aside, I hadn't known that Musk's idea was to dig this for car use. I honestly feel that money would be put to better use just making a subway.
WheelsAtLarge 9y ago
Why is boring the way to go? Here in L.A., we keep on widening the freeways and traffic is just as bad. Boring is just another channel that will get clogged once it's built. Mass transportation is a better way to go. Also,policies that make it desirable for people to work close to where they live will help.

141 points by Osiris30 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Underground freeways? Wow. I didn't realize that was the target of The Boring Company. I thought it was a start at making Hyperloop a thing. That would have (to me) made more sense than underground freeways. This is a scathing review, but I can't really find anything inaccurate in it. Perhaps I didn't try hard enough, but the thought of riding hundreds of miles underground doesn't make me enthusiastic about looking for ways to make it more real. I've seen what happens when Lithium batteries catch on fire, and I wouldn't want to be stuck in a tunnel when that happened.

akgerber 9y ago
Mostly-underground ultra-high-speed railways are nearing commercial implementation in Japan soon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen Experientially, it'll probably mostly be like a very long subway ride— but much comfier than the the tiny-tunnel, tiny-car Hyperloop, since at least you'll be able to go to the bathroom.
- falcolas 9y ago
  That looks like a pretty cool project. My problem with tunnels is mostly related to being in a car: no room to stand, it's easy to be locked into the car in an accident, and nice big windows to let in the absolute darkness (or to "trap" you inside a reflection if you turn on your interior lights). That train is also looking to go about 2.5x faster than the Boring Tunnel cars, resulting in a much shorter trip.
tfha 9y ago
No I think it's generally right. The boring company seems like a really silly idea. It's an extension of a broken transportation system. Cities scale with busses and trains. For some reason, the boring company wants to scale a city with cars. You build this big expensive tunnel to get 1/10th or even 1/50th the throughput that you could get with a train system. Maybe that's not the California way though.
- chrischen 9y ago
  It's because he owns a car company. You can pretty much throw any idea he has for transit out the window there. If he had his way, he'd probably put rentable self-driving cars back-to-back in those tunnels. It'll be like aluminum and steel train cars, except each one is a Tesla.
- adventured 9y ago
  > Cities scale with busses and trains. You're missing that the boring premise is to utilize electric mass-transit units within the tunnels as well. That could dramatically scale the transit systems. It becomes a defacto variation of a subway system. Musk keeps pointing this out and it keeps getting ignored for some reason.
  - hacknat 9y ago
    Because it’s an absurd idea. He’a trying to solve an already solved problem with an inferior consumer solution. When you look at the commuter trains of the major metro areas you’ll notice some very well off people that could afford to drive, but choose to ride in a comfortable train and focus on reading or catching up on email. Driving is an inferior mode of transportation. And before you yell, “but driverless cars!” Consider that many folks don’t want to buy a car in some of these bigger metro areas or to pay for the parking to maintain one. For so many reasons, beyond technology, traditional mass transit is the superior option. I couldn’t care less whether Musk achieves his technological goals with the Boring Company. It’s hawking an inferior product even if he does.
  - namelost 9y ago
    Tunnels are dangerous. Elon is proposing to build really narrow tunnels that are hard to evacuate and then allow every random vehicle inside it. Yes it's on a sled but who is certifying that my fellow tunnelgoers' vehicles won't leak fuel, spontaneously catch fire, or find some other special way to kill me? Elon has some good ideas and some stupid ideas, this is of the latter category.

akgerber 9y ago

Elon Musk seems like a rich guy from the California suburbs interested in decarbonizing his lifestyle— a reasonably noble goal, but the California suburbs have a ton of issues totally unrelated to their ecological footprint— not least of which is that their car-dependent transportation system can't scale beyond a certain level of density without massive congestion. And preventing them from scaling beyond that density instead results in a profoundly broken housing market because everyone who wants to live in California is required to bid up a profoundly expensive patch of land. A modest improvement in road throughput from automation is nothing but a short-term solution, and might well make congestion worse because of the reduced time/attention cost of driving— potentially much worse, since people many more people could move into RVs occupying the only free land in coastal California, its roads. Elon Musk does not look like a smart guy when he rejects what clever outsiders who have been paying attention to these issues for years have to say and by calling them idiots— after all, he supposedly got into rocketry by devouring textbooks, not by getting angry during his commute. This graphic makes the point about why cars can never be a solution for mass urban mobility better than pretty much anything else: https://i.imgur.com/sCvRIEd.gif https://i.imgur.com/sCvRIEd.gif

fartcannon 9y ago
The first thought that came to mind when I looked at that gif is, "this is what 200 people in their detached homes look like, this is what 200 people in their condos look like, this what 200 people sharing a multi-bed dorm room look like."
candiodari 9y ago
Maybe it's just me but that picture makes the exact opposite point from what you're saying. It clearly points out that the difference between cars and other forms of transportation is linear. Public transportation doesn't scale this especially well, as anybody using public transport knows, but this article is a nice summary [1]. We all know what would happen to bus stops, stations, and generally to public places if people on buses actually had anywhere near the density "made possible" by public transport. It just won't work. While for instance, adding roads in the sky (ie. very long bridges) scales exponentially, for obvious reasons. As does just flying (flying, incidentally, is a lot more efficient than people think). People don't want this, for obvious reasons, but there comes a point in cities where we have no choice. Frankly, cities like depicted in "the fifth element" and "star wars" are the future. Probably more rails, less floating, but the general idea is where we'll be going. Doesn't even really matter if they have public or private transport. Given how fast public transport upgrades (even when absolutely required by the numbers of people they just refuse to upgrade for decades. Yes. Decades) and how comfortable it is, and add of course the fact that they just don't support the use cases cars enable (some of which, like an elderly or disabled person doing groceries, are absolute requirements) and you get to the point : private transport is far preferable to public transport. [1] http://www.uwgb.edu/DutchS/PSEUDOSC/MassTransit.HTM http://www.uwgb.edu/DutchS/PSEUDOSC/MassTransit.HTM

Osiris30 9y ago

Background info to the 'flame war' between Musk and Jared Walker (humantransit.org), which was the catalyst for this post, can be found here - http://humantransit.org/2017/12/elon-musk-responds.html http://humantransit.org/2017/12/elon-musk-responds.html

deleted 9y ago
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deleted 9y ago
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sidcool 9y ago

This is an opinionated blog, not necessarily wrong. But a bad idea implemented is sometimes better than a good one not implemented at all. And if you think I am a biased fan of Elon Musk, well you would be right.

sundaeofshock 9y ago
The problem is money. Implementing the bad idea means there won’t be money for the good idea. The bad idea also gains inertia, so it tends to stay around and worsen for decades (e.g. current auto-centric infrastructure).
- rohit2412 9y ago
  Exactly! I'm Indian, and am tired of listening to the argument that India shouldn't build bullet trains, as hyperloops will obviously be real in 5 years. People think that hsr which will cost 80 billion dollars will be replaced by a maglev in pnuematic tubes for only 6 billion.
kybernetikos 9y ago
There's something of value to the energy and enthusiasm that Elon seems to be able to generate. Even if the initial version of the idea is dumb he may be able to iterate it until it's not, if he's creating more buy in and excitement than everyone else.

jimrandomh 9y ago

This article claims (1) that Elon Musk has no chance to achieve a 10x reduction in tunneling costs, and (2) that this reduction has already been achieved in other countries. This seems like a contradiction. If all his company does is catch up to the international state of the art, that will be a huge improvement for the US. And if he pretends that the 10x reduction in price is due to technological advancement rather than reducing profit margin and egregious waste, that will help city governments and competitors save face.

frabbit 9y ago
I wondered about exactly that point. Reading on, it seemed like one of his suggestions for cost-reduction was to drive down wages for workers. I would have thought he would have seen Musk as a kindred spirit there: "There appears to be a lot of union featherbedding in some American cities, but this is a political rather than technological problem; without such featherbedding, labor costs are not onerous."
yiyus 9y ago
There is an extra claim that clarifies the contradiction: Elon Musk is trying to achieve that 10x reduction reducing the tunnel diameter. The author argues this won't work. What I understood is that, if the company indeed was trying to catch up with the international state of the art, they could actually achieve their goal, but the problem is that Mr.Musk is not only ignoring it, but calling them idiots. So, I do not see any contradiction. But that is just how I interpret the article, I do not have a personal opinion in this issue.
- jimrandomh 9y ago
  Prediction: The Boring Company's first tunneling machine will be small-diameter, and each subsequent one will be larger, similar to the scale-up from Falcon 1 to Falcon 9 to Falcon Heavy, simply because that's the right way to do the R&D. But it would be very bad salesmanship to say "the first TBM is really small because that was easier for us", so instead he talks about the benefits of being smaller.

njarboe 9y ago

"b) promises reducing tunneling costs by a factor of 10, a feat that he himself has no chance to achieve, and c) is unaware that the cost reduction he promises, relative to American construction costs, has already been achieved in a number of countries." So Musk, a person who owns and is the CTO of a company that can now land reusable rockets that were only dreamed about in science fiction a decade ago, won't be able to drop tunneling costs in the US by a factor of ten, when the author admits this is already done in other countries. Not sure this is worth reading past that part.

hacknat 9y ago
He’s specifically calling out the goal of reducing tunneling costs by accelerating the TBM. The other projects that have reduced costs have done so through boring old sound construction management practices (the article pointing out the labor and stations are actually the expensive parts of these projects, not the tunnel by itself). Also, if you read the rest of the article he literally predicts your response of appealing to the authoritative win of SpaceX as a completely invalid counter argument (and he’d be right, appeals to authority is on the list of logical fallacies, last I checked ;) ).
- jakubp 9y ago
  Or perhaps the author of the article is doing armchair philosophy, whereas Elon Musk is the supposedly too optimistic doer who actually builds incredible stuff. (In the sense that Nassim Taleb distinguishes people who talk a lot and people accomplish stuff.)
- njarboe 9y ago
  One can't prove a negative. The Boring company has a plan and a goal. Saying it can't be done is not useful or productive. There has not been much change in tunneling tech in the last 20 years and Musk seems to think it is possible to get some great improvements. He has done it in two other very different fields with SpaceX and Tesla. Creating a new technology is not about the logic of debates but doing things and failing over and over again, in a productive way, to get to success. Musk can access great people and large amounts of capital, thinks things out from first principles, doesn't believe in "safety first", and thinks tunnels could be of great value. Traffic (on car and trains) is killing our cities and nothing is being done about it. No new transportation infrastructure built in the Bay Area since 1980 except a few small BART extensions. We could put anything in these tunnels. Not sure why people are so worried that he is going to get some people together and try.

m3kw9 9y ago

The author has a bunch of numbers and stats written down which supports his claims but none of us would even bother to check up. Now the thing is do I trust what his guy says that Musk can’t actually do it or do I trust a man that has already built a working reusable rocket to space and made a few electrical vehicles? If Elon says he’s an idiot, i wouldn’t bet against that

bryananderson 9y ago

I am on the same page with everyone here about the problems with car-centered infrastructure, but I think perhaps we haven’t fully internalized the extent to which driverless, electric, shared vehicles will change this equation. It’s an entirely new paradigm - and even more so if cheap tunneling can be achieved. While Musk’s initial ideas about how to reduce the cost may be wrong, at least he’s trying to! His initial ideas about electric cars and rockets weren’t completely right either, because he was not an expert in those areas. He hired the most talented people in those fields and learned and changed over a period of years until he found what worked. It’s a good algorithm, and it helps to be wealthy so that you can survive the failures and dead-ends without running out of money. There are two arguments in the article: that Musk is going about solving the problem in the wrong way, and that he is solving the wrong problem altogether by trying to put cars in tunnels. The author may well be right about the first, but I think he/she is wrong about the second. Let’s think about everything that changes in a fully driverless, electric, shared, and tunnel-augmented vehicle ecosystem. No more greenhouse gas emissions directly from vehicles (and none at all once the grid is fully renewable). No more need to dedicate huge amounts of valuable land in our cities and suburbs to parking (cars can drive themselves to outlying areas to park or, better yet, can be shared). Dramatically higher throughput because the human mistakes that cause congestion can be avoided (I recommend CGP Grey’s video on the causes of traffic: https://youtu.be/iHzzSao6ypE https://youtu.be/iHzzSao6ypE ). Driverless cars could drive faster and closer together, especially if they can communicate with one another. Even more dramatic reduction in deaths and injuries as human error is removed from the equation. Far fewer cars are needed in a shared-vehicle ecosystem. Most privately-owned cars are idle nearly all of the time, but they still take up space. Sharing vehicles allows us to reduce the amount of infrastructure needed for cars. The average size of vehicles in the fleet can also be reduced. Right now people drive unnecessarily large vehicles because they might need the space a few times per year (annual family skiing trip, etc). These vehicles use up more energy and take up more space. In a shared-vehicle ecosystem, most of the vehicles can be something like a Smart ForTwo, with a smaller number of large vehicles that can be used by whoever actually needs them at any moment. A shared-vehicle ecosystem could also include something like a cross between a scaled-up UberPOOL and a scaled-down bus: a Sprinter van (or equivalent) could pick up and drop off a dozen or so commuters who live in area A and work in area B. This improves the density of the system. With affordable tunneling, freeways can go underground instead of destroying communities on the surface. This is one of the greatest evils of our car-centric infrastructure today, but with affordable tunneling we can abolish it. Train-based mass transit will always be desirable for high-traffic corridors because it can be made far more dense. And despite this article’s attempts to paint him otherwise, Musk agrees with this - he is in talks to build a Hyperloop between Washington and Baltimore, as well as a lower-speed mass transit “loop” in Chicago. However, trains will never be all that we need for transit, because they just can’t go everywhere. You will almost always need last-mile transportation at the endpoints, and there will always be routes that are not efficiently served by the train network. That’s where cars (or whatever we call the things they evolve into) come in. A driverless, electric, shared, and tunnel-augmented vehicle ecosystem is probably the perfect mass transit system.

deleted 9y ago

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blindwatchmaker 9y ago

Tunnel costs aside, I hadn't known that Musk's idea was to dig this for car use. I honestly feel that money would be put to better use just making a subway.

WheelsAtLarge 9y ago

Why is boring the way to go? Here in L.A., we keep on widening the freeways and traffic is just as bad. Boring is just another channel that will get clogged once it's built. Mass transportation is a better way to go. Also,policies that make it desirable for people to work close to where they live will help.