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I hope that this would be a boon for transit costs in America which are ridiculous compared to Europe [0]. But part of the problem lies with transit advocates

I hope that this would be a boon for transit costs in America which are ridiculous compared to Europe [0]. But part of the problem lies with transit advocates in the US, who think tech and Elon Musk are a threat to transit. [1] 0: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs-congress.html?mtrref=www.google.com&gwh=CEC730A179DCBAF18A6F6273514862D7&gwt=pay https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-... 1: https://twitter.com/humantransit/status/941386665519595521 https://twitter.com/humantransit/status/941386665519595521

jcranmer 8y ago
The largest reason for the high construction costs is probably union featherbedding and contractual mismanagement [0]. There's no indication that The Boring Company is capable of meaningful cost reduction in this regard. The actual cost of physical material in constructing tunnels is a relatively small cost of the project (note that most of the cost in a subway isn't the subway tunnels themselves, it's the subway stations). The only meaningful idea I've seen about cutting costs from The Boring Company is recovering TBMs, which strongly suggests there's no sense of why tunnels themselves cost money [1]. If Musk just talked about being able to build tunnels cheaper, even transit enthusiasts would have a hard time bringing themselves to care. But between Hyperloop and his underground road conveyance thingy, it's quite clear that he has no idea how to build any high-capacity transit [2]. It seems as if he cares far more about "how do I get me from A to B most effectively" rather than "how do I get a million people from A to B most effectively," and moreover, that he doesn't even realize that those are different questions that necessitate different answers. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-... [1] TBMs are largely unrecovered because it costs too much to recover them. You can't back them up without risking geological stability of the above ground, and digging a cut-and-cover shaft to reach them is quite expensive. [2] On fixed-guideway systems, the capacity is largely dictated by station dwell time and switch fouling time, which governs the minimum headway between adjacent consists. Consequently, you need high capacity through consist to get any meaningful capacity. But the Hyperloop pods and the road sleds both envision ultra-low consist capacity, consequently killing total throughput. Incidentally, higher speeds also reduce capacity.
- SteveGregory 8y ago
  I disagree. I think the Boring Company FAQ addresses both labor and station costs fairly directly. Labor: they want to increase automation so there are fewer workers needed, and tunnel faster so they can pay for fewer hours of work. Stations: they do not want to make expensive subterranean stations, and instead just want small stations at the surface. People have questioned the throughput, but I think throughput appears reasonable if 1 car can leave every 0.5 minutes vs a normal station in which 10 cars leave every 5 minutes
  - windlep 8y ago
    > Labor: they want to increase automation so there are fewer workers needed, and tunnel faster so they can pay for fewer hours of work. Musk has not had a great track record of reducing costs by increasing automation. See: https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/13/17234296/tesla-model-3-robots-production-hell-elon-musk https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/13/17234296/tesla-model-3-ro...
  - jcranmer 8y ago
    > Stations: they do not want to make expensive subterranean stations, and instead just want small stations at the surface. This is essentially saying "let's save money by cutting costs on the cheap part of the project and increase the most expensive part of the project several fold." The cost of a bored tunnel is largely dictated by its length (essentially, length determines how much infrastructure you need--cabling, shielding, drainage, etc.; cross-section determines the scale of this infrastructure) [1]. A car elevator access shaft is going to be a very time-consuming vertical cut via excavators, where depth is going to be the driving dimension in cost. Of course, throughput comes back to bite you: how long does it take cars to make it up and down the elevator shaft? A vehicle elevator might make 1 foot per second, or somewhere in the region of a 4 minute round trip per vehicle if the tunnel is 100 ft deep [2]. A regular highway lane has a capacity of ~2000 cars per hour, so you need 266 elevators to fill and empty it [3]. Of course, the capacity of rapid transit is ~20,000 people per hour in the same tunnel space, so you really need over a thousand elevators. When you take into account acceleration/deceleration lanes for well over a thousand elevators, is that really cheaper digging than a dozen cavernous stations? [1] Cutting the diameter of a tunnel in half does not cut its construction costs by 75%, more like 25-50%. Construction costs are closer to linear in diameter than linear in cross-sectional area. [2] The other really, really big omission in the FAQ is the lack of discussion of the consequence of depth. Vertical circulation is already a tricky issue with what we construct today, and the space-hungry nature of SOV-centric design compounds the problem tremendously. 100 ft is sort of the highest level I'm assuming is in play here, since that's about as high as you can go without running into the sewers and extant mass transit lines. Going deeper of course makes the vertical circulation numbers even worse. [3] This assumes that you only build one elevator to service both directions.
throwawaymaroon 8y ago
Elon Musk is actively hostile to existing transit advocates like Jarrett Walker and also pretty damn stupid and uneducated: proudly ignorant. The problem isn't with transit advocates, it's with Elon Musk. And also probably also people like you.
ccccccccccccc 8y ago
Musk's idea is _incredible_ and I really think it has the potential to take off with American car culture. However, I think that might be it's biggest downfall, too. In many aspects, from environmentally friendliness to ridership growth, I think mass public transit would scale better than individuals owning their own vehicle.
DmenshunlAnlsis 8y ago
It’s hard to take him seriously in terms of mass transit when he talks about vacuum trains as though they’re not a terrible idea. Then you remember he owns a company that plans to ultimately replace airlines in some markets with rockets, and a car company, and a person not overly taken with his “charisma” wonders if his interest in mass transit is in scuttling it. If he was serious about mass transit there are existing, proven technologies he could get behind with his billions, rather than hyperloop. Instead he proposes a technology that is entrancing to people who don’t know enough about engineering and physics, and that is exciting. Unfortunately the tech isn’t workable, it’s just exciting, but it could take a decade or more for that to become apparent to most people. Wikipedia has an excellent article which lays out the history of the concept going back to the 18th century. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain I love the understatement of “prohibitively expensive” too, very droll. Any experimentalist who has worked with strong vacuums knows how absurd the idea of a hyperloop is at this point. The expense, the maintence costs, the airlocks, the pumps, all would be an incredible expense that could never be recouped in the builder’s lifetime. The actual tunneling would have to be totally revolutionary too, with incredibly long, nearly straight sections. The turning radius would have to be on the order of of a commercial airliner’s turning radius, which is absurd. Credit to the man though, it hits that sweet spot requiring specialist knowledge to see through the hype, much like promises of nuclear fusion as a major power source within a couple of decades. The big idea is so attractive, and the problems all involve technical details. It’s not quite a con, but it’s close.
- jcranmer 8y ago
  To be fair, the original Hyperloop proposal is not actually a vactrain. Instead, it's something that manages to be worse than a vactrain, and so everyone who is actually interested in making it work is basically turning it back into a vactrain.
- unethical_ban 8y ago
  That you think Tesla is solely a money making venture via automobiles is telling. It's a car company that could reduce our world's impact on the environment substantially over time. It is a vehicle (ha) for battery and charging technology, and for AI via their research in driver assist. It isn't unreasonable for a tech billionaire with civilization defining aspirations to want to make better cars, build better batteries, and improve public transit all at once.
so33 8y ago
>I hope that this would be a boon for transit costs in America which are ridiculous compared to Europe [0]. What is special about America's underground bedrock, compared to Europe's, that today's existing tunnel boring technology cannot solve in America, leading to high costs? >But part of the problem lies with transit advocates in the US, who think tech and Elon Musk are a threat to transit. [1] Transit advocates, like Jarrett Walker (as you linked), who view public transit in the US (of the "put a bunch of people on a bus or train" type) as a service that is already useful but often deficiently funded and poorly maintained, are extremely rational to be wary, especially when technologists like Elon Musk view transit as primarily a highway-building exercise. Elon's original vision for The Boring Company was basically a re-skinned highway tunnel. Instead of onramps and offramps you have elevators, and instead of "cars" traveling on "roads" you get high speed cars traveling inside tunneled roads. His most recent announcement, to "prioritize pedestrians over cars" (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/972245615735222273 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/972245615735222273), looks an awful lot like a bus that runs on a freeway. To transit advocates this just looks like more of the same.
- dx034 8y ago
  It's labour cost and legal cost. The actual construction isn't more expensive in the US than it is in Europe.

jcranmer 8y ago

The largest reason for the high construction costs is probably union featherbedding and contractual mismanagement [0]. There's no indication that The Boring Company is capable of meaningful cost reduction in this regard. The actual cost of physical material in constructing tunnels is a relatively small cost of the project (note that most of the cost in a subway isn't the subway tunnels themselves, it's the subway stations). The only meaningful idea I've seen about cutting costs from The Boring Company is recovering TBMs, which strongly suggests there's no sense of why tunnels themselves cost money [1]. If Musk just talked about being able to build tunnels cheaper, even transit enthusiasts would have a hard time bringing themselves to care. But between Hyperloop and his underground road conveyance thingy, it's quite clear that he has no idea how to build any high-capacity transit [2]. It seems as if he cares far more about "how do I get me from A to B most effectively" rather than "how do I get a million people from A to B most effectively," and moreover, that he doesn't even realize that those are different questions that necessitate different answers. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-... [1] TBMs are largely unrecovered because it costs too much to recover them. You can't back them up without risking geological stability of the above ground, and digging a cut-and-cover shaft to reach them is quite expensive. [2] On fixed-guideway systems, the capacity is largely dictated by station dwell time and switch fouling time, which governs the minimum headway between adjacent consists. Consequently, you need high capacity through consist to get any meaningful capacity. But the Hyperloop pods and the road sleds both envision ultra-low consist capacity, consequently killing total throughput. Incidentally, higher speeds also reduce capacity.

SteveGregory 8y ago
I disagree. I think the Boring Company FAQ addresses both labor and station costs fairly directly. Labor: they want to increase automation so there are fewer workers needed, and tunnel faster so they can pay for fewer hours of work. Stations: they do not want to make expensive subterranean stations, and instead just want small stations at the surface. People have questioned the throughput, but I think throughput appears reasonable if 1 car can leave every 0.5 minutes vs a normal station in which 10 cars leave every 5 minutes
- windlep 8y ago
  > Labor: they want to increase automation so there are fewer workers needed, and tunnel faster so they can pay for fewer hours of work. Musk has not had a great track record of reducing costs by increasing automation. See: https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/13/17234296/tesla-model-3-robots-production-hell-elon-musk https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/13/17234296/tesla-model-3-ro...
- jcranmer 8y ago
  > Stations: they do not want to make expensive subterranean stations, and instead just want small stations at the surface. This is essentially saying "let's save money by cutting costs on the cheap part of the project and increase the most expensive part of the project several fold." The cost of a bored tunnel is largely dictated by its length (essentially, length determines how much infrastructure you need--cabling, shielding, drainage, etc.; cross-section determines the scale of this infrastructure) [1]. A car elevator access shaft is going to be a very time-consuming vertical cut via excavators, where depth is going to be the driving dimension in cost. Of course, throughput comes back to bite you: how long does it take cars to make it up and down the elevator shaft? A vehicle elevator might make 1 foot per second, or somewhere in the region of a 4 minute round trip per vehicle if the tunnel is 100 ft deep [2]. A regular highway lane has a capacity of ~2000 cars per hour, so you need 266 elevators to fill and empty it [3]. Of course, the capacity of rapid transit is ~20,000 people per hour in the same tunnel space, so you really need over a thousand elevators. When you take into account acceleration/deceleration lanes for well over a thousand elevators, is that really cheaper digging than a dozen cavernous stations? [1] Cutting the diameter of a tunnel in half does not cut its construction costs by 75%, more like 25-50%. Construction costs are closer to linear in diameter than linear in cross-sectional area. [2] The other really, really big omission in the FAQ is the lack of discussion of the consequence of depth. Vertical circulation is already a tricky issue with what we construct today, and the space-hungry nature of SOV-centric design compounds the problem tremendously. 100 ft is sort of the highest level I'm assuming is in play here, since that's about as high as you can go without running into the sewers and extant mass transit lines. Going deeper of course makes the vertical circulation numbers even worse. [3] This assumes that you only build one elevator to service both directions.

throwawaymaroon 8y ago

Elon Musk is actively hostile to existing transit advocates like Jarrett Walker and also pretty damn stupid and uneducated: proudly ignorant. The problem isn't with transit advocates, it's with Elon Musk. And also probably also people like you.

ccccccccccccc 8y ago

Musk's idea is _incredible_ and I really think it has the potential to take off with American car culture. However, I think that might be it's biggest downfall, too. In many aspects, from environmentally friendliness to ridership growth, I think mass public transit would scale better than individuals owning their own vehicle.

DmenshunlAnlsis 8y ago

It’s hard to take him seriously in terms of mass transit when he talks about vacuum trains as though they’re not a terrible idea. Then you remember he owns a company that plans to ultimately replace airlines in some markets with rockets, and a car company, and a person not overly taken with his “charisma” wonders if his interest in mass transit is in scuttling it. If he was serious about mass transit there are existing, proven technologies he could get behind with his billions, rather than hyperloop. Instead he proposes a technology that is entrancing to people who don’t know enough about engineering and physics, and that is exciting. Unfortunately the tech isn’t workable, it’s just exciting, but it could take a decade or more for that to become apparent to most people. Wikipedia has an excellent article which lays out the history of the concept going back to the 18th century. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain I love the understatement of “prohibitively expensive” too, very droll. Any experimentalist who has worked with strong vacuums knows how absurd the idea of a hyperloop is at this point. The expense, the maintence costs, the airlocks, the pumps, all would be an incredible expense that could never be recouped in the builder’s lifetime. The actual tunneling would have to be totally revolutionary too, with incredibly long, nearly straight sections. The turning radius would have to be on the order of of a commercial airliner’s turning radius, which is absurd. Credit to the man though, it hits that sweet spot requiring specialist knowledge to see through the hype, much like promises of nuclear fusion as a major power source within a couple of decades. The big idea is so attractive, and the problems all involve technical details. It’s not quite a con, but it’s close.

jcranmer 8y ago
To be fair, the original Hyperloop proposal is not actually a vactrain. Instead, it's something that manages to be worse than a vactrain, and so everyone who is actually interested in making it work is basically turning it back into a vactrain.
unethical_ban 8y ago
That you think Tesla is solely a money making venture via automobiles is telling. It's a car company that could reduce our world's impact on the environment substantially over time. It is a vehicle (ha) for battery and charging technology, and for AI via their research in driver assist. It isn't unreasonable for a tech billionaire with civilization defining aspirations to want to make better cars, build better batteries, and improve public transit all at once.

so33 8y ago

>I hope that this would be a boon for transit costs in America which are ridiculous compared to Europe [0]. What is special about America's underground bedrock, compared to Europe's, that today's existing tunnel boring technology cannot solve in America, leading to high costs? >But part of the problem lies with transit advocates in the US, who think tech and Elon Musk are a threat to transit. [1] Transit advocates, like Jarrett Walker (as you linked), who view public transit in the US (of the "put a bunch of people on a bus or train" type) as a service that is already useful but often deficiently funded and poorly maintained, are extremely rational to be wary, especially when technologists like Elon Musk view transit as primarily a highway-building exercise. Elon's original vision for The Boring Company was basically a re-skinned highway tunnel. Instead of onramps and offramps you have elevators, and instead of "cars" traveling on "roads" you get high speed cars traveling inside tunneled roads. His most recent announcement, to "prioritize pedestrians over cars" (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/972245615735222273 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/972245615735222273), looks an awful lot like a bus that runs on a freeway. To transit advocates this just looks like more of the same.

dx034 8y ago
It's labour cost and legal cost. The actual construction isn't more expensive in the US than it is in Europe.