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I don't get it. Aren't there lots of companies around the world that already have this equipment and have done this kind of work for years? Drilling holes for t

• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• cozzyd 8y ago
  Other companies probably had more realistic cost and service projections. Or maybe this is a sick marketing move by Rahm and in a year they'll pick some well-established contractor.
  • starpilot 8y ago
    SpaceX was completely unrealistic. Like we in the aerospace industry thought it was a joke and sat smugly with their string of spectacular failures in the mid '00s. My friend at NASA JSC launch operations especially. Now, he does launch ops at SpaceX.
    • philliphaydon 8y ago
      I don't know a lot about SpaceX but I think I read somewhere he wanted to buy a rocket, and the price given to him was insane, so he looked up how to make a rocket and figured he could do it for less than the cost of buying one, and then after reducing costs decided it also needed to be reusable.
      • icelancer 8y ago
        That's more or less what happened. The supplier of the rockets were Russian and they basically screwed with him. And now, SpaceX.
    • megablast 8y ago
      If you can't beat them?
    • dx034 8y ago
      The sector before solely consisted of a few government agencies. He showed that a private company can operate successfully in that space, which many doubted before. That he can be cheaper is then not much of a surprise, government agencies have little incentive to be as efficient as possible. Tunnels are different, it's already done solely by private companies and there is some competition. Beating a Swiss company will be harder than a EU or US government agency.
      • dingaling 8y ago
        > The sector before solely consisted of a few government agencies. Not at all. This seems to be a common misconception. NASA, the USAF and the Navy have never built a launcher themselves. The US Army did, in the late 40s and 50s.
      • nickik 8y ago
        ULA wa s private but government supported. They coild have competet in the international launch market but largly didnt. While tunneps are private, not many pivate companies come up with new transportation systems.
• SeanAnderson 8y ago
  Well, The Boring Company is claiming they've improved the speed of a traditional boring machine by 10x. So, maybe they are making the argument the improved speed makes larger projects more practical? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boring_Company#Boring_machines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boring_Company#Boring_mach...
  • ComradeTaco 8y ago
    If the Boring company could produce a reliable boring machine that dug at 10x speed, the boring machine would far far more valuable than these tunnels. It makes me think that the claims are exaggerated or misleading.
    • Johnny555 8y ago
      It makes me think that the claims are exaggerated or misleading. Which is why they need to get their first paid job so they can prove it. They can make lots of bold claims for their own tunnel, but if they prove it's true on a real job, then their technology suddenly becomes much more valuable. That said, I'm skeptical too.
      • WalterBright 8y ago
        The history of the telegraph is entertaining. It was so good, investors thought Morse was just flim-flam man. Morse finally wised up, and devised a demonstration that could not be faked. He set up a line between Washington and Baltimore, and transmitted the news from a convention in Baltimore. It arrived in Washington 64 minutes before the train bearing the news did, thus proving it worked. Within 2 years, there was 2,000 miles strung, within 4 years, 12,000 miles. People had discovered they could make money by using the telegraph. People who received news faster made money.
        • mlrtime 8y ago
          And low latency trading is still alive and kicking.
• bluthru 8y ago
  https://www.boringcompany.com/faq/ https://www.boringcompany.com/faq/
• KKKKkkkk1 8y ago
  Elon Musk has effective control of a public company in which he has a minority stake. He already sold one failing business to Tesla's shareowners (SolarCity). Why not do it again?
  • gorbot 8y ago
    Salty
• gok 8y ago
  The innovation claims to be that they’re drilling smaller holes. We’ve always been able to cheaply drill low diameter tunnels but we haven’t been able to use them for anything but aqueducts. The idea is that using little electric sleds they can make a transit tunnel using aqueduct-sized tunnels.
  • maym86 8y ago
    How come someone didn't come up with the idea of smaller trains (sleds) before? London tube is fairly small in diameter.
    • gok 8y ago
      Firstly most of the London Underground was built cut-and-cover which is no longer practical in modern cities. Secondly, this will be much smaller than even the Tube. Crossrail’s tunnels will be about 6 meters, most existing are more like 4. BoringCo is talking about something like 2 meters. Note that a 2m tunnel requires excavating 4x less earth than a 4m tunnel and 9x less than a 6m tunnel. Most modern tunnels built for existing transit systems are built to fit existing rolling stock, so the idea of smaller tunnels gets ruled out early on. In the past, smaller tunnels were used. In fact, one of the most extensive small tunnel transit networks was in Chicago: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tunnel_Company https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tunnel_Company
      • Symbiote 8y ago
        > Firstly most of the London Underground was built cut-and-cover The small-diameter tunnels we're talking about were built with a tunnel shield, which is the hand-operated predecessor to the TBM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_London_Underground#Electric_underground_railways_(1900%E2%80%931908) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_London_Undergro...
      • isostatic 8y ago
        Most of the London Underground is above ground. Of that underground, I Elise the majority is the deep tube bored lines (pic, jubilee, bakerloo, central, northern) rather than pretty much just the circle that's cut and cover.
• csomar 8y ago
  I think the way it works is that the company that bids the least takes the project. By law. Also I think before you bid you have to get through the requirements. So if they had the cheapest offer, Chicago city has to take them.
• jimjimjim 8y ago
  maybe they haven't yet got unions in their work.
• spacenick88 8y ago
  I think Musks main idea is that everyone else is drilling tunnels with larger diameter than necessary and that drilling scales badly with tunnel diameter. Also he probably thinks that SpaceX material tech and brunt force can make it faster.
  • dx034 8y ago
    And no one before thought of that? The reason tunnels have become larger over past decades is because of additional requirements (safety, electricity, larger rolling stock). That small tunnels are easier and faster is known at least since the 1890 when much of the London underground (deep underground, not cut and cover) was built.
    • masklinn 8y ago
      And as anyone who's been in the London underground and is more than 5ft tall can attest, it's also very uncomfortable. Only place where I had to bend to enter and exit a subway car, only place were I could comfortably stand was the center alley, and I'm hardly tall.
      • spacenick88 8y ago
        That's why the Boring company vehicles are more like cars and you'd enter them while on the surface from which they'd use an elevator to get underground. Also they wouldn't block the rail while waiting at a station. Subways are pretty efficient systems but that doesn't mean they are anywhere close to the most efficient system, especially considering they were invented during a time where it would be unthinkable to dynamically compute optimized schedules. When the London underground was built you'd need a room full of people working many hours to come up with a workable scheduling.
        • jcranmer 8y ago
          > Subways are pretty efficient systems but that doesn't mean they are anywhere close to the most efficient system, especially considering they were invented during a time where it would be unthinkable to dynamically compute optimized schedules. Personal rapid transit systems, which is basically what Loop is and sounds like what you're proposing, have been proposed several times and even built in a few places (Morgantown's is perhaps the most notable, at least in the US). They just haven't shown themselves to be very capable. Subways are probably the most efficient system possible. They're a 1-D system, with transfers between separate 1-D system. When there's no conflicts between different lines (i.e., everything is grade-separated), you can dedicate most of the space to the actual trains themselves and the safety buffers for moving trains to stop. As you move to more complex systems, now you need to have extra gaps that other trains on other lines can merge into, which reduces scheduling flexibility. In other words, subways are much simpler, and it turns that simple systems are often the most efficient in practice. (If you want to see an example of what can go wrong even with computerized scheduling of dynamic routing, look at Denver's baggage system).
• abainbridge 8y ago
  I see a lot of parallels between Elon and Isambard Kingdom Brunel's careers. Brunel was an excellent marketeer who consistently over-promised and under delivered. He also drove technology forward more than anyone else of his generation. When Brunel was making the Great Western Railway, he decided to survey the route himself because he felt the existing surveyors were slow, expensive and crap. He did this on horseback. During the process he concluded that the horses he was hiring were slow, expensive and crap, so he started his own horse hire company. Somehow, despite this insanity, we got a railway, and it was good. Disclaimer: it's twenty years since I read a Brunel biography. I might have some of the details a bit wrong.
  • jacobolus 8y ago
    *Brunel
    • abainbridge 8y ago
      Oh dear. Very sorry. Now fixed. Thanks.
  • abainbridge 8y ago
    Also on that project, he designed a brick arch bridge that everyone thought was too low profile to stay up. It's still there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Railway_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Railway_Bridge
  • taneq 8y ago
    > When Brunel was making the Great Western Railway, he decided to survey the route himself because he felt the existing surveyors were slow, expensive and crap. He did this on horseback. During the process he concluded that the horses he was hiring were slow, expensive and crap, so he started his own horse hire company. Somehow, despite this insanity... Was he wrong on those counts?
    • abainbridge 8y ago
      I think it is hard to tell. I guess he just had more drive and energy than everyone he depended on, so replacing them with himself was often a win. I like to imagine the metal struggle he went through we he decided the animal feed he was getting was sub-standard and thought about designing a steam powered tractor and buying a field: too much latency, gotta survey this god-damn route today.
• bufferoverflow 8y ago
  Musk has improved the process and the speed a lot. You should watch his recent interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofRm13SbP5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofRm13SbP5g
• s_kilk 8y ago
  It's the same logic behind the medias fawning admiration of Boring Co's putting a roofers torch in a nerf-gun housing. Which is to say, none, there is no logic, it's pure unalloyed hype and worship.
• Someone 8y ago
  ”The project is unusual in that no government funding is involved, forcing the winner to finance the entire construction cost itself. That limited interest from bidders” Musk is willing to take more risk in business than others. That likely made his offer a lot lower than that of the competition. Also note that this is a tender for a combination of building, financing, and running that line, with strict limits on what ‘runnig’ entails: ”In its request for proposals, the city set a goal of connecting downtown with the airport in 20 minutes or less, with service every 15 minutes for the majority of the day. It also requested that fares be below the current rates for taxis and ride-share trips”
• ameister14 8y ago
  Ask the MTA - several billion to dig a tunnel that should cost a couple hundred million. Hundreds of no-work jobs nobody can explain, with unions dictating that there needs to be 25 people there operating a machine that takes 8 people to operate. Just cut out the corruption and you've saved hundreds of millions. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
• ozim 8y ago
  As in article: "The project is unusual in that no government funding is involved, forcing the winner to finance the entire construction cost itself. That limited interest from bidders..."
• thegranderson 8y ago
  As I understand it, the Boring Company's strategy is to dig smaller tunnels. Since the volume of earth that must be moved scales with the square of the tunnel radius[1], a tunnel that is half as wide only requires a fourth of the dirt to be moved. I believe this accounts for most of their estimated speed/cost advantage - dig thinner tunnels and move less dirt. They also seem to be coupling that with more continuous tunneling and less labor. As far as I know, they're doing this with existing tunnel boring machines, just used differently. Volume = pi * radius^2 * length
  • Brakenshire 8y ago
    Don't you need wide tunnels to fit normal trains, let alone high speed trains, because they operate on a higher gauge? I know in London the new Crossrail tunnels have been deliberately made a lot wider than the existing Underground tunnels, because that allows normal trains to run through it. The Underground trains are narrow-gauge light-rail.
    • JoeSmithson 8y ago
      Not just Crossrail, even the new tube lines, such as the Northern Line Extension to Battersea are dug much wider than the old tunnels they connect up to. Obviously they carry the same trains as the rest of the line. The narrowness of the old tunnels is a constant hurdle to improving the tube.
      • KJKingJ 8y ago
        Indeed, wider tunnels make maintenance much easier, and also allow evacuation of the train via the regular side doors rather than through the cab door.
    • Symbiote 8y ago
      > The Underground trains are narrow-gauge light-rail. No, they're standard gauge heavy rail; in some places the track is shared with ordinary passenger trains. The older tunnels just have very tight clearance. You may mean the structure gauge, which is the clearance for tunnels, platforms and so on. That is normal-rail for Crossrail.
• jeromegv 8y ago
  What's interesting is dozens of message on HackerNews and nobody links to any type of studies or evaluation of Elon's work, just repeating is selling point that because the tunnel is smaller, it will be cheaper. Public transportation and cost is a very well studied topic internationally (outside the US) and we can't just assume that for a fact. Actually, boring is actually not the most expensive part of building a subway. Even this idea of saving 10x the amount of money, actually just works when you compare with other US subway construction projects. Close to 10x saving has already been achieved in Spain and in South Korea, and surprise, it didn't need some new fancy technology. Great article here: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2017/12/15/elon-musks-ideas-about-transportation-are-boring/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2017/12/15/elon-musks-ide... Basically
  • mkirklions 8y ago
    I used to be an Elon Musk fan until I realized I fell for the advertisement. After reading the 48 laws of power, Elon became crystal clear. SpaceX was his PR scheme to gain fame, he promised the moon, he shows off his toys. He was a cult leader. Since his reddit topic(with fake upvotes) saying "Tesla quietly delivers solar panels to PR", I woke up. It was fake and it was advertising. Since I've actually looked into Tesla quality(not good) and got increasingly skeptical of his businesses(not good). Makes me sick to know I fall for advertisement like anyone else, but it was a good wakeup call. Wonder what else I believe in...
    • joefourier 8y ago
      There's certainly a middle ground, however. You can appreciate the ground-breaking work done at SpaceX and the fact that Tesla helped drive the demand for practical, desirable electric vehicles without falling victim to hype machine. Being skeptical of say, the Tesla autopilot claims should not make you deny the real accomplishments done by his companies.
    • claytoneast 8y ago
      He has revolutionized payload delivery to space w/t significant cost savings, pushed most of the major auto manufacturers into converting their product lines mostly/entirely to electric, and is slowly building out models of what battery storage grid-load-balancing looks like all over the world (which will be essential as we transition to irregular flow clean energy sources). How you can possibly say these are PR stunts is so far beyond me I wonder if we inhabit the same planet.
• jcranmer 8y ago
  Musk isn't selling a better TBM. He's selling an entirely new transit system. Well, an entirely new transit system that sounds very much like personal rapid transit and shares most of the disadvantages with PRT and adds a few of its own (such as focusing on supporting cars). If Musk were selling better tunnel boring, what you would see is attempts to subcontract on major infrastructure projects. This bid is for an express "rail" system to O'Hare from the Loop, and the intent on Chicago's part is to make The Boring Company suffer all the risk of construction and possibly even pay for the entire thing (Chicago did previously have a construction plan for an express rail to O'Hare, but it was nixed due to cost overruns).
• zamalek 8y ago
  They are able to recoup some of the costs by using the waste material to make bricks on-site. They could give the bricks away for free and it would still work out cheaper (as trucking waste away is extremely expensive). Anyone could obviously do this, but Boring Company currently has the pipeline set up to do it. They use an electric train to move the waste away underground. This comes with many benefits - including eliminating the need to drill ventilation shafts for workers (which cost time and money). If you're not receiving federal funding for the project, the cost is pretty important. The Boring Company can likely do things cheaper than anyone else. Raw drilling speed isn't the only area where innovation is occurring. I'm not sure if their biggest optimization (cross-section area) applies here, because the type of vehicles in the tunnels is a factor in that vision.