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Boring Co. Drops LA Westside Tunnel Plan
- ForHackernews 8y agoWell, that was completely predictable. It's not obvious to me that any of the Boring Company plans are anything except vaporware.
- _pmf_ 8y ago> It's not obvious to me that any of the Boring Company plans are anything except vaporware. Not at all: https://www.boringcompany.com/not-a-flamethrower/ https://www.boringcompany.com/not-a-flamethrower/ This is actually Grimes' boyfriend's most profitable product.
- ABS 8y agohave you read the reason why this was dropped?
- jeletonskelly 8y agoWhat were the environmental impacts they briefly mention?
- ABS 8y agoI have no idea, don't even live in the US :) but the second paragraph mentions the reason this was dropped (local lawsuits ) so found... peculiar the vaporware snark
- sschueller 8y ago"review of its potential environment impact" Kind of ironic that the man who for many is seen as saving the planet with his electric vehicles is trying to avoid an environment impact study.
- leesec 8y agoWhy do you think he's trying to avoid it? “The parties (The Boring Company, Brentwood Residents Coalition, Sunset Coalition, and Wendy-Sue Rosen) have amicably settled the matter"
- moduspol 8y agoI think it's either incredibly naive or willfully misleading to frame this as simply "wanting to avoid an environment impact study." It could more accurately be described as, "concerned and organized opposition taking every available legal step to delay and increase the costs of the project under the guise of genuine and valid concern." And succeeding, as it seems. Although it's tough for me to feel too sorry for Californians being negatively impacted by a complex and bureaucratic legal nightmare that enables exactly this kind of NIMBYism.
- imglorp 8y agoI'm curious about the continued negativity on this. Hasn't he pretty much accomplished everything he has said? Batteries, cars, solar, space, it's all working.
- guelo 8y agoThe hyperloop has proven to be absolute bullshit, just like knowledgeable engineers predicted at the time it was announced. Which is part of my dislike of him, all the dishonest hype, and the hordes of online defenders like yourself that just talk about the marketing vision but not about the engineering.
- leesec 8y agoHonestly, I cannot help but get frustrated even though I know I shouldn't. How are people rooting against this person? Do they not want space exploration/green technology/incredible cars/transportation innovation/globally accessible satellite internet/self driving cars/etc? I don't even really understand where the hate comes from, because he missed a few deadlines, because he dreams big? I'm sure his critics have missed more than a few deadlines, and on things not nearly as important/world changing.
- sschueller 8y agoThe issues is not that we don't want these things. People cheer for NASA and you hardly ever read anything negative about those missions. Elon is why people complain. He rubs a lot of people the wrong way with this tweets and attitude. You can be diplomatic and move things forward or you can be abrasive like Elon and also move forward.
- johnnyfaehell 8y ago> You can be diplomatic and move things forward or you can be abrasive like Elon and also move forward. Just curious, can you name some people who have been diplomatic and managed to move things as far forward? I honestly can't think of many actual achievers that have been diplomatic about things.
- jseliger 8y agoMy dad used to work in local government and likes to call the automatic opposition, "People united against anything." Today we call them NIMBYs. California has empowered them in peculiar and powerful ways, as anyone, anywhere, can challenge any project under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which actually supersedes the national version (NEQA).
- wyldfire 8y agoAnd yet development should take the environment into consideration because it can have massive consequences. Those consequences are ultimately an externality of the development project and evaluating it in advance can help inform the true financials of the project.
- dpcx 8y agoI wonder whether those that were taking the environment in to consideration for the development thought beyond the project to what environmental impacts could be lessened by the project. I'm not a Musk fanboy, but if these tunnels will work the way he's suggesting, the amount of traffic that would be removed from the roads (and by extension, the pollution) would probably be a net benefit to the environment.
- freeflight 8y ago> traffic that would be removed from the roads (and by extension, the pollution) I don't understand how any pollution would be removed, just because it's now in tunnels doesn't equal it being gone. Wouldn't it just be blasted back out through the ventilation system? Or were there plans to build some kind of "pollution scrubbing" into those?
- deegles 8y agoI think the tunnels would run electric cars/trains only.
- exogeny 8y ago“Brentwood Residents Coalition” just screams NIMBY bullshit to me.
- readhn 8y agowould you be ok with tunnel being built under YOUR house (that you own and worked/will be working for for the rest of your life) without consulting with you FIRST?
- untog 8y agoDepends on the tunnel. A subway tunnel 12ft under the ground? Absolutely not. A deeper tunnel that I can't hear or feel? ...yeah?
- cdelsolar 8y agoyes? i don't own the prismatic wedge of land that extends all the way to the core of the Earth afaik
- rripken 8y agoWhy wouldn't you?
- lodi 8y agoYou don't own the airspace over your house (over some minimum altitude), why would you own the land under your house (below some minimum depth). I would have absolutely no problem with a tunnel running 20m--or whatever the safe, silent amount is--underneath my house.
- gamblor956 8y agoSo you wouldn't have been okay with the Elontunnel, which runs closer than 20m below the surface--about 28 feet in the case of the Hawthorne tunnel. Though for point of comparison, some portions of the Metro system run at this depth or shallower.
- traditionalist 8y agoWhy doesn't Musk take his business elsewhere where he's welcome? I can imagine LA being a nightmare for this sort of project. He needs a place where bureaucracy is thinner and people are actually excited about everything new.
- emiliobumachar 8y agoAny suggestions? China comes to my mind, but that comes with a whole other can of worms.
- newyankee 8y agoIndia has a lot of potential, unlike China much of the infrastructure needed for the population still does not exist. A connection from Mumbai to New Mumbai under the sea like NYC comes into mind. The problem is i doubt given the experimental nature (still) the govt. will be bold enough to try it
- myrandomcomment 8y agoDealing with the politics of getting anything done in India will make the dealing with the people in LA look simple and trouble free. India is a mess because of the government policies, bureaucracy and corruption. I strongly feel if India has a dictatorship like China for let’s say a 20 year period, they could far exceeded the enconmoy of China.
- nihonde 8y agoChina and Japan have solutions to mass transit. They really don’t need disruption because they’re directly in competition with The Boring Company in terms of exporting their high speed train tech.
- thrower123 8y agoChina doesn't really need novel technological approaches when they have the political capital and power to just successfully do things the old ways. Moreover, they have an understanding of acceptable losses and human casualties that is more in line with attitudes prevalent when most of European and US basic infrastructure was initially constructed, compared to the extremely safe working conditions now expected in the west.
- jerf 8y agoIt seems sort of shortsighted to block a tunneling company on environmental grounds. In the long term, cheap tunneling would be fantastic for the environment. Most of what we consider the biosphere is on the surface, and to the extent that there's life in the tunneled area, by volume tunneling isn't going to be significant for a long time. (Volume is much larger than surface; in general, areal intuition fails miserably for volume.) Being able to tunnel places instead of running roads over things and such would be great. (If indeed anyone can get too worried about potential rock-living life, since it is conspicuously lacking in anything you could call "cute".)
- untog 8y ago> In the long term, cheap tunneling would be fantastic for the environment. Depends how the tunneling is done, surely? If it's haphazard and prone to problems or even collapse I doubt it's an environmental plus.
- mav3rick 8y agoThat could be said for any infrastructure project ever. If X isn't done right,it will be disastrous for the environment.
- Anechoic 8y agoYes it could be said for any infrastructure project, which is why nearly all of those projects are subject to environmental assessments.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> That could be said for any infrastructure project ever. And that's why we have environmental review to vet infrastructure and similar projects before they get built.
- lightedman 8y ago"It seems sort of shortsighted to block a tunneling company on environmental grounds." It would seem equally short-sighted to make such a statement without thinking about what lies underneath most of Southern California. Oil fields galore, gas deposits, aquifers, and many superfund cleanup sites. Digging around SoCal is already a half-impossibility. You never know when you're going to run across a deposit of natural gas and BOOM.
- jbaczuk 8y agoIs it just me or is it ironic that the reason for cancelling is environmental impact, when the tunnel would help alleviate congestion and smog due to gasoline-powered traffic?
- dclowd9901 8y agoIt’s not just you and the cancellation isn’t about environmental impact, it’s abojt NIMBYism. Perhaps even more ironically, those who live by an transit area would expect to see their home values increase due to desire to live near mass transit in big cities (see SF, NYC)
- robotcookies 8y agoI believe LA had an explosion with fatalities years ago while digging a tunnel. There are also issues with subsidence in the area (sink holes).
- gamblor956 8y agoThe stated maximum capacity of the Elontunnel is sufficiently low that it would have had minimal, if any, positive effect on congestion and smog.
- mips_avatar 8y agoIt’s a test tunnel, you would get the improvement when more are made.
- gamblor956 8y agoSorry, no, I was referring to the capacity of the finished tunnel, which isn't meaningful better.
- blondie9x 8y agoMusk can do better than this. We need real subways and trains for transit. We do not need another express freeway lane that's underground. This is just adding more room for cars. Building on the existing approach of solving traffic by adding more lanes. This will not help Los Angeles nor America as a whole shift away from car dependency.
- iagovar 8y agoYour cities are very sparsely populated to be cost effective with rail.
- dawnerd 8y agoLA already has a pretty large rail network. Problem is when they try to build new subways it takes many many years to go even a mile and is met with the same lawsuits Elon faced. Fact is, California culture wants it but doesn’t want it at the same time.
- vinay427 8y ago> Fact is, California culture wants it but doesn’t want it at the same time. That applies to every culture, ever, and I have a hard time identifying some "California culture" that encompasses the state. The difference is that in California, the people who don't want it largely outnumber the people who want it more than in most places.
- bbeekley 8y ago> The difference is that in California, the people who don't want it largely outnumber the people who want it more than in most places. Measure R (2008, 67% in favor) and Measure M (2016, 71% in favor) both passed with supermajorities and raised Los Angeles taxes by billions to pay for rail and other public transit options. To me, that seems to indicate that the majority wants these kinds of projects.
- 8y ago
- nimbius 8y agoFor those not familiar with LA's private property rights, they are some of the strictest in the nation. The 710 freeway, originally designed and intended to go all the way from long beach to pasadena, has successfully been litigated for fifty years to prevent it from ever doing so. heavy truck traffic has to exit to surface streets to continue to the city or route around it using the 101. trucks are prohibited on the 110. And the residents standing in the way of this project? not even very powerful residents. Just backed by a handful of attorneys well versed on property rights.
- HillaryBriss 8y ago> not even very powerful residents Maybe this understates the wealth level of South Pasadena, which would have been significantly affected by that final leg of the 710. South Pasadena is relatively well off compared to many other areas of the county, has a good school district, some rather nice craftsman era homes, a little bit of old money, attractive retail zones, convenient location to downtown, nice hillside geography, etc. Though not Beverly Hills or Santa Monica, South Pasadena is an independent city with a largely middle to upper middle class population. So, in a way, it's not surprising that it succeeded in killing that final leg of the 710. Personally, I wish the 710 had been completed. It would have benefited a lot of people.
- zjaffee 8y agoWhy are you saying this like it's a bad thing? Transportation development has time over time been proven to work best when decisions are made by consensus rather than by letting central authorities and monied interests do whatever they think is right. Had this never happened, LA would have far worse pollution problems than it does today, and NYC would be completely overrun with highways.
- quotemstr 8y agoHas a consensus-based approach been proven "best"? New York would be much worse off today if not for Robert Moses ramming through much-needed and innotative infrastructure. Consensus, in practice, amounts to giving everyone the power to veto massive projects, and widespread veto power leads to paralysis and weakness. You need strong central authority to actually make decisions and get things to happen.
- readhn 8y agowell, im not sure where this tunnel would be located BUT if he was digging under my $500,000-1,000,000 residential house (or whatever the prices there are) or my commercial property i sure as hell would sue the billionaire all the way to the bank as well. For him its just "playing games" oh let me dig a tunnel so i can skip the traffic on MY way to work. For me - its my livelihood - house is a single biggest purchase in most people's lives (or my business - if he is digging under my commercial property). If this tunnel affects my building - what do i do when things go wrong (foundation cracks)? I have to go around and ask 10 people in my neighborhood if its ok if i want to move a freaking wall inside my house and this guy can just go and dig up tunnels without asking us ... just because he feels like it and he is a billionaire.
- leesec 8y agoThe tunnels will not impact the people above them, you won't even notice them being dug if they were directly beneath you.
- newaccoutnas 8y agoDuring the construction of the Crossrail development in London, they had to 'thread a needle' in terms of tunneling underneath the Barbican Theatre. They were tunnelling directly below (metres away!) whilst people were still enjoying shows in the theatre.
- rripken 8y agoUnless you want to build a different tunnel or a basement, parking garage, ground source heat sink...
- crysin 8y agoWhy would you live in a place where people have to approve what you want to do with your property?
- readhn 8y agobecause: work/children/life/friends/business?
- mips_avatar 8y agoWhen I read the title I was thinking that they had just released the final plans, like a secret album drop. This is much more disappointing.
- dqpb 8y ago> The Boring Company is no longer seeking the development of the Sepulveda test tunnel and instead seeks to construct an operational tunnel at Dodger Stadium
- Proven 8y agoGood. The less he does the better for the taxpayer
- blaisio 8y agoThis is not a story of NIMBYs, this is a story of how LA can't make decisions for the greater good because anything that affects a useful part of the metro area requires independent agreement from multiple cities with very different demographics. A lot of people don't realize that, unlike NYC, LA isn't one city - it's a bunch of cities clustered together. Right now, there's no good way to force all the communities to agree on something. Some communities might have a NIMBY attitude, but just saying that this is California NIMBYism is oversimplifying.
- zjaffee 8y agoExcept for the fact that this tunnel was trying to get developed in a way that first off, violated California Environmental laws, something that the government owned and built metro would have to spend millions of dollars and several years on in order to complete, and second, it would've increased the complexity of building an already budgeted heavy rail line under that part of the city. LA is very capable at making decision that work for the greater good as the county has a sizable amount of power around taxation, and manages the regions transit authority. The parts of the region most notable for NIMBYism are largely only effective at delaying action rather than completely blocking it unlike in the bay area which has multiple counties to deal with.
- gamblor956 8y agoLA's cities and peoples just agreed to spend several billion dollars on building/improving mass transit in the city...And we just voted to support those efforts again in this past election. LA's cities actually work very well together on many infrastructure projects; it's the valley portions of LA (San Gabriel and San Fernando) that don't cooperate well with others.
- lucas_membrane 8y agoIIRC, the original PR for this gave the idea that automobiles would enter the tunnel through single-car elevators that looked like parking spaces. How many such elevators are needed to keep a high-cost roadway running reasonably full? How much infrastructure (safety barriers, driveways, waiting areas, not to mention people) around each elevator to move the cars on and off safely?
- quotemstr 8y agoYes/no decisions on the basis of environmental impact lead to excess risk aversion, sloppy thinking, and ultimately, technological stagnation. While I agree that we should consider the environment in project planning, the proper way to do that is to use the price mechanism to account for environmental damage. That is, the output of environmental review should never be "no". It should be "the environmental cost of this project is $X billion, and here's a breakdown". Forcing people to quantify their objections will lead to a more honest evaluation of the options.