8 ms·

Sounds like a less-scalable metro system, a technology that predates this "innovation" by a century or so.

losteric 7y ago
Musk wants to re-engineering both tunnel boring and how we use tunnels - the latter may not pan out but the former is useful regardless of what gets run through the tunnel.
- jcranmer 7y ago
  Not necessarily. The key cost savings that Musk envisions boils down to "build tunnels that are too small to put existing rolling stock in," which means that if the proposed personal rapid transit system turns out to be like every other PRT system and not work well, you're left with a tunnel that is too small to be useful for anything else.
  - Retric 7y ago
    Making an existing tunnel wider is vastly cheaper than building an equivalent tunnel from scratch. Simply knowing the soil composition makes a huge difference. In hard rock you can use drilling and blasting across long sections rather than just the leading edge. Alternatively, a TBM needs to remove significantly less material.
    - jcranmer 7y ago
      But more expensive than building the tunnel the right size to begin with, when you take into account the cost to build the too-small tunnel in the first place.
    - the-dude 7y ago
      Are you sure about that? Because I have never heard about a tunnel project which has been 'upgraded' this way ever. And if I start to think about the practical problems, like breaking up part of the tunnel before widening it, it quickly seems like building a new one might be more efficient.
      - Retric 7y ago
        Assuming the tunnel is not in use then yes. Here the are filling the tunnel and using a TBM. https://www.newcivilengineer.com/farnworth-tunnel-widening/10000253.article https://www.newcivilengineer.com/farnworth-tunnel-widening/1... Widening an existing tunnel without interrupting traffic is still possible like: https://www.rocksoil.com/pdf/233_r.pdf https://www.rocksoil.com/pdf/233_r.pdf. Though with increased costs. However, this changes for under sea tunnels which are segments placed down and thus can’t really be widened.
    - the-dude 7y ago
      It is common courtesy to indicate you have editted your post.
    - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
      Almost every tunnel has a lining that makes widening prohibitive. Which is why the London Underground is forever stuck with small tunnels on the original lines.
      - Retric 7y ago
        A larger issue is the underground is in use forcing you to do something like: www.rocksoil.com/pdf/233_r.pdf That and the cost vs benefit is not considered worth it.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    Well this tunnel is only a couple miles long. Put in some lights and humans can walk the whole length to get around. It seems like a moving sidewalk could be put into this tunnel.
    - komali2 7y ago
      This would be pretty nice to have in hot as fuck Vegas.
  - ncallaway 7y ago
    > The key cost savings that Musk envisions boils down to "build tunnels that are too small to put existing rolling stock in," Do you have a reference for that? My understanding was that over the long term the goal was to develop cost savings through better boring machines themselves, not through just by reducing the cross-sectional area of the tunnel. I thought they were starting with smaller cross-sectional areas and working their way up as they developed machines, but by understanding of the end-goal of The Boring Company was to be able to build large tunnels at 1/10th the cost of current processes.
    - jcranmer 7y ago
      All of the innovations that are cited on The Boring Company's FAQ are things that are already done (e.g., reusing TBMs, or continually operating TBMs), or related to the "new" transit system and the virtues of narrower tunnels (which are overstated--at the size of tunnels we're talking about, cost tends to scale linearly with diameter, not cross-sectional area).
ryantgtg 7y ago
Yeah, the joke is that next they'll release that the concrete tunnel road is subject to deterioration, so they'll shift to steel tracks. Then they'll realize that these individual vehicles should be linked together to allow for higher capacity. Then... then you have a subway.
- Robotbeat 7y ago
  Is that a bad thing? If they can somehow address the insane tunneling infrastructure costs in the US, I don't really care what path they take to get there.
  - ryantgtg 7y ago
    I'm under the impression that their costs are cheaper right now because public agencies are eager to see a working test case and so exempted them from environmental clearance. I doubt that will still be the case when the scheme changes from "a single tunnel from Musk's home in Bel-Air to his work in Hawthorne" to "hundreds of stacked tunnels traversing the entire city." But I'm open to corrections.
  - naravara 7y ago
    Most of that extra cost comes from the legal fees around buying the land and getting permits to dig under it. A better tunnel borer doesn't address any of that. You could maybe save on OSHA concerns if you can somehow slash the number of people employed, but you'd need to get rid of a LOT of people before you see enough gains from that to make this a game changer. Elon's whole deal around transit is utterly uninformed about anything urban planning.
    - Robotbeat 7y ago
      Except it does seem to have addressed that. Even the dumb test tunnel seems to have been completed for far less than it should've taken, given the constraints you mentioned. Experts (including those who have studied foreign mass transit in detail) are at a loss to fully explain why the US's tunneling costs are so out of whack compared to other countries. Sometimes, when expert systems seem to have failed, it's a useful exercise to throw everything out (i.e. be "utterly uninformed") and learn from scratch by trying. They may fail anyway, but it's worth a shot. Sometimes, the naive intern will find a solution because of their own naïveté. (And even then there are lots of practical things that will need to be relearned, at great pain.)
throwaway2048 7y ago
It has basicly all the same infrastructure requirements of trains, thus inevitably, similar costs, but you give it a slick new label like "people mover" and suddenly the costs are cut 90%, but nobody builds "people movers" so the bullshittium can be heavily sprinkled everywhere.
aeternus 7y ago
A more point-to-point metro system would be great. The airline industry has been embracing this change for quite awhile. People don't like a hub & spoke system and it doesn't make sense to take everyone to city center which just adds to the crowding and congestion, as many current metro systems do. Imagine a city that is crisscrossed with multiple direct metro lines. Design for extremely frequent departures, which likely means smaller carriages. We should be designing our transit systems to be faster and better than car-based travel.
- niftich 7y ago
  The airline industry embraced point-to-point routing in part because it reduces their costs on inelastic infrastructure on the ground, and allows them to tailor their schedule around demand at the two endpoints rather than on maintaining a network. They pay-as-they-use for airport gates and lessened their spending on hubs. Fixed-guideway transport infrastructure (trains, busways) and dedicated structures (tunnels, bridges, airports, etc) come with high capex that must be borne by the builder. One advantage of road-based transport over rail-based transport is that the road is already there and will (often) already be built and expanded by the government just to allow private vehicles to come and go -- it's multipurpose -- while any other mode of transport requires this infrastructure to be purpose-built and maintained for the transport mode itself. That costs.
  - aeternus 7y ago
    Sure, I'm by no means suggesting deprecating roads. They still serve an important purpose and will always be important for the 'last-mile'. Roads however have significant constraints since you can only build them in two dimensions. The premise of Boring Company is that by building smaller tunnels, they can build them much more cheaply. Commutes could be more efficient, and city traffic reduced substantially if people could take tunnels across the city instead of drive.
ncallaway 7y ago
I don't understand this comment at all. The Boring Company's main plans aren't to create new and novel tunnels. The Boring Company's goal is to create cheaper tunnels. Like, if I said I was planning on developing a wheel at 1/10th the cost of current wheels, I don't care that the wheel predates my innovation by millenia. I'm not attempting to _improve_ the wheel, I'm attempting to make it viable in an increasing number of contexts by lowering the cost. The same is true of the Boring Company. You can dismiss it as being unrealistic, or as the cost-savings not actually being there. But I don't understand being dismissive because we already have tunnels. Of course! If we didn't already have tunnels, we wouldn't be trying to make them cheaper!
- jcranmer 7y ago
  > The Boring Company's main plans aren't to create new and novel tunnels. The Boring Company's goal is to create _cheaper_ tunnels. The Boring Company's main plans, as can be evidenced by their communications (such as their FAQ) and their commitments and attempted commitments to build actual projects, is to pitch a radically new, 21st century mode of mass transit that is really just a variation of personal rapid transit (which has historically failed at being effective mass transit solution). The meaningful commitment to building cheaper is actually... to build narrower tunnels, that are unusable for any other purposes, since there's not enough room to put in high-capacity subway trains in the same tunnel. Oh, and for good measure, tunnels are not why subways are expensive. It's station caverns and ancillary infrastructure (such as procuring more rolling stock for the extension) that consumes most of the cost of a subway, so it's not clear that cheaper tunneling would actually meaningfully reduce the cost of building new subways.
  - ncallaway 7y ago
    > The Boring Company's main plans, as can be evidenced by their communications (such as their FAQ) and their commitments and attempted commitments to build actual projects Agree that this evidences their short-term plans (1-5 years), but I actually think it's a poor-proxy of evidence of their long-term (5+ years) plans. I mostly agree with you about their short-term plans, but my understanding (which could be wrong!) was that they had longer-term plans, of which the proposed tunnels are stepping-stones and learning opportunities towards. Though, I'll readily acknowledge that the evidence I have for their long-term plans is thin (mostly some interviews with Elon Musk about The Boring Company, and having seen similar developments at SpaceX), so if the counter-argument is that the long-term plans aren't well-enough evidenced to be worth considering, I wouldn't disagree. I also think it's totally reasonable to argue that those long-term plans aren't realistic or a likely potential outcome. > Oh, and for good measure, tunnels are not why subways are expensive. It's station caverns and ancillary infrastructure (such as procuring more rolling stock for the extension) that consumes most of the cost of a subway, so it's not clear that cheaper tunneling would actually meaningfully reduce the cost of building new subways. I don't know that I agree with this. Tunneling is definitely a significant cost whenever it happens under a city. For example, the SR99 tunneling project in Seattle cost ~$2.1B dollars to build (https://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Projects/Viaduct/Budget https://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Projects/Viaduct/Budget), and that doesn't involve any station caverns or rolling stock. It does, obviously, involve the highway finishings and road connections, but tunneling is a significant expense whenever it is required.
r3bl 7y ago
Musk seems to really dislike the idea of public transport. There's an appeal in moving a large number of people from one side of the city to the other really fast, but with their cars!? The amount of trouble people in the US are willing to through to avoid the solution every other developed country enjoys is really mind-blowing to me. Dig a tunnel, put some rails in it, and add some sort of a vehicle on top of those rails. Splitting up a cart to individual vehicles seems wasteful, impractical, and guaranteed to move less people. A perfect example of a "gadgetbahn": completely useless 10-15 years down the road, but it wastes city's money that could have been used for actual, viable alternatives that are in use everywhere else. But hey, at least it's unique.
- rayiner 7y ago
  We try to avoid it in the US because it costs us 5-10x as much money to do it. If it cost Madrid $4.5 billion to build a two mile subway extension they wouldn’t do it either.
  - r3bl 7y ago
    So the solution is to still build a tunnel... but smaller... and move hundreds of people through it really fast in separate, quite heavy vehicles with no possible way of escaping the tunnel when something goes wrong? And something will go wrong. I'm rooting for Elon with all my heart to cut down the costs of digging tunnels, but everything else about this is just ludicrous.
- bluGill 7y ago
  Every city I've ever seen has a large amount of personal cars on the road. Sure some people in some cities ride in shared public transit, but don't try to pretend that there are not large amounts of people that for whatever reason don't. You might want to look closer to home and solving your own problems instead of attacking the US.
  - r3bl 7y ago
    > but don't try to pretend that there are not large amounts of people that for whatever reason don't. Oh, I know precisely the reason: there's no viable alternative in place. It might surprise you to learn that other countries were in that same situation and aren't anymore. When there's something more efficient, reliable, and cheaper to use, people tend to prefer that. But of course, you'd first have to step outside of the US to see what a viable alternative even looks like. Judging by your first and last sentence, I'm willing to bet you haven't.
Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
A lot of people really really like to travel in their individual vechicles instead of public transport. They like it so much that they spend a lot of money (a proxy for their own time and life energy), and deal with other problems like parking etc. So a tunnel system which moves public transport trains does not compare in utility with a system which can move personal cars. Did you just ignore this fact?
- hannasanarion 7y ago
  The above comment pointed out that they abandoned the idea of moving personal cars, they will now have large proprietary vehicles that only travel within the tunnels and have seating for a bunch of people. Aka, trains.
  - Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
    This looks like a first project for them. From the previous Boring Company presentation it is clear that the long-term vision includes a lot of tunnels for private cars.

Musk wants to re-engineering both tunnel boring and how we use tunnels - the latter may not pan out but the former is useful regardless of what gets run through the tunnel.

jcranmer 7y ago
Not necessarily. The key cost savings that Musk envisions boils down to "build tunnels that are too small to put existing rolling stock in," which means that if the proposed personal rapid transit system turns out to be like every other PRT system and not work well, you're left with a tunnel that is too small to be useful for anything else.
- Retric 7y ago
  Making an existing tunnel wider is vastly cheaper than building an equivalent tunnel from scratch. Simply knowing the soil composition makes a huge difference. In hard rock you can use drilling and blasting across long sections rather than just the leading edge. Alternatively, a TBM needs to remove significantly less material.
  - jcranmer 7y ago
    But more expensive than building the tunnel the right size to begin with, when you take into account the cost to build the too-small tunnel in the first place.
  - the-dude 7y ago
    Are you sure about that? Because I have never heard about a tunnel project which has been 'upgraded' this way ever. And if I start to think about the practical problems, like breaking up part of the tunnel before widening it, it quickly seems like building a new one might be more efficient.
    - Retric 7y ago
      Assuming the tunnel is not in use then yes. Here the are filling the tunnel and using a TBM. https://www.newcivilengineer.com/farnworth-tunnel-widening/10000253.article https://www.newcivilengineer.com/farnworth-tunnel-widening/1... Widening an existing tunnel without interrupting traffic is still possible like: https://www.rocksoil.com/pdf/233_r.pdf https://www.rocksoil.com/pdf/233_r.pdf. Though with increased costs. However, this changes for under sea tunnels which are segments placed down and thus can’t really be widened.
  - the-dude 7y ago
    It is common courtesy to indicate you have editted your post.
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    Almost every tunnel has a lining that makes widening prohibitive. Which is why the London Underground is forever stuck with small tunnels on the original lines.
    - Retric 7y ago
      A larger issue is the underground is in use forcing you to do something like: www.rocksoil.com/pdf/233_r.pdf That and the cost vs benefit is not considered worth it.
- bluGill 7y ago
  Well this tunnel is only a couple miles long. Put in some lights and humans can walk the whole length to get around. It seems like a moving sidewalk could be put into this tunnel.
  - komali2 7y ago
    This would be pretty nice to have in hot as fuck Vegas.
- ncallaway 7y ago
  > The key cost savings that Musk envisions boils down to "build tunnels that are too small to put existing rolling stock in," Do you have a reference for that? My understanding was that over the long term the goal was to develop cost savings through better boring machines themselves, not through just by reducing the cross-sectional area of the tunnel. I thought they were starting with smaller cross-sectional areas and working their way up as they developed machines, but by understanding of the end-goal of The Boring Company was to be able to build large tunnels at 1/10th the cost of current processes.
  - jcranmer 7y ago
    All of the innovations that are cited on The Boring Company's FAQ are things that are already done (e.g., reusing TBMs, or continually operating TBMs), or related to the "new" transit system and the virtues of narrower tunnels (which are overstated--at the size of tunnels we're talking about, cost tends to scale linearly with diameter, not cross-sectional area).

ryantgtg 7y ago

Yeah, the joke is that next they'll release that the concrete tunnel road is subject to deterioration, so they'll shift to steel tracks. Then they'll realize that these individual vehicles should be linked together to allow for higher capacity. Then... then you have a subway.

Robotbeat 7y ago
Is that a bad thing? If they can somehow address the insane tunneling infrastructure costs in the US, I don't really care what path they take to get there.
- ryantgtg 7y ago
  I'm under the impression that their costs are cheaper right now because public agencies are eager to see a working test case and so exempted them from environmental clearance. I doubt that will still be the case when the scheme changes from "a single tunnel from Musk's home in Bel-Air to his work in Hawthorne" to "hundreds of stacked tunnels traversing the entire city." But I'm open to corrections.
- naravara 7y ago
  Most of that extra cost comes from the legal fees around buying the land and getting permits to dig under it. A better tunnel borer doesn't address any of that. You could maybe save on OSHA concerns if you can somehow slash the number of people employed, but you'd need to get rid of a LOT of people before you see enough gains from that to make this a game changer. Elon's whole deal around transit is utterly uninformed about anything urban planning.
  - Robotbeat 7y ago
    Except it does seem to have addressed that. Even the dumb test tunnel seems to have been completed for far less than it should've taken, given the constraints you mentioned. Experts (including those who have studied foreign mass transit in detail) are at a loss to fully explain why the US's tunneling costs are so out of whack compared to other countries. Sometimes, when expert systems seem to have failed, it's a useful exercise to throw everything out (i.e. be "utterly uninformed") and learn from scratch by trying. They may fail anyway, but it's worth a shot. Sometimes, the naive intern will find a solution because of their own naïveté. (And even then there are lots of practical things that will need to be relearned, at great pain.)

throwaway2048 7y ago

It has basicly all the same infrastructure requirements of trains, thus inevitably, similar costs, but you give it a slick new label like "people mover" and suddenly the costs are cut 90%, but nobody builds "people movers" so the bullshittium can be heavily sprinkled everywhere.

aeternus 7y ago

A more point-to-point metro system would be great. The airline industry has been embracing this change for quite awhile. People don't like a hub & spoke system and it doesn't make sense to take everyone to city center which just adds to the crowding and congestion, as many current metro systems do. Imagine a city that is crisscrossed with multiple direct metro lines. Design for extremely frequent departures, which likely means smaller carriages. We should be designing our transit systems to be faster and better than car-based travel.

niftich 7y ago
The airline industry embraced point-to-point routing in part because it reduces their costs on inelastic infrastructure on the ground, and allows them to tailor their schedule around demand at the two endpoints rather than on maintaining a network. They pay-as-they-use for airport gates and lessened their spending on hubs. Fixed-guideway transport infrastructure (trains, busways) and dedicated structures (tunnels, bridges, airports, etc) come with high capex that must be borne by the builder. One advantage of road-based transport over rail-based transport is that the road is already there and will (often) already be built and expanded by the government just to allow private vehicles to come and go -- it's multipurpose -- while any other mode of transport requires this infrastructure to be purpose-built and maintained for the transport mode itself. That costs.
- aeternus 7y ago
  Sure, I'm by no means suggesting deprecating roads. They still serve an important purpose and will always be important for the 'last-mile'. Roads however have significant constraints since you can only build them in two dimensions. The premise of Boring Company is that by building smaller tunnels, they can build them much more cheaply. Commutes could be more efficient, and city traffic reduced substantially if people could take tunnels across the city instead of drive.

ncallaway 7y ago

I don't understand this comment at all. The Boring Company's main plans aren't to create new and novel tunnels. The Boring Company's goal is to create cheaper tunnels. Like, if I said I was planning on developing a wheel at 1/10th the cost of current wheels, I don't care that the wheel predates my innovation by millenia. I'm not attempting to _improve_ the wheel, I'm attempting to make it viable in an increasing number of contexts by lowering the cost. The same is true of the Boring Company. You can dismiss it as being unrealistic, or as the cost-savings not actually being there. But I don't understand being dismissive because we already have tunnels. Of course! If we didn't already have tunnels, we wouldn't be trying to make them cheaper!

jcranmer 7y ago
> The Boring Company's main plans aren't to create new and novel tunnels. The Boring Company's goal is to create _cheaper_ tunnels. The Boring Company's main plans, as can be evidenced by their communications (such as their FAQ) and their commitments and attempted commitments to build actual projects, is to pitch a radically new, 21st century mode of mass transit that is really just a variation of personal rapid transit (which has historically failed at being effective mass transit solution). The meaningful commitment to building cheaper is actually... to build narrower tunnels, that are unusable for any other purposes, since there's not enough room to put in high-capacity subway trains in the same tunnel. Oh, and for good measure, tunnels are not why subways are expensive. It's station caverns and ancillary infrastructure (such as procuring more rolling stock for the extension) that consumes most of the cost of a subway, so it's not clear that cheaper tunneling would actually meaningfully reduce the cost of building new subways.
- ncallaway 7y ago
  > The Boring Company's main plans, as can be evidenced by their communications (such as their FAQ) and their commitments and attempted commitments to build actual projects Agree that this evidences their short-term plans (1-5 years), but I actually think it's a poor-proxy of evidence of their long-term (5+ years) plans. I mostly agree with you about their short-term plans, but my understanding (which could be wrong!) was that they had longer-term plans, of which the proposed tunnels are stepping-stones and learning opportunities towards. Though, I'll readily acknowledge that the evidence I have for their long-term plans is thin (mostly some interviews with Elon Musk about The Boring Company, and having seen similar developments at SpaceX), so if the counter-argument is that the long-term plans aren't well-enough evidenced to be worth considering, I wouldn't disagree. I also think it's totally reasonable to argue that those long-term plans aren't realistic or a likely potential outcome. > Oh, and for good measure, tunnels are not why subways are expensive. It's station caverns and ancillary infrastructure (such as procuring more rolling stock for the extension) that consumes most of the cost of a subway, so it's not clear that cheaper tunneling would actually meaningfully reduce the cost of building new subways. I don't know that I agree with this. Tunneling is definitely a significant cost whenever it happens under a city. For example, the SR99 tunneling project in Seattle cost ~$2.1B dollars to build (https://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Projects/Viaduct/Budget https://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Projects/Viaduct/Budget), and that doesn't involve any station caverns or rolling stock. It does, obviously, involve the highway finishings and road connections, but tunneling is a significant expense whenever it is required.

r3bl 7y ago

Musk seems to really dislike the idea of public transport. There's an appeal in moving a large number of people from one side of the city to the other really fast, but with their cars!? The amount of trouble people in the US are willing to through to avoid the solution every other developed country enjoys is really mind-blowing to me. Dig a tunnel, put some rails in it, and add some sort of a vehicle on top of those rails. Splitting up a cart to individual vehicles seems wasteful, impractical, and guaranteed to move less people. A perfect example of a "gadgetbahn": completely useless 10-15 years down the road, but it wastes city's money that could have been used for actual, viable alternatives that are in use everywhere else. But hey, at least it's unique.

rayiner 7y ago
We try to avoid it in the US because it costs us 5-10x as much money to do it. If it cost Madrid $4.5 billion to build a two mile subway extension they wouldn’t do it either.
- r3bl 7y ago
  So the solution is to still build a tunnel... but smaller... and move hundreds of people through it really fast in separate, quite heavy vehicles with no possible way of escaping the tunnel when something goes wrong? And something will go wrong. I'm rooting for Elon with all my heart to cut down the costs of digging tunnels, but everything else about this is just ludicrous.
bluGill 7y ago
Every city I've ever seen has a large amount of personal cars on the road. Sure some people in some cities ride in shared public transit, but don't try to pretend that there are not large amounts of people that for whatever reason don't. You might want to look closer to home and solving your own problems instead of attacking the US.
- r3bl 7y ago
  > but don't try to pretend that there are not large amounts of people that for whatever reason don't. Oh, I know precisely the reason: there's no viable alternative in place. It might surprise you to learn that other countries were in that same situation and aren't anymore. When there's something more efficient, reliable, and cheaper to use, people tend to prefer that. But of course, you'd first have to step outside of the US to see what a viable alternative even looks like. Judging by your first and last sentence, I'm willing to bet you haven't.

Erlich_Bachman 7y ago

A lot of people really really like to travel in their individual vechicles instead of public transport. They like it so much that they spend a lot of money (a proxy for their own time and life energy), and deal with other problems like parking etc. So a tunnel system which moves public transport trains does not compare in utility with a system which can move personal cars. Did you just ignore this fact?

hannasanarion 7y ago
The above comment pointed out that they abandoned the idea of moving personal cars, they will now have large proprietary vehicles that only travel within the tunnels and have seating for a bunch of people. Aka, trains.
- Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
  This looks like a first project for them. From the previous Boring Company presentation it is clear that the long-term vision includes a lot of tunnels for private cars.