10 ms·

There is a quality about TBMs which vaguely reminds me of the feeling of getting a new LEGO set and building stuff. Imagine if we had cheap ways to build tunnel

There is a quality about TBMs which vaguely reminds me of the feeling of getting a new LEGO set and building stuff. Imagine if we had cheap ways to build tunnels, no more traffic, no more congestion, roads and parking lots would only exist underground and cities would have more space for gardens, parks, buildings, and walkways. We have these things - Subways but its very expensive to build that system. Elon has an itch to solve this problem and I want this dream to succeed! While that's going on, please someone make a game out of building tunnels, it would be super cool!

djsumdog 7y ago
The article clearly states we have the tunnel tech. That's not the issue. We already have the tech to connect a lot of American cities with decent trains again. It's about buy-in from the communities, the ability to put up stations (safely, faster, more efficiently) and Americans to stop screaming "our spaces are too far apart." They weren't less than 100 years ago. They will collapse back in once we start building transport again. As shown in the article, the current tech is really good. It just takes time and the biggest problem are the stations, track and power. These car tubes that Elon is proposing are terrible. We need a faster way to put up full metro systems.
- sansnomme 7y ago
  Perhaps it has nothing to do with tech, but framing it as a tech problem lends credibility and allows for easier structural changes/violence. It is easy to say "here's how to improve transportation because xyz is a tech issue" than to say "we have a NIMBY and willpower problem, let's hire some political grads to draft a plan on lobbying politicans and researching the impact of solution abc", especially when your past achievements are all tech related. Also tech has the perception of being hard, inflexible. Just ask anyone who had to contact Google for customer support. Tech billionaires are not known to be easy to sue either, at least compared to a bunch of city-council bureaucrats. See the first paragraph of this article as an example of how tech CEOs are portrayed in the media versus city government bureaucrats: https://www.wired.com/2017/05/apple-park-new-silicon-valley-campus/ https://www.wired.com/2017/05/apple-park-new-silicon-valley-... Framing it as a people problem is simply asking for interference by third-party interests, which is one of the main factors currently preventing accumulation of sufficient political willpower to build metros. It may be a cheap, unethical hack in the sense that the state avoids having to exhaust political capital/use controversial powers like eminent domain in exchange for having private interests build poorly thought out transportation infrastructure. At the end of the day there is an unfulfilled need for transportation infrastructure. A poorly thought out one is still better than nothing.
chrispeel 7y ago
So, replace every major road in big cities with a park or green space over a tunnel? I like this vision :-)
cwojno 7y ago
Building more capacity usually induces demand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand I know it's boring (derpa derpa), but adding congestion pricing, mass transit is likely a better option. https://ideas.repec.org/b/mtp/titles/0262012197.html https://ideas.repec.org/b/mtp/titles/0262012197.html Getting rid of cars should be the goal, not encouraging them: https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=pjatbiavDZYC&oi=fnd&pg=PR13&dq=automobile+traffic+reduction&ots=BbOToLpEzB&sig=A6266ARbk19JuRygzwjPkGuU2ic#v=onepage&q=automobile%20traffic%20reduction&f=false https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=pjatbiavDZYC&oi=... Or, skipping the commute altogether with remote work.
- wongarsu 7y ago
  > Building more capacity usually induces demand Viewed from a different perspective: we have so little capacity that most journeys are never taken. I agree that in general mass transit is much better than cars. But tunnels do remove many of the arguments against cars: pollution (both CO2 and tire abrasion) can be easily filtered, noise is blocked by solid rock, tunnels can be crossed without knowing they are there, they don't interfere with pedestrians, don't reduce building density, don't create artificial barriers. Cars are still incredibly dangerous, but Elon's sledges would solve even that. Cars still take up a lot or room both in transit and when parked, but most other disadvantages are reduced or eliminated by putting them in tunnels.
  - legulere 7y ago
    People will just start commuting to further away places like from barcelona to london: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/11/commuting-from-barcelona-a-london-worker-who-makes-it-pay https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/11/commuting-fro... You can argue for an economical benefit, but it's very hard to argue that they are larger than the costs.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    Elon's tunnels don't solve anything. His cars are so large that the amount of people a tunnel can move is small. We can add more tunnels, but it isn't cheap, and geometry means we can't add enough - there is only so much space below us and you need to keep tunnels apart.
bArray 7y ago
> Imagine if we had cheap ways to build tunnels, no more > traffic, no more congestion, roads and parking lots would > only exist underground and cities would have more space > for gardens, parks, buildings, and walkways. Or, skip the tunnel building and just ban cars from major cities. Building more infrastructure to "reduce traffic" only makes using vehicles more attractive. The amount of congestion is approximately equal to the amount of congestion the average person using the infrastructure is willing to accept, so making it less congested just means more people use the infrastructure until the limit is reached again. The real answer to the problem is to simply ban all but buses and delivery vehicles - even then you can incentivize that they are electrically driven. Space increases and infrastructure maintenance costs are reduced, not increased. The real golden use for TBMs is for efficiency - i.e. Go around some mountain or go straight through it? Go around a city or go under it? I imagine buildings sharing a service elevator down to the tunnel where delivery vehicles can offload to and send goods up (rather than Musk's idea of trying to lift a several tonne vehicle in some personal elevator). Would likely make sense for all kinds of maintenance this way to, servicing water/gas pipes or electricity/internet lines for example could be as simple as removing a service panel from the side of a tunnel, rather than the terrible solution we have today involving digging up streets over and over.
- rklaehn 7y ago
  Why have technical innovation at all, let's just outlaw stuff... I really don't get this desire to outlaw cars. I like walkable cities, but I also like the comfort and privacy of car transport. I live in a place (Germany) with good public transport. I used to live in cities with very good public transport. I still don't enjoy being squeezed in with thousands of other people. Does that mean that people like me have to be reeducated and/or forced to see the error of their ways?
  - giomasce 7y ago
    I don't think that outlawing car is a solution, but disincentivizing them maybe is: higher taxes with which pay a better public transport network, less and more expensive parking, more lanes dedicated to public or unmotorized transport, traffic lights more favourable to public or unmotorized transport, stronger presumption of fault on the side of the motorized vehicle after accidents. All of these improve the value of less impacting transport. After all, cars, especially when moving just one person, heavily overuse shared and scarce resources like space and environment. It's all too fair that they pay a higher share to public resources. Maybe you will still use your car, accepting to pay a higher price for it, but other people will switch, making the world a better place also for you.
jtolmar 7y ago
You could replace highways with a magical teleporter and you'd still have traffic and congestion. Most traffic happens at the interface between the highway and the rest of the road network, as cars can only join the flow of traffic at whatever rate its capacity frees up - and cars entering the city compete for that capacity with cars leaving parking spots. Cities are already crammed full of street capacity, so the only way to increase capacity is to increase the number of people per car. And that solution, taken to its logical conclusion, is a train. Subways face similar problems to highway interchanges - passengers have to rejoin the flow of (foot) traffic. This is easier than with cars, since people are smaller and most of them can use stairs, but the cost of stations ends up being the larger portion of cost, not the cost of tunnels (which can be built more cheaply using cut & cover than they can with boring machines anyway). I'd like to see Musk throw his resources behind cheaper ways to make stations, instead of a problem that's better solved by digging a ditch.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
> While that's going on, please someone make a game out of building tunnels, it would be super cool! In a way, Minecraft is that game. At least when I played it couple years ago, I spent most of my time building metro tunnels.

djsumdog 7y ago

The article clearly states we have the tunnel tech. That's not the issue. We already have the tech to connect a lot of American cities with decent trains again. It's about buy-in from the communities, the ability to put up stations (safely, faster, more efficiently) and Americans to stop screaming "our spaces are too far apart." They weren't less than 100 years ago. They will collapse back in once we start building transport again. As shown in the article, the current tech is really good. It just takes time and the biggest problem are the stations, track and power. These car tubes that Elon is proposing are terrible. We need a faster way to put up full metro systems.

sansnomme 7y ago
Perhaps it has nothing to do with tech, but framing it as a tech problem lends credibility and allows for easier structural changes/violence. It is easy to say "here's how to improve transportation because xyz is a tech issue" than to say "we have a NIMBY and willpower problem, let's hire some political grads to draft a plan on lobbying politicans and researching the impact of solution abc", especially when your past achievements are all tech related. Also tech has the perception of being hard, inflexible. Just ask anyone who had to contact Google for customer support. Tech billionaires are not known to be easy to sue either, at least compared to a bunch of city-council bureaucrats. See the first paragraph of this article as an example of how tech CEOs are portrayed in the media versus city government bureaucrats: https://www.wired.com/2017/05/apple-park-new-silicon-valley-campus/ https://www.wired.com/2017/05/apple-park-new-silicon-valley-... Framing it as a people problem is simply asking for interference by third-party interests, which is one of the main factors currently preventing accumulation of sufficient political willpower to build metros. It may be a cheap, unethical hack in the sense that the state avoids having to exhaust political capital/use controversial powers like eminent domain in exchange for having private interests build poorly thought out transportation infrastructure. At the end of the day there is an unfulfilled need for transportation infrastructure. A poorly thought out one is still better than nothing.

chrispeel 7y ago

So, replace every major road in big cities with a park or green space over a tunnel? I like this vision :-)

cwojno 7y ago

Building more capacity usually induces demand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand I know it's boring (derpa derpa), but adding congestion pricing, mass transit is likely a better option. https://ideas.repec.org/b/mtp/titles/0262012197.html https://ideas.repec.org/b/mtp/titles/0262012197.html Getting rid of cars should be the goal, not encouraging them: https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=pjatbiavDZYC&oi=fnd&pg=PR13&dq=automobile+traffic+reduction&ots=BbOToLpEzB&sig=A6266ARbk19JuRygzwjPkGuU2ic#v=onepage&q=automobile%20traffic%20reduction&f=false https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=pjatbiavDZYC&oi=... Or, skipping the commute altogether with remote work.

wongarsu 7y ago
> Building more capacity usually induces demand Viewed from a different perspective: we have so little capacity that most journeys are never taken. I agree that in general mass transit is much better than cars. But tunnels do remove many of the arguments against cars: pollution (both CO2 and tire abrasion) can be easily filtered, noise is blocked by solid rock, tunnels can be crossed without knowing they are there, they don't interfere with pedestrians, don't reduce building density, don't create artificial barriers. Cars are still incredibly dangerous, but Elon's sledges would solve even that. Cars still take up a lot or room both in transit and when parked, but most other disadvantages are reduced or eliminated by putting them in tunnels.
- legulere 7y ago
  People will just start commuting to further away places like from barcelona to london: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/11/commuting-from-barcelona-a-london-worker-who-makes-it-pay https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/11/commuting-fro... You can argue for an economical benefit, but it's very hard to argue that they are larger than the costs.
- bluGill 7y ago
  Elon's tunnels don't solve anything. His cars are so large that the amount of people a tunnel can move is small. We can add more tunnels, but it isn't cheap, and geometry means we can't add enough - there is only so much space below us and you need to keep tunnels apart.

bArray 7y ago

> Imagine if we had cheap ways to build tunnels, no more > traffic, no more congestion, roads and parking lots would > only exist underground and cities would have more space > for gardens, parks, buildings, and walkways. Or, skip the tunnel building and just ban cars from major cities. Building more infrastructure to "reduce traffic" only makes using vehicles more attractive. The amount of congestion is approximately equal to the amount of congestion the average person using the infrastructure is willing to accept, so making it less congested just means more people use the infrastructure until the limit is reached again. The real answer to the problem is to simply ban all but buses and delivery vehicles - even then you can incentivize that they are electrically driven. Space increases and infrastructure maintenance costs are reduced, not increased. The real golden use for TBMs is for efficiency - i.e. Go around some mountain or go straight through it? Go around a city or go under it? I imagine buildings sharing a service elevator down to the tunnel where delivery vehicles can offload to and send goods up (rather than Musk's idea of trying to lift a several tonne vehicle in some personal elevator). Would likely make sense for all kinds of maintenance this way to, servicing water/gas pipes or electricity/internet lines for example could be as simple as removing a service panel from the side of a tunnel, rather than the terrible solution we have today involving digging up streets over and over.

rklaehn 7y ago
Why have technical innovation at all, let's just outlaw stuff... I really don't get this desire to outlaw cars. I like walkable cities, but I also like the comfort and privacy of car transport. I live in a place (Germany) with good public transport. I used to live in cities with very good public transport. I still don't enjoy being squeezed in with thousands of other people. Does that mean that people like me have to be reeducated and/or forced to see the error of their ways?
- giomasce 7y ago
  I don't think that outlawing car is a solution, but disincentivizing them maybe is: higher taxes with which pay a better public transport network, less and more expensive parking, more lanes dedicated to public or unmotorized transport, traffic lights more favourable to public or unmotorized transport, stronger presumption of fault on the side of the motorized vehicle after accidents. All of these improve the value of less impacting transport. After all, cars, especially when moving just one person, heavily overuse shared and scarce resources like space and environment. It's all too fair that they pay a higher share to public resources. Maybe you will still use your car, accepting to pay a higher price for it, but other people will switch, making the world a better place also for you.

jtolmar 7y ago

You could replace highways with a magical teleporter and you'd still have traffic and congestion. Most traffic happens at the interface between the highway and the rest of the road network, as cars can only join the flow of traffic at whatever rate its capacity frees up - and cars entering the city compete for that capacity with cars leaving parking spots. Cities are already crammed full of street capacity, so the only way to increase capacity is to increase the number of people per car. And that solution, taken to its logical conclusion, is a train. Subways face similar problems to highway interchanges - passengers have to rejoin the flow of (foot) traffic. This is easier than with cars, since people are smaller and most of them can use stairs, but the cost of stations ends up being the larger portion of cost, not the cost of tunnels (which can be built more cheaply using cut & cover than they can with boring machines anyway). I'd like to see Musk throw his resources behind cheaper ways to make stations, instead of a problem that's better solved by digging a ditch.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

> While that's going on, please someone make a game out of building tunnels, it would be super cool! In a way, Minecraft is that game. At least when I played it couple years ago, I spent most of my time building metro tunnels.