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ELI5... why is digging a tunnel tech news? Does Elon dig them faster or more cheaply or something? Otherwise do I submit this to HN? https://www.sydneymetro.inf

• s_dev 7y ago
  HN isn't exlusively for "tech news" but for anything that is of interest to nerds/intelligent people. You can of course submit any tunneling articles/media you think are interesting. Just look at the abundance of Atlas Obscura articles -- few are tech based.
  • m4rtink 7y ago
    While we are at it, I really recommend checking out all the base tunnel projects currently in progress or recently completed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_tunnel Massively cool cutting edge technology, even before Elon involvement. ;-) There is also a huge amount of interesting videos on Youtube about these projects, all the way from the initial tunnel boring/blasting all the way to final outfitting (imagine installing rails & electric equipment in a 57 km long tunnel - no wonder it took 6 years of multi shift daily work, etc.).
    • LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
      All very impressive. But most impressive to me is this: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikan_Tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikan_Tunnel >>A 2002 report by Michitsugu Ikuma described, for the undersea section, that "the tunnel structure appears to remain in a good condition." The amount of inflow has been decreasing with time, although it "increases right after a large earthquake".
• justapassenger 7y ago
  > ELI5... why is digging a tunnel tech news? It's because Elon is loved in the tech circle.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • saalweachter 7y ago
    Loved and hated. Being both attracts way more interest and engagement than one or the other.
  • puranjay 7y ago
    I can't see any argument where a boring machine (Elon's or otherwise) isn't "tech" and "engineering".
• dv_dt 7y ago
  I think this follows Elons pattern of being able to find areas where the fundamental technology has advanced and is available, but the integration and step up to a new level hasn't been invested in yet. I think the Boring company basically made more efficient custom built tunneling equipment.
  • mc3 7y ago
    Yeah OK, does anyone have the angle on that? Is there a new technology aspect here?
    • seiferteric 7y ago
      The big one I remember was to remove diesel engines from the machine and make it electric. This removes the problem of fumes. Did they do that?
    • xeromal 7y ago
      The idea is to make it 10x cheaper and 14x faster. The boring company is more of a personal effort by Elon due to his hatred of LA traffic.
      • astrodust 7y ago
        "Let's solve traffic by building more roads!" Elon has a lot to learn about induced demand.
        • cgy1 7y ago
          He has said that he doesn't believe in induced demand: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1211076829395738626?s=20 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1211076829395738626?s=20
          • majormajor 7y ago
            I think he's woefully disconnected from the non-rich person's life, then. He can already afford to buy however much space he wants. >If the transport system exceeds public travel needs, there will be very little traffic. Sure. But... it would take an enormous amount of development to make this happen, because so many people are going to want more space if they can have it with still a <1hr commute. So more sprawl, leading to more pressure on the new network, lather, rinse, repeat... For all the talk of walkable neighborhoods, if you gave people the choice of a 30min walk-and-subway commute in a 5-story condo building vs a 30min new-car-tunnel point to point commute with a 2000sqft house on a private parcel of land, you're going to have a lot (not everyone, but a lot) of people picking the latter. Best case it's going to, for a long time, until we reach steady state, still just be a repeat of the "build roads, watch sprawl" cycle of the last century, just with potential to build even more roads by being able to continually go deeper (but is this that much easier than vertical overpasses and such?).
• aaron695 7y ago
  > ELI5... why is digging a tunnel tech news? Does Elon dig them faster or more cheaply or something? Honestly as a 5 year old you are not going to get it. This is multi levelled. Some people just like Elon. But what's really however interesting is how Elon is changing manufacturing. It's like a new Kanban But it's not 5 year old stuff. I'd just say, I know all the other kids like rockets and think they are cool to watch take off, but tunnels are pretty cool to watch too.... and so are processes but that's adult stuff for now kido (and give them a wink)
  • astrodust 7y ago
    So what you're saying is you can't explain it.
    • afarrell 7y ago
      I think aaron is saying that the meme should be ELI15.
  • eloff 7y ago
    Just a pet peeve, I hope I don't tell my kids it's "adults stuff" and leave it at that. I think kids can sometimes surprise you at how much they can understand. Explain it as simply as you can, and if they don't get it try again. If they still don't get it, well maybe it's too advanced for them, or maybe you can't explain it in a simple enough way. I know I was eternally annoyed at how much adults underestimated me growing up.
    • aaron695 7y ago
      Fair enough, I agree. Saying it's adult stuff to children is demeaning and can temper enthusiasm and is a bad habit to get into.
• astrodust 7y ago
  Elon's making bold claims about how he's going to disrupt the tunnelling industry but so far the results are unimpressive to say the least. Tunnel boring is a complex, multi-faceted civil engineering discipline with a large number of well-funded firms that are aggressively competing and innovating. In this space Elon is utterly insignificant. The ELI5 version is: "Elon thinks he can dig tunnels faster and cheaper than anyone else, but so he's failed to demonstrate he can create even one useful tunnel. The only reason he's doing this is because he hates traffic and thinks that driving in a private tunnel will make it easier to get to work on time."
  • imron 7y ago
    > Tunnel boring is a complex, multi-faceted civil engineering discipline with a large number of well-funded firms that are aggressively competing and innovating. In this space Elon is utterly insignificant. 20 years ago you could have said much the same thing about Elon Musk and rocketry.
  • drcross 7y ago
    You're bad mouthing someone who regularly lands rockets on ships in the ocean and has bootstrapped the first electric car company. I think Elon deserves the benefit of the doubt here.
    • modo_mario 7y ago
      He bought the title of founder in title in a way that the original founders couldn't use it so saying he bootstrapped it is a bit much same with saying it's the first electric car company. He has a knack for attracting nice attention and generally is a great marketeer for his brands and himself as a brand. He's also great at extracting government funds.
    • prawnsalad 7y ago
      I'm a fan of Elon but he did not bootstrap the first electric car company. Electric cars have been around since the 1800s with a resurgence in the late 1900s. Musk got into electric cars in the 2000s.
• guessmyname 7y ago
  > ELI5... why is digging a tunnel tech news? > Does Elon dig them faster or more cheaply or something? > Otherwise do I submit this to HN? https://www.sydneymetro.info/tunnelling https://www.sydneymetro.info/tunnelling Someone already did [1] but it didn’t attract much interest. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22069948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22069948
• ShorsHammer 7y ago
  That Sydney Metro tunnel is coming in at nearly double the initial budgeted cost. It's over $1B per km of tunnel. Australian infrastructure projects are hardly something to be proud of.
  • siquick 7y ago
    Have you seen any breakdown of why it costs that much? It seems like an unfathomable amount.
    • threeseed 7y ago
      Because the tunnel is going underneath the Sydney harbour: https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/under-wraps-sydney-s-first-rail-tunnel-dug-beneath-harbour-20191121-p53cs3.html https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/under-wraps-sydney-s-fir...
    • sansnomme 7y ago
      All sorts of reasons, but corruption (along-side organized crime) is a big issue in the construction industry. Imagine Oracle-style of service and business approach coupled with an npm-deep level of dependencies/middlemen whose palms need greasing and to have their cut of the project. Then on the other side you are boxed in by physics, thousands of regulations, zoning laws, complaints, city council, government bureaucracy.
      • mc3 7y ago
        "npm-deep" I love that phrase. anyone who suffers a dig around the node_modules folder knows the pain! Ugh! I also used Oracle in the early 2000's, I need hypnotherapy to get over that.
  • jacques_chester 7y ago
    The MTA's Second Avenue line in New York comes out to more than AU$2Bn per km, on my reckoning (US$2.6Bn/mile). It's the current world champion for expensive holes. The fact is that megaprojects basically never come in anywhere near their schedule or budget. That's because of a selection bias. When you crunch the numbers honestly, megaprojects come out as a terrible on a cost-benefit or ROI analysis. The ones that get built are built by people who choose to ignore the honest figures in favour of the shiny, optimistic ones. Et voila, another farce. There are lots of other factors, but that's the core one that precedes the others.
• Rexxar 7y ago
  If you like tunnels, there will be 200km of tunnels built by 21 boring machines at the same time between 2020 and 2030 around Paris : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Paris_Express https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Paris_Express
  • SECProto 7y ago
    Any detail specifically on the tunnels? That just mentioned 200km of track, but not whether above or below grade
    • asdff 7y ago
      all tunnels are below grade
      • jtolmar 7y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minneapolis_Skyway_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minneapolis_Skyway_System
    • Rexxar 7y ago
      90% will be underground (last item of the list of figures at beginning): https://www.societedugrandparis.fr/info/grand-paris-express-largest-transport-project-europe-1061 https://www.societedugrandparis.fr/info/grand-paris-express-...
  • flexie 7y ago
    Thanks for posting. This really shows the power of the English language. I am not French, I don't live in France, I don't speak French and I am not particularly interested in tunnels or rails. And probably that's why it's the first time I hear about this. But I am not American either, and I don't live there, but I have read about the expensive few mile extension of a subway line in the Upper East Side of Manhattan and the failed attempts to build a high speed train between LA and San Francisco hundreds of times. A project of that scale in one of the largest Western capitals goes relatively unnoticed outside of France mainly because of language. Think about what else is lost. I bet there are thousands of businesses, and lots of culture which never get noticed mainly because of language.
• wnevets 7y ago
  https://www.sydneymetro.info/tunnelling https://www.sydneymetro.info/tunnelling needs a better PR firm to make it onto the front page
• hourislate 7y ago
  Toronto can't build a subway stop for under 1 billion. I would imagine someone like Elon could could dig a complete line with a dozen stops for 1 billion. It's amazing how he creates companies and solutions on a whim that revolutionize complete industries.
  • chrisco255 7y ago
    What's amazing to me is that we built the Golden Gate bridge for $35 million in 1933 (would be $688 million in today's dollars) and it only took 4 years. The Empire State building was built in one year (1930). What happened to our ability to build massive structures quickly? Is it amazing that Musk can do things so quickly or is it just that we got so fucking slow on everything that it seems amazing?
    • staplers 7y ago
      Dragging out construction timelines drags out budgets. Developers (construction) got better at extracting value from clients and thus, time as well.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • adventured 7y ago
      > What happened to our ability to build massive structures quickly? It takes longer to complete an environmental impact review to do a major project than it did to build the Golden Gate. And that's just one of several major red tape & time hurdles that didn't exist in 1933. > According to CEQ, the average length of a full-blown Environmental Impact Statement is currently 600 pages and takes 4.5 years to conclude. US federal agencies prepare approximately 170 such assessments per year. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/09/white-house-projects-permits-climate-impact-plan https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/09/white-ho...
    • snifflumpus 7y ago
      If you want a serious answer: try and build a house. I did. It will expose you to the bananas state of local government. Planning/zoning will kill you, it's simply illegal to build most types of houses in most of the US. There was a recent blog post about this I can't find, but it outlined all the houses that exist that are now practically illegal. For example, mixed use where there's a business on the ground floor. Or building 3 stories in a 2-story zone. Or having an ADU. The list is endless. In fact my current town just made it illegal to build single family units next to multi-family (with a buffer), and we only have two places in the town where you're allowed to build office space. Retail is slightly better, there are three places that's okay. If you get through planning, then permits will kill you. The permits to demolish our place (different town!) were more than buying a new house. I'm not kidding. If you get through permits then good luck with inspections. What musk is doing with tunnels is what the entire tech industry is doing: working in a zone with a lot less rules. It's illegal to make a building but you can make any website you want. Though that is going away too, it'll get regulated to death eventually and you can already see it starting to happen with data and privacy laws. The main escape from all this, as far as I've been able to find, is Texas. It's apparently still legal to build things there.
• triggercut 7y ago
  It's not just the digging. It's the fit-out. Channel Tunnel suffered significant delays and additional costs for instance because the brackets supporting cable and pipe runs needed to be taken down after everything had been installed because of a latent design defect and replaced. Imagine how long it takes to pull 20+km of cable off the wall. Also, compared to other construction sites, tunnels are a different beast, you often need to transport huge amounts of materials, people and equipment long distances to get to your work-front (and back again). It might be a straight line, but it's still far. As much as I love the Channel Tunnel (my father was an engineer on it and I grew up during the construction) the actual outrun cost benefit ratio just isn't there. Extra ferries probably would have been more economical.
• Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
  > Does Elon dig them faster or more cheaply Yes it is exactly that. A lot faster and much cheaper. Please watch the initial boring company presentation, the motivation is presented like in the first minutes. It is not like they are trying to hide anything, they are very open about what is new with their technology.
• on_and_off 7y ago
  I have no idea either but I agree on the traffic. The old quote about rich people using public transit applies : my personal preference is to live in an (european) city with a great public transport system.
• jshevek 7y ago
  As a space exploration enthusiast, Elon's tunnel boring activities are especially interesting to me. He is the only tunnel boring CEO who has openly expressed interest in developing the technology for Mars.
• michaelbrooks 7y ago
  If you want to see a working model of Elon's tunnel then take a look at this video[0]. He actually invited lots a bunch of people to test it out and give them an idea of how it'll all work. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3WR2VIUKqY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3WR2VIUKqY