I don't get it. Much of the USA is faced with crumbling infrastructure and a lack of money for maintaining that infrastructure. How is creating a network of powered tunnels - which are much more expensive to maintain than surface roads - going to interact with this economic reality?
This seems like technology that addresses mostly fun, theoretical problems - like traffic optimization, not ugly, practical ones like tight municipal budgets and urban sprawl.
It's unclear why this centralized control car-train approach even needs to be underground. Seems like you could do something very similar above-ground. It's basically freeways but without human operation.
But getting rights of way are more complicated above ground. That's probably the one thing that's going to kill the Hyperloop and it already strangles passenger rail in the US.
And it's unlikely that any technological/engineering innovation will make that cheaper. I can see why going the underground route is an attractive idea, you can hope to drive the cost down there.
That being said the cost is currently extremely high, the tunnel that is finished boring and still under construction is estimated to cost 4.2 billion for 2 miles dug over 3 years.
I am not sure the poor state of existing infrastructure precludes someone from building their own new infrastructure. Public transportation outside of the US is often run by private companies, and they make plenty of money.
Even in the US, passenger rail is typically run by the government or government-like bodies, while freight rail is just private companies. I don't think there's an intrinsic reason for that, it's just how it is. (More like, people with goods to transport are willing to pay, but people with only themselves to transport aren't. Or we see public transportation as a "public good" that's worth subsidizing, but of course the government super subsidizes the road network too.)
The fact that your local politician doesn't want to allocate public funds to shoring up a collapsing bridge doesn't mean that Elon Musk can't spend his own money to build his own bridge (tunnel in this case), right?
I am not sure the poor state of existing infrastructure precludes someone from building their own new infrastructure. Public transportation outside of the US is often run by private companies, and they make plenty of money.
It would be relatively easy (which is to say, it would be easier than doing it to private cars) to fit the municipal bus fleet with the equipment to also become automatically piloted "packets." For that matter, it would also be possible to bake-in such functionality to Tesla cars.
> The fact that your local politician doesn't want to allocate public funds to shoring up a collapsing bridge doesn't mean that Elon Musk can't spend his own money to build his own bridge (tunnel in this case), right?
If you're advocating for a private transportation network, then I'm theoretically OK with that as long as it's not subsidized directly or indirectly by the taxpayer. No special tax loopholes or favourable deals on digging rights please.
The problem with such tunnels is that they're natural monopolies, not least because underground space in reasonable depth is finite. It's not a service you'll get competition on.
In Europe there are plenty of private companies offering public transportation and they are almost always subsidized by the government in one way or another.
They stopped turning a profit because the government regulated their profits (after throwing money at them hand over fist, which was naturally exploited) and then federalized it when it fell apart when they decided finally to go to war.
During World War I, regulation prevented the rail industry from properly responding to an uptick in rail demand for exports to fuel the war's various foreign factions (ship capacity had been greatly reduced by German submarines). After the rail companies asked for a rate increase in order to help deal with the increased traffic (which was rejected), the President seized the rail network in order to sidestep the debacle and get their exports out.
The rails were de-nationalized when the war ended 2 years later. After that, the use for passenger travel steadily declined as automobile and bus transportation grew, and the rails never recovered (except during WWII). In 1971, when the entire network was about to collapse, the government created Amtrak. Amazingly, most of the network is still limited in capacity and speed due to regulations from 1947. And most of the improvements in the system have come since 2000. Any subsidies that could have upgraded the network or increased capacity or efficiency over a period of 80 years went into building highways and airport control towers (but not more efficient public buses or light rail).
Of course, Amtrak still leased its rail lines from the railroads, so the old rail companies became the new landlords and freight providers, while Amtrak serviced passengers. Amtrak basically cut passenger service and available rail lines in half, with whole corridors becoming freight-only. Later Amtrak bought bankrupted railroad track, and currently something like 25% of the rails Amtrak travels are owned by it.
The parent is half-correct. The freight customers don't have the same needs as the passengers, and "more convenient" methods of transportation exist for them, but for some reason the government demands that passenger rail remain (for the next big war?) so it got bailed out and nationalized.
I feel as though a large scale privatization of roads would see an explosion in toll roads, which I don't believe is a sustainable solution to infrastructure problems.
Well, since the Internet was once described as a series of tubes(tm), the Boring company is just extending this metaphor to create the Mole People Highway of The Future. That said, it seems like a great experiment to run somewhere in the middle of nowhere in China the next time they want to build another one of those nearly empty cities they wish to fill with future citizens some day.
But seriously, Elon Musk appears to be dating hot and crazy at the moment. Let's just let him get through this phase of his bucket list so he can get back to being visionary once he realizes why one should never marry hot and crazy.
They are clearly pictured as being private tunnels for Tesla owners, which allow the rich technologist to avoid surface traffic, charge their car while on the tunnel platform, and avoid driving through all those uncomfortable poor regions.
It will interact with the surface economic reality in the same way that flying Audis in tunnels interact with the dystopian wilderness in Hollywood sci-fi films.
Well, Tesla is getting into the large vehicle industry, so it's not crazy to think they'd make autonomous vehicles for public transit if there was a market for it.
Yeah, proposing a massive engineering and infrastructure effort with an insane upfront cost in order to be the exclusive provider of the commodity trains for a few years until other manufacturers lobby for manufacturing rights is the real business venture here.
And worse in others. This at least has the advantage that people might actually want to use it since it's zero latency and you have your car for local driving.
If you think this is zero latency you're out of your mind. People can't merge or parallel park without causing traffic on normal streets and you think they'll be able to do it on elevators?
It seems crazy, but there's also some appeal in the idea of opting out of all the legacy infrastructure. If we could rebuild our roads from scratch today to serve a vehicle for the 21st century, what would we build? Probably something like this - standardized vehicles on automated roadways with built in electric connections that enable unlimited long-distance high-speed travel (though we'd just build this into cars instead of using 'carriers').
But it does seem pretty far out that we'd have tens of levels of tunnels for all this underground traffic. Hyperloops seem more plausible.
Hyperloop would seem even _more_ plausible if we were able to lower the cost of tunnel construction. Likewise, traditional mass transit and other infrastructure (power, telecom, sewage) could be significantly cheaper with improved tunneling technology.
If Elon Musk wants to spend--or convince others to spend--billions of dollars innovating tunneling construction, then I'll enthusiastically support whatever vision motivates him.
It's like if a kid decides to clean his room so the aliens can land their spacecraft, then by all means, let's get ready for the aliens!
Sorry I know that post quality is important and everyone should strive to make important points that move the conversation forward but at the same time I have to say "let's get ready for the aliens" really made me happy. Funny.
> It seems crazy, but there's also some appeal in the idea of opting out of all the legacy infrastructure. If we could rebuild our roads from scratch today to serve a vehicle for the 21st century, what would we build?
I don't know, but we did rebuild our roads from scratch to serve as a vehicle for the 20th century, and it was a disaster. Let's first fix the problems that the last attempt to start from zero created (read up on Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs), before trying to start from zero again.
If you go and do something like that, why have the car at all?
Edit: To be a little less snarky, multi-modal transport of this form has been considered; it's one of the ways in which PRT systems have been proposed. But those systems don't also say "and now we build the highway underground."
It solves the last mile problem -- same problem we have fiber installation. You can build fast transport hubs but you can't get right from door to door.
Toronto really needs this. We have a raised express way that's right in front of our harbourfront and it makes the whole area noisy and ugly, blocking what should be a great view towards (great) Lake Ontario. Most importantly it takes up a ton of very valuable real estate.
A huge amount of condo development has been done right next to it and having lived in one the noise is a real problem. Living on the south-end of the highway towards the water almost feels like being cut off from the real city
You basically have to keep your window closed most of the time otherwise it's a constant drone. Night time is the worst as it goes quiet then occasionally a truck will come by and wake you up. The higher up you live the better, but that still leaves about half the units close to it.
So not only would it open up a lot of new property development but also significantly increase the value of existing properties.
The city has been considering burying the highway underground similar to Boston's tunneling project. But the Boston one ended up going billions over budget, so it is not an easy thing to do.
If they can bring the price down dramatically and perfect the concept I'm sure we'd be one of the first consumers for the tech.
Toronto is one of the most dysfunctional cities in NA. They can't even add a new subway line or additional stops. They have no problem closing down every major high way in the City for a marathon every weekend during the summer or the Molson Indy causing massive traffic issues.
The City Council is inept so good luck hoping they could ever have the insight to agree to something like this. , so I really doubt they will ever be capable of implementing a solution to the traffic congestion, noise, etc.
Toronto has enough space that LRT makes way more sense financially than subways but Ford ruined LRT in the minds of almost everyone.
Even GO could cut down a lot of traffic if they'd just add more parking lots on the edge of the city and make it all day two way. When I use to live north of the city there were 3 trains into Toronto in the morning on the Stouffville line and 3 trains back at the end of the day and if your schedule didn't fit them exactly then you had to drive to Finch and hope for a parking spot or drive in.
Yeah, they added like Mount Joy and Linconville on the Stouffville line. I think they are almost ready for two-way service on that line as well. Then all they need to do is figure out how to do it for less than $20/day.
I don't expect the Gardiner will ever be buried but I really wish the vote to tear it down and widen Lakeshore had won. I've read that the backfill land that makes up that whole area south of Front street would make it a lot more expensive than normal tunneling.
I use to live at 18 Harbor about 3 stories up from it and while the drone just became white noise the motorcycles at night were awful. Though that spot also had the horns from ACC spoiling the hockey games on TV(you knew a goal was coming) and the noise from concerts was often loud enough to clearly hear the singers words. Before that I lived at 33 Bay st in the same complex and you didn't hear a thing but I was 30 stories higher.
Just tear down the Gardiner and build public transit everywhere. The traffic will evaporate as people change their behaviour, just as we've seen in Paris and other jurisdictions that have removed road capacity. https://pricetags.wordpress.com/2017/03/30/paris-road-closur...
There's no need for this absurd fantasy tech. We can solve our transportation problems with the very basic tools we already have.
I have to give Elon Musk credit - the average person would be hard-pressed to come up with even a single laughably impractical mode of transportation, but he's got two.
On the other hand, investments in better boring technology produces a lot of valuable real world construction industry IP for pretty conventionally dull projects that happen to involve underground travel (as well as potentially being useful for his Mars and megacity dreams). Millions of people travel on underground railways and drive through hillsides every day. Whereas most innovations necessary to develop relatively-less-unsafe means of propel people at high speed through long distance above-ground vacuum tubes are kind of predicated on the assumption that people might actually travel in a way similar to his concept sketch.
Ignoring the marketing video, it's easy to see why he's potentially going to spend more engineer time and money on the boring technology and schemes for building big swooping curvy tunnels through prime metropolitan real estate whilst being happy to "open-source" the idea of firing people through metal vacuum tubes for others to work on.
Don't fully get the benefit of moving cars on rails vs. moving cars on wheels... Higher fixed costs to power the rail vs. just letting cars auto-drive with internal propulsion. What am I missing?
If you want cars to be more closely packed, travelling at higher speeds and controlled by computers, you probably don't want individual car owners to be able to bring the whole thing to a screeching halt through sloppy maintenance or shutting the engine down
I am of two minds about self driving cars. From a technology point of view, I think its great, but I don't really see what problem they solve that would not be better solved by ubiquitous public transportation (trains, mostly). Now, Musk wants to carry cars on sleds through tunnels under LA? Why not just build some damn trains?
EDIT: the real news is that he wants to improve boring machines which is not a bad goal. There will be more and more tunnels regardless of what you actually put in them, so faster, more efficient boring is a worthwhile goal.
It's about the last mile connectivity. People don't want to walk/uber from home to the train station and from the train station to work. Having a car on rails solves this problem.
When public transport is ubiquitous, the last mile is really just that, a mile, tops (in urban environments). The difference between public transit somewhere like Japan, where everything is linked and you have intermodal hubs efficiently connecting higher speed and lower speed transit and what we have in US cities is staggering. It's downright easy to cross the entire country in the span of a few hours, only stepping foot outside for the very short walk to the nearest metro. Then you usually just have metro -> shinkansen -> metro, all connected to eachother, to get to where you have to go. You might need to change your metro once, but that's hardly an inconvenience when the connections are in the same building and you just walk a few feet from one platform to the next.
Compare that to Seattle, where my friend got lost trying to get from the light rail to the incredibly slow train up to Vancouver because they're several blocks apart. And then had to do the same on the Vancouver end for the same reason. To make matters worse, the train between the two cities is actually slower than the train between Tokyo and Hiroshima, with roughly 3x the distance.
Shared self-driving cars would essentially be an ultra-efficient bus service. Instead of huge (often half-empty) vehicles driving set routes, you have small custom electric vehicles (remember, the interior could be anything) going exactly where they're required.
Keep the trains, but replace buses, taxis, and probably quite a lot of private cars with an automated fleet. It would be a huge change, a huge improvement in many lives.
It reduces the complexity of the tunnel needed for combustion vehicles (most cars today) by not needing more complex exhaust infrastructure, and thus makes this idea more immediately viable.
The fact that the idea is that most cars would be able to use the system, not just ones from a certain company. Additionally, 130mph is pretty sporty to maintain for all vehicles using the system! Most cars probably can't even achieve that speed all out, let alone safely (even if self-driven).
It allows the entire system to be controlled by one system - e.g., no need for each car to have its own LIDAR system. ATO is way easier than self-driving cars. You get all the benefits of being able to group vehicles together, have all stop simultaneously in response to hazards, etc.
Plus, like with most rail systems, you get the big benefits of having a custom right-of-way. No need to contend with pedestrians, people parking in the traffic lane, vehicles that aren't as fast as others, etc etc.
Of course... if you want to build a new underground right of way, what's the best way to use it? Is a big open question in my mind. You could go for electric BRT, for instance, or big-dig style freeway.
Whenever I am stuck in traffic, I am thinking about how can we have no traffic jams at all. My idea is similar to this but not in tunnels. I think we can do it on earth. Just have an elevated freeway that is reserved for this type of traffic where road is like a conveyor belt. I hope you got the idea.
This is not likely to work in SoCal. Our geology and prolific and scattered mineral/gas reserves simply would not allow for it. Maybe elsewhere, but not down here.
I can't get over how impossibly dumb this idea is. It's a clever fantasy but it doesn't seem practical at all, from a cost or safety perspective... has he given a "first principles" talk about why any of this makes sense? By the time a system like this is built, all cars will be autonomous, so the self-driving sleds will be entirely redundant and it just becomes a super expensive road with no safety escapes.
Autonomous ground travel optimization, hyperloops, and air travel all work together to make a seamless system that make this seem redundant.
Maybe that is why he is pursuing it, is because maybe he can help reduce the cost and safety. Just look at how much he is going to reduce the cost of rocket launches and landing them is far safer. And to me that is a far harder challenge than making underground transit cheaper and safer.
> By the time a system like this is built, all cars will be autonomous
I think even if we all switch to traveling pods, this doesn't JUST solve a transportation problem. It solves underground expansion problems.
That tunnel could alleviate 'autonomous pod traffic' in dense areas. OR perhaps it could be used to build underground cities (tube cities) or (tube storefronts). Or perhaps just improved and accessible infrastructure for a city to utilize more expandable tunnels instead of the tiny ones we have now. (If they made boring significantly cheaper/safer).
Just remember there is more to underground boring than just transportation. And your 2 reasons why it won't work is likely the very 2 things they are trying to address.
Instead of using all this space and energy to move cars around, it'd make more sense to just have small pods for 1-2 people, and transport the people around from point to point.
There's already a project to do just this, called SkyTran. It never gets any attention.
I think this is actually more of a fix for the problems with self driving cars, specifically: other traffic.
By creating a new category of infrastructure the selfdriving parts can be far more reliable and simple.
There's a sidewalk I walk down, it's quite narrow and runs along a shoulderless road with a steady stream of cars whizzing by at 50 miles an hour. I think to myself 'how much more or less dangerous is this than walking along the edge of the Grand Canyon? One misstep and I'm toast. One misstep from one of those cars and I'm toast.'
We have a hardwired respect for heights, but at no time in our evolutionary history did we ever have to deal with the kind of speed cars move at. So we look at a 10 foot deep unprotected hole in the ground and instantly think 'Hey, that's a hazard', but we don't give nearly enough consideration to speed, and as such 2 million people each year who are killed and injured in US motor vehicle accidents, and we just sort of shrug our shoulders.
So you raise a fence around it (stored on the sides, underground of course), or slide a roof in (once again, stored below the surface) to prevent anyone from going in even if they wanted to. This doesn't sound like a biggie to me.
And (most?) new minivans nowadays. And most cars have power windows as well. And most supermarkets have sliding doors as well. And probably most garages in the suburbs have automatic doors. This is actually run of the mill technology.
This is obviously just a marketing video, but that isn't a very hard problem to solve. The bigger issue is building an enormous underground highway network under an existing city.
I mean, you can easily cover up the hole with a sliding door pretty quickly after dropping, or, as someone else mentioned, raise fences during the process.
This is far from the hardest problem to solve in the video.
I'm just pointing out that the flaw is egregious. PR videos are supposed to give people a view of the future, suspend disbelief for a minute. This just looks like something slapped together by an intern told to "put some future cars in a tunnel"
A damn disappointment for something hyped a while back from Musk himself. He should learn from Hollywood, movie trailers are far more important than the movie itself when public interest is involved.
Do you really think that no one, not even Elon did notice? I would rather assume, that for this concept video they considered this detail as non-essential and the actual entry points would look quite differently (and safer) than displayed. They most certainly would be different to those "parking spots" shown in the video.
The easiest solution is to make it a covered "garage" with doors on both sides then the hole is always covered. But that doesn't look as good on a promotional video.
I was too busy noticing how there was no contention between the newly raised car leaving the platform and a new car driving into the platform, or the endless line of cars queueing to be raised or lowered, or the amount of time it would take for a car to make it in or out at rush hour, or brain sizzles
Side note/tangent: I think this is closer to what "flying cars" look like in the future vs. what's being attempted lately (which are really just increasingly small lift-based aircraft.)
Replace the underground rails with above-ground "rails" (perhaps electromagent based, when there's enough power to do so.)
On the downside, LA traffic sucks but at least you get the sun shining in. Spending your whole commute in tunnels seems a depressing way to live, even if its shorter.
So what you're saying is you'd rather get stuck in line waiting for tunnel access instead of actually driving to where you're going?
Based on that video it looks like the cycle time on those platforms is pretty limited. There's a fixed number of them circulating at any time. You'll be stuck waiting for one to pop up even if you're second in line.
I dunno man, spending 2 hours in traffic versus 15 minutes is probably a pretty easy choice for most people. I get the sentiment, but if we are being honest, sitting in traffic is ALREADY a depressing way to live for most people.
The costs of tunneling are like FAR more expensive than most think. Breaking, excavating, and supporting rock is slow, time and cost heavy, and precarious work. While this is an interesting concept, unless there are serious advances in rock boring techniques (personal opinion: there are none coming) this will never approach fruition. I would suggest anyone interested in further research look into the "Big Dig" of Boston and the staggering costs and challenges it faced.
Good luck, Elon. It'll be another moonshot company if you can pull it off.
> unless there are serious advances in rock boring techniques
I'm pretty sure Elon Musk doesn't enter a market unless he intends to do just that.
Edit: I got downvoted a bit but it is his MO. He takes things that are expensive and makes them cheaper. For what it's worth though, I do think the tunnels in that video are ridiculous.
People made electric cars before Tesla and they'll make cars after. People made rockets before SpaceX and they'll make them after.
He's cut component costs on the Tesla by maybe 70%. On the SpaceX project it's more like 80% compared to the highest cost competitor. Both of these are huge achievements.
The problem with tunnels is they're not cars, not rockets, not anything like he's ever done before. If he had a functioning Hyperloop system, if he'd proven he can build out infrastructure on a geographic scale and not just product from a factory I'd be more likely to agree with you.
This is a bad idea, a bad project, and a total waste of time.
I have to struggle to think of a dystopian future any more hellacious and soul-crushing than Musk's vision here. It's just tripling down on the concept of living a life centered around the car. Another step to eliminating all human interaction in the course of your daily life.
If, by some stroke of genius and fluke of luck, this thing does get built it will go down in history as the most absurd thing ever constructed.
Then perhaps a hundred years after it goes bankrupt someone will be drilling down there and hit a tunnel that nobody knew existed and re-discover its brief and absurd history just like Chicago has done with their own boring company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tunnel_Company
> And concrete production? And underground hazard detection? And coordination with city infrastructure? And...
to...
> And battery production, and driving hazard detection, and coordinating with the FAA and NASA, and rockets, and...
It's not guaranteed success (not even remotely) but if I had to bet on anyone...
You act like Musk does all the work himself. If he wanted to he could hire the best and brightest in each of those areas and they can work in parallel.
I don't even know if the guy is a good engineer. But I'm pretty sure to have the success he has had he knows how to inspire them.
I think he's gone one step too far on this project. Concrete is something that's necessarily expensive to produce, there's inescapable costs in the production cycle, so while he could probably make it 80% cheaper, he can't make it 99.9% cheaper.
I agree that video goes WAY too far. The tunnels in that video are absurd. I give way better odds of him actually sending people to Mars than building that absurd tunnel system.
But he might succeed at something somewhere in between the tunnel he is boring in his parking lot and the video.
Context: I lived in Boston during much of the Big Dig. Large tunnel projects scare the heck out of me as a tax payer.
If he wants to get into the tunnelling business and start bidding on these "big dig" projects in various cities, I think he'll find some success. His engineering aptitude, his ability to think around problems, that's gotten him to where he is today.
If he retreats from this and builds some kind of pneumatic tube system to transport goods, people, or whatever, he still might have a chance of a win. Those systems have been proposed, and in some cases actually built, and in many cases they've been great ideas.
If he stubbornly insists on pursuing this batshit insane system of tubes he will fail, and he'll fail hard. There is not enough concrete in the world to make that many tunnels.
Maybe he can. The construction industry has explored a lot of options, but let me tell you something: If there's one group of people that are necessarily conservative about these things it's civil engineers.
A rocket can go to the moon and come back safely, that takes an abundance of caution and significant attention to detail, but it's a fixed-length trip. Civil infrastructure has to exist for decades, or in the case of many American undertakings, well over a century. That requires extreme caution.
If you invented a concrete alternative today it'd take at least twenty years for it to be considered a viable alternative to concrete because long-term studies of the mechanical characteristics of it under a wide variety of conditions will have to be taken out.
Concrete is an extremely complicated material, I know people that have gotten a Ph.D. in aspects of it, and it's very well understood. This hypothetical alternative you're talking about has a lot to measure up to.
>Concrete is something that's necessarily expensive to produce
That's true. But techniques like compressed stabilized earth blocks can reduce the required percentage of concrete from ~30% to 4%.[1] For example, recently a 4% concrete and 8% ash CSEB was shown to be as strong as class 30 concrete.[2] Fly ash can also be used. Obviously considerations like longevity and manufacturability need to be validated, but the strength is there.
Essentially you're mechanically squeezing all the air out of the concrete, thus reducing the cement requirement. Since TBM tunnels are made from precast formed concrete currently, it seems like a natural cost (and CO2) saving improvement.
Sending rockets to another solar system would be cheaper than the tunnels depicted in this video. I'm not even kidding.
Where is all that material going to go? There's so many tunnels there you could build a small mountain with it. Maybe he can team up with some sea-steading outfit and build a small continent off the shore of San Francisco.
You'd need three or four orders of magnitude reduction in tunnelling costs to make that anywhere near affordable, and even then you'd still have unbelievably complicated logistical issues. How much concrete do you need for those tunnels? What about ventilation? Safety procedures? Flood control? A single one of those could cost upwards of a billion dollars and I'm not sure there's a lot of cost savings by doing more of them, the complexities don't scale that way.
The more you dig, the more you're likely to hit something expensive you're going to have to pay to fix.
Somehow I think Elon Musk has made it through the middlebrow dismissal phase of this if the concept has made it this far(to include actual digging in SpaceX's parking lot even).
Musk could also be bullshitting to help get funding to create a boring machine that is just twice as good as what we have now. That would be a very profitable company and would reduce subway costs, etc.
Musk's a sales technique to promise the moon (Mars really) and then use the cash to build a revolutionary but realistic company.
SpaceX isn't going to colonize mars, but its putting satellites in orbit.
People said moving phonebooks to the internet was stupid. Then he founded Zip2. People said moving banking to the internet was stupid/insane. Then he founded x.com which merged with and became what we now know as Paypal. People said he couldn't possibly make rockets from scratch that go to space. Then he did it. People also said he wouldn't land rockets on boats. Then he did it. Then they said he would never refly a "launch proven" rocket. Then he did.
As absolutely insane as his goals are, betting against him overall tends to be a losing bet. I'd be careful about what you think SpaceX "isn't" going to do. If it is technologically possible, they will do it. Period.
There's people who will think any issue is stupid, but by no mean did the vast majority of people think those ideas were stupid. I particularly don't recall anyone saying reusable rockets were a bad idea.
And X.Com didn't become Paypal. Paypal became Paypal. Paypal was already developed before the merger and it was not Musk's idea.
I wouldn't be surprised if a 2x or 3x more efficient boring machine is the ultimate product of this and it makes future infrastructure projects much cheaper as a result.
I wouldn't be surprised that for such a niche industry he couldn't make it 20x more efficient. I also wouldn't be surprised if he could only increase efficiency marginally because its a hard problem. But these niche problems often have huge potentials for efficiency gain.
You make it sound like all that's down there is uniform layers of perfectly intact rock just waiting to be bored.
No, it's a hellacious mess of rocks of different types, of muck of all kinds, of brittle, water-filled pockets of who knows what, and every inch you dig you find out there's another problem up ahead.
In the case of Seattle they planned, they surveyed, they did test drilling, and they plotted a course that should have avoided everything, yet they still managed to slam into a steel pole that shouldn't have been there. It set their project back months, the machine was trashed and had to be dug up and fixed.
Plus, these tunnels are only part of the package. You need those surface access lifts, and those may well be the most logistically complicated of the whole system. To make this accessible you'll need hundreds of them, potentially thousands, and each one is a mega-project unto itself if you've sunk the tunnel down deep enough to avoid all those hazards you're now digging straight through.
The deeper you go, the more those lift stations cost. The shallower you go the more you'll come into conflict with infrastructure. There's no easy win here.
That's the entire point of The Boring Company. It's way more expensive than anyone expects. That's the problem they are trying to solve. The entire goal is "serious advances in rock boring techniques".
That may be a lofty goal, but at least the message I got is that it is the one they want to reach.
It seems to me that there may be room for disruption. Currently every TBM (tunnel boring machine) is completely bespoke and is used for exactly one project and is then dismantled/recycled. They cost hundreds of millions of dollars each. I imagine there are relatively few manufacturers out there building TBMs.
Actually in some ways it bears a resemblance to the spaceflight industry (expensive, custom-made, few players). Coincidence?
There is a ton of room for innovation around tunnel boring machines built by the major manufacturers (primarily Herrenknecht and Robbins), around reliability, durability, ease of serviceability etc. I cannot emphasize enough how modern TBM's require an unbelievable amount of engineering attention, repair labor, spare parts infrastructure etc, similar to many super-early-stage fragile prototype technologies. Unfortunately TBM's are no longer early stage, but for some reason the technology is frozen at just-good-enough-to-barely-work."
However I don't know if the economics will work out to fix any of these. Here are a couple of the big problems:
* Most TBM's are semi- or fully-customized for a single job. This raises machine costs. It'd be better if there were only a small range of small-medium-large TBM's that work ~everywhere.
* Most TBM's are fully assembled in the factory, smoketested aka turned on to make sure they work, disassembled and shipped to the job, then reassembled and used. This is not efficient, surely we can figure out a better way.
* Most TBM's are entombed aka thrown away at the end of the job, because getting them out of the hole is expensive and difficult.
* Changing the cutterheads is labor intensive and dangerous and requires highly trained very expensive humans, and it's slow. While you change the cutterheads, your billion dollar toy is sitting there doing nothing.
* TBM architecture is highly dependent on geology. A slurry faced TBM that works in mixed soils is a totally different beast from a hard-rock TBM. It would be cool to have one machine that works in many geologies, perhaps with minimal or automated modifications.
* TBM's require lots of care and feeding from a small army of humans. This raises job costs.
* Topside support infrastructure such as slurry plants and ground freezing machinery comes from different vendors, often even from different countries. E.g. it's common to buy your topside slurry plant from the MS company, in France, while your ground freeze vendor might be Tachibana from Japan. Often each subsystem's engineers on site literally don't even speak a common language. Hilarity predictably ensues. Vertical integration would pay huge dividends here.
Ideally Elon can mass-produce TBM's that just work out of the box for most jobs, and that are easier to work on. Then we can laugh him out of town for his stupid "put cars in tunnels" ideas and use his miracle machines to build sensible train tunnels.
So they are somewhat similar to the problems Elon tries to solve with rockets. Rockets are not normally reused, which makes them expensive to use.
They are often custom built (at least partly) and thus not mass produced. While we won't see that for rockets any time soon, it believe he managed to bring down the cost of building rockets and continues to do so (he uses his own money after all and does not have the support of every tax-paying citizen like NASA used to during the Apollo missions).
Sure the engineering challenges are probably different for the most part but the economics are the same. Rockets are more expensive then they should be. Boring is also more expensive then it needs to be.
First, I want to say that I'm a _massive_ fan of what Elon Musk is doing with SpaceX.
> he uses his own money after all and does not have the support of every tax-paying citizen like NASA used to during the Apollo missions
This isn't really true. SpaceX, like pretty much all private Spaceflight providers, has received many development contracts from NASA. These are basically NASA giving the company a bucket of money to develop launch capabilities to certain requirements.
SpaceX has _absolutely_ been supported by the US taxpayer, and likely will continue to be. It definitely has been _much_ cheaper for the taxpayer than Apollo, but we haven't gotten a free lunch on this one.
Well, that's true but the only reason spaceX was given the money is because the government wanted to put satalties in orbit. They just figured SpaceX was the cheapest way to get them up their.
They had to prove that they could do it before they saw a dime. The NASA has a project and gets funded without having at least a prove of concept (e.g. A single rocket that can do the job) as long as congress likes it. I'm not saying that this is bad, but this way he earned the money.
Furthermore, unlike the Apollo missions, sending satellites into orbit served a practical purpose. Sure the apollo missions were really cool and have helped science a lot but their practicality was a lot less.
That's a lot of good insight into tunnel boring. Thanks for that.
I know Cincinnati's subway failed because of some bad tunnelling that caused foundations to sink .. well that and the great depression. If they had started earlier or designed it better, Cincinnati could have a Chicago like transit system today. Unfortunately it took them years to get a tram and there are people still trying to shut that down instead of expand it! Unbelievable.
I know in Seattle, many of the tunnels (like to Northgate/UDistrict) have actually been fully bored. The new stations are still not due to open for a few years, mostly because the majority of time isn't spend on the tunnels, but installing track, electrics and building the underground rail stations.
Here's Crossrail's video explaning how their TBMs work. This gives enough detail that you can get an understanding of what's going on.[1]
There's so much variation in geology. The Seikan tunnel to Hokkaido had huge variations in soil and the project went very slowly. Eurotunnel is mostly through chalk, and went well. The Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland was a long grind through hard rock well above water level. That's a slow process, but was reasonably uniform. SF's BART tunnel, unusually, was built onshore in sections and lowered into a dredged trench. NYC's Water Tunnel #3 was in hard rock, and that project went very slowly.
Many things can go wrong. Hard rock may not be competent rock capable of supporting itself. The Tom Lantos tunnels south of San Francisco were through a small mountain of loose shale. One tunneling project in Japan hit an underground river.
The most advanced underground rail project today is probably the Tokyo-Osaka maglev line.[2] 43 kilometers of this is already operating, and most of the route is in tunnel. Tokyo to Nagoya is scheduled to open in 2027. The connection through to Osaka was scheduled for 2045, but the Government has decided to accelerate the program and get it done sooner. Here's what the ride looks like.[3] 500km/h. Working now.
I have a naïve question about subterrean _housing_.
With the real estate skyrocketing in some cities, and scarcity of terrain, I wonder why there is not much more underground liveable habitations (for example, near an expensive city center with no space left).
For anyone interested, there are a few Grand Designs episodes featuring underground residential work. Some are quite inventive due to space constraints. Amazing how expensive some of the groundworks can be dealing with weather or underpinning neighbouring properties.
Precisely this. Most people are focusing on the wrong issues, whether it should be tunnelling cars and not Subway trains etc. That is like arguing SpaceX is putting humans on Rocket and not Satellite.
If Elon could make tunnelling 10x faster, requires much less Human labour and reusable, this will dramatically cut down the cost of building SubWay, or other underground Networks. I am not sure if such tech could be used to build like a underground Shopping Mall in Cities. But if we could build a Walk way under every Car Road would be great for urban cities.
"unless there are serious advances" ...which is precisely what Musk is researching (bottleneck of boring machines): “We’re trying to dramatically increase the tunneling speed,” Musk says. “We want to know what it would take to get to a mile a week? Could it be possible?” See https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-02-16/elon-musk...
Above ground rail isn't practical in urban areas. The video had silly car tunnels, but in practice, I'm sure the bulk of their business will be subway tunnels.
What? The Chicago L and NYC subways (both of which carry hundreds of millions of riders per year) have many, many miles of either at-grade or above-grade track.
I was talking about the demand side / use more than the supply side / cost. But after a cursory examination of the statistics, Tokyo doesn't seem to have a measurably greater density by any common metric vs other cities.
So I suppose my above was wrong. I'd guess the more reliable enablers are only sufficient density, coupled with good geology and a cooperating regulatory / permitting structure.
Not only the drilling, but the shoring up and walling of the tunnel. Also, people tend to be opposed to "move fast and break things" if they're likely to get buried under them.
People also tend to object to "move fast and break things" when they, and their very expensive buildings, are on top of said things and get broken as a result.
Point. Although I'd assume the majority of subway routes tend to be built under roads (also bad, but less terrible)?
Not sure what the geology of San Francisco / California tends to be like, but I believe most of the Manhattan skyscrapers are anchored down to the bedrock. Which I'd expect would require cutting and reinforcing vs just "drill on through".
AFAIK, in many major cities, a major part of the cost of tunnelling is the fact we simply don't know where hundred-year old utilities are.
And, hell, the fact that many cities aren't built on rock (e.g., London, Berlin, Moscow), so even if you can bore through solid rock you're probably not actually that well off: can you also bore through clay and gravel?
The whole process can be fully robotized, and the energy comes from cheap solar. It's not even a moonshot, it will happen. We will do even crazier things than this. In the future we will bore tunnels out of boredom.
Or a person who actually understands what people want in a transportation solution. Nobody outside of city planners and environmentalists take the train/bus solution seriously because it's such a lifestyle downgrade from cars.
If you're in a city that's not explicitly designed around cars, a car is a total hassle. America's gone all-in on cars, but even then the current generation is abandoning them and instead doing something crazy: Living close to where they work.
A car is a massive investment of time, money, and emotional capital that an increasing number of people are simply unwilling to make.
Now what if we add an Uber-like component to this and let people share/carpool together to reduce the number of cars above and below ground? Instead of tires that wear out, we could use steel on rails! Aaaand, we just re-invented the subway.
This doesn't seem feasible at all. Especially the overview shot of the underground network, like it's all open air. Definitely wouldn't be possible like that under a major city.
How about... mass transit. You know, not needing to dig giant big tunnels and build the infrastructure to ferry individual people in huge cars around underground, because the roads are too congested with individual people in huge cars.
Dig big tunnels to ferry trains with people underground. Works pretty well.
This is the thing. Why on earth would you build this insane network to ferry one person in their car, the displacement of which could probably move 8 people using the same footprint. I think they throw that idea a laurel at the end, where a more people-pod-like vehicle is getting lowered in the same manner.
If the system doesn't move your car, then you need two cars and parking for both of them. Park your first car, use the system, then get into another car that you have previously left waiting for you.
Unless there is a stop at every home and business, you'll be needing cars. You might as well transport them.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 337 ms ] threadThis seems like technology that addresses mostly fun, theoretical problems - like traffic optimization, not ugly, practical ones like tight municipal budgets and urban sprawl.
Creating a powered tunnel, especially if it can be engineered to be done faster and cheaper, could result in increased urban density?
That being said the cost is currently extremely high, the tunnel that is finished boring and still under construction is estimated to cost 4.2 billion for 2 miles dug over 3 years.
Even in the US, passenger rail is typically run by the government or government-like bodies, while freight rail is just private companies. I don't think there's an intrinsic reason for that, it's just how it is. (More like, people with goods to transport are willing to pay, but people with only themselves to transport aren't. Or we see public transportation as a "public good" that's worth subsidizing, but of course the government super subsidizes the road network too.)
The fact that your local politician doesn't want to allocate public funds to shoring up a collapsing bridge doesn't mean that Elon Musk can't spend his own money to build his own bridge (tunnel in this case), right?
It would be relatively easy (which is to say, it would be easier than doing it to private cars) to fit the municipal bus fleet with the equipment to also become automatically piloted "packets." For that matter, it would also be possible to bake-in such functionality to Tesla cars.
If you're advocating for a private transportation network, then I'm theoretically OK with that as long as it's not subsidized directly or indirectly by the taxpayer. No special tax loopholes or favourable deals on digging rights please.
It would be interesting to learn details: How often? Who is making how much? And in what circumstances does it tend to work and not work?
During World War I, regulation prevented the rail industry from properly responding to an uptick in rail demand for exports to fuel the war's various foreign factions (ship capacity had been greatly reduced by German submarines). After the rail companies asked for a rate increase in order to help deal with the increased traffic (which was rejected), the President seized the rail network in order to sidestep the debacle and get their exports out.
The rails were de-nationalized when the war ended 2 years later. After that, the use for passenger travel steadily declined as automobile and bus transportation grew, and the rails never recovered (except during WWII). In 1971, when the entire network was about to collapse, the government created Amtrak. Amazingly, most of the network is still limited in capacity and speed due to regulations from 1947. And most of the improvements in the system have come since 2000. Any subsidies that could have upgraded the network or increased capacity or efficiency over a period of 80 years went into building highways and airport control towers (but not more efficient public buses or light rail).
Of course, Amtrak still leased its rail lines from the railroads, so the old rail companies became the new landlords and freight providers, while Amtrak serviced passengers. Amtrak basically cut passenger service and available rail lines in half, with whole corridors becoming freight-only. Later Amtrak bought bankrupted railroad track, and currently something like 25% of the rails Amtrak travels are owned by it.
The parent is half-correct. The freight customers don't have the same needs as the passengers, and "more convenient" methods of transportation exist for them, but for some reason the government demands that passenger rail remain (for the next big war?) so it got bailed out and nationalized.
But I seriously doubt this thing is actually cost efficient.
But seriously, Elon Musk appears to be dating hot and crazy at the moment. Let's just let him get through this phase of his bucket list so he can get back to being visionary once he realizes why one should never marry hot and crazy.
It will interact with the surface economic reality in the same way that flying Audis in tunnels interact with the dystopian wilderness in Hollywood sci-fi films.
Then a vast network of these tunnels is somehow posited.
I don't think reality was one of the constraints applied to this concept.
electric hub motors would work here quite easily.
But it does seem pretty far out that we'd have tens of levels of tunnels for all this underground traffic. Hyperloops seem more plausible.
the vacuum requirements alone make hyperloop an non-starter imo. This type of "fastloop" seems a lot more viable.
If Elon Musk wants to spend--or convince others to spend--billions of dollars innovating tunneling construction, then I'll enthusiastically support whatever vision motivates him.
It's like if a kid decides to clean his room so the aliens can land their spacecraft, then by all means, let's get ready for the aliens!
I don't know, but we did rebuild our roads from scratch to serve as a vehicle for the 20th century, and it was a disaster. Let's first fix the problems that the last attempt to start from zero created (read up on Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs), before trying to start from zero again.
Edit: To be a little less snarky, multi-modal transport of this form has been considered; it's one of the ways in which PRT systems have been proposed. But those systems don't also say "and now we build the highway underground."
A huge amount of condo development has been done right next to it and having lived in one the noise is a real problem. Living on the south-end of the highway towards the water almost feels like being cut off from the real city
You basically have to keep your window closed most of the time otherwise it's a constant drone. Night time is the worst as it goes quiet then occasionally a truck will come by and wake you up. The higher up you live the better, but that still leaves about half the units close to it.
So not only would it open up a lot of new property development but also significantly increase the value of existing properties.
The city has been considering burying the highway underground similar to Boston's tunneling project. But the Boston one ended up going billions over budget, so it is not an easy thing to do.
If they can bring the price down dramatically and perfect the concept I'm sure we'd be one of the first consumers for the tech.
The City Council is inept so good luck hoping they could ever have the insight to agree to something like this. , so I really doubt they will ever be capable of implementing a solution to the traffic congestion, noise, etc.
Even GO could cut down a lot of traffic if they'd just add more parking lots on the edge of the city and make it all day two way. When I use to live north of the city there were 3 trains into Toronto in the morning on the Stouffville line and 3 trains back at the end of the day and if your schedule didn't fit them exactly then you had to drive to Finch and hope for a parking spot or drive in.
I use to live at 18 Harbor about 3 stories up from it and while the drone just became white noise the motorcycles at night were awful. Though that spot also had the horns from ACC spoiling the hockey games on TV(you knew a goal was coming) and the noise from concerts was often loud enough to clearly hear the singers words. Before that I lived at 33 Bay st in the same complex and you didn't hear a thing but I was 30 stories higher.
There's no need for this absurd fantasy tech. We can solve our transportation problems with the very basic tools we already have.
Ignoring the marketing video, it's easy to see why he's potentially going to spend more engineer time and money on the boring technology and schemes for building big swooping curvy tunnels through prime metropolitan real estate whilst being happy to "open-source" the idea of firing people through metal vacuum tubes for others to work on.
A crash at that speed would wreck that tunnel and put it out of service for weeks.
(See also: Channel Tunnel)
Isn’t that called “a train”?
I am of two minds about self driving cars. From a technology point of view, I think its great, but I don't really see what problem they solve that would not be better solved by ubiquitous public transportation (trains, mostly). Now, Musk wants to carry cars on sleds through tunnels under LA? Why not just build some damn trains?
EDIT: the real news is that he wants to improve boring machines which is not a bad goal. There will be more and more tunnels regardless of what you actually put in them, so faster, more efficient boring is a worthwhile goal.
Compare that to Seattle, where my friend got lost trying to get from the light rail to the incredibly slow train up to Vancouver because they're several blocks apart. And then had to do the same on the Vancouver end for the same reason. To make matters worse, the train between the two cities is actually slower than the train between Tokyo and Hiroshima, with roughly 3x the distance.
Keep the trains, but replace buses, taxis, and probably quite a lot of private cars with an automated fleet. It would be a huge change, a huge improvement in many lives.
Plus, like with most rail systems, you get the big benefits of having a custom right-of-way. No need to contend with pedestrians, people parking in the traffic lane, vehicles that aren't as fast as others, etc etc.
Of course... if you want to build a new underground right of way, what's the best way to use it? Is a big open question in my mind. You could go for electric BRT, for instance, or big-dig style freeway.
Autonomous ground travel optimization, hyperloops, and air travel all work together to make a seamless system that make this seem redundant.
> from a cost or safety perspective
Maybe that is why he is pursuing it, is because maybe he can help reduce the cost and safety. Just look at how much he is going to reduce the cost of rocket launches and landing them is far safer. And to me that is a far harder challenge than making underground transit cheaper and safer.
> By the time a system like this is built, all cars will be autonomous
I think even if we all switch to traveling pods, this doesn't JUST solve a transportation problem. It solves underground expansion problems.
That tunnel could alleviate 'autonomous pod traffic' in dense areas. OR perhaps it could be used to build underground cities (tube cities) or (tube storefronts). Or perhaps just improved and accessible infrastructure for a city to utilize more expandable tunnels instead of the tiny ones we have now. (If they made boring significantly cheaper/safer).
Just remember there is more to underground boring than just transportation. And your 2 reasons why it won't work is likely the very 2 things they are trying to address.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ateh7hnEnik
There's already a project to do just this, called SkyTran. It never gets any attention.
This is a marketing fluff video untouched by engineers
We have a hardwired respect for heights, but at no time in our evolutionary history did we ever have to deal with the kind of speed cars move at. So we look at a 10 foot deep unprotected hole in the ground and instantly think 'Hey, that's a hazard', but we don't give nearly enough consideration to speed, and as such 2 million people each year who are killed and injured in US motor vehicle accidents, and we just sort of shrug our shoulders.
Now imagine having tens of thousands of subway cars instead of a couple hundred.
And die.
And lawsuits.
This is far from the hardest problem to solve in the video.
A damn disappointment for something hyped a while back from Musk himself. He should learn from Hollywood, movie trailers are far more important than the movie itself when public interest is involved.
Replace the underground rails with above-ground "rails" (perhaps electromagent based, when there's enough power to do so.)
Edit: fixed typo
Based on that video it looks like the cycle time on those platforms is pretty limited. There's a fixed number of them circulating at any time. You'll be stuck waiting for one to pop up even if you're second in line.
If you're tenth? Get out a magazine.
Good luck, Elon. It'll be another moonshot company if you can pull it off.
I'm pretty sure Elon Musk doesn't enter a market unless he intends to do just that.
Edit: I got downvoted a bit but it is his MO. He takes things that are expensive and makes them cheaper. For what it's worth though, I do think the tunnels in that video are ridiculous.
And battery production? And crash test safety? And coordination with NHTSA?
He's cut component costs on the Tesla by maybe 70%. On the SpaceX project it's more like 80% compared to the highest cost competitor. Both of these are huge achievements.
The problem with tunnels is they're not cars, not rockets, not anything like he's ever done before. If he had a functioning Hyperloop system, if he'd proven he can build out infrastructure on a geographic scale and not just product from a factory I'd be more likely to agree with you.
This is a bad idea, a bad project, and a total waste of time.
If, by some stroke of genius and fluke of luck, this thing does get built it will go down in history as the most absurd thing ever constructed.
Then perhaps a hundred years after it goes bankrupt someone will be drilling down there and hit a tunnel that nobody knew existed and re-discover its brief and absurd history just like Chicago has done with their own boring company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tunnel_Company
> And concrete production? And underground hazard detection? And coordination with city infrastructure? And...
to...
> And battery production, and driving hazard detection, and coordinating with the FAA and NASA, and rockets, and...
It's not guaranteed success (not even remotely) but if I had to bet on anyone...
You act like Musk does all the work himself. If he wanted to he could hire the best and brightest in each of those areas and they can work in parallel.
I don't even know if the guy is a good engineer. But I'm pretty sure to have the success he has had he knows how to inspire them.
But he might succeed at something somewhere in between the tunnel he is boring in his parking lot and the video.
Context: I lived in Boston during much of the Big Dig. Large tunnel projects scare the heck out of me as a tax payer.
If he retreats from this and builds some kind of pneumatic tube system to transport goods, people, or whatever, he still might have a chance of a win. Those systems have been proposed, and in some cases actually built, and in many cases they've been great ideas.
If he stubbornly insists on pursuing this batshit insane system of tubes he will fail, and he'll fail hard. There is not enough concrete in the world to make that many tunnels.
A rocket can go to the moon and come back safely, that takes an abundance of caution and significant attention to detail, but it's a fixed-length trip. Civil infrastructure has to exist for decades, or in the case of many American undertakings, well over a century. That requires extreme caution.
If you invented a concrete alternative today it'd take at least twenty years for it to be considered a viable alternative to concrete because long-term studies of the mechanical characteristics of it under a wide variety of conditions will have to be taken out.
Concrete is an extremely complicated material, I know people that have gotten a Ph.D. in aspects of it, and it's very well understood. This hypothetical alternative you're talking about has a lot to measure up to.
That's true. But techniques like compressed stabilized earth blocks can reduce the required percentage of concrete from ~30% to 4%.[1] For example, recently a 4% concrete and 8% ash CSEB was shown to be as strong as class 30 concrete.[2] Fly ash can also be used. Obviously considerations like longevity and manufacturability need to be validated, but the strength is there.
Essentially you're mechanically squeezing all the air out of the concrete, thus reducing the cement requirement. Since TBM tunnels are made from precast formed concrete currently, it seems like a natural cost (and CO2) saving improvement.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267637559_Effect_Of...
[2] https://www.hindawi.com/journals/je/2016/7940239/
Sending rockets to another solar system would be cheaper than the tunnels depicted in this video. I'm not even kidding.
Where is all that material going to go? There's so many tunnels there you could build a small mountain with it. Maybe he can team up with some sea-steading outfit and build a small continent off the shore of San Francisco.
You'd need three or four orders of magnitude reduction in tunnelling costs to make that anywhere near affordable, and even then you'd still have unbelievably complicated logistical issues. How much concrete do you need for those tunnels? What about ventilation? Safety procedures? Flood control? A single one of those could cost upwards of a billion dollars and I'm not sure there's a lot of cost savings by doing more of them, the complexities don't scale that way.
The more you dig, the more you're likely to hit something expensive you're going to have to pay to fix.
Next up: Elon's Space Elevator! Elon's Fusion Reactor! Elon's Teleporter!
Musk's a sales technique to promise the moon (Mars really) and then use the cash to build a revolutionary but realistic company.
SpaceX isn't going to colonize mars, but its putting satellites in orbit.
As absolutely insane as his goals are, betting against him overall tends to be a losing bet. I'd be careful about what you think SpaceX "isn't" going to do. If it is technologically possible, they will do it. Period.
And X.Com didn't become Paypal. Paypal became Paypal. Paypal was already developed before the merger and it was not Musk's idea.
No, it's a hellacious mess of rocks of different types, of muck of all kinds, of brittle, water-filled pockets of who knows what, and every inch you dig you find out there's another problem up ahead.
In the case of Seattle they planned, they surveyed, they did test drilling, and they plotted a course that should have avoided everything, yet they still managed to slam into a steel pole that shouldn't have been there. It set their project back months, the machine was trashed and had to be dug up and fixed.
Plus, these tunnels are only part of the package. You need those surface access lifts, and those may well be the most logistically complicated of the whole system. To make this accessible you'll need hundreds of them, potentially thousands, and each one is a mega-project unto itself if you've sunk the tunnel down deep enough to avoid all those hazards you're now digging straight through.
The deeper you go, the more those lift stations cost. The shallower you go the more you'll come into conflict with infrastructure. There's no easy win here.
(I'm kidding)
That may be a lofty goal, but at least the message I got is that it is the one they want to reach.
Actually in some ways it bears a resemblance to the spaceflight industry (expensive, custom-made, few players). Coincidence?
Former tunnel boring engineer here.
There is a ton of room for innovation around tunnel boring machines built by the major manufacturers (primarily Herrenknecht and Robbins), around reliability, durability, ease of serviceability etc. I cannot emphasize enough how modern TBM's require an unbelievable amount of engineering attention, repair labor, spare parts infrastructure etc, similar to many super-early-stage fragile prototype technologies. Unfortunately TBM's are no longer early stage, but for some reason the technology is frozen at just-good-enough-to-barely-work."
However I don't know if the economics will work out to fix any of these. Here are a couple of the big problems:
* Most TBM's are semi- or fully-customized for a single job. This raises machine costs. It'd be better if there were only a small range of small-medium-large TBM's that work ~everywhere.
* Most TBM's are fully assembled in the factory, smoketested aka turned on to make sure they work, disassembled and shipped to the job, then reassembled and used. This is not efficient, surely we can figure out a better way.
* Most TBM's are entombed aka thrown away at the end of the job, because getting them out of the hole is expensive and difficult.
* Changing the cutterheads is labor intensive and dangerous and requires highly trained very expensive humans, and it's slow. While you change the cutterheads, your billion dollar toy is sitting there doing nothing.
* TBM architecture is highly dependent on geology. A slurry faced TBM that works in mixed soils is a totally different beast from a hard-rock TBM. It would be cool to have one machine that works in many geologies, perhaps with minimal or automated modifications.
* TBM's require lots of care and feeding from a small army of humans. This raises job costs.
* Topside support infrastructure such as slurry plants and ground freezing machinery comes from different vendors, often even from different countries. E.g. it's common to buy your topside slurry plant from the MS company, in France, while your ground freeze vendor might be Tachibana from Japan. Often each subsystem's engineers on site literally don't even speak a common language. Hilarity predictably ensues. Vertical integration would pay huge dividends here.
Ideally Elon can mass-produce TBM's that just work out of the box for most jobs, and that are easier to work on. Then we can laugh him out of town for his stupid "put cars in tunnels" ideas and use his miracle machines to build sensible train tunnels.
They are often custom built (at least partly) and thus not mass produced. While we won't see that for rockets any time soon, it believe he managed to bring down the cost of building rockets and continues to do so (he uses his own money after all and does not have the support of every tax-paying citizen like NASA used to during the Apollo missions).
Sure the engineering challenges are probably different for the most part but the economics are the same. Rockets are more expensive then they should be. Boring is also more expensive then it needs to be.
> he uses his own money after all and does not have the support of every tax-paying citizen like NASA used to during the Apollo missions
This isn't really true. SpaceX, like pretty much all private Spaceflight providers, has received many development contracts from NASA. These are basically NASA giving the company a bucket of money to develop launch capabilities to certain requirements.
SpaceX has _absolutely_ been supported by the US taxpayer, and likely will continue to be. It definitely has been _much_ cheaper for the taxpayer than Apollo, but we haven't gotten a free lunch on this one.
They had to prove that they could do it before they saw a dime. The NASA has a project and gets funded without having at least a prove of concept (e.g. A single rocket that can do the job) as long as congress likes it. I'm not saying that this is bad, but this way he earned the money.
Furthermore, unlike the Apollo missions, sending satellites into orbit served a practical purpose. Sure the apollo missions were really cool and have helped science a lot but their practicality was a lot less.
I know Cincinnati's subway failed because of some bad tunnelling that caused foundations to sink .. well that and the great depression. If they had started earlier or designed it better, Cincinnati could have a Chicago like transit system today. Unfortunately it took them years to get a tram and there are people still trying to shut that down instead of expand it! Unbelievable.
I know in Seattle, many of the tunnels (like to Northgate/UDistrict) have actually been fully bored. The new stations are still not due to open for a few years, mostly because the majority of time isn't spend on the tunnels, but installing track, electrics and building the underground rail stations.
Here's Crossrail's video explaning how their TBMs work. This gives enough detail that you can get an understanding of what's going on.[1]
There's so much variation in geology. The Seikan tunnel to Hokkaido had huge variations in soil and the project went very slowly. Eurotunnel is mostly through chalk, and went well. The Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland was a long grind through hard rock well above water level. That's a slow process, but was reasonably uniform. SF's BART tunnel, unusually, was built onshore in sections and lowered into a dredged trench. NYC's Water Tunnel #3 was in hard rock, and that project went very slowly.
Many things can go wrong. Hard rock may not be competent rock capable of supporting itself. The Tom Lantos tunnels south of San Francisco were through a small mountain of loose shale. One tunneling project in Japan hit an underground river.
The most advanced underground rail project today is probably the Tokyo-Osaka maglev line.[2] 43 kilometers of this is already operating, and most of the route is in tunnel. Tokyo to Nagoya is scheduled to open in 2027. The connection through to Osaka was scheduled for 2045, but the Government has decided to accelerate the program and get it done sooner. Here's what the ride looks like.[3] 500km/h. Working now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z38JIqGDZVU
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltqp4McM2wY
I have a naïve question about subterrean _housing_.
With the real estate skyrocketing in some cities, and scarcity of terrain, I wonder why there is not much more underground liveable habitations (for example, near an expensive city center with no space left).
I think this is really just Elon's goal, and the talk and fluffy marketing video are just that. Fluffy marketing and PR for his companies.
If Elon could make tunnelling 10x faster, requires much less Human labour and reusable, this will dramatically cut down the cost of building SubWay, or other underground Networks. I am not sure if such tech could be used to build like a underground Shopping Mall in Cities. But if we could build a Walk way under every Car Road would be great for urban cities.
I wonder if anyone has tried that yet?
https://youtu.be/FPzpugrbwBE?t=120
He's going to involve the government? :|
Your phrasing is interesting given that SpaceX announced sending two people around the moon next year.
http://www.spacex.com/news/2017/02/27/spacex-send-privately-...
So I suppose my above was wrong. I'd guess the more reliable enablers are only sufficient density, coupled with good geology and a cooperating regulatory / permitting structure.
Not sure what the geology of San Francisco / California tends to be like, but I believe most of the Manhattan skyscrapers are anchored down to the bedrock. Which I'd expect would require cutting and reinforcing vs just "drill on through".
(which were during construction, but happened in "finished" sections, I believe. NATM applies a single pass of shotcrete to the cut rock surface)
And, hell, the fact that many cities aren't built on rock (e.g., London, Berlin, Moscow), so even if you can bore through solid rock you're probably not actually that well off: can you also bore through clay and gravel?
Hyperloops are round + tunnels are round = Boring Company
Putting cars through the tunnels is not what I first expected.
A car is a massive investment of time, money, and emotional capital that an increasing number of people are simply unwilling to make.
Dig big tunnels to ferry trains with people underground. Works pretty well.
Unless there is a stop at every home and business, you'll be needing cars. You might as well transport them.