"Verbal government approval" sounds like bullshit. There have to be at least a dozen different governments that would need to be involved in a project like this: the federal government, DC, Maryland, Pennsylvania, NY state and a bunch of local governments. Who would be able to give verbal approval for all of them?
Building inspector walks up to construction foreman overseeing the digging of holes in the ground, pouring concrete, etc.
Inspector: Hi... can I see your permits? I hadn't heard about this.
Foreman: It's OK... we have verbal permission from the zoning board and building commission.
Inspector: Oh, I see, well... carry on!
I think it's fair to say that there is no such thing as "verbal approval" when it comes to any government bureaucracy so empowered to approve/reject any activity. Sure, you might get the verbal commitment of bureaucrats and politicians to oil the wheels and speed things up, or even look the other way... but they can also just be giving you happy talk, too. It don't mean a thing until the right approvals are filed with the right offices, usually on the right forms, with the right seals, and the right signatures.
I am not concerned about the surface substance of Elon's message. What I am concerned about is the Boring company having no experience building tunnels yet, having no test track, and having no experience building vehicle elevators.
So many unknowns. The least of their issues right now is permission to start work.
I suspect this is almost literally true. He got positive noises from someone in the administration, and is spinning that as "verbal approval" even though it's next to worthless. I can't imagine what else he could mean.
He may also have preliminary approval from an existing railroad that already owns the right of way. There are a bunch of rights of way in that area already, and since his stuff would go underneath, it wouldn't interfere with the existing track.
You're right, of course, which is probably why he's tweeting about it: once the public is sufficiently hyped about the hyperloop happening, it becomes harder for those governments to say no.
You go where people are at least moderately cooperative. If Beverly Hills wants to fight to such an extreme, you avoid their political fiefdom. Simple.
Beverly Hills sits between downtown and the beach areas. It's also a destination for many people who work in the city but can't afford or don't want to live there
This seems to be his strategy exactly, per this tweet:
If you want this to happen fast, please let your local & federal elected representatives know. Makes a big difference if they hear from you. -@elonmusk [1]
Plus a lot of the train stations are owned by quasi-governmental agencies like the port authority.
Traveling 1 mile under the hudson would involve deals with at least 6 entities: the states of NY and NJ, the port authority, the federal government via amtrak, and the city government of NYC and whichever municipality on the NJ side.
This is never going to fly in New Jersey. Its so damn corrupt, take any cost and multiply by 10 for our section. And add a newark or jersey city station too, you're not going under us without that.
Whilst, I'm always pro on anything that can ameliorate our transportation network, I'd much rather see them connect areas where people work with areas where people can live - I think this is the biggest problem of our times. Optimize for the trips that are made the most frequently - people's commute to work.
If someone can get from Baltimore to NYC in about 20 minutes you're changing the scale of where people can live and commute from. I have plenty of friends that spend 45 minutes commuting from Brooklyn to Manhattan and I'd guess a not insignificant number of them would be willing to live in Baltimore where housing is cheap if they could get to the city in 20-30 minutes.
"I'd guess a not insignificant number of them would be willing to live in Baltimore where housing is cheap if they could get to the city in 20-30 minutes."
And I'd bet the cost of Baltimore housing would no longer be cheap when commuting options are expanded.
Yeah, prices would certainly move and rebalance in this scenario. Not just in Baltimore, but in Philadelphia and D.C. as well.
My point is mainly that we'd start thinking about commuting distance differently if we had a system like the hyperloop (assuming the cost isn't prohibitively high). We could conceivably even build other dense cities somewhere in the radius of 225 miles outside of places like NYC, LA, or SF to offload people if commute times are around 30 min.
It can take me an hour to go see friends in Harlem or The Bronx, so you'd even open up the possibility of going to see friends or family for the evening 200 miles away for the same door to door travel time.
Of course this is all futurist speculation, who knows what the numbers would actually add up to until a pilot program happens.
That's pretty much going to be the story of Hyperloop if it succeeds. Sprawl will move to a nodal form with the cost of housing being greater next to each node (station in this case). I am hoping that consideration is being taken at the station-level to insure that more modes of transportation are available to reduce the commute time further and extend the new sweet spot of housing.
You'll never be able to get from Baltimore to NYC in 20 minutes. You'll be able to get from the Hyperloop station in Baltimore to the Hyperloop station in NYC in 20 minutes. To get to/from the station from/to your place of residence/work will take most people another half hour on each side. So… more like an hour and 20 minutes. Yes, it makes living in Baltimore and working in NYC reasonable, but not easy as "20 minutes" implies.
Not to mention the difference in housing cost would have to support the cost of travel. Who knows what a single Hyperloop ticket will cost but a 3-digit figure wouldn't surprise me, especially during rush hour. You could be looking at $3-$4k/month for a daily commute (which granted, is not too far from the difference in housing costs between parts of NYC and parts of Baltimore).
Living 5min from Baltimore hyperloop station would give you 15mim on the other side for a 40min overall commute each way.
If you are saving 2k/month on rent you could pay up to 50$ each way and break even. Though, I don't know what tickets would actually cost, that not ridiculous.
The thing is, the exact customer you are describing already exists and takes the Accela. And that trip takes 2 hours one way! Cutting that by 5x would be transformative. Plus, lots and lots of commuters in the del-mar-va area are already used to 120min+ round trip commutes and I imagine NYC/NJ commuters are similar.
Of course door to door wouldn't be 20 minutes, the article is clearly talking city to city, but 45 minutes sounds about reasonable to assume would be in the realm of possibility for a commute in this future. Sorry if I wasn't clear.
I have friends that have moved upstate from NYC and spend 80 minutes door to door commuting via Metro North, while only being about 60 miles away. Baltimore is about three times the distance and in this future would take 1/2 the time. The metrics just change with something like the hyperloop.
I tend to think of the pricing issue through the corollary of commercial air travel (or any "luxury" good really). At first the cost will be unmanageable for most, but over time (through investment from the rich first adopters) it gets more reasonable. Without doing the research I imagine it was a very long time between the first plane flying and the general public being able to fly cross country affordably. Thankfully knowing that ahead of time didn't halt the technological, legislative, and business innovation required for commercial air travel to reach ubiquity.
As I understand it, this could be solved much better by having people live closer to where they work. Better zoning laws are a better solution than more transportation capacity.
>The American way of dealing with crime is to move away from it to a shoebox in the exurbs.
The other way of dealing with it is to gentrify an area so the inner-city housing prices are so absurd that the poorer people can't afford to live there any more.
In a nutshell, the American way to is establish a lot of space between poorer people and everyone else. Honestly, I'm not sure what else can be done; all kinds of social programs have been tried.
100% this. The transportation problem began when cars were seen as the one true solution for everything, and the zone policy makers could assume that any pair of points A and B can simply be connected by a highway. Let to the rise of suburbs and decline of city life.
I find it fascinating that human society can spend so much time and money trying to optimize the current state (highway, roads, public transport, etc) when the root cause of the issue (having to work on-site, or in a city) seems like such an easier issue to solve.
SF Bay area is a leader in this work-from-home/remote revolution, but what external factors will tip the masses to be able to migrate?
> when the root cause of the issue (having to work on-site, or in a city) seems like such an easier issue to solve.
That's not actually easier to solve. Only theoretically and only if your theory involves only robots and is specific to a dozen cities.
Study after study keeps proving most people like working physically with other people. The majority would prefer to not telecommute. It also keeps getting proven that most people perform their jobs much better on location rather than telecommuting. Amazing things happen from physical human interaction that do not happen telecommuting. Bell Labs and Xerox PARC would never happen via telecommuting. These things are not true for everyone, they're simply true for most.
Beyond that, it's a small minority in the US that has a housing cost problem. Overwhelmingly the US is the land of inexpensive housing compared to other nations with comparable median incomes.
You are right to say that working on location is generally much more productive than working remotely. And it will likely stay that way for the next decade or two, so it makes sense to continue developing commute-to-work infrastructure for now.
But I wonder about the longer term. In 30 or 40 years we will have virtual reality systems that can almost perfectly fool our senses into believing a remote colleague is in fact sitting in the same room. Will most people still commute to work?
It's not an either or - investment in more traditional transportation infrastructure doesn't all of a sudden shut down based on an Elon Musk tweet. The problem you touch on is massive and billions of public and private dollars are invested in this space every year. Specifically ride sharing now and autonomous vehicles down the line will do wonders for commute congestion.
I'll be reservedly optimistic about this. Besides money, right of way is going to have to be an issue. Hope DoT does all it can without having to get into eminent domain much.
All the best, and please make up all the way to Boston.
I don't think they'd build the whole or even the majority underground --it's super costly and trench and cover tunneling still needs access to ground level.
It sounded ridiculous the first time I heard it but trains actually have right of way over cars/pedestrians... I wonder if those rights transfer if you could buy up an old train line?[0] (Of course, a HyperLoop isn't as easy to just drive over like train tracks, but if the tracks are already there, it's actually the towns/taxpayers that are responsible for the cost of building a safe crossing for cars/people.)
For the Boring company to really get going and work like Elon Musk is dreaming about, I think the laws for mineral rights (underground property rights) will have to be modified in the US. Sort of like how the ownership of airspace was modified when airplanes became a big thing. Imagine every airline negotiating with all of the property owners they flew over for a coast-to-coast flight. Air travel would just have not developed in the US.
Maybe below ground property rights should not be quite as absolute and people would have to allow tunneling below a depth where disturbance to the near surface is far below the background. They could receive some kind of predetermined fee and/or rent. I hope America is still flexible to implement such a legal change.
Even within the current framework, it shouldn't be hard to acquire an underground easement, by market or eminent domain. Shouldn't be very expensive, either. A deep underground tunnel means basically no diminution of property values. Subway and water tunnel projects tend to pay very small token amounts (a few hundred dollars) for similar underground takings. Not quite as streamlined as a "free groundspace" regime, but not a big obstacle.
I was surprised to hear this, since there's already a rail line from DC to NYC. But maybe that's why they're so receptive, and 30 minutes is a whole lot better than 3 hours. I hope this succeeds, I'd love to see some lines between cities without rail connections.
I would rather see an investment in Hyperloop instead of the "US tax payer-subsidized but still overpriced and unprofitable" Amtrak service.
I imagine if this news is true it will get very political as Amtrak has recently secured billions from the Federal Government for new trains, along the same corridor:
Amtrak is largely a political problem with no will in Washington to fix. It would be interesting to see what would happen if Amtrak had actual competition.
Even if the threat of Hyperloop were the kick in the pants Washington needs to fix Amtrak, Hyperloop would be a success. See:
Musk wants to gussy up interest in his Boring Company.
Comparing the Northeast Megalopolis to West Germany is instructive, they are similar in size and population. Germany has had its Intercity-Express since the late 1980s. America on the other hand can't get its ass off the seat. No competition needed, just political will.
Sure, but the interstate highway system's capital costs are paid mostly by the federal government too -- gas taxes don't come close to covering it so it's decidedly not user-pays -- and nobody expects that to be profitable. National transportation infrastructure is a public good, not a business investment on the part of the government.
If they succeed, you'll likely get your wish in more ways than you bargained for. The NE corridor is the only part of the entire Amtrak system that's even close to solvent, and it subsidizes the rest of the system. This project would take the bottom out of the part of the network that pays for the rest of it. It would probably kill Amtrak, everywhere, even in places that will never see a hyperloop.
Yeah, but how much ridership does Amtrak even get in those places that "will never see a hyperloop"? Amtrak has coast-to-coast routes, but who actually takes them? At Amtrak speeds, it takes days to cross the country (I could drive it faster), and it costs a small fortune too. The only way it makes any sense is if you have plenty of time and money to spare and really want to see America from a train; if you actually need to get somewhere in time, or you don't have an extra $3k or whatever for a sleeper cabin (you don't want to sit in a seat for 3 days and nights), flying is the way to go.
Amtrak isn't solvent in those other areas because it simply isn't competitive. It's too slow (because we won't invest in bullet trains, and it doesn't help that Amtrak trains use freight tracks and have to yield to the freight trains), and it costs way too much. Air travel in the US sucks, but it's still better than the Amtrak option for those routes. It only works in the NE Corridor because those cities are close enough together for it to work out; air travel is hampered by the crappy TSA security (aggravation but also a lot of time: having to be at the airport 3 hours before your flight makes it uncompetitive if you're just going from DC to Philly for instance) so train travel makes some sense there, though even there you can get there more cheaply by bus, though it isn't as comfortable or quite as fast.
>"If they succeed, you'll likely get your wish in more ways than you bargained for. The NE corridor is the only part of the entire Amtrak system that's even close to solvent, and it subsidizes the rest of the system."
Yes exactly, and that is the point being made in my Economist link. Amtrak should be broken up. Why should commuters along the NE corridor be subsiding the rest of it? In 1971 when Amtrak was founded this made sense but in 2017 with budget air travel it's to believe it still does.
Let Amtrak continue to operate the NE corridor and be profitable. But why should they be protected from competition? Or stated a different way - why should commuters be denied an alternative?
What I don't like about the hyperloop is its focus on cars as a solution to the transportation problem. Mass transit can be way more efficient and desirable, as well as allow pedestrians to take back city life.
The under-city car tunnel project is not hyperloop, it's a separate project, no vacuum involved, just multilevel tunnels with fast automatic pods for cars.
Hyperloop is both passenger and freight, it is mass transit. Where do you see it as focusing on cars as a solution?
>"Mass transit can be way more efficient and desirable, as well as allow pedestrians to take back city life."
Indeed mass transit "Can be" more efficient and desirable. Unfortunately however there's often a host of real world constraints such as budgetary, political, and logistical that seem to ensure that its never optimally efficient or desirable. See:
I took the train from New York to New Haven once. I have no idea if that's Amtrak or whatever, but it was the only time I took a train in the US and it was slowest train journey I have ever been on, felt like we never went faster than about 40mph. That should be a 45min trip not >2hrs. Are all trains that slow? Maybe that's where they should start.
Most of the East Coast passenger railways were laid down when trains were much slower, and even then they had to pass through many densely populated areas. So there are a lot of curves, mostly flat, and lots of surface crossings with roads. That slows the trains down. Some sections have been upgraded to allow higher speeds, but with station stops and unimproved sections the average speed is stilk slow.
On the spectrum of likeliness to mean shit all, how does "verbal green light" compare to Obama announcing $8 billion toward high speed rail (which was later obstructed by republicans).
I can't help but think of this Simpsons scene whenever I hear Musk talk about Hyperloop and the Boring company.
The guy has no skin in the game, and meanwhile he's building a car company which does not benefit from increased public transit use. It's a sham folks.
So a hyperloop in the NE corridor means no one in the 320,000,000 person, 9,833,520 km2 landmass would want an electric car and all its potential benefits?
Also, Tesla is a vehicle (heh) for battery research.
The Boring Company is meant to work with the road system by transporting cars underground. It fits perfectly with his car company.
What's the nature of the supposed sham? It doesn't look like he's structuring this company in a way that will let him take the money and run, so what's the plan?
The sham is that he's creating hype in future nonexistent tech to distract government officials from investing in current infrastructure that would compete with automobiles.
Governments could build high speed rail right now and significantly improve transportation options, but with the promise of some better Hyperloop system in the future, they could be encouraged to hold off. Of course Hyperloop may never appear at all.
Similarly with the Boring Company Musk is asserting that increasing road capacity with tunnels will reduce congestion and improve the transportation system, when in reality this issue has been studied at length and has been proven false. Due to induced demand increasing road capacity simply encourages more people to drive, which Musk would of course be in favour of. Yet again by putting forward a zany idea and additionally hand waving about the future promise of autonomous cars, Musk distracts government officials from real transportation solutions that can be implemented today.
Your first paragraph doesn't make any sense. Our government could have built high speed rail any time in the past 30 years if there was the political will to get it done. There wasn't. The fact that someone is offering alternatives at this point just means that they realistically see that no one has no desire to build high speed rails in the US.
I'd say the history of our public transport infrastructure over the past few decades demonstrates the utter unnecessity of this scheme, since it happens all by itself anyway.
He's open sourced all of Tesla patents with the goal of accelerating the transition to EVs. For that and many other reasons it's obvious his intentions are pure. Not to mention failures in regard to high speed rail are nothing new in the US. To think this "announcement" was derived to thwart those efforts is delusional. Hope you find a way to channel your nefarious thinking toward something positive.
EV patents are irrelevant to the discussion. EVs are still cars. Public Transport offers an alternative to automobile based transportation. It is in his best interest for governments to invest their infrastructure dollars in automobile based infrastructure instead of alternatives.
I think the proposed scam is bizarre, but the DC-NYC corridor discussed here is a distance where cars are still competitive. Travel time is longer but overhead is much lower, leaving the total transit time fairly similar.
EVs are fine for DC-NYC. The higher-end Teslas can do the trip in one shot. My S85 could too, if I were willing to arrive running on the electrical equivalent of fumes, but I'd probably take 15 minutes to stop in Delaware to top up the car and driver. With charging, my total trip time would be about four hours, which compares pretty favorably with making the trip by air.
The reality is that USA has terrible trains. Our transportation technology is horribly behind in everything but cars. You can tear down this guy as much as you want, but the truth is that our trains are decades behind China and Japan. This is an effort by private industry to bring us back to the forefront, and we should embrace it.
I mean, is it feasible he released the idea of Hyperloop into the wild and let other companies battle it out and spend an enormous amount of money on R&D, only to build a "straightforward" company and sell it's "product" (infrastructure) to Hyperloop and the others?
>>"City center to city center in each case, with up to a dozen or more entry/exit elevators in each city"[1]
This alone will drive up required funding exponentially. Almost all of the named city centers have onerous space, security and tunneling red tape that will intuitively drives up the marginal per-mile costs the closer to the city centers one tries to bore.
If this is true, what is needed to cement public confidence in this techology is a quick and definite win. Maybe a tunnel between lower Manhattan and Staten Island? Both landings are government owned and would greatly improve upon the current 20 minute ferry ride across. It can also be the first link on the NYC-DC route.
Ok, so let's say there is 350 km in an almost straight line. A great tunnel boring machine excavates around 20 meters per day in average (80 m on good days; next to nothing on other days). So that's 140 meters per week or 7 km per year. With 10 of those he could cover the distance in 5 years. For one tube. If he wants 2, 3 or 4 tubes, which would make sense on such busy stretch, he would need 2, 3 or 4 machines more. Musk claims the Boring Company will drill faster than traditional tunnel boring machines. If he could go twice as fast, he could do with half the machines.
It's doable, I guess, but I think the regulatory obstacles, archeological excavations, etc would slow it all down more than the machines.
"The Boring Company's ambitions include reducing both the diameter of tunnels and increasing the speed of soft-soil boring machines to carve them. It wants to increase machine power and have them run on electricity instead of diesel, automate the process with fewer human operators, and tunnel continuously instead of erecting support structures. Noting that a snail is effectively 14 times faster than a soft-soil boring machine, the company says in bold that "our goal is to defeat a snail in a race." To highlight the point, it also links to a picture on Musk's Instagram of the company's mascot, a snail with a name and environs inspired by SpongeBob Squarepants."
Musk claimed[1] existing tunnels are far too big/wide as they're over-engineered for safety + regulatory FUD. Boring plans to reduce tunnel diameter by half (from 28ft to 14), and then build a better machine to tunnel + support the walls simultaneously. Estimates would reduce costs by ~10x.
I would imagine that cost and time are pretty interchangeable on a tunnel from DC to NYC, since you could simply add more boring machines all digging different sections of the tunnel.
Even IF this means there are magically zero problems with tunneling rights... There's no way this gets approved without detailing fire safety.
Tunnel fires are NO JOKE. Especially with very, very long underground tunnels with particularly narrow diameters and primarily (or exclusively) elevator-based access. A thousand firefighting and evacuation questions there that I haven't heard a single reporter ask.
Hyperloop is supposed to use vacuum or close-to-vacuum tunnels to achieve those speeds, so fire is not really a problem. Still I think the tunnels should be accessible section by section to enable disaster recovery crews to operate.
The video does not illustrate an exclusively hyperloop system. But even if it is exclusively hyperloop, what if there's a fire or toxic gas release inside a pod and you have to escape?
My claim is not that The Boring Company and related government public safety agencies can't figure this out. It's that the tunnel project is not going to get approved without detailing fire safety, which is a BIG deal and probably more complicated in terms of government approvals than "mere" tunneling rights.
You mentioned planes. There are tons of regulations and engineering codes and procedures and training and on-board safety personnel that go into making airplanes fire safe. Including emergency landing and evacuation and firefighting procedures which need to be reimagined for deep underground, elevator-accessed tunnels.
Even the existing procedures for subway systems probably need to be reimagined for deeper depths, narrower diameters and elevators which are the hallmark of The Boring Company's approach.
And I should reiterate that the video shows cars using surface elevators and riding on electric sleds, not a more tightly controlled hyperloop system. So that further complicates safety.
Big Government seems to be really hooking into the trend of these new and unproven tech trend, like solar roadways, because lets face it, it's a great way to soak millions into great sounding/feeling things and run away while everyone is still dreaming with their heads in the clouds.
If we could efficiently dig straight-line tunnels under the Northeast Corridor, would it actually make sense to stick a hyperloop in them?
The reason trains are slow on (some of) the Northeast Corridor is because (1) tracks aren't straight (2) population density means you're frequently running through cities and (3) trains stop all over the place, so people can actually get on and off.
The hyperloop sacrifices throughput for speed, but if you ran a conventional-style train fast through straight tracks underground, you could still do DC to NYC in 90 minutes or less, with a much higher throughput. Letting an order of magnitude or two of people make the trip in 2-3 times the time seems way more valuable than letting the smaller number make it faster.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] threadInspector: Hi... can I see your permits? I hadn't heard about this.
Foreman: It's OK... we have verbal permission from the zoning board and building commission.
Inspector: Oh, I see, well... carry on!
I think it's fair to say that there is no such thing as "verbal approval" when it comes to any government bureaucracy so empowered to approve/reject any activity. Sure, you might get the verbal commitment of bureaucrats and politicians to oil the wheels and speed things up, or even look the other way... but they can also just be giving you happy talk, too. It don't mean a thing until the right approvals are filed with the right offices, usually on the right forms, with the right seals, and the right signatures.
I am not concerned about the surface substance of Elon's message. What I am concerned about is the Boring company having no experience building tunnels yet, having no test track, and having no experience building vehicle elevators.
So many unknowns. The least of their issues right now is permission to start work.
Musk is trying to drum up momentum for it. It'd be wrong to think he's gotten anything terribly official done, here.
LA Metro is currently building a subway extension, and Beverly Hills has fought them every step of the way.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you want this to happen fast, please let your local & federal elected representatives know. Makes a big difference if they hear from you. -@elonmusk [1]
[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/888053175155949572
Traveling 1 mile under the hudson would involve deals with at least 6 entities: the states of NY and NJ, the port authority, the federal government via amtrak, and the city government of NYC and whichever municipality on the NJ side.
Maybe best to just go around us.
He also later tweeted:
> Still a lot of work needed to receive formal approval, but am optimistic that will occur rapidly
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/888077452265771008
He will reference it when the lawmakers try to back out, delay, or, otherwise impede the progress of Boring Company.
"I've got a pen and a phone." -- Barack Obama
So does Trump.
The ratchet of increasing federal government power only turns one way.
And I'd bet the cost of Baltimore housing would no longer be cheap when commuting options are expanded.
(I moved from Brooklyn to Baltimore, in part because of the >30% difference in housing prices.)
My point is mainly that we'd start thinking about commuting distance differently if we had a system like the hyperloop (assuming the cost isn't prohibitively high). We could conceivably even build other dense cities somewhere in the radius of 225 miles outside of places like NYC, LA, or SF to offload people if commute times are around 30 min.
It can take me an hour to go see friends in Harlem or The Bronx, so you'd even open up the possibility of going to see friends or family for the evening 200 miles away for the same door to door travel time.
Of course this is all futurist speculation, who knows what the numbers would actually add up to until a pilot program happens.
Not to mention the difference in housing cost would have to support the cost of travel. Who knows what a single Hyperloop ticket will cost but a 3-digit figure wouldn't surprise me, especially during rush hour. You could be looking at $3-$4k/month for a daily commute (which granted, is not too far from the difference in housing costs between parts of NYC and parts of Baltimore).
Living 5min from Baltimore hyperloop station would give you 15mim on the other side for a 40min overall commute each way.
If you are saving 2k/month on rent you could pay up to 50$ each way and break even. Though, I don't know what tickets would actually cost, that not ridiculous.
I have friends that have moved upstate from NYC and spend 80 minutes door to door commuting via Metro North, while only being about 60 miles away. Baltimore is about three times the distance and in this future would take 1/2 the time. The metrics just change with something like the hyperloop.
The other way of dealing with it is to gentrify an area so the inner-city housing prices are so absurd that the poorer people can't afford to live there any more.
In a nutshell, the American way to is establish a lot of space between poorer people and everyone else. Honestly, I'm not sure what else can be done; all kinds of social programs have been tried.
SF Bay area is a leader in this work-from-home/remote revolution, but what external factors will tip the masses to be able to migrate?
That's not actually easier to solve. Only theoretically and only if your theory involves only robots and is specific to a dozen cities.
Study after study keeps proving most people like working physically with other people. The majority would prefer to not telecommute. It also keeps getting proven that most people perform their jobs much better on location rather than telecommuting. Amazing things happen from physical human interaction that do not happen telecommuting. Bell Labs and Xerox PARC would never happen via telecommuting. These things are not true for everyone, they're simply true for most.
Beyond that, it's a small minority in the US that has a housing cost problem. Overwhelmingly the US is the land of inexpensive housing compared to other nations with comparable median incomes.
I'll bet Bell Labs and Xerox PARC didn't have modern open-plan office spaces.
When the choices are telecommuting or open-plan offices, telecommuting is clearly the better option.
But I wonder about the longer term. In 30 or 40 years we will have virtual reality systems that can almost perfectly fool our senses into believing a remote colleague is in fact sitting in the same room. Will most people still commute to work?
All the best, and please make up all the way to Boston.
> Just received verbal govt approval for The Boring Company to build an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop. NY-DC in 29 mins.
Obviously they'll need to be _some_ ground level access. But no where near the type of access an above-ground hyperloop would.
[0] The wiki article is pretty thin on details but it sounds like they do me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-of-way_(transportation)
Depends. In some states, the costs are shared between the rail owner and the locality (by law). Michigan is one of those.
Maybe below ground property rights should not be quite as absolute and people would have to allow tunneling below a depth where disturbance to the near surface is far below the background. They could receive some kind of predetermined fee and/or rent. I hope America is still flexible to implement such a legal change.
I imagine if this news is true it will get very political as Amtrak has recently secured billions from the Federal Government for new trains, along the same corridor:
https://media.amtrak.com/2016/08/1610/?mc_cid=d3b3f1fecc&mc_...
Amtrak is largely a political problem with no will in Washington to fix. It would be interesting to see what would happen if Amtrak had actual competition.
Even if the threat of Hyperloop were the kick in the pants Washington needs to fix Amtrak, Hyperloop would be a success. See:
https://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2014/07/amtrak
Comparing the Northeast Megalopolis to West Germany is instructive, they are similar in size and population. Germany has had its Intercity-Express since the late 1980s. America on the other hand can't get its ass off the seat. No competition needed, just political will.
Amtrak isn't solvent in those other areas because it simply isn't competitive. It's too slow (because we won't invest in bullet trains, and it doesn't help that Amtrak trains use freight tracks and have to yield to the freight trains), and it costs way too much. Air travel in the US sucks, but it's still better than the Amtrak option for those routes. It only works in the NE Corridor because those cities are close enough together for it to work out; air travel is hampered by the crappy TSA security (aggravation but also a lot of time: having to be at the airport 3 hours before your flight makes it uncompetitive if you're just going from DC to Philly for instance) so train travel makes some sense there, though even there you can get there more cheaply by bus, though it isn't as comfortable or quite as fast.
Yes exactly, and that is the point being made in my Economist link. Amtrak should be broken up. Why should commuters along the NE corridor be subsiding the rest of it? In 1971 when Amtrak was founded this made sense but in 2017 with budget air travel it's to believe it still does.
Let Amtrak continue to operate the NE corridor and be profitable. But why should they be protected from competition? Or stated a different way - why should commuters be denied an alternative?
A great book on topics related to this is "The Great Good Place" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Good_Place_(Oldenbur...
>"Mass transit can be way more efficient and desirable, as well as allow pedestrians to take back city life."
Indeed mass transit "Can be" more efficient and desirable. Unfortunately however there's often a host of real world constraints such as budgetary, political, and logistical that seem to ensure that its never optimally efficient or desirable. See:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/interrogatio...
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/driving...
I can't help but think of this Simpsons scene whenever I hear Musk talk about Hyperloop and the Boring company.
http://imgur.com/a/KRmlS
The guy has no skin in the game, and meanwhile he's building a car company which does not benefit from increased public transit use. It's a sham folks.
Also, Tesla is a vehicle (heh) for battery research.
What's the nature of the supposed sham? It doesn't look like he's structuring this company in a way that will let him take the money and run, so what's the plan?
Governments could build high speed rail right now and significantly improve transportation options, but with the promise of some better Hyperloop system in the future, they could be encouraged to hold off. Of course Hyperloop may never appear at all.
Similarly with the Boring Company Musk is asserting that increasing road capacity with tunnels will reduce congestion and improve the transportation system, when in reality this issue has been studied at length and has been proven false. Due to induced demand increasing road capacity simply encourages more people to drive, which Musk would of course be in favour of. Yet again by putting forward a zany idea and additionally hand waving about the future promise of autonomous cars, Musk distracts government officials from real transportation solutions that can be implemented today.
EVs and trains are a great match. Self-driving EV takes you to train, train takes you to another city, and another self-driving EV picks you up.
I mean, is it feasible he released the idea of Hyperloop into the wild and let other companies battle it out and spend an enormous amount of money on R&D, only to build a "straightforward" company and sell it's "product" (infrastructure) to Hyperloop and the others?
This alone will drive up required funding exponentially. Almost all of the named city centers have onerous space, security and tunneling red tape that will intuitively drives up the marginal per-mile costs the closer to the city centers one tries to bore.
[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/888053729919877120
Suppose this happens, some cities like Boston become simple "suburbs" to a more connected mega region.
It's doable, I guess, but I think the regulatory obstacles, archeological excavations, etc would slow it all down more than the machines.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/ne...
Musk claimed[1] existing tunnels are far too big/wide as they're over-engineered for safety + regulatory FUD. Boring plans to reduce tunnel diameter by half (from 28ft to 14), and then build a better machine to tunnel + support the walls simultaneously. Estimates would reduce costs by ~10x.
[1]: https://youtu.be/zIwLWfaAg-8?t=3m10s
Tunnel fires are NO JOKE. Especially with very, very long underground tunnels with particularly narrow diameters and primarily (or exclusively) elevator-based access. A thousand firefighting and evacuation questions there that I haven't heard a single reporter ask.
You mentioned planes. There are tons of regulations and engineering codes and procedures and training and on-board safety personnel that go into making airplanes fire safe. Including emergency landing and evacuation and firefighting procedures which need to be reimagined for deep underground, elevator-accessed tunnels.
Even the existing procedures for subway systems probably need to be reimagined for deeper depths, narrower diameters and elevators which are the hallmark of The Boring Company's approach.
And I should reiterate that the video shows cars using surface elevators and riding on electric sleds, not a more tightly controlled hyperloop system. So that further complicates safety.
Why not fix the train instead - you know, in some other parts of the world the high speed train is a reality, and works quite well.
The reason trains are slow on (some of) the Northeast Corridor is because (1) tracks aren't straight (2) population density means you're frequently running through cities and (3) trains stop all over the place, so people can actually get on and off.
The hyperloop sacrifices throughput for speed, but if you ran a conventional-style train fast through straight tracks underground, you could still do DC to NYC in 90 minutes or less, with a much higher throughput. Letting an order of magnitude or two of people make the trip in 2-3 times the time seems way more valuable than letting the smaller number make it faster.