Underground freeways? Wow. I didn't realize that was the target of The Boring Company. I thought it was a start at making Hyperloop a thing. That would have (to me) made more sense than underground freeways.
This is a scathing review, but I can't really find anything inaccurate in it. Perhaps I didn't try hard enough, but the thought of riding hundreds of miles underground doesn't make me enthusiastic about looking for ways to make it more real. I've seen what happens when Lithium batteries catch on fire, and I wouldn't want to be stuck in a tunnel when that happened.
Experientially, it'll probably mostly be like a very long subway ride— but much comfier than the the tiny-tunnel, tiny-car Hyperloop, since at least you'll be able to go to the bathroom.
That looks like a pretty cool project. My problem with tunnels is mostly related to being in a car: no room to stand, it's easy to be locked into the car in an accident, and nice big windows to let in the absolute darkness (or to "trap" you inside a reflection if you turn on your interior lights).
That train is also looking to go about 2.5x faster than the Boring Tunnel cars, resulting in a much shorter trip.
No I think it's generally right. The boring company seems like a really silly idea. It's an extension of a broken transportation system.
Cities scale with busses and trains. For some reason, the boring company wants to scale a city with cars. You build this big expensive tunnel to get 1/10th or even 1/50th the throughput that you could get with a train system.
It's because he owns a car company. You can pretty much throw any idea he has for transit out the window there.
If he had his way, he'd probably put rentable self-driving cars back-to-back in those tunnels. It'll be like aluminum and steel train cars, except each one is a Tesla.
You're missing that the boring premise is to utilize electric mass-transit units within the tunnels as well. That could dramatically scale the transit systems. It becomes a defacto variation of a subway system. Musk keeps pointing this out and it keeps getting ignored for some reason.
Because it’s an absurd idea. He’a trying to solve an already solved problem with an inferior consumer solution. When you look at the commuter trains of the major metro areas you’ll notice some very well off people that could afford to drive, but choose to ride in a comfortable train and focus on reading or catching up on email. Driving is an inferior mode of transportation. And before you yell, “but driverless cars!”
Consider that many folks don’t want to buy a car in some of these bigger metro areas or to pay for the parking to maintain one. For so many reasons, beyond technology, traditional mass transit is the superior option.
I couldn’t care less whether Musk achieves his technological goals with the Boring Company. It’s hawking an inferior product even if he does.
Tunnels are dangerous. Elon is proposing to build really narrow tunnels that are hard to evacuate and then allow every random vehicle inside it. Yes it's on a sled but who is certifying that my fellow tunnelgoers' vehicles won't leak fuel, spontaneously catch fire, or find some other special way to kill me?
Elon has some good ideas and some stupid ideas, this is of the latter category.
The tunnel could allow just Teslas - with their ultra fancy air filters you could set off a chemical weapon inside the tunnel and everyone in the cars would still be fine :D
Switzerland has a couple of tunnels in operation that have short haul trains running through them that you drive your car onto. They don't check what kind of cars are on the train, as long as they fit you're good.
Yes, but those tunnels are not as narrow as Musk suggests and have good ventilation and an emergency exit every 100m or so. Source: Swiss that used the said tunnel multiple times.
With automated driving systems you can put the vehicles really close together with high speed and get throughput equal to train systems with single passenger cars. These same tunnels can also have vehicles in them with higher density seating (call them buses, if you like). If you put these vehicles close together you get a train. With this system you can have both cars, buses and trains running all in the same tunnel. Charge each by how much space they take up and vary the price so there is never a backup to get on. Seems like a transportation dream come true. Everybody gets the system they want to use.
Apart from tolling based on footprint, that sounds exactly like what we have now. Automation might increase the capacity, but individual cars will never be as efficient the public transit we already know how to build. You're never going to get the cars closer together than people on a train.
Did you read what I wrote? You can put buses into this system and charge by how much space the vehicle takes up. If a car is 1/2 the space of a bus then the bus pays 2 times the price and the people in the bus pay 1/20th the price. If demand is high enough then car travel will get very expensive and the system transitions very nicely to a train system with only large, packed buses traveling in it.
This system is also nice because people could choose all types of different ways they would like to travel. From sleeper cars, to mobile offices, to cramped seats on a bus, to stand-only packed in like-sardines, we are now in a Japanese subway situation.
Or you could just make it a damn subway system at the begining and be done with it. This seems like a damned inefficient and expensive way to get a subway line.
Even worse, it sounds just like an underground highway with streetcars and trams.
But as it runs on skates, do they want everybody to input their routes first? And clearly, it's going to cost so much now than surface highways, but economics is lost here, for people are convinced that a maglev train in a pneumatic tube will cost 6 billion, but a high speed rail will cost 80 billion. The name Elon musk is like magic to dispel any economic sense.
That's not solving the issue: single-passenger cars are just extremely inefficient passenger density. Technology might allow you to pack them to 2× or 3× density, but the space efficiency of a single railcar is closer to 100× that of a single-passenger car.
How close can you put trains together? For BART it is 24 trains max per hour in the tube and with a new switching and control system they claim they will get up to 30[1]. They go about 60mph. So two minutes between trains. Think about how much space that is: 2 miles between trains. Trains have to carry 100x more people otherwise they would not work at all. Imagine a freeway where cars had to be two miles apart at max density and only going 60mph. You would never see another car while you were driving.
The plan would to be able to pack cars at 100x the density of trains.
If your signalling and switches are good enough, you can get to about ~30s headways. You can't really go faster than that because station dwell times will screw you. Scheduling this theoretical maximum is a daft idea, though, because any mishaps, and you have no spare time for recovery. Metro systems in practice usually end up being scheduled around 90-150s headway, so about 24-45tph.
There's one catch for trains though: most trains aren't dispatching single cars. Rather, trains on busy systems are generally 8 or 10 cars that move as a consist. If you factor that in to your example, you don't have 120s between cars, but rather 12s. That might sound like a lot, but you should have 3s between cars for safe driving anyways, and train cars carry well over 4× the number of people in individual cars. Even if every road car were full Jitney vans.
Or you could just put a train in the space taken up by 10 automobiles. In LA, each rail car can hold roughly 100 people at capacity, and each train has 3 cars, so we're looking at a 5x-29x increase in capacity over Musk's underground freeway proposal.
Doesn't look that way in the bay area on the caltrain line from San Jose to SF. Tere, due to limitation and NIBYism along the tracks, but part of the argument of the boring folks is that a tunnel would not face the same political headwind that a decent train system would require.
Like, the drivers manual? We're talking about basic driving skills here. Cars need room to stop, the higher the speed, the more room they need to stop safely. Most human drivers aren't perfect and leave a lot less room than they should, AVs won't share that flaw.
AVs can react faster than humans - if all the vehicles in the tunnel are controlled automatically, distances could conceivably shortened quite safely. Not sure why "citation needed" was downvoted, it's far from clear no matter where you stand on the issue.
Elon Musk seems like a rich guy from the California suburbs interested in decarbonizing his lifestyle— a reasonably noble goal, but the California suburbs have a ton of issues totally unrelated to their ecological footprint— not least of which is that their car-dependent transportation system can't scale beyond a certain level of density without massive congestion. And preventing them from scaling beyond that density instead results in a profoundly broken housing market because everyone who wants to live in California is required to bid up a profoundly expensive patch of land.
A modest improvement in road throughput from automation is nothing but a short-term solution, and might well make congestion worse because of the reduced time/attention cost of driving— potentially much worse, since people many more people could move into RVs occupying the only free land in coastal California, its roads.
Elon Musk does not look like a smart guy when he rejects what clever outsiders who have been paying attention to these issues for years have to say and by calling them idiots— after all, he supposedly got into rocketry by devouring textbooks, not by getting angry during his commute.
This graphic makes the point about why cars can never be a solution for mass urban mobility better than pretty much anything else:
https://i.imgur.com/sCvRIEd.gif
The first thought that came to mind when I looked at that gif is, "this is what 200 people in their detached homes look like, this is what 200 people in their condos look like, this what 200 people sharing a multi-bed dorm room look like."
Maybe it's just me but that picture makes the exact opposite point from what you're saying. It clearly points out that the difference between cars and other forms of transportation is linear. Public transportation doesn't scale this especially well, as anybody using public transport knows, but this article is a nice summary [1].
We all know what would happen to bus stops, stations, and generally to public places if people on buses actually had anywhere near the density "made possible" by public transport. It just won't work.
While for instance, adding roads in the sky (ie. very long bridges) scales exponentially, for obvious reasons. As does just flying (flying, incidentally, is a lot more efficient than people think). People don't want this, for obvious reasons, but there comes a point in cities where we have no choice. Frankly, cities like depicted in "the fifth element" and "star wars" are the future. Probably more rails, less floating, but the general idea is where we'll be going.
Doesn't even really matter if they have public or private transport. Given how fast public transport upgrades (even when absolutely required by the numbers of people they just refuse to upgrade for decades. Yes. Decades) and how comfortable it is, and add of course the fact that they just don't support the use cases cars enable (some of which, like an elderly or disabled person doing groceries, are absolute requirements) and you get to the point : private transport is far preferable to public transport.
> Public transportation doesn't scale this especially well, as anybody using public transport knows, but this article is a nice summary
Then how do cities like Singapore, with a population density of nearly 8k people per square km, have far less traffic than pretty much any major US city? They make public transportation work, and if you've ever been there, you'd know it works really well.
Just because western countries haven't figured it out yet doesn't mean that it can't work at all. Public transportation in the US sucks because the US, as a whole, wants it to suck.
You don’t need to run a one-party police state in order to have a functioning public transit system or limit urban car use, and it’s entirely possible to have a one-party police state while also having car-dependent suburban sprawl.
Japan also has excellent public transportation, and is much less restrictive than Singapore. In major metro areas, its rail systems even make a profit.
It has sprawl but it's far less auto-oriented than the US.
Some major factors are:
-expressways are almost all tolled
-carbuyers are required to demonstrate that they own/rent a parking space, rather than policy than mandates every new housing unit and business have enough parking that demand is more than sated even at zero cost
-zoning that allows sufficiently-dense land use such that most residences are within a short walk of a rail station— this station usually has groceries and other necessities nearby, as well as schools within walking distance
> Public transportation in the US sucks because the US, as a whole, wants it to suck.
Rather, public transportation sucks, so everyone who can afford a car (and some who can't) buy a car and use it, so they don't care very much that public transportation sucks; they instead are annoyed that private transportation sucks and want that to improve (e.g. by having an AI deal with driving). They don't see public transportation as a solution to the problem they experience, even if it would solve the problem that brought them into that situation.
FWIW, I have always relied on public transportation in any western country I have been to and while it could have been better sometimes (e.g. rural bus schedules requiring you to plan around them) I don't think it's too bad either. I don't know how Singapore compares, but usable public transportation is definitely also common elsewhere.
Are you implying that public transport, which in Europe is required to have accessibility measures like ramps and elevators, is worse for someone in a wheelchair than a regular car they would never fit in (let alone in the driver seat)? Most elderly also benefit from the same measures.
EDIT: I don't really understand the Amazon question. Maybe I didn't understand the original question either.
1) Cars are accessible for wheelchair users (obviously they are modified for this purpose, which is less than you'd think) [1] [2] [3]
2) public transport is not wheelchair accessible. We have trains from the 70s on the track, and aside from multiple steps and a gap, there are no places for wheelchairs. Buses are a little better, but not really usable either. When push comes to shove, this requires people to lift the wheelchair and put it on the train/bus, then help you on the bus as well. If bystanders don't do this, I guarantee out here the driver won't either. For trains, you are supremely unlikely to find anyone of the public transport companies in the station, and nobody helping wheelchair bound people on the bus. Plus, you never, ever see wheelchairs on the train.
Note that if you look at the videos below you see that in most cases, disabled people need (much) more time to get aboard a vehicle. This is not available in public transport and is available in private cars.
Furthermore, wheelchair users (as visible in the second video) (and obviously only up to a certain level of disability) are not just able to use cars, but are able to carry and move heavy loads using them, like groceries.
So once again, an argument in favor of cars once a good look at reality is added to it.
The fact you talk about “public transport” makes me think you’re British, in which case when you say
> We have trains from the 70s on the track, and aside from multiple steps and a gap, there are no places for wheelchairs
you’re wrong. The only 1970s train still in widespread use is the HST. These have generally been refitted with wheelchair spaces: it’s in carriage C on a GWR HST, for example.
Besides, HSTs are being either replaced or hugely refurbished (power doors etc.) by 2020 - because really serious accessibility regulations come into force then (RVAR). Entire fleets of 80s trains (Pacers) are being scrapped because of this. The British railways are already good for accessibility, and getting much better.
Your whole argument is just trivially disprovable. Both trains and buses can be wheelchair accessible[1][2]. You don't need to lift the chair, you just roll it in, either up a slight incline in the case of buses or completely flat in the case of trains. No need for bystanders or station attendants to help.
(I've used these Eurostar trains. If you have to get on with a wheelchair ... good luck. It's frankly too hard for perfectly normal people and pretty much all young kids have a lot of trouble)
I will generally agree that London is a positive exception. Mostly because everything else in Europe is utterly inaccessible for wheelchair users. Unfortunately, even with that there isn't all that much that is accessible.
Let's just all sanely agree that obviously cars are a lot more wheelchair accessible than public transport, with a few small and limited exceptions. And even within those exceptions, public transport does not provide the services a car can give.
That's not obvious at all. For cars to be accessible, the car needs to be designed to be accessible. For public transportation to be accessible, it needs to be designed to be accessible. The situations are identical.
Here in the US, all public transportation is required by law to be wheelchair accessible. Perhaps Europe is different, but that is a decision that they have made, it is not an inherent limitation of public transportation.
Cars are not inherently wheelchair friendly; they must be designed to accommodate them. Trains and buses are exactly the same. Here at least, public transport is much more accessible than private vehicles because all public transportation must be wheelchair accessible, but there is no such requirement for private vehicles.
I especially encourage you to look at the picture of the ramp in the last article. The Eurostar may be difficult to board for normal people, but if someone in a wheelchair calls in advance, they get all the assistance they need.
The article you linked for London buses is just people being inconsiderate and needing to be told to behave. That could have happened just as well with someone blocking a parking lot reserved for disabled people.
Just read through the Dutch accessibility article and ... I find it incredibly hard to believe that a system like that actually works during periods of real traffic. During commute-heavy hours, there is no way in hell the NS could do this for even 0.1% wheelchair travelers on a train line. You also just don't see wheelchair users on Dutch trains. Never. I mean, it's not like I was paying attention to it and yes, there is sometimes section with a wheelchair accessible toilet, but there's never any wheelchairs there. I mean I take perhaps 2 or 3 Dutch trains per year, but still.
So to put it bluntly: I see your articles ... they paint a completely unrealistic picture, and frankly I refuse to believe that things practically work this way.
A lot of details are unspecified. They essentially say "call 3 hours in advance and we'll provide". I called "sorry we don't work at this time, call back during working hours ... blah blah blah", but of course there are (a lot of) trains riding around at the moment. So ... not during weekends ?
I hope it's not that bad. Somehow this isn't mentioned on that page. It also seems to be limited to large stations and is not generally available on either all trains or all stations.
I also refuse to believe that this can work for 10-15 wheelchair users on one train. Picturing such a situation raises all sorts of practical issues (for one, I seriously doubt that you can fit more than 5-6 wheelchairs in the biggest NS wheelchair section in a train that I've ever seen) that I'm thinking they just don't deal with.
Just no.
Additionally I'm ignoring the fact that for wheelchair users and other accessibility-challenged users the other problems of the train (such as a potentially large walking distance between the station and your house and/or your actual destination) that cars don't have as much are much worse than for normal people.
I will agree that the trains in Holland are much more usable than the trains in the Bay Area. That's certainly true. But practical for wheelchair users ? No way. Anywhere even remotely as good as having a car ? No way. (but yes, if you're rich (cars are cheaper), and live in inner city of the Hague, they're certainly more practical)
Eurostars are awfully simple to board on a wheelchair. If a platform hasn't been already provided (as it should be if you booked online) you merely need to ask for assistance at the check in desk, they'll call for a ramp. If push comes to shove, somebody will lift you up. Total time of the operation = 50 seconds.
Public transit is dramatically better for disabled and elderly people (and anyone else who can’t easily drive, such as children, tourists, the poor, sick/injured people, ..) than cars.
High-density neighborhoods make grocery shopping much easier for everyone. Here in San Francisco, I have one grocery store 1 block away, another grocery store 2 blocks away, and 3 more grocery stores within 5 blocks. I can do all of my grocery shopping on foot, and I can pick up what I need in a small batch on my way home on any arbitrary trip. If I were disabled or elderly I would probably additionally need a cart of some sort, instead of carrying groceries myself.
What does Amazon have to do with this? Nobody is saying that service trucks transporting goods should go away. Obviously they cannot. And nobody is trying to completely abolish private personal transportation either. But those who need to use a personal car also benefit from more people using public transport, via reduced congestion!
Of course, there's coordination problem here: ceteris paribus car users benefit from other people shifting to public transport, as long as they themselves don't have to switch. This is why it is important to make public transport a genuinely attractive option, and to put a price on the negative externalities caused by private cars, for example by means of congestion charges.
This comment only makes sense in an American context. Other developed and even developing countries do it much better, lacking the limitations you’ve described.
>We all know what would happen to bus stops, stations, and generally to public places if people on buses actually had anywhere near the density "made possible" by public transport. It just won't work.
And yet it works perfectly well all around the world.
Maybe American culture is a bit different than everywhere else. If so, enabling this different to continue might be a good idea. Diversity and all that.
It seems to work in New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Seattle. Of course it could be better in some of those places, but those cities could not exist in their current form without mass transit.
Or maybe not, obesity, environment costs, and all that...
Besides, is Manhattan not American? The seem to do well (though, of course, they could spend more and improve their neglected since the 70s or so subway).
This is totally the exact thing the article is talking about. I've spoken to American friends who tell me that public transport can just never work when talking about their experience with BART and MUNI. But you don't have to go very far away to find a place where it really does work.
I'm humbled to learn that the experience that have led to me never bothering to get a drivers license because public transportation generally works better than private the high population density places I've lived the vast majority of my
adult life has been a figment of my imagination.
> high population density places I've lived the vast majority of my adult life has been a figment of my imagination
Just a wild guess, the "vast majority of your adult life" are the experience you imagine the whole world has, yet they were spent unattached, without children or supporting so much as a cat, never mind children in a rich area of a huge city (and yes, San Francisco counts as huge) ...
Clearly we should design the entire planet around the frustrations extremely rich Californians experience ($100k per year is almost 2 TIMES the median income, and makes you part, as an unattached person, of the top 7% income earners in the US. Let's just stop pretending and point out the obvious: to fix income inequality in the US, these incomes are what needs to be taxed MUCH more, without, of course, providing any more government services for that extra tax for you. You do not need it. Plenty of other people, 93% when not even counting those outside the US, do need it)
Sorry for the derision, but you were doing it to me.
I live in San Francisco am unable to drive (before Uber and Lyft) and raised a child. While it was sometimes challenging, I would have been unable to live my life without mass transit.
San Francisco Muni has a daily ridership of 658k. Do you really think it would be better if all of those rides were done via car?
> Just a wild guess, the "vast majority of your adult life" are the experience you imagine the whole world has, yet they were spent unattached, without children or supporting so much as a cat, never mind children in a rich area of a huge city (and yes, San Francisco counts as huge) ...
The majority of it was spent attached, with a child, and several years of it taking buggies on public transport.
And no, San Francisco is not huge - San Francisco isn't much bigger than my suburb.
You also seem to think I'm in the US, for no good reason.
I think that other big cities that are progressively closing to cars have it right.
If I look at paris, it already has a very dense subway system. The main drawback is that it closes between midnight and early morning and that it could be even denser.
Close the roads to cars (except emergencies and buses), promote bikes and electric longboards (along with other transportation systems that are easy to carry under your arm when you are done) and you have a solution for megalopolis.
i'm multi-modal--train, bus, car, feet, & bike (before it was stolen)--so i especially appreciate your points, but i don't think it has to be an either-or situation. let's build more efficient cars/roads and build better public transportation. let's level the playing field--stop subsidization (or at least even out the subsidization) and internalize unaccounted-for costs like road maintenance and pollution, and let them compete.
even though musk might seem short-sighted in his approach, his vision and determination are admirable. let's have more of that, especially in the public transportation space.
(i agree that automated cars is not going to be a panacea, at least not in the next 30 years, but it's an meaningful step forward in transportation tech)
Electrification of the vehicle fleet will be great for cities (especially in Europe) just because it'll reduce a huge source of point pollution on urban blocks.
And I'd definitely enjoy owning a car or campervan for hiking/biking trips and other adventures — or paying $.75 a mile for a robocar to pick me up for similar trips.
I just hate the way that nearly all American cities make car ownership mandatory for full citizenship, and American land use laws mean almost all new development is almost purely auto-oriented (this is somewhat less the case in a subset of post-2008 development, but these developments are generally islands of sorta-walkability in an inhumane hellscape of high-speed arterials).
This is an opinionated blog, not necessarily wrong. But a bad idea implemented is sometimes better than a good one not implemented at all. And if you think I am a biased fan of Elon Musk, well you would be right.
The problem is money. Implementing the bad idea means there won’t be money for the good idea. The bad idea also gains inertia, so it tends to stay around and worsen for decades (e.g. current auto-centric infrastructure).
Exactly! I'm Indian, and am tired of listening to the argument that India shouldn't build bullet trains, as hyperloops will obviously be real in 5 years. People think that hsr which will cost 80 billion dollars will be replaced by a maglev in pnuematic tubes for only 6 billion.
There's something of value to the energy and enthusiasm that Elon seems to be able to generate. Even if the initial version of the idea is dumb he may be able to iterate it until it's not, if he's creating more buy in and excitement than everyone else.
This article claims (1) that Elon Musk has no chance to achieve a 10x reduction in tunneling costs, and (2) that this reduction has already been achieved in other countries. This seems like a contradiction. If all his company does is catch up to the international state of the art, that will be a huge improvement for the US. And if he pretends that the 10x reduction in price is due to technological advancement rather than reducing profit margin and egregious waste, that will help city governments and competitors save face.
Reading on, it seemed like one of his suggestions for cost-reduction was to drive down wages for workers. I would have thought he would have seen Musk as a kindred spirit there:
"There appears to be a lot of union featherbedding in some American cities, but this is a political rather than technological problem; without such featherbedding, labor costs are not onerous."
There is an extra claim that clarifies the contradiction: Elon Musk is trying to achieve that 10x reduction reducing the tunnel diameter. The author argues this won't work. What I understood is that, if the company indeed was trying to catch up with the international state of the art, they could actually achieve their goal, but the problem is that Mr.Musk is not only ignoring it, but calling them idiots.
So, I do not see any contradiction. But that is just how I interpret the article, I do not have a personal opinion in this issue.
Prediction: The Boring Company's first tunneling machine will be small-diameter, and each subsequent one will be larger, similar to the scale-up from Falcon 1 to Falcon 9 to Falcon Heavy, simply because that's the right way to do the R&D. But it would be very bad salesmanship to say "the first TBM is really small because that was easier for us", so instead he talks about the benefits of being smaller.
"b) promises reducing tunneling costs by a factor of 10, a feat that he himself has no chance to achieve, and
c) is unaware that the cost reduction he promises, relative to American construction costs, has already been achieved in a number of countries."
So Musk, a person who owns and is the CTO of a company that can now land reusable rockets that were only dreamed about in science fiction a decade ago, won't be able to drop tunneling costs in the US by a factor of ten, when the author admits this is already done in other countries.
He’s specifically calling out the goal of reducing tunneling costs by accelerating the TBM. The other projects that have reduced costs have done so through boring old sound construction management practices (the article pointing out the labor and stations are actually the expensive parts of these projects, not the tunnel by itself).
Also, if you read the rest of the article he literally predicts your response of appealing to the authoritative win of SpaceX as a completely invalid counter argument (and he’d be right, appeals to authority is on the list of logical fallacies, last I checked ;) ).
Or perhaps the author of the article is doing armchair philosophy, whereas Elon Musk is the supposedly too optimistic doer who actually builds incredible stuff. (In the sense that Nassim Taleb distinguishes people who talk a lot and people accomplish stuff.)
One can't prove a negative. The Boring company has a plan and a goal. Saying it can't be done is not useful or productive. There has not been much change in tunneling tech in the last 20 years and Musk seems to think it is possible to get some great improvements. He has done it in two other very different fields with SpaceX and Tesla. Creating a new technology is not about the logic of debates but doing things and failing over and over again, in a productive way, to get to success.
Musk can access great people and large amounts of capital, thinks things out from first principles, doesn't believe in "safety first", and thinks tunnels could be of great value. Traffic (on car and trains) is killing our cities and nothing is being done about it. No new transportation infrastructure built in the Bay Area since 1980 except a few small BART extensions. We could put anything in these tunnels. Not sure why people are so worried that he is going to get some people together and try.
This meme needs to die. On HN, of all places, we should all know that the difference in difficulty between proving P and !P has nothing to do with one of them having a negation in its syntax.
I guess a better statement is that in complex systems one cannot predict what is possible. One can only try and see what is possible by doing. Most people here might be computer people so need to see the world in very precise, math like, constructs to produce code that works, but most of reality is not like that.
Theorem. There are no even prime numbers greater than 2.
Proof. Assume n > 2, 2 divides n and n is prime. Therefore, 2 is a prime factor of n. But since every prime number only has one prime factor, itself, then n = 2. But n = 2 contradicts n > 2. Therefore, no prime numbers greater than 2 exist. QED.
- or -
Claim. There is no beer in the fridge.
Argument. I opened the fridge, there was no beer in the fridge.
- or -
p is a proposition. ~p is its negation. Take q = ~p. Proving p is the same as proving ~q.
Seems to me you can most certainly prove "negatives".
Fine. One can't necessarily prove a negative. Only if you can prove the negation of the assertion can you "prove the negative".
Now apply that logic to: <Musk> I can reduce the cost of boring by an order of magnitude.
Can you prove that he can't? The gp was (over)simply stating that just because no other digging project has done what Musk claims to be able to do doesn't necessarily mean that Musk can't do it.
> He’s specifically calling out the goal of reducing tunneling costs by accelerating the TBM.
IDK, if they can make a boring machine that is faster and more efficient than the ones used on projects that achieved the cost/km they are shooting for I really don't see the problem.
An automated (less labor), faster (less labor over the life of the project), smaller bore (less cost per mile) and more efficient (less cost per mile) machine should reasonably be able to hit the same target current technology already has, no?
I'm also thinking there's probably a lot of low-hanging fruit to be found if one starts fresh instead of having to tie into an existing system or use the 18th century train model.
It's not like shooting rockets to the moon or anything.
The article argues that 1) the boring machine isn't the biggest cost, so if TBM speed were an important factor and you want faster digging now you can use multiple TBMs, 2) the current labor costs in the US is primarily a "political rather than technological problem", and 3) bore size doesn't have that much of an effect on overall cost. Indeed, "there’s a trend toward bigger tunnels, as a cost saving mechanism" as for example "[i]n Barcelona, the large-diameter TBM actually saved money and reduced disruption in construction."
Shooting rockets at the moon is 1950s technology. ;)
> 1) the boring machine isn't the biggest cost, so if TBM speed were an important factor and you want faster digging now you can use multiple TBMs
Yes but reducing the cost of something that "isn't the biggest cost" which directly effects the things that are the biggest cost does seem to be beneficial.
> 2) the current labor costs in the US is primarily a "political rather than technological problem"
Which is why a boring machine which reduces overall labor costs through increased efficiency and automation also seems to be beneficial.
> 3) bore size doesn't have that much of an effect on overall cost
"The Barcelona Line 9 doesn’t use the 12m diameter stacked tunnel along its whole route. Some sections are built using different construction methods, presumably because they are cheaper. This mostly depends on the local geography and available space."[0]
"This is why there’s a trend toward bigger tunnels, as a cost saving mechanism: BART’s San Jose extension is studying different tunnel approaches, one with a large-diameter tunnel and one with twin small-diameter tunnels, and the cost turns out to be similar. "
One could be excused to think 1 large tunnel == 2 small tunnels would imply that one small tunnel would cost about half of one large tunnel. As an aside, I grew up out there, why they even digging tunnels, not like there's a mountain between Fremont and SJ?
Still not seeing a reason why it isn't possible to make digging tunnels efficient enough to...actually, why are we even arguing over how some rich dude choses to spend his money?
Regarding 1), certainly it reduces other costs. But the article points out that each additional TBM drive, including those extra costs, adds only about 10% to the overall cost of the tunnel. "The rest is dominated by labor and materials that are insensitive to tunnel width, such as interior lighting and cables."
It then points out that "the actual cost is even less sensitive to tunnel width. The VLHC study only looks at the cost of tunneling itself. In addition, there must be substantial engineering. This is especially true in the places where transportation tunnels are most likely to arise: mountain crossings (for intercity rail), and urban areas (for urban rail and road tunnels)." While on the other hand, the smaller tunnels means more complex junctions, including "forcing underground four-level interchanges".
This helps explain why one small tunnel might cost more than 1/2 the price of a large one.
2) "increased efficiency and automation" are technological solutions. One of the costs is union featherbedding, which is a political problem not easily solved by such a technology solution.
3) "The Barcelona Line 9 doesn’t use the 12m diameter stacked tunnel along its whole route".
The same reference also says "The metro line is almost completely contained in this single tunnel". Certainly if you can get away with cut-and-cover then there's no need for an expensive TBM.
Regarding "why they even digging tunnels, not like there's a mountain between Fremont and SJ", I don't know about that project but I know that in other projects the main options are either surface or elevated trains. Surface means at-level crossings, which are dangerous and stop road traffic. Elevated is safer, though more expensive. Both require condemning expensive land, and people will object to the sound and visual impact, and file lawsuits.
Also, underground routes can usually go straighter.
You asked "actually, why are we even arguing over how some rich dude choses to spend his money?"
We do this all the time.
People complain when the Koch brothers use their billions to help push politics in a direction they favor.
People complain when Bill Gates uses his billions to help push education policy in a direction he favors.
In both cases one of the objections is that money amplifies influence, to the point where one rich person's whims can have more political influence than the serious concerns of tens of thousands of other citizens. Including experts.
It's also a problem should public institutions start to fund projects which are fundamentally flawed.
And finally, I'll argue that your question is misdirected. The article is not about "how some rich dude choses to spend his money" but rather an argument directed to people who have already decided to listen to a rich dude, in order to dissuade them of their enthusiasm.
The author is also noting Asia. Countries where labour costs, govt subsidies, currency cost, etc is superior. Comparing costs in US to another place is not a good comparison
I mean, his main argument is that costs that revolve around the TBM do not make up enough of the total cost of tunneling that TBM and tunnel diameter based cost savings can generate the costs savings that Musk wants to achieve. His primary data with regards to TBM and diameter costs comes from Europe (which ya, is not USA, but closer than Asian countries), and comes up with a rough upper bound of 50% of total tunneling costs in the LHC were associated with the TBM (this is bound to be lower for any transit application, that isn't a point to point tunnel due to additional group level access and extra boring).
If TBM costs are 50% of total cost, no amount of TBM cost reduction can achieve the 90% cost reduction goal - it clearly has to be combined with other strategies.
I believe it's clear that the author believes that these other strategies (all of which is probably project management based strategies) should be engaged with first, before falling down a path of throwing capital and R&D at cost reduction mechanisms (reduction of tunnel diameter for example) that may have significant technical and long-term short comings.
I mean, the entire blog post is just telling Americans what Americans kind of know - Large American government contracts are often poorly managed and executed (for whatever reason), and that reaching for a technological magic bullet is unlikely to achieve what we want.
"can now land reusable rockets that were only dreamed about in science fiction a decade ago"
You could have done that 40 years ago. SpaceX has figured out how to do this in an economically feasible way but technically it was possible a long time ago. Same for Mars. We could have landed there probably somewhere in the 1980s if someone had been willing to pay for it.
Yes, it was possible but did not happen. Somebody(s) has to be the person/people that does it. Nuclear powered rocket engines existed in the 1960's, but little to no work has been done on that problem since then. If someone develops one in 2361, proclaiming, "not big deal, we could have done that four hundred years ago" is a bit silly.
Musk went to NASA's website back in 2000 or so looking for the man to Mars plans and found nothing so he started a rocket company to bring down launch costs by a factor of 100. Ten years later reuse of rockets is happening. Amazing isn't it. Let's see what the next twenty bring.
I just don't think that anything SpaceX or Tesla have done is science fiction material the way you wrote. They are really good at commercializing and streamlining existing ideas and they have the courage to do something first.
Why mentioning sci-fi can be a bit hyperbole, the fact is that rocket reusability was considered a pipe dream a decade ago. Nobody thought it could be done commercially. SpaceX sticked with it and prevailed in the face of all skepticism. It's just not "commercializing" and "streamlining" as you trivially dismissed
Science fiction is part of the spectrum of:
Idea --> Actually Economically Viable Product. Your "existing ideas" is not very different from science fiction compared to the amount of work needed to get to viable product from existing ideas.
The author has a bunch of numbers and stats written down which supports his claims but none of us would even bother to check up. Now the thing is do I trust what his guy says that Musk can’t actually do it or do I trust a man that has already built a working reusable rocket to space and
made a few electrical vehicles? If Elon says he’s an idiot, i wouldn’t bet against that
I am on the same page with everyone here about the problems with car-centered infrastructure, but I think perhaps we haven’t fully internalized the extent to which driverless, electric, shared vehicles will change this equation. It’s an entirely new paradigm - and even more so if cheap tunneling can be achieved. While Musk’s initial ideas about how to reduce the cost may be wrong, at least he’s trying to! His initial ideas about electric cars and rockets weren’t completely right either, because he was not an expert in those areas. He hired the most talented people in those fields and learned and changed over a period of years until he found what worked. It’s a good algorithm, and it helps to be wealthy so that you can survive the failures and dead-ends without running out of money.
There are two arguments in the article: that Musk is going about solving the problem in the wrong way, and that he is solving the wrong problem altogether by trying to put cars in tunnels. The author may well be right about the first, but I think he/she is wrong about the second.
Let’s think about everything that changes in a fully driverless, electric, shared, and tunnel-augmented vehicle ecosystem.
No more greenhouse gas emissions directly from vehicles (and none at all once the grid is fully renewable).
No more need to dedicate huge amounts of valuable land in our cities and suburbs to parking (cars can drive themselves to outlying areas to park or, better yet, can be shared).
Dramatically higher throughput because the human mistakes that cause congestion can be avoided (I recommend CGP Grey’s video on the causes of traffic: https://youtu.be/iHzzSao6ypE ). Driverless cars could drive faster and closer together, especially if they can communicate with one another.
Even more dramatic reduction in deaths and injuries as human error is removed from the equation.
Far fewer cars are needed in a shared-vehicle ecosystem. Most privately-owned cars are idle nearly all of the time, but they still take up space. Sharing vehicles allows us to reduce the amount of infrastructure needed for cars.
The average size of vehicles in the fleet can also be reduced. Right now people drive unnecessarily large vehicles because they might need the space a few times per year (annual family skiing trip, etc). These vehicles use up more energy and take up more space. In a shared-vehicle ecosystem, most of the vehicles can be something like a Smart ForTwo, with a smaller number of large vehicles that can be used by whoever actually needs them at any moment.
A shared-vehicle ecosystem could also include something like a cross between a scaled-up UberPOOL and a scaled-down bus: a Sprinter van (or equivalent) could pick up and drop off a dozen or so commuters who live in area A and work in area B. This improves the density of the system.
With affordable tunneling, freeways can go underground instead of destroying communities on the surface. This is one of the greatest evils of our car-centric infrastructure today, but with affordable tunneling we can abolish it.
Train-based mass transit will always be desirable for high-traffic corridors because it can be made far more dense. And despite this article’s attempts to paint him otherwise, Musk agrees with this - he is in talks to build a Hyperloop between Washington and Baltimore, as well as a lower-speed mass transit “loop” in Chicago.
However, trains will never be all that we need for transit, because they just can’t go everywhere. You will almost always need last-mile transportation at the endpoints, and there will always be routes that are not efficiently served by the train network. That’s where cars (or whatever we call the things they evolve into) come in.
A driverless, electric, shared, and tunnel-augmented vehicle ecosystem is probably the perfect mass transit system.
"the extent to which driverless, electric, shared vehicles will change this equation"
Yes, I think it's agreed that such a system could/will change things dramatically. Let's assume that it is possible. The questions then are 1) when will the transition take place, and 2) how do we improve the current system until it happens?
If it takes 50 years, then it's rather pointless to wait before making big changes, or even to plan for such a transition. (By comparison, the US interstate system is only 60 some-odd years old.)
It's quite clearly not next year.
Nor would it be easy for cities like Miami and Amsterdam to go underground, if tunnels are what's needed to make such a transportation system work.
"A driverless, electric, shared, and tunnel-augmented vehicle ecosystem is probably the perfect mass transit system."
You may be missing a qualifier - perhaps "personal"? - in your description. The word "vehicle" includes buses, trams, and trains, so this summary includes many current subway and tram systems, except without a driver.
P.S. It's hard to predict if something really will cause a big change. I remember in the 1990s when Dean Kamen talked about the Segway as being the next transportation paradigm, "John Doerr speculated that it would be more important than the Internet" and "Steve Jobs was quoted as saying that it was "as big a deal as the PC"" (quotes from Wikipedia). When it came out, it turned out not to be a big change. I think e-bikes - an update of 1800s technology - have had a bigger impact than Segway.
> No more need to dedicate huge amounts of valuable land in our cities and suburbs to parking (cars can drive themselves to outlying areas to park or, better yet, can be shared).
Let's solve our congestion problems by doubling the amount of traffic on the roads! Sharing vehicles is a red herring; the peak traffic is caused by what's effectively a unidirectional, time-compressed mode of transit--once the car drops someone off at work, there's not enough trips nearby that it can do.
> Driverless cars could drive faster and closer together, especially if they can communicate with one another.
Yeah, except for all those unpredictable pedestrians walking on the street in busy cities. You could drive faster and closer together only if a) every car were so wired, and no one drove manually and b) it's a limited-access highway with little conflicting movement. It might help I-70 in Kansas; it's not helping any street in NYC.
> A driverless, electric, shared, and tunnel-augmented vehicle ecosystem is probably the perfect mass transit system.
No, it ain't. The way you get mass transit is you start packing people into tighter spaces. A single-occupant car, no matter how many times it's reused, no matter how tightly you pack them, is just way too much extra space. The twin Hudson river NEC tubes carry more capacity than the GWB, Lincon Tunnel, Holland Tunnel, Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, and Brooklyn Bridge combined.
Tunnel costs aside, I hadn't known that Musk's idea was to dig this for car use. I honestly feel that money would be put to better use just making a subway.
Why is boring the way to go? Here in L.A., we keep on widening the freeways and traffic is just as bad. Boring is just another channel that will get clogged once it's built. Mass transportation is a better way to go. Also,policies that make it desirable for people to work close to where they live will help.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadThis is a scathing review, but I can't really find anything inaccurate in it. Perhaps I didn't try hard enough, but the thought of riding hundreds of miles underground doesn't make me enthusiastic about looking for ways to make it more real. I've seen what happens when Lithium batteries catch on fire, and I wouldn't want to be stuck in a tunnel when that happened.
Experientially, it'll probably mostly be like a very long subway ride— but much comfier than the the tiny-tunnel, tiny-car Hyperloop, since at least you'll be able to go to the bathroom.
That train is also looking to go about 2.5x faster than the Boring Tunnel cars, resulting in a much shorter trip.
Cities scale with busses and trains. For some reason, the boring company wants to scale a city with cars. You build this big expensive tunnel to get 1/10th or even 1/50th the throughput that you could get with a train system.
Maybe that's not the California way though.
If he had his way, he'd probably put rentable self-driving cars back-to-back in those tunnels. It'll be like aluminum and steel train cars, except each one is a Tesla.
You're missing that the boring premise is to utilize electric mass-transit units within the tunnels as well. That could dramatically scale the transit systems. It becomes a defacto variation of a subway system. Musk keeps pointing this out and it keeps getting ignored for some reason.
Consider that many folks don’t want to buy a car in some of these bigger metro areas or to pay for the parking to maintain one. For so many reasons, beyond technology, traditional mass transit is the superior option.
I couldn’t care less whether Musk achieves his technological goals with the Boring Company. It’s hawking an inferior product even if he does.
Elon has some good ideas and some stupid ideas, this is of the latter category.
This system is also nice because people could choose all types of different ways they would like to travel. From sleeper cars, to mobile offices, to cramped seats on a bus, to stand-only packed in like-sardines, we are now in a Japanese subway situation.
But as it runs on skates, do they want everybody to input their routes first? And clearly, it's going to cost so much now than surface highways, but economics is lost here, for people are convinced that a maglev train in a pneumatic tube will cost 6 billion, but a high speed rail will cost 80 billion. The name Elon musk is like magic to dispel any economic sense.
The plan would to be able to pack cars at 100x the density of trains.
[1] https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2016/news20160502-0
There's one catch for trains though: most trains aren't dispatching single cars. Rather, trains on busy systems are generally 8 or 10 cars that move as a consist. If you factor that in to your example, you don't have 120s between cars, but rather 12s. That might sound like a lot, but you should have 3s between cars for safe driving anyways, and train cars carry well over 4× the number of people in individual cars. Even if every road car were full Jitney vans.
Conceivably, the utilization of the tunnel could be way higher than the utilization of train tracks (most of the time: empty)
You're not getting 150+ cars in that tunnel during the same time period.
A modest improvement in road throughput from automation is nothing but a short-term solution, and might well make congestion worse because of the reduced time/attention cost of driving— potentially much worse, since people many more people could move into RVs occupying the only free land in coastal California, its roads.
Elon Musk does not look like a smart guy when he rejects what clever outsiders who have been paying attention to these issues for years have to say and by calling them idiots— after all, he supposedly got into rocketry by devouring textbooks, not by getting angry during his commute.
This graphic makes the point about why cars can never be a solution for mass urban mobility better than pretty much anything else: https://i.imgur.com/sCvRIEd.gif
We all know what would happen to bus stops, stations, and generally to public places if people on buses actually had anywhere near the density "made possible" by public transport. It just won't work.
While for instance, adding roads in the sky (ie. very long bridges) scales exponentially, for obvious reasons. As does just flying (flying, incidentally, is a lot more efficient than people think). People don't want this, for obvious reasons, but there comes a point in cities where we have no choice. Frankly, cities like depicted in "the fifth element" and "star wars" are the future. Probably more rails, less floating, but the general idea is where we'll be going.
Doesn't even really matter if they have public or private transport. Given how fast public transport upgrades (even when absolutely required by the numbers of people they just refuse to upgrade for decades. Yes. Decades) and how comfortable it is, and add of course the fact that they just don't support the use cases cars enable (some of which, like an elderly or disabled person doing groceries, are absolute requirements) and you get to the point : private transport is far preferable to public transport.
[1] http://www.uwgb.edu/DutchS/PSEUDOSC/MassTransit.HTM
Then how do cities like Singapore, with a population density of nearly 8k people per square km, have far less traffic than pretty much any major US city? They make public transportation work, and if you've ever been there, you'd know it works really well.
Just because western countries haven't figured it out yet doesn't mean that it can't work at all. Public transportation in the US sucks because the US, as a whole, wants it to suck.
-Tax cars really highly.
-Have car quotas
-Suppress dissent and in practice a one party system
-Build out public transit
-Pop Density.
-No land for sprawl available.
It has sprawl but it's far less auto-oriented than the US.
Some major factors are: -expressways are almost all tolled -carbuyers are required to demonstrate that they own/rent a parking space, rather than policy than mandates every new housing unit and business have enough parking that demand is more than sated even at zero cost -zoning that allows sufficiently-dense land use such that most residences are within a short walk of a rail station— this station usually has groceries and other necessities nearby, as well as schools within walking distance
Rather, public transportation sucks, so everyone who can afford a car (and some who can't) buy a car and use it, so they don't care very much that public transportation sucks; they instead are annoyed that private transportation sucks and want that to improve (e.g. by having an AI deal with driving). They don't see public transportation as a solution to the problem they experience, even if it would solve the problem that brought them into that situation.
FWIW, I have always relied on public transportation in any western country I have been to and while it could have been better sometimes (e.g. rural bus schedules requiring you to plan around them) I don't think it's too bad either. I don't know how Singapore compares, but usable public transportation is definitely also common elsewhere.
(and let's not forget things like Amazon just don't work unless they exploit delivery men if you do choose to answer this question)
EDIT: I don't really understand the Amazon question. Maybe I didn't understand the original question either.
2) public transport is not wheelchair accessible. We have trains from the 70s on the track, and aside from multiple steps and a gap, there are no places for wheelchairs. Buses are a little better, but not really usable either. When push comes to shove, this requires people to lift the wheelchair and put it on the train/bus, then help you on the bus as well. If bystanders don't do this, I guarantee out here the driver won't either. For trains, you are supremely unlikely to find anyone of the public transport companies in the station, and nobody helping wheelchair bound people on the bus. Plus, you never, ever see wheelchairs on the train.
Note that if you look at the videos below you see that in most cases, disabled people need (much) more time to get aboard a vehicle. This is not available in public transport and is available in private cars.
Furthermore, wheelchair users (as visible in the second video) (and obviously only up to a certain level of disability) are not just able to use cars, but are able to carry and move heavy loads using them, like groceries.
So once again, an argument in favor of cars once a good look at reality is added to it.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0usQ1LksSA
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTuMw6rtsxA
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMvvQOeBDfY
> We have trains from the 70s on the track, and aside from multiple steps and a gap, there are no places for wheelchairs
you’re wrong. The only 1970s train still in widespread use is the HST. These have generally been refitted with wheelchair spaces: it’s in carriage C on a GWR HST, for example.
Besides, HSTs are being either replaced or hugely refurbished (power doors etc.) by 2020 - because really serious accessibility regulations come into force then (RVAR). Entire fleets of 80s trains (Pacers) are being scrapped because of this. The British railways are already good for accessibility, and getting much better.
[1] https://cdn.londonandpartners.com/visit/london-organisations...
[2] http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1TZlXmiSe3I/UTcdowZY8hI/AAAAAAAAH3...
Dutch train: https://www.seat61.com/images/Russia-austrian-ext.jpg
Swiss train: http://citytransport.info/Digi/3253.jpg
British train: https://www.angeltrains.co.uk/Products-Services/Regional-Pas...
Eurostar: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/09/14/15/2C4DBFB70000057...
(I've used these Eurostar trains. If you have to get on with a wheelchair ... good luck. It's frankly too hard for perfectly normal people and pretty much all young kids have a lot of trouble)
Oh and as for London buses: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/transport/driver-in-angry-co...
I will generally agree that London is a positive exception. Mostly because everything else in Europe is utterly inaccessible for wheelchair users. Unfortunately, even with that there isn't all that much that is accessible.
Let's just all sanely agree that obviously cars are a lot more wheelchair accessible than public transport, with a few small and limited exceptions. And even within those exceptions, public transport does not provide the services a car can give.
Here in the US, all public transportation is required by law to be wheelchair accessible. Perhaps Europe is different, but that is a decision that they have made, it is not an inherent limitation of public transportation.
Cars are not inherently wheelchair friendly; they must be designed to accommodate them. Trains and buses are exactly the same. Here at least, public transport is much more accessible than private vehicles because all public transportation must be wheelchair accessible, but there is no such requirement for private vehicles.
Netherlands:
http://www.accessibletravelnl.com/blogs/Trains-in-the-Nether...
Switzerland:
https://www.sbb.ch/en/station-services/passengers-with-reduc...
Britain:
http://www.britrail.com/plan-your-trip/passengers-needing-as...
Eurostar:
https://wheelchairtravel.org/review-eurostar-train-london-to...
I especially encourage you to look at the picture of the ramp in the last article. The Eurostar may be difficult to board for normal people, but if someone in a wheelchair calls in advance, they get all the assistance they need.
The article you linked for London buses is just people being inconsiderate and needing to be told to behave. That could have happened just as well with someone blocking a parking lot reserved for disabled people.
So to put it bluntly: I see your articles ... they paint a completely unrealistic picture, and frankly I refuse to believe that things practically work this way.
A lot of details are unspecified. They essentially say "call 3 hours in advance and we'll provide". I called "sorry we don't work at this time, call back during working hours ... blah blah blah", but of course there are (a lot of) trains riding around at the moment. So ... not during weekends ? I hope it's not that bad. Somehow this isn't mentioned on that page. It also seems to be limited to large stations and is not generally available on either all trains or all stations.
I also refuse to believe that this can work for 10-15 wheelchair users on one train. Picturing such a situation raises all sorts of practical issues (for one, I seriously doubt that you can fit more than 5-6 wheelchairs in the biggest NS wheelchair section in a train that I've ever seen) that I'm thinking they just don't deal with.
Just no.
Additionally I'm ignoring the fact that for wheelchair users and other accessibility-challenged users the other problems of the train (such as a potentially large walking distance between the station and your house and/or your actual destination) that cars don't have as much are much worse than for normal people.
I will agree that the trains in Holland are much more usable than the trains in the Bay Area. That's certainly true. But practical for wheelchair users ? No way. Anywhere even remotely as good as having a car ? No way. (but yes, if you're rich (cars are cheaper), and live in inner city of the Hague, they're certainly more practical)
High-density neighborhoods make grocery shopping much easier for everyone. Here in San Francisco, I have one grocery store 1 block away, another grocery store 2 blocks away, and 3 more grocery stores within 5 blocks. I can do all of my grocery shopping on foot, and I can pick up what I need in a small batch on my way home on any arbitrary trip. If I were disabled or elderly I would probably additionally need a cart of some sort, instead of carrying groceries myself.
Of course, there's coordination problem here: ceteris paribus car users benefit from other people shifting to public transport, as long as they themselves don't have to switch. This is why it is important to make public transport a genuinely attractive option, and to put a price on the negative externalities caused by private cars, for example by means of congestion charges.
And yet it works perfectly well all around the world.
Besides, is Manhattan not American? The seem to do well (though, of course, they could spend more and improve their neglected since the 70s or so subway).
Just a wild guess, the "vast majority of your adult life" are the experience you imagine the whole world has, yet they were spent unattached, without children or supporting so much as a cat, never mind children in a rich area of a huge city (and yes, San Francisco counts as huge) ...
Clearly we should design the entire planet around the frustrations extremely rich Californians experience ($100k per year is almost 2 TIMES the median income, and makes you part, as an unattached person, of the top 7% income earners in the US. Let's just stop pretending and point out the obvious: to fix income inequality in the US, these incomes are what needs to be taxed MUCH more, without, of course, providing any more government services for that extra tax for you. You do not need it. Plenty of other people, 93% when not even counting those outside the US, do need it)
Sorry for the derision, but you were doing it to me.
San Francisco Muni has a daily ridership of 658k. Do you really think it would be better if all of those rides were done via car?
The majority of it was spent attached, with a child, and several years of it taking buggies on public transport.
And no, San Francisco is not huge - San Francisco isn't much bigger than my suburb.
You also seem to think I'm in the US, for no good reason.
So that's wrong on every count.
No one is saying get rid of cars, simply improve traffic by adding mass transit
If I look at paris, it already has a very dense subway system. The main drawback is that it closes between midnight and early morning and that it could be even denser.
Close the roads to cars (except emergencies and buses), promote bikes and electric longboards (along with other transportation systems that are easy to carry under your arm when you are done) and you have a solution for megalopolis.
even though musk might seem short-sighted in his approach, his vision and determination are admirable. let's have more of that, especially in the public transportation space.
(i agree that automated cars is not going to be a panacea, at least not in the next 30 years, but it's an meaningful step forward in transportation tech)
And I'd definitely enjoy owning a car or campervan for hiking/biking trips and other adventures — or paying $.75 a mile for a robocar to pick me up for similar trips.
I just hate the way that nearly all American cities make car ownership mandatory for full citizenship, and American land use laws mean almost all new development is almost purely auto-oriented (this is somewhat less the case in a subset of post-2008 development, but these developments are generally islands of sorta-walkability in an inhumane hellscape of high-speed arterials).
Reading on, it seemed like one of his suggestions for cost-reduction was to drive down wages for workers. I would have thought he would have seen Musk as a kindred spirit there:
"There appears to be a lot of union featherbedding in some American cities, but this is a political rather than technological problem; without such featherbedding, labor costs are not onerous."
So, I do not see any contradiction. But that is just how I interpret the article, I do not have a personal opinion in this issue.
So Musk, a person who owns and is the CTO of a company that can now land reusable rockets that were only dreamed about in science fiction a decade ago, won't be able to drop tunneling costs in the US by a factor of ten, when the author admits this is already done in other countries.
Not sure this is worth reading past that part.
Also, if you read the rest of the article he literally predicts your response of appealing to the authoritative win of SpaceX as a completely invalid counter argument (and he’d be right, appeals to authority is on the list of logical fallacies, last I checked ;) ).
Musk can access great people and large amounts of capital, thinks things out from first principles, doesn't believe in "safety first", and thinks tunnels could be of great value. Traffic (on car and trains) is killing our cities and nothing is being done about it. No new transportation infrastructure built in the Bay Area since 1980 except a few small BART extensions. We could put anything in these tunnels. Not sure why people are so worried that he is going to get some people together and try.
Proof. Assume n > 2, 2 divides n and n is prime. Therefore, 2 is a prime factor of n. But since every prime number only has one prime factor, itself, then n = 2. But n = 2 contradicts n > 2. Therefore, no prime numbers greater than 2 exist. QED.
- or -
Claim. There is no beer in the fridge. Argument. I opened the fridge, there was no beer in the fridge.
- or -
p is a proposition. ~p is its negation. Take q = ~p. Proving p is the same as proving ~q.
Seems to me you can most certainly prove "negatives".
Fine. One can't necessarily prove a negative. Only if you can prove the negation of the assertion can you "prove the negative".
Now apply that logic to: <Musk> I can reduce the cost of boring by an order of magnitude.
Can you prove that he can't? The gp was (over)simply stating that just because no other digging project has done what Musk claims to be able to do doesn't necessarily mean that Musk can't do it.
IDK, if they can make a boring machine that is faster and more efficient than the ones used on projects that achieved the cost/km they are shooting for I really don't see the problem.
An automated (less labor), faster (less labor over the life of the project), smaller bore (less cost per mile) and more efficient (less cost per mile) machine should reasonably be able to hit the same target current technology already has, no?
I'm also thinking there's probably a lot of low-hanging fruit to be found if one starts fresh instead of having to tie into an existing system or use the 18th century train model.
It's not like shooting rockets to the moon or anything.
Shooting rockets at the moon is 1950s technology. ;)
Yes but reducing the cost of something that "isn't the biggest cost" which directly effects the things that are the biggest cost does seem to be beneficial.
> 2) the current labor costs in the US is primarily a "political rather than technological problem"
Which is why a boring machine which reduces overall labor costs through increased efficiency and automation also seems to be beneficial.
> 3) bore size doesn't have that much of an effect on overall cost
"The Barcelona Line 9 doesn’t use the 12m diameter stacked tunnel along its whole route. Some sections are built using different construction methods, presumably because they are cheaper. This mostly depends on the local geography and available space."[0]
"This is why there’s a trend toward bigger tunnels, as a cost saving mechanism: BART’s San Jose extension is studying different tunnel approaches, one with a large-diameter tunnel and one with twin small-diameter tunnels, and the cost turns out to be similar. "
One could be excused to think 1 large tunnel == 2 small tunnels would imply that one small tunnel would cost about half of one large tunnel. As an aside, I grew up out there, why they even digging tunnels, not like there's a mountain between Fremont and SJ?
Still not seeing a reason why it isn't possible to make digging tunnels efficient enough to...actually, why are we even arguing over how some rich dude choses to spend his money?
[0]http://www.cat-bus.com/2017/10/barcelonas-line-9-inspiring-m...
It then points out that "the actual cost is even less sensitive to tunnel width. The VLHC study only looks at the cost of tunneling itself. In addition, there must be substantial engineering. This is especially true in the places where transportation tunnels are most likely to arise: mountain crossings (for intercity rail), and urban areas (for urban rail and road tunnels)." While on the other hand, the smaller tunnels means more complex junctions, including "forcing underground four-level interchanges".
This helps explain why one small tunnel might cost more than 1/2 the price of a large one.
2) "increased efficiency and automation" are technological solutions. One of the costs is union featherbedding, which is a political problem not easily solved by such a technology solution.
3) "The Barcelona Line 9 doesn’t use the 12m diameter stacked tunnel along its whole route".
The same reference also says "The metro line is almost completely contained in this single tunnel". Certainly if you can get away with cut-and-cover then there's no need for an expensive TBM.
Regarding "why they even digging tunnels, not like there's a mountain between Fremont and SJ", I don't know about that project but I know that in other projects the main options are either surface or elevated trains. Surface means at-level crossings, which are dangerous and stop road traffic. Elevated is safer, though more expensive. Both require condemning expensive land, and people will object to the sound and visual impact, and file lawsuits.
Also, underground routes can usually go straighter.
You asked "actually, why are we even arguing over how some rich dude choses to spend his money?"
We do this all the time.
People complain when the Koch brothers use their billions to help push politics in a direction they favor.
People complain when Bill Gates uses his billions to help push education policy in a direction he favors.
In both cases one of the objections is that money amplifies influence, to the point where one rich person's whims can have more political influence than the serious concerns of tens of thousands of other citizens. Including experts.
It's also a problem should public institutions start to fund projects which are fundamentally flawed.
And finally, I'll argue that your question is misdirected. The article is not about "how some rich dude choses to spend his money" but rather an argument directed to people who have already decided to listen to a rich dude, in order to dissuade them of their enthusiasm.
If TBM costs are 50% of total cost, no amount of TBM cost reduction can achieve the 90% cost reduction goal - it clearly has to be combined with other strategies.
I believe it's clear that the author believes that these other strategies (all of which is probably project management based strategies) should be engaged with first, before falling down a path of throwing capital and R&D at cost reduction mechanisms (reduction of tunnel diameter for example) that may have significant technical and long-term short comings.
I mean, the entire blog post is just telling Americans what Americans kind of know - Large American government contracts are often poorly managed and executed (for whatever reason), and that reaching for a technological magic bullet is unlikely to achieve what we want.
You could have done that 40 years ago. SpaceX has figured out how to do this in an economically feasible way but technically it was possible a long time ago. Same for Mars. We could have landed there probably somewhere in the 1980s if someone had been willing to pay for it.
Musk went to NASA's website back in 2000 or so looking for the man to Mars plans and found nothing so he started a rocket company to bring down launch costs by a factor of 100. Ten years later reuse of rockets is happening. Amazing isn't it. Let's see what the next twenty bring.
There are two arguments in the article: that Musk is going about solving the problem in the wrong way, and that he is solving the wrong problem altogether by trying to put cars in tunnels. The author may well be right about the first, but I think he/she is wrong about the second.
Let’s think about everything that changes in a fully driverless, electric, shared, and tunnel-augmented vehicle ecosystem.
No more greenhouse gas emissions directly from vehicles (and none at all once the grid is fully renewable).
No more need to dedicate huge amounts of valuable land in our cities and suburbs to parking (cars can drive themselves to outlying areas to park or, better yet, can be shared).
Dramatically higher throughput because the human mistakes that cause congestion can be avoided (I recommend CGP Grey’s video on the causes of traffic: https://youtu.be/iHzzSao6ypE ). Driverless cars could drive faster and closer together, especially if they can communicate with one another.
Even more dramatic reduction in deaths and injuries as human error is removed from the equation.
Far fewer cars are needed in a shared-vehicle ecosystem. Most privately-owned cars are idle nearly all of the time, but they still take up space. Sharing vehicles allows us to reduce the amount of infrastructure needed for cars.
The average size of vehicles in the fleet can also be reduced. Right now people drive unnecessarily large vehicles because they might need the space a few times per year (annual family skiing trip, etc). These vehicles use up more energy and take up more space. In a shared-vehicle ecosystem, most of the vehicles can be something like a Smart ForTwo, with a smaller number of large vehicles that can be used by whoever actually needs them at any moment.
A shared-vehicle ecosystem could also include something like a cross between a scaled-up UberPOOL and a scaled-down bus: a Sprinter van (or equivalent) could pick up and drop off a dozen or so commuters who live in area A and work in area B. This improves the density of the system.
With affordable tunneling, freeways can go underground instead of destroying communities on the surface. This is one of the greatest evils of our car-centric infrastructure today, but with affordable tunneling we can abolish it.
Train-based mass transit will always be desirable for high-traffic corridors because it can be made far more dense. And despite this article’s attempts to paint him otherwise, Musk agrees with this - he is in talks to build a Hyperloop between Washington and Baltimore, as well as a lower-speed mass transit “loop” in Chicago.
However, trains will never be all that we need for transit, because they just can’t go everywhere. You will almost always need last-mile transportation at the endpoints, and there will always be routes that are not efficiently served by the train network. That’s where cars (or whatever we call the things they evolve into) come in.
A driverless, electric, shared, and tunnel-augmented vehicle ecosystem is probably the perfect mass transit system.
Yes, I think it's agreed that such a system could/will change things dramatically. Let's assume that it is possible. The questions then are 1) when will the transition take place, and 2) how do we improve the current system until it happens?
If it takes 50 years, then it's rather pointless to wait before making big changes, or even to plan for such a transition. (By comparison, the US interstate system is only 60 some-odd years old.)
It's quite clearly not next year.
Nor would it be easy for cities like Miami and Amsterdam to go underground, if tunnels are what's needed to make such a transportation system work.
"A driverless, electric, shared, and tunnel-augmented vehicle ecosystem is probably the perfect mass transit system."
You may be missing a qualifier - perhaps "personal"? - in your description. The word "vehicle" includes buses, trams, and trains, so this summary includes many current subway and tram systems, except without a driver.
P.S. It's hard to predict if something really will cause a big change. I remember in the 1990s when Dean Kamen talked about the Segway as being the next transportation paradigm, "John Doerr speculated that it would be more important than the Internet" and "Steve Jobs was quoted as saying that it was "as big a deal as the PC"" (quotes from Wikipedia). When it came out, it turned out not to be a big change. I think e-bikes - an update of 1800s technology - have had a bigger impact than Segway.
Let's solve our congestion problems by doubling the amount of traffic on the roads! Sharing vehicles is a red herring; the peak traffic is caused by what's effectively a unidirectional, time-compressed mode of transit--once the car drops someone off at work, there's not enough trips nearby that it can do.
> Driverless cars could drive faster and closer together, especially if they can communicate with one another.
Yeah, except for all those unpredictable pedestrians walking on the street in busy cities. You could drive faster and closer together only if a) every car were so wired, and no one drove manually and b) it's a limited-access highway with little conflicting movement. It might help I-70 in Kansas; it's not helping any street in NYC.
> A driverless, electric, shared, and tunnel-augmented vehicle ecosystem is probably the perfect mass transit system.
No, it ain't. The way you get mass transit is you start packing people into tighter spaces. A single-occupant car, no matter how many times it's reused, no matter how tightly you pack them, is just way too much extra space. The twin Hudson river NEC tubes carry more capacity than the GWB, Lincon Tunnel, Holland Tunnel, Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, and Brooklyn Bridge combined.