I have no idea, don't even live in the US :) but the second paragraph mentions the reason this was dropped (local lawsuits ) so found... peculiar the vaporware snark
I think it's either incredibly naive or willfully misleading to frame this as simply "wanting to avoid an environment impact study."
It could more accurately be described as, "concerned and organized opposition taking every available legal step to delay and increase the costs of the project under the guise of genuine and valid concern." And succeeding, as it seems.
Although it's tough for me to feel too sorry for Californians being negatively impacted by a complex and bureaucratic legal nightmare that enables exactly this kind of NIMBYism.
I'm curious about the continued negativity on this. Hasn't he pretty much accomplished everything he has said? Batteries, cars, solar, space, it's all working.
Honestly, I cannot help but get frustrated even though I know I shouldn't. How are people rooting against this person? Do they not want space exploration/green technology/incredible cars/transportation innovation/globally accessible satellite internet/self driving cars/etc?
I don't even really understand where the hate comes from, because he missed a few deadlines, because he dreams big? I'm sure his critics have missed more than a few deadlines, and on things not nearly as important/world changing.
The issues is not that we don't want these things. People cheer for NASA and you hardly ever read anything negative about those missions.
Elon is why people complain. He rubs a lot of people the wrong way with this tweets and attitude. You can be diplomatic and move things forward or you can be abrasive like Elon and also move forward.
> You can be diplomatic and move things forward or you can be abrasive like Elon and also move forward.
Just curious, can you name some people who have been diplomatic and managed to move things as far forward? I honestly can't think of many actual achievers that have been diplomatic about things.
What if said critic is a paedophile or he had a valid reason to believe it such as being told it by lots of locals? If someone is a paedophile, I think to call them it, should be perfectly acceptable.
History is built by people like this. Every mover and shaker in the world has had strong opinions and the ability to get people behind them. This pisses off the people that want to see the world stay the same or at least within their own parameters.
It takes a certain kind of person to do what Elon does, and the personality is non-negotiable, apparently.
The kind of people that want to see a brilliant person who is doing good work fail because he is not a nice guy irritate the hell out of me. I'm not totally sold that you have to be an asshole to progress things, but being wrapped up in pussy-footing around and not ruffling any feathers takes a helluva lot of energy out that could be directed towards real goals.
When you move things forward, you produce change, and this change inevitably bothers people who are comfortable in the existing order. These people will attack the source of the change, claiming that he's insensitive and undiplomatic or whatever merely because he doesn't let the minority that would be bothered by inconvenient change block that change.
Consequently, anyone who accomolishes something meaningful will be called a jerk. You can't do meaningful work while being universally well-liked. The world doesn't work that way.
Yes, he got himself in hot water with his funding secured tweet and created a big mess at Tesla that undoubtedly diverted a lot of resources that could have been put to use elsewhere.
I think they're rooting against him because he's been, frankly, extremely rude and petty in public to people that don't seem to deserve it. It's one thing for a celebrity to "feud" with another celebrity, it's another thing entirely when they do so to essentially anonymous people just trying to do their jobs (specifically, the well known investor call stuff, and also that cave diver).
Would people think so if they were analyzing and over analyzing ever single thing you did while you held one of the most stressful positions in the world?
I for one am happy to cut the man some slack given all the good he has done and is trying to do for the world. He said himself he could've just bought an island after Paypal and never worked again, instead he chose to dedicate basically the entire rest of his life to good causes.
I think a lot of the frustration is that all this tunneling stuff seems like a huge distraction from what we KNOW works.
Mixed use development near transit supplemented by a network of bike lanes an 8 or 80 year old would feel safe cycling on.
Tunnels aren't magic. Does anyone here think they won't succumb to induced demand just like any other road? Even if they reduce congestion (and they won't - the 405 carpool lane made commutes a minute longer, not shorter) all that means is people who want more space move farther from the city, enabling more urban sprawl, and thereby trashing the planet even more.
The other thing about Elon is that one wonders how many clever people are toiling away on solving the world's problems but can't get attention/funding/support because Elon sucks it all up, AND he's dangerously close to going full Kanye on Twitter (cave rescuers are pedophiles? wtf?), which doesn't help anything.
>I think a lot of the frustration is that all this tunneling stuff seems like a huge distraction from what we KNOW works.
If we know it works how come no one has done it? Traffic and congestion is a major issue in basically ever major city in the US (and probably the world), why the hate for attempted innovation?
>The other thing about Elon is that one wonders how many clever people are toiling away on solving the world's problems but can't get attention/funding/support because Elon sucks it all up
Is this really your concern? If anything I'd say he's inspiring many more people to try and tackle hard problems on a major scale. I'm way more frustrated that all the clever people are being sucked up by Facebook and Co to make ads super good and make time-wasters more addictive.
To the best of my knowledge, you are correct that every US city is horrible in this regard. This was not by accident.
To your comment "If we know it works how come no one has done it? " -
1) We have done it. Amsterdam fought like hell for it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuBdf9jYj7o . Now they have one of the finest cities in the world in which to move about.
Copenhagen at rush hour handles loads of people well because they have built systems that move people efficiently and safely. And pleasantly. Even driving there is nice, paradoxically.
2) People fight it because they believe they should be able to drive anywhere they like, for free, and without interruption - and then even store their car for free as well! The ideal situation is to be the only driver, but of course that only works if driving is very expensive (something I support).
In LA people are so furious at the idea of not being able to drive everywhere they shout down (almost) anything resembling progress. Things like Elon's tunnel are used as ammunition in these fights. After all, why should we build bike lanes when we're getting these kickass tunnels!?? This is part of why I left LA.
As for your latter point - yes, it is very much my concern. We have similar views regarding Facebook and Co. but given that Elon's tunnels are unlikely to actually make life better (note my earlier comment regarding induced demand) this is taking resources from actual solutions we could do right now, cheaply, and that we know work.
There are less people in all of Denmark than in LA. Not even half. Novel solutions will be needed. Much less area in Copenhagen than LA as well.
Also I really don't think this a resource drain. Before Elon there was basically no effort, and so if there was no Elon there would still be no effort. Also I would be shocked if there were more than like 150 people at Boring company.
The "hate" you speak of occurs on online comment sections only, and is likely a reaction to the sometimes cult-like devotion professed by his admirers.
This devotion is also fueled by Musk himself, who invests in positive PR (just look at any submission from Elektrek on this forum) and pretends to be a nerdy everyman on Twitter to appear to be "relatable".
Perhaps to his admirers, it seems like he's"just trying to help" when he proposes submarines for the Thai cave rescue. To outside observers, it looks like a cynical attempt to capitalize on the publicity around the rescue efforts for free. It's gauche when a normal person does it, and becomes in extremely poor taste when a billionaire with real resources does it.
Comments of the "He's trying to save the world, can't you see?" variety mix freely with the "this is a conspiracy against Tesla by big auto/big oil" comments that pop up anytime bad news is reported.
At the end of the day, neither Elon nor Tesla are hurting because of online comments.
Those other things don't typically require approval from local governments and neighborhoods. That is a fight entrepreneurs rarely win even successful, famous ones.
IMO his greatest accomplishment by far is Space X, from an engineering perspective it's the one that seems the most impressive and hardest to achieve.
Tesla is impressive but it seems more like the success of a vision, making electric cars look cool and inspirational, not "like a real car but eco-friendly and boring". Technologically speaking are they really ahead of the competition?
Meanwhile the Boring company and especially Hyperloop fail to convince me. For the former it's mostly that I don't see what he's bringing to the table. If digging holes underneath large cities is so great why did we wait for him to do it? Why does it seem to be such a huge pain when everybody else does it but it would be cheap and easy for him? What's the secret sauce? Where's the innovation? It's not like we didn't know how to dig tunnels before Musk. They've been extending Paris Metro line 14 into the northern suburbs lately and it's a long, expensive and complicated process, both technically and administratively. What would Musk do better?
For the hyperloop it's almost the other way around: the innovation is obvious but what's unclear is if it can work in practice and actually be useful, so I think that would be a better situation to argue that "he's got Space X to work, why not Hyperloop?"
> For the former it's mostly that I don't see what he's bringing to the table.
He's trying to build mass transit using sewer tunnel boring machines and sewer tunnel cost structures. It's not "hard" innovation but innovation it is.
Now he's trying to find out if sewer tunnel sized mass transit requires the same level of environmental assessment as mass transit or as sewer tunnels...
I think the negativity is an inevitable reaction to the Elon Musk hype machine, which he himself plays into. Recall the Thai diving incident, when he proposed a submarine solution that was neither realistic not workable.
In this instance, it would have been obvious from the get-go that a project like this would run into environmental concerns. The whole thing has been a waste of time and sucked attention away from more realistic possibilities. This broadly applies to Hyperloop as well, which is cool tech that solves none of the problems holding back transportation in the US, which are almost all political.
This tunnel is just a smaller, lower-capacity metro system. There is exactly zero groundbreaking technology here. They've even bought off-the-shelf commercial tunnel-boring machines.
The hyperloop has proven to be absolute bullshit, just like knowledgeable engineers predicted at the time it was announced. Which is part of my dislike of him, all the dishonest hype, and the hordes of online defenders like yourself that just talk about the marketing vision but not about the engineering.
My dad used to work in local government and likes to call the automatic opposition, "People united against anything." Today we call them NIMBYs. California has empowered them in peculiar and powerful ways, as anyone, anywhere, can challenge any project under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which actually supersedes the national version (NEQA).
And yet development should take the environment into consideration because it can have massive consequences. Those consequences are ultimately an externality of the development project and evaluating it in advance can help inform the true financials of the project.
I wonder whether those that were taking the environment in to consideration for the development thought beyond the project to what environmental impacts could be lessened by the project. I'm not a Musk fanboy, but if these tunnels will work the way he's suggesting, the amount of traffic that would be removed from the roads (and by extension, the pollution) would probably be a net benefit to the environment.
An increase in quality of life? Really? Who is to tell? Maybe those people would have done something more fulfilling instead of whatever they did as the porpose of those trips.
The biggest win -if it works as expected- would be the influence on other cities to do similar projects and focus on creating fast-and-electric-powered alternatives to move cars; also there may be a gain in safety issues due not relying in the driving skills of its users.
I would think that's the reason why Boring Co. cancelled the project then. They probably need to get some "MVP" tunnels up and running as soon and as cheaply as possible.
Also, cars use a minimum of CO2/mile when traveling at 40mph. Time spent idling in traffic is time spent burning gas to no purpose and to the extent that these tunnels decrease surface traffic there are add on benefits.
> the amount of traffic that would be removed from the roads
seriously, how would that work?
any expansion of road capacity in LA is immediately used up and oversaturated. if you build it they will come. if you free roads up by providing an alternative like Musk's tunnel system, someone else will still come and fill the roads back up, because, "hey, traffic is moving again."
Oddly enough, currently the opposite is true. All the construction blocks being put up sometimes in the name of environmental assessment are pushing people out of dense areas and into sprawling suburbs, with people taking on huge commutes to get to work.
Where is the environmental assessment on NIMBY-ism I wonder? :/
I've read articles that talk about that debate. Indeed, I tend to agree that development to support denser population is often an environmental net win over the immediate local environmental impacts, but I suppose it should be case-by-case.
"California has empowered them in peculiar and powerful ways"
Fun example of this is John Wayne airport in Orange County pilots do a special takooff involving cutting power to engines to reduce noise for Newport Beach neighborhood below dating back to a lawsuit from the 80s.
I have some mildly related personal experience as well. The glider club I belong to started getting noise complaints from people living near the airport. On a busy day, our tow plane might make 25 takeoffs. We often took the same path every time, repeatedly annoying the same people. We started varying our routes and also replaced the propellor with a quieter one and everybody was happy.
Seems unreasonable to me, who's to say which neighborhood deserves more or less noise pollution? Oh right, economic status and ability to file massive lawsuits. If that takeoff method was all around better they would just do it everywhere, Congress outlawed other airports from doing the same in 1990
"In 1990, Congress, fearing that many localities could eventually hamstring the growth of aviation by implementing their own patchwork of noise restrictions, passed the Airport Noise and Capacity Act which outlawed curfews at airports. John Wayne was grandfathered in, however, due to the original lawsuit being filed in 1985."
It's our profound nature as humans to reflexively unite against any outside change we don't feel part of. It's true at every scale and level of society. From "they don't make good music these days" to racism to opposition to political reforms. It's frankly a huge problem for humanity as a whole. We don't like change, especially if it's forced upon us. With climate change looming in the distance it's an almost suicidal trait.
On the other hand not letting anybody do what they want when they feel like it is important if you want to maintain a working society so it's a very tricky balance to maintain. It's probably reasonable for Californian residents not to let anybody dig holes willy-nilly underneath their cities.
That being said the article is pretty thin on details. They mention "a review of its potential environment impact" but don't explain what the problem was exactly, so it's hard for me to form an educated opinion on this particular case.
Call me crazy, but as an outsider looking in with attachment to California (many friends moved from there, brother's wife from there, I visit often), isn't part of their empowerment of NIMBY's out of fear that if they don't empower them they will straight up leave? Owning a home in California close to any of the economic centers sounds like one of the hardest endeavors one could embark upon, I imagine if you don't give any sort of concessions then more people would straight up leave.
California's insane housing prices (at least near the aforementioned economic centers) indicates that people are clamoring to move there. If you drive people away, more will replace them, possibly after causing prices to drop somewhat.
To me it indicates much more than that: high taxes, high regulatory fees, high cost of labor. The median cost per square foot for a home in California is $319 dollars, the median cost per square foot for the entire U.S is $151. The median home price in California is $379,000, and the U.S. is $225,000. One only needs to do a simple web search to see the current migration from California's tech centers to other tech destinations such as Austin, for example (note in my previous comment I said more people will leave, people are already leaving)
>If you drive people away, more will replace them
There is no data to support this hypothesis, however, in this case. The facts are California housing is expensive, and there are not enough jobs at those wages to support the expensive houses.
Prices can't exist without people willing to pay them. It doesn't matter how high your taxes, fees, and labor costs are, if people aren't willing to pay, prices don't stay high.
Another way of interpreting "The median home price is California is $379,000" is "people are willing to pay, on average, $379,000 for a home in California."
The home prices are the data to support my hypothesis. If there wasn't demand for houses then prices would fall. Demand for houses means people want to move there. If there were a net migration out of the state, prices would be dropping.
> The home prices are the data to support my hypothesis. If there wasn't demand for houses then prices would fall. Demand for houses means people want to move there. If there were a net migration out of the state, prices would be dropping.
This is true in general, but it isn't as immediate as you are making it out to be and doesn't give you any insight into how long it takes for the price to correct itself. The migration trends are 1-2 years old at this point. If my hypothesis is correct, expect to see your pricing drops soon (towards the middle to end of next big moving season, typically May 15 to August 31st), but only to a certain level and then it will make more sense for the builder to go under and let the banks take the hit.
Several major tech companies just announced moves into Downtown LA...Almost every new apartment building built in downtown has reached 90% occupancy within 6 months. A few of them reached 95%+ occupancy within their first month. For about 2 months earlier this year, the available inventory of new condos (as in, sold by the developer) reached zero and even the supply of condos on the market dropped into the lower double digits.
California is experiencing a net outward migration of people, but from the parts of California where there are already too many people, so all those people leaving has had minimal effect on the price of housing in LA or SF.
The problem is NIMBYs think that no things improve the neighborhood. Everyone would say they are for things that improve the neighborhood, but some are reflexively anti-change.
Well, that may be true, but there is good reason to doubt the effects of adding more roads to LA: demand will grow to meet capacity, which I am sure Musk is aware of given that he runs a car company.
would you be ok with tunnel being built under YOUR house (that you own and worked/will be working for for the rest of your life) without consulting with you FIRST?
You don't own the airspace over your house (over some minimum altitude), why would you own the land under your house (below some minimum depth). I would have absolutely no problem with a tunnel running 20m--or whatever the safe, silent amount is--underneath my house.
So you wouldn't have been okay with the Elontunnel, which runs closer than 20m below the surface--about 28 feet in the case of the Hawthorne tunnel. Though for point of comparison, some portions of the Metro system run at this depth or shallower.
If the NVH of a train passing through is equal to or less than that of heavy trucks using the main road that's a few hundred feet away I wouldn't care one bit.
Yes, as long as it gets the necessary permits and green-light from my elected officials.
The canceled tunnel was planned to go in about a block from where I currently live and I was excited for it. It wasn't even going to be under Brentwood (the northern terminus was about 2.5 mi away from the nearest edge). The hypothetical question for the plaintiffs might better be: would you be ok with a tunnel being built between 2-4 mi away from your house after successfully consulting with your elected representatives?
Why doesn't Musk take his business elsewhere where he's welcome? I can imagine LA being a nightmare for this sort of project. He needs a place where bureaucracy is thinner and people are actually excited about everything new.
India has a lot of potential, unlike China much of the infrastructure needed for the population still does not exist.
A connection from Mumbai to New Mumbai under the sea like NYC comes into mind. The problem is i doubt given the experimental nature (still) the govt. will be bold enough to try it
Dealing with the politics of getting anything done in India will make the dealing with the people in LA look simple and trouble free. India is a mess because of the government policies, bureaucracy and corruption. I strongly feel if India has a dictatorship like China for let’s say a 20 year period, they could far exceeded the enconmoy of China.
China and Japan have solutions to mass transit. They really don’t need disruption because they’re directly in competition with The Boring Company in terms of exporting their high speed train tech.
China doesn't really need novel technological approaches when they have the political capital and power to just successfully do things the old ways. Moreover, they have an understanding of acceptable losses and human casualties that is more in line with attitudes prevalent when most of European and US basic infrastructure was initially constructed, compared to the extremely safe working conditions now expected in the west.
Minor nitpick: the 2 mile test tunnel is in Hawthorne (starts at spacex HQ, goes under W 120th). And they stopped it a bit early (possibly because they planned or predicted that this extended route wasnt gonna happen, but that's speculative). Dodger Stadium is their next plan in LA but they haven't started it yet.
Importantly, that 1400 people is per day, as in...the entire day. A single bus can take 50-60 people in 30-40 minutes (roundtrip), so a dozen buses could transport more people to the game in an hour than the Elontunnel in an entire day.
Metro runs between 12 and 24 shuttle buses to Dodgers games (based on anticipated attendance) starting about 2 hours before to about an hour after the game ends, for a theoretical capacity of 3600 people on the low end and 17,000 on the high end over the course of the game.
Everyone with a new transit option plans to demo it between DC to Baltimore. The two cities are close enough to each other that a new company could fund the demo largely by itself. But the real hope is to convince government to extend it to go between DC and NYC, which is where the real market opportunity is, and, naturally, being the first to develop the technology, the initial company is the sole supplier. So plans to build something from DC to Baltimore should be taken with a grain of salt.
Musk says a lot of things. He is really amazing at getting press attention for himself. Ask Buffalo how Musk promises regarding the solar roof factory have gone so far...
Per your own link, Tesla has not yet satisfied the requirement. Tesla needs to hire 500 workers by April 2019, and so far has only hired 400. The other 400 were hired by Panasonic and don't get counted towards Tesla's total. Based on the abysmal/lack of solarroof sales in the past year, it's unlikely they'll need 100 new workers in the next 5 months.
Speaking as a Chicago resident, I don't think there's much enthusiasm (or opposition) for the project. It's not the kind of thing you'd take if you lived in the city: after all, it's a $25 express ride from the airport to the Loop. Most Chicagoans live out in the neighborhoods.
One thing that kinda shocked me was how limited its capacity was. The Blue Line "L" train actually has something like 10x the throughput despite being extremely slow (45 minutes vs 12). I don't know if that's a design limitation of the technology or if that's all the demand they anticipated. It makes me worried it's not scalable.
I'm pretty sure it's because he lives there. Not only does it make it easy for him to be involved, but it sounds like he really hates LA traffic and really wants to bypass it for his own personal benefit. He announced the company saying "Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging..." and the proposed route happens to be convenient for him: https://www.fastcompany.com/40500593/elon-musks-tunnel-throu...
LA is excited about many things, but a pointless tunnel to nowhere that can't fit any reasonable amount of traffic while permanently forestalling any options that could--that's the kind of boondoggle that people get excited to oppose. Elon's still proposing to build a Dodger Stadium tunnel. While similarly pointless from a traffic perspective (a single bus would get more people to the game in 20 minutes than the proposed Loop system would in an hour), it at least has the possible use of being a tourist destination and justifying its existence in that fashion. (And due to the nature of the geology between the proposed end points, a mass transit rail option of the scale Metro normally operates on that pathway is unfeasible.)
It seems sort of shortsighted to block a tunneling company on environmental grounds. In the long term, cheap tunneling would be fantastic for the environment. Most of what we consider the biosphere is on the surface, and to the extent that there's life in the tunneled area, by volume tunneling isn't going to be significant for a long time. (Volume is much larger than surface; in general, areal intuition fails miserably for volume.) Being able to tunnel places instead of running roads over things and such would be great.
(If indeed anyone can get too worried about potential rock-living life, since it is conspicuously lacking in anything you could call "cute".)
"It seems sort of shortsighted to block a tunneling company on environmental grounds."
It would seem equally short-sighted to make such a statement without thinking about what lies underneath most of Southern California. Oil fields galore, gas deposits, aquifers, and many superfund cleanup sites.
Digging around SoCal is already a half-impossibility. You never know when you're going to run across a deposit of natural gas and BOOM.
I kind of want to send these ‘environmentalists’ pieces of asphalt because that’s what their actions here are going to cause the entire planet to be covered in.
It's like how a lot of environmentalists seem to be opposed to nuclear despite it being statistically safer than even solar (let alone wind or hydro) and much better for the environment than even natural gas (let alone coal).
By letting perfect be the enemy of good, they're leaving the environment worse off.
The people I know want America to take the economic hit of renewables, bring electricity prices to $0.25 per kWh so that we can show the world our moral superiority. It would limit our economy, but it's possible.
The problem is that developing countries are adding fossil fuel power plants so fast that it would dwarf our reductions. I don't know if nuclear is the solution. But America needs to be bold enough to try.
Tunneling does have deleterious effects. After all, the biggest targets of the environmental movement are those companies who make gigantic interconnected tunnels that most people know by the name of mines. (Granted, it's the ore processing that does develop the most ire, but the handling of spoil has been implicated in several disasters such as the Aberfan disaster).
The first major issue of tunnels is that you have to put all of the stuff that you dug up somewhere, and the usual methods of dumping (such as the nearest coastline) aren't very environmentally-friendly. There are also some other issues you can find going underground--radon emissions come to mind.
The other key thing to analyze is the effect of the entire project. The Boring Company isn't selling better tunneling technology, they're selling a form of transit. (And it's pretty clear that Musk is personally interested in speeding up single-occupant vehicle as opposed to improving mass transit). The standard environmental impact analysis compares different approaches to see which one would minimize negative impacts. Quite frankly, the proposed Loop transit system is a very space-intensive, low-throughput system, which makes it a pretty poor option for the environment in comparison to standard subways.
But unless you’re going to the same destination mass transit isn’t ideal. If there are enough shared routes, and the cost advantage of shared transportation add up to a big enough benefit than it works. But my ideal transport is teleporting, which I think a subterranean hyperloop pod is closer to.
The concept of Loop is basically yet-another-repackaging of personal rapid transit. And the operational history of personal rapid transit has essentially shown that it sounds good in theory but doesn't work that well in practice.
The real problem is that the suburban ideal of detached single-family homes combined with low-density commercial parks is not an environmentally-friendly way of living, and when you try to scale it up, what you get is an unavoidable mess of traffic that has no real solution. If you care about moving people, the first thing you want to do is get people out of their cars; and that means that you need to concentrate one of the endpoints (invariably workplaces) to allow people to walk to their destination at that point. The land use policies are going to have to change if you want to be environmentally-friendly, and anyone who promises a way around that is selling you a fantasy.
These tunnels could solve the traffic problem. That is the whole point. They can be stacked to great depth to get traffic congestion to zero. People are willing to pay for this and it is only our ignorance and stupidity getting in the way of at least trying. The point of cities is that one has a huge number of people you could potentially interact with. With horrible traffic, this is not the case. With mass transit, you can only go certain places at certain times.
Just call a tunnel with automatic pods in them mass/public transit (that is what it would be) and fell good about a better future for all of us.
> They can be stacked to great depth to get traffic congestion to zero.
No, they can't. How do you handle vertical circulation?
Also, the capacity of highways is absolute rubbish compared to trains. I've run the numbers before--you'd need about 10 times the number of tunnels with Musk's Loop proposal, and about 100x the number of stations to get the same kind of vertical throughput as you would with regular subways.
> Just call a tunnel with automatic pods in them mass/public transit (that is what it would be)
Loop is essentially (as I've said) personal rapid transit. PRT is definitely public transit, but every PRT system has generally found that the "mass" part is rather hard to achieve.
The problem with this sort of thing is that it takes energy out of proven, working solutions to instead build technology that consistently hasn't lived up to promises. I might feel better about it if there were serious discussion as to why this system is going to succeed where others fail, but there has been absolutely nothing of that sort.
If personal rapid transit did work it would be better than a mass transit alternative. But I think it's pretty clear that surface streets and cars won't do this.
They didn't block it on any known Environmental grounds, CEQA exists to insure major infrastructure projects evaluate many options and attempt to find the most environmentally friendly option. In this particular case, it was almost certainly not building a low capacity tunnel for small vehicles and cars, but to build the already planned metro rail line without having to add engineering complexity to maneuver around a privately owned and built tunnel.
I'd also add that the use of concrete in tunneling does have a large environmental impact as well (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_concre...), so cheap tunneling wouldn't necessarily improve the environment in any clear way. The best solution for the environment will always be electric powered rail lines that are at grade, although that would be a poor choice from a transportation planning stand point.
> In this particular case, it was almost certainly not building a low capacity tunnel for small vehicles and cars, but to build the already planned metro rail line without having to add engineering complexity to maneuver around a privately owned and built tunnel.
A metro rail line can't transport a car, so point-to-point transit is out, as is any semblance of privacy. Why are you so quick to devalue these advantages?
If Musk can build a tunnel profitably, he should be able to do it, even if the opinion of people like you, mass transit would be preferable. Musk isn't willing to fund mass transit, but he is willing to fund a tunnel, so all you get by blocking the tunnel is neither mass transit nor a tunnel. Congratulations!
He can’t build it profitably, or at least without going through the environmental impact review that every other project of this scale must pass. Do you really think the hole digging is the bottleneck for every other underground project?
How much infrastructure is getting built under the current review process? The current process is just a fig leaf for everyone getting a NIMBY veto. California ought to be ashamed of its technological paralysis.
It's not a technological problem. If people get unhappy when Facebook "moves fast and breaks things" in its mission to "connect the world", then people should be just as cautious when it comes to construction projects that impact miles of public infrastructure and thousands of private homes.
Sure I mean bad (insert bad thing) things are bad. And a risk to private homes should stop a project. But I can’t find any proof that there’s a risk here. Tunneling is really safe.
You’d probably have to ask Elon Musk. I also haven’t read the lawsuit so I don’t know what specifically the homeowners wanted investigated. California law basically gives veto power to any homeowner for anything, so why bother trying to be innovative there in the first place? I think the software industry only evolved there because nobody had figured out how to regulate a bit yet.
California software companies are still subject to the same taxes and standard of state employment laws.
California's high speed rail has been subject to the same scrutiny and legal threats. Was Boring/Musk completely ignorant of well-known past precedent and hurdles when they claimed they could build a transportation project for much cheaper? As recently as 1 month ago, Musk still thought and publicly claimed that the tunnel "opens Dec 10": https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1054164838430064640
I think Elon Musk knows that if there's something big to be gained for society the laws can be modified. For instance Tesla only worked because the Obama administration kind of bent the laws of economics by securing a huge loan to the company.
In theory there’s going to be a high speed train built between SF and LA. Not convinced it can happen, or should happen at the price these property owners have made the project incur.
Because the purpose of mass transit is to increase throughput, a super highway tunnel for cars will just lead to more congested streets around the entrance the same way wider highways have done.
> It seems sort of shortsighted to block a tunneling company on environmental grounds.
They didn't block a tunneling company on environmental grounds. A tunneling company gave up rather than risk even having an environmental evaluation of a potential tunnel.
> It seems sort of shortsighted to block a tunneling company on environmental grounds.
Probably. But this wasn't about cheap tunneling technology, it was about a specific proposed tunnnel.
Is it just me or is it ironic that the reason for cancelling is environmental impact, when the tunnel would help alleviate congestion and smog due to gasoline-powered traffic?
It’s not just you and the cancellation isn’t about environmental impact, it’s abojt NIMBYism.
Perhaps even more ironically, those who live by an transit area would expect to see their home values increase due to desire to live near mass transit in big cities (see SF, NYC)
Musk can do better than this. We need real subways and trains for transit. We do not need another express freeway lane that's underground. This is just adding more room for cars. Building on the existing approach of solving traffic by adding more lanes. This will not help Los Angeles nor America as a whole shift away from car dependency.
LA already has a pretty large rail network. Problem is when they try to build new subways it takes many many years to go even a mile and is met with the same lawsuits Elon faced. Fact is, California culture wants it but doesn’t want it at the same time.
> Fact is, California culture wants it but doesn’t want it at the same time.
That applies to every culture, ever, and I have a hard time identifying some "California culture" that encompasses the state. The difference is that in California, the people who don't want it largely outnumber the people who want it more than in most places.
> The difference is that in California, the people who don't want it largely outnumber the people who want it more than in most places.
Measure R (2008, 67% in favor) and Measure M (2016, 71% in favor) both passed with supermajorities and raised Los Angeles taxes by billions to pay for rail and other public transit options. To me, that seems to indicate that the majority wants these kinds of projects.
The majority may want a few projects that cost relatively little, but they clearly don't want as much as people in other cities that spend more on public transit and have more public transit infrastructure per capita. In other words, I'm sure the majority is in favor of some public transit as an alternative, but the bar is far lower for being an alternative.
Also, it goes without saying that LA County is not representative of "California culture."
Measure M is a 120 billion dollar measure, one of the largest regional transit initiatives ever in the history of the united states. The only real problem with it is that LA has to rework itself around transit oriented development for both residential and office space for it to really work.
These tunnels can have a bunch of buses running in them next to each other (ie a train). Cars are great. When there is no congestion you get fast point-to-point transportation at any time. We should work on making this mode of transportation better, not trying to kill it. Make the cars more energy efficient, underground roads to fix the noise and land use problems, make them automatic to reduce deaths, etc.
Would you ban a teleportation system that was energy efficient and insist people take trains and subways? Trains and subways are much inferior mode of transport compared to a functioning road system with vechicles. I wonder why so many people have this car hate? Scared of driving a car? They are dangerous and you have to pay attention to drive them, so that makes some sense to me. Some kind of socialist reason that people should be forced into contact with random other people. Sitting at home is what one should be doing instead of going places? Where did you get this idea that cars where some kind of evil device?
Cars are one of the least space-efficient transportation option imaginable. In an urban environment, space comes at a premium. At the same time, car infrastructure is quite heavily subsidized. Finally, there is a very large car lobby that absolutely abhors the idea of spending a dime on anything that's not cars such that talking about mass transit is equated with a war on cars. (And quite frankly, you sound much closer to that end of the spectrum).
> When there is no congestion you get fast point-to-point transportation at any time.
Following on the above point I made about space-inefficiency... it's impossible to allocate enough space in cities to prevent such congestion. And tunnels don't help because it means you have a vertical circulation problem, which is a problem that we struggle to solve with conventional mass transit systems already, and it's even harder with cars.
Ultimately, the reason why people like me are so against Loop is because we see it as Musk doing to car owners what Trump does to coal miners: sympathize with their plight, blame it on completely the wrong thing, and then peddle fantasies that he'll be able to make it better.
Tesla is a long-term play in a business--privately-owned-and-operated automobiles--that doesn't necessarily have a long enough term for the Tesla business plan to play out. Propping up automobile infrastructure and tearing down other forms of transportation infrastructure directly addresses Musk's business interests.
For those not familiar with LA's private property rights, they are some of the strictest in the nation. The 710 freeway, originally designed and intended to go all the way from long beach to pasadena, has successfully been litigated for fifty years to prevent it from ever doing so. heavy truck traffic has to exit to surface streets to continue to the city or route around it using the 101. trucks are prohibited on the 110.
And the residents standing in the way of this project? not even very powerful residents. Just backed by a handful of attorneys well versed on property rights.
Maybe this understates the wealth level of South Pasadena, which would have been significantly affected by that final leg of the 710. South Pasadena is relatively well off compared to many other areas of the county, has a good school district, some rather nice craftsman era homes, a little bit of old money, attractive retail zones, convenient location to downtown, nice hillside geography, etc.
Though not Beverly Hills or Santa Monica, South Pasadena is an independent city with a largely middle to upper middle class population. So, in a way, it's not surprising that it succeeded in killing that final leg of the 710.
Personally, I wish the 710 had been completed. It would have benefited a lot of people.
Why are you saying this like it's a bad thing? Transportation development has time over time been proven to work best when decisions are made by consensus rather than by letting central authorities and monied interests do whatever they think is right.
Had this never happened, LA would have far worse pollution problems than it does today, and NYC would be completely overrun with highways.
Has a consensus-based approach been proven "best"? New York would be much worse off today if not for Robert Moses ramming through much-needed and innotative infrastructure. Consensus, in practice, amounts to giving everyone the power to veto massive projects, and widespread veto power leads to paralysis and weakness. You need strong central authority to actually make decisions and get things to happen.
The entire premise of things happening cannot in this day and age be something that involves screwing over the working class as has been the case with the vast majority of urban planning decisions historically, abet is also something that is starting to get better now.
I cannot understand how so many of my fellow Americans love to talk about the merits of democracy, but when it comes to large scale capital projects, either public or private, people suddenly hate democratic decision making. Moses sized power completely ignoring the democratic process, and had musk built these tunnels, he'd have done the same.
well, im not sure where this tunnel would be located BUT if he was digging under my $500,000-1,000,000 residential house (or whatever the prices there are) or my commercial property i sure as hell would sue the billionaire all the way to the bank as well. For him its just "playing games" oh let me dig a tunnel so i can skip the traffic on MY way to work. For me - its my livelihood - house is a single biggest purchase in most people's lives (or my business - if he is digging under my commercial property). If this tunnel affects my building - what do i do when things go wrong (foundation cracks)?
I have to go around and ask 10 people in my neighborhood if its ok if i want to move a freaking wall inside my house and this guy can just go and dig up tunnels without asking us ... just because he feels like it and he is a billionaire.
During the construction of the Crossrail development in London, they had to 'thread a needle' in terms of tunneling underneath the Barbican Theatre. They were tunnelling directly below (metres away!) whilst people were still enjoying shows in the theatre.
I don't know about GP comment about stuff inside the house but here we have something called "local urban planning" where I live. For example, depending on the plan, you can't build above 2 stories, or you have to conform to a predefined set of colors for the street facing wall. There are various rules depending on the neighborhood you're in and if there is a historical site in the vicinity, etc.
> The Boring Company is no longer seeking the development of the Sepulveda test tunnel and instead seeks to construct an operational tunnel at Dodger Stadium
This is not a story of NIMBYs, this is a story of how LA can't make decisions for the greater good because anything that affects a useful part of the metro area requires independent agreement from multiple cities with very different demographics. A lot of people don't realize that, unlike NYC, LA isn't one city - it's a bunch of cities clustered together. Right now, there's no good way to force all the communities to agree on something.
Some communities might have a NIMBY attitude, but just saying that this is California NIMBYism is oversimplifying.
Except for the fact that this tunnel was trying to get developed in a way that first off, violated California Environmental laws, something that the government owned and built metro would have to spend millions of dollars and several years on in order to complete, and second, it would've increased the complexity of building an already budgeted heavy rail line under that part of the city.
LA is very capable at making decision that work for the greater good as the county has a sizable amount of power around taxation, and manages the regions transit authority. The parts of the region most notable for NIMBYism are largely only effective at delaying action rather than completely blocking it unlike in the bay area which has multiple counties to deal with.
LA's cities and peoples just agreed to spend several billion dollars on building/improving mass transit in the city...And we just voted to support those efforts again in this past election.
LA's cities actually work very well together on many infrastructure projects; it's the valley portions of LA (San Gabriel and San Fernando) that don't cooperate well with others.
IIRC, the original PR for this gave the idea that automobiles would enter the tunnel through single-car elevators that looked like parking spaces. How many such elevators are needed to keep a high-cost roadway running reasonably full? How much infrastructure (safety barriers, driveways, waiting areas, not to mention people) around each elevator to move the cars on and off safely?
Yes/no decisions on the basis of environmental impact lead to excess risk aversion, sloppy thinking, and ultimately, technological stagnation. While I agree that we should consider the environment in project planning, the proper way to do that is to use the price mechanism to account for environmental damage.
That is, the output of environmental review should never be "no". It should be "the environmental cost of this project is $X billion, and here's a breakdown". Forcing people to quantify their objections will lead to a more honest evaluation of the options.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 296 ms ] threadNot at all: https://www.boringcompany.com/not-a-flamethrower/
This is actually Grimes' boyfriend's most profitable product.
Kind of ironic that the man who for many is seen as saving the planet with his electric vehicles is trying to avoid an environment impact study.
“The parties (The Boring Company, Brentwood Residents Coalition, Sunset Coalition, and Wendy-Sue Rosen) have amicably settled the matter"
It could more accurately be described as, "concerned and organized opposition taking every available legal step to delay and increase the costs of the project under the guise of genuine and valid concern." And succeeding, as it seems.
Although it's tough for me to feel too sorry for Californians being negatively impacted by a complex and bureaucratic legal nightmare that enables exactly this kind of NIMBYism.
I don't even really understand where the hate comes from, because he missed a few deadlines, because he dreams big? I'm sure his critics have missed more than a few deadlines, and on things not nearly as important/world changing.
Elon is why people complain. He rubs a lot of people the wrong way with this tweets and attitude. You can be diplomatic and move things forward or you can be abrasive like Elon and also move forward.
Just curious, can you name some people who have been diplomatic and managed to move things as far forward? I honestly can't think of many actual achievers that have been diplomatic about things.
It takes a certain kind of person to do what Elon does, and the personality is non-negotiable, apparently.
Consequently, anyone who accomolishes something meaningful will be called a jerk. You can't do meaningful work while being universally well-liked. The world doesn't work that way.
Would people think so if they were analyzing and over analyzing ever single thing you did while you held one of the most stressful positions in the world?
I for one am happy to cut the man some slack given all the good he has done and is trying to do for the world. He said himself he could've just bought an island after Paypal and never worked again, instead he chose to dedicate basically the entire rest of his life to good causes.
Mixed use development near transit supplemented by a network of bike lanes an 8 or 80 year old would feel safe cycling on.
Tunnels aren't magic. Does anyone here think they won't succumb to induced demand just like any other road? Even if they reduce congestion (and they won't - the 405 carpool lane made commutes a minute longer, not shorter) all that means is people who want more space move farther from the city, enabling more urban sprawl, and thereby trashing the planet even more.
Quick, cheap tunneling would be GREAT for building subways, though. Shame Elon hates public transport https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-awkward-dislike-mass-t...
The other thing about Elon is that one wonders how many clever people are toiling away on solving the world's problems but can't get attention/funding/support because Elon sucks it all up, AND he's dangerously close to going full Kanye on Twitter (cave rescuers are pedophiles? wtf?), which doesn't help anything.
If we know it works how come no one has done it? Traffic and congestion is a major issue in basically ever major city in the US (and probably the world), why the hate for attempted innovation?
>The other thing about Elon is that one wonders how many clever people are toiling away on solving the world's problems but can't get attention/funding/support because Elon sucks it all up
Is this really your concern? If anything I'd say he's inspiring many more people to try and tackle hard problems on a major scale. I'm way more frustrated that all the clever people are being sucked up by Facebook and Co to make ads super good and make time-wasters more addictive.
To your comment "If we know it works how come no one has done it? " -
1) We have done it. Amsterdam fought like hell for it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuBdf9jYj7o . Now they have one of the finest cities in the world in which to move about.
Copenhagen at rush hour handles loads of people well because they have built systems that move people efficiently and safely. And pleasantly. Even driving there is nice, paradoxically.
https://twitter.com/Pidge/status/1064443820245422080
2) People fight it because they believe they should be able to drive anywhere they like, for free, and without interruption - and then even store their car for free as well! The ideal situation is to be the only driver, but of course that only works if driving is very expensive (something I support).
In LA people are so furious at the idea of not being able to drive everywhere they shout down (almost) anything resembling progress. Things like Elon's tunnel are used as ammunition in these fights. After all, why should we build bike lanes when we're getting these kickass tunnels!?? This is part of why I left LA.
As for your latter point - yes, it is very much my concern. We have similar views regarding Facebook and Co. but given that Elon's tunnels are unlikely to actually make life better (note my earlier comment regarding induced demand) this is taking resources from actual solutions we could do right now, cheaply, and that we know work.
Also I really don't think this a resource drain. Before Elon there was basically no effort, and so if there was no Elon there would still be no effort. Also I would be shocked if there were more than like 150 people at Boring company.
This devotion is also fueled by Musk himself, who invests in positive PR (just look at any submission from Elektrek on this forum) and pretends to be a nerdy everyman on Twitter to appear to be "relatable".
Perhaps to his admirers, it seems like he's"just trying to help" when he proposes submarines for the Thai cave rescue. To outside observers, it looks like a cynical attempt to capitalize on the publicity around the rescue efforts for free. It's gauche when a normal person does it, and becomes in extremely poor taste when a billionaire with real resources does it.
Comments of the "He's trying to save the world, can't you see?" variety mix freely with the "this is a conspiracy against Tesla by big auto/big oil" comments that pop up anytime bad news is reported.
At the end of the day, neither Elon nor Tesla are hurting because of online comments.
Tesla is impressive but it seems more like the success of a vision, making electric cars look cool and inspirational, not "like a real car but eco-friendly and boring". Technologically speaking are they really ahead of the competition?
Meanwhile the Boring company and especially Hyperloop fail to convince me. For the former it's mostly that I don't see what he's bringing to the table. If digging holes underneath large cities is so great why did we wait for him to do it? Why does it seem to be such a huge pain when everybody else does it but it would be cheap and easy for him? What's the secret sauce? Where's the innovation? It's not like we didn't know how to dig tunnels before Musk. They've been extending Paris Metro line 14 into the northern suburbs lately and it's a long, expensive and complicated process, both technically and administratively. What would Musk do better?
For the hyperloop it's almost the other way around: the innovation is obvious but what's unclear is if it can work in practice and actually be useful, so I think that would be a better situation to argue that "he's got Space X to work, why not Hyperloop?"
Yes and have been since 2012 when they started producing the Model S. It's been 6 years and major manufacturers have still not caught up.
He's trying to build mass transit using sewer tunnel boring machines and sewer tunnel cost structures. It's not "hard" innovation but innovation it is.
Now he's trying to find out if sewer tunnel sized mass transit requires the same level of environmental assessment as mass transit or as sewer tunnels...
In this instance, it would have been obvious from the get-go that a project like this would run into environmental concerns. The whole thing has been a waste of time and sucked attention away from more realistic possibilities. This broadly applies to Hyperloop as well, which is cool tech that solves none of the problems holding back transportation in the US, which are almost all political.
Which is an increase in quality of life for those who would have otherwise forgone those trips. Either way it's a win.
Whether it's a big enough win to be worth the cost is a perpetual debate with projects like this.
Generally the person themselves should be the one to tell. Other systems have not worked out so well.
This isn’t about declaring the project a hazard to the environment, this is skipping the process to determine if it is or isn’t a net good.
I don't understand how any pollution would be removed, just because it's now in tunnels doesn't equal it being gone.
Wouldn't it just be blasted back out through the ventilation system? Or were there plans to build some kind of "pollution scrubbing" into those?
seriously, how would that work?
any expansion of road capacity in LA is immediately used up and oversaturated. if you build it they will come. if you free roads up by providing an alternative like Musk's tunnel system, someone else will still come and fill the roads back up, because, "hey, traffic is moving again."
LA deserves better public transit.
Where is the environmental assessment on NIMBY-ism I wonder? :/
Of course, if you choose not to follow the rules and processes for development...it's very difficult.
Elon's learning the hard way that not following the rules can make his pet projects difficult or even impossible.
Fun example of this is John Wayne airport in Orange County pilots do a special takooff involving cutting power to engines to reduce noise for Newport Beach neighborhood below dating back to a lawsuit from the 80s.
I wonder if they do this at other airports located in of near cities such as LGA.
I have some mildly related personal experience as well. The glider club I belong to started getting noise complaints from people living near the airport. On a busy day, our tow plane might make 25 takeoffs. We often took the same path every time, repeatedly annoying the same people. We started varying our routes and also replaced the propellor with a quieter one and everybody was happy.
"In 1990, Congress, fearing that many localities could eventually hamstring the growth of aviation by implementing their own patchwork of noise restrictions, passed the Airport Noise and Capacity Act which outlawed curfews at airports. John Wayne was grandfathered in, however, due to the original lawsuit being filed in 1985."
https://www.avgeekery.com/whats-rollercoaster-takeoffs-orang...
On the other hand not letting anybody do what they want when they feel like it is important if you want to maintain a working society so it's a very tricky balance to maintain. It's probably reasonable for Californian residents not to let anybody dig holes willy-nilly underneath their cities.
That being said the article is pretty thin on details. They mention "a review of its potential environment impact" but don't explain what the problem was exactly, so it's hard for me to form an educated opinion on this particular case.
>If you drive people away, more will replace them
There is no data to support this hypothesis, however, in this case. The facts are California housing is expensive, and there are not enough jobs at those wages to support the expensive houses.
Another way of interpreting "The median home price is California is $379,000" is "people are willing to pay, on average, $379,000 for a home in California."
The home prices are the data to support my hypothesis. If there wasn't demand for houses then prices would fall. Demand for houses means people want to move there. If there were a net migration out of the state, prices would be dropping.
This is true in general, but it isn't as immediate as you are making it out to be and doesn't give you any insight into how long it takes for the price to correct itself. The migration trends are 1-2 years old at this point. If my hypothesis is correct, expect to see your pricing drops soon (towards the middle to end of next big moving season, typically May 15 to August 31st), but only to a certain level and then it will make more sense for the builder to go under and let the banks take the hit.
California is experiencing a net outward migration of people, but from the parts of California where there are already too many people, so all those people leaving has had minimal effect on the price of housing in LA or SF.
California is a really nice place to live; great weather, great coast lines, great food, great people, etc. Most people don't live there on accident.
I love the BANANA acronym, which stands for "build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything".
The canceled tunnel was planned to go in about a block from where I currently live and I was excited for it. It wasn't even going to be under Brentwood (the northern terminus was about 2.5 mi away from the nearest edge). The hypothetical question for the plaintiffs might better be: would you be ok with a tunnel being built between 2-4 mi away from your house after successfully consulting with your elected representatives?
This. all im saying.
A connection from Mumbai to New Mumbai under the sea like NYC comes into mind. The problem is i doubt given the experimental nature (still) the govt. will be bold enough to try it
This was just one test tunnel. They have already succeeded on their other 2 mile test tunnel (Dodger Stadium) and are working to extend that.
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-dodger-stadium-...
This was a great Twitter thread on the public interest in a LA tunnel
Metro runs between 12 and 24 shuttle buses to Dodgers games (based on anticipated attendance) starting about 2 hours before to about an hour after the game ends, for a theoretical capacity of 3600 people on the low end and 17,000 on the high end over the course of the game.
Also, how do you define “welcome”? A single lawsuit doesn’t mean much about overall endorsement.
They're even paying for the whole thing, I think most residents here are excited about it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/16/us/chicago-tunnel-elon-mu...
https://www.boringcompany.com/eastcoast/
One thing that kinda shocked me was how limited its capacity was. The Blue Line "L" train actually has something like 10x the throughput despite being extremely slow (45 minutes vs 12). I don't know if that's a design limitation of the technology or if that's all the demand they anticipated. It makes me worried it's not scalable.
(If indeed anyone can get too worried about potential rock-living life, since it is conspicuously lacking in anything you could call "cute".)
Depends how the tunneling is done, surely? If it's haphazard and prone to problems or even collapse I doubt it's an environmental plus.
And that's why we have environmental review to vet infrastructure and similar projects before they get built.
It would seem equally short-sighted to make such a statement without thinking about what lies underneath most of Southern California. Oil fields galore, gas deposits, aquifers, and many superfund cleanup sites.
Digging around SoCal is already a half-impossibility. You never know when you're going to run across a deposit of natural gas and BOOM.
By letting perfect be the enemy of good, they're leaving the environment worse off.
The first major issue of tunnels is that you have to put all of the stuff that you dug up somewhere, and the usual methods of dumping (such as the nearest coastline) aren't very environmentally-friendly. There are also some other issues you can find going underground--radon emissions come to mind.
The other key thing to analyze is the effect of the entire project. The Boring Company isn't selling better tunneling technology, they're selling a form of transit. (And it's pretty clear that Musk is personally interested in speeding up single-occupant vehicle as opposed to improving mass transit). The standard environmental impact analysis compares different approaches to see which one would minimize negative impacts. Quite frankly, the proposed Loop transit system is a very space-intensive, low-throughput system, which makes it a pretty poor option for the environment in comparison to standard subways.
The real problem is that the suburban ideal of detached single-family homes combined with low-density commercial parks is not an environmentally-friendly way of living, and when you try to scale it up, what you get is an unavoidable mess of traffic that has no real solution. If you care about moving people, the first thing you want to do is get people out of their cars; and that means that you need to concentrate one of the endpoints (invariably workplaces) to allow people to walk to their destination at that point. The land use policies are going to have to change if you want to be environmentally-friendly, and anyone who promises a way around that is selling you a fantasy.
Just call a tunnel with automatic pods in them mass/public transit (that is what it would be) and fell good about a better future for all of us.
No, they can't. How do you handle vertical circulation?
Also, the capacity of highways is absolute rubbish compared to trains. I've run the numbers before--you'd need about 10 times the number of tunnels with Musk's Loop proposal, and about 100x the number of stations to get the same kind of vertical throughput as you would with regular subways.
> Just call a tunnel with automatic pods in them mass/public transit (that is what it would be)
Loop is essentially (as I've said) personal rapid transit. PRT is definitely public transit, but every PRT system has generally found that the "mass" part is rather hard to achieve.
The problem with this sort of thing is that it takes energy out of proven, working solutions to instead build technology that consistently hasn't lived up to promises. I might feel better about it if there were serious discussion as to why this system is going to succeed where others fail, but there has been absolutely nothing of that sort.
I'd also add that the use of concrete in tunneling does have a large environmental impact as well (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_concre...), so cheap tunneling wouldn't necessarily improve the environment in any clear way. The best solution for the environment will always be electric powered rail lines that are at grade, although that would be a poor choice from a transportation planning stand point.
A metro rail line can't transport a car, so point-to-point transit is out, as is any semblance of privacy. Why are you so quick to devalue these advantages?
If Musk can build a tunnel profitably, he should be able to do it, even if the opinion of people like you, mass transit would be preferable. Musk isn't willing to fund mass transit, but he is willing to fund a tunnel, so all you get by blocking the tunnel is neither mass transit nor a tunnel. Congratulations!
California's high speed rail has been subject to the same scrutiny and legal threats. Was Boring/Musk completely ignorant of well-known past precedent and hurdles when they claimed they could build a transportation project for much cheaper? As recently as 1 month ago, Musk still thought and publicly claimed that the tunnel "opens Dec 10": https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1054164838430064640
No, it doesn't.
Of course not, Boring pulled out rather than go through the process that would evaluate any risks.
> Tunneling is really safe.
Then there was no reason to avoid environmental review.
https://www.metro.net/projects/westside/
The environmental review process doesn't stop a lot of infrastructure getting built, people prioritizing public spending on other priorities does.
> The current process is just a fig leaf for everyone getting a NIMBY veto.
No, it's not.
> California ought to be ashamed of its technological paralysis.
Perhaps, but CEQA isn't the source of the problem, to the extent there is one.
They didn't block a tunneling company on environmental grounds. A tunneling company gave up rather than risk even having an environmental evaluation of a potential tunnel.
> It seems sort of shortsighted to block a tunneling company on environmental grounds.
Probably. But this wasn't about cheap tunneling technology, it was about a specific proposed tunnnel.
Perhaps even more ironically, those who live by an transit area would expect to see their home values increase due to desire to live near mass transit in big cities (see SF, NYC)
That applies to every culture, ever, and I have a hard time identifying some "California culture" that encompasses the state. The difference is that in California, the people who don't want it largely outnumber the people who want it more than in most places.
Measure R (2008, 67% in favor) and Measure M (2016, 71% in favor) both passed with supermajorities and raised Los Angeles taxes by billions to pay for rail and other public transit options. To me, that seems to indicate that the majority wants these kinds of projects.
Also, it goes without saying that LA County is not representative of "California culture."
Would you ban a teleportation system that was energy efficient and insist people take trains and subways? Trains and subways are much inferior mode of transport compared to a functioning road system with vechicles. I wonder why so many people have this car hate? Scared of driving a car? They are dangerous and you have to pay attention to drive them, so that makes some sense to me. Some kind of socialist reason that people should be forced into contact with random other people. Sitting at home is what one should be doing instead of going places? Where did you get this idea that cars where some kind of evil device?
Cars are one of the least space-efficient transportation option imaginable. In an urban environment, space comes at a premium. At the same time, car infrastructure is quite heavily subsidized. Finally, there is a very large car lobby that absolutely abhors the idea of spending a dime on anything that's not cars such that talking about mass transit is equated with a war on cars. (And quite frankly, you sound much closer to that end of the spectrum).
> When there is no congestion you get fast point-to-point transportation at any time.
Following on the above point I made about space-inefficiency... it's impossible to allocate enough space in cities to prevent such congestion. And tunnels don't help because it means you have a vertical circulation problem, which is a problem that we struggle to solve with conventional mass transit systems already, and it's even harder with cars.
Ultimately, the reason why people like me are so against Loop is because we see it as Musk doing to car owners what Trump does to coal miners: sympathize with their plight, blame it on completely the wrong thing, and then peddle fantasies that he'll be able to make it better.
And the residents standing in the way of this project? not even very powerful residents. Just backed by a handful of attorneys well versed on property rights.
Maybe this understates the wealth level of South Pasadena, which would have been significantly affected by that final leg of the 710. South Pasadena is relatively well off compared to many other areas of the county, has a good school district, some rather nice craftsman era homes, a little bit of old money, attractive retail zones, convenient location to downtown, nice hillside geography, etc.
Though not Beverly Hills or Santa Monica, South Pasadena is an independent city with a largely middle to upper middle class population. So, in a way, it's not surprising that it succeeded in killing that final leg of the 710.
Personally, I wish the 710 had been completed. It would have benefited a lot of people.
Had this never happened, LA would have far worse pollution problems than it does today, and NYC would be completely overrun with highways.
I cannot understand how so many of my fellow Americans love to talk about the merits of democracy, but when it comes to large scale capital projects, either public or private, people suddenly hate democratic decision making. Moses sized power completely ignoring the democratic process, and had musk built these tunnels, he'd have done the same.
I have to go around and ask 10 people in my neighborhood if its ok if i want to move a freaking wall inside my house and this guy can just go and dig up tunnels without asking us ... just because he feels like it and he is a billionaire.
The less he does the better for the taxpayer
Some communities might have a NIMBY attitude, but just saying that this is California NIMBYism is oversimplifying.
LA is very capable at making decision that work for the greater good as the county has a sizable amount of power around taxation, and manages the regions transit authority. The parts of the region most notable for NIMBYism are largely only effective at delaying action rather than completely blocking it unlike in the bay area which has multiple counties to deal with.
LA's cities actually work very well together on many infrastructure projects; it's the valley portions of LA (San Gabriel and San Fernando) that don't cooperate well with others.
That is, the output of environmental review should never be "no". It should be "the environmental cost of this project is $X billion, and here's a breakdown". Forcing people to quantify their objections will lead to a more honest evaluation of the options.