Unless I'm misunderstanding you, there isn't a offramp/onramp in the latest design scheme. When Boring Company first unveiled the design, it had elevators that moved vehicles from grade-level to the tunnel. The vehicles then locked into a track. Then after reaching an "exit" the vehicle is brought back to the surface so the driver can continue the journey within that same vehicle. But they recently scrapped all that. In the current design, there is no locked track and the vehicles never leave the tunnel. This ensures that the tunnels only function with a proprietary vehicle.
There still might be some human ingress/egress issues to resolve.
Yeah, the joke is that next they'll release that the concrete tunnel road is subject to deterioration, so they'll shift to steel tracks. Then they'll realize that these individual vehicles should be linked together to allow for higher capacity. Then... then you have a subway.
That would be great. Subway costs are absolutely ridiculous, so it would be fantastic if the boring company decides to build exactly the same thing for much less.
At the moment, all the analysis I've seen points more towards the only reason it's cheaper being because of the smaller size of the tunnel (there's actually nothing novel about the boring machine, it's just a standard one that is used to build utility tunnels with some minor tweaks), and because they don't build (or don't take into account) things like station caverns, cross linking tunnels, ventilation/emergency egress, etc.
So if they actually built a subway it would cost... about the same as a subway. That's not to say that US subways aren't crazy expensive to build compared to Europe, Asia etc. - but that's more to do with legal issues (industrial relations etc.), business structures, and possibly corruption, rather than the technology.
It's not exactly the same thing. In the Boring underground car-train, each party of travelers takes up an entire car's or truck's worth of space. On a subway, each person takes up room for themselves and their belongings. Plus maybe a bicycle. You can move a lot more people at once in a subway.
Further, when the Boring underground car-train "stops", and parties leave the train, those cars still demand that same space, just on the surface. With mass transit carrying pedestrians and cyclists, you need much less room on "integrate" passengers coming out from the underground, with local traffic on the surface.
If Boring gives up on the personal vehicle folly, and can build a smaller, cheaper, but equally safe tunnel for mass transit, great. But they seem preoccupied with letting people keep their cars.
This article that we're discussing, about Las Vegas, involves dedicated vehicles, not personal cars. And one of them is a 16-person people mover. It is expected to have a low enough usage that that makes sense.
How many people are you expecting to take their bikes on the subway on the Vegas strip?
Subway cost in mismanged US are ridiculous.[0] Around the world, countries like Spain are already building tunnels for the claimed cost of an Hyperloop tunnel.
Most of that extra cost comes from the legal fees around buying the land and getting permits to dig under it. A better tunnel borer doesn't address any of that.
You could maybe save on OSHA concerns if you can somehow slash the number of people employed, but you'd need to get rid of a LOT of people before you see enough gains from that to make this a game changer.
Elon's whole deal around transit is utterly uninformed about anything urban planning.
Except it does seem to have addressed that. Even the dumb test tunnel seems to have been completed for far less than it should've taken, given the constraints you mentioned.
Experts (including those who have studied foreign mass transit in detail) are at a loss to fully explain why the US's tunneling costs are so out of whack compared to other countries. Sometimes, when expert systems seem to have failed, it's a useful exercise to throw everything out (i.e. be "utterly uninformed") and learn from scratch by trying. They may fail anyway, but it's worth a shot.
Sometimes, the naive intern will find a solution because of their own naïveté. (And even then there are lots of practical things that will need to be relearned, at great pain.)
I'm under the impression that their costs are cheaper right now because public agencies are eager to see a working test case and so exempted them from environmental clearance. I doubt that will still be the case when the scheme changes from "a single tunnel from Musk's home in Bel-Air to his work in Hawthorne" to "hundreds of stacked tunnels traversing the entire city." But I'm open to corrections.
Musk seems to really dislike the idea of public transport. There's an appeal in moving a large number of people from one side of the city to the other really fast, but with their cars!?
The amount of trouble people in the US are willing to through to avoid the solution every other developed country enjoys is really mind-blowing to me. Dig a tunnel, put some rails in it, and add some sort of a vehicle on top of those rails. Splitting up a cart to individual vehicles seems wasteful, impractical, and guaranteed to move less people. A perfect example of a "gadgetbahn": completely useless 10-15 years down the road, but it wastes city's money that could have been used for actual, viable alternatives that are in use everywhere else. But hey, at least it's unique.
From a physics standpoint, what is your argument that a giant car with transfers to a number of smaller cars is more efficient than just using all smaller cars?
Public transit seems really wasteful to me: empty busses running up and down the same main streets, people going out of their way to get to a train station, subway cars stopping in the track and blocking the passage of all other vehicles, all movement stopping at a certain time due to low demand... it’s a mess.
Again, from a physics standpoint the optimal solution to me would seem to be a variety of different size autonomous cars, with 100% occupancy, which can draft each other, and tunnels that allow you to go direct(ish) to your destination with an IP-like routing plan.
What am I missing?
Is there a city that you think is close to optimal so I can study it?
Try Shenzhen. Super low cost ubiquitous underground train transport, augmented with super low cost electric taxis and buses for last mile. Occupancy is very high, and trains go every few minutes. Metros stop going at night because the taxi and bus system has sufficient capacity to cover nighttime demand.
We try to avoid it in the US because it costs us 5-10x as much money to do it. If it cost Madrid $4.5 billion to build a two mile subway extension they wouldn’t do it either.
So the solution is to still build a tunnel... but smaller... and move hundreds of people through it really fast in separate, quite heavy vehicles with no possible way of escaping the tunnel when something goes wrong? And something will go wrong.
I'm rooting for Elon with all my heart to cut down the costs of digging tunnels, but everything else about this is just ludicrous.
Americans seem to avoid social contact at all costs. Yesterday there was a comment on HN where a user said they throw things out instead of selling them because they don't want to interact with understandable people who buy second hand items.
Cars, drive throughs, home delivery food. Its all tools for avoiding social contact.
Every city I've ever seen has a large amount of personal cars on the road. Sure some people in some cities ride in shared public transit, but don't try to pretend that there are not large amounts of people that for whatever reason don't. You might want to look closer to home and solving your own problems instead of attacking the US.
> but don't try to pretend that there are not large amounts of people that for whatever reason don't.
Oh, I know precisely the reason: there's no viable alternative in place.
It might surprise you to learn that other countries were in that same situation and aren't anymore. When there's something more efficient, reliable, and cheaper to use, people tend to prefer that.
But of course, you'd first have to step outside of the US to see what a viable alternative even looks like. Judging by your first and last sentence, I'm willing to bet you haven't.
Right, because there is no car traffic in London or Tokyo or Paris or Hong Kong or Berlin, even though they are all noted for having some the best public transit.
I have stepped outside of the US. I saw a lot of car traffic in Barcelona Spain. I saw a lot of car traffic in Frankfurt Germany even though I was only in the city for a few hours. My friends in Sweden got around by car for every trip when I visited them.
I don't understand this comment at all. The Boring Company's main plans aren't to create new and novel tunnels. The Boring Company's goal is to create cheaper tunnels.
Like, if I said I was planning on developing a wheel at 1/10th the cost of current wheels, I don't care that the wheel predates my innovation by millenia. I'm not attempting to _improve_ the wheel, I'm attempting to make it viable in an increasing number of contexts by lowering the cost.
The same is true of the Boring Company.
You can dismiss it as being unrealistic, or as the cost-savings not actually being there. But I don't understand being dismissive because we already have tunnels. Of course! If we didn't already have tunnels, we wouldn't be trying to make them cheaper!
> The Boring Company's main plans aren't to create new and novel tunnels. The Boring Company's goal is to create _cheaper_ tunnels.
The Boring Company's main plans, as can be evidenced by their communications (such as their FAQ) and their commitments and attempted commitments to build actual projects, is to pitch a radically new, 21st century mode of mass transit that is really just a variation of personal rapid transit (which has historically failed at being effective mass transit solution). The meaningful commitment to building cheaper is actually... to build narrower tunnels, that are unusable for any other purposes, since there's not enough room to put in high-capacity subway trains in the same tunnel.
Oh, and for good measure, tunnels are not why subways are expensive. It's station caverns and ancillary infrastructure (such as procuring more rolling stock for the extension) that consumes most of the cost of a subway, so it's not clear that cheaper tunneling would actually meaningfully reduce the cost of building new subways.
> The Boring Company's main plans, as can be evidenced by their communications (such as their FAQ) and their commitments and attempted commitments to build actual projects
Agree that this evidences their short-term plans (1-5 years), but I actually think it's a poor-proxy of evidence of their long-term (5+ years) plans.
I mostly agree with you about their short-term plans, but my understanding (which could be wrong!) was that they had longer-term plans, of which the proposed tunnels are stepping-stones and learning opportunities towards.
Though, I'll readily acknowledge that the evidence I have for their long-term plans is thin (mostly some interviews with Elon Musk about The Boring Company, and having seen similar developments at SpaceX), so if the counter-argument is that the long-term plans aren't well-enough evidenced to be worth considering, I wouldn't disagree.
I also think it's totally reasonable to argue that those long-term plans aren't realistic or a likely potential outcome.
> Oh, and for good measure, tunnels are not why subways are expensive. It's station caverns and ancillary infrastructure (such as procuring more rolling stock for the extension) that consumes most of the cost of a subway, so it's not clear that cheaper tunneling would actually meaningfully reduce the cost of building new subways.
I don't know that I agree with this. Tunneling is definitely a significant cost whenever it happens under a city. For example, the SR99 tunneling project in Seattle cost ~$2.1B dollars to build (https://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Projects/Viaduct/Budget), and that doesn't involve any station caverns or rolling stock. It does, obviously, involve the highway finishings and road connections, but tunneling is a significant expense whenever it is required.
I mostly follow mass transit and railway projects, so that's where my numbers are derived from. Considering that Loop is pitched as a new mass transit system, it makes sense to compare it to costs. Especially because Musk loves comparing it to the obscenely overpriced NYC Second Avenue Subway extension, so it helps to understand how much it actually cost.
The Boring Company claims in its FAQ that the Second Avenue Subway cost "more than $1 billion per mile" (it doesn't mention it by name, but it's the only thing it could be referring to). The actual cost (from http://web.mta.info/capitaldashboard/CPDMega.html) is $415 million for 2 miles of 2 pairs of tunnel, with track work being another $364 million. The three new stations cost $649 million, $802 million, and $821 million--each more than the cost of all of the tunnel work.
> Considering that Loop is pitched as a new mass transit system
Is this a different loop from the LVCC Loop mentioned in the article? The LVCC Loop seems pretty clearly to fall fairly far outside the "mass transit" system, so it must be a different project you're referring to.
> The Boring Company claims in its FAQ that the Second Avenue Subway cost "more than $1 billion per mile"
Definitely agree that one of the hallmarks of Elon Musk's companies are exaggerated claims about their own abilities and about the competition. I've been impressed by his ability to deliver on some of the bold claims that he has made (even if he fails to do so on a claimed timeline), but also disappointed by his readiness to exaggerate faults in other products / solutions.
Still, if the end-result is to be to reduce tunneling costs from $415M for 2 miles down to $200M for 2 miles, that's a pretty significant result. It wouldn't be nearly as dramatic as the original goal, but still a huge improvement that would make tunneling more viable in a larger number of cases.
I’m not seeing the numbers you quoted on the linked page, but I see a $2b project to add a 3rd rail to an existing 10 mile stretch (LIRR), $2.4b for a mile+ of new tunnels and a new station (Flushing), $10b for the East Side project which entails a massive new terminal and 10,500 ft of new tunnels....
I think the theory is that these mega train stations where thousands of people walk through every hour to embark/disembark is one vision of transit, one which can serve an extremely dense metropolis, but also one which is terribly difficult to expand and maintain, as we see in NYC.
Now maybe the future is that people coming into and through the city are stopping at waypoints at the outskirts and switching on to subways which run at a fixed schedule and carry masses of people in long convoys to fixed destinations, where they then have to transfer to buses or walk to their destination. Carrying luggage or packages or even just keeping children close in these environments is stressful and requires vigilance.
Alternatively, a fully autonomous transport can pick up someone or some family at their door, and bring them directly to their destination. It can carry your luggage in the trunk. It has seats for all your party and is quiet enough to carry on a conversation or work. It plays the music you want as you go. Etc... Most importantly it works on a dynamic schedule and can accommodate any arbitrary pickup and drop off point non-stop. You can pay for different classes of service, different capacity, maybe even different transit speeds.
These are fundamentally different modes of transportation. Boring is not trying to lower the cost of fixed point mass transit hubs, nor are they going to iterate in their idea until they end up building a subway. I think it’s important to admit that fixed point transport hubs are not in fact the ultimate solution to all personal transit.
For the [rather large] share of transport which is done in personal vehicles, wouldn’t it be incredible to have a solution that’s better than the massive cost of surface roads and surface parking everywhere you look?
> For the [rather large] share of transport which is done in personal vehicles, wouldn’t it be incredible to have a solution that’s better than the massive cost of surface roads and surface parking everywhere you look?
I generally care about mass transit, and it becomes pretty obvious that if you care about mass transit, you have to get people out of the massive wastes of space of single-occupancy vehicles. The problem I see with solutions like the Loop is that they're pitched as trying to replace mass transit, and there's no consideration given to the fact that storing empty personal vehicles takes lots of space that don't exist in dense cities, or, in places such as Kansas City where SOV transit is preferred, creates massive dead zones of parking that deadens the appeal of the area.
Boring + Autonomy is an attempt at a solution to the space inefficiency of personal transport.
Personal transport is absolutely essential for the vast majority of people. Whereas public transit in most cases is not sufficient to live car-free, and ridership continues to plummet as a result which drives up costs [1].
The promise of autonomy, coupled with EVs designed for 1 million mile duty cycles opens up the possibility for personal transport to be significantly more efficient, and ecological than mass transit.
If you can do all that and put the majority of it underground, I’d say it’s revolutionary.
I'm unsure where you are getting this from. If you watch their presentation for their test tunnel unveiling (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSIzsMlwMUY), it is fairly explicitly communicated that what they are attempting to do is increase the speed at which you can bore a tunnel, thereby decreasing tunneling costs. The rapid production of the tunnel is the product here.
The video linked has Elon saying specifically that they have an industry-standard TBM that they used for the Hawthorne test tunnel. There is no improvement there. They have 2 more machines they are building that are expected to be large improvements over the tunnel status quo for that given size of tunnel they are constructing.
Again, the improvement is not in the tunnel size... they are building their own TBMs, trying to get them to be faster at tunneling than the existing machine that they have.
What if you actually reduce track / signaling / control / facilities cost massively by virtue of using self-powered autonomous vehicles? Then the math could start making a lot more sense.
> What if you actually reduce track / signaling / control / facilities cost massively by virtue of using self-powered autonomous vehicles?
The problem is that it's hard to carry more people into a tunnel than a metro train (excepting forcing everyone to become pedestrians). The proposed replacement for metro trains is so capacity inefficient that you're going to spend more building parallel tunnels, and you'll probably have an even more egregious problem of vertical circulation. Vertical circulation is already an issue of concern on the busiest passenger systems, and trying to move heavy, bulky, low-capacity personal vehicles is far more difficult (requires far more space) than packing pedestrians as current systems do.
A more point-to-point metro system would be great. The airline industry has been embracing this change for quite awhile. People don't like a hub & spoke system and it doesn't make sense to take everyone to city center which just adds to the crowding and congestion, as many current metro systems do.
Imagine a city that is crisscrossed with multiple direct metro lines. Design for extremely frequent departures, which likely means smaller carriages.
We should be designing our transit systems to be faster and better than car-based travel.
The airline industry embraced point-to-point routing in part because it reduces their costs on inelastic infrastructure on the ground, and allows them to tailor their schedule around demand at the two endpoints rather than on maintaining a network. They pay-as-they-use for airport gates and lessened their spending on hubs.
Fixed-guideway transport infrastructure (trains, busways) and dedicated structures (tunnels, bridges, airports, etc) come with high capex that must be borne by the builder. One advantage of road-based transport over rail-based transport is that the road is already there and will (often) already be built and expanded by the government just to allow private vehicles to come and go -- it's multipurpose -- while any other mode of transport requires this infrastructure to be purpose-built and maintained for the transport mode itself. That costs.
Sure, I'm by no means suggesting deprecating roads. They still serve an important purpose and will always be important for the 'last-mile'. Roads however have significant constraints since you can only build them in two dimensions.
The premise of Boring Company is that by building smaller tunnels, they can build them much more cheaply. Commutes could be more efficient, and city traffic reduced substantially if people could take tunnels across the city instead of drive.
Musk wants to re-engineering both tunnel boring and how we use tunnels - the latter may not pan out but the former is useful regardless of what gets run through the tunnel.
Not necessarily. The key cost savings that Musk envisions boils down to "build tunnels that are too small to put existing rolling stock in," which means that if the proposed personal rapid transit system turns out to be like every other PRT system and not work well, you're left with a tunnel that is too small to be useful for anything else.
Well this tunnel is only a couple miles long. Put in some lights and humans can walk the whole length to get around. It seems like a moving sidewalk could be put into this tunnel.
> The key cost savings that Musk envisions boils down to "build tunnels that are too small to put existing rolling stock in,"
Do you have a reference for that? My understanding was that over the long term the goal was to develop cost savings through better boring machines themselves, not through just by reducing the cross-sectional area of the tunnel.
I thought they were starting with smaller cross-sectional areas and working their way up as they developed machines, but by understanding of the end-goal of The Boring Company was to be able to build large tunnels at 1/10th the cost of current processes.
All of the innovations that are cited on The Boring Company's FAQ are things that are already done (e.g., reusing TBMs, or continually operating TBMs), or related to the "new" transit system and the virtues of narrower tunnels (which are overstated--at the size of tunnels we're talking about, cost tends to scale linearly with diameter, not cross-sectional area).
Making an existing tunnel wider is vastly cheaper than building an equivalent tunnel from scratch. Simply knowing the soil composition makes a huge difference.
In hard rock you can use drilling and blasting across long sections rather than just the leading edge. Alternatively, a TBM needs to remove significantly less material.
Are you sure about that? Because I have never heard about a tunnel project which has been 'upgraded' this way ever.
And if I start to think about the practical problems, like breaking up part of the tunnel before widening it, it quickly seems like building a new one might be more efficient.
Almost every tunnel has a lining that makes widening prohibitive. Which is why the London Underground is forever stuck with small tunnels on the original lines.
But more expensive than building the tunnel the right size to begin with, when you take into account the cost to build the too-small tunnel in the first place.
A lot of people really really like to travel in their individual vechicles instead of public transport. They like it so much that they spend a lot of money (a proxy for their own time and life energy), and deal with other problems like parking etc.
So a tunnel system which moves public transport trains does not compare in utility with a system which can move personal cars. Did you just ignore this fact?
The above comment pointed out that they abandoned the idea of moving personal cars, they will now have large proprietary vehicles that only travel within the tunnels and have seating for a bunch of people. Aka, trains.
This looks like a first project for them. From the previous Boring Company presentation it is clear that the long-term vision includes a lot of tunnels for private cars.
It has basicly all the same infrastructure requirements of trains, thus inevitably, similar costs, but you give it a slick new label like "people mover" and suddenly the costs are cut 90%, but nobody builds "people movers" so the bullshittium can be heavily sprinkled everywhere.
Well it's a concept I'm sure all of us are familiar with, if you want 10Gbps of throughput you can have a 32 bit bus at 322MHz or 64 bit bus at 161MHz. So if you want a tunnel with 10 cars/second you need one tunnel with at a speed of 10 cars/second or you need 10 lanes of 1car/second. That's really where my question is - the 125mph isn't what interests me, it's how you get a thousand cars (or people into cars) that are stationary, and accelerate them up without having massive gaps between them.
You could increase packet size, and do one lane with (60 cars) every minute (as opposed to one car every second).
The result is called a bus or a train.
Alternatively, use token ring. If you have a separate tack for cars to get up to speed, and really trust your hardware and your software, a car can simply slip into an empty 10m gap between cars, and slip out of it onto a side track to decelerate when it approaches its destination.
A good metaphor, because as you increase bus size, the complexity of dealing with crosstalk increases. To achieve 10 cars / second one would have to size it more than 10 times, to include bypasses so that long distance traffic doesn't interfere with shorter distance.
There still might be some human ingress/egress issues to resolve.