Here’s what Elon Musk’s 2.7-mile tunnel in LA looks like

There are a lot of unanswered questions about the ambitious project.

Read the whole story

 

[Frnic]

It amazes me how many people that have never done anything except work a job explain in great detail why Musk will fail, and yet he keeps making headway.

I for one applaud him and his vision of the future - will some of his ideas not pan out, yes, but we need more visionaries and fewer complainers.

 

[10thDoctor]

The Roads Must Roll!

Clearly Elon is actually Delos David "D.D." Harriman! He'll probably try to buy the Moon next.

 

[matthewlw]

This is an expensive an inefficient solution imagined by a wealthy person. On a medium term basis free helicopters would be more efficient at scale for at least a series of years. Tunneling is laborious and expensive and the turn needs to be made at some point. I love the ambition of it all but it doesn't pan out as it's described. Especially in a region like Los Angeles which is why a subway system is already not commonplace.

Luckily, Musk doesn't need your approval to waste his money.

Really though, he's betting that he can make tunnelling relatively cheap, at least compared to the status quo. Complete nonsense, of course, right up there with the absurd thought that you could ever make spaceflight cheap.

Relatively cheap requires density. A billion a mile doesn't turn into a small amount which is why it has always been concentrated on urban centers. My criticism may be too focused on Los Angeles but this is simple stuff. I use a helicopter regularly and that cost still wouldn't justify this. Spaceflight he cut marginally which I respect and that is important. Tunnels aren't run by subsidized government programs such as ULA which did go from $460m (ULA) to $90m (SpaeX teaser; now $150m) but even if they were overpriced and similar efficiencies could be gained it would still cost $360 million a mile to build a tunnel. Just so you can stay in your car. It's a beautiful dream but it doesn't compare with relaxing urban density and being reasonable.

 

[beth(beth(omega))]

I'm guessing the true purpose is to get enough experience with tunneling to start working toward automated tunneling so that the first folks to show up on Mars will have a place to hang out away from the radiation.

For those of us stuck here on Earth, the goal isn't just to build subways, but to make our transportation systems 3D, with pathways above and below each other to increase capacity. I think Musk said as much when he first announced the Boring Company. That will become much more economically feasible if someone can figure out how to automate and speed up the tunneling process and get the market for the necessary equipment to scale.

 

[Spudley]

i think the purpose of the boring company is to do r&d for a future manned mission to mars, in which musk wants to go underground (for relatively easy shielding from radiation etc.)

and all the transportation stuff is mostly just to get someone else to pay a part of it

Out of curiosity, just how heavy is a TBM? Given the cargo constraints of the BFR, how easy would it actually be to get one to Mars?

 

[Republikan]

Here's a Musk quote from the Teslarati article: "The tunnel network is also infinitely scalable."

Similar to the comment someone made in another thread about a process being "100% accurate", the phrase "infinitely scalable" is a sure sign of 100% pure infinite bullshit.

 

[matthewlw]

I'm guessing the true purpose is to get enough experience with tunneling to start working toward automated tunneling so that the first folks to show up on Mars will have a place to hang out away from the radiation.

For those of us stuck here on Earth, the goal isn't just to build subways, but to make our transportation systems 3D, with pathways above and below each other to increase capacity. I think Musk said as much when he first announced the Boring Company. That will become much more economically feasible if someone can figure out how to automate and speed up the tunneling process and get the market for the necessary equipment to scale.

There are much cheaper ways than such laborious things to create basic radiation shielding. Especially with energy in short supply. He is an inventive person willing to take on major tasks and the idea of going underground in earth based transport systems has some applications. Not as a primary.

 

[bossk]

Spaceflight he cut marginally which I respect and that is important.

You lost me when you referred to the drop in launch costs as marginal...

 

[matthewlw]

Here's a Musk quote from the Teslarati article: "The tunnel network is also infinitely scalable."

Similar to the comment someone made in another thread about a process being "100% accurate", the phrase "infinitely scalable" is a sure sign of 100% pure infinite bullshit.

If the tunnels are infinitely smaller we can have a global fractal transportation system though. We just need progressively smaller people and cars.

 

[Sarty]

Here's a Musk quote from the Teslarati article: "The tunnel network is also infinitely scalable."

Similar to the comment someone made in another thread about a process being "100% accurate", the phrase "infinitely scalable" is a sure sign of 100% pure infinite bullshit.

The guy who made that comment is happy to be the first upvote on this one

 

[alastairmayer]

the system will always give priority to pods for pedestrians & cyclists for less than the cost of a bus ticket.

So, it's a subway?

Not exactly. I mean it is in the terms of it is a transportation system underground, but instead of there being trains that take you from point A to point B they are small individual 'cars' (ie subway cars) taking people where they need to go:

So instead of having a single train on a loop you can have multiple smaller vehicles using the same tracks to take people directly where they want to go with a minimum of stops in between.

Yeah. Think the Enterprise's turbo-lifts, but with more side-to-side and less up-and-down.

 

[tangerinecheese]

it seems very unlikely that Musk is really thinking of this as a mass transit system, despite his pronouncements that pedestrians and cyclists will be given priority at less than the price of a bus ticket.
this is a personal transit system dreamed up by a rich guy who was pissed off about being personally inconvenienced by getting stuck in traffic and intended to be used by other rich guys.
so, the issues of scalability etc. aren't crucial. By design.

I dunno, Musk's attitude towards the rich people investing in his companies seems to be "shut up about profits, I'm doing important things here and it'll pay out later", which is a far cry from what the average CEO does with a large corporation. Doesn't seem like he much cares for others at his level of economic status.

 

[firsttimecaller]

not quite getting the big picture.

as a subway with 1,000 stops it sounds annoying. you don't generally want your ride to lose momentum. and if the stops are so close, you need to think about just walking.


but maybe it's for cars? then what are the logistics of a small space and getting off/on?

 

[matthewlw]

It amazes me how many people that have never done anything except work a job explain in great detail why Musk will fail, and yet he keeps making headway.

I for one applaud him and his vision of the future - will some of his ideas not pan out, yes, but we need more visionaries and fewer complainers.

He is brilliant and leads with visionary excellence. Nobody in that realm succeeds or falls by a single concept but anything is worthy of discussion. He rolls the dice and makes an effort, and enough people that do that change how we all work eventually. Cheers to that.

 

[matthewlw]

Spaceflight he cut marginally which I respect and that is important.

You lost me when you referred to the drop in launch costs as marginal...

A billion a mile built in cost for a tunnel. 60% off still makes no sense (assuming insane efficiencies). I did elaborate, I apologize for that word. So for a cheap at least $400 million/mile vs $2-3 million a mile in a best case, cars can move underground faster. Deal.

 

[tangerinecheese]

not quite getting the big picture.

as a subway with 1,000 stops it sounds annoying. you don't generally want your ride to lose momentum. and if the stops are so close, you need to think about just walking.


but maybe it's for cars? then what are the logistics of a small space and getting off/on?

I've played enough factorio to know that you can solve any problem with more belts! I would think that rather than his original idea of a single loading station it would be more practical to have a small parking lot worth of space with many loading stations. A sled would occupy the space of a parking stall, you drive into it, are clamped in, and descend. Underground you can easily have a feeder system to load from multiple "stations" the way a roller coaster with multiple platforms does, so that sleds can be loaded very quickly one after another. Meanwhile an empty sled will have taken the space you just vacated in the system and be on its way up to the surface. That's how I would tackle the issue anyways.

A large city like L.A. has many below-ground parking structures as it is, you make deals with enough property owners to access their space and put in a dedicated Boring Entry/Exit and the issue of placement solves itself.

 

[Morris von Habsburg]

This is an expensive an inefficient solution imagined by a wealthy person. On a medium term basis free helicopters would be more efficient at scale for at least a series of years. Tunneling is laborious and expensive and the turn needs to be made at some point. I love the ambition of it all but it doesn't pan out as it's described. Especially in a region like Los Angeles which is why a subway system is already not commonplace.

Luckily, Musk doesn't need your approval to waste his money.

Really though, he's betting that he can make tunnelling relatively cheap, at least compared to the status quo. Complete nonsense, of course, right up there with the absurd thought that you could ever make spaceflight cheap.

I don't really understand what it is that Musk is adding here, to be honest. Tunneling has been automated for decades and one can order a standard tunnel boring machine practically off the shelf. Why does he think he can do it cheaper than the market leaders with decades of experience?

I wonder if he is making the same mistake that he is (IMHO) making with Hyperloop in that he thinks technology is the bottleneck and that creating a different design will change things. Technology is almost always the easy part, the hard parts are usally economics, regulation and marketing (granted, marketing is the one thing I feel Musk is definitely good at).

All in all, even if you halve the price per meter for a bored tunnel it still will have a negligible effect on the total cost of a project. Similarly with time. Look at any major metro/subway project and you'll see that the time boring the actual tunnel is perhaps a tenth of the total time involved. Both planning beforehand and fitting out the tunnel once bored take longer than the drilling itself.

 

[pancakesandbeyond]

Oops double post

 

[Ringold76]

Density is going to be a huge problem for this idea:
- For not-particularly dense cities you need very large tunnels to build a system worth using. This is very expensive.
- For dense cities having a lot of small stations is inefficient as land is more expensive. More population also means crowded stations.
- Elevators for cars or passengers ingress/egress have a capacity way smaller than ramps/scalators.
- Throughput is going to be a problem as you need enough separation between sleds to allow them to stop without crashing in case of failures. This separation combined with the small size of the sleds is going to result in a very small passengers/hour/tunnel capacity.

Especially in regions specified this is a solution to suit Musk himself or other people of high wealth. A tunnel doesn't beat a road and it would take thousands in a city with so much geographic disparity as LA. It only makes sense as a premium product for wealthy individuals. It's an exciting concept but it's not based in reality. An urban road cost around $2-3m/mile and a tunnel costs around $1billion/mile ^1. Expand that to a large system or roadways. Even with high improvements in efficiency it's flat out silly. ^1 https://www.teslarati.com/boring-compan ... l-digging/

A tunnel costs around $1 billion/mile? He just built 2.7 miles, and didn't spend anywhere near 2.7 billion.

Allow me to offer a correction. Just like a launch only costs a billion dollars if NASA does it, it only costs an astounding amount of money to tunnel if government does it. We've been tunneling a long time. I'll point out we built the entire Transcontinental Railroad in just 6 years for about $1.3 billion in todays dollars (my quick estimate), plus some land grants, most of which were in the middle of nowhere and without value (but certainly not all). That included a lot of blasting through mountain rock.

If you look at how bloated and corrupt surface road construction has become, I think Elon has happened upon another sector that, like space launch, is so ripe for the picking it's nearly falling off the branch on its own.

 

[Sarty]

I don't really understand what it is that Musk is adding here, to be honest. Tunneling has been automated for decades and one can order a standard tunnel boring machine practically off the shelf. Why does he think he can do it cheaper than the market leaders with decades of experience?

Many in tech seem to perceive that disruption of the status quo is, in and of itself, a feature.

I take the contrary view that, most of the time, we do things the way we do them because it's mostly been the least-bad option we've tried, and that nearly anything you can think of is more complicated than it looks on the surface.

Sometimes there's a new way you can try that's better than the previous ways. Sometimes you're just too clever by half.
.
.
.
edit: I solemnly swear that "more complicated than it looks on the surface" was not an intentional joke about digging tunnels

 

[matthewlw]

This is an expensive an inefficient solution imagined by a wealthy person. On a medium term basis free helicopters would be more efficient at scale for at least a series of years. Tunneling is laborious and expensive and the turn needs to be made at some point. I love the ambition of it all but it doesn't pan out as it's described. Especially in a region like Los Angeles which is why a subway system is already not commonplace.

Luckily, Musk doesn't need your approval to waste his money.

Really though, he's betting that he can make tunnelling relatively cheap, at least compared to the status quo. Complete nonsense, of course, right up there with the absurd thought that you could ever make spaceflight cheap.

I don't really understand what it is that Musk is adding here, to be honest. Tunneling has been automated for decades and one can order a standard tunnel boring machine practically off the shelf. Why does he think he can do it cheaper than the market leaders with decades of experience?

I wonder if he is making the same mistake that he is (IMHO) making with Hyperloop in that he thinks technology is the bottleneck and that creating a different design will change things. Technology is almost always the easy part, the hard parts are usally economics, regulation and marketing (granted, marketing is the one thing I feel Musk is definitely good at).

All in all, even if you half the price per meter for a bored tunnel it still will have a negligible effect on the total cost of a project. Similarly with time. Look at any major metro/subway project and you'll see that the time boring the actual tunnel is perhaps a tenth of the total time involved. Both planning beforehand and fitting out the tunnel once bored take longer than the drilling itself.

Thank you for being knowledgeable. Current average expense $1b/mile for a tunnel. Urban road average high point $3m/mile. Space launch was very due for disruption because of stagnant Apollo era contracts that required inefficient political budgets and almost no competition. Tunneling has real and reasonable built in expenses, it's difficult and laborious. You can't turn a billion a mile into less than likely 600 million a mile, even that is much too far from reasonable. I say this as an investor from a large tech company and someone who deeply supports SpaceX.

 

[mltdwn]

Density is going to be a huge problem for this idea:
- For not-particularly dense cities you need very large tunnels to build a system worth using. This is very expensive.
- For dense cities having a lot of small stations is inefficient as land is more expensive. More population also means crowded stations.
- Elevators for cars or passengers ingress/egress have a capacity way smaller than ramps/scalators.
- Throughput is going to be a problem as you need enough separation between sleds to allow them to stop without crashing in case of failures. This separation combined with the small size of the sleds is going to result in a very small passengers/hour/tunnel capacity.

In terms of throughput I think that has a big chance of being a wash. Instead of having a large train stopped in the middle of the tracks delaying all other trains as people off load and on load at every station instead you have cars constantly in motion on the main track and only splitting off to side areas to off load, presumably at speed. When the main thoroughfare is at a constant speed with only minor slow downs during pods merging and then speed ups as pods exit to take up the empty space you can move a lot of people.

Think of it as a highway where all of the cars are all going the same speed and the merging is perfectly synchronized. You get a hell of a lot more efficiency than we would now where most gridlock is caused by individuals constantly exiting and entering at different speeds and rates causing constant speed ups and slow downs. Also people being morons at driving doesn’t help.

 

[Cheshire Cat]

I love it.
... 397.3 miles to go.
* stares impatiently at progress bar *

 

[storyteller]

Wow. 2.7 miles?! Already?! It took the NYC MTA, what? ... 100 years to mostly finish the 2nd Ave. line? Musk please build a cross town subway on 125th street.

 

[jimcox]

This is an expensive an inefficient solution imagined by a wealthy person. On a medium term basis free helicopters would be more efficient at scale for at least a series of years. Tunneling is laborious and expensive and the turn needs to be made at some point. I love the ambition of it all but it doesn't pan out as it's described. Especially in a region like Los Angeles which is why a subway system is already not commonplace.

Luckily, Musk doesn't need your approval to waste his money.

Really though, he's betting that he can make tunnelling relatively cheap, at least compared to the status quo. Complete nonsense, of course, right up there with the absurd thought that you could ever make spaceflight cheap.

Relatively cheap requires density. A billion a mile doesn't turn into a small amount which is why it has always been concentrated on urban centers. My criticism may be too focused on Los Angeles but this is simple stuff. I use a helicopter regularly and that cost still wouldn't justify this. Spaceflight he cut marginally which I respect and that is important. Tunnels aren't run by subsidized government programs such as ULA which did go from $460m (ULA) to $90m (SpaeX teaser; now $150m) but even if they were overpriced and similar efficiencies could be gained it would still cost $360 million a mile to build a tunnel. Just so you can stay in your car. It's a beautiful dream but it doesn't compared with relaxing urban density and being reasonable.

Did this 2.7 mile tunnel cost 2.7 billion dollars? That cost per mile sounds like an overall cost for an entire subway system divided by the miles the subway system covers. A more distributed system isn’t going to have the same level of cost.

I would worry about the boring companies system being able to scale up though. It is basically an underground road, and we know roads don’t scale at all well to heavy traffic. The “cars” will all be self driving, I assume, but that doesn’t fix everything. If a large number of people want to go to a similar destination, it is unclear how they would get a large number of “cars” up to street level and back down in a small amount of space and time. Perhaps they will be having the “cars” drive some distance on the surface. Also, autonomous vehicles doesn’t make a “single lane” tunnel magically able to carry a huge amount of traffic. Computerized scheduling could keep things moving much faster than human driven cars, but there are limits. There is no guarantee that they are planning on using what would be considered a human safe following distance. They could us more of a roundabout for connecting multiple tunnels combined with vehicles able to communicate with each other or a more centralized routing system. This still has limitations though. They may be able to scale by just adding more lanes, but that hasn’t worked well for highways with human drivers. If it does work better with computers doing the driving, then the “exit ramp” still seems like a major bottleneck.

They have one tunnel built, but that has limited applicability to the entire system. It would be more of a novelty at this point, rather than a useful transportation system. A lot of people would go ride it to see what it is like. It may be a while before we can get useful data on how well a distributed system would actually work. This is basically autonomous cars on a road where non-autonomous cars are not allowed. It is not a traditional subway system with trains carrying thousands.

 

[same.dan]

So this tunnel needs exits shafts every few meters, right? How does your pod get out 'when you want' ? Something doesn't add up here...

Edit: This seems more like a rich man solution to bypass the traffic.

 

[WiseGuy7]

Underground tunnel .. a truly revolutionary idea from a visionary man.
When can I buy some hats and t-shirts ?

 

[alastairmayer]

This is an expensive an inefficient solution imagined by a wealthy person. On a medium term basis free helicopters would be more efficient at scale for at least a series of years. Tunneling is laborious and expensive and the turn needs to be made at some point. I love the ambition of it all but it doesn't pan out as it's described. Especially in a region like Los Angeles which is why a subway system is already not commonplace.

Luckily, Musk doesn't need your approval to waste his money.

Really though, he's betting that he can make tunnelling relatively cheap, at least compared to the status quo. Complete nonsense, of course, right up there with the absurd thought that you could ever make spaceflight cheap.

I don't really understand what it is that Musk is adding here, to be honest. Space launches have been automated for decades and one can order a standard launch vehicle practically off the shelf. Why does he think he can do it cheaper than the market leaders with decades of experience?

There, clarified that for you.

 

[BigAssRat]

It seems like his proposed system has more points of failure than a traditional subway train system. I appreciate the idea that I could drive my car into and out of this system to continue my journey. But every single sled has to function or else the whole tunnel comes to a stop.

Trains concentrate propulsion into fewer points of failure.

Duh...didn't you see how fast the camera was going? The camera was able to travel that 2.7miles in roughly 6 seconds, and the camera didn't even lean. Pretty impressive ;-)

 

[Ringold76]

I don't really understand what it is that Musk is adding here, to be honest. Tunneling has been automated for decades and one can order a standard tunnel boring machine practically off the shelf. Why does he think he can do it cheaper than the market leaders with decades of experience?

Many in tech seem to perceive that disruption of the status quo is, in and of itself, a feature.

I take the contrary view that, most of the time, we do things the way we do them because it's mostly been the least-bad option we've tried, and that nearly anything you can think of is more complicated than it looks on the surface.

Sometimes there's a new way you can try that's better than the previous ways. Sometimes you're just too clever by half.

My industry directly abuts construction. Believe me, not a lot is done in construction because we've tried other things and this is the least-bad. Far more often, it's because someone/company has captured part of the regulatory process and mandated a specific methodology or technology, or labor unions nudge regulations to favor more labor-intensive methods, or sub-sectors that would risk being wiped out by innovation lobby to block it.. Or most often of all, that's how we did it at some point between 1950 and 1980 and it got frozen in to law, and now there's a lot of money to be made by not upsetting that apple cart.

There's also corruption, from top to bottom (and by that I mean from the Senate all the way on down to smaller towns permitting office, fire marshals, etc).

Between tradition, capture, resistance to change and overt corruption, no, I don't think you describe the state of regulations in the construction world at all.

There's a lot to be gained if someone can figure out how to side-step a lot of that.

 

[xrmb]

Why is the video so blurry? And that doesn't look like 2.7 miles at all.

Because you are traveling almost at the speed of light... thats why the video is blurry and short.

 

[alastairmayer]

not quite getting the big picture.

as a subway with 1,000 stops it sounds annoying. you don't generally want your ride to lose momentum. and if the stops are so close, you need to think about just walking.


but maybe it's for cars? then what are the logistics of a small space and getting off/on?

That's why it's not a subway. If the car you're in doesn't need to stop at a given station, it doesn't.

Of course that means either some really fancy scheduling algorithms and control, or bypasses for the stations. Or some combination of both.

 

[Morris von Habsburg]

This is an expensive an inefficient solution imagined by a wealthy person. On a medium term basis free helicopters would be more efficient at scale for at least a series of years. Tunneling is laborious and expensive and the turn needs to be made at some point. I love the ambition of it all but it doesn't pan out as it's described. Especially in a region like Los Angeles which is why a subway system is already not commonplace.

Luckily, Musk doesn't need your approval to waste his money.

Really though, he's betting that he can make tunnelling relatively cheap, at least compared to the status quo. Complete nonsense, of course, right up there with the absurd thought that you could ever make spaceflight cheap.

I don't really understand what it is that Musk is adding here, to be honest. Space launches have been automated for decades and one can order a standard launch vehicle practically off the shelf. Why does he think he can do it cheaper than the market leaders with decades of experience?

There, clarified that for you.

I get your point but I would argue that the two sectors are not comparable. Spaceflight is almost exclusively technology-limited while tunneling (or even urban transport as a whole) are not technology-limited but rather economics or regulation-limited.

Want to make tunneling considerably cheaper with very little effort? Just have government declare that property rights by default only extend three meters below someone's property or else require licensing. That would give most people enough space to have a basement under their house while if a subway line needs to pass underneath they have no recourse.

Theoretically such a change in the law can be pretty straightforward but would cut tunneling costs more than making a better tunnel boring machine.

 

[searaydriver]

the system will always give priority to pods for pedestrians & cyclists for less than the cost of a bus ticket.

So, it's a subway?

Not exactly. I mean it is in the terms of it is a transportation system underground, but instead of there being trains that take you from point A to point B they are small individual 'cars' (ie subway cars) taking people where they need to go:..... to take people directly where they want to go with a minimum of stops in between.

Here's an above ground example of this sort of system that has been operating since 1975. I guess that Elon will use such a system underground.

https://transportation.wvu.edu/prt

 

[harmless]

I don't really understand what it is that Musk is adding here, to be honest. Tunneling has been automated for decades and one can order a standard tunnel boring machine practically off the shelf. Why does he think he can do it cheaper than the market leaders with decades of experience?

I don't know, but that sound almost exactly like what people said about SpaceX a few years ago ...

Edit: Yeah, yeah, I didn't watch out for ninjas, I get it.

 

[wvmikep]

Instead of tunneling long continuous subway tunnels, maybe he could just create multiple, shorter 2-3 mile tunnels across the city, like airport motorized walk-ways that have a gap at a group of gates? That way he can avoid tunneling through the most complicated areas, and pick off where there's less obstacles and still have some sort of patch-work system.

They could even branch off existing subway lines.

 

[fredsbend]

This is neither ambitious nor innovative. It's a tunnel with a rail in it. We've done that before. Like rails above ground, whether they're useful comes down to where they are installed and how much it costs. Not every idea Musk has is worth talking about.

 

[wvmikep]

The video clearly highlights a single-track system; does Musk intend this to be a one-way route that switches directions with the prevailing flow of rush hour traffic?

Also, don't most cyclists choose that method of travel to enjoy the outdoors while getting some exercise? In which case, going underground and standing next to your bicycle on an electric sled would seem to defeat the purpose.

On the other hand, one can imagine LA traffic jams could have driven people who wouldn't normally bicycle onto two wheels out of necessity, in which case those commuters may welcome a respite from the stoplight slog.

I bike to work to:
*save money on parking
*save money on gas and wear & tear on my car
*get through city part of my commute quicker
*avoid the DC Metro