Sure. Why didn't we have electric cars before tesla? Why didn't Boeing or Lockheed Martin make reusable rockets?
Alan Kay said something[1] recently that has been bouncing around my head for the past few days. He said that many people think darwinian processes (like the economy) optimize. "One my degrees is in molecular biology, and I can tell you, any biologist would say they're absolutely not optimized. The whole point is to fit into some niche in an environment. And if the environment isn't the right kind of environment evolution isn't going to give you something interesting".
In the context of the economy, if there's no innovation, and not enough competition, and no new players entering a market, I don't think its all that surprising that the existing companies might stop reaching to be more efficient.
It seems strange to think that companies would leave money on the table, but in older industries I think this is exactly what happens. The money just requires too much organizational churn for their corporate appetite.
The more I think about organizations the more I they seem to be the key players preventing change to me. (Which is not necessarily a bad thing)
Business says: We had this great idea, now let's freeze everything in time and let's make money of this snapshot forever, because who knows when we'll find gold again.
Entertainment industry likes to do that especially.
Darwinian processes are near-perfectly optimized ... for an extremely local maximum. Once there, they fail to make jumps to much better nearby maxima.
If you look at a somewhat larger scale, where there are better maxima available, then the correct conclusion is that they are absolutely not optimized.
A great example of this is me; I'm pretty amazing; I can move around my environment, make a living to a sufficient degree to cover costs of food and shelter, and somehow even have a fiancée and manage to keep another organism alive & fed. However I'm not an expert at everything, I'm pretty bad at most sporting based things (even compared to other, existing humans; not some theoretical concept of perfection), and I spend about a third of my life doing nothing (sleeping), despite this not necessarily being required (e.g. Dolphins can sleep half their brain at a time, allowing them to avoid this inefficient downtime).
Somewhat related: it was interesting when my kids were born; they both had to be C-sectioned. I asked the obstetrician about it, and yes, bigger heads are becoming more and more common because mother+child no longer just die when they do occur. We really are removing selection pressures!
There's a huge difference between "exploit in the now" and "exploit, but still be viable in a billion+ years".
Von Braun originally proposed reusable boosters, although he had in mind a parachute system with a water splashdown. A recovery system for the Saturn V was considered, but it would have added time to the schedule, and the "man/moon/decade" goal would have been at risk.
I'm not sure you are accepting the basic principle, which is that evolution is not in any way optimization (not that the evolutionary process is not "optimized").
See something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherian_runaway
Also Giuseppe Longo's work on randomness as a cause of organizational complexity in evolution: http://montevil.theobio.org/en/system/files/articlepdf/Longo...
It's only when the environment changes (rise of mammals post dinosaur-extinction) or the organisms themselves change environment (Darwin's finches) that you get the rapid rates of evolution to find the new optimumm.
Some obvious analogies of these two situations in tech are the rise of the Internet (Microsoft did change, but struggled), and the rise of the smartphone (Apple came from nowhere to a position of dominance).
Mostly because batteries sucked. Small electronics drove most of the research to improve them.
I guess Tesla vehicles are market leading in several ways, but they aren't a generation ahead of what anyone else can do or anything like that.
But sure, no one is out there doing anything other than Tesla.
And I think I am giving credit where credit is due. Battery research made a lot of progress, Tesla used the resulting batteries to make nice electric vehicles. I mean, they have a battery partner and all that jazz.
This is probably true, but it's also deeply heretical for believers in market efficiency.
A public transportation network's usefulness is roughly quadratic in proportion to its size, because it needs to cover both your origin and your destination. A small subway system is nearly useless, because even people who live or work near it probably don't live and work near it. You can mitigate this to an extent with busses, taxis, letting people park at stations, etc., but there's still a lot of friction.
By carrying cars, these tunnels will act as an extension of the road network, which almost certainly covers your origin and destination already. The tunnel part doesn't need to serve the ends, it just needs to exist somewhere in the middle to be useful.
If you build one subway line, it's pretty much "great, let's finish the system so we can have something useful." If you build one Boring Tunnel, it would be immediately useful for anyone whose car trips are vaguely in that direction.
I'm really skeptical it'll all work out, but I don't think it should be thought of as a lame subway.
Unfortunately, they don't allow it during rush hour due to space constraints, so it's not nearly as useful as it could be.
Because with trains you never build just a tunnel - there are train stations, escalators leading in and out, ticketing booths/machines, electrical work to power all that fun stuff, connectors to existing depots so that maintenance workers can come and service the cars and the engines.
His idea is closer to Madrid, which has dug tunnels to relieve the city streets of the traffic. The tunnels themselves are very unassuming and look like onramps and underground parking garage entrances.
Everything about Musk's idea seems absolutely terrible. If America had better trains and subways, it could move massive amounts of people. Train automation is a solved problem, and currently implemented in cities around the world. There is absolutely no possible way in any reality where individual car/pod transport could even approach the capacity of real mass transit:
http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-sol...
Americans need to get over our wasteful individualism, our "alone time" in cars and realize you can read a book, watch a movie or do something not involving driving on real public transport. Buses need to stop being just a means of transport for the poor.
In most European cities, if you get off at train station, you're in the midst of (or very close to) the city center, office locations, touristy walking sites and plenty of choices for retail or food.
In the US once you get off at the train station, well, you're at the train station, and now need a car to go anywhere you actually need to go. NYC and SF are likely to be the only exception - train stations as close as LA or San Jose are fairly sparse and have limited connections.
You can run the fastest most frequent train you can handle, and California in fact is building one between Borden and Corcoran, but the "step 2" in US cities generally involves getting a car.
EDIT: embellishment due to baq, this tends to be true of cities which developed before the car revolution of the 50's and 60's. For example, my city has a pretty poor average walkability score, but for where I live in the city core, it is very walkable since it is the older part of the city.
This lesson seems to have been lost for some reason but infrastructure is to be built first, destinations second. Much of the New York City Subway system, like in the Bronx, was built through farmland. Once the infrastructure was built, destinations (dense residential) was built. It has to work that way. It's not practical to expect there to be any destinations available when the subway opens- people need a few decades to rearrange themselves.
Portland should probably join that list.
Depends what his goal is. Currently getting from A to B in a car at a certain time involves traffic jams.
If his goal is to get from A to B most efficiently in a car then it's one of the best ideas.
If his goal is get people from A to B via any mode of transport, perhaps trains. But he owns a car company, so that's not exactly in his interest.
Also with cars it's truly A to B. Not A to subway/carpark, wait, travel, walk to B.
That's why public mass transport was created and was so successful in the big cities. US big automotive destroyed most of this working infrastructure in the last century (E.g. Los Angeles, Houston, ...) but it's still cheaper to build mass transport than to support individual transport. Just ask a New Yorker or a foreigner.
Tunnels are a hazard for individual traffic. That's why pods do help. But trains are still preferred.
It's a good alternative idea to build long range tunnels. He is right. But the focus needs to be mass transport, not individual. It's a matter of costs.
You could rent your car back to the system to use as a lounge for people who want to travel but didn't bring a car to get on the network. Saves you parking costs, maybe an operator could work out paying you for that.
But for big cities trains are much better and cheaper.
Tunnels are great parking structures. Cars on sleds provide a great interface to said parking structure. Heck, NYC has automated parking structures with car elevators and sleds. The only imagination required is not having to dig a big hole down to the depth of the lowest level of the garage first.
Another problem is that all those people have to walk to and from the end station.
A "packet switched" system of sending individual cars at high speed solves both those problems, and going just by my gut feel, should have a quite high throughput too.
Then I sat at an intersection one day and counted how many individuals were being moved through two lanes of regular car traffic vs how many came through on the light rail.
I was shocked by how inefficient regular traffic is.
So now MY gut feel is that without any technological breakthrough, this sort of system would already be starting with an order of magnitude disadvantage: which is to say, shockingly inefficient compared to allready available technology and solutions...
People are walking from the station to these giant office towers in central London. The walk from the Tube station to the office must only take 5-10 minutes, total. My gut feeling says the throughput won't be high specifically because you'll have 800 or so people trying to get out at the same place at roughly the same time.
Where mass transit struggles is in getting people from one arbitrary spot to another at an arbitrary time.
There is a delay between each car which after 20 cars really adds up.
How would that work? Now it's true that there won't be any delays caused by drivers not paying attention, but unless the cars will go 125 mph with only a couple meters of space between them (eep!) the cars will require a non-zero delay "off the line" to allow them to spread out as they gain speed.
How fast they can fork and merge is more interesting, and I dare not have an opinion about that.
I think in the original video, they showed a pod with a group of commuters.
Furthermore, a solution that leverages personal vehicles is slightly more viable for a private sector company. Telsa can continue to promote their car sales without that having a negative effect on the Boring Company.
This idea that a company can replace our entire existing infrastructure with a train/bus system is just purely impractical. There is the solution that seems the most obvious (current public transit), and then there is the one that is actually viable from a business perspective.
I don't get it, where does that come from anyway? I mean America's mostly a country of immigrants; most inhabitants' forefathers, only a couple generations ago, abandoned everything they know to build up a new life. If that's not change, then IDK what is.
I think that at one point it's not about what they want - having the option even to drive anywhere is a luxury a lot of people don't have - it's what's practical. Driving in New York isn't practical, so people take the tube - regular services, high capacity, etc. There's no way a tunnel system with individual cars, which will have a much lower capacity than a regular road, will be able to compete, neither on cost nor capacity.
Of course, if you're rich then it doesn't matter. I'm sure it'll work in SF, where there should be plenty of people that can afford it.
The best answer I have: the more people are individualistic, the more difficult it is for them to coordinate. Big changes like fundamental infrastructure require collective buy-in, and when you have lots of self-interested individuals who stand to gain by introducing friction into the process, costs skyrocket.
The alternative ends of the spectrum (it's not 1D) of that is more social people (dream utopia, I don't know where it exists, if at all) and more authoritarian control (easiest way to coordinate people is to have someone unilaterally decide for them).
That's an excellent answer and I think you are right. Car culture is a big deal in the US and I think the perceived independence it represents is part of the reason why.
Let's:
* replace tipping with a minimum wage which helping working people get out of poverty
* make checks obsolete
* etc.
> Driving in New York isn't practical, so people take the tube
The what now? I think you'll find it's actually called le Métropolitain
- Eliminate small coins
- Move to metric in a practical sense rather than just officialUh? What? Please explain - are you expecting everything to go fine the first time, because in the history of the world, that almost never happens.
The tunnels obviously don't make sense in places that have well established train systems, but a lot of places don't have that. Often in America, the only 'practical' way to get around is using a personal vehicle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_Rail_(Los_Angeles_County...
The tunnels themselves are very unassuming
Ventilation, as a very critical entity, comes to mind. Also safety features are extremely critical. I live in a country with lots of tunnels and essentially every longer auto tunnel has additional tubes that are under pressure, for example. That's required if you suddenly have a burning vehicle in the middle of a narrow tube.
While car tunnels don't need to be sexy from an optical perspective there's a ton of necessary infrastructure and safety features, which aren't immediately obvious.
Maybe this changes when we all go electric, but I really don't see that happening anytime soon.
For what its worth, it hints that those sleds will also become public transit platforms as well - "if one adds a vacuum shell, it is now a Hyperloop pod" - but Musk will want to call it something cool like an Urban Hyperloop instead of just a subway.
So this is something I've been trying to address all thread, so excuse me picking your comment.
You can only create a public transit platform by having _dedicated_ infrastructure. We know this because cities like London and Paris (and not-so-big Vancouver) all have mostly-to-fully automated trains with 90-second headways between each train at rush hour. This basically means that if once a train pulls out of the station, the next one pulls in mere seconds later. These trains are usually packed to the gills. Even one single-occupancy vehicle would decrease the overall efficiency of that system.
Heck, you can create a tunnel in each which sled contains one bus and it'd still be less efficient than the London Tube because the whole thing will take up more space, physically (these trains squeeze in every last passenger). This is what Seattle tried to do with the downtown bus tunnel and they're evicting all the buses there in favor of light rail.
I think it will always make sense for subway trains in dense city cores, but I think the discussion about dedicated rapid transit is hampered in more suburban areas because of the whole notion that we have to fit in cars into rapid transit corridors, or else it's not worth it. But this ends up making buses less reliable and gives them their crappy reputation (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_bunching).
Grade-separation is absolutely necessary for good rapid transit.
It would be interesting I guess if they combined it with the Hyperloop concept, board the tube system in the city, transition to a (cheaper?) above-ground vacuum tunnel system at a transit station.
But it's all very science-fiction and, if anything, it's not going to be cheap. Like, at all.
At least it's a commercial project, not something a government has to pay for.
It may be expensive - but you only have to build each tunnel once.
There's a startup that got some hype recently for flying an electric airplane between London and Paris - when as someone commented on the HN story [0] you can just take the Eurostar through the tunnel - which is electric and takes just as long and doesn't cost any more.
Because people have opinions on trains. So instead of building train tunnels you debate it for 20 years in town halls and NIMBY protests and nothing changes.
This is clearly a hack around that issue. The article mentions a Hyperloop several times, that's the ultimate goal here.
Anecdote, I don't have a lot of mileage (pun unintended), but every girl I've ever dated did not have license, and neither do I, and I am 27. I live alone and bike and bus ride for the most part.
[0] http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-millennials-c...
There is the possibility of increased urbanization and improvements to self-driving car technology will make it economically feasible for car ownership to be unnecessary for most, but I highly doubt that happens within the millennial generation. Probably the next one.
But what if the cost were a tenth as much? I posit that for a city of 500,000 - 1,000,000 it might become practical to have subways and that radically changes the transit equation.
So I am very bullish on Musk bringing down the cost of tunneling. It all depends on how low he's able to reduce the cost.
If smart and motivated teams can't do something, can anyone?
With something like soil, maybe they figure the technology will be useful even if it only services projects with easy terrain and environments and avoids areas with swamps.
Actually, the story is that Musk made it up on a whim while stuck in L.A. traffic, founded the company the same day and bought a used drilling rig which started digging in the Tesla parking lot.
Really the main difference is that someone without money and follow through would've just sat in traffic and complained.
Yes, of course, now that he has money, connections, and a powerful reputation, that makes it easier for him to do things. But he created the money, connections, and power by being able to do things even when he had none of them.
And in general - entrepreneur "origin" stories are often bullshit - useful to get go PR, that's it.
You might want to look at them closer. Hyperloop and ET3 are very different from a technical perspective, even though they're superficially similar.
ET3 tubes need 1/1,000,000th of an atmosphere to mitigate the sonic boom, and that makes the pumping requirements exceedingly hard (requiring multi-stage pumping with turbo- and cryo-pumps). That also means ET3 has a higher top speed, assuming you can secure the right-of-way to satisfy the minimum curve radius.
Hyperloop tubes use 1/1,000th of an atmosphere, chosen because it's the lowest pressure achievable with purely mechanical pumping. They then route air around the pod, allowing them to approach the speed of sound despite the fact that air has to speed up as it squeezes around the pod (aka the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kantrowitz_Limit).
So ET3's pumps see basically the same differential pressure, but 1,000x more volume needs to be pumped per m^3 of air that leaks in. This means the Hyperloop requires less pumping power, fewer pump units, uses only cheap mechanical pumps, and can tolerate more air leakage than ET3. This is a big win, since the tube is the expensive part.
let's judge the outcome - or lack of it - when they fold or succeed.
Cities of 500000 inhabitants which have a subway exist. See
My family is from Lausanne and I spent a few months studying in Rennes–the size and density plus the metro system makes these cities really pleasingly 'human scaled' in my view. Walking-first center city areas with lots of restaurants/shops, easily accessed from less dense areas by metro+good bus systems+intercity train, but small enough overall to not feel sprawling.
The figure is way out. Crossrail in London has a $20 billion total budget (£15b GBP), with 26 miles of tunnel[1]. But the tunnel is only part of the project, several billion is being spent on new regular track and station rebuilds, so the tunneling figure is really closer to $15 billion.
That's about $570 million per mile, but the Crossrail tunnels are just shy of 50% bigger in diameter than what Musk wants to build (20.5' vs 14'). And as the FAQ says, "reducing the diameter in half reduces tunneling costs by 3-4 times".
LA's tunnel might be costing $1B/mile, but how much of that cost is actual construction versus bureaucracy and mismanagement?
The closest thing is the Regional Connector project, which will be 1.9 miles of light rail and has a budget of $1.8B. But that's the entire project budget. Tunneling costs are only part of it; it's hard to find a finely grained budget, but total construction (including four new underground stations) is budgeted at $1.2B here [1], which is still "just" $600M/mile.
[1]: https://mtadash.mlmprojectservices.com/projects/5773#/cost
But that project was building a subway including station directly below a riverbed.
A few reasons off the top of my head:
- flexibility; car infrastructure is much more flexible than train infrastructure
- incremental construction - cars already exist, you're only solving the problem of moving them around (building train infrastructure means building more trains with additional train-supporting infrastructure and more railroads outside of tunnels)
- meshes well with electrification of car transportation
- allows to reduce fossil fuel polution with minimum impact on people's habits - instead of asking someone to start using trains, you just ask them to drive into a tunnel, and for the duration of tunnel transit, the pollution (and fuel costs) magically disappear
- related, it's easier do incremental changes than all-out revolutions
- R&D in efficient boring could be of vital importance to future Mars colony
- last but not least, electric PRT system (aka. "packed-switched" public transport) could be, and probably will, incrementally implemented with self-driving electric cars; this again meshes nicely with that future (benefits of PRT over other forms of public transit are a longer topic)
Presumably whether this system is privately or publicly operated, there would be a major toll associated with its use. So the ask isn't just "drive into a tunnel", it's "drive into a tunnel and pay $$$", compared with a new subway line integrated with the existing mass transit system (trains and buses) and under the same fare.
Traffic is often massively asymmetric so you can just reverse the direction it travels at noon.
It seems plausible that keeping a conveyor belt in good service is cheaper than keeping a fleet of railway cars is. It's also significantly less hassle as you don't need to figure out where to put railway cars when they get the end of the track. Finally it's costs would scale fairly linearly with distance, making short belts totally doable in a way that short railway systems are not.
The natural throughput of the system will be high. Like a new car on the belt every x seconds, where x is not a big number, seems totally plausible.
Those aren't new either, but not common for urban transportation.
In Europe, that would be true, but I think in Southern California he can charge exorbitantly per car and people will pay it.
A tunnel for cars is different. Even a single and relatively short tunnel is useful and people would probably pay something for access. This means you would start making money on the investment quite quickly.
I agree that trains are the right thing to do, but that is much larger project and likely too big to be an option for private company.
Now I know why big companies do those reading comprehension tests...
He didn't say that was a benchmark at all. He explicitly said that was one of the highest costs for tunnels.
> with some projects costing as much as $1 billion per mile
I think it's move polivalent to transport vehicles (personal or mpv) that way the last 1-5 miles can be resumed by the vehicle and they don't have to stop everywhere (which is the main crutch of trains), you want to cover as much area and not have "why don't you stop near my house" syndrome.
there's also nothing stopping bicycle riders from using the system provided there are seats to strap into and goggles to wear.
When it's all said and done, Elon is a car salesman and entrepreneur, I guess that's why?
There are obvious benefits of being able to come and go as an individual instead of relying on public transit.
Hygiene, safety, and storage all pop to my mind.
The largest part of the problem to solve here for the US is not the technology of tunneling. It's the process of engineering and building infrastructure like this that seems to become way more expensive in the US compared to places like Spain. I do believe he could reduce costs by vertically integrating the whole thing. But then we should ask why don't we do that anyway?