The Boring Company FAQ

Re:The Boring Company FAQ by CodeWriter23 on Wednesday May 17, 2017 @01:11AM (#14355813)

He's trying to hit a price point. We're not completely allergic to the $20M freeway bridge that's about 100ft long, and comes with heavy upkeep costs over the long term. So, $100M per mile with Upkeep Lite™ sounds good when making conversation about the topic. Also the $1B/mile is the cost of the Purple Line extension in Los Angeles. Worst case cost no doubt. A real figure nevertheless.

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Re:The Boring Company FAQ by objclxt on Wednesday May 17, 2017 @01:22AM (#14355850)

> So, $100M per mile with Upkeep Lite™ sounds good when making conversation about the topic. Also the $1B/mile is the cost of the Purple Line extension in Los Angeles. Worst case cost no doubt. A real figure nevertheless.

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?

[1]: http://www.crossrail.co.uk/construction/

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Re:The Boring Company FAQ by tomjakubowski on Wednesday May 17, 2017 @02:03AM (#14356012)

I don't know where this "$1B/mile" just for tunneling figure comes from. That's certainly not the tunneling cost for any current subway extension project in Los Angeles: all-in (i.e. not only tunneling) estimates for the first phase of the Purple Line extension are at $2.8B for 3.9 miles of heavy rail subway; the full Purple Line Extension is estimated at $6.3B for 9 miles of heavy rail subway.

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

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Re:The Boring Company FAQ by kuschku on Wednesday May 17, 2017 @03:41AM (#14356384)

In one of the subway projects in Hamburg, a cost of 1.1 billion EUR per kilometre was reached.

But that project was building a subway including station directly below a riverbed.

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Re:The Boring Company FAQ by Piskvorrr on Thursday May 18, 2017 @08:19AM (#14366586)

Well, that's some adverse conditions - a silt riverbed behaves quite like water, so you're actually building a submerged part of the city. Look at London's early tunnels and their cost overruns (and the maintenance due to leaks).

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Re:The Boring Company FAQ by tigershark on Wednesday May 17, 2017 @04:38AM (#14356605)

No, crossrail tunnels are WAY less expensive than that: http://www.crossrail.co.uk/news/articles/crossrail-awards-ma... It's about 145M$ per mile that is well in the range of 10 times less the outrageous cost that they pay in US for a single mile.

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