Elon Musk’s Boring Company lands $48.7M contract for underground “people mover”

Re:Elon Musk’s Boring Company lands $48.7M contract for unde... by rayiner on Wednesday May 22, 2019 @11:05PM (#19988010)

> Details of the 35.3-mile system, which emerged recently in a 505-page draft environmental assessment, reveals a design that fails to meet several key national safety standards. The underground system appears to lack sufficient emergency exits, ignore the latest engineering practices and proposes passenger escape ladders that one fire safety professor calls “the definition of insanity.”

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Re:Elon Musk’s Boring Company lands $48.7M contract for unde... by Traster on Thursday May 23, 2019 @06:15AM (#19990272)

That's a quote about an entirely different project that hasn't been approved yet. This 1 mile tunnel is much much less ambitious and probably is more about TBC building up expertise than actually deploying any fantastic new tech.

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Re:Elon Musk’s Boring Company lands $48.7M contract for unde... by geezerjay on Thursday May 23, 2019 @02:49PM (#19994669)

IIRC TBC never announced any "fantastic new tech", in spite of the marketing effort. It seems they have COTS tunneling equipment, a knack for ignoring basic establish practices, and a enthusiastic PR team.

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Re:Elon Musk’s Boring Company lands $48.7M contract for unde... by HoveringOrb on Thursday May 23, 2019 @09:04AM (#19991300)

Also, the whirling blades that move randomly up and down the length of the tunnel seem downright unnecessary.

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[dead]

Re:Elon Musk’s Boring Company lands $48.7M contract for unde... by gamblor956 on Thursday May 23, 2019 @12:20AM (#19988427)

Boring Co uses old tech to build a tunnel the same way its been built for decades...but smaller...

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Re:Elon Musk’s Boring Company lands $48.7M contract for unde... by Skye on Thursday May 23, 2019 @09:17AM (#19991429)

This concept is not new at all, From what I understand the tunnel sizes proposed are barely bigger than the London Underground "tube" tunnels. (Glasgow's subway has even smaller tunnels too). Now, don't get me wrong, it worked quite well for London, but it's not exactly innovative.

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Re:Elon Musk’s Boring Company lands $48.7M contract for unde... by geezerjay on Thursday May 23, 2019 @02:52PM (#19994708)

It should also be noted that london's postal service also deployed 2ft-wide tunnels to cart mail through the city, which was launched in the late 1920s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Post_Office_Railway

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Re:Elon Musk’s Boring Company lands $48.7M contract for unde... by candiodari on Thursday May 23, 2019 @04:17AM (#19989622)

That is the future of tunneling. If we had tech that could dig tunnels the size of a big tube this would be quite a big advancement. Shrinking the equipment seems to be one way forward for tunnel digging.

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Re:Elon Musk’s Boring Company lands $48.7M contract for unde... by gamblor956 on Thursday May 23, 2019 @06:16PM (#19996570)

I'm not sure if this comment is supposed to be satire or not?

Boring Co is using a second-hand sewer tunnel boring machine. This isn't the future of tunneling, it's quite literally the distant past.

Modern mass transit uses bigger tunnels because bigger tunnels means more throughput. It's generally cheaper to dig two (parallel) big tunnels than a dozen smaller ones, since the fixed costs are such a large part of the expense.

This is the part that Elon doesn't understand: it's not all about opex. Capex matters to, and for infrastructure projects, capex dominates opex. (For example, if he hadn't wasted a billion on the dreadnought, i.e., capex, Tesla wouldn't be in the doldrums right now unable to fund its basic operating activities, i.e., opex.)

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Re:Elon Musk’s Boring Company lands $48.7M contract for unde... by londons_explore on Thursday May 23, 2019 @12:44PM (#19993364)

Big tunnels are more expensive because more dirt needs moving, the tunnel walls need to be thicker, and the tunnelling machine needs to be bigger and more powerful.

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Re:Elon Musk’s Boring Company lands $48.7M contract for unde... by de_watcher on Thursday May 23, 2019 @04:39AM (#19989717)

Deploy ants!

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Re:Elon Musk’s Boring Company lands $48.7M contract for unde... by adbachman on Thursday May 23, 2019 @11:42AM (#19992748)

Civil engineering has different, higher, standards for quality than software or even electrical engineering.

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