I am not French, I don't live in France, I don't speak French and I am not particularly interested in tunnels or rails. And probably that's why it's the first time I hear about this. But I am not American either, and I don't live there, but I have read about the expensive few mile extension of a subway line in the Upper East Side of Manhattan and the failed attempts to build a high speed train between LA and San Francisco hundreds of times.
A project of that scale in one of the largest Western capitals goes relatively unnoticed outside of France mainly because of language.
Think about what else is lost. I bet there are thousands of businesses, and lots of culture which never get noticed mainly because of language.
Remarkably complacent view, and undermined by the fact that other channels will report on this stuff, but not the BBC. The point is firstly that the signal to noise used to be far higher in the UK - I've been watching it for 40 years - I know what I'm talking about - and secondly that it's extremely unlikely I'm going to learn anything new from Stormzy's poorly informed opinions. And yet the latter is prioritised over the former.
If you think the willingness of a news organization to publish something depends on how newsworthy it is, I guess all I can do is respond by quoting the Daily Mail Song:
Pop stars take drugs
Teen boys wear hoods
Sports stars have sex
Bears shit in woods
But that's still English news. I guess I can quote something else:
> the more lurid, titillating, sensational, or nationalistic, the better. Even the distinguished Xinhua News Service is not immune from this sort of thing. I couldn't help but chuckle when the podcast host Scott Peters worried whether or not the American press corps' obsession with non-stories like Kim Kardashian and Bruce/Catelynn Jenner would give it [Xinhua] a strategic advantage in the contest to control global media narratives. My guess is Mr. Peters doesn't read Xinhua too often. If I had few dollars [for] every time Xinhua placed a photo collage like "Beautiful Female Soldiers From All Over the World," "Singer Valen Hsu Poses For Fashion Shots," "Sleeping Babies With Their Cutest Pets," on their front page...
( http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2015/07/chinese-journalis... )
Newsworthiness is something that can force news organizations to begrudgingly give up space they would rather have allocated to -- going back to the song -- their photo feature on schoolgirl skirt styles. If you're watching the news because you're hoping to learn something, you're making a blatant category error; that's not what the news is for.
And "civil war in Africa" fits tabloid desires perfectly; it's lurid and violent, drawing readers or watchers, without being at all surprising or important.
Something like BBC news world or The Times will generally cover the more important global events.
Tunnel boring is a complex, multi-faceted civil engineering discipline with a large number of well-funded firms that are aggressively competing and innovating. In this space Elon is utterly insignificant.
The ELI5 version is: "Elon thinks he can dig tunnels faster and cheaper than anyone else, but so he's failed to demonstrate he can create even one useful tunnel. The only reason he's doing this is because he hates traffic and thinks that driving in a private tunnel will make it easier to get to work on time."
20 years ago you could have said much the same thing about Elon Musk and rocketry.
That doesn’t mean it doesn’t sometimes happen, but at this point there’s no evidence that the Boring Company is really doing anything particularly novel at this point...
SpaceX was also not really novel. Their engine, construction method and most things were pretty standard and not very impressive.
I guess if we're being pedantic, he also didn't bootstrap Tesla.
He has a knack for attracting nice attention and generally is a great marketeer for his brands and himself as a brand.
He's also great at extracting government funds.
http://superexcavators.com/news/super-excavators-consult-mac...
There is no evidence of any improvements or innovations.
Buying an of-the-shelf product and reverse engineering it, before building ones' own, is a very valuable step.
I'd say the largest value add about Elon Musk is his ability to create a reality distortion field to convince large swathes of people to follow his dream.
I'm actually not being critical of Musk here. Jobs did this and you can see how transformative certain technologies have been as a result.
What you don't seem to understand is that the battery tech's problems currently are not the chemical process or format of the cells, but the volume. The volume of cells that we are able to produce. This is a major bottleneck of electric cars. It is not just some minor problem, it is a great fundamental problem.
This is also why tesla can churn out hundreds of thousands of cars with battery only, and with range of hundreds of miles, and where practically all other manufacturers in this price range are only able to do hybdrids with small batteries. This is not coincidence, this is because tesla has a gigafactory and those others do not and are subject to volume problems in the outside battery production chain.
So no this is not only about vision, Tesla (whether Musk himself or his engineers) identified a real problem, and engineered a real solution - the gigafactory.
> So no this is not only about vision, Tesla (whether Musk himself or his engineers) identified a real problem, and engineered a real solution - the gigafactory
So, Musk identified a problem (manufacturing batteries at scale), found a vendor with a solution (Panasonic) and sold it under the name Tesla.
Do you see my point now?
Not really, what is your point?
Every car manufacturer uses parts sourced from other companies - software, parts of engines, whole engines, whole gearboxes, complete modules, raw materials... That's how the industry works...
> and engineered a real solution
So, which is it? Did he outsource the parts like every other company or did he engineer a solution?
So not sure why you would focus on that superficial difference here, like what are you trying to prove? I don't understand your point. Elon Musk has a lot of results behind his companies to prove that he can engineer and a good ratio of technical terms and numbers he can spur off the top of his head in an interview to prove that he is not even mainly marketer, his brain is in engineering, he knows the technical stuff deeply down to revision numbers and decimal points and can give you an educated opinion on technical matters. So this shows you that he is indeed an engineer, not sure if that's your point even though?
Let's put it in perspective: London is covered by a network of small tunnels dedicated to cart mail around by autonomous vehicles. The tunnels were opened almost a century ago.
Haven't seen anything covered about what they've built or how it compares with anything else on the market.
https://tunnelinsider.com/everything-we-know-about-the-borin...
https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-the-boring-company-tunne...
> He also drew upon the 67-year-old contracting company’s expertise to get going, with an ultimate goal of developing ways to dig tunnels faster
Not evidence I agree, but not entirely inconsistent with improvements.
Musk has not proposed any improvements to the expensive parts of tunneling.
Versus an electric train. Theoretically, since the energy is transported into the tunnel via power lines, wouldn’t fire suppression and ventilation systems be cheaper since they wouldn’t need to handle so much stored energy potential (via batteries) traveling through a tunnel?
Simply using private funds without numerous contractors can decreases costs by an order of magnitude with no technological improvements.
NYC only has a big subway system because it gobbled up all the failing private railways over the years. LA used to have the largest rail transportation network in the world, it was private, and it too failed to turn a profit and failed. Transportation runs at a loss.
This is false. The biggest cost to tunnels is moving and replacing utility lines (power, internet, sewage, water, etc.) that were not properly recorded by private entities when they constructed their buildings.
It's precisely where government bureaucracy was involved that tunneling is the cheapest, because then moving and replacing the utility lines can happen all at once instead of over the course of months as the tunneling machine bores into them, and bureaucracy can coordinate road closures, utility shutoffs, etc.
Also, private entities use subcontractors not because bureaucracy requires it but because it lets them delegate out responsibility for areas in which they do not have competence for less than the cost of developing such competence in-house. It's simply the way the construction industry works. Even Joe Blow Contractor rebuilding someone's bathroom will hire contractors to do specific parts of the rebuild (like the plumbing, or the tiles). Another example: the SoFi Stadium in Inglewood has hundreds of subcontractors, and is fully privately funded.
To answer your question: He’s not building subway tunnels. It’s tunnels for Tesla vehicles.
From the perspective of the city, the ROI of a subway train is high.
From the perspective of an individual, the ROI of using my own car in a tunnel, exactly when I want to, without parking, waiting, embarking, smelling the vagrants, disembarking, walking or getting a cab, ... Priceless!
My corrections in CAPS.
I don't think I need to say more, it should be obvious way tunnels for cars are a bad idea.
What about everyone else and their cars?
Weird then that he didn't ask the individual to pay for it.
Because if you keep downvoting every statement that you don’t agree with, that’s what you’ll soon have!
It's not where technology has advanced, per se, but where he can find a niche that provides an excuse to not be constrained by existing burdensome regulation, or where he can shape and use regulation as a competitive advantage. So far this has mostly been by advances in tech, but the tech isn't necessarily the key component to the formula.
In the case of the boring company, I suspect the initial plan was the same (a la hyperloop), but have 1) discovered hyperloop is not cost feasible, 2) discovered that the same skills for negotiating regulation is itself a major advantage in subsurface construction, and 3) can use the Elon marketing hype machine to overcome NIMBY opposition, whether that be publicly or via politically (whereas people generally view mega construction companies as untrustworthy, and these companies are unlikely to be able to sway public opinion, except by maybe buying politicians.)
It's sort of an Uber approach to dodging rules, but in markets that limit competition by being relatively capital and knowledge intensive.
And if your number is low - you are not counting deferred maintenance which is huge in these systems
And rail has otherwise struggled in the US.
The amtrak story is not great. I've tried to use them repeatedly, and outside of northeast corridor it is cheaper to fly then to take them anywhere. Let that sink in, the cost to get you up in air, and FLY is cheaper than rolling along on low friction rails. When you say why is it hard to understand that rail is cheapest it's because folks KNOW that things like buses are MUCH MUCH cheaper.
This is ignoring the absolutely stupid cost to build one mile of rail tunnel.
Mass transit rail has hardly "struggled" in the US - it has high usage and conflating the distinction between mass transit rail and long distance rail is disingenuous when considering the usecases of Musks tunnels.
The boring company is more of a personal effort by Elon due to his hatred of LA traffic.
Elon has a lot to learn about induced demand.
people want more fast, affordable, on-demand, point-to-point private transportation. "induced demand" tells us we're woefully under-providing that demand. we're very far from the desired equilibrium point in nearly every metro area. elon seems to understand that better than a pithy quip might indicate.
along with mixed-use-as-default along transportation corridors, i would prefer more underground trains, dedicated busways, and small personal transport infrastructure (for electric bikes, scooters, etc.) in our cities (particularly in LA), but every effort, including the boring company's, that addresses that overwhelming demand helps.
The fact of the matter is that it's absurd to transport people in a dense environment 25'x10' apart, one at a time, all going back and forth to the same exact two places five days a week for 40+ years. Trains let you fit way more people in a given area, people who are already heading the same direction, and therefor offer more space for a city to be a city rather than a place for infrastructure.
Until we get to a point where people are able to move easily with high capacity transit, it's irresponsible to waste precious political will to build with the intention of providing low capacity transport for those who can afford a $30k+ car.
that's accounted for in the foot-second metric. by a (very) rough calculation, we'd only need to double road foot-seconds to alleviate most congestion. that's very expensive, since most of these roads would have to go underground or be elevated, but not impossible (elon is trying to do just that for teslas).
i'm not advocating we double our roads, however. i'm just refuting the pithy notion that it's impossible to meet the supposedly insatiable demand implied by "induced demand" arguments.
but yes, let's build way more public transit and smaller personal transport networks (along with taller, mixed-use buildings)! it's definitely more efficient and can be less expensive and stressful.
If you had to pay for road access, you could easily set the price to where demand meets supply, and all roads would have well flowing traffic 24/7.
But of course "induced demand" happens when the price is $0. The same would occur for bread, phones or pianos at that price point.
To make up for that, we can charge people at the entrance point. But charging people time is basically impossible, so money is used instead.
How capacity is provisioned from A to B influences how people choose to move and, over the long term, build homes/workplaces.
Induced demand does not suggest that supply is less than demand - it implies that demand is "flexible" to meet any supply conditions. There is overwhelming evidence of this at work over 50 years and across continents.
As a consequence, the argument is not "why bother?" but rather - "build it in a way that scales". For urban areas, private transport doesn't scale well.
that's the exact interpretation i'm refuting.
of course supply is less than demand. that's because the price of using roads is (perceived to be) zero, but the cost of construction on the supply side is high (and increasing, relative to inflation). it's impossible to meet the demand for free when costs are high.
my point is that this mispricing is a political and cultural choice, not an economic one explained by "induced demand". by using an economic concept for a non-economic market, we fall prey to misinterpreting and misadvocating.
we need to make the price of private transport much more transparent (e.g., real-time pricing) and rein in costs (land prices, legal/regulatory costs) so that we can make better choices in allocating our precious and limited resources (toward more mass transit for example).
(real-time pricing should also be progressive so that roads aren't just for rich people.)
Individual point-to-point transport systems are great. We just need to find a way to reduce the bad externalities of cars (pollution, traffic deaths, non-walkable cities/town, traffic congestion, taking up surface space). Elon Musk is working on three of these with Tesla and the Boring Company.
I'd argue that a lot of people don't want to drive a car, they want to get to their destination. Where options other than driving are available, then they weigh cost/convenience to make their decision.
My view isn't that cars travel is innately evil, or that building roads is always terrible - but that so much more money is spent on building more roads than on public transit options.
For some reason we ignore the last 60+ years of evidence to show that building more roads doesn't lead to reduced traffic. It's simply not possible to build out roads fast enough to beat the rise in traffic.
If you build public transit options that get people between locations they want to travel, ensure that it's run on time, clean, and affordable - then people who already drive will evaluate that cost/convenience function for themselves and decide that public transport is actually better. This results in much reduced road traffic.
There aren't enough tunnels in the world to dig your way out of traffic problems. The more roads you make the more traffic you get.
Toll roads just increase the already staggering cost of owning a car, marginalizing even more people.
What about not doing that and instead investing in alternatives?
>If the transport system exceeds public travel needs, there will be very little traffic.
Sure. But... it would take an enormous amount of development to make this happen, because so many people are going to want more space if they can have it with still a <1hr commute. So more sprawl, leading to more pressure on the new network, lather, rinse, repeat...
For all the talk of walkable neighborhoods, if you gave people the choice of a 30min walk-and-subway commute in a 5-story condo building vs a 30min new-car-tunnel point to point commute with a 2000sqft house on a private parcel of land, you're going to have a lot (not everyone, but a lot) of people picking the latter.
Best case it's going to, for a long time, until we reach steady state, still just be a repeat of the "build roads, watch sprawl" cycle of the last century, just with potential to build even more roads by being able to continually go deeper (but is this that much easier than vertical overpasses and such?).
Isn't it easier to persuade local residents to support a tunnel under their area than an above-ground structure in their area?
Market demand, induced and otherwise, is a good thing, if the externalities are also addressed. That's basically Musk's whole business model.
The easy availability of roads leads to more people driving since it's the more effective option, which in turn leads to more traffic. Eventually the system reaches equilibrium where it's busy enough that other alternatives are more desirable.
Time and time again predictions of apocalyptic traffic doom have failed to manifest when roads are removed. The traffic just goes away largely because the traffic was an artifact of the roads being there in the first place.
People are highly adaptable. They take the path of least resistance. If that path is a road, they take it. If you make the road bigger, it reduces resistance and becomes busier.
The only problem is cost. For a city to out build unmet demand they would need to get to add several dozen layers of road, one on top of another (that is bridges over bridges for 12 layers). Nobody would seriously propose building such a thing. If we had it the mobility of the city would allow people to accomplish more things in the city than they can today.
Would traffic flow become infinitely fast if we removed them all?
Conversely, would it become infinitely slow if we paved every square inch of land in sight?
It's almost as if such simplistic models are worse than useless, huh.
I'd say that it's more like taking models to extremes is useless.
If your doctor says that you're consuming too much salt it is increasing your risk of a range of diseases, you don't turn around and say "But salt is necessary for the function of life, I can't just cut it out entirely!". The answer, as with most things - is somewhere in between.
With our current set of transport options - a mix of transport options are going to be optimal. The specific mix is going to depend entirely on the area and traffic patterns.
Not quite. The company has standard COTS tunneling equipment but an above par and well financed marketing and propaganda machine. That's it.
And hyperloop is another bullshit story as well.
The fact is that megaprojects basically never come in anywhere near their schedule or budget. That's because of a selection bias. When you crunch the numbers honestly, megaprojects come out as a terrible on a cost-benefit or ROI analysis. The ones that get built are built by people who choose to ignore the honest figures in favour of the shiny, optimistic ones. Et voila, another farce.
There are lots of other factors, but that's the core one that precedes the others.
It has been my experience -- which some more "keepin it real" journalism concurs with -- that New York's outlandish infrastructure costs, as well as the majority of the USA's public projects, are primarily due to two main agents:
1. White collar bureaucracy
2. Blue collar "bureaucracy"
Both parties -- and the multitude of agents that operate within them -- are all too able to align their "piece" of the project towards their own interests.
These interests very much involve time and money.
For money, it's simply rerouting costs. And for time, it's "making one's mark," by misallocating resources to personally-enriching matters, that do not benefit the project as a whole, and usually hinder it.
It's late, and I'm not at 100% to go into detail, but surely this is well-known already?
I take the argument about selection bias from Brent Flyvbjerg, who has been studying megaprojects for a fair while now. He calls it "survival of the unfittest"[0].
A similar resource is Merrow's Industrial Megaprojects[1], which is based on a large dataset of such efforts. He identifies many factors in project overruns, but essentially notes that most projects start off with fanciful estimates that will never be met. For a book about petrochemical plants, bridges and power stations, it's a fun read.
[0] https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1409/1409.0003.pdf
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Industrial-Megaprojects-Concepts-Stra...
[0] http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/new-york-infrastructu...
We also have more complicated, and are dependent on, soft and hard power structures to access and use capital. A great place to start looking into these issues is Bent Flyvbjerg at Said, Oxford
Houses typically go according to plan because so many of the processes and parts are standard. Even large mansions can go according to plan if you have good management (note that cheap management is rewarded for change orders and thus will ensure things don't go according to plan while better management will see that if they don't make a minor change now things won't go according to plan latter.
[0] Best example of this sort of logic that I have seen implemented is painting the golden gate bridge, just one properly sized and experienced crew painting from one end to the other and back again without the boondoggle.
The Project Production Institute take a similar view: that instead of modeling a project as a fixed thing, you focus on it as a production process.
Otherwise every 20 years they would need to hire, train, then fire 200 painters for a 6 month-long paint job project. 200 painters, managers, and etc. who will invariably be less experienced with the finer points of painting said bridge since they don't do it every day.
We do have ships, rockets, and a few other things that don't need wheels (tough they tend to have wheels of some form inside), but the wheel itself is still just incremental improvements on that first one way back...
It seems that China does not suffer from this "cost disease", but I don't know any real facts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Avenue_Subway#Construct...
That's before adding other factors such as increase regulation, inflation and good ol' corruption.
If all the businesses along the block you are trenching through back then went under... so fucking what?
If your 24/7 jackhammers kept all the block up the whole night you’d tell them to take a hike.... etc, etc, etc.
If turns out if you care about any or all of those things, your costs go up. Back then it was all just negative externalities that got foisted on the neighborhoods around them. Think of the negative externalities causes by our interstate highway system. Good luck building that now! It literally divided entire neighborhoods. The entire thing would be require to go into a tunnel under the city. No way would people tolerate that shit now.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/under-wraps-sydney-s-fir...
You can of course submit any tunneling articles/media you think are interesting.
Just look at the abundance of Atlas Obscura articles -- few are tech based.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_tunnel
Massively cool cutting edge technology, even before Elon involvement. ;-)
There is also a huge amount of interesting videos on Youtube about these projects, all the way from the initial tunnel boring/blasting all the way to final outfitting (imagine installing rails & electric equipment in a 57 km long tunnel - no wonder it took 6 years of multi shift daily work, etc.).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikan_Tunnel
>>A 2002 report by Michitsugu Ikuma described, for the undersea section, that "the tunnel structure appears to remain in a good condition." The amount of inflow has been decreasing with time, although it "increases right after a large earthquake".
Channel Tunnel suffered significant delays and additional costs for instance because the brackets supporting cable and pipe runs needed to be taken down after everything had been installed because of a latent design defect and replaced.
Imagine how long it takes to pull 20+km of cable off the wall.
Also, compared to other construction sites, tunnels are a different beast, you often need to transport huge amounts of materials, people and equipment long distances to get to your work-front (and back again). It might be a straight line, but it's still far.
As much as I love the Channel Tunnel (my father was an engineer on it and I grew up during the construction) the actual outrun cost benefit ratio just isn't there. Extra ferries probably would have been more economical.
> Does Elon dig them faster or more cheaply or something?
> Otherwise do I submit this to HN? https://www.sydneymetro.info/tunnelling
Someone already did [1] but it didn’t attract much interest.
Yes it is exactly that. A lot faster and much cheaper. Please watch the initial boring company presentation, the motivation is presented like in the first minutes. It is not like they are trying to hide anything, they are very open about what is new with their technology.
It's because Elon is loved in the tech circle.
Being both attracts way more interest and engagement than one or the other.
The old quote about rich people using public transit applies : my personal preference is to live in an (european) city with a great public transport system.
It's amazing how he creates companies and solutions on a whim that revolutionize complete industries.
Planning/zoning will kill you, it's simply illegal to build most types of houses in most of the US. There was a recent blog post about this I can't find, but it outlined all the houses that exist that are now practically illegal. For example, mixed use where there's a business on the ground floor. Or building 3 stories in a 2-story zone. Or having an ADU. The list is endless. In fact my current town just made it illegal to build single family units next to multi-family (with a buffer), and we only have two places in the town where you're allowed to build office space. Retail is slightly better, there are three places that's okay.
If you get through planning, then permits will kill you. The permits to demolish our place (different town!) were more than buying a new house. I'm not kidding.
If you get through permits then good luck with inspections.
What musk is doing with tunnels is what the entire tech industry is doing: working in a zone with a lot less rules. It's illegal to make a building but you can make any website you want. Though that is going away too, it'll get regulated to death eventually and you can already see it starting to happen with data and privacy laws.
The main escape from all this, as far as I've been able to find, is Texas. It's apparently still legal to build things there.
It seems to me like building a house is more like a doing a complex tree fitting problem then actual design.
Just the whole GDPR compliance and showing the cookie alert is a PITA if you're going to run any small online business. And it will get much worse.
It takes longer to complete an environmental impact review to do a major project than it did to build the Golden Gate. And that's just one of several major red tape & time hurdles that didn't exist in 1933.
> According to CEQ, the average length of a full-blown Environmental Impact Statement is currently 600 pages and takes 4.5 years to conclude. US federal agencies prepare approximately 170 such assessments per year.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/09/white-ho...
[1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/1/14112776/ne...
Honestly as a 5 year old you are not going to get it.
This is multi levelled. Some people just like Elon. But what's really however interesting is how Elon is changing manufacturing. It's like a new Kanban
But it's not 5 year old stuff. I'd just say,
I know all the other kids like rockets and think they are cool to watch take off, but tunnels are pretty cool to watch too.... and so are processes but that's adult stuff for now kido (and give them a wink)
I know I was eternally annoyed at how much adults underestimated me growing up.
Saying it's adult stuff to children is demeaning and can temper enthusiasm and is a bad habit to get into.
I think tunnels are the future though for cities. But I'd prefer trains to be running in them, or roads that only allow electric public transport.
Edit. In 1988 they started work on the Channel Tunnel UK to France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel - I am still in awe that they did this! I like the vision, bean counters be damned. If he made a tunnel like that it'd be news.