The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

Re:The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done by maxharris on Thursday January 16, 2020 @05:13PM (#22069581)

That's only a valid comparison if you take massive infrastructure projects head-on. There is no law of physics stating that these tunnels can't be used for other situations and purposes.

Several things come to mind:

1. There are lots of places with lower density than city centers, but higher density than suburbs that would benefit massively from underground transportation.

2. Smaller tunnels running everywhere will be very useful for package delivery! John McCarthy (the man that gave us LISP) explains it in detail here: http://jmc.stanford.edu/commentary/future/delivery.html

3. Let's not discount the strong likelihood of further cost reductions. The Boring Company has made huge strides already, with further cost and speed gains to be had from a TBM they are designing and building from scratch: https://www.teslarati.com/boring-company-line-storm-tunnelin...

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Re:The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done by reitzensteinm on Thursday January 16, 2020 @05:23PM (#22069663)

Do you have any citation for the "huge strides" TBC has made already? The only concrete numbers I've seen have been apples to oranges, either not normalizing for cross section area, or comparing just the cost of TBC digging to complete projects.

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Re:The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done by microtherion on Thursday January 16, 2020 @05:44PM (#22069843)

It appears that The Boring Company uses both off-the-shelf TBMs and their own designs (and, I think, also a customized off-the-shelf TBM). It would be interesting to learn which one they used here.

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