Yes, it is. With one that caveat that if it's built 10x cheaper than comparable tunnels, it is. Moving our roads underground is a vastly superior transportation system than we have today. It can be safer, better for the air, better for light and noise pollution, unlock vast amounts of land in our urban areas for parks, etc. I grew up near Boston during the big dig and the city is a drastically different place before and after the Central Artery. The same is happening in Seattle now. The problem is the cost. If Boring Company can solve that (and he already has a history of doing comparable things in the rocket and battery industries) it very much is the future of public (and private) transportation.
The demo tunnel doesn't look to have sufficient ventilation or emergency exits in case of fire, car crash, etc.
They haven't addressed the ingress and egress congestion problems into and out of the tunnel. How can a single elevator go up/down to handle 1000+ cars per hour (4400 passengers per hour)? Basic math gives you 3.6 seconds for the elevator to go down, wait for the car to offramp, go back up, and wait for the next car to onramp.
These are some of the many reasons tunnels and subways get expensive. You can't just build a basic tunnel rigged with cars and say "problem solved" at 1/10th the cost.
Unless I'm misunderstanding you, there isn't a offramp/onramp in the latest design scheme. When Boring Company first unveiled the design, it had elevators that moved vehicles from grade-level to the tunnel. The vehicles then locked into a track. Then after reaching an "exit" the vehicle is brought back to the surface so the driver can continue the journey within that same vehicle. But they recently scrapped all that. In the current design, there is no locked track and the vehicles never leave the tunnel. This ensures that the tunnels only function with a proprietary vehicle.
There still might be some human ingress/egress issues to resolve.
Yeah, the joke is that next they'll release that the concrete tunnel road is subject to deterioration, so they'll shift to steel tracks. Then they'll realize that these individual vehicles should be linked together to allow for higher capacity. Then... then you have a subway.
That would be great. Subway costs are absolutely ridiculous, so it would be fantastic if the boring company decides to build exactly the same thing for much less.
At the moment, all the analysis I've seen points more towards the only reason it's cheaper being because of the smaller size of the tunnel (there's actually nothing novel about the boring machine, it's just a standard one that is used to build utility tunnels with some minor tweaks), and because they don't build (or don't take into account) things like station caverns, cross linking tunnels, ventilation/emergency egress, etc.
So if they actually built a subway it would cost... about the same as a subway. That's not to say that US subways aren't crazy expensive to build compared to Europe, Asia etc. - but that's more to do with legal issues (industrial relations etc.), business structures, and possibly corruption, rather than the technology.
It's not exactly the same thing. In the Boring underground car-train, each party of travelers takes up an entire car's or truck's worth of space. On a subway, each person takes up room for themselves and their belongings. Plus maybe a bicycle. You can move a lot more people at once in a subway.
Further, when the Boring underground car-train "stops", and parties leave the train, those cars still demand that same space, just on the surface. With mass transit carrying pedestrians and cyclists, you need much less room on "integrate" passengers coming out from the underground, with local traffic on the surface.
If Boring gives up on the personal vehicle folly, and can build a smaller, cheaper, but equally safe tunnel for mass transit, great. But they seem preoccupied with letting people keep their cars.
This article that we're discussing, about Las Vegas, involves dedicated vehicles, not personal cars. And one of them is a 16-person people mover. It is expected to have a low enough usage that that makes sense.
How many people are you expecting to take their bikes on the subway on the Vegas strip?
Subway cost in mismanged US are ridiculous.[0] Around the world, countries like Spain are already building tunnels for the claimed cost of an Hyperloop tunnel.
Most of that extra cost comes from the legal fees around buying the land and getting permits to dig under it. A better tunnel borer doesn't address any of that.
You could maybe save on OSHA concerns if you can somehow slash the number of people employed, but you'd need to get rid of a LOT of people before you see enough gains from that to make this a game changer.
Elon's whole deal around transit is utterly uninformed about anything urban planning.
Except it does seem to have addressed that. Even the dumb test tunnel seems to have been completed for far less than it should've taken, given the constraints you mentioned.
Experts (including those who have studied foreign mass transit in detail) are at a loss to fully explain why the US's tunneling costs are so out of whack compared to other countries. Sometimes, when expert systems seem to have failed, it's a useful exercise to throw everything out (i.e. be "utterly uninformed") and learn from scratch by trying. They may fail anyway, but it's worth a shot.
Sometimes, the naive intern will find a solution because of their own naïveté. (And even then there are lots of practical things that will need to be relearned, at great pain.)
I'm under the impression that their costs are cheaper right now because public agencies are eager to see a working test case and so exempted them from environmental clearance. I doubt that will still be the case when the scheme changes from "a single tunnel from Musk's home in Bel-Air to his work in Hawthorne" to "hundreds of stacked tunnels traversing the entire city." But I'm open to corrections.
Musk seems to really dislike the idea of public transport. There's an appeal in moving a large number of people from one side of the city to the other really fast, but with their cars!?
The amount of trouble people in the US are willing to through to avoid the solution every other developed country enjoys is really mind-blowing to me. Dig a tunnel, put some rails in it, and add some sort of a vehicle on top of those rails. Splitting up a cart to individual vehicles seems wasteful, impractical, and guaranteed to move less people. A perfect example of a "gadgetbahn": completely useless 10-15 years down the road, but it wastes city's money that could have been used for actual, viable alternatives that are in use everywhere else. But hey, at least it's unique.
From a physics standpoint, what is your argument that a giant car with transfers to a number of smaller cars is more efficient than just using all smaller cars?
Public transit seems really wasteful to me: empty busses running up and down the same main streets, people going out of their way to get to a train station, subway cars stopping in the track and blocking the passage of all other vehicles, all movement stopping at a certain time due to low demand... it’s a mess.
Again, from a physics standpoint the optimal solution to me would seem to be a variety of different size autonomous cars, with 100% occupancy, which can draft each other, and tunnels that allow you to go direct(ish) to your destination with an IP-like routing plan.
What am I missing?
Is there a city that you think is close to optimal so I can study it?
Try Shenzhen. Super low cost ubiquitous underground train transport, augmented with super low cost electric taxis and buses for last mile. Occupancy is very high, and trains go every few minutes. Metros stop going at night because the taxi and bus system has sufficient capacity to cover nighttime demand.
We try to avoid it in the US because it costs us 5-10x as much money to do it. If it cost Madrid $4.5 billion to build a two mile subway extension they wouldn’t do it either.
So the solution is to still build a tunnel... but smaller... and move hundreds of people through it really fast in separate, quite heavy vehicles with no possible way of escaping the tunnel when something goes wrong? And something will go wrong.
I'm rooting for Elon with all my heart to cut down the costs of digging tunnels, but everything else about this is just ludicrous.
Americans seem to avoid social contact at all costs. Yesterday there was a comment on HN where a user said they throw things out instead of selling them because they don't want to interact with understandable people who buy second hand items.
Cars, drive throughs, home delivery food. Its all tools for avoiding social contact.
Every city I've ever seen has a large amount of personal cars on the road. Sure some people in some cities ride in shared public transit, but don't try to pretend that there are not large amounts of people that for whatever reason don't. You might want to look closer to home and solving your own problems instead of attacking the US.
> but don't try to pretend that there are not large amounts of people that for whatever reason don't.
Oh, I know precisely the reason: there's no viable alternative in place.
It might surprise you to learn that other countries were in that same situation and aren't anymore. When there's something more efficient, reliable, and cheaper to use, people tend to prefer that.
But of course, you'd first have to step outside of the US to see what a viable alternative even looks like. Judging by your first and last sentence, I'm willing to bet you haven't.
Right, because there is no car traffic in London or Tokyo or Paris or Hong Kong or Berlin, even though they are all noted for having some the best public transit.
I have stepped outside of the US. I saw a lot of car traffic in Barcelona Spain. I saw a lot of car traffic in Frankfurt Germany even though I was only in the city for a few hours. My friends in Sweden got around by car for every trip when I visited them.
I don't understand this comment at all. The Boring Company's main plans aren't to create new and novel tunnels. The Boring Company's goal is to create cheaper tunnels.
Like, if I said I was planning on developing a wheel at 1/10th the cost of current wheels, I don't care that the wheel predates my innovation by millenia. I'm not attempting to _improve_ the wheel, I'm attempting to make it viable in an increasing number of contexts by lowering the cost.
The same is true of the Boring Company.
You can dismiss it as being unrealistic, or as the cost-savings not actually being there. But I don't understand being dismissive because we already have tunnels. Of course! If we didn't already have tunnels, we wouldn't be trying to make them cheaper!
> The Boring Company's main plans aren't to create new and novel tunnels. The Boring Company's goal is to create _cheaper_ tunnels.
The Boring Company's main plans, as can be evidenced by their communications (such as their FAQ) and their commitments and attempted commitments to build actual projects, is to pitch a radically new, 21st century mode of mass transit that is really just a variation of personal rapid transit (which has historically failed at being effective mass transit solution). The meaningful commitment to building cheaper is actually... to build narrower tunnels, that are unusable for any other purposes, since there's not enough room to put in high-capacity subway trains in the same tunnel.
Oh, and for good measure, tunnels are not why subways are expensive. It's station caverns and ancillary infrastructure (such as procuring more rolling stock for the extension) that consumes most of the cost of a subway, so it's not clear that cheaper tunneling would actually meaningfully reduce the cost of building new subways.
> The Boring Company's main plans, as can be evidenced by their communications (such as their FAQ) and their commitments and attempted commitments to build actual projects
Agree that this evidences their short-term plans (1-5 years), but I actually think it's a poor-proxy of evidence of their long-term (5+ years) plans.
I mostly agree with you about their short-term plans, but my understanding (which could be wrong!) was that they had longer-term plans, of which the proposed tunnels are stepping-stones and learning opportunities towards.
Though, I'll readily acknowledge that the evidence I have for their long-term plans is thin (mostly some interviews with Elon Musk about The Boring Company, and having seen similar developments at SpaceX), so if the counter-argument is that the long-term plans aren't well-enough evidenced to be worth considering, I wouldn't disagree.
I also think it's totally reasonable to argue that those long-term plans aren't realistic or a likely potential outcome.
> Oh, and for good measure, tunnels are not why subways are expensive. It's station caverns and ancillary infrastructure (such as procuring more rolling stock for the extension) that consumes most of the cost of a subway, so it's not clear that cheaper tunneling would actually meaningfully reduce the cost of building new subways.
I don't know that I agree with this. Tunneling is definitely a significant cost whenever it happens under a city. For example, the SR99 tunneling project in Seattle cost ~$2.1B dollars to build (https://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Projects/Viaduct/Budget), and that doesn't involve any station caverns or rolling stock. It does, obviously, involve the highway finishings and road connections, but tunneling is a significant expense whenever it is required.
I mostly follow mass transit and railway projects, so that's where my numbers are derived from. Considering that Loop is pitched as a new mass transit system, it makes sense to compare it to costs. Especially because Musk loves comparing it to the obscenely overpriced NYC Second Avenue Subway extension, so it helps to understand how much it actually cost.
The Boring Company claims in its FAQ that the Second Avenue Subway cost "more than $1 billion per mile" (it doesn't mention it by name, but it's the only thing it could be referring to). The actual cost (from http://web.mta.info/capitaldashboard/CPDMega.html) is $415 million for 2 miles of 2 pairs of tunnel, with track work being another $364 million. The three new stations cost $649 million, $802 million, and $821 million--each more than the cost of all of the tunnel work.
> Considering that Loop is pitched as a new mass transit system
Is this a different loop from the LVCC Loop mentioned in the article? The LVCC Loop seems pretty clearly to fall fairly far outside the "mass transit" system, so it must be a different project you're referring to.
> The Boring Company claims in its FAQ that the Second Avenue Subway cost "more than $1 billion per mile"
Definitely agree that one of the hallmarks of Elon Musk's companies are exaggerated claims about their own abilities and about the competition. I've been impressed by his ability to deliver on some of the bold claims that he has made (even if he fails to do so on a claimed timeline), but also disappointed by his readiness to exaggerate faults in other products / solutions.
Still, if the end-result is to be to reduce tunneling costs from $415M for 2 miles down to $200M for 2 miles, that's a pretty significant result. It wouldn't be nearly as dramatic as the original goal, but still a huge improvement that would make tunneling more viable in a larger number of cases.
I’m not seeing the numbers you quoted on the linked page, but I see a $2b project to add a 3rd rail to an existing 10 mile stretch (LIRR), $2.4b for a mile+ of new tunnels and a new station (Flushing), $10b for the East Side project which entails a massive new terminal and 10,500 ft of new tunnels....
I think the theory is that these mega train stations where thousands of people walk through every hour to embark/disembark is one vision of transit, one which can serve an extremely dense metropolis, but also one which is terribly difficult to expand and maintain, as we see in NYC.
Now maybe the future is that people coming into and through the city are stopping at waypoints at the outskirts and switching on to subways which run at a fixed schedule and carry masses of people in long convoys to fixed destinations, where they then have to transfer to buses or walk to their destination. Carrying luggage or packages or even just keeping children close in these environments is stressful and requires vigilance.
Alternatively, a fully autonomous transport can pick up someone or some family at their door, and bring them directly to their destination. It can carry your luggage in the trunk. It has seats for all your party and is quiet enough to carry on a conversation or work. It plays the music you want as you go. Etc... Most importantly it works on a dynamic schedule and can accommodate any arbitrary pickup and drop off point non-stop. You can pay for different classes of service, different capacity, maybe even different transit speeds.
These are fundamentally different modes of transportation. Boring is not trying to lower the cost of fixed point mass transit hubs, nor are they going to iterate in their idea until they end up building a subway. I think it’s important to admit that fixed point transport hubs are not in fact the ultimate solution to all personal transit.
For the [rather large] share of transport which is done in personal vehicles, wouldn’t it be incredible to have a solution that’s better than the massive cost of surface roads and surface parking everywhere you look?
> For the [rather large] share of transport which is done in personal vehicles, wouldn’t it be incredible to have a solution that’s better than the massive cost of surface roads and surface parking everywhere you look?
I generally care about mass transit, and it becomes pretty obvious that if you care about mass transit, you have to get people out of the massive wastes of space of single-occupancy vehicles. The problem I see with solutions like the Loop is that they're pitched as trying to replace mass transit, and there's no consideration given to the fact that storing empty personal vehicles takes lots of space that don't exist in dense cities, or, in places such as Kansas City where SOV transit is preferred, creates massive dead zones of parking that deadens the appeal of the area.
Boring + Autonomy is an attempt at a solution to the space inefficiency of personal transport.
Personal transport is absolutely essential for the vast majority of people. Whereas public transit in most cases is not sufficient to live car-free, and ridership continues to plummet as a result which drives up costs [1].
The promise of autonomy, coupled with EVs designed for 1 million mile duty cycles opens up the possibility for personal transport to be significantly more efficient, and ecological than mass transit.
If you can do all that and put the majority of it underground, I’d say it’s revolutionary.
I'm unsure where you are getting this from. If you watch their presentation for their test tunnel unveiling (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSIzsMlwMUY), it is fairly explicitly communicated that what they are attempting to do is increase the speed at which you can bore a tunnel, thereby decreasing tunneling costs. The rapid production of the tunnel is the product here.
The video linked has Elon saying specifically that they have an industry-standard TBM that they used for the Hawthorne test tunnel. There is no improvement there. They have 2 more machines they are building that are expected to be large improvements over the tunnel status quo for that given size of tunnel they are constructing.
Again, the improvement is not in the tunnel size... they are building their own TBMs, trying to get them to be faster at tunneling than the existing machine that they have.
What if you actually reduce track / signaling / control / facilities cost massively by virtue of using self-powered autonomous vehicles? Then the math could start making a lot more sense.
> What if you actually reduce track / signaling / control / facilities cost massively by virtue of using self-powered autonomous vehicles?
The problem is that it's hard to carry more people into a tunnel than a metro train (excepting forcing everyone to become pedestrians). The proposed replacement for metro trains is so capacity inefficient that you're going to spend more building parallel tunnels, and you'll probably have an even more egregious problem of vertical circulation. Vertical circulation is already an issue of concern on the busiest passenger systems, and trying to move heavy, bulky, low-capacity personal vehicles is far more difficult (requires far more space) than packing pedestrians as current systems do.
A more point-to-point metro system would be great. The airline industry has been embracing this change for quite awhile. People don't like a hub & spoke system and it doesn't make sense to take everyone to city center which just adds to the crowding and congestion, as many current metro systems do.
Imagine a city that is crisscrossed with multiple direct metro lines. Design for extremely frequent departures, which likely means smaller carriages.
We should be designing our transit systems to be faster and better than car-based travel.
The airline industry embraced point-to-point routing in part because it reduces their costs on inelastic infrastructure on the ground, and allows them to tailor their schedule around demand at the two endpoints rather than on maintaining a network. They pay-as-they-use for airport gates and lessened their spending on hubs.
Fixed-guideway transport infrastructure (trains, busways) and dedicated structures (tunnels, bridges, airports, etc) come with high capex that must be borne by the builder. One advantage of road-based transport over rail-based transport is that the road is already there and will (often) already be built and expanded by the government just to allow private vehicles to come and go -- it's multipurpose -- while any other mode of transport requires this infrastructure to be purpose-built and maintained for the transport mode itself. That costs.
Sure, I'm by no means suggesting deprecating roads. They still serve an important purpose and will always be important for the 'last-mile'. Roads however have significant constraints since you can only build them in two dimensions.
The premise of Boring Company is that by building smaller tunnels, they can build them much more cheaply. Commutes could be more efficient, and city traffic reduced substantially if people could take tunnels across the city instead of drive.
Musk wants to re-engineering both tunnel boring and how we use tunnels - the latter may not pan out but the former is useful regardless of what gets run through the tunnel.
Not necessarily. The key cost savings that Musk envisions boils down to "build tunnels that are too small to put existing rolling stock in," which means that if the proposed personal rapid transit system turns out to be like every other PRT system and not work well, you're left with a tunnel that is too small to be useful for anything else.
Well this tunnel is only a couple miles long. Put in some lights and humans can walk the whole length to get around. It seems like a moving sidewalk could be put into this tunnel.
> The key cost savings that Musk envisions boils down to "build tunnels that are too small to put existing rolling stock in,"
Do you have a reference for that? My understanding was that over the long term the goal was to develop cost savings through better boring machines themselves, not through just by reducing the cross-sectional area of the tunnel.
I thought they were starting with smaller cross-sectional areas and working their way up as they developed machines, but by understanding of the end-goal of The Boring Company was to be able to build large tunnels at 1/10th the cost of current processes.
All of the innovations that are cited on The Boring Company's FAQ are things that are already done (e.g., reusing TBMs, or continually operating TBMs), or related to the "new" transit system and the virtues of narrower tunnels (which are overstated--at the size of tunnels we're talking about, cost tends to scale linearly with diameter, not cross-sectional area).
Making an existing tunnel wider is vastly cheaper than building an equivalent tunnel from scratch. Simply knowing the soil composition makes a huge difference.
In hard rock you can use drilling and blasting across long sections rather than just the leading edge. Alternatively, a TBM needs to remove significantly less material.
Are you sure about that? Because I have never heard about a tunnel project which has been 'upgraded' this way ever.
And if I start to think about the practical problems, like breaking up part of the tunnel before widening it, it quickly seems like building a new one might be more efficient.
Almost every tunnel has a lining that makes widening prohibitive. Which is why the London Underground is forever stuck with small tunnels on the original lines.
But more expensive than building the tunnel the right size to begin with, when you take into account the cost to build the too-small tunnel in the first place.
A lot of people really really like to travel in their individual vechicles instead of public transport. They like it so much that they spend a lot of money (a proxy for their own time and life energy), and deal with other problems like parking etc.
So a tunnel system which moves public transport trains does not compare in utility with a system which can move personal cars. Did you just ignore this fact?
The above comment pointed out that they abandoned the idea of moving personal cars, they will now have large proprietary vehicles that only travel within the tunnels and have seating for a bunch of people. Aka, trains.
This looks like a first project for them. From the previous Boring Company presentation it is clear that the long-term vision includes a lot of tunnels for private cars.
It has basicly all the same infrastructure requirements of trains, thus inevitably, similar costs, but you give it a slick new label like "people mover" and suddenly the costs are cut 90%, but nobody builds "people movers" so the bullshittium can be heavily sprinkled everywhere.
Well it's a concept I'm sure all of us are familiar with, if you want 10Gbps of throughput you can have a 32 bit bus at 322MHz or 64 bit bus at 161MHz. So if you want a tunnel with 10 cars/second you need one tunnel with at a speed of 10 cars/second or you need 10 lanes of 1car/second. That's really where my question is - the 125mph isn't what interests me, it's how you get a thousand cars (or people into cars) that are stationary, and accelerate them up without having massive gaps between them.
You could increase packet size, and do one lane with (60 cars) every minute (as opposed to one car every second).
The result is called a bus or a train.
Alternatively, use token ring. If you have a separate tack for cars to get up to speed, and really trust your hardware and your software, a car can simply slip into an empty 10m gap between cars, and slip out of it onto a side track to decelerate when it approaches its destination.
A good metaphor, because as you increase bus size, the complexity of dealing with crosstalk increases. To achieve 10 cars / second one would have to size it more than 10 times, to include bypasses so that long distance traffic doesn't interfere with shorter distance.
From what I saw, the hyped Boring tunnel cost savings he demoed were by comparing the cost of the tunnel he had built to the cost of a complete station.
Comparing apples to apples, it's competitive, and that's an achievement in itself, but they haven't proven anything like the savings he claimed.
That's a recurring theme with Musk's hype. It's great that he's taking a fresh look at these things, and in some cases he's found some genuine efficiencies, but the expectations he puts out is that the rest of industry is locked down into hopelessly obsolete and inefficient methods. That's just not true, but it's a very appealing story.
It's mostly hype yes, what do you expect from a startup? The strongest premise is the tunnel diameter is smaller, therefore quicker and cheaper to build. There may be efficiencies to be gained through improved engineering of tunneling machines as well, given SpaceX and Tesla's innovations.
Yes, there are many problems left, however every start-up faces a number of problems. They're basically just lining up to build an MVP, or perhaps that was the previous tunnel and LVCC is the beta version.
In either case, they have a CEO famous for his marketing and overly optimistic promises. If this wasn't an Elon Musk venture, I doubt it'd be getting over-hyped and blasted as much as it is.
The price tag for the tunnel is pretty much what you’d expect at the low end of civil engineering costs, so there’s no room in the pricing if things start to go south. Musk’s entire premise is that there are magical inefficiencies in the commercial tunnel boring machines he’s purchased, and he assumes that spacecraft and automotive engineering expertise is sufficiently transferable to uncover those opportunities and redesign a considerably more efficient and cheaper machine. Oh, and using commercial automobiles will be faster, cheaper, and more pax-intensive than light rail solutions. I’m … skeptical. Let’s go with “skeptical” on this one.
Based on my ballpark guesses at the cost of the tunnel, I would be surprised if The Boring Company actually made any money on this. They're liable for all cost overruns, and they have to bear the costs of developing the custom Tesla car manufacturing and safety qualification themselves.
The most galling part to me is that I can't see how they make the mandated 4400 people/hr limit. That requires 26 second headways between vehicles (assuming that 4400 people/hr is a bidirectional capacity, not unidirectional), and I don't see them getting station dwell times low enough to permit those headways--airport people movers usually run around 30-45 second dwell times.
You're thinking in train terms. There's nowhere near 26 second headway between vehicles in busy tunnels near me - cars enter and exit the road from multiple sides before entering and the headway in the tunnel is much shorter. 30-45 second headway makes sense when your station stops blocks the entrance to the tunnel, which is the norm for rail systems, but not for car tunnels.
Wouldn't the obvious solution be to multiplex cars at each station? They could have twenty Teslas at each ___location for passenger pickup/drop-off, only entering the launch queue when all occupants are seated and restrained.
It is totally fair that what they have shown isn't ready to change the world, but at least give them credit for thinking about those problems and having innovative solutions. Electric motors vastly reduce ventilation requirements, autonomous vehicles under the control of the central system make it possible to evacuate most riders rapidly in the event of an emergency without leaving the cars, and having small vehicles going straight to your destination means there can be many more stations, decreasing the traffic at each one. All of these are fundamentally new technologies that aren't part of traditional subways, and if they can get them all to work, it will be a system with new and novel capabilities.
> ingress and egress congestion problems into and out of the tunnel[..]
They posted a video 2 years ago that has 6 million views that shows how this works in the first 30 seconds. It was all over the news when it was posted:
> Moving our roads underground is a vastly superior transportation system than we have today.
When I read stuff like this I'm flabbergasted. The cost of maintenance for tunnels is almost certainly higher than that for surface roads. That's not to mention additional considerations like always-on lighting (no free light from the sun) and poor access to businesses (so the roads still have to exist in some form). Tunnels only make sense in a few high-density urban centres, where the alternative would be elevated highways. Otherwise they're a great way to create a municipal budget time bomb when big repairs have to take place.
>The cost of maintenance for tunnels is almost certainly higher than that for surface roads.
Pros would include avoiding the freeze thaw cycle that destroys roads in much of the country. Tunnels could also allow pollution mitigation to take place if internal combustion engines were used, which is simply impossible on open highways.
Cons include an obviously higher initial capital expenditure.
I suppose we need to get down to a cost per person moved metric over something like 30 years to more objectively compare.
i really appreciate what elon musk is doing, but to be clear, he's not strictly trying to make tunneling cheaper for mass transit.
as i understand it, the high costs of transportation projects are a political problem not an engineering one. well-run subway projects have been completed at $50-100 million per mile, while most such projects in the US are 5 to 10 times that. that's attributable not to sticter safety standards or excessive land costs or public agencies being inefficient, even if those things do contribute at the margins. it's because so many constituencies laden these projects with deadweight costs (lawsuits, foot-dragging, overcharging, kickbacks, etc.).
while his engineering leadership is exceptional and that contributes to lowering costs, elon adeptly sidesteps much of those constituent ladenings, perhaps through careful choice of goals and projects and sheer force of will. for all his faults, he seems to have the right blend of vision, skill, money, charisma, and motivation to bring these projects to completion without a lot of deadweight loss.
so the boring company's technological advances just won't translate to cost reductions generally in underground transportation projects. even if a project uses the boring company for the tunneling, the large infrastructure contractors will find ways to extract their generous slice of pie. we need political/social/economic solutions to reduce these costs, not technological ones.
> "Sometimes technological solutions solve political problems."
sure, but what technology could be applied in this case?
for instance, projects are often underbid and then overcharged over time, whether it's fixed bid or time and materials. fixed bid incentivizes subcontractors to cut corners. time and materials billing incentivizes subcontractors to be inefficient. and subcontractors find ways to cheat.
people have tried complicated incentive systems to fix this issue (a kind of technological solution), but they seem to have mixed results (that is, not much better, for a lot more complexity in tracking and apportioning compensation).
even if you could build a machine to monitor all the workers and perfectly pay them based on quality and efficiency, such dystopian conditions would most certainly meet heavy resistance.
i mean, i love tech, but who'd want a machine controlling their lives?
> sure, but what technology could be applied in this case?
A big problem with tunnels has traditionally been land rights (less so than with highways/but still a problem). If your tunneling costs are 10-100x lower, suddenly landowners who would otherwise try to extract exorbitant prices have a lot less leverage because you have more freedom in where you build the tunnels and entry/exit points.
There's no magical new technology that will entirely subvert the political expense of this project, but they make it explicitly clear on the Boring Company website that they have vastly improved the mostly old and uninspired technology of the tunnel boring machine itself, which will save millions at least. So like, that answers your question.
Exactly! They didn't mention cost in the correct way in the article, only saying that it costs less because it's a small tunnel. Instead of addressing the possible cost savings from advances in tunnel digger technology that Musk hopes to achieve.
the first tunnels won't make as much financial sense as subsequent tunnels but they're have to start somewhere
I disagree. Cars should be at surface levels. Going below ground or above ground is too expensive: cars (and more importantly trucks which this tunnel doesn't cover at all) are heavy and so they need expensive infrastructure. We can have tunnels and overpass in places where required, but in general cars belong at surface level.
What we should be doing is moving humans up: we should be building sky ways between buildings. Someone on foot (I'll allow wheelchairs) is not very heavy and doesn't take much space: the amount of infrastructure needed to support them is not nearly as expensive as moving cars to a different level. The skyway also allows for heating and air conditioning, something humans like.
When the distances get long we can put in a moving sidewalk if we want. However, for the most part when distances get long humans should move back to ground level and catch a bus/train.
Trucks are large: they need bigger more expensive tunnels. It isn't that we cannot do it, it is just that tunnels are expensive, and the larger you make them the more expensive they become. While a car/truck less city sounds like a great idea, it isn't practical. There are a lot of goods that need to move around somehow for a city to work. While trains or horses could be used instead, both have issues as we get to the "last mile".
Thus I'm proposing get humans off the ground level - we have the technology to make this convenient today. The cost is not very high and it solves a lot of congestion problems on the street.
What's a comparable tunnel? Isn't the Vegas loop a single lane tunnel for personal vehicles? I can't think of other existing/planned tunnels that fit that description, aside from other Boring Co ones.
I'm not at all convinced that this design can scale.
It feels that way. As much as I want Mr. Musk to succeed, this doesn't feel any better than the dozens of other small people movers that have been around for half a century or more.
The only point of difference I can see is that it's going to be more on-demand (though that's been done before), and it's going to be cheap.
Even accounting for the cost, I think many would still argue that it was worth it, replacing a highway system that divided the city with a walkable network of parks that effectively connects different neighborhoods like financial district <-> north end, along with a new series of (underground) highways that provided improved traffic flow.
Oh my God, it actually became parks?! I lived there back in 2007 or so and had no faith whatsoever that the promises that the artery would be replaced with parkland once it was finished. My apologies to the government of Boston.
Ah okay, that makes sense (but parent comment was talking about Boring Company / other new technology potentially reducing cost in the future; though I'm also skeptical).
I think the issue isn't that the techniques used for tunnel boring are so expensive, but that other issues (mismanagement, corruption) end up costing a lot. I don't think The Boring Company is going to solve those problems. Certainly reducing costs through new technology is a good thing, but it's not the whole picture by a long shot.
That doesn't look worth it at all. It cost $22 billion and the result is a narrow 1-block park through the center of Boston.
Most of those buildings next to what used to be the highway are at most 10-20 stories. A 60 story skyscraper was finished in Boston this year for $700[1].
So to a first approximation they could have had a full 2-3 blocks of parks around 15 new such skyscrapers to get the same building space after demolishing most of the buildings seen in the foreground on that picture, and have come out even on floor area.
They'd then have had had $12 billion left over to elevate the highway and put that elevated highway in a tunnel to cancel out the noise before they got to to $22 billion.
It was absolutely worth it. I've visited that area back in the early-/mid-00s when the highways and construction were still there, and recently (was just there a few weeks ago, actually) after completion. It's night and day, and the new space is a huge improvement over the old.
Comparing skyscraper build costs to tunnel build costs is meaningless.
Noise isn't the only factor. The bigger issues are division of the city, and the urban blight that is common under and around elevated highways.
The cost overruns were due to the usual things: mistakes that were expensive to correct, graft, and corruption. If you can solve those things, great. But I don't think the presence of those things should invalidate the need for truly valuable projects that make cities much more livable.
Whether it's worth it isn't measured by whether it's a huge improvement, it's obvious to anyone with eyes that the current state is better. It's whether it could have been even better had the $22 billion been spent differently.
So no, comparing skyscraper cost to tunnel cost is absolutely meaningful, because if you want to increase green space one way is to spend an exorbitant amount of money digging a highway into the ground, another is to demolish 5 blocks of 10 story houses, build one 50 story skyscraper, and get 4 blocks of public park as a result.
Urban blight around elevated highways isn't some law of nature, it's just a zoning problem, and one that's a lot cheaper to solve than digging the highway into the ground.
Those existing buildings have people inside. Pulling them out to demolish the buildings and add new, taller, skyscrapers has significant costs I think you aren't factoring in. Like all those businesses inside have to relocate... which costs money.
How would tunnels be any better for air quality? You either vent all the toxic fumes to the surface or you kill everyone in the tunnel. Underground trains make far more sense than underground roads.
>I grew up near Boston during the big dig and the city is a drastically different place before and after the Central Artery.
What did the Big Dig do that a better central artery with more decks wouldn't?
The whole "highways are ugly" argument really is mostly from/for upscale people who don't want their view ruined. Very few people who actually has to use or live/work near the infrastructure really cares all that much about it's presence. It's just a fact of life. Heck, if you painted it like something interesting everyone would stop caring in a couple years (i.e. same thing that happened to the rainbow natural gas tank on the side of I93).
Putting stuff underground is expensive and complicated compare to building above ground.
> The whole "highways are ugly" argument really is mostly from/for upscale people who don't want their view ruined.
That's really, really not true. And "it's ugly" isn't the argument usually presented, either - it's that it's a tremendous waste of space.
Move all the roads underground and you can reuse that land. Maybe for a park, but also maybe for high-density housing that will make things more affordable for everyone.
Hi. I work near the infrastructure and I care about its presence or lack thereof. Fortunately the oppressively loud, reverberating steel structure is no longer a fact of life. When I walk through that area I am literally no longer in its shadow. https://ourdoings.com/brlewis/2008-05-14
The big dig is way more pedestrian friendly than multiple decks and pedestrian overpasses. And pedestrians are a huge positive for cities in so many ways.
