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Next Big Thing From Elon Musk? It Could Be 'Boring' (usatoday.com)
A string of tweets put out by serial tech entrepreneur Elon Musk on Saturday hints that his entrepreneurial future may be a little "boring." USA Today reports: The Tesla and SpaceX founder got on Twitter on Saturday morning to rant about an issue he seems to find irksome -- traffic. Musk has also been working on resolving his frustration with traffic issues through above-ground means with his Hyperloop venture, which proposes a plan for mass-transit pods moving through above-ground tubes. But that doesn't appear to be enough, commenting: "Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging..." He even offered up a name for the venture, calling it "The Boring Company," and began branding it with a slogan: "Boring, it's what we do." Then capped it off by tweeting, "I am actually going to do this."
I think it was Stephen Colbert who made an attempt to describe the Lincoln Tunnel to people who didn't live in New York:
Imagine trying to get that contents of this container of jelly beans into this bucket, putting them all through these two drinking straws...Also, all of those jelly beans are late to work.
A major problem is when accidents happen in tunnels. There is literally nowhere for anyone - including emergency vehicles - to go. Now, accidents in tunnels tend to be of the fender bender variety, but when a vehicle is rendered inoperable, you're just plain screwed. Making tunnels the way roads are built as a general rule is not the best of ideas - it's why subways make more sense as long as the stops can pick up and drop off enough people to nudge the needle of the rest of traffic. Manhattan would be utterly impassable without the subway moving half a million people a day.
Nobody likes traffic, and nobody likes parking. LA has its problems due not simply to cost, but the lack of a useful alternative when dealing when that level of population density independent of a useful mass transit system.