Slashdot Mirror
Elon Musk Outlines His 'Boring' Vision For Traffic-Avoiding Tunnels (axios.com)
Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed new details about his futuristic tunnel-boring project during his TED talk on Friday. Ina Fried, writing for Axios: In an appearance at the TED conference in Vancouver, Musk showed off a new video visualization of electric skates transporting cars in a narrow tunnel, then raising them back to street level in a space as small as two parking spaces. Inside the tunnels, Musk said cars could travel as fast as 200 kilometers per hour (roughly 130 MPH). "You should be able to go from say Westwood to LAX in 5-6 minutes," the Tesla and SpaceX founder said, adding he is spending only 2-3 percent on the tunnel effort. The Boring Company is currently building a demo tunnel in SpaceX's parking lot, but will need permits from the city of Los Angeles to extend beyond the property line. Musk added, "I'm not trying to be anyone's savior. I'm just trying to think about the future and not be sad." You can watch the video here.
>The Boring Company is currently building a demo tunnel in SpaceX's parking lot
Before the inevitable post about how he has revolutionized yet another industry, realize the borer on site was purchased from another company that makes such things.
...you just invented an even more expensive version of Amtrak's Auto Train.
The roads were actually belts (think belt sander) you stepped on it and you would go faster, now if you drove on it. You would get places faster, like wow.
Invest in me.
(idea was actually from old scifi)
How about trains? They're remarkably efficient at transporting lots of people long distances in short periods of time. Seriously.
I understand the obsession people Americans with cars, but there's a lot of extra materials required for a car that used just to allow people to keep their own personal bubble. It's really a waste of space and materials.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
It's getting rather...uhm...boring
The single best solution to traffic in Cities Skylines is tunnels, lots of tunnels, put those freeways underground. I put my tunnel on-off ramps on the inside of big roundabouts, then the surface traffic is tremendously diminished, the freeway traffic has ready access to most areas, and the freeways don't add noise to neighborhoods or bisect and separate them.
How about private infrastructure, like private roads built with private money and the owner of the road charging to build/operate/maintain it? Naah, impossible, that's a government's job.
I mean... lots of areas have that. I live in Dallas where just about any highway worth driving on is a private toll road. Even people who claim to be free-market libertarians love to complain about private toll roads. The roads are awesome, and almost always have a higher speedlimit, better quality, and included roadside assistance.
The main problem with "private infrastructure" in Los Angeles is that if there were space for more roads, they would already be there. Which leads us to some sort of BORING (get it!?) proposition.
i never understood why on a private toll road there is ANY speed limit. i always use those private toll roads because there is typically less of a traffic cop presence and most people don't want to pay extra so the traffic is less.
Solutions like this are classic examples of tech-rich people thinking they have all the answers when there's a whole bank of qualified specialist people already working in that field who know what's really needed to fix the problem but have only been stymied by politics.
If traffic is driving Musk nuts then the solution is not to find innovative new ways to handle more traffic. The solution is to ask why is traffic so bad in the first place.
Recommended reading: The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jacobs
Or if that's too heavy, try Suburban Nation: The rise of sprawl and the decline of the American dream.
Only then will you come to see the culprit: Single Use Zoning, aka the BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) rules. Single-use zoning forces everybody to make several car journeys just to get through a typical day. Going to work? Car. Going out for lunch? Car. Going home form work? Car. Need to go out for a bottle of milk and postage stamp? Car. Going to a movie? Car.
No bloody wonder the place is flooded with traffic. You try to build a city around the automobile and it becomes a hostile environment for pedestrians and cyclists. You try to widen roads to accommodate more cars and the laws of induced demand kick in, resulting in even more traffic and roads as choked as they were before.
Learn a few things about urban planning, Elon. Don't arrogantly assume that you're the first person to want to address this problem. Smart growth and sustainable, walkable, transit-oriented development is a far better solution than drilling holes in the ground and cracking puns about the word "boring." It requires years of tedious work and politicking to build support for smart growth. A city is not a private company with which you can do what you like. There are elected councils, public advisory committees, public hearings, tax implications, and all manner of complex bureaucratic hoops that you have to jump through to fix these things.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I want a Tesla Roadster with a drill on the front, so that I could create my own tunnel on my way to work at 125mph. It would be the most boring car ever!
...were built around individual car ownership. If you want convenient, easy public transport, you have to build urban areas around that in an integrated, systemic way. Just sticking in trains, underground skate parks, or whatever hair-brained idea some oligarch comes up with ain't gonna solve any complex problems.
For examples of better designed urban transport systems, have a look at older cities that were built before cars were a thing.
Did anyone else think the tracks looked like the slot car racing tracks. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slot_car) I can just imagine some kids running the controllers to see how fast they can take the corners.
The idea isn't new... there are science fiction books with moving walking ways. Isaac Asimov, in the novel The Caves of Steel (1954) and its sequels in the Robot series, uses similar enormous underground cities with a similar sidewalk system. The period described is about the year 3,000.
I guess we only have about 1000 years to wait....
They aren't private in Dallas... the companies have paid Texas for the right to 'manage' and toll for 25 or 50 years with rights to raise tolls 10% per year or some insane amount.
-Unresolved symbol? Byte me!
This is a nice idea, and it could be practical in 50 or so years. But why would you start in or around any city on the west coast. One earthquake during the early stages and this will die a terrible death, as would anyone buried in those tunnels.
https://youtu.be/HmEtR17A6ck?t...
Google Maps says Westwood to LAX takes over an hour during rush hour, or 18 minutes when traffic is light. So all they have to do is charge a variable congestion toll on the 405. If the price is set correctly, this would permanently eliminate traffic congestion on the 405 without overcharging anyone, and as a bonus it would replace taxes as a revenue source for maintenance or even, if people want it, to build the tunnel.
Lower taxes and congestion-free travel at the cost of a toll. That's two benefits for the price of one, and who doesn't like 2-for-1 deals?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
no pillars mods and over head
Guess how we fixed that problem over here?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_Autoroute_720
Yes, a 3-5 lanes highway (each direction) digged under all the city sky scrapper
with many entrances / exits all over downtown.
It gets you in the middle of the city or through the entire downtown area in no time,
so instead of being stuck at 5 mph in a 30 mph dense street city zone,
you can safely drive under all this crowded area at 45 mph
(even though most people actually drive up to a max speed of 60 mph on it).
The best part is that when it snow a lot during winter and the city blue collars are working hard to shovel it all
and block the streets shoveling the snow at low speed while doing so,
those tunnels are already free of snow, because physics.
I have no idea why other cities just don't do the exact same thing.
Oh and if you don't have a car, then you can also take the crowded subway:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Metro
Just need to an have high lighting level 24/7 to keep the bums out. Or an speed limit of 60-70+
Swarms of self driving car orbiting the city. Call and get one to take you to the store or the train station or the restaurant, wherever you need to go, release it to join the swarm/flock/herd and do your thing, calling for another just few minutes before you need to go. Automated monitoring could have enough cars at the train depots to take the occupants to their final destinations, and if done right a transfer from the train could cover the final mile cost just like a single bus bas does multiple transfers or a rail pass handles all the switches you need.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
It's just a matter of cooling... once you get to hot magma if you can provide enough cooling it will harden naturally and you can create a tube right through the earth.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Now the question is what to do about it.
It's easier to build tunnels than rebuild an entire city organically.
It's basically a subway system with individual cars rather than trains.
Work Safe Porn
The reason there is so much traffic and politics is because people don't like change and then they think they know better. Its people like Elon that don't listen to them and just go out and make the change. Don't listen to those that don't think we need change, or want to spend years studying what the change will do. Make smart decisions and go for it.
This is definitely the solution. In my home city of Birmingham in England there was a smaller scale system of tunnels called Queensway that, although scaled back in recent years, really did a good job of easing inner city traffic. They also gave me, and I'm sure many other kids, the wonderful opportunity of attempting to hold our breath all the way through. Something I wouldn't advise given the length of the tunnel in Montreal!
Boston did (the "Big Dig"), but it was astronomically over budget and schedule.
Many cities around the world are building tunnels to bypass the outer suburbs but Musk wants to add speed to the solution. How long does it take to fit these electric skates? What's the battery life when moving 2 tonnes of metal at 200 km/h?
I still like the 1950s idea of double-decker roads.
You just know somebody on their phone is going to blindly step into that hole.
1900 is a little before his time. It is the sort of idea that sounds good until you start confronting the reliability/safety problems of a real device, so many moving parts, as such it has turned up more than once and promptly failed.
https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/rare-photos-of-pariss-mechanical-moving-sidewalks-from-1123349748
What about earthquakes?
be sad.
Referee: Presenting Bender the Offender!
Bender: I'm just an ex-con trying to go straight and get my kids back.
I love this idea from Elon. He proposes building underground tunnels to carry cars with people in them from one part of a city to another. It's a subterranean motorway - a "subway,' if you will. This is a great time to be alive! And to think my grandmother only lived in the period when humans first took flight to walking on the moon.