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 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.
> Smart growth and sustainable, walkable, transit-oriented development...
Transit-oriented development is exactly what is being proposed. From the fine summary:
"[The system would contain] electric skates transporting cars in a narrow tunnel, then raising them back to street level in a space as small as two parking spaces... cars could travel as fast as 200 kilometers per hour [through the tunnel.]"
This is a subway for cars, which is _exactly_ the sort of short-to-medium-term fix that you need in a metro area that is obscenely car-heavy, has next-to-no underground rail system, and next-to-no political will for constructing one.
Musk understands the political realities on the ground in the LA metro area far, far better than you do.
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
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!
"Workers in Tokyo spend an average of 2 hours per day commuting."
Assuming that things haven't changed since I lived in Tokyo many, many years ago, that's because:
1. Housing of any sort in Tokyo itself is very expensive.
2. Japanese employers pay transportation costs for workers.
At least on a train to the distant suburbs of Tokyo, you can sleep. And many Japanese do exactly that. How do they wake up when the train gets to their station? Damned if I know. But they do.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey