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.
Ok, so you get in a train that drops you off in the middle of LA. Now, how do you get to where you're going from there? LA is hundreds of square miles of urban area, all spread out so there's no way any train will take you to all parts of it. You'll need a car to drive yourself to your destination. Now you're looking at spending a bunch of time and money dealing with a rental car agency, instead of just using your own car to get you there.
Trains are just like planes, only a lot slower. Planes are great for getting a medium number of people between two points all at once, in a short amount of time (except for TSA groping). But they don't help you much in getting from the airport to your final destination. Trains are worse because they're so slow, it ends up not being sensible to use them too much because if the distance is short, you might as well drive, and if it's longer, you're better off flying. If you happen to live in an urban downtown and want to travel to another urban downtown not too far away, trains make a lot of sense. That's about it though.
What would make a lot more sense is if they'd build SkyTran, but no one believes that'll possibly work so we can't have it.
Why am I obsessed with cars? Because my crappy 35 minute commute by car becomes a 2 hour 20 commute by BART + Bus + walking (according to Google Maps). And trains can't take me to the hikes or parks I like, aren't really a practical way to bring around my kid and all the random shit he needs, etc.
I suppose we could bulldoze the entire Bay Area to organize it around a train system, but that's not going to happen.
Good username/comment synergism, though. I will say that even in NYC, taking the subway to go between my brother in North Brooklyn to my friend in South Brooklyn is like an hour, even though they're just about 4 miles away. Even NYC needs cars, although it makes more sense to use Uber/taxi for many people.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
This, in Miami I could drive 35 minutes pre-rush, or 55 minutes for the same commute during rush hour in a car. Or, I could drive 20 minutes in the car, park at the rail station, take a train for 20 minutes, transfer to the people mover for another 10 minutes, then walk exposed to sun and rain for 1/4 mile to work, paying $4 per day for the privilege of riding the trains.
Gee, what would you do?
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!
Musk seems to have a tunnel & tube fixation. I wonder what Freud would say about that.
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.
OK, so you get in a train that drops you off in the middle of London. Now, how do you get to where you're going from there?
The answer is not "MOAH CARS!" The answer is better city planning.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The answer is better city planning.
Keep in mind that the city is already there.
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.
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
"Gee, what would you do?"
Move?
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Have you ever actually tried to get around London without getting stuck in a bottleneck somewhere? Hardly a bastion of transportation efficiency.
I think you missed the point. London has a very good transport system for getting you beween points including the centre and the suburbs : a system of several railways incuding the Underground , the Overground and others. I worked in central London, commuting from the suburbs, for 15 years and only once ever drove into the centre (to collect a heavy office item). Only idiots drive in London regularly.
The US trains only work for shorter distances. Even going from DC to Boston is just too far: it's cheaper, and MUCH faster to go by plane (1.5 hours vs. 8 hours). So yeah, going from DC to Baltimore by train is OK (if you don't need a car on either end), or even DC to NYC, but that's about it, unless you have a lot of time. And Amtrak prices aren't cheap either.
Musk's scheme makes little sense because of the high cost of tunneling. It would make far more sense to embrace SkyTran PRT: it's cheap to build, it uses utility towers and suspends rails from it (instead of tunneling), the rails can be built alongside existing roads, using existing rights-of-way, and you're only moving people and lightweight little pod-cars, not thousands of pounds of metal.
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!
So true. If I don't walk to the train station 6 minutes from my house I have to walk to the one on another line 12 minutes away. Or take the bus which is 1 minute walk away. But then I do live out in the sticks, 15 miles from central, and I have short legs. Also the trains don't run on Christmas day.
It also has an absurdly high cost of living. ......., and (not being a Londoner or UKer I'm speculating) many people who work there probably don't live near a public transit station.
Yes, you are speculating.
The cost of living in the London suburbs is not greatly different from elsewhere in the UK. Of course, there is huge variation between desirable areas and grotty areas - both in London and the UK generally. And the vast majority of people who live in the Greater London area do in fact live "near a public transit station"; say 10 minutes walk from a railway station or less to a bus stop.