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Elon Musk Posts New Video of 'Boring' Equipment and Company's First Tunnel (cnbc.com)
Elon Musk has posted a new video and several pictures of equipment that will be used to start digging tunnels beneath Los Angeles. There's a picture of boring machine segments that are being lowered into the start tunnel at SpaceX, a front view of the tunnel, an inside view of the tunnel, and a picture of the front of the boring machine that will cut through underground rock. Additionally, the video shows a version of the "skate" that will cary cars through the tunnel at a speed of 125 mph. CNBC reports: The project is one of Musk's latest ventures, which was inspired by a desire to alleviate "out of control" traffic in Los Angeles. He aims to first dig a tunnel from SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, to the nearby Los Angeles airport. Musk frequently flies from Los Angeles to the San Francisco area, where he runs Tesla. Eventually, he envisions a deep, multilayered network of underground tunnels spanning the city.
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.
I think you've just lost an argument with yourself there, buddy. As you said, it would take decades of tedious effort and politicking to turn a city around to your "smart growth", and with the vagaries of politics and finance, there's no guarantee of success; you're always only an election away from some numpty cutting funding for the projects and spending the money on something else. I wouldn't want to get involved in that, and it seems Elon doesn't either. You can, however, start building tunnels today, as Elon has done. The idea may or may not pan out, and it may or may not play a significant role in urban transportation even if it does pan out to some extent, but it's something that you can start the ball rolling on right away, and have a reasonable degree of control over. That's exactly why Elon goes for that kind of solution, and personally I'm all for it. It doesn't preclude any other kind of development, so if others want to pursue "smart growth", great, it doesn't have to be Elon's job.
Oh no... it's the future.
He wants to retire on Mars, so he's building rockets to get there.
Mars has no fossil fuels, so everything's going to be electric and the source will be solar or nuclear. So he's got Tesla working on solar power and storage.
Mars has a nasty surface, so underground is the place to be. Either you build and heap surface material over you... or you bore tunnels. Enter the Boring Company.
Mars has no communications infrastructure... at all. Enter SpaceX worldwide Internet. You think those same satellites couldn't orbit Mars? Probably with less worry of orbital impact or atmospheric drag, too.
Mars has no transportation infrastructure... and the surface (as previously mentioned) is not human-friendly. Mars ALSO has very little atmosphere, and Elon has a boring machine. Enter the Hyperloop. With less gravity and less atmosphere to deal with, the Hyperloop concept seems like it's a perfect fit for a well-bored tunnel.
Each of the things he's working on is part of a future Mars colony, and they all have the potential to make him money here (which helps him get there).
Not that I disagree with the obvious problems with Elon's project, but a few words in defence of jumping in and trying stuff. It's extremely easy to start reading about the complexity inherent (social, political, technological) and therefore decide the way things are is the only real practical way things can ever be. Sometimes it's better to jump in, try something, and see if it works. Accepted wisdom is right far more often than wrong (hence accepted) but it's still not 100%, and we should try the corner cases where odds of success are 1% (ideally at least 1% of the time). So even as it's foolhardy I'd rather see more billionaires at least trying new ideas, if only because out of the randomness we'll learn something new rather than rely on accepted wisdom.