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.

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Re:Tech-rich people need to do more consultation

[Tx]

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.