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Elon Musk's Boring Machine Completes the First Section of An LA Tunnel (theverge.com)
New submitter simkel shares a report from The Verge: Serial entrepreneur Elon Musk says his ambitious tunnel-boring endeavor, aptly named The Boring Company, has officially started digging underneath Los Angeles. Musk announced the news on Twitter, where he said "Godot," the Samuel Beckett-inspired name of the company's tunnel boring machine, had completed the the first segment of a tunnel in the Southern California metropolis. Prior to today, it was unclear how long it would take Musk to convince the city to allow him to move the experimental effort beyond the SpaceX parking lot in Hawthorne. We don't have details on what Musk hammered out with the city of LA. But he did tweet earlier this month about a meeting with L.A Mayor Eric Garcetti to lay the groundwork for the necessary permits and regulatory approvals he'd need to start digging with Godot, which weighs about 1,200 tons and runs about 400 feet long. Musk said last month that the first tunnel would run from LAX to Culver City, Santa Monica, Westwood, and Sherman Oaks, with later tunnels covering more of the greater LA area. Now, it looks like the LAX to Culver City route appears underway.
As it used to say in the Yellow Pages: "Boring: see Civil Engineers".
The article doesn't say, but does anyone know how long this "first segment" is? Since the TBM itself is 400 feet long, I can only assume it's at least 400 feet...
Musk's idea is original and terrific! He is proposing building a network of tunnels to move people around LA. No other cities anywhere will have such things. These subterranean roadways, or subways, will be... oh wait.
To keep the concept fresh, he could sell sandwiches on them as well. They would be Subway Sand... nevermind.
Old economy square daddies don't. Hip unicorns with agile apps totally do.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
He already used all the tunneling equipment to build his secret underground super-villain lair. This is just re-purposing it for profit.
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I wonder what these tunnels will do? Perhaps he's just tired of sitting in traffic in LA like everyone else - in his 100k Tesla - with fanboys gawking at him and he is tired of the lookie-loos? He's more important than everyone else so, hey he's a billionaire, why not just build a tunnel so he doesn't have to share the road with other common folk? 10 to 1 these tunnels will have gates on each end with a pass-code available to only a handful of 1%'ers.
Namaste
where he said "Godot," the Samuel Beckett-inspired name
Whats the chances that a reader does not get the "Godot" reference, but knows Beckett from all his other famous plays?
For those unfamiliar, Beckett won a Nobel Prize in literature, but is better known by your average theatre-goer as the most boring playwright in history.
(And obviously the machine arrived well behind schedule.)
And there I am... just past 50 years old thinking the only revolution I'd see was the internet.
And here we are... rockets, electric cars, and tunneling machines.
I hope I make it to 90!!!
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
LA is not one big city. SpaceX is in Hawthorne, a totally separate city with its own city council, etc. The same can be said of Culver City, Santa Monica, and dozens of other cities that many think of as just part of "LA". Each of these presents another opportunity to get bogged down in local politics.
I think there might be the underground superhero/villain, and hopefully a profitable project, but I think it's practice for Mars. The Martian ground offers conveniently available radiation shielding.
But he hasn't left his own property yet has he? There isn't a lot of red tape to work though to dig a hole on your own property, some, but not a lot.
It's a tunnel that goes nowhere at this point. Wait, he's going to be tied up in red tape soon enough doing traffic studies, environmental impact statements, building permits and OSHA reports.... Not to mention doing some actual engineering and survey work...
However, I wouldn't be surprised if getting caught up in the red tape isn't the plan. I know of a couple of deep holes being dug in some pretty interesting locations under strange circumstances, including this one. I'm beginning to suspect some kind of Glomar Explorer esk project is going on....This hole in the ground sure looks like a cover story worthy of Howard Huges, dubious in actual value, but plausible enough you cannot just dismiss it out of hand.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
IIRC the machine was built for a tunnel somewhere else and he bought it, but wikipedia does not have it and I am not digging deeper.
Silence is a state of mime.
I'm sure this isn't an issue since they must have smart engineers working on the project, but the first thing that comes to my mind are the earthquakes that plague California. Is this not an issue?
I'm not sure the extend of Musk's boring machine but the ones they use to dig tunnels through mountains also reinforce the walls at the same time. So from a traffic and environmental standpoint.. not sure there's much to study.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
IIRC the machine was built for a tunnel somewhere else and he bought it, but wikipedia does not have it and I am not digging deeper.
If only you had some sort of machine to help you dig deeper.
LOL, This IS LA you know... Right smack dab in the middle of some pretty nasty earthquake prone fault lines... It's going to obviously produce a LOT of tailings that will have to be put someplace and likely have to be below the water table meaning it will have waste water being pumped out of it....AND this is California we are discussing... There will be scads of environmental impact studies required for this...
Then there are all the permits he's going to need from all the various cities, county, state and federal interests for just the traffic impacts of his "private" transportation system.... And Building permits..... Engineering studies..... Inspections.... Mining permits... Safety plans... Dang the list goes on and on..
This is just a cover story....He's never going to build the tunnel... At least not one that goes anywhere related to getting to the airport on time.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Adam West is the greatest underground superhero.
"His name was James Damore."
"...which weighs about 1,200 tons and runs about 400 feet long.
L.A. is spread out, with several corridors of dense building. The "central city area" of downtown L.A. is actually pretty small, a roughly pentagonal area about 2 miles across. Musk's initial tunnel doesn't even go there.
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Environmental law is a lot confusing, so let me clear this up:
Per California law Environmental Impact Reports under CEQA are only required if a public agency is in charge of the project, aka state or local tax money is being used.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Environmental_Quality_Act#Environmental_Impact_Report_.28EIR.29
It's a similar story at the Federal level, NEPA only requires Federal agencies to complete assessments if a Federal agency is involved, or if Federal tax money is being used.
Because this endeavor is entirely privately funded, Elon stays clears of the murkiest of environmental laws. He will probably will still have to pull some kind of building permit, but theoretically if he buys rights to the underground along the path it is his property and he doesn't need broad public approval, or even the approval of the people living above. Property owners don't own what's underneath the ground of their property unless it was specifically included in the deed.
This is the most exciting boring machine I've ever read about!
The Simpsons saw this coming years ago.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
You can engineer against anything. At least up to a 50 years lifespan. It's only after 50 years when the rebar is rusting that you have to worry. In other words only old structures are potentially dangerous but then that's why such things are rebuilt.
There is nothing stronger than a tube in the ground. Far more secure during a 12.0 earthquake than any overpass. Your far more likely to die from being trampled in an earthquake than from a tunnel collapse. We are not talking about mine shafts but rather oversized concrete tubes. A tube could split in half and move 3 inches and still be perfectly fine and usable.
The bigger issue is structures on the surface and ground stability during and after the evacuation. If they are drilling in rock or underneath rock then it should be much of an effect. But I can see Musk digging tunnels underneath other tunnels.
They are putting in a tunnel in my city for an LRT system. For many years before they were drilling core samples to know what they were going to be drilling through. Even then we've had 3 sinkholes caused by the tunnelling and it's only been luck that nobody has been hurt.
One does not just decide to make a tunnel through a downtown core without years of preparation and approval. Tunnelling causes a lot of the ground to shift which can cause damage to buildings and the sinkholes. While Musk can afford to pay for the damages the city can't if it's found out that due diligence wasn't done and they permitted this to go ahead.
While this 'boring' news seems a little bit exciting, one must not forget that there are lots of seismic faults beneath LA, and many of them are unstable
Or perhaps it's a reference to the (massive, extremely strong, near invulnerable, hyper competent, hyper confident, and utterly laid-back) science fiction graphic novel character Buck Godot.
(Who, himself, is a reference to "Waiting For Godot", but a step removed.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I wonder if Musk is planning on combining boring, hyperloop, and SpaceX tech to create a maglev space launch system like StarTram.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Too Soon.
But still funny.
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
They are putting in a tunnel in my city for an LRT system. ... Tunnelling causes a lot of the ground to shift which can cause damage to buildings and the sinkholes.
They are not doing it the right way then. Modern tunneling generally lines the bore continuously as the earth is cut. There should be no external effect whatsoever; that is how London's Crossrail is being built. But I wouldn't like to say about the ground in an area with moving faults, like California.
Having said that, Musk's scheme is nonsense. As cars are to be brought down to the tunnels with lifts, the throughput will be very low indeed, OK for just a few billionaires maybe. Has Musk never had to wait for a lift?
Than just a plain old TBM.
Yeah ok, so he is drilling tunnels with it, but I dont see any differences to any other run of the mill TBM out there.
Elon being Elon, I would have expected at least a plasma drill or maybe even better, a subterrene: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Yet somehow Japan has managed to have very effective subway systems all over the country while being far more seismically active.
You're correct in that he just can't start boring tunnels wherever he pleases. However if you do it correctly, the tunnel is going to be extremely strong and stable.
I'd have to go back and search but wasn't the original plan simply to build a tunnel connecting a couple parking lots so his employees could park their cars and have a relatively easy walk to get inside the building?
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
I didn't pay much attention to this until I noticed an article explaining the thinking behind it. Basically, the idea is to substantially reduce the cost of a tunnel system, and they are going to try to do that through a combination of:
- smaller tunnels, which will require only 1/4 of the dirt removal of standard vehicle tunnels
- automated, continuous tunnel lining, to reduce downtime for the boring machine
- speeding up both boring and lining
The small tunnel size is what necessitates the cars-on-sleds idea. Can they load cars on sleds quickly and cheaply? Who knows.
Should we start a betting pool on which they hit first? Lava? Oil? A delicate fault line? American Indian remains?
You still have to do them. Laws don't bend to logic.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
"I think there might be the underground superhero/villain, and hopefully a profitable project, but I think it's practice for Mars."
Hummm... He'll need to practice a lot, then. It's a lot of digging to Mars.
There's nothing fresh about his machine - it was bought for purposes of understanding the current technology.
Christopher Reeve might beg to differ.
"Somewhere else" was conveniently close, in LA - but I don't remember the project.
How's it going to help testing the equipment on Earth? On Mars it'll be operating in about 0.3776 of Earth gravity, less than 1% of the atmospheric pressure, and around 100(K/C) lower temperatures. That's going to affect everything from sparking in electrical motors, to viscosity of hydraulics, to bending of structural members under the weight. So you're going to have to re--design it considerably once you get experience on Mars itself.
I don't believe it's going to happen, or be needed, but we're already certain that there are appreciable natural lava-tube caves on Mars, which would give you the radiation and micrometeoroid protection for essentially free. That'll be enough for a Mars-based science mission. Terraforming isn't going to happen - because living in space will be easier than terraforming by many orders of magnitude.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
The tailings, the boring machine, and the tunnel it digs probably cause cancer also.
They are lining the tunnel as they proceed but we're still getting sinkholes including one that turned into a popular meme (at least around here). Of course the mayor says it's just part of the work which makes me dislike him as a mayor even more. (I have no opinion as a person because I don't know him.)
But they've been working on phase 1 for a few years now and it won't be open for almost another year and they are already lining up phase 2 work to start right away. We have no idea how well it's going to work but let's spend another $3B on LRT for the hell of it. The company running it might be a disaster or people just might not take the LRT and turn to their car but let's double down. It's only taxpayer money after all.