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'Elon Musk's Hyperloop Is Doomed For the Worst Reason' (bloomberg.com)
schwit1 quotes a Bloomberg column by Virginia Postrel:
What makes Musk's Hyperloop plan seem like fantasy isn't the high-tech part. Shooting passengers along at more than 700 miles per hour seems simple -- engineers pushed 200 miles-per-hour in a test this week -- compared to building a tunnel from New York to Washington. And even digging that enormously long tunnel -- twice as long as the longest currently in existence -- seems straightforward compared to navigating the necessary regulatory approvals... The eye-rolling comes less from the technical challenges than from the bureaucratic ones.
With his premature declaration, Musk is doing public debate a favor. He's reminding us of what the barriers to ambitious projects really are: not technology, not even money, but getting permission to try. "Permits harder than technology," Musk tweeted after talking with Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti about building a tunnel network. That's true for the public sector as well as the private... SpaceX and its commercial-spaceflight competitors can experiment because Congress and President Barack Obama agreed to protect them from Federal Aviation Administration standards. usk is betting that his salesmanship will have a similar effect on the ground. He's trying to get the public so excited that the political pressures to allow the Hyperloop to go forward become irresistible. He seems to believe that he can will the permission into being. If he succeeds, he'll upend not merely intercity transit but the bureaucratic process by which things get built. That would be a true science-fiction scenario.
With his premature declaration, Musk is doing public debate a favor. He's reminding us of what the barriers to ambitious projects really are: not technology, not even money, but getting permission to try. "Permits harder than technology," Musk tweeted after talking with Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti about building a tunnel network. That's true for the public sector as well as the private... SpaceX and its commercial-spaceflight competitors can experiment because Congress and President Barack Obama agreed to protect them from Federal Aviation Administration standards. usk is betting that his salesmanship will have a similar effect on the ground. He's trying to get the public so excited that the political pressures to allow the Hyperloop to go forward become irresistible. He seems to believe that he can will the permission into being. If he succeeds, he'll upend not merely intercity transit but the bureaucratic process by which things get built. That would be a true science-fiction scenario.
God forbid there should be some oversight in building a ground level supersonic transport system.
there are too many regulations getting in the way?
Huh? My eyes roll for the technical challenges.
We should just give away all the land rights to the public lands and allow him to take any private by eminent domain. The local populace should have no recourse if its something Musk wants.
Who ever said that the hyperloop will be a tunnel from start to finish? Hyperloop works just as well above ground on concrete pylons. Going alongside highways, through farmland and even going over existing roads is perfectly possible with an elevated hyperloop.
At the end of the day hyperloop can't have any steep gradients or changes of direction. It'll be tunnels when passing through hills or mountains, and above ground when they land is low lying.
Similar to railways in that it's mixed above ground and tunnels. Only more so because changes of direction need to be minimised much more.
There will not be one long tunnel.
Yes, it's hard to get approval to shoot thousands of people in a tube dug underground across several legislative jurisdictions. I wonder why? What could possibly go wrong is such scenario? Could people die? Could the tunnel compromise sensitive locations? Could the tunnel disrupt plans already set in motions by the in-between communities? I think it's perfectly fair to make this difficult, and I think Musk is tenacious enough to see it through, and by junmping through the hoops make an even better product than if a more laissez faire attitude towards other people were the standard.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
I certainly wouldn't want the government to regulate the construction of a supersonic passenger vehicle that travels through the world's largest vacuum chamber, which could be subject to explosive decompression.
If enough people die in HyperLoop, people will simply stop using it. And they will be forced to increase their safety standards or go out of business.
This is how the free market works.
Damn straight permits are needed. Because even the biggest Elon Musk advocate would be screaming bloody murder if they found the Hyperloop would pass right through their living room, their farm, or that really scenic lake on their property.
The question is then what permits, and are they bullshit or not? Some permits exist for obscure reasons, some because some things involve other people's property, some for safety reasons, and some because people get pissy when heavy earth moving equipment shows up in their backyard.
Yes, of course before cities were built and when people were just moving into America, there weren't such problems, because there wasn't a crapload of infrastructure and settled people to object. But you can't have those times back, unless you like the idea of completely unrestrained forfeiture where you can be kicked out of your home to make room for a mall, and companies building housing that's going to sink into the ground in a decade or two.
The problem is with the regulators, not the regulations.
Bureaucrats - and politicians - of every stripe want their fingers in big projects, partly for the reflected kudos and partly for the perks. The "working lunches" at your expense to iron out some sort of "paperwork glitch", permit fees, consultancy fees, introduction fees, and the bigger the project, the stickier their fingers...
I think Musk's approach of shining a BIG spotlight on the process is to try and keep these "public servants" honest. I hope it works...
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Permits for ultra-major construction project like this are very important. Really, for gawd sakes. Those "permits" are to enforce measures in silly laws like the Clean Water Act. Do you want to live in a nation where anyone with money is just allowed to do whatever they want where ever they want to? Permits are dang important.
That would be a true science-fiction scenario.
And yet that's exactly what Uber has done. Anyone looking at that business model in March of 2009 would have said that their hurdles were more regulatory than technological. Uber basically bullied its way through taxi regulations, one major city at a time.
It's a mistake to underestimate Elon Musk.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I'm sure we'll hear there are only 2 possibilities:
1. A many layered, multi-year regulatory process that makes it prohibitively difficult to get anything done
2. An anarchy hellscape where corpses rot in the streets and the living envy the dead
Too bad we can't come up with a sensible regulatory scheme more like the countries in Europe. Regulators could have specific, written requirements and definite timetables. And they could be limited to 2 layers at most: State and Federal, with one board taking all the inputs and making the final decision in each case.
But, no. How would dozens of minor bureaucrats wield power then? How would city councilmen get campaign funds? How would 50 State boards justify their paychecks? Who would protect the habitat of the endangered Morlocks or historical heritage sites of the CHUDs?
In the last century, a short-sighted if not outright evil power broker by the name of Robert Moses, never elected to any post, directly planned the transport system of New York city and the state around it, and vastly influenced the planning of other cities.
One of Mr. Moses' nasty feats was to specify that all of the parkway bridges be built so low that it would be impossible to run trains under them, even though many were built with broad center islands.
I grew up in one of the towns under his thumb. We literally had a 100-year-old railroad system that only went to one station for 3 large communities, with 100-year-old bridges, etc. No new train construction since New York's subways in the '30's and '40's, but lots of new roads for cars.
America's cities still suffer under the dead hand of Robert Moses and people like him, who actively wiped out our railroads, never considering the problems automobiles would bring.
Elon Musk's hyperloop is not the solution for this. The speed, confinement, and vacuum are obvious problems that make it more of a bomb than a train. But conventional high-speed rail transport is the solution.
Most americans never spend time in Europe and learn about really good trains. Try Switzerland and you won't understand why people even want cars.
Bruce Perens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
If anything, they seem like an even more sensible target for careful permitting. Even if this wasn't in LA, with the accompanying seismic issues, drilling around under people's foundations, buried lines and pipes, etc. is something you have to do rather carefully if you don't want to cause considerable damage, run into unexpected stuff, or both.
John Galt forbid that human beings should have any say in what happens in their physical, environmental, or economic environment through the entity they have created to provide such oversight, their government. Next you'll be telling me that Uber should be held responsible for flat-out breaking the law.
By the way, how's that self-driving car thing coming? Been tested on a snowpacked street in Boston with children playing on snowbanks yet?
https://www.amazon.com/Enginee...
Applicable in this case, I think.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Say, for the sake of argument, that bureaucratic red tape makes building a Hyperloop impractical in the USA.
The solution? Build it somewhere else first. Once it has been up and running for a few years in, say, China, it would be more of a known entity and therefore easier to convince people to support it in the USA. (Or perhaps it would crash and burn in China for whatever reason, in which case we'd know that not allowing it in the USA was in fact the right thing to do)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
In the US, when you buy a house, you don't necessarily get the mineral rights. If there's gold or diamonds or oil under your house you may not have a valid claim to it. Are we to assume that cities, counties and other entities DO have rights to the land below them? How deep do those rights go?
As a practical matter, communities should not be concerned about activities far below them any more than activities in the air high above. Fracking being an obvious exception where it can cause earthquakes or damage the water table. OTOH if the tunnel is near building foundations, of course some caution is warranted. I haven't seen any indication of the depth of these tunnels.
...omphaloskepsis often...
And that is just completely wrong. Although the fans of the Transrapid like to revise (i.e. fake) history. Shanghai has some unique conditions that make it feasible there, including that they were willing to spend a lot more money on it than it is worth.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Earthquakes.
in a world where you could put eight miles of new subway line in a major city without checking to see what's there first. But after hundreds of years of development, most without the benefit of geographic information systems, you can't be certain what kind of weird shit (or people) down there.
The author seems shocked that it'd take ten years of planning before you could start workers digging. The reality is you need to figure out the impact on water, sewer, gas, electricity, telecom, peoples basements -- and chances are none of that stuff is all on one map; a lot of it is likely not mapped at all, or mapped incorrectly. Ten years before your break ground seems very reasonable to me.
Likewise he's mortified that the Chesapeake Bay Tunnel project had to spend two years on geological and environmental impact studies before breaking ground. That's a twenty-three mile long complex of causeways and tunnels across the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, one of the most important fisheries in the country as well one of the world's busiest shipping routes. Two years of study! He calls this a "run-of-the-mill highway". Sure, anything seems easy if you no abso-frickin' nothing about engineering. Bridges and tunnels are the most prestigious projects for a civil engineer to work on because they're ridiculously complex. Just look at all the pieces of the thing. Two years of preliminary geological and environmental study to build the thing sounds outstanding.
This is just Dunning-Kruger run amok. These aren't cases of preliminary studies holding back engineering. Assessing the feasibility and impact of a project is a *major part* of civil engineering. Sure, you could start digging and hope you don't rupture a gas line, breech a high pressure water main, start a plague of rats in Manhattan's Upper East Side (average annual income $180K), damage a fishery that that brings in 290 million dollars per year, or find out the soil you're tunneling through won't support the weight above it. And then you'd be forced to stop and figure out how to fix it. In fact you'd almost inevitably be forced to stop and redesign your project.
A basic principle of engineering project management is that it's waaay cheaper to anticipate a problem than to figure out what to do about it when you're halfway done.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Here's the vid, so everyone knows what we're talking about:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... He's made others since, but that's the first and most comprehensive. TL:DW technical challenges:
* The tube would be the largest vacuum chamber in the world.
* Any maintenance whatsoever in the tube requires depressurization and shutting down the line.
* Vacuum seals must work repeatedly and reliably for passenger loading and unloading.
* If a vehicle dies out in the field, it's unclear how they plan to evacuate passengers from either the vehicle or the sealed, elevated steel tube.
* The tube has to deal with steel expansion in the daytime. The total expected variance (for the 370-mile California route) is three football fields, so you need lots of expansion joints (unless your loading platforms and pylons are going to be incredibly mobile), all of which must also be vacuum sealed. Also keep in mind the sun hits only the top of the tube so the expansion won't be uniform.
* A breach in the system is likely to be catastrophic, with a torrent of air rushing in and propelling the first vehicle it hits at great speed into the next one, since there's no air cushion between the vehicles.
* Anyone with a rifle along the impossible-to-guard 370-mile tube can cause one of those failures by penetrating the inch-thick steel.
If these crushing technical challenges have been addressed, please do give us a link, because so far it looks a lot like solar roadways or Onlive.
But don't worry. Der Trumpenfuhrer will fix all that. He has vowed to eliminate all those terrible regulations. And when Elon Musk's hyperlloop damages your property, you''l just have to suck it up and stop being such a cry-baby liberal.
TFS:
SpaceX and its commercial-spaceflight competitors can experiment because Congress and President Barack Obama agreed to protect them from Federal Aviation Administration standards.
If anything, when the overhyped and unworkable Hyperloop goes nowhere (based on its own merits), this sounds like a pretense to spin the failure as "Thanks Trump."
"So what doomed the Transrapid?"
It was twice as slow as the Hyperloop and needed much more energy and expensive infrastructure.
We should be taking real care in how this thing effects people. Affecting this much change is a damn big deal, and I think that we should be doing this because we need to be comfortable with upgrading our infrastructure. And if we consistently say no to changes, we don't move forward.
Sure this will piss people off, but we should have a reasonable ability to reshape the future.
Sure, government regulation is a huge problem, but I think we should all acknowledge all the other impossible hurdles to a practicle Hyperloop first:
1) During normal temperature variance, the inaugural, proposed route will experience over three football fields worth of expansion and contraction. Your supports have to deal with this. The only real solution is flex couplings, but we don't know how to build flex couplings that can also maintain the kind of vacuum that is required for the Hyperloop to be anything but an insanely expensive monorail.
2) In the event of failure, there's no good way to evacuate people. Decompression of a car, even if controlled will kill the passengers because even compressed pure oxygen can't provide enough oxygen to them to survive in the vacuum conditions.
3) A simply pipe bomb, detonated anywhere along the line, will cause explosive decompression of the entire tube, killing anyone in the tube, and immediately scrapping the entire route.
4) Even with conservative projections, and assuming the above problems magically go away, the cost of building the Hyperloop based on the technologies that we can forecast, the cost is astronomical (see the light rail fiasco in California already).
5) While cool, and faster, the Monorail has limited capacity, limited flexibility (it can't carry much or large cargo), so it is less useful than existing forms of transportation that are already "fast enough" in most cases. This means it is of limited use, which massively effects the viability of such an expensive project.
But, yeah, other than the EVERYTHING else, the Hyperloop is probably doomed by government regulation.
The vast majority of the problems are solved simply by going deep. They would be silly to plan these new systems less than 500 ft down. That is why they are planning for the vehicles to enter the system via shafts.
When Musk originally proposed the hyperloop as an alternative to California's not-really-high speed rail, one of his arguments was that it'd be much cheaper and easier to get permission for. HSR is unable to wrangle permission to build anywhere but empty bits of the central valley because it needs to acquire so much land and rights of way. The hyperloop, he argued, could simply follow the freeways and be built above the center divider. What happened to that notion?
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I still want to know how the system will handle a situation where the pod is trapped in the tube? And all of this seems very vulnerable to terrorist attack with miles and miles of expensive-and-fragile-yet-difficult-to-monitor tubing.
Honestly I'd bet more on self-driving vehicles than I would HyperLoop. Other than cargo there aren't a lot of people who regularly do intercity traffic.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
That's the best reason. Fuck your useless pet project. There are rules, regulations, and property owners that take precedence over some jerkoff building a jumbo pneumatic tube system.
The entire concept has long been disproven.
First off, a vacuum tunnel miles long is impossible. Vacuum chambers cannot have flexible seals that are moving around, expanding and contracting, which is what anything over a few hundred feet has to do.
Secondly, sucking all the air out of the tunnel, and the powering it with a propeller makes no sense at all.
And most damning, the fail state is everyone gets vaporized and a large section of the city probably gets exploded as well. Their is just far too much potential energy in a vacuum of that size.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
You know, there seem to be a lot of people trying their darndest to make things better, to improve the world, and to improve everything around us.
Am I the only one who's already happy?
I live in a Canadian metropolitan suburb. I've got a house. I'm safe. There's food. There's electricity. There's healthcare. What do I have to complain about?
Look at things thusly: until 100 years ago, there wasn't a man alive in all of history who had things better than I have things right now. Even the wealthiest king in the wealthiest land in the biggest castle didn't have big-screen tvisions, a telephone, the ability to vacation around the world by plane. And that castle of his? Hark, drafty, dang, dusty, quiet. I've got a Swiffer. I've got music in every room. I've got self-cleaning ovens. I've got a gas fireplace, two barbecues, a gas furnace, a superb air conditioner, farm-fresh food, and a fridge -- not to mention a sports car.
And, oh yeah, I've got furniture that's actually called a lazy-boy.
In all truth, I've zero interest in making things any "better". Sure, instantaneous transport would make vacationing a tad-bit easier, but this hyper loop is meant to make people work more. I work enough already, thank you very much.
I'm happy that he's having trouble getting large populations to make large changes.
I don't really want any changes.
I'm actually happy.
Am I the only one?
Since when does Elon Musk strike you as a crazy man who cares about profits above all else, and wants to sacrifice anything having to do with safety to better his bottom line?
The slow, careful roll-out of the self-driving mode in the Tesla should make it pretty clear that's not how this guy operates. He was working on all of that BEFORE government could get around to regulating it -- and he still managed to do a pretty responsible job of deploying the tech.
The thing all of the liberals seem to ignore, with the "Government needs to protect us all from our own foolishness!" mantra is that government itself is just made up of more people like the rest of us. Many of them with the most power and say-so are individuals who rose up the ranks inside government because they wanted only to better themselves at the expense of anyone else in their way. There's no reason to trust them with our safety any more than trusting anyone else with it!
What businesses have in their favor as motivation to do things safely is this: It's TERRIBLE for profits and the bottom line if you keep killing off your best customers.
Government agencies and regulators, by contrast, can often just say "Oops.... we screwed up. We take back our earlier promise that X was safe." They usually get to keep their jobs afterwards and families of those who died have little recourse.
Right now, I live out here in Maryland watching the whole project to add another line to the DC metro system. It's a huge undertaking that's costing taxpayers millions of dollars, just for a system that will cost users quite a bit just to ride on it afterwards as it loses money annually, as it always has. Entire blocks of successful businesses had to be shut down and moved to new locations for it, among other things. And ultimately, what do we get for it? A way to travel another 16.2 miles, total, if you happen to have a need to travel between a handful of designated stations in Prince George's County and Bethesda where it will terminate.
I can't help but think I'd be much MORE excited to see effort in digging tunnels and installing new infrastructure for something like the HyperLoop -- that promises to get people between much more distant points at far greater speed than was possible previously. The rail system in America feels woefully outdated, just like our land line copper wire phone system does today. What was once a great achievement has just stagnated since then.
Government doesn't make me feel safer at all, most of the time. Chipotle restaurant chains out here keep getting dozens of people sick and government hasn't done a damn thing to fix that yet. Meanwhile, they DO hurt small business owners like my neighbor who was trying to run his own BBQ business on weekends, serving food in front of microbreweries and at town events, etc. They pulled his permit because somebody called in to complain they saw him bringing in some food that was prepared off-site (back at his house in the kitchen), instead of preparing all of it right where he was selling it. I get why they have that rule, but practically-speaking? It was just needless harassment. The guy ran out of something and his wife was able to fix up some more for him back in the house, so he wouldn't disappoint customers who wanted it. If I trust his food enough to eat it at some event, I trust it just as much if he had to drive a mile or two back home to get it from there first.
The obstacles facing a run-of-the-mill highway, tunnel, or bridge are great enough. Throw in untried and unfamiliar technology and you're asking for endless delays. Those delays aren't, however, facts of the natural world. They're human artifacts. They don't have to be there.
.. just like how the police aren't facts of the natural world, you don't need them! They just get in your way! Let's get rid of them!
This stinks of anti- net neutrality propaganda to me. Hyperloop is a complete non-issue, in that it will never work for technical reasons. People are emotional about it though, and what better a way to sway people away from "evil" government regulation than to say that it will take their shiny new hyperloop toy away from them.
We're America. We can't do things any more.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
ever noticed that the tallest buildings in the world are in Muslim countries, or in China. The obvious reason is that if you build one in the West the muslims will be queuing up to destroy it. Only Islamic countries, or countries which recognise and deal with the threat of Islam decisively get to have these buildings. The same will go with hyperloops. This is why it is likely that there will be one between Dubai and Abhu Dabi before anywhere in the West. And if we did have one there would have to be airline-like baggage checks and security, and it would have to be sufficiently deep to make it difficult for the muslims to dig to without being noticed.
No. It is extremely complicated (better: virtually impossible) UNDER THE INTENDED CONDITIONS (= transporting lots of people). This is precisely the biggest problem I see with these generic talking people seriously thinking that sci-fi-/CGI-video-/I-dont-know-but-here-comes-my-opinion-/just-put-more-money-there-based extrapolations of some basic ideas can solve anything: they don't get the context right (what IMHO is the worst form of ignorance: you don't know and aren't even aware about that fact).
The last test of Hyperloop gave a good proof of the expectations of these individuals: "we reached 200 mph = 200 mph speed is done". Any sensible person with almost a basic engineering (or understood-within-its-right-context physics) background should know that the conditions under which whatever result is reached (= context) matters a lot. Something like reaching 1 km/h means nothing without the exact conditions under which such an event happened; for example, you might need a power of 1 W or 1000000 W for reaching 1 km/h on account of the given conditions! The result "it is moving at 200 mph" means pretty much nothing from the point of view of knowing where you are exactly within that development.
In summary, the problem isn't regulations; at least, not as per the intention of that comment (i.e., unfair obstacles which ideally shouldn't be there). The problem is that these individuals aim to build what makes no sense from many different angles. Ironically, what they represent (lots of money and trendy ideas relying more on the imposition of a noisy group than on actual knowledge) is likely to find quite adaptable regulations. I am sure that the eventual construction of Hyperloop would be eminently restricted by just the most basic regulations, the ones meant to avoid the construction of death traps. I am also quite sure that all this will end (and/or be completely changed) way before reaching the that-permit-avoided-me-to-build-what-I-already-had point.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
...in infrastructure, they can steamroller through initiatives like this. Hence China has superfast trains, and Singapore fibre to every home, and has done for years. Same in Spain, France etc, where in comparison to the UK (our trains are awful and expensive), their trains are well designed, fast and affordable - oh, and on time! Elon needs to do all his good work in Dubai, China etc. The West is too greedy and full of special interests currently.
Pi 25 39 ForeverPi.com
Would love to see a valid comparison between getting in a car in midtown manhattan and driving to an arbitrary destination in Washington DC, say, the White House, and starting at the same spot in midtown msnhatran, head over to the NYC hyperloop 'station', riding it into Washington, then arranging transport to the White House from the D.C. Hyperloop 'station'. Of course, hyperloop travel will likely require a TSA-like security screening, and the trains will run on a certain schedule.
A driver in a private car can make the trip in 4 hours (230 miles approx.), will the hyperloop trip really be much quicker?
(Co-worker that was in the federal gov't during 9/11 got to WTC from D.C. in just over two hours, but their suburban averages over 100 MPH the entire way.)
Ken
The Hyperloop was debunked a year ago and there has been no counter arguments to it (because - reality).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
If you can't run a business without immunity for the damage you do to other people and their property, maybe you shouldn't be in business?
This so reminds me of Ghostbusters.
Regulations exist for a reason. Originally.
Then they get modified to preserve the property and markets that are endangered by change.
Just like 98 percent of DOE money is used to stop cheaper solar and wind, and prop up failed fossil fuels and halt the transition of the transportation to clean energy by the DOT.
Lead, follow, or stop progress. It's the American Way.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
... because it was impossible to build it anywhere else...
Why worry about the regulations - A Slave Obeys.
Only the parasite wants to step in the way of innovation...
(Because I didn't see any of the obvious and obligatory Andrew Ryan references among the comments yet)
"Shooting passengers along at more than 700 miles per hour seems simple -- engineers pushed 200 miles-per-hour in a test this week -- "
Clearly the author is another starry eyed idiot who thinks Physics and Engineering are just silly little problems to avoid. There is a HUGE difference between 200 and 700, it's logarithmic not linear. For those of you who suck at math this means double is not equal to twice as hard.
Murphy was an optimist
There's other problems involved with going 500 feet down for a long horizontal stretch. Doing something we haven't done before should take a great deal of study.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Oh, and if something goes wrong you have people stranded 500 feet down. There have to be good measures for quick evacuation. If, due to a disaster, I had to climb 500 feet of stairs reasonably quickly, I have no confidence that I'd reach the surface alive, and I'm not tremendously unhealthy.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
So, study it. Build a single tunnel and use it for cargo or other purposes. If it works, build the parallel tunnels. In the end, it is likely cheaper and more of a sure thing than experiencing the cost increases related to spending time thinking about the problem.
The only reason I can think of for not trying it would be if someone can think of why it might be dangerous for people on the surface. That one is hard to imagine. I've lived in areas that have much shallower mines underneath virtually every square foot of whole counties. A single tube 500 ft down is not going to effect people on the surface.