Elon Musk Changes 'Boring Company' Vision To Reward Cyclists and Pedestrians (techcrunch.com)

"Remember Elon Musk's plan to dig a massive web of traffic-beating tunnels underneath Los Angeles...?" asks CNN. "Now, that plan appears to be getting a huge makeover." An anonymous reader quotes TechCrunch: While it will still focus on digging tunnels to provide a network of underground tubes suitable for use by high-speed Hyperloop pods, the plan now is to use that Hyperloop to transport pedestrians and cyclists first, and then only later to work on moving cars around underground to bypass traffic. Musk shared the update via Twitter, noting that the idea would be to load customers onto cars roughly the size that a single parking space takes up currently, [thousands of which] would be dotted around an urban environment close to any destinations where someone might travel. The single-car station model would be designed to replace the current subway-style model, Musk said, where only a few small stations are very spread out... This is a big departure from the original vision, and it seems like one that might have evolved after Musk and his collaborators on the project spoke to urban planners and transit authorities.
"If someone can't afford a car, they should go first," Musk posted on Twitter, sharing a new conceptual video where an elevator lowers one of these pedestrian- and cyclist-focussed shuttle pods underground.

TechCrunch says this new vision "would be appealing both to urban officials looking to decrease congestion on downtown roads and discourage personal vehicle use, and to anyone hoping to increase access to affordable transit options."

Comments

Excellent!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm happy to see that Elon Musk's vision is flexible. This indicates to me that maybe he does indeed want The Boring Company's work to benefit as many people as possible, and not just help himself and the rich "elites" dodge traffic as I've seen the Elon bashers insinuate.

Now will his detractors applaud this move, or will they simply adjust their conspiracy theories and redouble their efforts?

It points to tech working better than expected

[SuperKendall]

nobody notices he just moved the goal post (either because their tech don't work or they don't have the money).

Not sure what article you read, but this new plan means MORE stations, and MORE tunnels to provide access to the wider variety of entry points scattered around the city. Before it was just a handful of terminals at either end of a city.

So the only implication one can possibly derive from this new plan is that tunneling is either easier or cheaper than originally thought (probably both).

Distraction

[Jodka]

Musk does this honest bullshit thing sometimes; What he says is factually correct, but his statements play on human psychology to distract from his true motives and concerns. Here are some examples:

- Launching the roadster into space. Really, he might have been wary of lifting off the first prototype of Falcon Heavy with a full capacity load and wanted to fly with a much lighter test mass. A light test mass would look weak. So he flew the roadster. A car in space! Wow! Everyone was so distracted by a car in space that nobody thought to ask so hey, what's wrong with this thing that you are not flying it at even close to full weight capacity?

- Gwynne Shotwell, President and CEO of SpaceX. Musk is never going to find an equal proportion of highly qualified man and women engineers to staff SpaceX because colleges and universities do not graduate them in equal proportion. So he finds one super-competent woman and gives her the two most prominent jobs in the company to distract for the skewed gender ratio among top engineers.

- Prioritizing people and bicycles over cars in his Boring Co tunnels. Well, someone probably ran the numbers and found something out. Like that you can't run internal combustion engine cars through these things because of the exhaust CO and yet the number of electric cars on the road will not be enough pay for the tunnel until decades from now. So what does Musk say? "Errr, sorry everyone, I was wrong, car plan is not going to work now. Sucks" Nope. Instead that, in the interests of courtesy and fairness, the people and bikes get priority. With no mention whatsoever of any technical or financial flaws with his car skid plan, despite those probably being the determining concerns.

- The electric semi and next-gen roadster reveal were timed to coincide with the worst of the model 3 manufacturing hell. The effect was to distract from the failure to meet announced production rates.