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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."
"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."
"If someone can't afford a car, they should go first" - I love the insinuation that the only people who don't have a car are those that can't afford one. I quite often forget that Musk is an American but every now and then, he makes it super obvious.
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?
Except it doesn't because there are too many cars.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Capacity tends to get used; see the computer industry: 25 years ago 640k of memory seemed enough -- nowadays 16 gig seems to barely get things done.
Chapter 11.
And when it turns out that this solves most of the traffic problems
No we won't need to. Because when you eliminate pedestrians and cyclists you'll also see unicorns returning to the world, and magical fairies giving us alternatives to the car problem.
If you're going to live in an alternate reality at least make it a fun one.
make sure everybody talks about traffic congestion and cyclists and nobody notices he just moved the goal post (either because their tech don't work or they don't have the money).
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One of my biggest complaints about mass transit is that it's inconvenient on both ends. If this is fast, pods leave frequently, and I only have to walk a couple blocks on both ends it, why would I drive even if I owned a car?.
We can call them CHUDs!
If hyperloop is going to be used for short transit trips for pedestrians and bikes, the overhead of having a vacuum enclosed space, with pods shooting around begs the question--can't we just build the tunnels and build a setup that uses something like a segway or personal vehicle on a small track to get your around to your destination? It seems this would have much a much smaller failure impact (people can still walk in the tunnels) and would require far less investment in technology and upfront cost to build.
I personally despise this point of view, that there should be fewer lanes/roads so that people will drive less so there will be less traffic.
You know what I call the ability to go where you want, when you want, comfortably, in as little time as possible at as little expense as possible?' I call that "quality of life".
"Lock and load, Brides of Christ!"
Of course, they'll only be used to transport children and impoverished people. Until they get approval and a network in place. Then they'll be converted to luxury use, because the market demands it.
And then that will be abandoned in favor of some sort of self-driving electric vehicle you can purchase.
This idea actually makes a lot of sense. The ultimate goal for driverless cars is an autonomous on-demand transport system. The biggest impediment to doing that right now is that the driverless cars have to work with existing road infrastructure and human drivers. This is a complicated problem and it is really the reason why autonomous cars are still some way from being viable. If we just wanted to build some autonomous cars that can only go around on a set of 'rails' physically separated from the public, then we have the tech to do that easily now. That is essentially what Musk is proposing. A re-hash of the old pod transport idea but with the pods travelling underground.
In the end though, most of these infrastructure projects fail because the cost of planning permission and consultation is absurd, and I don't see how Musk's high speed tunnel boring machine is going to speed up the legal system. I mean, it has been about 40 years now since the UK first started looking into expanding its airports in the South East, and millions of pounds later they still can't make a decision. Perhaps Musk should start a more efficient law firm next.
Just use different roads. You've got that fancy motor thing and the big round steery thing.
semantics are everything!
I find it amusing that Slashdot, of all places, does not see the obvious evil genius angle on this.
The "feedback" obtained was obviously that Tesla owners do not want to go underground like mole people, where few will be able to admire the cars.
So what do do? Flip it! Send all of the people who might otherwise clog up the streets with non Tesla cars and buses, leaving the streets to mostly Teslas and a few stragglers. Right next to every people loading station will be a Tesla charging and wash station so people can admire Teslas while they load.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That's just what you heard on a Mexican radio.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
As soon as someone doing the same thing names their company "Interesting Company," Musk is toast.
Except it doesn't because there are too many cars.
Autonomous robo-taxis will solve that problem. It is silly to design the hyperloop for private cars when they will soon be fading away. Elon should focus on the future, not the past.
1. Wake up at home in Rancho Cucamonga.
2. Take a 5 minute ride in a robo-taxi from your home to the hyperloop terminal
3. Zip to downtown LA at 600 km/hr
4. Take another robo-taxi the last mile to your office.
Number of minutes driving on the Santa Monica Freeway: 0.
This makes a lot of sense, in hindsight. For Boring to be useful to vehicles, you'd need to start with a minimum 10KM track (hand-waving) for the large cities that would even consider this - and that would get you a single direction in and out of the centre of a city, if you need to go south instead of north, your SOL. For this to be useful for pedestrians though, 4KM of tunnels would get you a few different paths in the core part of town where it's just a bit too far away from a subway station. Much easier for permits, much lower initial start up costs, and much easier politically.
This seems like fake news. The time of a trip includes loading and unloading as well as transit time between points. Even if the purchase of a ticket is done electronically, and each car is fully loaded, how exactly do you get that car from point A to point B at hypersonic speeds? You don't as far as I can see. A hypersonic tunnel (if it can be built at all) would be tremendously expensive (one place you wouldn't put them would be in active seismic zones). You still have to accelerate and decelerate the vehicle. And there has to be some sort of route from pt. A to pt. B. Certainly it can't be direct, so transportation will either have to be like bus stops (sequential with many stops per vehicle on its route) or hub-based. Redirecting a vehicle at the hub would be enormously expensive (I'd guess prohibitively so) and time-consuming (ignoring the safety issues) since you have to stop the thing, and then move it into another tunnel for it to continue. In order for such a system to be cost efficient, each car will have to be large enough to carry enough paying customers to at least pay for the costs, which are going to be extreme. Neither approach makes any sense to me, what am I missing? There is as much "logic" in having local commutes at hypersonic speeds as there is equipping the current buses with 100,000 hp jet engines.
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).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's effectively a fast train with more privacy. Expect it to be priced accordingly.
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...at least make it a fun one
So your idea of "fun" involves a unicorn. Alrighty, then...
It's not true, period. No matter what, pedestrians slow down traffic, because they have to cross in front of traffic, and they cross far more slowly than cars, which means you have a minimum traffic light cycle time, and often means cars having to wait to make turns while someone walks across.
The only way pedestrians could not slow down traffic would be if you have second-floor pedestrian bridges between buildings like they do up north (or basement or whatever).
Don't believe me? Take a look at which traffic lights in the Bay Area have the worst problems with traffic backups, and you'll find high-pedestrian zones at nearly every one of them (with the exception of a few that back up because of freeways).
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Canadian writer here. Poor urban planning is the reason we have traffic congestion in the first place. It's the reason I need a car. It's there reason I consume much of my energy. In Ottawa, Canada, a four bedroom house where I can walk to work and walk to a store is 1.3 million CAD. Same house plus a yard, in the suburbs is $350,000 CAD. No one in my neighbourhood uses their yard except to pile the snow from our driveways. Based on the prices of houses, most people would like to live packed together. I do like Musk's idea but it is solving a problem that is only there because of politicians and the morons who vote them in. In Canada, a non-trivial amount of a cities budget comes from building permits. If the city doesn't approve new sub divisions it would have to raise taxes. Multi dwelling unit permits in the city core don't generate anywhere near enough money. Also the city has to pay for the services and infrastructure for the subdivisions that it approved last decade but spent the building permit money on something else.
Because biking in a tunnel is a great way to exercise. You get fresh air, and if someone assaults you you can easily get away.
Really, this is such a dumb idea I don't know where to begin.
-- Cheers!
No, another easily-drawn inference is that heâ(TM)s discovered that a giant infrastructure project requiring vast swaths of underground right-of-way with the sole aim of benefiting a tiny number of well-off people was a political
I think you've accidentally stumbled on the truth here, but not in the way you think.
Benefitting rich people in California has never been an issue, the entire state is pretty much founded on that ideology. So we can quickly discard that as being an issue.
No, indeed, costs or difficulty may not have gone down at all. But by expanding the project in a way that theoretically anyone can use it, regardless of the fee, well now it's a public works project with all the enormous amount of construction graft that implies. The wider it goes, the more the local government can skim - they are salivating.
This pivot on his part just turns this into another spin on subways and light rail
Yes, although a more practical one for most people since there are more locations serviced with a much smaller number of customers per location that traditional subway or light rail lines.
I imagine the fee to make use of this will be pretty high, one might say high enough only the rich could afford it...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Here in Seattle, we've seen the opposite where the city engineers create all sorts of new choke points trying to jam bike lanes that nobody actually uses in places that don't make any sense.
When they added their last batch of bike lanes, they interviewed a bunch of people on the local news. One guy ran a bicycle messenger service and stated that he had warned his employees not to use the lanes. Too dangerous.
Many of the bike lanes are parallel to residential streets that cyclists tend to prefer.
Because the residents don't want bicycles in their neighborhoods.
Have gnu, will travel.
You've got that backwards. There are plenty of liberal conspiracies masquerading as science.
So your idea of "fun" involves a unicorn. Alrighty, then...
I'm confused? Doesn't yours?
As the title says, but I'll get to that. First a bit of devils advocate:
Launching the roadster into space
Marketing, nothing more. The only people who think this is a distraction from the fact that the Falcon Heavy wasn't loaded at full capacity have never done a project before. You never flick the switch to 100% and hit the GO button on your first startup. It doesn't matter if you're designing a spaceship, a nuclear power plant or building a new kind of smartwatch.
Gwynne Shotwell
Yes there's a problem with how the Universities are cranking out graduates. That doesn't make what Musk is doing a distraction. If anything this is THE SINGLE BEST WAY to turn around the industry. Why would women chose STEM if there are no role models for success? He can't fix the skewing due to the underlying issues in society, so he's attempting to portray the power of women. This is more common sense than anything most other companies have come up with.
Prioritizing people and bicycles over cars in his Boring Co tunnels
You do realise this entire concept is in early stages of front end loading right? At this point there's still all sorts of ideas floating around. Finding a different way that may suit the original goal of the project (making money through a new form of mass transit) doesn't mean the original way didn't work, wasn't profitable, or wasn't technically feasible. This isn't a government project where you start at the conclusion and work backwards, it's a private company which generally means that projects look for the best possible outcome, even if that outcome isn't moving cars around.
Electric Semi
Well there's two things here, Firstly the Model 3 production shortfall was far worse several months before the semi was announced and had pretty much already been done to death in the media, and secondly these products don't just appear out of nowhere. This semi is clearly something that had a lot of engineering already completed. Why would you delay the announcement of your cool new shiny just because of some teething problems on a completely different product line?
Now back to Musk not having a clue
The thing that separates Musk and his companies from others is that he is comfortable with not having a clue. He is basically shaking up everything he touches in ways that people consistently say won't work. The end result may not be that each of his companies has blasted into profitability, but rather the result has had an incredible effect on the industry and society as a whole. He doesn't know what he's doing because no one has done the things he's doing. That ultimately means that some things aren't going to pan out.
Whenever you see someone like Musk failing at something or get criticised for not knowing what he's doing it's worth remembering these two statistics:
1. 95% of start-ups fail to get off the ground.
2. 90% of businesses even using established and traditional methods in normal industries fail in the first 2 years.
And these two say nothing of the number of companies that manage to change the course of entire industries.
Yes - the 'other guy' should walk or bike... that is why we have cities full of empty buses driving in circles and traffic squeezed to provide unused bike lanes...
What is really strange is a lot of sidewalks are not used - yet they ban bikes. Mixing bikes and cars is just stupid.
How do the flamethrowers figure into this vision?
"I'm a humble person really,
I'm actually much greater than I think I am"
And that's the reason we don't let farm equipment use the roads as if they are commuter vehicles.
Putting one car on another car is pretty silly.
If there were self-driving taxis passengers could transfer to them (a different one, think hard in case the idea of using more than one car on a trip somehow is difficult for your little brain...) at each end. And in a lot of cases the trip on one end or another would be so short that a bicycle or walking would be faster. It does seem to me that some bicycles will fit in a box designed for humans so it is kind of ok to carry these vehicles with you. Electric scooters would be even smaller. Though both bikes and scooters might be available for rental use at each end just like self-driving cars will be.
Even in the video the elevator seems to be the slow part. I would just load from the level of the tunnel, the elevator could be much larger because it would be a real 1 point-to-point vehicle so the number of riders can be quite large. He wants to limit the size of the cars so they can stop less often compared to a subway but perhaps several cars can be filled by one elevator load. Also people are obviously willing to go several stories underground to do things (witness city shopping malls and especially city parking).
Sound Transit bus driver?
Have gnu, will travel.
Really, this is such a dumb idea I don't know where to begin.
Thank Elon Musk. It's his idea.
Have gnu, will travel.