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Elon Musk's First LA Tunnel Nears Completion, With Free Rides To Kick Off This Summer (newatlas.com)
The Boring Company has made some pretty impressive strides in its relatively short existence. Elon Musk first shared his vision for the company in December 2016, promising to solve traffic woes with networks of tunnels for city centers. It is now adding the finishing touches to its first burrow. From a report: In a video shared on Instagram today, Musk showed what a trip through one of these tunnels would look like. He also declared the Boring Company's first tunnel under LA to be almost complete, and that "pending final regulatory approvals, we will be offering free rides to the public in a few months."
...makes another claim no-one sane would believe, but the press and tech illiterates eat up.
Should they always be free? City busses are not free. Why should Elon's tunnel be free in perpetuity?
The construction of this tunnel seems to be moving at an incredible pace. How is it going so fast?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
People who think BART is claustrophobic will be in for a rude awakening.
Lots of earthquake risk in LA.......
Convincing the elite to ride public transit would be quite a trick. Not that I would complain about it; more room on the roads for the rest of us.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
I find more and more sites display a popup window telling me I need to turn off my ad blocker... when I don't use one. Hell, the dialog box is blocking some of the ads. Unfortunately, there is no button for "I'm not using an adblocker" so they don't get the message. It sure would be nice if they tested their own sites. I am almost certain that the problem is with the "do not track" options.
Elites don't ride underground. That's for the Morlocks. The Eloi ride on monorails.
Have gnu, will travel.
Got anything to back that up? Anything at all other than just being a hater? No?
It states on the Instagram post:
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
until the subsidies dry up or the cost and complexity of implementing at scale slap the project back into reality. Then Musk will get 'bored' and move onto the next distraction. Musk is not a visionary, he just has the internet jackpot fortune to kickstart his adolescent fantasies far enough to get press adulation.
"A subterranean commuter expressway. I'll call it a 'Sub-Way'. Why didn't anyone think of this before? I'm brilliant!"
All of his ventures operate at loss or through subsidy or in unique markets with no competitor (SpaceX)
HEY, wait a minute, maybe I have it backwards....Elon is taking his cue from the Superman movie (Christopher Reeves)....and like Lex Luthor, he's trying to cause the faults out there to trigger and drop off a bunch of CA into the ocean, and create "new" beach front property.
This time, however, he's using a drill instead of missiles!!!
He IS a genius!!!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Preeeetty sure that's just footage from Sewer Shark. This is fake news.
Long live the Sega CD!
I hate to sound like a fanboi, but let's give credit where credit's due:
-- Musk has an Ivy League physics degree and a Wharton econ degree, and was accepted into Stanford's PhD physics program.
-- Musk is actually creating infrastructure - doing science and advancing technology with Tesla, Boring, SpaceX, and even PayPal.
-- Musk has a deep understanding of both humans and human systems, as well as science and technology, and is improving society. The "cult of the rich guy" that sprang up during the 90s and 2000's had this type of person in mind, not your typical sociopathic Wall Street robber baron.
This is much more than a ride-hailing app (Uber) that got lucky during a central-bank induced liquidity tsunami, and seeks to undercut taxi unions and suppress wages. I recall Kalanick speaking derisively of Musk. These guys are on two separate planes. There are a lot of people with a "CEO-view" of people. In this case, one brings a lot more to the table than the other, and is doing very different things for society.
The Eloi are cattle. The Morlocks ruled.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
He took half of the employees who are supposed to be building the Tesla 3's and made them dig this silly hole, instead.
I don't respond to AC's.
The Eloi are cattle. The Morlocks ruled.
Nobody ruled. The Morlocks lived *underground* and kept the machines working. They were descended from the working class, and the Eloi from the elite. :-)
The Eloi were only cattle in the sense that they were eaten
...then by now, after decades of building roads, Los Angeles would be traffic free! But maybe it will work this time.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
I'm sure cows don't realise they're being kept around to be eaten either ...
I call them beta testers. However if something goes wrong it's not the kind of crash you expect.
Elites fly. Give elites a faster way from downtown to the airport, they will take it.
Hmm....why do I see in the future...one good earthquake, and BOOM...tunnels fill up and kill 1000's...?
HEY, wait a minute, maybe I have it backwards....Elon is taking his cue from the Superman movie (Christopher Reeves)....and like Lex Luthor, he's trying to cause the faults out there to trigger and drop off a bunch of CA into the ocean, and create "new" beach front property.
This time, however, he's using a drill instead of missiles!!!
He IS a genius!!!
Perhaps he's actually taking a cue from Max Zorin in A view to a kill...
Of course this whole LA tunnel train is so what's old is new again... Been there, done that...
And yet for three decades several hundred trolley cars rattled through the 4,325-foot-long tunnel each day. When it opened for service on December 1, 1925 , L.A.’s first subway shaved 15 minutes off travel time between downtown and other points like Hollywood and Glendale.
And oh, yeah, the The Pacific Electric, nicknamed the Red Cars, was (like many of that era) a privately owned mass transit system...
So what happened? The question you might want to ask is Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Wednesday I attended IEEE-SCV CES meeting where Dennis Ratcliffe presented VTA/BART extension to and under downtown San Jose. The game changer is the single bore tunnel digging, a technique that is new for underground subways. Contrast to the cut-and-cover used for LA Metro and for BART on Market st in 1960s (Dennis said it took 35 years for SF to economically recover from that). They can proceed boring a tunnel under downtown SJ without disrupting downtown. This was done in Barcelona so SJ will not be the first, however, many other cities are looking at how this will proceed.
Another game changer is a single rich guy (single as in not slaved to stock market share holders) who can plunk down a billion dollars and say "build it." Musk still needs to comply with regulatory matters but he doesn't have to deal with bureaucratic tussles to get money. Dennis Ratcliffe said in 2001 when extension was conceived, VTA had to come up with the money to pay for BART extension (guess all the politics in this one). There are funds from Federal Transit Administration but they delayed funding Phase 2 until VTA/BART completes Phase 1. And when this began economy took a dump so all that forecasted tax revenue decreased. But they slowly got moving and economy improved. However, it took a dump again in 2008 (but real estate got cheap so VTA bought property for stations). Elon simply tells his people to start digging on his property. I haven't looked at details but he probably funded others to build smaller and more tailored boring machine than what VTA/BART is using.
Single bore tunneling is not new except for subways. This provides option for many cities, the race may be will it be done by public agencies or by private companies.
Elon Musk can sim
mfwright@batnet.com
I've seen some properties with mesas on them that I'd like to bore some passages through.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Seriously, this could be interesting. If that is able to run under ground at speeds of say 60-180 MPH, this would make a huge difference in city transportation.
One thing about Musk, is he is changing society for the better.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I had a look at the pictures and they've clearly just been knocked up in photoshop.
If his bogus company truly was putting the "finishing touches" to a tunnel, then he wouldn't have to do that or put another 'imagineered' video up on Instagram because a real video would be impressive enough!
He would also tell us where exactly the tunnel goes from and to.
I've had enough of this scam artists bollocks. He should be thrown in prison; which I think he will be in the not too distant future.
The Machine stops.
Musk states in the linked post: "As mentioned in prior posts, once fully operational (demo system rides will be free), the system will always give priority to pods for pedestrians & cyclists for less than the cost of a bus ticket." Which probably means a couple dollars.
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If there's an earthquake, underground is definitely where you want to be. It doesn't shake down there like it does on the surface.
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"Techbro accidentally reinvents Subway. News at 11."
So you can't get out of it with any haste in the case of a fire. Sounds like 1800's safety standards have been blown off.
It would be very interesting if you explained that, or provided a link.
A fast tunnel bore is about 60 feet per day. He's claiming 13 MILES in 1 year; that would be about 200+ feet per day. I guess Musk is - once again - over-promising, and under-delivering. But that makes sense - an issue with Tesla came up, so time to pop out comments about another adventure to distract the masses!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I think a bus ticket is still less than $2 here.
Impossible! Never happened!
The Slashdot Luddites have already told us that there's no possible way that he can ever tunnel under LA, so this is Fake News® just like the Moon Landing.
(Yes, that's sarcasm, since it's so hard to tell these days. I've already seen the other comments where the usual idiots have declared that it's impossible even in this thread. As always, they have no idea what they're talking about, but they like to be sure that their idiocy is vomited all over everywhere.)
Is to build tunnels on Mars.
It had to be small enough to fit on a rocket. Building one on Mars or any other planet is not an option.
Going underground on any extra planetary body is a 100% must.
Being able to turn or refine what you dig out is the second piece of the puzzle. (including making fuel on mars)
My guess is that the next stage is to make the boring machine as light as possible.
Also if you look at all E.Musk's companies they have a Mars centric purpose.
Solar panels are going to be needed in abundance to create fuel on Mars. Batteries Ditto.
Tesla's real purpose is the create a highly automated manufacturing line, there is (probably) a reason why the Model Y is gong to a new factory, Musk needs to test the portability of assembling a new factory. My guess is that he want to take it with him off planet.
Also: there is s little other reason for Tesla to not use off the shelf components and contractors if its purpose was to make profitable cars alone. This isn't about Tesla's success as a company (although that is very important)
Its about creating a portable manufacturing system that can build anything anywhere.
Others:
Satellite internet, Will also be needed on any other planet. (even more so then here)
Space X, that's the only publicly viable arm of the grand plan. I wonder if the Circumference of the BFR and the Boring machine matches?
Just my armchair observation. I think its probably short of the real plans.
And exciting as hell. I hope it happens in my lifetime.
It makes you look soooo much smarter than the Chinks and Sauds that own all your debt.
One ought to research issues with tunnels and earthquakes and guess what, i did. It takes no great effort and tunnels so long as they do not cross seismic fault lines are unffected by earthquakes... look in wikipedia as an example