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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.
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.
Damn, I knew I was forgetting something! Thank you, Anonymous Coward, for pointing out this glaring design flaw to me. --Elon
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
honestly while I do like quite a bit of what Elon does, there are indeed times I think he really does jump the gun and start building, long before something is even fully plausible on paper. The technical requirements and problems in the hyper-loop (thermal expansion problems, and just in general trying to make hundred mile long functioning vacume tubes). Those limits and requirements seem... pretty insane to me.
Now that necro81 provided the sarcasm, I'll add the response: when you're in the ground itself, everything moves together, and thus provides little shear force. Earthquakes are more dangerous to structures on the surface because their inertia tries to hold the top still while the base is shaken by the ground.
"WANTED: Sinking ship seeks rats."
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!
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 bigger problem in Los Angeles is tar. The ground in the region was once the top oil producing field in California. Most of the oil has been pumped out, but the tar remains. The La Brea Tar Pits are the most visible example.
When Los Angeles first planned an underground subway system in the 1980s, the cost estimate was $400 million. Soon after they began digging, they had to stop because workers would go home for the night, and return the next day to find the newly-dug tunnel walls were covered in tar which had seeped through overnight. The tar made a mess of their equipment and prevented laying down uniform concrete walls. The project was put on hold for years as they worked on designing a way to hold back the tar as they dug. By the time they finally got a process figured out, the additional time, design, and equipment had ballooned the cost to nearly $2 billion - then the most expensive public works project in history (later surpassed by the Big Dig in Boston).
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 ...
or in unique markets with no competitor (SpaceX)
You're funny.
honestly while I do like quite a bit of what Elon does, there are indeed times I think he really does jump the gun and start building, long before something is even fully plausible on paper. The technical requirements and problems in the hyper-loop (thermal expansion problems, and just in general trying to make hundred mile long functioning vacume tubes). Those limits and requirements seem... pretty insane to me.
Then let him try and, if he fails, fail. Let him fail another twenty times if if yields just one more Spacex.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
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 did not know that, and tar can be refined and used.
if it's carefully done, I bet he can mesh the outside of the tube and have it act as a gathering area and let gravity take it down.
thanks
if you see me, smile and say hello.
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.
Yes, but the very low shear forces make this less of a problem.
They talk about it in their FAQ.
Jesus saves and takes half damage.
The good news is that there is already underground infrastructure in LA, as well as Tokyo, and other earthquake-prone cities. There's a chance that there is already some structural engineering expertise with this kind of thing available.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Orbital/ATK and ULA went out of business? Damn, that's hard times for Boeing and Lockheed Martin...
Oh, no, you're just wrong about everything you said.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
"I've had enough of this scam artists bollocks."
I can't tell if you are joking or serious.
The scam artist has been building electric cars and rockets for years. The real things. Do you know any other scam artists doing that?
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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In other news, about 3500 other people were murdered by their cars today alone. The drivers disclaim all responsibility.
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He has built less cars than Ferrari have in the same time and his production line is always just "...6 months away from producing <insert ludicrous figure> cars". The other differences between Tesla and Ferrari is that the cars Ferrari build is not done at a thundering loss and nor are they dishonestly pitched to customers so that they think they're self-driving with the inevitable tragic results.
As for the rockets, they are cross-subsidised and he has entirely failed to address the Arianespace CEO's pertinent observations:
"challenges of reusability ... have not disappeared. ... The stress on stage or engine structures of high-speed passage through the atmosphere, the performance penalty of reserving fuel for the return flight instead of maximizing rocket lift capacity, the need for many annual launches to make the economics work – all remain issues."
The Falcon 9 engine is supposed to be re-usable but only half a dozen or so have been re-used so far and then only once.
The fact of the matter is that with rocket engines you design them with a very small safety factor & hence the materials are at their limits. To do otherwise means excess material and more weight. To do otherwise and use fuel (which itself needs carrying aloft) to land the now shagged engine is absurd.
To top things off, last week in a conference call with financial types, he basically tells them to go and boil their heads when they ask him tricky finance type questions and then even more insultingly only responds to the "When are you going to build a space elevator out of unobtainium, Elon?" type questions from fanbois.
By doing that, he just pissed over any chance of getting further investment from the big players and has just hastened the demise of his shonky companies.
The tragedy is not only the lives he has taken in order to satisfy his ego but the chilling effect it will have on future investment for people who aren't charlatans.
The Machine stops.
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.
Have some understanding. If you were born and raised in the back woods of Kentucky, you would have trouble believing electric cars really exist, too.