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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."
Damn, I knew I was forgetting something! Thank you, Anonymous Coward, for pointing out this glaring design flaw to me. --Elon
It's pretty short... it was 500 feet in October (so maybe double that now). He keeps drawing hockey stick growth curves for length (a few miles in a few months, 20 in the next year), but he also said Tesla was going to be cranking out 5k cars/week a year ago.
It may get there, but it's going to be a slower uptake than he claims.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Elites don't ride underground. That's for the Morlocks. The Eloi ride on monorails.
Have gnu, will travel.
Try opening the page in Firefox, then click the little reader mode button in the address bar. Honestly, reader mode is the best feature in any web browser at the moment...
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
It depends on what you mean by "this". This was their first prototype tunnel, working to develop their boring tech (the whole point of Boring Company is to get TBM speeds up and costs down by 1/2 to 1 order of magnitude). It's just a tunnel. They'll also be testing out their first Loop vehicles in it. Since it's just one leg, they'll just go from one end to the other.
Now, as mentioned, this tunnel is just a prototype. It's to be extended to form an LA Loop system, they're getting started on a NY/DC Loop system right now, bidding for a Chicago Loop system, and planning to start a LA/SF Hyperloop system later this year (confirmed by Musk last night - with the interesting addendum that they have a straightforward way to branch in and out of the Hyperloop tunnels to serve smaller cities en route).
Loop is underground PRT (Personal Rapid Transit). Relatively small vehicles take either people or cars. People generally - and cars always - go directly to their destination, rather than on fixed routes. At peak traffic times, passenger capsules get routed to optimal paths with a few stops on each end that group together people going from and to the same general areas (ala Uber Pool). Underground, the main routes are limited access (like highways); there's never any stopping or significant slowing down / speeding up in them. Feeder tunnels branch on and off (again, akin to a highway system rather than a subway system). Control is 100% automated. Access to and from the surface is from numerous small pod elevator shafts rather than fewer, larger stations; the surface footprint is 1-2 parking spaces per shaft (the surface footprint use is justified by how many vehicles it takes off the roads - even when people travel by car, as they're off all of the roads between the start and end of their journey).
Hyperloop is a low-pressure variant of Loop, designed for near-supersonic speeds (and with the potential to operate in environments with higher speeds of sound as well). Several orders of magnitude lower pressure than atmosphere, many orders of magnitude higher pressure than a hard vacuum (and thus several orders of magnitude easier to maintain the reduced pressure, per unit surface area). Some air in the tubes is essential, at least to the "true" Hyperloop proposal (Hyperloop Alpha; there are now lots of other things calling themselves "Hyperloop" that are just maglev vactrains). In the HA design, the vehicles are suspended by air bearings (like an air hockey puck or hard drive platter), which is comparable to maglev in terms of energy losses. The air bearings are fed by a battery powered, water-cooled compressor, which also shunts the air ahead of the vehicle past it (preventing it from building up a high pressure zone ahead of it). Acceleration is provided by short accelerator segments. Wheels propel the craft at low speeds (akin to Loop) and in emergencies. (And to head people off, yes, Thunderf00t the Biochemist-Pretending-To-Be-An-Engineer does not know what he's talking about)
For anyone who's curious as to what's actually proposed in Hyperloop Alpha, and what's been addressed, Link. Note that this document is several years old, so there's plenty of work that's been done since then. This predated Boring Company, so boring costs were estimated at then-current (much higher) rates, and thus boring segments were minimized. They also had to stop the route on the edges of town (like an airport) to save money, as this also predated Loop.
"WANTED: Sinking ship seeks rats."
The billionaire I work for regularly takes the subway in NYC. In fact, he berates me when I am in an Uber and running late while he is already at the destination having taken the subway.
That's a rather poor analogy choice. Yes, Model 3 production is late, but it is following a hockey stick growth. Through Q4, production averaged a couple hundred per week. Through most of Q1 it was at 1k/wk. At the end of Q1 it jumped to 2k/wk. Now they're hitting 3k/wk not even half a quarter later.
General rule with Musk projects: Increase estimated timelines by roughly 20-100%, depending on the project and how far ahead you're talking; he always sets ridiculously short timelines for himself. But he generally delivers in the end.
"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.........
Look at how small it is. A typical subway train tunnel is triple that diameter.
That's one of the ways they are speeding up construction. The amount of material that needs to be removed increases by the square of the diameter.
Getting in and out will be stepping down into it and sitting only while the carriage roof doubles as the door. Which I guess means the real question is how it will be ADA compliant.
Getting in and out of the "skate" will be done on the surface, where there is more room. I'm more concerned with emergency exits.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Preeeetty sure that's just footage from Sewer Shark. This is fake news.
Long live the Sega CD!
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).
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!
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
...makes another claim no-one sane would believe, but the press and tech illiterates eat up.
Not sure what claim you are referring to. If you mean his claim that he will build a deep level subway [= underground railway] under a city, then there is no reason to disbelieve it considering that such railways were first built over 100 years ago (over 150 years ago if you include the shallow cut and cover method) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... It is established technology.
But Musk's tunnels are tiny, as are the "trains" - single pods that will each carry only a few people (or a car I gather). The capacity will be a drop in the ocean and will do very little to "solve traffic woes" except for the small number of people it can carry. Compare London Underground tube trains which each carry around 1000 passengers and run at 90 second intervals in the peak.
Reading the comments on that Instagram video is nauseating. The fanbois there seem to think that Musk has invented subways.
Wrong, and wrong. There are no subsidies for Loop; it's entirely privately funded.
"WANTED: Sinking ship seeks rats."
Smaller tunnels require removing a lot less material, and also mean having to use less material to line the tunnel.
Brilliant. Why did no-one else think of that? Let's have 2ft diameter tunnels and fit people along them lengthways.
With a focus on faster transport and using the available space efficiently they should be able to get throughput as good or better than the traditional large tunnels.
You are not going to fill space more efficiently than existing subways. London Underground trains (with which I am familiar) almost scrape their tunnels (and really do occasionally) and the passengers are jam-packed inside at peak times.
http://www.londontravelwatch.o...
http://mkshft.org/observed-cro...
To beat the London Underground, Musk's Loop will need to be able to move over 40,000 passengers per hour along each tunnel. You won't do that with lots of little separate vehicles, partly because of the gaps ("headway") needed between them (a conventional train zeros the gaps between its constituent vehicles) and partly because of the Loop's inefficiency with passenger loading. With a conventional train, all its constituent vehicles are loading simultaneously; with Loop vehicles each vehicle loads separately and hence sequentially.
Ironically your link was just updated. Guess what it now says?
Total cars: 25,506
Per week: 2,473
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?