Slashdot Mirror
Musk's Boring Company Proposes High-Speed Underground Subway To Dodger Stadium (geekwire.com)
Elon Musk's Boring Company wants to build a transit tunnel connecting Dodger Stadium to a Los Angeles subway station. An anonymous reader quotes GeekWire:
The Boring Company laid out the plan for the Dugout Loop on its website, saying that the linkup could take baseball fans and concertgoers to the stadium in less than four minutes for a roughly $1 fare. This ride would be nothing like your typical subway trip: Loopers could book their tickets in advance, through an app-based reservation system that's similar to what's used to purchase theater tickets, or buy them over the phone or in person for a given time (say, 5:45 p.m. heading for the stadium).
At least initially, the Dugout Loop clientele would be limited to about 1,400 people per event, or roughly 2.5 percent of stadium capacity. The Boring Company says that capacity could be doubled over time. Loopers would board electric-powered pods (also known as "skates") that are based on the Tesla Model X auto design and are capable of carrying 8 to 16 passengers at a time. The skates would be lowered into the tunnel system, and sent autonomously at speeds of 125 to 150 mph from one terminal to the other. The Boring Company says it'll cover the cost of digging the roughly 3.6-mile tunnel with no public funding sought.
The Boring Company's site says this project will preempt construction of their proof-of-concept tunnel under Los Angeles' Sepulveda Boulevard.
"The Boring Company has made technical progress much faster than expected and has decided to make its first tunnel in Los Angeles an operational one, hence Dugout Loop!"
At least initially, the Dugout Loop clientele would be limited to about 1,400 people per event, or roughly 2.5 percent of stadium capacity. The Boring Company says that capacity could be doubled over time. Loopers would board electric-powered pods (also known as "skates") that are based on the Tesla Model X auto design and are capable of carrying 8 to 16 passengers at a time. The skates would be lowered into the tunnel system, and sent autonomously at speeds of 125 to 150 mph from one terminal to the other. The Boring Company says it'll cover the cost of digging the roughly 3.6-mile tunnel with no public funding sought.
The Boring Company's site says this project will preempt construction of their proof-of-concept tunnel under Los Angeles' Sepulveda Boulevard.
"The Boring Company has made technical progress much faster than expected and has decided to make its first tunnel in Los Angeles an operational one, hence Dugout Loop!"
At least initially, the Dugout Loop clientele would be limited to about 1,400 people per event, or roughly 2.5 percent of stadium capacity. The Boring Company says that capacity could be doubled over time
Is that it? 2-3 subway trains worth of people per event? If someone just built a real subway system then it could potentially shift everyone to the stadium and back.
So Ol'Musky wants to cut down on LA's traffic, with a project that won't need anything from the local government except approval & right of ways. So why not let him give it a try. Absolute worst case is that it doesn't pan out, and the city just ends up using the tunnel as storage space or fills it back up with dirt.
It's funny that most of the comments in this thread so far seem to be... upset about people going to sports events. I mean, I'm no sports fan, but this just strikes me as weird.
Neat that they're going to make their first full LA tunnel an operational one. A connection to Dodger Stadium was drawn up on their longer-term man of plans for the LA area, so looks like they're jumping ahead a step. I wonder what upgrades they're going to be making to Godot for it? Maybe bringing it closer to Line-Storm? I know they've been modifying Godot over time in order to test tech for Line-Storm.
Boring Company has been going through phases as they transition from standard TBM approaches toward their ultimate goal. In their first tunnel with Godot (a mostly standard TBM in the beginning), they required the standard laying of tracks and power lines (time consuming and expensive, particularly the power lines) and a powerful ventilation system to deal with diesel exhaust from the diesel locomotive that hauls ore, as well as pushing off the casing ends and using normal cutting discs. Their third TBM, Prufrock, will be using delivered/replaced battery packs, no tracks, a battery powered electric locomotive, pushing off the wall sides and automating their assembly, and advanced alloy highly cooled hot swappable cutting discs; it's in the advanced design stage. Between Godot and Prufrock is Line-Storm, which has nearly completed construction, and is a mix of technologies between Godot and Prufrock, and is expected to be 2-4 times as fast as Godot (Prufrock is expected to be 10-15x faster). Line-Storm will be used on the east coast.
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
It helps a little. Automotive CO2 is a small part of total greenhouse gas emission and overall electric vehicles result in less energy consumption than gas powered cars. Electric vehicles are great for the planet in Canada where so much of the electricity comes from hydroelectric sources. It's too bad that nuclear power isn't used that much in the USA.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
We can also do without plumbing, central heating, electricity, paved roads, refrigeration, telephones, and computers. Why would we want to? Those things all make life better.
For example, Los Angeles has hundreds of bus routes, yet few places have buses that run more often than once every 20 minutes, and some places it's every 2 hours and not on Sundays. Would you want to wait 20 minutes before you can go someplace, and another 20 if you have to make a transfer? Repeat that for the return trip? Even while not waiting a bus goes half the speed of normal traffic because it has to let passengers on and off. Time is money, and time is life.
Cars make life better, and for most Americans car ownership and use is a rational choice.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Not sure how much better they make life in Los Angeles. The region is at a breaking point, and everything that can be done to limit individual car trips makes life better for everyone.
Then do it, and do what I do - a motorcycle. Lane splitting means that when you're stuck on the 10 or the 101 - I'm still moving. I can always find parking between vehicles. I get free parking in public garages, in the striped sections at the ends of the rows. I get 50+ MPG. I pay $285/year for insurance, for full coverage with a $500 deductible. It's a Honda motorcycle that needs an oil change every 8000 miles (very low service intervals). Get out of your car, get on a motorcycle, and free yourself.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I'm just getting bored (pun intended) of all these stories about random stuff Musk and his companies say. The chances of it actually happening are 50/50 at best and this seems like one of the more half baked ideas.
Get back to us when they start digging it
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It's perfectly legal in California, where Los Angeles is based. Too bad your State doesn't allow what California, and 95% of the rest of the world, allows.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
This is why Musk's tunnel-boring is so important. Transit often makes gridlock on city streets WORSE... unless it has its own dedicated right of way. Tunnels are the least-objectionable way to do that, but traditional methods are just too expensive to do it large-scale.
With cheap tunneling, you CAN pitch transit to NIMBYs by saying, "it might reduce gridlock, and at LEAST won't make it even worse than it already is". You can't say that honestly about buses, streetcars, etc.
It's a shame the ADA made future transit projects based on overhead suspended cables impossible (no way to provide a 3-foot wheelchair-accessible egress path from vehicles... floor hatches with unrolled ladders to climb down aren't legal anymore), because it eliminated potential cheap solutions that could literally run overhead with widely-spaced support towers (especially as a way to increase the "reach" of subway stations by a mile or two perpendicular to the main line).
Musk's subways can potentially do that. You could take a subway station that was built in a less-than-ideal location (with a major trip-generator a mile away), and build an automated mini-subway a-la-Musk to shuttle people between that destination and the subway.
Illustrative example: downtown Miami. When Metrorail opened 35 years ago, the "downtown" station was a good half-mile west of what most of what Miamians considered "downtown", and the station in Brickell (Miami's original financial district) was ~2/3 mile from all the tall buildings. The elevated PeopleMover ("Metromover") VASTLY increased the reach of both stations & made most of downtown Miami accessible via Metrorail. Without Metrorail, Metromover would have been a useless toy. Without Metromover, 80-90% of the people who voluntarily used Metrorail (despite owning cars) to commute to downtown Miami in the 80s and 90s would have driven instead.
Considering the New York Times routinely runs hit pieces on the best things the Western world has to offer, why would that be any surprise? Elon Musk would be doing us a favor if he bought it just to burn it down.