Boring Company Approved To Build Futuristic Garage That Would Connect To Underground Commuter Tunnel (mercurynews.com)

On Tuesday night, the Hawthorne City Council gave Elon Musk's Boring Company the green light to build a prototype for a new garage that would connect passenger cars to the entrepreneur's envisioned underground hyperloop. The Mercury News reports: Musk's Boring Company recently bought a private residence abutting the one-mile underground tunnel it already built beneath 120th Street between Hawthorne Boulevard and Prairie Avenue near SpaceX. The garage at the residence would connect to the tunnel. But as part of its approval, the company agreed not to open the test elevator to the public or to have cars move in and out of the garage from the street. Cars would enter the tunnel from the SpaceX campus, move through the tunnel and on to the garage and then back to SpaceX, so the test process would not create additional traffic on the street. The company wants to show that it can utilize an elevator and short tunnel spur for developing a high-speed underground public transportation system. It plans to rent the house as well.

As sketched out in public documents, a car would drive onto a "skate" that connects to a hyperloop track, such as the ones being developed by two private companies and recently featured in the collegiate Hyperloop Competition at SpaceX. The company also on Tuesday earned approval for a separate short spur from its existing tunnel in order to remove a boring machine that it first intended to leave in the ground. Originally, the company planned to bore a two-mile length of tunnel, but as company representative Jane Labanowski explained to the City Council, they identified an opportunity to remove its expensive cutter head. So, it now plans to reduce the tunnel length to just one mile and extricate it from another piece of property the company recently purchased.

Comments

Hopefully soon, more info about this aspect

[Rei]

Here's to hoping that we soon get more info about their surface connections. Because they've talked almost nothing about them and to me it seems like the hardest part. Loop, in their ultimate design goal, fundamentally requires large numbers of these surface stations (in contrast to subways that use a smaller number of large terminals), so you have to be able to build them quickly and cheaply. You obviously can't make them with a TBM, it's not just going to make a sharp right-angle turn and drive vertically to the surface. And while the main tunnel can be as deep as you want in order to avoid city infrastructure, every single one of the surface stations has to penetrate every layer below it en route to the Loop tunnels.

I really want to see what their approach is to be able to rapidly make the vertical tunnel segments while quickly detecting and avoiding or rerouting any unmarked underground hazards or infrastructure. Their ease of getting permits en masse will depend on how well they can demonstrate causing minimal disruption to everyday life. To me, this sounds like the hardest part of the whole Loop goal.

Re:Hopefully soon, more info about this aspect

[RhettLivingston]

In addition, these surface tunnels can't just drop straight into the main loops. To be able to carry any real volume in the main loops, you can't have acceleration occurring on the loop. If you accelerate on the loop, you have to maintain a ridiculous gap between vehicles to allow for a car or carrier to enter the loop and accelerate before being rear ended. The throughput would suck.

The solution is to have lots of acceleration and deceleration tunnels that merge with the loop and some automated management of the merging process. Given that tunnels are planned to be cheap, this is likely the intended solution.

So a connection involves an elevator to get through the crud closest to the surface using the shortest route (straight down cuts through much less crud than ramping down) connecting to a ramp that leaves the loop, passes a bunch of elevators, and rejoins the loop.

Extra points to anyone who can design an off ramp that splits off in such as way as to make it impossible for any vehicle to ever hit the divider because that is the only point in the system where a head on collision with a wall could happen.

Re:Hopefully soon, more info about this aspect

[mlyle]

Assuming uniform loading for capacity factors is erroneous. People take more trips at 8AM than at 3AM or 2PM. Adding more station density out at the edges of San Jose doesn't help capacity in the downtown at rush, too.

Re: actually

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you been there? Most of the work Elon Musk does is engineering, like 80% of the work he does.

> This celebrity bullshit everything has to end, it is a lie, a great big fat, psychopathic egoistic lie.

Good luck with that. We need role models. It can even be observed in toddlers. It is never going to end. Certainly not within our lifetime, and not for the next 1000 years either. Now get with the program and be a better role model instead.

>Be careful who you call a real like Tony Stark, a make believe characters with a really good public relations team, that believes themselves above the law and above government, in real life, those fuckers belong in prison.

This again. Prison? Why? What criminal law did he break this time?

Re:Passenger cars in a hyperloop tunnel?

[Rei]

OMG, a car caught fire - quick, get breathless overcoverage of it! Wait, you already did? Good!

There's one car fire in the US for every 20 million miles driven and one fatality per 85 million miles.

Teslas have been driven 9 billion miles. This should correspond to 450 fires and 106 deaths.

Where are they?

Concerning fires, here's a list of Tesla fires between 1 January 2013 and 11 March 2018, which is the vast majority of Tesla miles. The total count? 14. Vs. an expected 450.

Concerning fatalities, three months ago an anti-Tesla Twitter account added up the number of deaths in Teslas and arrived at 34. Note that many of these occurred in other countries like China that have a much higher road fatality rate than the US. It's still a third of the expected number for US-only driving of that many miles.

Let's look at the newest Teslas, shall we - the Model 3? So far there have been no fatalities and no reports of fires in customer cars (there was one Model 3 found up for scrap that had been gutted by fire, but it was "Location: Fremont" with 1 mile on the odometer, so clearly something that happened at the factory. Also, the fire damage was heaviest on the bumper, where it had melted the alumium - but hadn't managed to do so over the pack itself. So it's not clear that a battery fire was actually involved). But how many miles have been driven for this rate of "0/1 fires and 0 deaths"?

Lacking specific numbers, the best we can do is estimate. The average driver drives around 12k miles per year. Owners of new cars put significantly more miles on them during their first year, and particularly first few months because - obviously - it's a new car that they bought because they wanted to drive it. Bloomberg says there were around 25k made in the past month (0-1m ago), 19k in the previous month (1-2m ago), then 13,5k (2-3m ago), then 9k (3-4m ago), the 9k (4-5m ago), then 6,5k (5-6m ago), and 9k earlier than that. So around 19k*(30k/12)*0,5 + 13,5k*(30k/12)*1,5 + 9k*(26k/12)*2,5 + 9k*(23k/12)*3,5 + 6,5k*(21k/12)*4,5 + 9k*(18k/12)*6 = ~315M miles. Meaning if they were gasoline cars we should expect 16 fires and 3 1/2 deaths. Where are they?