Elon Musk unveils traffic-busting underground tunnel

magicbastarder · 20-12-2018 11:25am #1

Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has unveiled his ground-breaking underground transportation tunnel, which he hopes will provide an answer to “soul-destroying traffic” across the world.

Reporters and invited guests took some of the first journeys in the revolutionary subterranean tube system beneath the surface of Los Angeles, which could eventually hit speeds of 150mph (241km/h).

Guests were driven along the city’s streets in a Tesla Model S electric car about a mile away from the departure point known as O’Leary Station.

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/elon-musk-unveils-traffic-busting-underground-tunnel-1.3736579

so he's invented an underground road.

neris · 20-12-2018 11:45am

so hes basically just made an underground/tube for cars or just moved the traffic from above ground to below ground. We had enough trouble in Dublin building the port tunnel cant imagine the uproar and claims for damaged houses, subsidance etc if this ever goes ahead here but knowing our infrastucture planning it probably wouldnt be till about the year 2350

Elons fairly packed on the pounds aswell if thats an up to date photo

ted1 · 20-12-2018 11:48am

neris wrote: »

so hes basically just made an underground/tube for cars or just moved the traffic from above ground to below ground. We had enough trouble in Dublin building the port tunnel cant imagine the uproar and claims for damaged houses, subsidance etc if this ever goes ahead here but knowing our infrastucture planning it probably wouldnt be till about the year 2350

Elons fairly packed on the pounds aswell if thats an up to date photo

his tunnel and the port tunnel are very different, his use a much smaller bore hole and are a fraction of the cost and can tunnel much faster

seamus · 20-12-2018 11:48am

How is sitting in a queue of vehicles to get into this tunnel any better than sitting in a queue of vehicles on the road?

While I do applaud his dedication to the unconventional - it is yielding big dividends for science with SpaceX and Tesla - sometimes he does seem to be looking too close to the problem he's trying to solve rather than taking a bigger picture.

ted1 · 20-12-2018 11:58am

seamus wrote: »

How is sitting in a queue of vehicles to get into this tunnel any better than sitting in a queue of vehicles on the road?

While I do applaud his dedication to the unconventional - it is yielding big dividends for science with SpaceX and Tesla - sometimes he does seem to be looking too close to the problem he's trying to solve rather than taking a bigger picture.

because its not just an entry with an exit. you enter from on street left shafts that drop you into the tunnel. so there is multiple entry and exit points. you can avoid Queuing all together.

ednwireland · 20-12-2018 12:02pm

reminds me of this

oh and it happens to go past elon musks house

magicbastarder · 20-12-2018 12:36pm

ted1 wrote: »

because its not just an entry with an exit. you enter from on street left shafts that drop you into the tunnel. so there is multiple entry and exit points. you can avoid Queuing all together.

surely that's going to be a crippling pinch point? he's selling the idea of a 150mph tunnel where cars have to be winched in and out.

seamus · 20-12-2018 12:41pm

ted1 wrote: »

because its not just an entry with an exit. you enter from on street left shafts that drop you into the tunnel. so there is multiple entry and exit points. you can avoid Queuing all together.

You can, but that's not how traffic works. Some entry points will be more popular than others.

Looking at non-paywalled sources, it does sound to me like the intention is not to make this open to regular vehicles.

It will be opened only to autonomous vehicles, which will choose the most appropriate (read: least busy) entry point based on current traffic volumes, and the system will then eject you at the quietest exit point closest to your destination, but not necessarily the closest one.

This can only work if it's autonomously load-balanced, and not depending on people to pick the entry/exit point that they want.

magicbastarder · 20-12-2018 12:47pm

i'd also be curious about how the 'supply' tunnels will work - obviously you won't want to be winching cars into a tunnel where there's already vehicles doing 150mph, so you'd need entry and exit tunnels to allow the cars to speed up and slow down before joining or leaving the main tunnels. an electric car would obviously have decent acceleration, but they'd want to keep it to a level which is not discomforting or impractical for the occupants.

FitzElla · 20-12-2018 12:52pm

How many autonomous cars would you need to get down a tunnel to carry the same number of people as say, oh, a subway carriage? That's even leaving aside how these tunnels would deal with a breakdown of a vehicle or an emergency evacuation situation.

daheff · 20-12-2018 12:57pm

this seems like a bad solution to the problem

if he could bore tunnels at that speed for subway trains it would be much better

LeinsterDub · 20-12-2018 2:44pm

On every level this is a moronic level. Not quite a road and not quite a metro. A metro can carry hundreds of thousands per hour. This is going to carry cars most like single occupied cars from one congested area to another? What's the point.

lawred2 · 20-12-2018 2:47pm

magicbastarder wrote: »

Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has unveiled his ground-breaking underground transportation tunnel, which he hopes will provide an answer to “soul-destroying traffic” across the world.

Reporters and invited guests took some of the first journeys in the revolutionary subterranean tube system beneath the surface of Los Angeles, which could eventually hit speeds of 150mph (241km/h).

Guests were driven along the city’s streets in a Tesla Model S electric car about a mile away from the departure point known as O’Leary Station.

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/elon-musk-unveils-traffic-busting-underground-tunnel-1.3736579

so he's invented an underground road.

lol

he's amazing

he's just a mad troll

LeinsterDub · 20-12-2018 2:48pm

https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/visionary-brain-genius-elon-musk-has-invented-the-world-1831210269

Good explanation on why this is it 3rd worst idea after the hyperloop and his point to point rockets.

lawred2 · 20-12-2018 2:49pm

ted1 wrote: »

because its not just an entry with an exit. you enter from on street left shafts that drop you into the tunnel. so there is multiple entry and exit points. you can avoid Queuing all together.

that'll be cheap then - thousands of entry points

20-12-2018 2:59pm

I remember the metro cost projections in Ireland - 300 million euro a km or something (actually 277mn https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/thinktank-challenges-5bn-metro-north-plan-26668500.html)

in Spain around the same time they were building metro for 50 million a km

if the boring company could bring this cost down and can handle metro tunnelling then definitely something worth looking into. although I wonder how much of the increased "Ireland cost" is down to nimbyism and planning inefficiency.

Measuring 1.4 miles (2.3 kilometers) long and 14 feet (4.3 meters) wide, the test tunnel winds its way underneath Hawthorne and is estimated to have cost $10 million. This, Boring notes, is a fraction of the cost of traditional tunneling. It exists as a research and development tunnel for Boring's aspirations of improving tunneling capabilities and creating new modes of public transport.

https://www.cnet.com/uk/news/elon-musk-opens-first-boring-company-tunnel-under-spacex-hq-in-hawthorne/

RayCun · 20-12-2018 3:02pm

It's a fraction of the cost of traditional tunneling, but a fraction of the specifications too.

20-12-2018 3:03pm

RayCun wrote: »

It's a fraction of the cost of traditional tunneling, but a fraction of the specifications too.

I imagine so - but still never got an explanation why Irish costs managed to be 5 to 6x that of Spain.

lawred2 · 20-12-2018 3:08pm

glasso wrote: »

I imagine so - but still never got an explanation why Irish costs managed to be 5 to 6x that of Spain.

would imagine what you're drilling through would make a difference to the cost

20-12-2018 3:15pm

seems a stretch to make that much difference.

magicbastarder · 20-12-2018 3:18pm

from what i can see, it's not that ireland's costs were exceptionally high, it's that spain's were exceptionally low.

Madrid's recently-opened Metrosur line is 41 km long, with 28 stations, yet was completed in four years at around $58m per km. Recent expansions in Paris and Berlin cost about $250 million per km.

New York, meanwhile, is building the most expensive subway line of all time, at $1.7b per km. This figure makes London's 16-km-long Jubilee line and Amsterdam's 10-km North-South line, which both faced delays and controversy and cost $350m and $400m per km, respectively, seem reasonable in comparison.

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2011/11/1-billion-doesnt-buy-much-transit-infrastructure-anymore/456/

4068ac1elhodqr · 20-12-2018 3:25pm

He should get back to his other novelty project, which moves cars at up to x10 faster, and won't require any drilling.
i.e. Hyperloop.

Bray Head · 20-12-2018 3:26pm

I like the idea that he's only building them to car spec. 90% of a given tunnel's traffic will not be buses and lorries, but every tunnel has to be sized for them.

Cost wise, the area of a circle of course increases with the square of the radius. According to their website, their tunnel diameter is 14 feet, compared to 28 feet for a regular tunnel. So that generates only a quarter of fill to be disposed of.

It's quite clever. No idea if it will work of course.

magicbastarder · 20-12-2018 3:31pm

the area of the bore is one quarter. is the carrying capacity one quarter too?

just strikes me that an attempt to make the car a more spatially efficient means of moving people around is just trying to polish a turd.

Bray Head · 20-12-2018 3:56pm

magicbastarder wrote: »

the area of the bore is one quarter. is the carrying capacity one quarter too?

no.

kippy · 20-12-2018 3:58pm

This is ridiculous.

Cuddlesworth · 20-12-2018 4:14pm

magicbastarder wrote: »

the area of the bore is one quarter. is the carrying capacity one quarter too?

just strikes me that an attempt to make the car a more spatially efficient means of moving people around is just trying to polish a turd.

I could see many instances where it could work.

Looking at the gridlock at the M50/N11 intersection into Bray.

If you knew that 30% of cars just wanted nothing to do with Bray by the time they reached junction 14 of the M50, filter them off into a short hop tunnel and out the other side of Bray back onto the motorway.

If you knew that 50% of the cars entering Bray lived in south Bray, filter them out and deposit them into one or more locations south of Bray where they are now heading against the main traffic flow.

As more people picked up electric cars hooked into a autonomous system, traffic paths could be more effectively managed, meaning you could free up traffic blackspots and provide investment into better public transport solutions.

Even ignoring the car part, whats to say that smaller driverless carriages can't be used with these small tunnels to provide direct path hops, like Dublin Airport to Connolly Station.

RayCun · 20-12-2018 4:23pm

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

Even ignoring the car part, whats to say that smaller driverless carriages can't be used with these small tunnels to provide direct path hops, like Dublin Airport to Connolly Station.

It's like the old commentary - "Your proposal contains much that is good, and much that is original. The parts that are good are not original, the parts that are original are not good."

Underground tunnels for transporting passengers are not a new idea. Underground tunnels for cars aren't even a new idea.
But making the tunnels small enough to be death traps, that takes a particular kind of genius.

seamus · 20-12-2018 4:32pm

magicbastarder wrote: »

from what i can see, it's not that ireland's costs were exceptionally high, it's that spain's were exceptionally low.

I understand that in some parts of Spain, property rights are exceptionally weak (or at least used to be), and the local government could expropriate your land at little or no cost and with little or no resistance, once they could prove that they needed it for public projects.

Just take the land, bulldoze what's on it, and tough sh1t.

That would certainly go a long way to reducing the costs of this kind of work.

uptherebels · 20-12-2018 4:38pm

magicbastarder wrote: »

the area of the bore is one quarter. is the carrying capacity one quarter too?

just strikes me that an attempt to make the car a more spatially efficient means of moving people around is just trying to polish a turd.

I think this is just one step in an overall plan.
When you have autonomous vehicles and we get to the point where everybody shares cars instead of privately owning them.
You get picked up at your home, taken into the tunnel and go across a city in minutes and dropped to your place of work. No parking etc etc and the car goes off to collect someone else.
I think the problem with musk is that people look at what he is doing and ask what good is that today instead of asking how this will contribute in 30 years time.
The main reason I think he is involved is SpaceX is to finally achieve mining for various metals in space that will contribute to vast expansion of autonomous systems that needs rare earth metals.

AlmightyCushion · 20-12-2018 4:59pm

uptherebels wrote: »

I think this is just one step in an overall plan.
When you have autonomous vehicles and we get to the point where everybody shares cars instead of privately owning them.
You get picked up at your home, taken into the tunnel and go across a city in minutes and dropped to your place of work. No parking etc etc and the car goes off to collect someone else.
I think the problem with musk is that people look at what he is doing and ask what good is that today instead of asking how this will contribute in 30 years time.
The main reason I think he is involved is SpaceX is to finally achieve mining for various metals in space that will contribute to vast expansion of autonomous systems that needs rare earth metals.

Autonomous vehicles make this make even less sense than a normal subway/metro tunnel. If this was just a normal metro/subway tunnel then the autonomous vehicle would pick you up at your door drop you to the closest subway/metro stop, you get off at whatever stop is convenient and an autonomous vehicle picks you up and drops you off where ever it is your going. Same thing but the tunnel can now carry about 100 times as many people. Plus the cars on either end are doing less driving per person (because they are only driving to and from the tunnel and not in it) so you need less of them to carry more people.

Elon Musk unveils traffic-busting underground tunnel

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