Musk as a company leader means a lot. I’m sure a lot of other people had the idea for a “Tesla” before there was Tesla. Or the idea of self-landing rockets.
When you build the tunnel for a tenth the cost, that's a pretty big difference. The same budget lets you build ten times more infrastructure, which is quite badly needed! I live in Los Angeles and things are so bad here that often you simply can't see friends that live only a few miles away.
They're using standard tunnel boring machines same as anyone else. It's not clear what their "special sauce" is that's supposed to enable them to do it at one-tenth the cost. So far they haven't delivered.
As for LA, you've had ample opportunity to expand your subway system over the past decades to solve this problem, it's just never actually been done. It's not clear how Boring Company changes anything. I would love to be wrong about this, but I'm not seeing it.
LA has expanded its rail system quite dramatically in the past decade and will be opening a new rail line next year...
It turns out the expensive part was not the digging. It was moving undisclosed utility lines and building the stations. Moving undisclosed utility lines is almost singlehandedly the reason the regional connector and Crenshaw lines are over budget.
And acquiring all the land to build the stations ...
And subways have relatively few surface interfaces compared to what you'd need to build to move the same amount of people in cars. Come to Manhattan and look at the massive, multi-block entrances to the Lincoln Tunnel, Holland Tunnel, Midtown Tunnel, etc. You're talking billions worth in real estate acquisition costs, demolition, and construction just to build a new tunnel entrance in the city, completely ignoring the tunnel cost itself.
And these tunnels move fewer people per day than the most-used subway stations, which are easier to integrate into the urban environment because you only need to build stairways and a couple elevators, not massive ramps and road connections for vehicles.
But what if it's also tenth the capacity? According to the article this accommodates 4,400 people/hr. BART ridership is 411k/day, and (to pick a random example) Gangnam subway station in Seoul averages at 230k/day. And that's actual usage, not max capacity.
That's only a valid comparison if you take massive infrastructure projects head-on. There is no law of physics stating that these tunnels can't be used for other situations and purposes.
Several things come to mind:
1. There are lots of places with lower density than city centers, but higher density than suburbs that would benefit massively from underground transportation.
3. Let's not discount the strong likelihood of further cost reductions. The Boring Company has made huge strides already, with further cost and speed gains to be had from a TBM they are designing and building from scratch: https://www.teslarati.com/boring-company-line-storm-tunnelin...
Do you have any citation for the "huge strides" TBC has made already? The only concrete numbers I've seen have been apples to oranges, either not normalizing for cross section area, or comparing just the cost of TBC digging to complete projects.
It appears that The Boring Company uses both off-the-shelf TBMs and their own designs (and, I think, also a customized off-the-shelf TBM). It would be interesting to learn which one they used here.
Except this 10% of cost is just a marketing ploy by Musk to sell you the project. When you compare to the price of subways in Europe, this isn't any cheaper. North America is extremely bad at building cheap subways, but other places of the world have already achieved it.
I personally know people that work at SpaceX (because my wife works there). Reusable rockets weren't a cheap marketing ploy. I don't have personal contact with anyone at the Boring Company, but it's located right across the street from SpaceX in Hawthorne, and I know that many of the people there are from SpaceX. In fact, I just drove past the test tunnel there this morning, as I dropped her off at work.
I might be biased given where my friends work, but how do you know that calling it a "marketing ploy" isn't an overly-cynical view of things? After all, Musk sees more cost reductions coming, and his track record has been pretty good (if a bit late at times).
I also have some questions for you that I hope can resolve things:
1. Do you believe it is possible to do better than the infrastructure projects in other countries that you cite?
2. Do you agree that it would be a good thing if they succeed in making tunnels far cheaper than they are anywhere else in the world?
Finally, I hope that my tone does not come across to you as being negative in any way. I do not mean to sound strident, overconfident, or for any of the above to come across as a put-down. I mean no harm!
Your tone does come off as negative, especially the second question. I think virtually everyone agrees with that, so why bother asking unless you are questioning the intelligence of him (which I do not think you do, but you come off that way)? If you do not want to sound negative you should skip any questions with only one sane answer.
1: yes I believe it is possible to better. However I also believe that many of the reasons those other countries do better than the US - as much a 7 times cheaper - are political and thus not something any manager can solve. Going from 4x more expensive than best world prices prices (LA is about 4x, NYX is about 7x) to 3.9x more expensive than world prices are possible - that is a drop in the bucket though compared to the 4x improvement possible by finding the real issues where are political.
How is this different from saying someone selling a fine bottle of wine for $2 in New York is scamming you, because you could get the same bottle for $2 in France... ?
If we can get good wine at $2 in France, a fine bottle of wine at $2 in NY is still a bargain. But a NY-based company saying they'll revolutionize wine industry by selling quality wine at $2/bottle, might be trying to scam you.
The difference between one that falls into the ocean and one that brings itself back down into orbit and lands safely is one is cheaper than the other?
I guess the better analogy is "an orbit is an orbit". We don't care about the orbit as much as we care about the rockets in the case of SpaceX, because what the rockets mean for our ability to explore space.
In the case of Boring, a tunnel is a tunnel, but if they can make them cheap and fast, that opens up a bunch of possibilities for improving transit.
With SpaceX, it's very clear how they're getting the >10X cost efficiencies. Rockets are massively expensive to build, and instead of building a new one for each launch and throwing them away as part of the mission, SpaceX is reusing each rocket many times. Their next-gen architecture BFR will be reusable dozens of times. So it's super obvious how SpaceX is putting things into orbit cheaply.
This is not true at all for tunnel construction, though. SpaceX is using largely the same technology (tunnel-boring machines) and is going to have all the same problems going through permitting, land acquisition, entrance/exit construction, etc., same as anyone else. It's not clear at all what fundamental advantage they have that would allow them to do this stuff much more cheaply.
Maybe the price? My city recently built an overpass over a single rail track that cost the same amount - $50 million. A tunnel like this would probably be a 10x cost run by most companies.
The "wow" factor is the price per distance, and digging rate. These infrastructure projects (in the USA at least) are usually extremely expensive and slow.
In London I have a thousand
options, and every single one of them is clogged at 6 pm. People stay extra hour at work because there is no way for them all to get home.
London has two options - tube or (half each) car or bus. All suck, but tube gets you there fastest (with probably higher level of discomfort as bus does).
Imagine having real bike lanes (and not getting killed) where you'd be able to use e-bikes and e-scooters. Imagine pooling electric car with your neighbour in a Boring tunnel. Even when it's slower you are not a sardine in a sweaty, hearing-damaging tube.
Options dont matter when roads are already clogged. Whether the cars are electric or not wont make a difference.
Bikes/scooter are last mile transport, sure, you can squeeze another 10% capacity out of them or whatever. Maybe another 10% from car pooling. That's it. The only way to get more throughput on the surface is to replace cars with buses. The only way to get more throughput underground is to expand the tube. It does not need to be sweaty or ear damaging, in Prague our metro is really nice, and so is the one in Madrid.
The boring tunnel is basically useless, a hundred of them will move less people than a single tube line.
There is no space in central megacities for cars and the sooner you people realise that, the sooner we can start solving the problem.
I mean, neither the Tesla being an electric car or an iPhone being a smart phone were new things but they are changing/changed the landscape of technology.
I guess it makes sense to listen in when someone who has shown to be more than a one hit wonder tries to do more of these things.
Also, I think the point here is the hypothetical way that cars can be moved in the tunnels which makes the smaller size still useful.
