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posted by Fnord666 on Monday December 19 2016, @07:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the boring-doesn't-have-to-be-boring dept.

http://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/12/elon-musk-hates-sitting-in-traffic-so-now-hes-going-to-build-tunnels/

Brunel had his ships. Trump had his walls. And now Musk wants to make... tunnels, tunnels under cities to reduce traffic congestion and make the world a better, cleaner, less rage-filled place.

Over the weekend, probably while sitting in traffic behind the wheel of an autonomous Tesla, Musk tweeted: "Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging." An hour later, probably while still sitting in traffic, giving him plenty of time to think of a witty pun, he declared: "It shall be called 'The Boring Company.' Boring, it's what we do."

And finally, an hour after that, just in case any of us were foolish enough to think the billionaire multi-CEO was joking, Musk said, "I am actually going to do this." He also changed his Twitter bio to include "Tunnels."

So, unless Musk was suffering from a prolonged bout of entrepreneurial road rage, we now know roughly how long it takes a pedigree industrialist to pick a new disruptible domain: two hours, give or take.

Tunnels are indeed a pretty good solution for traffic congestion, though they take a long time to build, and the construction usually causes a huge amount of disruption above ground—especially if those tunnels are being built in a metropolitan area, which is where you'll find most of the world's congestion.

Depending on the setting, it can be very difficult and expensive to build tunnels as well. Cut-and-cover—where you dig up an existing road, build a tunnel, and put the road back—is the only "cheap" tunnel building method, but it's so incredibly disruptive that most tunnels nowadays are built at deeper depths by automated tunnel boring machines (TBMs). Cost-wise, you're looking at about £1 billion per mile for TBMs: London's Crossrail, with 13 miles of new tunnel, will cost around £15 billion; Manhattan's second avenue subway line, with 8.5 miles of new tunnel, will cost about $17 billion. The costs are much lower if you just want to bore through a mountain—the just-completed 35-mile Gotthard Base Tunnel through the Alps in Switzerland cost a mere £10 billion (and took 17 years to build!)—but I doubt Musk has those kinds of tunnels in mind.


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Francis on Monday December 19 2016, @09:32PM

    by Francis (5544) on Monday December 19 2016, @09:32PM (#443351)

    Like the AC said, you have fewer intersections.

    You're also freed of the usual space constraints that come from being on the surface as your rail can go directly under most buildings without issues. So, you can run the lines on top of each other or you can have interchanges as well. You can't really mine out the entire ground of the whole city, but if you're mindful about it, you can build an extremely efficient method of getting people from one neighborhood to another with surface street transit just being used for the last few blocks. If even that, most people can just walk the last bit.

    Ideally, you could run shorter trains that run more frequently and get on and off the tracks as needed to allow other trains to pass by while you load and unload passengers.

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