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Elon Musk pitches 150 MPH rides in Boring Company tunnels for $1
Earlier in the evening Musk retweeted an LA Metro tweet that said it's coordinating with The Boring Company on its test and said the two will be "partners" going forward. Much of what Musk discussed about how his concept in-city Loop would work has been answered in concept videos and the company's FAQ, but he specifically said that the plan is for rides that cost a $1, and carry up to 16 passengers through hundreds of tunnels to those small, parking space-size tunnels located throughout a city.
The big problem is digging those tunnels to start with, and while part of the session included video of a speedy test run through the tunnel Musk has already dug on SpaceX property, the plan is to pick up the pace. Davis said Musk has challenged his team to match the digging pace of a snail (0.03 MPH), and get up to 1/10th of the average walking speed of a human at about 0.3 MPH -- compared to its current top speed of about 0.003 MPH.
Previously: Elon Musk Wants to be Boring
Elon Musk's Boring Tunnel Near Los Angeles
(Score: 3, Disagree) by requerdanos on Saturday May 19 2018, @06:01PM (15 children)
Even if there were such as a thing as a linear digging pace divorced from volume of earth removed--and there isn't--0.03 MPH is about the *maximum* traveling pace of a snail while it is *not* digging [snail-world.com]. So even if we were to agree on a "standard linear digging pace" for snails, it would be some fraction of (i.e. lower than) this speed.
But to measure the pace of a given snail (we'll name him "speedy") digging something with the displacement of Musk's tunnel, miles per "hour" isn't going to be your unit of measure. It's more likely to be somewhere between "per millennium" and "per eternity".
Saying that a crew digging a tunnel about 0.003 MPH is digging slower than a snail is as insulting as it is misleading.
Or perhaps it's intended to be motivational (by means of misleading insult)?
(Score: 2) by julian on Saturday May 19 2018, @06:50PM (14 children)
Musk is smart enough to know this is bullshit. The Hyper Loop is bullshit. The rocket ships flying ballistic trajectories to replace airplanes are bullshit. It's fake. Yet the money he's wasting on these things is very much real. So I don't understand what his game is. Is he using these fake projects as test projects so his team can gain practical engineering experience? But if so, then why not just hire engineers who already know how to do these things. Building tunnels isn't...well I was going to say groundbreaking work but...
Unless I'm mistaken and he really is dumb and just got super lucky in the tech boom and doesn't know jack shit about engineering. Hell, neither do I, but I can point out the obvious problems with all of these things. They should be obvious to anyone who stops to think about it for a few minutes. I wouldn't throw a single dollar at this project if I had his money. He has a few ventures that work and produce real products but even those aren't really new products. There was a rocket that could take off and land in the 1990s. Electric cars are over a century old.
He seems like a snake oil salesman.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Saturday May 19 2018, @07:11PM (1 child)
He wants to develop better tunneling technology for subterranean habitats and launch tubes on Mars and other bodies. Getting that development even partially subsidized is a win.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 19 2018, @07:36PM
That's part of what I was thinking too, the hyperloop transport gets a lot easier when the atmosphere is thin!
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 19 2018, @07:31PM (3 children)
Or, bear with me here, you just might lack imagination and ingenuity.
I personally agree on the Hyperloop being overly expensive and dangerous but we humans are pretty amazing at building things that people think are impractical if not impossible.
Electric cars? No one said Musk invented those, why bitch there?
Rocket planes that can pop out of the atmosphere and re-enter across the globe are not foolish in the slightest if they can get a plane that ascends to high altitude and then hits the rockets to go sub-orbital. I'm pretty sure they would be less efficient, but maybe not wildly so.
The future of air travel is looking like electric! Use nuclear / renewable energy sources to charge the batteries and we'll clear up a LOT of air pollution along with making the efficiency less of an issue for humanity. Even then if you have a hybrid electric / rocket plane and energy costs plummet as they should, then it wouldn't be crazy expensive to take a sub-orbital flight for 4 hours instead of 16+.
Long story short, you sound like a cynic with just enough knowledge to feel confident and lacking too much to speak authoritatively.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 19 2018, @09:45PM (2 children)
We're also good at making attempts and building things and then abandoning them when they turn out to be impractical. I'm tired of the Musk worship.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 20 2018, @03:00AM
Well, you could always abandon it when it turns out impractical, right?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 20 2018, @05:25PM
Round these parts i dont ever see Musk worship, just haters hating for no real good reason. "I hate him cause everyone likes him!" is a pretty sad bit.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Saturday May 19 2018, @07:59PM (5 children)
Warren de La Rue [weebly.com] had a working vacuum-sealed long-life electric light bulb decades before Edison's, but Edison's was economical and production-ready and de La Rue's wasn't.
Thomas Saint in ca. 1790 and Walter Hunt in ca. 1833 [moah.org] both invented and patented sewing machines--Saint's machine imitated hand-stitching and Hunt's machine performed a two-thread lock stitch--but Elias Howe gets the credit because he actually did something with his machine. (Singer's contribution was the vertical-needle rigid-arm design, also a useful thing that we remember.)
John Stevens had build a working steamboat [thoughtco.com] years before Robert Fulton did, but we remember Fulton because his steamboat was *successful*.
If all Musk ever does is take previously neat-but-impractical things and make them useful, beneficial, and successful for mankind, then he is "a brilliant man", not a "copycat".
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nuke on Saturday May 19 2018, @10:24PM (4 children)
This thread is about Musk's in-city Loop, which is in fact an underground railway ("Subway" in the US). I'm sorry to burst your bubble but they were invented and made useful over 150 years ago with the Metropolitan Railway in London:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Railway [wikipedia.org]
Then there was a technical step change to deep tubes over 100 years ago with the City and South London Railway:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_and_South_London_Railway [wikipedia.org]
Those lines (both very heavily used today, the latter as part of the Northern Line), and many similar built since in London and around the world have been immensely successful, and are the solution to moving large numbers of people in cities. Why do I need to tell people these things?
The London Underground system moves nearly 5 million passengers every day. It is capable of shifting up to 40,000 passengers per hour along any one of its tunnels and some central parts of it do that in the peak periods. The capacity of of one of Musk's in-city Loop tunnels, with cars of 16 passengers, will be pitiful by comparison. His system will only work well for the individual passenger if not many other people want to use it, in which case it will not be economic.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Saturday May 19 2018, @10:35PM (3 children)
The difference is not in whether they go underground or not, of course, nor whether they utilize rails. If you examine the speeds of subterranean rail systems in cities such as London, Chicago, Atlanta, etc., you will find that they move mostly somewhat slower than 150 MPH, and while they are pretty good proof-of-concept for what Musk is working on, none of them can do it, much less routinely nor usefully.
The world doesn't need Musk to make underground rail transportation systems work. But 150 MPH ones would be nice, and I don't think anyone's got that working so far.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Nuke on Sunday May 20 2018, @10:44AM (2 children)
I know exactly what London Underground trains can do; as a test engineer I have driven them. In fact I claim the speed record for driving one - 86mph :-)
Stations on the London Underground are typically a mile apart, sometimes two miles in the suburbs, and as little as 250 yards in the centre (Charing Cross to Embankment). It would be utterly pointless, impractical, and in many cases impossible, to accelerate to 150mph between stations. The speed of the service (ie how long an individual passenger's journey takes) in the final analysis is largely dictated by the speed at which people leave and board the trains, even though regular commuters undertand that and are pretty good at it.
Conventional city underground [or subway] trains can be boarded in the extreme case by 1000 people as simultaneously as the door widths allow (nearly 50% of the side of a London Underground train). Compare Musk's 16-people carts. One arrives at a station platform (or whatever Musk wants to call them, and the lift-to-the-surface idea would be even slower); assuming the platform is longer than one cart, another cart pulls in behind after a 2 second (or 2 minute, or whatever Musk proposes - makes no difference) interval. The second must stop behind the first unless that interval is longer than it takes for passengers to get in and out*. Then a third pulls in and must stop behind the second, even if the first cart has already left. Progressively, the carts arriving will back up and soon they will be stopped in the tunnel before they reach the platform - in other words queueing to enter the station even if the leading end of the platform ahead is by now empty
A solution to this would be to link the carts together so they enter and leave as a block - oh wait, we have re-invented the train.
I know Musk proposes that passengers are grouped to common destinations, so their cart skips stopping at other stations. But they won't escape being delayed in that queue, unless you build passing loops at every station - except that the popular stations will still cause that tailback onto the through line, and even if not, the "150mph" through carts will be hampered by the acceleration and deceleration of carts ahead of them leaving for the loop or joining from it.
As for 150 mph in tunnels, European high speed trains are doing more than that in tunnels every day, but they are not city subway trains.
* In which case, with 16 passengers at a time, the capacity of the system would be miniscule.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 20 2018, @01:45PM (1 child)
> Then a third pulls in and must stop behind the second, even if the first cart has already left.
Thanks for the summary, all good as far as it goes. But you are a using a linear or serial model based on one track (in each direction). Since these are "cars" that run on a fairly normal flat road and not "trains" on tracks, there is no elevated platform and additional cars pulling into the station can just pull up alongside other cars. As soon as any car is full (or full enough, off-peak) it can leave at any time, as long as it leaves suitable headway between cars. If any station gets too busy, just dig some more and make it wider.
Separate question, what are typical loading and unloading times on the London Underground?
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Tuesday May 22 2018, @10:48AM
London Underground trains can have doors open for as little as 10 seconds if there are not many passengers around. OTOH at a busy station in the rush hour it could be a minute, or more if there is a total log-jam of passengers. It is this time that is the main limit on the service frequency, which is typically 2 minutes on busy stretches, although I have seen as little as 90 seconds - ie the next train is pulling in as soon as the previous has left the station.
Good point about the parallel "roads" in the station, although it is nothing to do with whether it on rails or not, or whether there are raised platforms or not. Parellel roads are used at both busy conventional railway stations and at road bus stations. But it does add a lot to the expense of the station in terms of surface land area or underground tunnelling. Under London it is difficult to find more subterranean space these days with so many existing tunnels, sewers, cable tunnels and tower block foundations, and I guess it is similar in many other cities.
(Score: 1, Troll) by RamiK on Saturday May 19 2018, @08:58PM
His game is to use aviation and aerospace engineers that would otherwise be used to build the next F35 or another NASA rocket (nonexistent federal funds) to build an overly-complex and completely inefficient mass transit system (California state funds).
Personally, I can totally see California splitting apart (state level or full federal secession) over these sort of spending shenanigans. Though I'm not quite sure who is going to portray Snake Plissken when Trump decides to nuke in retaliation...
compiling...
(Score: 2) by SanityCheck on Saturday May 19 2018, @10:54PM
So what, his every increasingly outlandish ideas just serve to get his dick in the next crazy slut "celebrity" he meets at some cocktail party. And keeps him from doing things that could really damage this planet.