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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: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 19 2018, @04:13PM (8 children)
16/car x $1 = $16 per trip and trips take 8 minutes.
Let's be optimistic and say the car loads/unloads in 2 minutes = 6 one-way trips/hour
6 x $16 = $96/hour gross revenue if every carload is full.
$96 x 24 = $2304/day, x 365 = $840960 per year is the max possible gross, but it's unlikely to be busy all night.
Now, how many millions will the tunnel, cars, software & maintenance cost? Pretty hard to see how this could operate without an enormous subsidy.
But then again, we know that Elon is very good at prying money out of government...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by BsAtHome on Saturday May 19 2018, @04:34PM (2 children)
That suggests you are looking at a half-duplex system.
Once you can do full-duplex, then the interval between cars can be f.ex. 1 min and running both ways. Then the gross would be $16819200 at continuous full load. Half the interval, double the gross.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 19 2018, @05:44PM
The truck stopped. A man jumped off from the back and ran over to the garbage bags on the side of the road. Working quickly, the man loaded all the garbage onto the truck and jumped back on. The truck then sped off to the next house. Anyone could guess this man's - Tommyson's - occupation; he was a trash collector.
Tommyson's job was rather mundane, but he had no complaints; it put food on the table, after all. As he was working through his normal routine, Tommyson spotted some garbage on the sidewalk that he could not ignore. The man, after having loaded the roadside garbage onto the truck, decided to do the community a favor and take care of the trash that polluted the public's infrastructure; he ran over to it.
When the man reached the sidewalk garbage, he immediately punched it and knocked it over. Screaming. The garbage screamed. However, Tommyson had no mercy to spare for trash like this that seemed to pollute everything around it, and so he violated her while his fists rained down on her from above. Every fist that slammed into the woman brought her closer and closer to True Silence. Then, finally, the garbage perished. Tommyson smiled and tossed the corpse into the truck, which promptly drove off.
A certain man received the 'The Trash Collector of the Year' award. Soon after, this man became known far and wide as 'The Proactive Garbageman'.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 19 2018, @07:42PM
I believe that full-duplex requires two tunnels. Once you have a tunnel for each direction, then you can "pipeline" and run multiple cars in each tube (at, for example, your suggested 1 minute headway/interval). This does require turn-arounds at each end, either a circular track, or a turntable -- more expense. Also, with more than one car at a time moving in a tunnel, any failure or accident will likely involve more than one car.
Since nothing is perfectly reliable, there will need to be service vehicles at each end that can pull disabled vehicles out of the tunnel and rescue the passengers. I helped design one of these for a rubber tire "train" that connects different parts of an airport--it was based on a Unimog truck that had been modified for 4-wheel steering to follow the guideway.
There is also the question of how many people need to get from LA to LAX (or between any two end points). This article https://www.dailybreeze.com/2016/01/26/lax-sets-record-for-passenger-volume-in-2015/ [dailybreeze.com] states there are 70+ million passengers a year through LAX (about 200000 per day), but of course most of them don't come from downtown LA, they come from all over the area.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tftp on Saturday May 19 2018, @06:35PM (3 children)
The $96/hr will pay salary of only one lowly tech who will be servicing this line. If you double the rate - two techs. I doubt that this will be sufficient, as there no money left to even buy them a uniform, let alone some specialized inspection equipment that in itself has to be inspected periodically. But a transport system needs a few more workers, like cleaners, security. Spare parts are necessary. Management and finances can be shared among all lines.
In other words, Musk voices an unrealistic ticket price in well-founded hope that when the system opens, nothing can be done. It's a standard tactic of many construction projects that end up late, worse and expensive. Everyone can name a few of those.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 19 2018, @07:46PM (1 child)
Don't you mean three lowly techs? Or does Elon expect one tech to live down there and be on call 24/7? {grin}
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 20 2018, @12:51AM
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Sunday May 20 2018, @09:39AM
The $96/hr will pay salary of only one lowly tech who will be servicing this line. If you double the rate - two techs. I doubt that this will be sufficient, as there no money left to even buy them a uniform, let alone some specialized inspection equipment that in itself has to be inspected periodically. But a transport system needs a few more workers, like cleaners, security. Spare parts are necessary. Management and finances can be shared among all lines.
Wait till you hear the rest of the pitch. It depends heavily on enforcing a gig economy model on the staff, each of whom will be an independent contractor supplying their own uniforms and anything else needed for the job out of their own pockets. They'll pool money every month to pay for inspections and spare parts.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 19 2018, @10:34PM
Old Muskie is banging one Grimes per night, which is a pretty impressive accomplishment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 19 2018, @04:51PM (4 children)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDOI0cq6GZM [youtube.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 19 2018, @05:42PM (3 children)
Please link to a transcript! Video is for illiterate people who don't understand what google is.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday May 19 2018, @05:56PM
Well... [letmegooglethat.com]
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(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Saturday May 19 2018, @10:22PM (1 child)
actual ANON is right. Pasting a link without context or summary is clickbait, plus possibly a little risky in these UTF16 url days....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 20 2018, @04:14AM
Apologies, I thought the subject was context enough for that joke. And for your second point, any link is risky if your user agent doesn't properly differentiate homoglyphs when a link contains characters from different scripts.
(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...
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(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.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 19 2018, @06:26PM (3 children)
For those having trouble grasping just how fast 0.003 mph is, it's 8 furlongs per fortnight. Likewise, 150 mph is 403,200 furlongs per fortnight.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 19 2018, @07:17PM (2 children)
That actually is useful because now I know that after two weeks of digging we're talking about 8 furlongs progress, which is almost the length of a horse race. You can easily picture that. Representing it in such a small number in mph (or forcing it into some other useless decimal place obsessed units) is not helpful at all.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Saturday May 19 2018, @07:40PM (1 child)
This assumes that the tunnel digging is linear. It isn't. It's cubic. There is a linear aspect, but only in relation to cubic volume removed.
Just because one person digging a ditch can make more linear progress per fortnight than all of Musk's Folly, Inc. workers digging a tunnel can, doesn't imply anything about who's faster or who's slower--it just means nobody thought to measure how much dirt gets removed from anything over any particular period of time.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 20 2018, @03:03AM
Which it is. The use of the label, "tunnel" implies that.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday May 20 2018, @04:45PM
Why not sell now? 50 feet per day is pretty good for a tunnel boring machine so 50 / 24 (per hour instead of day) / 5280 (feet per mile) and I get about 0.0004 which is less than a tenth the speed of Musk's boring machine.
I checked the project FAQ and
Ah well that's almost cheating. Wake me when they bore thousands of feet per day thru Manhattan granite. I thought thats what he was doing, therefore he should sell his amazing tech to the worlds TBM producers for billions. But instead he's not boring thru rock, but thru river silt.
I'm just saying that if you don't live in a city built on fill subject to soil liquefaction during earthquakes, what he's doing doesn't matter because he's comparing apples to oranges. A 50 foot day is OK thru solid rock and he's not fixing that problem.
It would seem to be a lot cheaper to change things to not require people to move, than to move people cheaply. My gut level guess of the real end game, given the guy's delight in small diameter drilling, is setting up an autonomous underground railway like the one Chicago had but drone controlled. If, as it seems, you can't put self driving cars on the road without killing a lot of people, you might be able to put large self driving trains underground and then have small flying drones for the last mile delivery or whatever. Also "tunnels everywhere" sounds tasty for everything thats currently buried or aerial, he might be taking aim at the entire aerial cable infrastructure budget.