[ryantgtg]

Yeah, the joke is that next they'll release that the concrete tunnel road is subject to deterioration, so they'll shift to steel tracks. Then they'll realize that these individual vehicles should be linked together to allow for higher capacity. Then... then you have a subway.

[tntn]

That would be great. Subway costs are absolutely ridiculous, so it would be fantastic if the boring company decides to build exactly the same thing for much less.

[stephen_g]

At the moment, all the analysis I've seen points more towards the only reason it's cheaper being because of the smaller size of the tunnel (there's actually nothing novel about the boring machine, it's just a standard one that is used to build utility tunnels with some minor tweaks), and because they don't build (or don't take into account) things like station caverns, cross linking tunnels, ventilation/emergency egress, etc.

So if they actually built a subway it would cost... about the same as a subway. That's not to say that US subways aren't crazy expensive to build compared to Europe, Asia etc. - but that's more to do with legal issues (industrial relations etc.), business structures, and possibly corruption, rather than the technology.

[tomjakubowski]

It's not exactly the same thing. In the Boring underground car-train, each party of travelers takes up an entire car's or truck's worth of space. On a subway, each person takes up room for themselves and their belongings. Plus maybe a bicycle. You can move a lot more people at once in a subway.

Further, when the Boring underground car-train "stops", and parties leave the train, those cars still demand that same space, just on the surface. With mass transit carrying pedestrians and cyclists, you need much less room on "integrate" passengers coming out from the underground, with local traffic on the surface.

If Boring gives up on the personal vehicle folly, and can build a smaller, cheaper, but equally safe tunnel for mass transit, great. But they seem preoccupied with letting people keep their cars.

[greglindahl]

This article that we're discussing, about Las Vegas, involves dedicated vehicles, not personal cars. And one of them is a 16-person people mover. It is expected to have a low enough usage that that makes sense.

How many people are you expecting to take their bikes on the subway on the Vegas strip?

[hannasanarion]

But it's not gonna be "for much less" because digging tunnels is probably the easiest and cheapest part of building a subway.

[testbed]

Subway cost in mismanged US are ridiculous.[0] Around the world, countries like Spain are already building tunnels for the claimed cost of an Hyperloop tunnel.

[0] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-c...

[Robotbeat]

Is that a bad thing?

If they can somehow address the insane tunneling infrastructure costs in the US, I don't really care what path they take to get there.

[naravara]

Most of that extra cost comes from the legal fees around buying the land and getting permits to dig under it. A better tunnel borer doesn't address any of that.

You could maybe save on OSHA concerns if you can somehow slash the number of people employed, but you'd need to get rid of a LOT of people before you see enough gains from that to make this a game changer.

Elon's whole deal around transit is utterly uninformed about anything urban planning.

[Robotbeat]

Except it does seem to have addressed that. Even the dumb test tunnel seems to have been completed for far less than it should've taken, given the constraints you mentioned.

Experts (including those who have studied foreign mass transit in detail) are at a loss to fully explain why the US's tunneling costs are so out of whack compared to other countries. Sometimes, when expert systems seem to have failed, it's a useful exercise to throw everything out (i.e. be "utterly uninformed") and learn from scratch by trying. They may fail anyway, but it's worth a shot.

Sometimes, the naive intern will find a solution because of their own naïveté. (And even then there are lots of practical things that will need to be relearned, at great pain.)

[ryantgtg]

I'm under the impression that their costs are cheaper right now because public agencies are eager to see a working test case and so exempted them from environmental clearance. I doubt that will still be the case when the scheme changes from "a single tunnel from Musk's home in Bel-Air to his work in Hawthorne" to "hundreds of stacked tunnels traversing the entire city." But I'm open to corrections.

[michaelleslie]

https://twitter.com/boring_as_heck/status/872144967350632448... comes to mind

[nsxwolf]

A subway where you can snap a segment off a train and take it out on the highway sounds awesome.