Boring Tunnel Will Be 2.5 to 7.5 Times Faster Than LA Commuter Traffic

45 thoughts on “Boring Tunnel Will Be 2.5 to 7.5 Times Faster Than LA Commuter Traffic”

1. Instead of moving 3300 cars per hour move 600 semis per hour. Semis will pay for this because they get to their destinations faster (saving money) and use less fuel in stop and go traffic.

   Cars and pedestrians are the wrong market, he needs to move freight through congested cities.

2. 1. You turn the engine off while the electric motor moves you along.
   2. You obviously push air in to the tunnel. I don’t know why I need to state this obvious fact.

3. MR musk is missing his market here.

   He should make tunnels for moving semi trucks. This would get semis off the regular roads (reducing congestion) and the cost-benefit analysis for moving diesel semis out of stop and go traffic is quite compelling. He could charge a $100 toll to move a semi 50 miles in to or out of the greater Los Angeles area and it would be happily paid by every trucking company. He could make $100 with a single tunnel as fast as he could move the trucks.

   $60k an hour per tunnel isn’t too outrageous.

4. Majority of government spending is Social Security and Medicare which are funded by the people that benefits from the program. They are not an issue to me. After that comes the military, national debt interest, and farm subsidy. Now I wouldn’t mind reducing some of that especially the interest payments.

5. People don’t like competition especially criminals. Much easier to kill your competitor than to compete.

6. People don’t understand that as bad as crime is that it can be much worse. It can get so bad that a significant portion of your family will be murdered. So bad that they get killed at the wakes and funerals for the ones that were previously killed.

7. I agree with you but there are some who think because they are strong that government only gets in the way. They forget that a pack of wolves can bring down a buffalo. And that they can’t work and protect their wife and children at the same time.

8. Everyone forgets that you have to get to the airport. It cost me as much to get to the airport as to fly from airport to airport. And it takes me about the same amount of time. I went to Washington D.C. by Amtrak. I walk to my local commuter train which took me to the Amtrak station. Took the Amtrak to DC. Go out and walk to the hotel. It cost less and took less time. And was less of an hassle.

   America is more spread out that Japan and Europe but there is space for Hi-speed train. And we use to depend on train travel up to advent of passenger jets in the 60s.

9. Musk has talked about the upper limit possible for the Loop as it is now envisioned. 100,000 passengers per hour, traveling in 4,000 vehicles. That means a 25 passenger ‘bus’.

   It’s too early to start building vehicles for the Loop. Adapting a MX makes sense. Provides some demo rides.

   There might be some private car use but more likely we’ll see a very rapid, “express” mass transit system. If you could robotaxi to a Loop elevator close to where you live, travel to your work local at 150 MPH, and finish the last mile by foot, bike, bus or robotaxi I think most people would quit clogging roads with private cars.

10. You do realize that even including the entirety of the US national defense budget in “government law and order” that government spending on “law and order” is only 17% of government spending?

    Or am I misunderstanding your post and are you in favor of reducing government spending by about 80%?

    Or are you arguing in bad faith and making the leap that if we do not have wasteful programs like NASA’s SLS then businesses will need to pay protection money to the local gang leaders?

11. Well there is a theme here. It is a good idea to bet against the government. The reason is that the government’s motivations aren’t towards efficiency or cost reduction.

    One of the reasons I invested in LPP.

12. One car per second at 150 mph means no ability to stop if something happens to the car in the tunnel in front of you. Like say the driver panics and hits the accelerator taking their vehicle out of the card and in to the walls at 150 mph.

    I’ve seen crazier stuff on LA’s freeways. Sooner or later the person or the machinery is going to fail and then it is a question of how badly the failure cascades.

13. People will obviously pay for travelling in Mr Musk’s tunnels.

14. Musk said that one car per second is only possible with autonomous driving.

15. The info I see on Musk’s idea is that the cars ride on platforms that are moved using electricity from the grid. As long as ICE cars in the tunnels aren’t running the engine that shouldn’t be a problem. Of course there are enough idiots that some way to make *sure* the engine is off while the car is in the tunnel will be required.

16. must be electric cars. otherwise drivers will get CO poisoning in long tunnel.

17. Now is 2018, why usa still struggles and concerns with traffic and transportation. While china helps africa to build roads, bridges and rails, american said this is financial colonialism. african dont need transportation?

18. HSR can work where sufficient ridership exists. Part of the definition of that is distance between destinations. One reason why HSR can work between SF and LA is it takes so much time to deal with all the hassles of airports and airplanes.

19. Don’t forget the original example: Paypal.
    I won’t waste time typing out how thoroughly intertwined government and traditional banking are.

20. People also confuse fantasies with reality.

21. > Ellen Musk

    I didn’t know he had a sister.

22. Government is not required.

    People confuse governance with requiring government in order to have it.

23. Who says it would be ‘crippling’?

    With competition, it wouldn’t be. This is the heart of anarcho-capitalism.

24. Do you mean businesses would have to buy insurance? How many things can you name that government prohibits, that don’t happen anyway, often done by government, or it’s employees? I can’t think of any.
    I’ve been the victim of crimes several times, and government could not even solve the crime, and didn’t really try. The one time thieves were caught stealing my property, it was my neighbor that caught them. He, and I held the criminals at gunpoint until the deputy sheriff arrived. I never paid my neighbor taxes, but got better protection from him than all the cops on the planet.
    I for one would not riot in the streets if every government that claims sovereignty over me was dissolved. Oh, I would celebrate, but it would be a celebration that respected every individual’s rights. There are a few useful things government does, they’re all listed in the constitution as interpreted at the time it was ratified, with the exception of a ban on chattel slavery.

25. So disappointing that you need to modify your car to play. This is the type of inertia that kills great ideas.

    Musk doesn’t fail. He will figure out the “electric skate”.

26. A normal lane of traffic can handle around 3300 cars per hour, even if you double it to 6600 it isn’t enough. The cars will have to drive into tunnels at volume to work. I also agree with what William Readling wrote about how he has picked the industries to develop and tunnel boring is one of these. Why improve it when your client is the government they pay top dollar, innovation is not liked by government, it rocks the boat. Same with rockets, NASA wasn’t/isn’t interested in actually launching, it just turned into a giant jobs program.

27. It’s more that every single sector in the US has been crippled by monopoly. Elon Musk is just the new generation of super monopolies.

    That is what happens what anti-trust laws aren’t used for 40+ years.

    The Corporate sector fully infused with the government in the US. They are interchangeable. The complete failure is the complete regulatory capture by industry and full monopolization of almost every industry.

28. And wait for fully reusable, super heavy launchers with space refueling, add to that mass-produced satellite meshes for really communicating across regions of interest in space.

    That will put the entire Solar System within reach for automated payloads and eventually, people.

    All without being dependent on the vagaries of politics and programs, just as a private service governments, companies and people will be able to purchase since the moment they exist and until they are superseded by something better.

    Now we are talking about a revolution.

29. The best and really, only necessary roles of a government are to impose the rule of law, protect private property rights and its citizen’s lives, followed by providing public benefit infrastructure that doesn’t have incentives to be performed privately.

    This alone justifies paying taxes.

    Because with that, any human group will tend to prosper and flourish.

30. Yeah… no. Just look at the usage rates of Amtrak outside the Acela corridor. Major cities get one train a day going each way. Wooo….

    Japan – it works because they’re going city-center to city-center. China – it works because there’s nothing else. They don’t have interstates or competitive airlines like here in the US. You get a LOT more throughput from an airport than you do a train line.

    Look, I LIKE the idea of HSR. But the CA system’s managed to disappear a whole lot of money without much to show for it. It isn’t practical in the US for a number of reasons (one of which is the need to buy right-of-way from existing land-holders, where in China they just take it.) The cost to build a usable network nationwide would be immense, and why? It wouldn’t be cheaper than the airlines.

    We aren’t Europe, we aren’t Japan, and we aren’t China. HSR’s an interesting idea – but we don’t need it and there’s no real desire for it. In fact, having watched the CA system for about 20 years now, their mismanagement of the idea may well kill it off in the US for good.

31. That is one of their modes for the tunnels. In fact Elon has talked about the fact that pedestrian and bicycle cars will get priority over individual vehicles.

32. One car at a time. This is all a lie. You just move the traffic jam off the road to the tunnel entrance. Even Ellen Musk admitted he doesn’t know if it will work.

33. For transporting large number of people nothing beats Hi-speed Rail, just take a look at Japan and China.

34. You do realized that without the law and order provided by the government businesses would have to purchase protection at a crippling cost.

35. Could not enter any more text:

    In situations like this, there is little innovation. A little vision, innovation, and creative engineering go a long way. That is, if you can afford to overcome the barriers to entry government(politicians, lobbyists, bureaucrats), and crony quid pro quos have put into place.
    Once you do break in, it’s relatively easy to out perform the existing competition. Look at the cost advantage SpaceX has, created by developing a reusable first stage, and fairings, which “would never be possible”. This cost advantage exists despite a healthy profit margin.
    Elon had the money to get started, and overcame many of the barriers to entry by using the publicity his celebrity status brings to embarrass politicians into not acting like complete crooks. SpaceX being allowed to bid on NASA contracts is the perfect example of this.

36. The flow rate will be limited by how long it takes to get on/get off. Maybe multiple on/off feeds would improve the flow rate.

37. Yesterday, I realized that Elon’s business model is disrupting industries that have been crippled by government intervention. Consider the following examples.

    1) Launch services provided exclusively by long time government contractors, or governments themselves. There was no need for innovation, because government regulation, and crony advantage made barriers to entry so high, no one tried until Elon did. Even he had to plead before congress to bid on contracts, and had to sue to bid on pentagon contracts.

    2) The automotive sector is so bad that the federal government pretty much bought out GM, rather than let it be liquidated when it went bankrupt. Questionable safety, and emissions standards further increase the cost of putting a car on the road. Many of the costs are for the “first of the model”, so it’s a huge barrier to entry for new enterprises.

    3)Transportation is perhaps the single most government screwed up industry in the US, with the exception of health(sickness) care. Except for the occasional turnpike, like the exceptionally well managed Florida Turnpike, that is operated by a nonprofit corporation, government decides where highways will be, how they will be built, and who may use them. Airports are almost all government enterprises, airlines are regulated heavily, as well as the few aircraft manufacturers left.

38. One tunnel using cars – neglible. Dozens of tunnels with 16-40 person transports closely spaced – huge impact.

39. One second between cars is a nice aspiration, but there are a lot of safety considerations (and regulations) that could make that difficult.

40. The throughput likely won’t help much – but since the state seems to have decided to spend billions on HSR and let the roads deteriorate, any help is better than none at all.

41. Elon mentioned a gap of one second between cars. Also, the next stage is pods that take more people.

42. Rationing is required in any resource constrained system, let the maximum money the market will bear be your ration card.

43. Many such tonnels will help the traffic

44. It’ll probably be a case of issuing a ticket to a phone app. If it’s overflowing, it won’t issue a ticket. Problem solved. It operates at capacity, and no more.

45. Well goodluck and all. But a slow moving freeway would be seeing thousands of cars passing in an hour. Even if the Boring tunnel can load and shoot a car in 15 seconds, thats 240 cars an hour. Plus you’d get queues of stationary traffic waiting to be loaded (The above ground infrastructure might fit in a car lot, but the collateral traffic jam won’t). I can only see it making traffic flow worse.

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