There is a quality about TBMs which vaguely reminds me of the feeling of getting a new LEGO set and building stuff. Imagine if we had cheap ways to build tunnels, no more traffic, no more congestion, roads and parking lots would only exist underground and cities would have more space for gardens, parks, buildings, and walkways. We have these things - Subways but its very expensive to build that system. Elon has an itch to solve this problem and I want this dream to succeed! While that's going on, please someone make a game out of building tunnels, it would be super cool!
> Imagine if we had cheap ways to build tunnels, no more
> traffic, no more congestion, roads and parking lots would
> only exist underground and cities would have more space
> for gardens, parks, buildings, and walkways.
Or, skip the tunnel building and just ban cars from major cities.
Building more infrastructure to "reduce traffic" only makes using vehicles more attractive. The amount of congestion is approximately equal to the amount of congestion the average person using the infrastructure is willing to accept, so making it less congested just means more people use the infrastructure until the limit is reached again.
The real answer to the problem is to simply ban all but buses and delivery vehicles - even then you can incentivize that they are electrically driven. Space increases and infrastructure maintenance costs are reduced, not increased.
The real golden use for TBMs is for efficiency - i.e. Go around some mountain or go straight through it? Go around a city or go under it? I imagine buildings sharing a service elevator down to the tunnel where delivery vehicles can offload to and send goods up (rather than Musk's idea of trying to lift a several tonne vehicle in some personal elevator).
Would likely make sense for all kinds of maintenance this way to, servicing water/gas pipes or electricity/internet lines for example could be as simple as removing a service panel from the side of a tunnel, rather than the terrible solution we have today involving digging up streets over and over.
The article clearly states we have the tunnel tech. That's not the issue. We already have the tech to connect a lot of American cities with decent trains again. It's about buy-in from the communities, the ability to put up stations (safely, faster, more efficiently) and Americans to stop screaming "our spaces are too far apart." They weren't less than 100 years ago. They will collapse back in once we start building transport again.
As shown in the article, the current tech is really good. It just takes time and the biggest problem are the stations, track and power. These car tubes that Elon is proposing are terrible. We need a faster way to put up full metro systems.
You could replace highways with a magical teleporter and you'd still have traffic and congestion. Most traffic happens at the interface between the highway and the rest of the road network, as cars can only join the flow of traffic at whatever rate its capacity frees up - and cars entering the city compete for that capacity with cars leaving parking spots. Cities are already crammed full of street capacity, so the only way to increase capacity is to increase the number of people per car. And that solution, taken to its logical conclusion, is a train.
Subways face similar problems to highway interchanges - passengers have to rejoin the flow of (foot) traffic. This is easier than with cars, since people are smaller and most of them can use stairs, but the cost of stations ends up being the larger portion of cost, not the cost of tunnels (which can be built more cheaply using cut & cover than they can with boring machines anyway). I'd like to see Musk throw his resources behind cheaper ways to make stations, instead of a problem that's better solved by digging a ditch.
"The cost of a TBM doesn’t get much higher as you increase its diameter."
This is the key assertion, and it is unsupported.
- heat extraction will become a bigger problem
- debris extraction too
- cost of parts, cost and speed of logistics like transport and installation of the machine will be worse
- small number of exotic large TBMs will scale worse than large number of small TBMs in manufacturing cost and operating experience
- I've seen elsewhere (citation missing) that small borers move much faster than large so any costs that scale with time will be worse.
- risk-wise: a portfolio of small borers will have less risk than an all-eggs-in-one-basket gamble. a broken part delaying a big machine incurs more cost than ona smaller machine.
unless your project requires a single enormous bore I think you would prefer to use the smallest you can get away with.
The author does not seem to have any relevant experience, so I'm not going to take this on his authority; he's a programmer who has done scheduling software on metro projects and is working on an MBA. Interesting summary of types of machines though!
1. Are any of these TBM considered state of art? I dont see any tech inside those TBM that could not be done 10 years ago other than the cost of the machine. We are entering new Space Race era and yet some fundamental stuff still looks very, should I say "traditional".
2. Why cant we build even bigger TBM? Like Double the current diameter. Or Bigger TBM that are Rectangular rather than Circle.
3. The biggest problem with TBM is that they are slow. Even if we had made them 10 times faster I would still consider them very slow. Surely there could be technology that improve on it?
4. Are there any reason why we dont use TBM for small pipes, ( like for electricity or fibre optics, )
I'm not out to analyze the clearly knowledgeable content of this article, but I'd not be surprised if someone wrote something just like it when he (Musk) started the whole illogical "make a rocket come back and land" stuff.
It's not logical, but I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt. Let him do his thing. Who knows?
Musk could help with the back end of the problem. The TBM up front gets all the attention. Behind the TBM is usually a temporary two-track narrow gauge railway line, with muck cars carrying dirt and rock out, segment cars carrying tunnel wall segments forward, plus tool cars and worker cars now and then.[1]
Hanging off the back of the TBM is all the machinery to move all those heavy items around.[2] Including the machinery for laying more railroad track behind the TBM.
Self-driving electric muck cars, segment cars, etc, might replace that temporary rail infrastructure. That's something Musk's company could address.
The back end of the process seems to get less attention than the front end. Most of the length of the TBM is devoted to material handling, though, as is the rest of the tunnel all the way back to the entry. A big fraction of the cost is in moving all that stuff around.
I'm uninpressed because it lacks Nuclear Tunnel Boring Machines like in [1] and [2] as envisioned by [3] for [4] and [5] in 1972 and 1978. Which all Hyperloop afficionados should read, if they haven't done so already :-)
I'm not sure that I agree with the author on Elon Musk's tunneling ambitions. Far more people are betting against him on Tesla and SpaceX without much success.
One thing lost in the debate is if the costs are lowered it will also increase the number of cities where a subway is possible financially. I see cities spending huge money on dedicated bus lanes. The bus companies adore it but I'm pretty certain that the return on investment is abysmal.
They tried to implement it locally and the grass roots groups put up such a huge fight the politicians withdrew support for it.
As far as the cost of the stations I wonder if anyone has given thought to using 3D concrete printing? Admittedly it would be easier if you excavated from the surface as opposed to widening a tunnel but I still think it has the possibility of losing costs.
"Musk says he can build tunnels cheaper if he just makes them smaller. But in reality, it’s not small TBMs that are the future, but big ones. The cost of a TBM doesn’t get much higher as you increase its diameter. Tt is therefore cheaper to build one very large tunnel, rather than two smaller ones."
If that is true, then Elon is betting on the wrong horse.
These animations are great, but for some puzzling reason they only advance while I am scrolling the page. To watch an animation I have to hold my thumb on the screen and subtly scroll up and down. This is on an iPhone X.
There seems to be a low tolerance to the construction disruption, especially to adjacent businesses and residents. Cut and cover also had high cost of moving infrastructure. I also wonder whether there's some relationship with the speed of construction - in NYC, ripping up the whole street to build a Subway was perhaps more acceptable if it's done in a year or so.
One note: new cut and cover projects tend to actually use cover and cut: first the walls are built underground (often piledriven), then the top is covered with a concrete plate, then the Earth dug away from below. This minimizes the surface disruption.
Most of these tunnels are being built in heavily populated areas where surface space is at a premium. You'd have to tear down thousands of apartments and offices to make any meaningful progress on a cut and cover tunnel inside a city unless the tunnel is exactly following existing roads. That would be both very expensive and far more disruptive than just a little traffic
It's cultural; cut and cover is more popular outside of the US. The Shanghai Metro (world's longest) is constructed using mostly cut and cover, and in the Anglosphere I remember seeing some of the Sydney metro being dug that way. One part of the Shanghai approach that I like is that they build their tunnels in advance of development, assuming that there will be demand in the future. This avoids a lot of cost and disruption, and I think it's a safe bet - of course the city's growth will follow the preemptive subway lines you built, that land has subway lines.
I wouldn't characterize cut and cover as a mild disruption to car traffic - it's a shorter duration of disruption than tunnel boring, but a block at a time will be completely shut down.
Cut and cover is only cheaper if you are going shallow. The deeper the tunnel the more expensive it is. If you have to cross an existing subway tunnel you have to go under it - even if we allow you to shutdown the existing subway for months cut and cover the additional depth is more expensive than just tunneling the whole thing. If there is a sewer line across any street you need to reroute that somehow to cut and cover. Same problem for water mains, electric, phone, cable, internet...
It quickly is cheaper to tunnel than to make plans for each thing you need to work around to cut and cover.
I know this is probably a very stupid idea, but I was thinking what if we shot ourselves out of rail guns into the air into a bullet shaped craft with fins?
You could be shot out of one rail gun in San Francisco, glide for awhile, fall to the earth and caught by a “reverse” railgun in San Jose.
It'd be cheaper and safer than planes since no need to carry fuel or an engine on board, and could have an emergency parachute incase something went wrong.
Or maybe I've been dreaming about Kerbal Space Program projects too much lately. (I'm fully expecting to be flamed and jided for this)
For personal drones, we could consider using railgun tubes to accelerate vertically and then glide. Without considering drag, a 100m vertical railgun could lift a craft to about 300m. With a 50-1 glide ratio, you could get to 15 km from launch without further propulsion.
If shot from a Burj Khalifa height at 2g, you'd accelerate for 9 seconds to 176m/s and reach a height of over 2000m in less than 30 seconds... allowing a glide of over 100km.
Not so sure about the "safer than planes" - planes are pretty safe really. Also I think the initial acceleration would be uncomfortable for passengers if they somehow retained consciousness.
Edit - the US navy rail gun apparently produces 60,000 G, humans black out around 10.
You might just about be able to do SF to San Jose with a glider and winch launch if they improved the tech 3x or so. Longer cable etc.
Not only is this a great idea, it's done in the real world. Once you realize you don't need the whole aircraft inside the rail gun, but only a hook, this is how planes take off from the newest US aircraft carrier USS Gerald Ford. The system is called Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System, EMALS [1].
If one day we start using this in the civilian aviation, this is probably one of the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to lowering aviation emissions.
Heh, this is a really fun idea, actually, ridiculous, but fun. It would probably be quite inefficient, since you need a high enough speed to be worth it since the trajectory is ballistic. The higher the speed needed to get where you want, the greater the energy losses, since air friction does not scale linearly with speed, but exponentially. This is the reason I think it would be inefficient energy-wise.
I actually like the Hyperoop model for transportaion the best, since the my understanding you would have the least energy losses.
It's not the stupidest idea ever: I want to build a mega-slingshot for commuter purposes (and squirrel hunting). At least your idea has some possibility of controlling acceleration forces, and having the subject/ammunition survive the actual launch.
My idea is still more economical to prototype; which means I'll be first to the important step of courting investors; and of course after that who cares if the idea ever happens or was even possible to begin with.
The vertical shaft sinking machine process is basically just an automated form of the old-school manual method of digging a well with men and shovels.
Laborers excavate at the bottom while new bricks are laid incrementally forming the casing at the top. The whole column of bricks slides down as a cylinder whenever progress is made at the bottom.
I've long wanted to dig a well that way, it's gotta be surreal to be at the bottom digging away with a little shovel and seeing a towering column of bricks move as one to fill in the progress.
>The vertical shaft sinking machine process is basically just an automated form of the old-school manual method of digging a well with men and shovels.
Yes, and the whole staff seems a lot more theorical than the rest, the approach can only work in a subset of terrains and for relatively short shafts (if you exceed certain lengths or in many terrains the attrition between the shaft walls and terrain will stop the sinking).
Usually in tunneling projects ventilation shafts are dug "traditionally" (if rather short) or by "raise boring" (if longish).
I think one of the major causes for the high cost of tunneling is that it is done too seldom. Any major city in the world probably has room for 10 or so additional tunnels, so why do they not operate a fleet of TBMs constantly for the next n years?
> Rather than including a facility for assembling the tunnel lining (out of multiple segments) inside the TBM, complete rings are inserted at the insertion shaft, and the whole tunnel is jacked forward one segment at a time.
Looks to me like they are looking at only going a short distance. I doubt you could get more than 100 meters like that, but if you only need 100 meters of tunnel it is probably cheaper because it is faster.
Or you could just move the surface streets a couple of stories up like they did in the early 20th century in Chicago. Trucks (for deliveries, etc) are not allowed on the surface, only below.
Here's interesting tidbit: Vast majority of underground railway network in Moscow was built in 1950s. Cost of building a mile of interstate highway in US is about $5M. Interestingly this cost hasn't changed since 1956 in inflation adjusted dollars when new 41,000 miles of interstate highway in US was laid out. It seems major cost is not tech but quite possibly regulation and/or government inefficiency/corruption.
We have also use highways a lot more and accordingly require better construction. I'm not saying nothing interesting is going on, but construction+maintenance over 20 years, adjusted for vehicle miles traveled (or rather semi-truck-miles traveled) would be a much better indicator.
Is Elon Musk a Samuel Beckett fan? I can totally picture a city council asking what's taking a tunnel project so long to complete, and Musk answering, with a straight face, "Oh, we're just waiting for Godot."
The boiling point of limestone is around 825°C or 1515°F. Heating up a tube of multiple meters diameter and multiple kilometer length to that temperature would require insane amounts of energy. A laser makes it possible to efficiently heat a small spot to that temperature which helps reduce waste heat, but you still have to heat every spot at some point.
Article does not seem to understand what Booring Company trying to achieve. It does not even seem try to understand.
We all know it's very popular to love Elon Musk. But it's generally more attractive to one-up those who do and hate Elon and his "fans".
As a disclaimer: I am in the wagon of "please leave this guy alone so he can do his thing, whatever it might turn out to be".
And I do not see any value in this article.
Booring Co. is about creating rich network of very small tunnels _to solve urban traffic,_ whereas article only talks about creating huge tunnels for longer distance transportation.
Article seem to be making a comparison while things it compares aren't in the same category nor does they try to solve the same problem to begin with.
Incoherent and poorly thought-out", if not straight clickbait.
The article only briefly mentions the Boring company and Elon Musk, because it's mainly about how cool these large tunnel are and how the machines are large enough to allow multimodal transportation in a tunnel. The comparison to Musk is that his company is making a bet the rest of the industry has rejected. They are all building large, versatile tunnels. Musk is betting that small tunnels will be the future. Who knows?
What I got out of the article was definitely not an "anti-Musk" vibe. Not even super critical of the Boring company approach. It was more of a "modern marvels" type of article.
[+] [-] spectramax|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bArray|6 years ago|reply
> traffic, no more congestion, roads and parking lots would
> only exist underground and cities would have more space
> for gardens, parks, buildings, and walkways.
Or, skip the tunnel building and just ban cars from major cities.
Building more infrastructure to "reduce traffic" only makes using vehicles more attractive. The amount of congestion is approximately equal to the amount of congestion the average person using the infrastructure is willing to accept, so making it less congested just means more people use the infrastructure until the limit is reached again.
The real answer to the problem is to simply ban all but buses and delivery vehicles - even then you can incentivize that they are electrically driven. Space increases and infrastructure maintenance costs are reduced, not increased.
The real golden use for TBMs is for efficiency - i.e. Go around some mountain or go straight through it? Go around a city or go under it? I imagine buildings sharing a service elevator down to the tunnel where delivery vehicles can offload to and send goods up (rather than Musk's idea of trying to lift a several tonne vehicle in some personal elevator).
Would likely make sense for all kinds of maintenance this way to, servicing water/gas pipes or electricity/internet lines for example could be as simple as removing a service panel from the side of a tunnel, rather than the terrible solution we have today involving digging up streets over and over.
[+] [-] djsumdog|6 years ago|reply
As shown in the article, the current tech is really good. It just takes time and the biggest problem are the stations, track and power. These car tubes that Elon is proposing are terrible. We need a faster way to put up full metro systems.
[+] [-] cwojno|6 years ago|reply
I know it's boring (derpa derpa), but adding congestion pricing, mass transit is likely a better option. https://ideas.repec.org/b/mtp/titles/0262012197.html
Getting rid of cars should be the goal, not encouraging them: https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=pjatbiavDZYC&oi=...
Or, skipping the commute altogether with remote work.
[+] [-] jtolmar|6 years ago|reply
Subways face similar problems to highway interchanges - passengers have to rejoin the flow of (foot) traffic. This is easier than with cars, since people are smaller and most of them can use stairs, but the cost of stations ends up being the larger portion of cost, not the cost of tunnels (which can be built more cheaply using cut & cover than they can with boring machines anyway). I'd like to see Musk throw his resources behind cheaper ways to make stations, instead of a problem that's better solved by digging a ditch.
[+] [-] chrispeel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|6 years ago|reply
In a way, Minecraft is that game. At least when I played it couple years ago, I spent most of my time building metro tunnels.
[+] [-] vpribish|6 years ago|reply
This is the key assertion, and it is unsupported.
- heat extraction will become a bigger problem
- debris extraction too
- cost of parts, cost and speed of logistics like transport and installation of the machine will be worse
- small number of exotic large TBMs will scale worse than large number of small TBMs in manufacturing cost and operating experience
- I've seen elsewhere (citation missing) that small borers move much faster than large so any costs that scale with time will be worse.
- risk-wise: a portfolio of small borers will have less risk than an all-eggs-in-one-basket gamble. a broken part delaying a big machine incurs more cost than ona smaller machine.
unless your project requires a single enormous bore I think you would prefer to use the smallest you can get away with.
The author does not seem to have any relevant experience, so I'm not going to take this on his authority; he's a programmer who has done scheduling software on metro projects and is working on an MBA. Interesting summary of types of machines though!
[+] [-] astrodust|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksec|6 years ago|reply
1. Are any of these TBM considered state of art? I dont see any tech inside those TBM that could not be done 10 years ago other than the cost of the machine. We are entering new Space Race era and yet some fundamental stuff still looks very, should I say "traditional".
2. Why cant we build even bigger TBM? Like Double the current diameter. Or Bigger TBM that are Rectangular rather than Circle.
3. The biggest problem with TBM is that they are slow. Even if we had made them 10 times faster I would still consider them very slow. Surely there could be technology that improve on it?
4. Are there any reason why we dont use TBM for small pipes, ( like for electricity or fibre optics, )
[+] [-] pugworthy|6 years ago|reply
It's not logical, but I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt. Let him do his thing. Who knows?
[+] [-] dlgeek|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ant6n|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|6 years ago|reply
Hanging off the back of the TBM is all the machinery to move all those heavy items around.[2] Including the machinery for laying more railroad track behind the TBM.
Self-driving electric muck cars, segment cars, etc, might replace that temporary rail infrastructure. That's something Musk's company could address.
The back end of the process seems to get less attention than the front end. Most of the length of the TBM is devoted to material handling, though, as is the rest of the tunnel all the way back to the entry. A big fraction of the cost is in moving all that stuff around.
[1] http://www.zslocomotive.com/products [2] https://youtu.be/SY3Q9GqUYro?t=115
[+] [-] LargoLasskhyfv|6 years ago|reply
[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US3693731 (I'm wondering about steam explosions when hitting ground water, which is not unheard of. But...NUKULAR!)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subterrene
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_M._Salter
[4] https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P4874.html
[5] https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P6092.html (Lacking cheaply mass produced super-conductors here)
[+] [-] rmason|6 years ago|reply
One thing lost in the debate is if the costs are lowered it will also increase the number of cities where a subway is possible financially. I see cities spending huge money on dedicated bus lanes. The bus companies adore it but I'm pretty certain that the return on investment is abysmal.
They tried to implement it locally and the grass roots groups put up such a huge fight the politicians withdrew support for it.
As far as the cost of the stations I wonder if anyone has given thought to using 3D concrete printing? Admittedly it would be easier if you excavated from the surface as opposed to widening a tunnel but I still think it has the possibility of losing costs.
https://all3dp.com/2/concrete-3d-printing-how-to-do-it-and-a...
[+] [-] _lbaq|6 years ago|reply
If that is true, then Elon is betting on the wrong horse.
[+] [-] baddox|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dingo_bat|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] asdff|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ant6n|6 years ago|reply
One note: new cut and cover projects tend to actually use cover and cut: first the walls are built underground (often piledriven), then the top is covered with a concrete plate, then the Earth dug away from below. This minimizes the surface disruption.
[+] [-] bskap|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KaiserPro|6 years ago|reply
First, all utilities have to be mapped out, then any basements shored up.
Then once the cut and cover is in progress, all utilities have to be re-routed, during, then replaced after the tunnel is cut.
Then, the disruption of having major transit ways shut for n weeks.
Lastly, there isnt a machine to do it. The TBM is pretty efficient labour wise.
[+] [-] jtolmar|6 years ago|reply
I wouldn't characterize cut and cover as a mild disruption to car traffic - it's a shorter duration of disruption than tunnel boring, but a block at a time will be completely shut down.
[+] [-] bluGill|6 years ago|reply
It quickly is cheaper to tunnel than to make plans for each thing you need to work around to cut and cover.
[+] [-] jcims|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] topmonk|6 years ago|reply
You could be shot out of one rail gun in San Francisco, glide for awhile, fall to the earth and caught by a “reverse” railgun in San Jose.
It'd be cheaper and safer than planes since no need to carry fuel or an engine on board, and could have an emergency parachute incase something went wrong.
Or maybe I've been dreaming about Kerbal Space Program projects too much lately. (I'm fully expecting to be flamed and jided for this)
[+] [-] dr_dshiv|6 years ago|reply
For personal drones, we could consider using railgun tubes to accelerate vertically and then glide. Without considering drag, a 100m vertical railgun could lift a craft to about 300m. With a 50-1 glide ratio, you could get to 15 km from launch without further propulsion.
If shot from a Burj Khalifa height at 2g, you'd accelerate for 9 seconds to 176m/s and reach a height of over 2000m in less than 30 seconds... allowing a glide of over 100km.
[+] [-] tim333|6 years ago|reply
Edit - the US navy rail gun apparently produces 60,000 G, humans black out around 10.
You might just about be able to do SF to San Jose with a glider and winch launch if they improved the tech 3x or so. Longer cable etc.
[+] [-] credit_guy|6 years ago|reply
If one day we start using this in the civilian aviation, this is probably one of the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to lowering aviation emissions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_Aircraft_Launc...
[+] [-] arethuza|6 years ago|reply
Edit: Also reminds me of a rather entertaining failure mode for UK AGR nuclear plants - but that's another story.
[+] [-] RealityVoid|6 years ago|reply
I actually like the Hyperoop model for transportaion the best, since the my understanding you would have the least energy losses.
[+] [-] h2odragon|6 years ago|reply
My idea is still more economical to prototype; which means I'll be first to the important step of courting investors; and of course after that who cares if the idea ever happens or was even possible to begin with.
[+] [-] newnewpdro|6 years ago|reply
Laborers excavate at the bottom while new bricks are laid incrementally forming the casing at the top. The whole column of bricks slides down as a cylinder whenever progress is made at the bottom.
I've long wanted to dig a well that way, it's gotta be surreal to be at the bottom digging away with a little shovel and seeing a towering column of bricks move as one to fill in the progress.
It can't be terribly safe :)
[+] [-] jaclaz|6 years ago|reply
Yes, and the whole staff seems a lot more theorical than the rest, the approach can only work in a subset of terrains and for relatively short shafts (if you exceed certain lengths or in many terrains the attrition between the shaft walls and terrain will stop the sinking).
Usually in tunneling projects ventilation shafts are dug "traditionally" (if rather short) or by "raise boring" (if longish).
Some related videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2oWTk4khvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QueB4GCQww
[+] [-] lstodd|6 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCti7FZiCHC5fhvgN_Ns_5ew
He digs wells by hand. Very scary videos.
[+] [-] KaiserPro|6 years ago|reply
just with prepoured concrete blocks instead of bricks.
[+] [-] choeger|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] morekozhambu|6 years ago|reply
This seems inefficient.
[+] [-] bluGill|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spullara|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sytelus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wongarsu|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k_sze|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teslaberry|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tiku|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wongarsu|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|6 years ago|reply
[1] https://youtu.be/TwA7c_rNbJE?t=137
[+] [-] lazysheepherd|6 years ago|reply
We all know it's very popular to love Elon Musk. But it's generally more attractive to one-up those who do and hate Elon and his "fans".
As a disclaimer: I am in the wagon of "please leave this guy alone so he can do his thing, whatever it might turn out to be".
And I do not see any value in this article. Booring Co. is about creating rich network of very small tunnels _to solve urban traffic,_ whereas article only talks about creating huge tunnels for longer distance transportation.
Article seem to be making a comparison while things it compares aren't in the same category nor does they try to solve the same problem to begin with.
Incoherent and poorly thought-out", if not straight clickbait.
[+] [-] projektfu|6 years ago|reply
What I got out of the article was definitely not an "anti-Musk" vibe. Not even super critical of the Boring company approach. It was more of a "modern marvels" type of article.