Indeed! I think the Vegas loop has immense potential. There are many ways we can iterate on this concept. Perhaps we can use bigger cars, in a bus like shape to transport more people at once. Or we could remove the batteries to save cost and weight and supply the cars with an external power source. There is immense potential here and I believe this will revolutionise transport.
The Boring Company’s mission is in its name. Better boring tools. The Teslas running around inside it are dumb, but that’s almost the point: it’s a PR project. We wouldn’t be talking about it if it were a train.
From what I can tell, TBC has failed to revolutionize tunnel-boring machines to date.
But that just shows they didnt really do anything. While european and other companies are building extremely long rail tunnels, this company built a short single-lane car tunnel with LEDs...
That's what I thought too. Boring equipment that could dig tunnels for extremely cheap. Don't know the current status, but I didn't think it was set up like picturing set of interconnected tubes like, for instance, the interwebs.
> From what I can tell, TBC has failed to revolutionize tunnel-boring machines to date.
Also, if you look at those Vegas tunnels, they’re just wide enough for a single car. Every single subway system in the world has better tunnels than that, and many of them have existed for well over a century.
The BC “mission” seems to be marketing hype that’s not quite as bad as “Mars colony”, but it’s still very far in the future at best.
That's just financial structuring. The tunnels still have a cost to build, which I'm guessing is unknown since BC is private. It's received on the order of a $1 billion in funding, though, which might give some idea of just how much those tunnels cost.
How did you reach the conclusion that it is a PR project?
Since Elon Musk is pushing ahead to colonize Mars - and Martian cities will probably be built underground - it is just as likely that he is using this company to develop one of the critical technologies for interplanetary expansion.
If you know how to do things in decent way. There is no point of doing them poorly. Each large investment should reach previous level if not improve from it. Or have reasonable trade off when not doing that.
Should next time we build say water infra, instead of burying pipes underground we build massive aqueducts to deliver water to each house?
It's not about building the perfect thing, it's about not building the dumb thing that blocks discussion of building something that will actually work. What's currently built is not even workable, IMO, let alone anywhere near perfect.
Interestingly one of the reasons some areas _aren't_ building these out is because of the promises Musk made re: the Hyperloop system, they felt it would be better to wait and see.
Freezing actual good mass transit progress seems to have been his goal, unfortunately.
Musk uses his resources to lobby against mass transit in America.
He is degrowth in ways that suit his selfish preferences (contracts for his companies over better alternatives, and wanting to avoid any proximity to other Americans in public).
edit due to rate limiting: Yes Musk is one of the reasons we don't have high speed rail in California at least. He admitted to creating Hyperloop as a fake and hopeless project simply as a campaign to get high speed rail canceled. And he used DOGE against it to further cripple the project. He used government authority to contribute to regulations against mass transit. His projects are literally fake psyops that don't deliver transit and exist to spoil mass transit options from growing.
We had mass transit before he got rich. Are you opposed to it because it's not perfect so we shouldn't do it at all instead of doing more of it? I don't understand the degrowth attitude of preferring luxury options that scale worse.
Ok so Musk is the reason mass transit isn't a success?
So why didn't we get mass transit before Musk was rich?
In Austin we approved an enormous rail project and the taxpayers approved billions to build it. Years later, they have descoped it by 75% and they haven't even come close to delivering that small bit they reduced it down to.
Was that Musk too? Or is overregulation destroying our ability to innovate?
Yeah it's a weak argument. Public transportation is weak in the US because support for it is weak. It will take a dramatic shift in the Average American view of mass transit or some breathtaking price decrease in trains/tunneling/trams along with comfort of travel in said methods.
How are batteries cheaper then... no batteries at all? Since the routes are fixed anyway you can attach a cable to the sealing of the tunnel and connect it to the Teslas. You can then drive the Teslas around like slot cars. Requires no charging, weight reduction, no battery degradation and no energy conversion loss.
Why are you so anti-innovation? So anti-progress? There is no reason why the slot car concept cant work. Just plug the car to a long cable. I call it the hyperslot.
Tram lines are far cheaper than having miles and miles of tunnels in a vacuum.
Actual trains can be loaded and unloaded faster, and don't need one driver for every 4 people. In fact, trains have been automated with no drivers for well over 50 years in many parts of the world.
These cars, despite being on an extremely limited access roadway, still can't be trusted to drive themselves. They are literally in the most ideal environment for self-driving. This should be the first place they have self-driving cars.
You need to free yourself from being such a fanboy.
everybody knew and voiced their knowledge before, during, and after the Vegas tunnel that Boring Co and the Hyperloop were just bad concepts. You didn't need to waste money to try it, because it's not new tech. It's a tunnel. It's a solution to traffic. It's for riders, not drivers. But instead of calling it a train and therefore being _lame_, you slap a fresh coat of paint on it with _self driving cars_ and _insane_ promises you could never deliver on.
Calling out snake oil, for being snake oil, and lamenting that it sucks all the oxygen out of the room for _real_ , _serious_ technology and progress? That's a good thing.
As someone who works enthusiastically on new ground breaking technology... a dumb idea is a dumb idea - and when we pour this many resources into a dumb idea it prevents us from funding good ideas.
This tunnel has been used as a continued excuse for NIMBYism to block an extension of the monorail which is the actual solution that Las Vegas needs. In fact, the entire boring company appears to, after the fact, have been an effort dedicated solely to derailing SoCal high speed rail efforts.
this is the news blog for a tech incubator. there is an awful lot of snake oil in this sector, and which is pushed hard here, and an awful lot of high-end talent here, too.
which means the snake oil tends to be called a lot.
Yes. There has been a distinct cultural shift. Some of it is politics for sure, but this forum is generally less optimistic about the future and technology than 2012-2016
Almost every bored tunnel project has unique constraints. Lots of breakthroughs could be achieved by ignoring regulations and external considerations. This is not innovation or a particularly interesting result.
They're not being held back by anti-progress haters, they're just straight-up ignoring the environmental agreement they voluntarily signed.
When companies have complete disregard for public welfare and dump the cost onto everyone else, that damage needs to be part of their value equation.
FTA -
>That agreement, signed by a Boring executive in 2022, was intended to compel the company to comply with state water pollution laws. Instead, state inspectors documented nearly 100 alleged new violations of the agreement.
People laugh at the Boring Company precisely because what is not doing anything meaningfully new, and what it is doing is worse than every other comparable system. There’s no “progress” there that makes any sense.
It's possible to be pro-progress while being anti-this specific thing. In particular, Elon Musk came out and admitted that he hates trains and busses and admitted that he just made up Boring Co to distract from giving money to them. The Boring Co tunnels in Vegas are a boondoggle and not even well designed (whether that's due to lack of funds or stupidity or corruption, who knows!). The problem is the opportunity cost. The millions that went into the Vegas tunnels could have gone into improving the existing monorail system, but instead there's this stupid thing.
The tunnels are cool and the technology is neat. I'm not in charge of anything, but no thanks.
In the last 50 years, well before Elon was involved and supposedly sabotaging all this great subway progress, how many new subway projects in America were started and successfully finished?
Maybe Elon's solution is a requirement to make ANY progress because the other ones have stalled out?
I would love a subway. Here in Austin, they proposed a bunch of new trains and subways for billions of dollars. We all voted yes and funded it. After a multi-year study, they revised it to about 1/10th the scope and doubled the cost. It still hasn't materialized.
I don't know who "you all" is. What I'm saying is that that the money spent on the Vegas tunnels could have been better spent on the monorail system. I'm not in charge of anything though, so me saying that doesn't affect anything.
> Was that Musk too? Or is overregulation destroying our ability to innovate?
Texas isn't known (to outsiders like me, at least) as burdening itself very much with regulations. It's possible that a blue city like Austin might apply extra regulation over state regulation, but still, are you sure that overzealous regulation is what prevents Texas from building transport? I would have tought complacency, nimbyism, corruption. But not regulation.
If you're right then it's pretty much game over for America, isn't it? Because almost all other states have even more regulatory pressure, right?
