Musk has admitted that he floated the hyperloop idea to get CA HSR cancelled. The only debate is whether he was well intentioned (trying to find a cheaper alternative to HSR…although it’s not clear hyperloop would achieve that) or if it was ill-intentioned (he hates public transit and clearly prefers a car focused future from which he would benefit personally).
Unfortunately, a lot of these efforts sound similar. And it looks like Musk has managed to do what he’s best at. Get even more government money directed towards his companies.
The HSR folks have turned out to be wrong on almost every material element of CA hsr - from capital cost to schedule to operating cost to performance. I voted for the bond - but wow - hsr folks seem like a bunch of scammers at this point.
I think hyperloop was primarily motivated by his hated of HSR - his many complaints well documented- basically for the insane cost he felt it would end up at - something better could be done or tried
The first Japanese Shinkansen train went over budget by 100%, but nobody remembers that anymore. Instead they talk about how wonderful the Shinkansen trains are.
Interstate I-69 costs more than CA HSR, has been plagued with problems, and has been under construction for more than 30 years and yet you don’t see the frothing negative coverage of that like you do CA HSR because in our country cars are normal and trains are the weird things we need to scrutinize to death.
Can you elaborate on that? Because the train is designed to go 220mph, and if that's "the slowest in the world" then I don't really care. I also read that it needs to slow down to 110mph in some sections, but again that isn't necessarily an issue unless it has to do that all the time.
The French TVG route from Paris to Lyon is 243 miles and takes 1 hours and 59 minutes, an average of 121 mph. So if our train travels 220mph sometimes and 110mph sometimes and the French TGV averages 121 mph on longer routes, then I'd say we're in the ballpark of building French TGV style trains in California, which sounds great to me!
It sounds like this "slowest in the world" claim is another soundbite without context used to make the project look bad.
> The first Japanese Shinkansen train went over budget by 100%, but nobody remembers that anymore. Instead they talk about how wonderful the Shinkansen trains are.
The next generation National Space Telescope went over budget by a factor of twenty and fell behind schedule. That's another data point on the loss of American prestige. I couldn't watch the documentary at the repeating use of the word incompetence. One recent commercial resupply vessel failed to open one of two solar panels and the Lisa probe failed to lock on of the two solar panels.
>The first Japanese Shinkansen train went over budget by 100%, but nobody remembers that anymore. Instead they talk about how wonderful the Shinkansen trains are.
HSR is at 300% of original budget without even a credible schedule for completion of that original plan -or- source of funding.
Long-distance "high speed" rail is going nowhere in CA without constraints on air travel, especially short-hop flights, that includes taxation for environmental consequences. Nobody flying the Bay Area or Sacramento - L.A. corridor is going to spend 4X as much to spend double the time in transit.
Yeah, the routing is weirdish - the opening date keeps getting pushed back (full route promised by 2020, we may not see first segment till 2029!) cost is going to be in 1b/year range. They are projecting 9 million riders on the Bakersfield segment, will be an interesting proof point if they can deliver that (Amtrak service use on nearby routes was declining for years ore pandemic).
I do wonder if for 100 billion we could have done automated bus or cargo lanes - or even just tried a few interesting ideas out.
The ballot summary was literally written by the ballot authors to avoid a more neutral party writing it
Tokaido Shinkansen (fastest train in the world): Projected ¥200 b . Completed at ¥380 b.
CA HSR (slowest HSR train in the world): Projected $40 b. Currently $105 b.
I think it will end north of $160 b. So that's 4x which further from 1.9x than 1.9x is from 1x.
I don't think they'll meet the other targets. But if you want to have fun, I'll have someone meet you in SF and we can make a deal: On the day CA HSR opens, I'll give you $80 (supposed LA/SF fare) times 20 and you can give me 20 LA/SF tickets over that first year. We can put it on longbets.org
Where is this myth that CAHSR will be the slowest HSR in the world coming from? I see it in sibling posts as well. CAHSR will travel up to 220 MPH (350 km/h) which makes it the fastest non-maglev train in the world.
Now it will travel slower within city limits in the Bay Area and Los Angeles as it shares a corridor with non-high speed trains, but that is not unheard of in other networks around the world.
As for the 2.5x over-budged, it is well known that the initial cost estimates were too low. The current rising of the estimate is largely due to inflation. This will keep happening while the project remains under-funded (which is precisely what the ill intentioned hyperloop idea was meant to do). I very much doubt that it will rise to 160 billion USD though (that is unless it remains unfunded for another decade or two).
IMHO every claim of performance on speed/completion/timeline/budget made by CA-HSR so far has been false and no claim has been true. But point taken on claimed speed - we have only their claims to go on. It isn't fair to examine them on the slow speed only, which is what I was doing.
However, I am somewhat curious about your certainty of the quality of this thing. I am willing to do the following on longbets.org:
- CA-HSR will not deliver regular service on IOS by current predicted 2029 date
- 10 years from now, budget estimates will be at least $160 b
We can pick terms at your convenience. I will commit a maximum of $10k to this through an intermediary who will meet you in San Francisco. If I lose, you get the $10k to a charity of your choice. If I win, you will donate to the charity of my choice 125 tickets (equal value at the CA-HSR-claimed $80/ticket) on CA-HSR for SF-LA.
I’m not gonna bet any money on this and I discourage anyone from doing so. Willingness to bet proves nothing about a merit of a prediction, and only loosely about ones faith in it.
10 years is a long time, and a lot can happen in that time. In 2017 there was an administration in the White House that was quite hostile to public infrastructure projects and withheld all the federal funding the previous administration had promised. For all we know there will be another administration like that in 2 or 6 years which does the same (or even more) to sabotage the project.
In 2018 a new CEO took over the project and took a hard policy against over promising. This is when we saw the initial operating segment being scaled back to only include Bakerfield to Merced by the end of this decade. Since then we’ve actually seen a lot truer projections which have come true. For example Construction Package 4 is almost complete and pretty much on time and on budget.
Right - and if you asked the new guy if they will actually run at 2:40 minutes - and he answered, the answered would be - no way.
Project is still badly managed. This was in early 2021:
“It is beyond comprehension that as of this day, more than two thousand and six hundred calendar days after (official approval to start construction) that the authority has not obtained all of the right of way … ” wrote Tutor Perini Vice President of Operations Ghassan Ariqat to Garth Fernandez, the contracting chief at the state rail authority.
And that has only continued. They literally are asking Tutor to build on land they don't own, utility relocations have been going on for YEARS.
And the costs to now tunnel back to the coasts (long tunnels near seismic fault lines!). I don't think any plan is credible on that front. The rights of way as you get closer to SF and LA are going to be BRUTAL to get.
Yeah I just did some research and I think that claim is a misleading soundbite. Copying from my other comment I just left:
The French TVG route from Paris to Lyon is 243 miles and takes 1 hours and 59 minutes, an average of 121 mph. So if our train travels 220mph sometimes and 110mph sometimes and the French TGV averages 121 mph on longer routes, then I'd say we're in the ballpark of building French TGV style trains in California, which sounds great to me!
Even if you do average speed instead of max speed CAHSR is still among fastest (if not the fasted) non-maglev train in the world. It will make a non stop run between LA union station and Transbay transit center in SF (a distance of around 760–790 km if my calculations are correct) in under 2 hours and 40 minutes. This will be an average speed of 280–300 km/h (or 180–190 MPH). In a quick google search I couldn’t find any trains—not even maglev trains—with faster average speed.
You do understand that the 2hr 40 minute number is total and absolute garbage?
It's weird seeing folks peddling fantasy land numbers here. Back in 2013 peer review board already said they were bogus, and it's only gotten a LOT worse.
For example, I think San Jose to SF have ALREADY been switched to shared tracks at ground level - tracks that are going to be mixed in with caltrain trips. Gilroy is going to switch to sharing some freight lines (100mph)? I'm sure down in Burbank / LA area similar give backs will occur.
This is all a major change from 220MPH which required elevated viaducts and 50 MILE (!!) turning circumferences! 220MPH actually WOULD be impressive but no chance of it. They've re-routed away from grapevine, they've added tons of stops. They've removed the dedicated trackways and rights of way (you CANNOT blast through downtown caltrain stops at 220MPH). They are going to in shared track situations (aka - Amtrak delays land for those like me who used to do amtrak).
All Environmental Impact Report/Environmental Impact Statement (EIR/EIS) have been approved between LA and SF with the exception of DTX between King and 4th to Transbay Transit Center in downtown San Francisco and between Palmdale to Burbank. The latter has Draft EIR/EIS that has a pretty clear strategy of maintaining 220 MPH (or close to it) mostly in tunnels under the San Gabriel mountains. So the strategy to reach the goal 2:40 is pretty sound^[1].
Now I would like to add that nothing here is a novel technology, there are plenty of build out systems worldwide with non-maglev trains maintaining a speed of 200 MPH or close to it, and even a handful of systems that maintain 220 MPH. The geography of the Central Valley even lends it self nicely to this with it’s flat surface and relatively straight lines between stations. The only novel thing here is maintaining a 220 MPH in several tunnels. However I don’t think this will be an impossible engineering challenge, and the EIR/EIS statements agree with that.
Also note that initial planning was for 200 MPH inside those tunnels, but after the preferred alternative of shared 110 MPH corridor between Gilroy and San José was approved, then it was decided to increase the speed in the tunnels to 220 MPH to make up the lost time. I think this was a good decision as you say, the challenges of building a fast corridor within city limits are probably greater then the challenges of going really fast inside tunnels. And as hinted the trains will only blast through caltrain stops at a max speed of 110 MPH, not 220 MPH.
I do want to emphasize the fact that the approved EIR/EIS has on the credibility of the project achieving its goals (this goes into concerns you raised in your other post). This means that interested parties had their chance to scrutinize every aspect of the plan, that includes engineering challenges as well as civic challenges (including right of way acquisition). I do agree that the property acquisition has proven difficult in the Central Valley (particularly around construction packages 1 and 2-3). This is in no small part down to the amount change orders and difficulty of utility relocations along the right of way. My understanding is that the authority has learned from these challenges and is now forcing its contractors to finish all the advanced design before they begin construction on that segment. This should significantly reduce the number of change orders which would make it easier to acquire the needed parcels.
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1: There is a case for the DTX to actually slow things down (I very much doubt the trains will be traveling much faster then 50-60 MPH this last mile), but this will only be like a minute or two. So I will give you 2:42 hours is actually a likely final number.
The CA HSR is over budget, but we know at least that HSR is technologically possible in contrast to hyperloop (in fact there are many voices which say it's fundamentally not possible). So if the hsr folks are scammers what does that make the people proposing hyperloop?
Is it politically possible? The first HSR contractor quit in total disgust - I think they went to africa and build high speed there instead?
I think they already torqued the routing based on some kind of backroom deals.
Some NY Times excerpts below. I don't think the hyperloop folks were trying to any of these gimmicks, none of them served on boards that could do the horse trading.
“There were so many things that went wrong,” Mr. McNamara said. “SNCF was very angry. They told the state they were leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional. They went to Morocco and helped them build a rail system." Morocco’s bullet train started service in 2018.
...
The horse-trading in this case involved an influential land developer and major campaign contributor from Los Angeles, Jerry Epstein.
Mr. Epstein, who died in 2019, was a developer in the seaside community of Marina del Rey who, along with other investors, was courting the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors for a 40-year lease extension on a huge residential, commercial and boat dock development.
Mr. Epstein was also a member of the rail authority board, and he became a strong backer of Mr. Antonovich’s proposal for a Mojave Desert diversion on the bullet train.
“The Palmdale route was borne of a deal between Epstein and Antonovich, absolutely,” said Art Bauer, the chief staff member on the State Senate Transportation Committee, speaking publicly on the matter for the first time.
“If I get my lease, you get my vote was the deal,” Mr. Bauer said. Though Mr. Epstein was only one member of the board, his lobbying of other board members proved critical, he said. “Epstein got the votes. The staff didn’t get the votes. The staff didn’t want to go that way.”
Can we cool it with the loaded language? What's wrong with "Musk said"?
Even at the time, in Musk's introduction he mentioned the massively delayed and over-budget (and slowest in the world and the most expensive per mile!) California HSR. There was never any attempt to hide his opposition, so it's no secret to 'admit.'
Musk was also open and honest about the fact that that he didn't know if Hyperloop would work, but that we should at least try to invent new and better technology over this worst-in-the-world status quo. I'm surprised to find disagreement on Hacker News of all places.
I think most here on HN agree that ideas are cheap. I mean I have an old school project from 7th grade where I came up with the iPhone in the mid 90s, that’s how cheap ideas are. Hyperloop was never more then an idea (and not even a novel idea), and Elon Musk never took it further. So giving him any credit for it as an attempted invention is still giving him too much. Now that we know the reason for this idea, I think we can safely call it sinister.
> Is there a reason that he would do that since the HSR directly pulls cars off the highway and relieves congestion?
Because he sells cars, so reducing demand for them is contrary to his interests (even if you believe his PR that he only is in the car business to develop tech abd raise money for Mars, losing the income stream hurts those interests.)
> Do you have a link to him talking about the hyperloop X HSR cancellation discussion?
Its from communications with his biographer, and recorded in the biography:
You don't have to dig that deep. Musk mentioned his inspiration was the (most expensive per mile and slowest in the world) California HSR in... his very first interview after publishing the whitepaper.[1]
He also mentioned it in the whitepaper (third paragraph).[2]
Musk was completely up-front with his disdain for that boondoggle. Can we not pretend like this was some deeply buried secret that had to 'leak' out?
> You don't have to dig that deep. Musk mentioned his inspiration was the (most expensive per mile and slowest in the world) California HSR in... his very first interview after publishing the whitepaper.
That it was proposed as an alternatige to CA HSR wasn’t the point, that it was proposed only to derail with no intent to build even if successful in derailing HSR was.
(That it was decidedly nonserious in substance as a proposal, aside from questions of intent or technical practicality, deriving most of its cost savings by fantastic assumptions about land acquisition costs and locating its terminals far from the population centers it would notionally serve is also worth keeping in mind.)
So in other words, no actual evidence for him doing this because of a conspiracy to sell more cars?
And if we’re going to grant Musk’s stated motivations as true, he started Tesla to enable the transition to clean energy in transport, not just to make money for Mars. I could see why a criminally over budget and grossly over-schedule HSR project would not exactly be helpful to that aim.
I'll pull the quote forward so people can make a decision as to how they feel:
> At the time, it seemed that Musk had dished out the Hyperloop proposal just to make the public and legislators rethink the high speed train. He didn't actually intend to build it. It was more that he wanted to show people that more creative ideas were out there for things that might actually solve problems and push the state forward. With any luck, the high speed rail would be canceled. Musk said as much to me during series of phone calls and emails leading up to the announcement. "Down the road, I might advise on a high speed rail project but right now I can't take my eye off the ball at either SpaceX or Tesla", he wrote.
I don’t know if there has been independent comparison of the faster tunneling speed, etc, but the ability of Prufrock to “porpoise” (directly launch) is an innovation that I can’t find any mention of in TBM before 2017. (But that could be because it goes by another name, I am no industry expert.) https://www.boringcompany.com/prufrock
I think the primary innovation is business plan, ie limit scope by only bidding on things like small diameter, simple requirements, etc. Avoid projects that would lengthy and expensive study, etc. Public works projects tend to be insanely expensive and part of it is due to continual scope creep, which brings in more stakeholders which further increases scope and cost… in a continuous cycle until the project is canceled or, miraculously, is finished at ten times the budget.
Which kind of answers the objections raised in these articles. If cities are unwilling or unable to allow scope to be constrained to the capabilities of TBC’s tunneling tech, why should TBC bid on the project? Why blame TBC for that?
In this way, this kind of scope discipline is more reminiscent of foreign tunneling projects.
But we’ll see. TBC has not completed many tunneling projects, and companies must ultimately be judged on the basis of their output (although for companies in growth and innovation mode, that can require patience).
They don't quote anything specific, but they do mention the porpoising as already existing in the article:
> Veterans of the tunneling industry note that tunnel-boring machines have been electrified for decades, and that neither continuous construction of the tunnel lining nor digging in from aboveground is new.
And I'm not too sure how useful of a feature is it. Transit tunnels are useally built in places that are so built up that land is at a premium. They actually want the tunnel to start underground, because they want to install the station underground too.
So you have to build a shaft anyway.
And also, they are trying to minimize elevation changes for efficiency.
Stations are one of the common reasons given for why tunnel projects are so ridiculously expensive. Porpoising would avoid that while still allowing you to go from one place to another underground.
How would it avoid that? It'd still be mega expensive to purchase plots of land in densely developed land (aka: cities) so your boring machine can tunnel up and down from these station points. One would also need to be careful to not dig the upwards and downwards slope on existing infrastructure: pipes, underground electric and communications lines, etc.
Porpoising doesn't help with any of that, if you need a slope of less than 2-3% inclination the machine will pass through a lot of potential infrastructure to surface and then dig down again. It doesn't make sense it'd save that much money considering that the expensive part of a project in developed land is that the land has a massive premium on it by being so productive.
The idea with porpoising is you can just install basically a bus stop on the surface, which is orders of magnitude cheaper than a massive excavated station, grand as it may be.
We actually don’t need TBC to do this stuff. We COULD just have extreme restraint on scope and limit the stakeholder input as much as possible, like is more often the case in every country other than the US. But the incentives are all totally misaligned, bordering on corruption here in the US.
Thinking logically, tunnel boring machines not being electrified is stupid design decision. They are in half done tunnel circulating air in such environment for combustion is rather stupid.
> the primary innovation is business plan, ie limit scope by only bidding on things like small diameter, simple requirements, etc
Wouldn’t this imply bidding for utility tunnels first?
Not an expert. But I thought the Boring Company's pitch was designing a better TBM. If today’s TBMs are state of the art, the Boring Company is another general contractor.
What if they're worse than the traditional TBM meanwhile overstating their capabilities? It's not necessarily outright lying, though. Maybe Musk's reality distortion field hasn't actually altered reality yet?
It sure seems they've oversold and underproduced though.
They tend to bid for fixed-price opportunities, though, so overstating wouldn't matter to the city as the company would eat the cost.
People thought Elon was "reality distortion field"ing SpaceX, too, but because COTS and CRS were fixed price, SpaceX was able to prove themselves. And for a while, SpaceX did struggle to meet launch rate, etc. But they ultimately DID deliver, so therefore they got paid (in cost plus, you can get paid simply for doing work, regardless of the project being completed) and now they dominate the entire industry in both price and reliability.
>I think the primary innovation is business plan, ie limit scope by only bidding on things like small diameter, simple requirements, etc. Avoid projects that would lengthy and expensive study, etc. Public works projects tend to be insanely expensive and part of it is due to continual scope creep, which brings in more stakeholders which further increases scope and cost… in a continuous cycle until the project is canceled or, miraculously, is finished at ten times the budget.
Is there any documentation that this is the motivation? Why as detailed in the article does he then entice local governments by saying he can do it at an insanely low price and then never puts a bit in? Also in the article Musk said he could build the tunnel for $45M, but after the discussions with the city the price rose to $500M, so much for keeping costs in check.
>Which kind of answers the objections raised in these articles. If cities are unwilling or unable to allow scope to be constrained to the capabilities of TBC’s tunneling tech, why should TBC bid on the project? Why blame TBC for that?
Again where is the evidence, for that claim? He got the local government to cancel the light rail project because he said he could build it for more than a factor 20-30 less, after discussions that became a factor 2-3 and then they didn't even bid?
> But we’ll see. TBC has not completed many tunneling projects, and companies must ultimately be judged on the basis of their output (although for companies in growth and innovation mode, that can require patience).
Not many is quite an understatement. 2 is the actual number, one on the SpaceX property under some road (they actually cancelled a second planed one) and the Las Vegas one, which is probably the easiest case for tunnel boring.
Exactly, in another forum someone was complaining the SpaceX was getting all the business and things should go back to the old rocket companies. For some reason he did not see the reason those companies was losing business was because they were not delivering results at a reasonable cost.
HSR is doing fine as far as big American infrastructure projects go. Building highways is typically even more costly and fraught, and yet nobody blinks an eye.
A four lane highway costs $12M/mile, plus about $1.5M to resurface every 8-10 years. Each overpass bridge costs $8-20M.
That doesn’t include condemnation, etc.
Rail should just be rolled into the normal interstate capital funds. Separate the “meta” infrastructure from the trains and stations and more will get done.
Trains are a tough business because it’s such an old business.
Self sabotage as in numerous ill faith law suites from municipalities, institutions, and private companies; non-cooperative utility companies and freight companies forcing ridiculous requirements such as the Hanford viaduct; a federal governments that only offers a nominal funding (and later withholds it when Trump comes into power); and then powerful people such as Elon Musk lying about having a better and cheaper alternative.
I think you are giving CASHR too much credit here.
Totally. But consider that maybe they're both implementations of the same strategy.
Musk made Tesla one of the most recognised brands with a similar status recognition to (say) Mercedes while not spending a dollar on advertising because Musk himself is news.
The flamethrower, so many column inches.
Tweeting that he hated traffic and seemingly off-the-cuff that he was going to build tunnels and calling it "The Boring Company" So many column inches.
Recall that he literally hired a bunch of the Onion's writers at one point. What do they do?
Being a human headline works in America even if most of the coverage is disparaging. Trump is another obvious example in the way he took control of the Republican party (the way Bernie couldn't quite manage to take the Dems) seemingly against the headwinds of relentlessly negative coverage but loads of it.
Interesting to see how Musk's blow-hard approach is going to work with twitter now he seems like he's going to call out Apple's monopoly abuses like so many others (spotify, fortnite...) have tried but not really succeeded. Going P.T. Barnum all the way seems to be necessary in the USA. We can idle time by speculating on whether Musk is a blow-hard who failed upwards or whether he's clever enough to know it and use it, playing the Musk character for all it is worth. As far as Musk himself goes I'm not really a fan but that seems utterly beside the point.
Does the P.T. Barnum thing work with smaller businesses launching? How? Any examples?
>In Fort Lauderdale, Democratic Mayor Dean Trantalis is pointing to the availability of the funding as he tries to sell the public on a $100 million pair of Boring-built tunnels that would ferry beachgoers back and forth from downtown. Mr. Trantalis said that he was awe-struck by Boring’s Las Vegas project, which he toured last year.
>North Miami Beach officials want to use federal infrastructure money to pay Boring for a tunnel project to reduce traffic.
You can't build underground in South Florida! It's a literal version of this:
> Officials had started planning for a street-level rail connection between booming Ontario International Airport and a commuter train station 4 miles away, with an estimated cost north of $1 billion.
Tangential but this is crazy. A cursory search tells me high speed rail cost US $17-21m per km in China and US $25-39m per km in Europe in 2014, according to World Bank.[1]
It might not be fully comparable, since most kilometers of high speed rail will be on the countryside and not in the city. The construction costs in city centers are always much higher. E.g. "Stuttgart 21" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart_21) which is about redoing railway in the Stuttgart area is also in the billion € range, despite being less than 60km (> 150M€/km) - and the majority of the 10B€ for that will probably be spent on the less than 10km of tracks inside the city.
That said the Ontario cost certainly still feels high.
The ongoing construction of the new broadway extension for Vancouvers skytrain system is even more costly. They are also building around 4 miles, and the estimated cost is 3 billion CAD (https://www.infrastructurebc.com/projects/projects-under-con...).
US building costs are high, but I don't think this is a fair comparison. Ontario, California is part of the Los Angeles metro area. Building a new railway inside any already-developed metro area is obviously going to cost much more than building a railway in the open countryside. The cost also likely includes the stations at either end.
I'd guess that's a classic case of economies of scale, although inflated property costs and government corruption could also be playing a role. However, compare to China(wiki):
> "The HSR network reached just under 38,000 km (24,000 mi) in total length by the end of 2020. The HSR building boom continues with the HSR network set to reach 70,000 km (43,000 mi) in 2035."
At that scale, costs per km would be expected to drop off on a steep curve, due to economies of scale, distribution of initial investment costs over more km of rail, etc.
Having your home demolished for a development project in China used to be like hitting the jackpot, because it meant your cheap old property will often be exchanged for expensive new apartment(s) in addition to massive cash compensation. There’s literally a nascent social class in China called 拆迁户 (relocated households, roughly) known for getting ridiculously rich overnight. A shitty old family home in the right place in Shanghai could net you something like $10-20m, for instance.
I heard that compensation has been vastly scaled back since a year or two ago, but I don’t know the details.
I'm not sure why Musk is the focus of this article either - isn't Warren Buffet & Berkshire-Hathaway the primary railroad owner in the USA today? Not exactly interested in upgrading the infrastructure or QoS on their own dime, are they?
Higher throughput with higher latency.
I am not strongly opinionated about tbc, but I've seen many comparisons of Las Vegas loop results compared to bus/train.
Sure throughput is lower.
But latency is too! And users experience latency first.
It's an interesting trade-off. They hit the target throughput. Its done.
What's not to love on this project?
Tokyo, NYC and London all run subway trains during peak hours within 2 mins. That’s almost certainly better than what the Boring loop achieves.
And these are subway systems. What you would run would be an autonomous light rail system with 1-2 cabins like you see running in airports all over the world.
It's very, very difficult to run trains with headways of under 2 minutes (as in, under two minutes from one train closing doors to the next train closing doors). The record holder is apparently Paris Line 1 at 85 seconds during peak hours, and some lines of the Moscow Metro do 90 seconds.
The latency is likely lower since you don't need to look for parking.
Slightly off-topic: The current Tokyo subway system has the unfortunate property that it turns off between midnight (~0) and early morning (~5). The Loop thing wouldn't have this likely, but I don't understand why Tokyo does this, especially for the trains that don't have a driver.
Maintenance is far easier when you don't have live trains running. If anything, NYC is an outlier for having 24 hour services, and it shows in their abysmal on-time record.
What are the "latency" numbers you're talking about on the LV loop? Like, what is the actual metric you're measuring for that, and what's the value you've been quoted for that measure.
If you count time waiting in traffic, I bet trains have better latency...
I mean it doesn't scale in the slightest so it doesn't solve any problems really, so there's that. In terms of latency it depends, every decent underground system will have passengers waiting no more than a few minutes. Worst I saw was in Naples where I waited over 15 minutes. 15 was too long, but I'd rather wait a few (<10) minutes to ride a train than wait some amount of time less to ride a Tesla. In fact, I would wait just to avoid riding a Tesla at this point.
What do you mean by higher latency? What do you think the latency for the Las Vegas loop would be if it needs to carry 1000 passengers over e.g. 20min? Sure if there's only 5 people waiting it's quicker, but if there is only 5 people wanting to go a certain path, why do we need a tunnel at all? The road would be faster. The whole point to build tunnels is to take away congestion.
They don’t. Boring company served its purpose. Huge advertising for Tesla and Elon, helping to push their visionary/10 years ahead of competition narrative, at very little cost. And it all helped Elon become richest person in the world.
Was actually in Vegas recently and tried this out, was the first time I had heard about it. Pretty cool, fast and convenient, but I think much of that was due to no waiting because people didn't really know it existed. Not sure how efficient it would be to move people up and down the strip with lots of high demand.. Of course maybe more efficient than Ubers on the strip are currently.
The quote from the book is "With any luck, the high-speed rail would be canceled. Musk said as much to me during a series of e-mails and phone calls"
They are paraphrasing Elon's intentions. And even the paraphrase sounds like HSR's cancellation would be some nice bonus on top of whatever Hyperloop is trying to achieve, not the primary goal.
@dang Is Algolia search delayed? Both this thread and the dupe at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33777962 don't show up in the search, with filters set to 1 week, sort set to popularity, and with trying the search terms "Musk" "Musk's" or "Boring"
Regulators didn’t force Musk to walk back from the autonomous vehicles sales pitch to the conventional sort.
Regulators didn’t force Musk to claim advances which were already common in the field.
Regulators didn’t force Musk not to ask why everyone else charged more.
Regulators didn’t force Musk not to do any research about legal requirements.
There are valid questions about why American infrastructure projects cost so much more than the rest of the world but that doesn’t mean that Musk’s problems are the fault of anyone but him. He’s good at marketing but as we’ve seen he only turns a profit where he can get a government guarantee and has a team managing his instincts to avoid him screwing up that gravy train on a whim.
I want to agree with you, but there is also the facet of a man that promised to build something cheaper and better, without doing his homework. Regulations don't just fall from the sky.
> a man that promised to build something cheaper and better
No such promise was made.
In fact, Musk explicitly went out of his way to say that he was not promising to build it himself.
He said — paraphrasing — "I'm too busy to do this and it might not even work, but maybe someone else can work on it and succeed, so I'm giving away the idea for free."
If nobody ever tries to build things which are physically possible but are likely to be blocked by regulators, we will never learn what the true constraint is. Most people around us believe that economic growth slowed down to near standstill due to some physical/technological constraints rather than was regulated away. We need more people like Musk who expose the truth that the regulations and bureaucracy are the largest problem the West has been facing for the last 40 years.
The article describes several projects that failed, including ones such as Maryland where permits and environmental review were completed and Boring did not perform the work.
Those regulations exist for a reason. If you dig tunnels underneath a city or town, you're liable to cause buildings to subside or collapse. This is not theoretical [1] - it happened in my city.
That it happened is not somehow an argument for paying less attention to tunnel digging projects either (the LCT was done at around peak "NSW government gives stupid handouts to private companies for our infrastructure").
Did you know that organized religions were invented to exploit gullible people like yourself? Today, politicians, propagandists and populists use the same honed techniques.
Elon Musk’s existence does not give rise to reality. The knowledge and ability to do these things is not his alone as clearly he relies on a lot of workers.
If society should really do these things is not for him to dictate via Twitter.
Musk is the only person that is both in a position to meaningfully push back against the depraved behavior of the corporate press, and the willingness to do so.
Yeah I mean the public could not logon for a day to send a message too. I mean that as a euphemism for broader ideas I won’t elaborate on. But let Musk do it, we don’t want that responsibility.
Social media either makes it clear the general public is of immense restraint or too confused to know they don’t really owe carrying around in their heads any of this gibberish and could set aside the assigned work queues and focus on the ignored ones, like infra and healthcare. The government will respond to a populace with twice as many guns as people in a hurry at the slightest whiff of public comity.
Please save us, Musk! … the great white savior complex. Still seeking a high minded savior suggests confused by all the gibberish and noise which is intentional but often ends up being uncontrollable. The code gets deciphered and the old masters get outplayed at their own game. Gen Z grew up digesting this gibberish. I’m hopeful they’re inoculated against it.
Most of the general public are effectively NPCs who robotically repeat what is on the screen. I'm sure you know the behavior I'm talking about where someone expresses "their opinion" and it's word for word something they mindlessly parrot from Fox News or CNN or whatever they watch. That little context/fact check is extremely important. Recently, the White House tweeted bragging SS recipients were getting the largest increase in history. Context was added to the tweet to say it was legally required because inflation was so high and not a new action the government took. They were so embarrassed they deleted the tweet. That's real power.
I doubt Musk is really a high-minded savior figure. If he's just doing this to make money then that is fine by me.
That’s your reductive view of the public. I don’t think they’re dimwitted NPCs, but being treated disingenuously by people who think they’re NPCs.
The public is very aware they don’t deference to any particular individual. Musk, or you. At the end of the day twice as many guns as people in this country.
I am reciting my own inner monologue reminding myself we’re each just one of billions, nothing special. None of my posts address anyone else specifically at all.
Qualified truth is relative. This is all generic language. You’re hardly saying anything novel. You’re no further beyond the edge of human understanding than I am.
You see it as I “played myself” I see it as you’re another meat bag over stimulated by their own awareness.
Unfortunately, a lot of these efforts sound similar. And it looks like Musk has managed to do what he’s best at. Get even more government money directed towards his companies.