The Boring Company
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2018–2019
1:12:05 · 448K views · May 18, 2018
A long information session where The Boring Company presents its vision for Loop, an underground high-speed transit system, and the traffic problems it aims to solve. It includes discussion of faster tunnel boring and electrification.
HN commenters point to it as the primary source for what the company is actually proposing, in threads skeptical of the project.
3 comments from Hacker News
Absolutely. People are super confused about this. The reporting wasn't very good and you have to look beyond it. The original idea is - little 16 person passenger pods with bikes, wheelchairs, and luggage. $1 fare. - possibly sleds for cars - you can stack tunnels (think of them as car lanes in 3D), so you can have 20, 50 or 100 lane highways - you make lane changes autonomously, so the subway pods can have different destinations - it's all electric so there isn't poisonous engine exhaust This is just people boarding a bus, the throughput is super high. Even sled loading can be pretty fast, imagine replacing 20 street parking spots with sled elevators. Then accelerated to 100 mph, that too is a lot of throughput. Here's the pod part of the Boring company talk. It's worth watching to see what they are proposing. this video Elon and company got excited that they built a tunnel, which is a real achievement. So they drove a Tesla through it. The media knows what you want, which is max outrage, so they reported that the 1% will get tunnels with their Teslas. You will be stuck in gridlock behind a diesel truck. They should not have driven a Tesla through it, it was a PR blunder. Here is a Heathrow pod experiment: [LINK]
Yes, there is a pretty good video of an interview with Musk and the chief engineer on the project: this video From memory, the important points: 1. They want to have the drill work continuously. Apparently current technology winds up drilling less than half the time, partially because the drills stop when putting in the wall sections that make up the tunnel. 2. Switch the drill and the waste train (that takes the dirt from the drill) to electric using batteries that the train brings in. This reduces the construction of pipes and infrastructure in the tunnel during construction. 3. Work to speed up the drill head by using the materials scientists from SpaceX. 4. Make bricks out of the waster material on-site. Right now disposing of the waste material is a big headache/cost.
Seconded, Ghent in belgium is also pretty cool car-wise. It has so-called pedestrian-centric planning. For example, the city centre may not be entered with a car, only by foot, bicycle or public transport. It's great. I enjoyed Musk's Boring Company's presentation, where they talk about some problems with transportation today and present some solutions, with emphasis on transportation within city borders [0]. [0] this video