CBS News:
Tuesday night in Los Angeles, Musk unveiled the very first tunnel in what he hopes will become a network of underground highways. The first tunnel runs between the headquarters of Musk’s SpaceX company and a parking lot behind a shuttered business a little over a mile away. It’s only for testing purposes and won’t be used by the public.
Musk knew nothing about building tunnels when he started this venture. Just as he did with Tesla and SpaceX, he figures to build his expertise as he goes, then find ways to crush the costs down.
While modern subway tunnels in Los Angeles cost around $900 million per mile, he says he built his for about $10 million. One way he saved money: he literally made it dirt-cheap.
“When digging tunnels…it’s quite expensive to have all this dirt trucked off somewhere. And we’re like, well, why don’t we try to use that dirt for something useful? So we are creating bricks on-site…and you can pick ’em up for, they’re very cheap; 10 cents a brick,” he said.
There’s also great savings in owning the entire process, rather than bringing in layers of third party contractors and specialized labor, all of which significantly pumps up the price of any large project.
As to how the whole tunnel thing will work:
At first glance, the tunnel is a bit daunting. At only 12 feet in diameter, it’s much more claustrophobic than most transportation tunnels. According to Musk, cars will be able to travel up to 150 mph in the tunnel but must be on autopilot.
A bit of genius here. Only properly outfitted cars will be allowed in these tunnels. Someone who can build such cars efficiently can make a lot of money. To me, that’s incredible vision on Musk’s part.
Read the article, watch the video embedded below. Both are fascinating.
If he’s still giving short shrift to the need for mass transit, his myopia might actually keep his vision from keeping up with the needs of high-population cities.
Beside resolving logistic problems of inland ports, I see no need for this.
Gaal Dornick traveled in such a tunnel in Trantor.
“The city of Hawthorne granted Musk an exemption from typical environmental impact reviews required under California law and in nearby neighborhoods where the tunnel runs”
Gee, wonder why it was cheaper. Also, if it’s anything like the Chicago tunnel, there are likely reasons why it’s so cheap. The proposed Chicago high speed system will be able to move 2,000 passengers an hour. By way of comparison, a single NYC Subway car holds 2,000 passengers.
What would be more productive is emulate European public transit systems that are able to build at a cost of $150 M or so per mile instead of $900M-1.5B
Car? I thought the tunnel is for hyperLoop???
If you do literally any back-of-the-napkin math on how this will work at scale, you realize this is an incredibly dumb idea, OR it’s only ever been meant for a small amount of rich people to use. He is not inventing anything here, he’s using existing technology to solve problems we don’t really have. Tunneling is not that expensive and we do it well. Trains work better (or at all) compared to how this harebrained car scheme would work at any scale. This is a grift.
The car scheme has the huge advantage of giving you last-mile transportation both at the beginning and end of the route.
Of course the real problem seems to be that this appears to be limited to Tesla owners. But I’ve noticed here in South Florida that the Model 3 and other Teslas are selling quite well.
I don’t think I’d want government to do this but as a strictly private endeavor it might cost about as well as Express Lanes and be as popular for eligible cars.
I can’t see the genius in this, as there are several well established aspects that Musk doesn’t address. The law of induced demand means that more road, no matter the format, means more traffic, and that will apply to tunnels. However fast the cars travel in the tunnel, they cannot enter or exit at the tunnel’s speed, which means bottlenecks at entry and exit (this happens a lot where bridges and tunnels are poorly connected with the rest of the network. Lastly, let’s call this what it is now clearly intended to be: a proprietary road system that has its hand out looking earnestly for public money subsidies.
The only consistently proven means of improving traffic flow through cities are mass transit and active transportation options, both stand on over a hundred years of evidence in thousands of cities. A cross between a car wash and subway tube that only works with some cars and requires hundreds of billions to become ubiquitous is childish folly, not genius, except in It’s ability to create credulous puff pieces on network tv.
The *real* problem is that this will never work at any scale. The elevators alone doom it, and when you take them out, you have absolutely nothing new. Musk has invented nothing here and it’s alarming that cities are falling for this grift.
That’s an excellent point. I didn’t think of it but with elevators you will always have queues and delays no matter how fast the rest of it is.