To say Elon Musk is a busy guy is an understatement between running SpaceX,
Tesla, and Neuralink, he apparently plans his day in five-minute slots. Time is precious. So one day
in 2016 while sitting in another LA traffic jam, he had enough and tweeted he was going
to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging. In case anyone thought he was kidding
he followed up with: I'm actually going to do this. It wasn't a spur of the moment decision to
found The Boring Company. Musk had been thinking about it for a while. Traffic is soul-destroying.
It's like acid on the soul, it's horrible. And his solution might just end traffic for good
When Boring built its test tunnel leaving the parking lot of SpaceX's headquarters in Hawthorne,
California, the aim was to find a better way for private vehicles to get around.
But the plans have now expanded into a public transportation system called the Loop,
where those who don't own cars can hop on a vehicle cycling through.
The first Loop will be in Las Vegas built for the massive convention center which hosts the
Consumer Electronics Show every January. A walk from one end to another normally takes 15 minutes.
That's now turned into a one-minute ride. Visitors will be packed into a Model X,
Model 3, or a modified Tesla that can fit up to 16 people. This is an earlier prototype.
The vehicles will be zipping through the tunnels at up to 155 mph, initially with a
driver and eventually autonomously. An electric skate was supposed to help center the car. That
was axed in favor of retractable wheels but both ideas have been abandoned and instead,
the vehicle will rely on its own tires driving through a paved tunnel. The convention center
Loop could be the beginning of a bigger Vegas network stretching all the way down the Strip,
potentially one day connecting to Los Angeles if the website is any indication. In LA, there's a
proposal to take fans to and from Dodger Stadium so instead of sitting in traffic for an hour,
the Dugout Loop as it's called would only be a four-minute ride and cost a dollar each way. I
mean wouldn't it be incredible if you could travel around LA, New York, DC, Chicago, Paris, London,
anywhere at 150 miles an hour? Expanding to major cities around the world will only be possible
by bringing down costs - the same strategy must apply to the rocket business. The final liftoff
of Atlantis. Space shuttle launches used to be really expensive - $450 million per mission
Then SpaceX came along and dropped it down to $62 million for a Falcon 9 flight largely because
it's able to re-use parts of the rocket. In the same way, building tunnels is very expensive.
Los Angeles' purple line subway extension has a price tag of more than a billion dollars a mile
yet the one-mile demo tunnel only costs $10 million because The Boring Company applied the
principle of reusability responsible for SpaceX's success. Typically, the excavated dirt is thrown
away and the process of taking it off-site is very costly. Instead, the dirt will be used to help
build the tunnel's reinforcing segments on-site and any leftovers will be turned into bricks to be
sold, paying for the dirt removal itself or given away for free for affordable housing projects.
Another way to cut costs is by building smaller tunnels. The standard size for a single lane is
28 feet in diameter. Boring's will only be 12 feet which doesn't leave a lot of room,
so although technically any electric vehicle with autonomous capabilities will be able to use
them in the future, they'll have to fit. Smaller tunnels also make building faster. Tunneling today
is slower than a snail. This is our goal: we must be faster than a snail. They plan on beating Gary
the company's pet snail by bringing a different approach to drilling. Usually, a tunnel boring
machine or TBM drill, then stops, as the segments are installed. The Boring Company wants to do both
at the same time and with a more powerful machine. A standard TBM can dig one mile in eight to 12
weeks whereas Boring's third-generation TBM, the custom-designed Prufrock, is meant to go more than
a mile a week. And if it moves that quickly, the system could rival subways or in Musk's words,
"crush" subways. While a train has to stop at every station, Loop passengers would travel
directly to their destination, skipping all the other stops. And unlike a subway, there isn't a
limit to the number of stations. They can be as discreet as a couple of parking spaces.
It would also be as much as nine times the speed of a train. If you find it uncomfortable it will
be hard to handle what comes next because the Loop is a stepping stone toward the Hyperloop.
The Hyperloop is meant for city-to-city transport at more than 600 miles an hour.
We're talking airplane speeds. So passengers and cargo will be in a pressurized pod. It could
either connect to the Loop or fit within the Loop tunnels. For the past few years, SpaceX has held a
competition for students and non-students to build sub-scale prototypes. Although this technology may
captivate minds, there are questions about how safe a Loop or Hyperloop would be. The
proposed 35-mile DC to Baltimore route has been criticized for not having enough emergency exits.
The plan is to construct up to 70 ventilation shafts serving as exits that would be spaced
as far as two miles apart. Boring notes the Loop is designed to be the fastest and safest system
ever and says it will comply with safety and fire protection standards. Still, some engineers are
skeptical this will succeed on a large scale. But the same was said of SpaceX when it began.
And many thought Tesla would never learn the art of mass production. If Musk is known for anything,
it's beating the odds with engineering feats. Finally, finally, finally there's something.
Something that I think could solve the goddamn traffic problem.
The future should be anything but boring. Hey guys, I appreciate you watching,
I'm Cindy Pom. So do you think Boring company tunnels will come to cities around the world
and would you use them? Let me know your thoughts, you can leave them in the comment section below.
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