There was a CityNerd video (which you may take or leave in general, but I found the anecdote interesting) in which there appeared to be one vehicle in service on the entire system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPjODKUxV5g
I assume though that they would adjust the capacity depending on time of day and whether there's an event or something going on, to some degree.
It's a single lane tunnel and is thus one way. The parking are can only hold so many waiting vehicles and queued passengers. Their options for adjusting capacity are severely limited.
Then you consider what might happen if the lead vehicle in a convoy becomes disabled, or worse, starts on fire.
It's the same reason planes are safer per "passenger mile traveled" but aren't as safe per "total journeys taken." If you crash a plane you stand to injure or kill hundreds of passengers at once.
Thanks for sharing this, I had understood prior to this video that the combo of self driving tech + dedicated tunnels might have capacity that rival a light rail system like Seattle has but that's clearly not the case in the current system. I'm curious why more of the autonomous driving tech isn't being used in what I might have thought would be an "easier" place to do it.
> I'm curious why more of the autonomous driving tech isn't being used in what I might have thought would be an "easier" place to do it.
There's no real need in a static environment, and much simpler ways to do it. Children's toys can follow a line painted on something; they just need proximity sensors and a basic signalling system (RF or also painted on the road) for where to stop and done.
There's no real need for the car to "see" beyond "am I going to run into something" and they operate at speeds where stopping is very feasible.
They're also a bad rival for light rail because they already have to dig a tunnel and the conveyance operates on a fixed path. They picked a domain that light rail is already incredibly good and efficient at.
If they have autonomous driving technology that works for “harder” problems, then why do they not use it for “easier” problems? You answered your own question; it does not work safely for those “harder” problems.
Zoox has permits to operate autonomously on Las Vegas streets. Tesla is unable to get permits to operate autonomously on isolated, one-lane, one-way streets with no pedestrians, cross-traffic, or even vehicles not under their control. That should tell you everything you need to know about how far reality is away from their corporate puffery.
> had understood prior to this video that the combo of self driving tech + dedicated tunnels might have capacity that rival a light rail system like Seattle has but that's clearly not the case in the current system
Not to disparage, but how did you come to that conclusion? A train will always be able to fit more people/m^2 than several cars of equivalent length, due to things like ability to stand, not needing to have multiple engines and trunks, etc.
> there appeared to be one vehicle in service on the entire system
I watched that video the other day, pretty sure it didn’t say that. What it did point out though is that in most of the system, other than the one main line, there’s just one single-lane tunnel so that when a car is in a tunnel going one way, cars going the other direction have to wait to enter the tunnel until the tunnel is clear.
The title of the video seems pretty accurate: “The Vegas Loop Is Getting Progressively More Stupid.”
He does say that around 5:32 in the video. He says his driver told him there were two cars on the loop that day, and the other car wasn't in service because it was being used for training.
When he rode his driver told him there should be two cars operating at a time but one was training and couldn't take riders, so there was just one car running.
When we were in Vegas for Def Con, one of the tube stations was next to one of the Las Vegas Convention Center entrances. I'd occasionally hang out there with friends, and once every half an hour or so, we'd see a lonely Tesla weave through the traffic cone path and disappear into the nethers.
Based purely on my own observations, I'd guesstimate that station sees about 50-75 cars per day.
I just hope there is never a battery fire down there, because there appears to be no evacuation tunnel or safety procedures. I don't think you can even get the car doors open in the tunnel.
More accurately all this so Elon Musk could keep peddling the lie that boreholes and cars are the future of public transit. What’s a little fraud and environmental harm compared to such a lofty goal?
If you’re curious, this is a demo/experiment. The long term goal is tunnels so inexpensive that they can go 30 levels deep, letting us travel within cities at 200kph with no stop signs (even eliminate automobiles from the surface of cities)
This will require considerable progress in tunneling r&d, which is their primary activity
IMHO Tunnels for bicycles make a ton of sense - similarly to EVs low ventilation requirements, small diameter means cheaper build and most importantly protects you from weather elements.
There were tens of thousands of riders _when you were there?_ Or there were tens of thousands of riders over the lifetime of the system?
Most videos I've seen recently show a system that, while functional, typically only has a handful of vehicles running simultaneously, each with carrying capacity for one party of up to 3 people.
So 1,000,000 passengers in 14 months or ~420 days. That is a average throughput of ~2,400 passengers per day.
In comparison, the Tokyo Marunouchi line averages ~1,100,000 passengers per day [3]. That is ~420x the rate. Every single day, they do what the Las Vegas Loop does in a year.
The peak capacity that they claim without evidence is ~32,000 in a day [4]. The Maruonouchi line does in a day what the Las Vegas Loop at maximum capacity could theoretically do in a entire month.
You might be shocked to learn the first airplane couldn’t take passengers.
Things improve, or at least attempt to. Even if it fails, I’d rather live in a world where new ideas are being tried and tested and not always talking about how good my horse and cart is.
Tens of thousands of riders in what time period? Please, look up how many people it is capable of moving per hour, and compare that to any light rail or street car service in any city. There is no way the loop makes sense to build.
> Please, look up how many people it is capable of moving per hour, and compare that to any light rail or street car service in any city.
I have a hard time understanding this criticism. Why not do both?
It seems to me like underground highways make sense as an alternative to above ground highways in urban areas, not that they're an alternative to rail. There's lots of cities with excellent public transport that also make use of underground car travel (Melbourne for e.g.). If a company can figure out how to (safely) make underground highways more quickly and more affordably, it seems like that means we may need to do above-ground roads less frequently -- why would that not be a good thing?
Further, obviously Musk has a PR angle in facilitating tesla traffic here as the test bed in early days, but I don't see any reason that this couldn't be repurposed to rail use at scale.
In urban areas, they're usually an alternative. If you're going past the city, you could build a ground level highway around the city for a lot cheaper. If you're going into the city, it makes more economic sense to leave your car at the periphery of the city and take a rail system in because of the difference in throughput per $ spent building it (as well as the space occupied by parking for people who need to leave their cars in the city). Plus the people leaving the highway will get onto surface streets, and back up the highway.
Being able to make underground tunnels cheaper and faster is cool. Using them for cars is mostly a boondoggle with clearly superior alternatives.
I think that's reasonable. I suppose I also think it idealist that cities will actually act that way in practice in the short term. I'm specifically thinking of examples like the Corniche highway in Alexandria or Marine drive in Mumbai which shows cities are willing to give up gorgeous public space throughout incredibly dense areas to support car traffic. But there's also examples like Boston's "big dig" which shows cities are willing to spend extra to move those auto pathways underground. At least in the short term it seems that 1) cities aren't giving up entirely on cars, but 2) are willing to pay more to have them underground.
I suspect in practice the actual approach is going to be a mix of all of the above. So my reasoning is primarily that if all cities won't give up cars anyway, it seems objectively better to make it easier to at least move more of them underground. I suppose one case where I would change my mind is if there was evidence that more affordable underground roads reduced the investment in public transit.
That is the peak spontaneous ridership per hour. So about 22 people per minute. Probably measured during a convention or something. Most of the time it's probably half of that.
So essentially they made a ride comparable to Space Mountain that takes about 2200 passengers per hour.
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...
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
The tricky thing about environmental regulations is that they are crafted and utilized by NIMBYs to block any infrastructure development. Even if, on balance, the infrastructure is a net positive.
It's not clear if these violations actually represent a real environmental hazard or are more reflective of NIMBY degrowth sentiment.
> Workers have complained of chemical burns from the waste material generated by the tunneling process, and firefighters must decontaminate their equipment after conducting rescues from the project sites. The company was fined more than $112,000 by Nevada’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration in late 2023 after workers complained of “ankle-deep” water in the tunnels, muck spills and burns.
That sounds like a "real environmental hazard" to me.
> I wonder what chemicals were involved. Probably nothing that you wouldn't find in any other construction site with heavy machinery. Fuel? Grease?
It was a chemical to speed up grout curing. I don’t know which one. I looked up a few and they were corrosive petrochemicals with like 20-letter-long names and an acute health exposure rating of 4 on the MSDS. They also didn’t provide PPE or instructions on what PPE was necessary. And have you ever gotten any significant amount of gasoline on your skin? It burns and it is not safe. Here’s a list of chemicals in common gasoline mixtures: Gasoline, Toluene,
Hexane, Xylene, Octane, Ethanol, Trimethylbenzene, n-Heptane, Pentane, Cumene, Ethylbenzene, Benzene, n-Hexane, Cyclohexane.
Even if it was just the water in the tunnel — how about you try 8+ hours of heavy work in steel toed boots with damp feet, let alone standing in ankle deep water filled with corrosive chemicals. Even standing still in clean water, your skin basically turns to paste after not too long.
With the way the job market is trending in tech, you might have the opportunity to find out one day while someone sitting in a Herman miller chair in a climate controlled office building dismisses your pain as petty griping.
Technically the term chemical burn doesn't indicate severity, just that you got in contact with a corrosive material which had an effect on your skin. My guess would be someone got lime/cement powder on themselves and reported it as a chemical burn. They could have also been dissolved alive in an acid bath, but the size of the fine and the fact propublica doesn't say what happened suggests it was minor.
How much of this is coverage is because this a true outlier situation versus Elon ragebait? Let's look at one of the larger construction companies in the US:
Since the year 2000, they've had 45 fines (and many violations per fine) by the federal Occupational Safety & Health Administration, and nearly $8 million in fines. And over $200k in fines just last year. There's separately 34 global violations totalling is over $50 million in fines.
This doesn't make Elon's company's violations excusable - it is however clearly the course of business in construction that these sorts of things happen. I think this is a good criticism of capitalist pressures in general rather than Elon being uniquely shitty in how he operates his companies.
obligatory Elon sucks, i'm just allergic to bullshit and ragebait
This is a company owned by the same guy whose other company is dumping huge amounts of pollution into the air around Memphis, TN. And when asked they basically said “no we aren’t.”
> It's not clear if these violations actually represent a real environmental hazard or are more reflective of NIMBY degrowth sentiment.
Here’s an article that has some details on some of the violations [1]. The sound like things that the state legitimately should be regulating and that this would have minimal impact on growth.
This is so wildly ignorant that I wasn't sure what website I was on for a minute.
Clearly, anyone who says [complex, multifaceted loose grouping of kind of related things] is [extreme, polarizing claim with no evidence] is not worth listening to further.
Please explain exactly what regulations in this context were 'crafted and utilized by NIMBYs'. Please cite agency and ruling for each supposed grave offense to your anti-NIMBY sensibilities.
The tricky thing about deregulating the environment is that deregulations are uncrafted and utilized by amoral capitalists who want to make money no matter what, including by poisoning the land and sea and air as much as they want.
it's not clear if you know what environmental regulations are or if you are just shilling for polluting billionaires.
It's a parody of your comment, which ascribes all environmental regulation to NIMBYs. If you blow a raspberry and someone blows a similar one right back at you, maybe you earned it.
>It's not clear if these violations actually represent a real environmental hazard or are more reflective of NIMBY degrowth sentiment.
>it's not clear if you know what environmental regulations are or if you are just shilling for polluting billionaires.
This is pretty clearly an escalation beyond what you're describing.
e: Because you did already read these lines, I guess I should spell this out: the former says we can't trust this datapoint as reflecting the issue we're concerned about; the latter says that the former person is either completely ignorant about the subject matter or lying due to corruption. The former is disagreeable; the latter is an ad hominem assuming bad faith against HN guidelines.
You did not include the more equivalent quote from the OP in my view:
> The tricky thing about environmental regulations is that they are crafted and utilized by NIMBYs to block any infrastructure development
This doesn't just say we can't trust a datapoint, it starts with a position premised on bad faith motivations for all environmental regulations. Still not totally equivalent, but I don't think the original commenter was exactly being neutral or reasoned in their opening argument.
A charitable reading of their comment would be that they meant NIMBYs write and use environmental regulations to stunt development, rather than that there is no such thing as a legitimate environmental regulation. It's definitely poorly phrased in a way that lends itself to the uncharitable interpretation, but their subsequent remarks are very clear that they don't agree with that.
As you note, even the uncharitable interpretation isn't equivalent- you say 'not totally equivalent' but they're different quite critically in that the one is attacking a political position and some laws and the other is attacking an individual person on this forum.
Let's look at the opening of the two comments which clearly mirror each other in tone and structure.
The tricky thing about environmental regulations is that they are crafted and utilized by NIMBYs to block any infrastructure development. Even if, on balance, the infrastructure is a net positive.
The tricky thing about deregulating the environment is that deregulations are uncrafted and utilized by amoral capitalists who want to make money no matter what, including by poisoning the land and sea and air as much as they want.
Perhaps missing the point like this was not deliberate, but you nevertheless missed it.
latter says that the former person is either [...] or [...]
[...] the latter is an ad hominem assuming bad faith
You went from characterizing it as an either/or comment in one sentence, to characterizing it as a bad faith assumption in the next. This is equivalent to: 'he says it's either odd or even...he says it's odd.'
I don't think that taking umbrage with a rude part of a comment can be called missing the point because another part of the comment was better. Am I missing yours?
And yeah, looks like I dropped an 'or' between 'hominem' and 'assuming'. My bad, I wasn't sure how long the edit window lasts and rushed it.
You need a moral framing for big infrastructure projects, or else that's how you get redlining and the destruction of minority neighborhoods for "urban renewal" and the inner-city highway system. You can't do a "cost-benefit" analysis without some sort of moral system inherent in the costs and the benefits, or else how can you calculate the effects on humans. Your "just the numbers" has its own moral system you are ignoring and instead saying everyone else isn't a cost-benefit and is only morality.
I want to build infrastructure too. Just not at the cost of the destruction of the world we live in.
Well isn't the boring company trying to build his dumbass single lane tesla road? Is this really infrastructure or just 'trains with extra steps and no safety'
This seems intrinsically safer than trains, or so it seems to me (although I am not an expert). It seems safer because trains derails regularly. Tires can blow, but blowing a tire is unlikely to damage the whole train like a derailment is. At the least, the operator has the option to increase safety against blown tires by increasing the separation between cars.
Instead of bringing up safety, I'd bring up the microplastics and other pollutants emitted by the technology of the elastomeric tire and which might be an intrinsic property of cost-effective use of the technology.
Derailments are really rare in properly maintained railroads; even the NYC subway with a century of chronic underinvestment derails rarely (think one every few years).
Cars get into accidents way more frequently. The American freight rail system derails at a more frequent rate because the private operators are incentivized to really not do any maintenance at all.
Looks like I was wrong. According to an unreliable source of fast answers, "passenger rail lines appear to be two to five times
safer than intercity bus lines on a per-passenger-mile basis".
>From the very first run of the Tōkaidō Shinkansen on October 1, 1964, until the present day, there has never been a single derailment or collision on the entire full-standard Shinkansen rail network resulting in a passenger fatality
if you don't automatically assume bad faith when dealing with hypercapitalist private infrastructure projects, you're going to be taken advantage of. every time.
that, or you're on the payroll. there's not a ton of wiggle room here.
You are falling prey to the myth of the cynical genius
> A further three studies based on the data of about 200,000 individuals from 30 countries debunked these lay beliefs as illusionary by revealing that cynical (vs. less cynical) individuals generally do worse on cognitive ability and academic competency tasks. Cross-cultural analyses showed that competent individuals held contingent attitudes and endorsed cynicism only if it was warranted in a given sociocultural environment. Less competent individuals embraced cynicism unconditionally, suggesting that-at low levels of competence-holding a cynical worldview might represent an adaptive default strategy to avoid the potential costs of falling prey to others' cunning.
only if it was warranted in a given sociocultural environment
GP explicitly specified such an environment. Musk is the epitome of a hypercapitalist - an outlier in terms of wealth, fame, ambition, and micromanagement.
It's not the boring process. It's the use of concrete curing accelerants producing toxic sludge.
Often, the accelerants would spill into groundwater and mix with concrete and other debris, creating a toxic mix of sludge, sometimes about two-feet deep, that workers would often have to trudge through. The OSHA report cited workers with permanently scarred arms and legs, and one instance in which a worker was hit in the face and seared with the chemical mix. Temperatures would regularly rise to 100 degrees as workers often toiled for 12 hour days, sometimes for six or seven days a week, at a worksite nicknamed “the plantation” by some workers, who spoke to the Nevada safety agency for its report. Workers also claimed having to ask for permission to use the bathroom.
That's the OSHA complaint. The environmental complaint comes from disposing of that sludge.
Sludge removal and treatment is a standard problem in tunneling. Usually, it's pumped out with "trash pumps" that can tolerate rocks and sand. Then it goes through some basic processing - screen out the big rocks, separate water from wet sludge, run the water through a mini sewerage treatment plant on site, squeeze more water out of the sludge, add bentonite as an absorbent to lock up toxics, and truck away the dry sludge.[2]
What it seems The Boring Company has been doing is dumping the wet sludge on a vacant lot in Las Vegas [3] and waiting for the water to run off or evaporate. The vacant lot isn't even out in the desert outside the city; it's in town, and the nearby mall is annoyed.
Reports of water two feet deep in the tunnels means they skimped on pumps and water processing. They're using a TBM, which makes a concrete tube as it digs. Most tunneling operations keep the completed tube dry.
Looks like the regulations are not fit for purpose. Why would companies ever improve if its cheaper to just ignore the regulations and pay the tepid fines?
> “Given the extraordinary number of violations, NDEP has decided to exercise its discretion to reduce the penalty to two $5,000 violations per permit, which it believes offers a reasonable penalty that will still serve to deter future non-compliance conduct,” regulators wrote in the letter.
The fuck?
"You were driving so fast we gave you a discount on the speeding fine."
60 admirals got investigated. One, Admiral Gilbeau, got the first felony on active duty in modern history = 1.5 year prison, and continue collecting your $10,000 monthly pension (while in prison). There were admittedly some punishments, there was also a lot of community service, misdemeanor, $100.
"You did too much crime. Therefore, we will charge you for fewer crimes! Bulk discount!"
This is ridiculous and why we have the problems with late-stage capitalism that we do. Fines are not high enough. No jail time for environmental crimes.
Source is my own two decades working in the criminal justice system, as both a prosecutor and a defense attorney. But perhaps your experience as an attorney differs from mine.
>> "1g of cocaine might get 10-30 days"
> Source please.
Google: how many days of jail time 1 gram cocaine california
As with many legal questions, the matter of jurisdiction comes into play. Possession of any amount in Texas, is supposed to dictate a higher length sentence on average. Florida, heavier than CA but far less than TX guidelines. In actuality, courts tend to sentence based on defendant history and current political climate.
I think the big picture here is much more important. If tunneling technology is radically improved, we're going to see massive improvements in urban living, including:
• Cleaner air at street level because vehicle exhaust stays underground and can be filtered, which would have massive health and environmental benefits
• Quieter cities with most traffic noise eliminated
• Cooler temperatures since asphalt and vehicle heat are removed from the surface (urban heat island effect)
• More space for trees, parks, and gardens, improving urban greenery.
• Lower stress levels thanks to quieter, greener surroundings.
• Better physical health from more walkable, pedestrian-friendly spaces.
There is simply no way to make enough tunnels for personal vehicles. That is basic city planning. Building more roads increases congestion.
The only _real_ way to achieve the above goals are building bicycle friendly cities with diverse public transport options and less parking spaces. There are European cities that function more like this.
Any reason you can't make tunnels? I've spent a while in San Pedro, Spain and it's been transformed by a cut and cover tunnel that the cars now go through. Seems to work fine.
> • Cleaner air at street level because vehicle exhaust stays underground and can be filtered, which would have massive health and environmental benefits
What exhaust? These are all electric cars running in the tunnels.
> Workers have complained of chemical burns from the waste material generated by the tunneling process, and firefighters must decontaminate their equipment after conducting rescues from the project sites. The company was fined more than $112,000 by Nevada’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration in late 2023 after workers complained of “ankle-deep” water in the tunnels, muck spills and burns.
I think we can do a little better while still reaping the improvements garnered by tunneling.
You think, in america, that someone would pay for putting all of our roads underground? No. They simply want to put a very tiny number of roads underground because even a catastrophically expensive tunneling project is cheaper than negotiating with all the people who own the actual land you would rather pave a road or rail through.
It really depends on the legal framework governing land use, e.g. do cities have the right to use the land beneath properties. And of course how affordable tunneling becomes.
Then we should stop with amatuer hour and outsource to China, where they've lapped us in tunneling technology. It will take more than one ketamine-fueled billionaire breaking laws in Vegas to catch up.
The criticisms of what the Boring Company has built are completely valid. I suggest you actually read them and consider them rather than just blatantly disregarding them because they might be interpreted as criticism of Elon.
Scrolling down the thread brings up statements about all environmental reviews, all satellite launches, and says that starlink is going to destroy humanity by ruining the atmosphere.
You're right that it's easy to mistake any statement like mine as being a blanket defense of Elon and dismissing valid criticisms, but this discussion as a whole has gone far afield of cement accelerators and chemical burns.
At this point we all know Musk only did this as part of his general "hyperloop" boondoggle to kill California high speed rail. Why do we have to continue to pretend this was anything other than an idiotic PR stunt?
Ah yes, the hyperloop is what killed California high speed rail. If only it weren't for those few tweets, it would be successful and done by now.
Or maybe there's another reason these high speed rail projects consistently fail. An insane regulatory and litigious environment where no technology progress can be made. Meanwhile, in Asia, rail is being laid at insane pace.
What do you think it'll take to match their progress? Do you honestly think Elon is the reason this is all failing?
> If only it weren't for those few tweets, it would be successful and done by now.
Not what I said. I said he did it to try and kill high speed rail, not that he was solely responsible for its failure. And Musk did a whole lot more than tweet.
> “Environmental regulations are, in my view, largely terrible,” he said at an event with the libertarian Cato Institute last year. “You have to get permission in advance, as opposed to, say, paying a penalty if you do something wrong, which I think would be much more effective.”
This quote is particularly telling of a billionaire's mindset when the fines are too small to matter.
The truth is somewhere in the middle. Many regulations are terrible and serve as a huge hindrance to innovation, and effectively restrict certain things to only the already-massively-rich entrepreneurs. However, (IMHO) there are a lot of regulations that are important and absolutely should be enforced up front. Finding the right balance is kind of impossible, and I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but even well-intended regulations often just create roadblocks and cement incumbents in a particular space.
>> >Many regulations are terrible and serve as a huge hindrance to innovation
What is an example of a regulation that was a "huge" hinderance to innovation?
Looking at the past 40 years of the US technological progress and the only thing I seen hindering innovation are the tech companies themselves through monopoly, monopsony, patents, and regulatory capture. (Unless the last one is what you meant, but that's a regulation put in place by a monopoly to maintain its monopoloy and not to protect the air we breathe).
EDIT: I am referring to "innovation" not "execution".
Speaking from personal experience running a non-profit seeking to disrupt the entrenched prison communications industry, there have been several. FCC data reporting requirements that took an FTE 200 hours to complete, accessibility requirements that have to be in place before you can (legally) even launch a pilot or MVP, endless legalese documents to parse through, compliance requirements that have to be checked even if they don't make any sense for the application, and some of the best ones: arbitrary requirements like "to be eligible for a proposal/contract, you must be in business at least 10 years and have a minimum $50M in annual revenue" (a requirement clearly written by our incumbent competitors to exclude us that was adopted by the regulators). Oh and all of that stuff you have to deal with before you can even close your first deal.
Most regulations are meant to limit a person or organization's ability to do something, which almost by definition will limit creativity and potential innovation. The challenge is getting the right balance of freedom and regulation that people are suitably protected while also allowing for innovation. And, of course, that balance exists in different places for different people.
Complete de-regulation of a sector, say banking or medicine, would certainly encourage a lot of innovation. A lot of people would also be hurt in the process.
– Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform: Intended to stabilize the system post-crisis, but its complex compliance requirements made it difficult for small and mid-sized banks to offer new products or compete with large incumbents.
- State by state money transmission licensing: Fintechs like PayPal and Stripe had to get 50+ separate state licenses, creating huge compliance costs and delaying product launches.
- FDIC De Novo Bank Rules: caused a collapse in new bank formation for nearly a decade (only a handful of new banks were approved between 2010–2016).
– Over 20 state laws restricted cities from building their own broadband networks, protecting incumbents and stalling fiber deployment.
- Slow spectrum auctions and rigid allocation by FCC delayed rollout of 5G infrastructure compared to countries with faster processes.
- State-based regulation patchwork for insurance: each US state has its own insurance regulator requiring 50+ separate filings for new products, slowing national rollout of innovations
- ACA: while expanding coverage, created heavy administrative burdens for smaller insurers and startups trying to innovate in plan design or digital enrollment
- Conflicting state laws and lack of federal standards created uncertainty for companies like Waymo and Cruise, delaying scaling of self-driving technology.
- Drone FAA rules: heavily limited commercial drone use, slowing the rise of delivery and mapping applications until modernized rules came into effect.
- California's recent, very nuanced "Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act" targeting frontier models and "safety" and "risk reporting" like "critical safety incidents"
Out of curiosity, have you ever attempted to create something from scratch and bring it to market? Not as an employee, but as someone trying to figure it out?
Your work history will impact the way you view this issue IMO.
Yes. 28 years ago I founded a small a software company (4 employees) that made test software for a Tier 1 automotive vendor's ECUs. I sold the IP to them in 2007. Next question? Or do you think my background makes my opinion invalid for another reason?
It was amazing just being able to build things back then. These days you need to cough up $1500 for a PDF of ISO 26262 to even think about doing something commercially with automotive ECUs. Depending on what you're trying to do, there are dozens of additional standards with thousands of pages. Not even to mention CARB compliance.
That sounds really cool. The background does provide a lot of perspective on your views. It makes a lot of sense. Thank you for keeping us safe on the road!
It's confusing how someone who has tried to build anything of substance, in say California, couldn't have run into a regulation or ten stifling innovation.
I for one have seen mid-5 figures spent on a dumpster enclosure, because of building codes.
In the U.S., McKinsey estimates that large infrastructure projects typically take 4 to 5 years to go through federal permitting before construction can begin.
Deployment is necessary for innovation. You can't iterate on designs if you don't deploy them in the real world and if you don't scale up their production.
In some cases you are correct, however the happy middle in this case probably does not include many (most?) of their violations. One particular example:
> Workers have complained of chemical burns from the waste material generated by the tunneling process, and firefighters must decontaminate their equipment after conducting rescues from the project sites. The company was fined more than $112,000 by Nevada’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration in late 2023 after workers complained of “ankle-deep” water in the tunnels, muck spills and burns.
In another part, the company is accused of dumping this water directly into streets (presumably without decontamination).
When I moved to a developing country with very few rules and regulations, sometimes I could feel the libertarianism leaving my body. There is definitely a happy regulatory medium which doesn't involve having to check the shower with a multimeter when moving in.
This is actually what we would love to have as Gov Department - DORO: Department Of Regulations Overview - a body that would asses each regulation and cut of all these that are unnecessary and were clearly created by politicians/lobbyist/lawmakers bribed by big corp. to "lawfully" eliminate competition.
> Many regulations are terrible and serve as a huge hindrance to innovation
Because "Innovation" isn't the be-all-end-all of a regulation or shouldn't be one of its aims or concerns. As a hyperbole, I don't care about "innovation" if you need to throw 4000 people into an industrial shredder in order to do it.
Another day, another invocation of the false dichotomy fallacy.
If the truth isn't somewhere in the middle, then by definition it must be on one of the two extreme edges. That's a pretty bad (and ironic) fallacy to commit, unless you think everything in this world (or at least all regulations) are binary (either perfect or completely worthless)
Not even in one dimension. But that is obviously also a categorization/composition issue and therefore subject to other, potentially fallacious and accordingly named, pitfalls.
> If the truth isn't somewhere in the middle, then by definition it must be on one of the two extreme edges.
Just because accurate results aren't to be found "somewhere (unspecific!) in the middle" doesn't mean that one a) finds them precisely in the (extreme) edges, or fringes, and b) that the middle is completely excluded, especially in the analysis and comparison of dynamic systems (e. g. macroeconomic analysis).
This might work if they have to pay for the full cost of cleanup. Unfortunately as we've seen, limited liability means the company declares bankruptcy and the taxpayers are stuck with the bill.
Yeah, of course you'd rather pay a fine when your net worth is thousands of times more than most people's, and the fines aren't scaled according to net worth.
You see this from time to time with headlines like "$CORP fined fifty MILLION dollars for ..." And then when you look into the details the fine turns out to be about one week of revenue and the offense resulted in early death for thousands of people over the past five years.
Fines that are too small to matter are just called permits after the fact. Hardly the penalty a fine should be, and this is hardly the first time that kind of thing has happened.
He is right, but also the fines need to be higher, especially for repeated violations.
Ever worked in a company where you need approval from 7 separate teams to land a simple change? Just can't get anything done, no matter how useful. This is a huge problem. People generally do not understand what serialized blocking does to performance.
On the other hand the fines cited in the article seem laughably low. I don't know how much ground water was discharged, and how big of a deal it is, but at certain pricetag even billionaires will say: well, it's cheaper to get a cistern and take that water to a water treatment facility or something.
Him being right, or wrong, is a bold call to make.
But all he's saying is he wants to run his company the way tech entrepreneurs have been for a while - "It's better to ask forgiveness than permission" which they like because it's favored toward them, and, by the time a regulator has caught up, they have made a pile of money, or lost it all and gone.
For a different perspective, it's the difference between the kind of (pro-innovation) restrictions imposed on automobile companies versus those (anti-innovation) ones imposed on aircraft companies:
> particularly telling of a billionaire's mindset when the fines are too small to matter
It’s telling that billionaires are human?
Fines being too small to matter are a phenomenon across the income spectrum. From delivery drivers dancing with New York meter maids to American tourists ignoring overseas traffic rules, the notion that inadequate fines stop deterring and become merely a nuisance is well know.
Sure, but the deterrence these people are actively opposing exists to stop them from rendering the area unlivable for everyone. They know this and don't care, and are working to be allowed to ruin the world. That's what's telling.
it's telling that he only sees effectiveness in what he wants. these rules are there for environmental protection, and in a worst case scenario, a fine is not gonna bring back the clean soil, or whatever was done.
Or on average less empathetic and moral than regular joes... It is pretty hard to get to be billionaire without at least something average people would consider immoral.
Fines are usually going to be too small to matter in a world with limited-personal-liability for corporations.
IMO his statement is disingenuous at that higher level. It's telling that billionaires propose things that wouldn't personally cut into their liquid assets, but instead would come out of a company that shields them from personal responsibility.
I mean, this is right out of two books: Abundance, and Why Nothing Works. Both spend maybe 1/3 of their pages detailing the excesses and legalistic nature of env reviews. They are weaponized for political reasons and cause an insane amount of delays. They are put in place for the right reasons, but are too effective at slowing projects down.
That is a very deceptive video/article (at least the first half above the paywall). It is true that a few of these sats will have to come down each day, but the video is of a booster failure/explosion, not a normal planned obsolescence sat re-entry.
And re-entry is part of the cleanup plan. All satellites responsibly launched need a plan to deal with possible orbital waste. By decommissioning in this way, we're reducing overall impact of the constellation.
Given the immense possible good worldwide internet can provide, and the virtuous cycle it creates for the US launch industry, it's really hard to take these claims seriously.
I believe that an atmosphere compatible with human life is a bit more useful than internet by satelite. The fact that the impact of re-entry of satelites is absolute insane. Any good engineering company would study the whole impact of scaling up before doing so. The fact that spacex didn't do that is really worrying and regulation should come to stop what they are doing asap until the impact is better understood. Some more serious engineers at Japan aerospace are studying wooden satelite which is a quite approach to the problem.
I am not aware of threats to the atmosphere from the entry at a 100kg/day scale. And nobody is. At this point risks are hypothetical to the ozone or other layers.
if the aersols do cause any problems we're done for quite a while as they do not seem to come down. As I understand it the amount of aerosol will be quite significant in this layer of athmosphere. https://csl.noaa.gov/news/2025/427_0428.html
It is impossible to make any improvement without some impact. We're way, way past any real problems when discussing a few 100kg of metal falling into the upper atmosphere every day.
Growth versus preservation. India is trashing its air quality burning coal near its cities. Yet that power is lifting millions out of poverty and into the world's second-largest middle class.
Everyone would prefer clean air ceteris paribus. But for a lot of those people, economic security is "more important than preserving the environment."
if you combine all the fallen starlink satellites and the debris/waste they produce in a year, it comes down to about less than 0.1% of what the earth receives from space in the same year
Okay, that makes sense. The reading I did indicated that the composition of the man-made mass is very different, and could greatly elevate the amount of certain elements released in the upper atmosphere, like aluminum. Is this not cause for concern?
The worst thing about space exploration is that it's not fun and optimistic like it was before this specific 2020s phase of capitalism, the best thing is that this crop of billionaires will all be dead before the real cool future stuff could happen anyway.
They're planning to live forever. All of them are investing in longevity research & some of them are young enough to live to see a few breakthroughs that might meaningfully extend their lifespan.
Why assume it's people who can't Google down voting and not Russian and Chinese plants. There's all kinds of topics on here that trigger a down voting campaign that works pretty well on non top comments.
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> in service of the development of modern subterranean transportation
It's not really that, it's a weird parody of "modern subterranean transportation". They could do interesting things with it, but right now it's just private roads. It isn't more efficient than a subway, it isn't more flexible, but it's likely more dangerous.
Cant wait for one of those cars to cook off it's battery pack possibly leading to the car behind it cooking off it's battery pack. And where do the humans in those cars go? Last time I looked at the press around this thing the tunnel is barely wider than the cars. Add fire and smoke and it's just a lot of dead people.
From what I've seen, there are cars (telsa's) driving in a circle and you grab the next one available. Right now someone is driving it but at some point it's supposed to be autonomous. I think when the tunnel was first built you could drive your own car through it but as far as I'm aware they're not doing that anymore (I think it was just a publicity thing before the tunnels were close enough to completion to use).
Looks at Hyperloop. Looks at London subway. Looks at NYC subway. Looks at literally any other subway Yeah, a poorly-made tunnel with cars that fit 2-3 people at a time while requiring each car to have their own driver is very modern and definitely worth environmental violations.
Poorly made two way tunnel... Not even two tunnels so you could send traffic to both direction at same time and have actual potential for reasonable capacity.
I assume though that they would adjust the capacity depending on time of day and whether there's an event or something going on, to some degree.
It's a single lane tunnel and is thus one way. The parking are can only hold so many waiting vehicles and queued passengers. Their options for adjusting capacity are severely limited.
Then you consider what might happen if the lead vehicle in a convoy becomes disabled, or worse, starts on fire.
It's the same reason planes are safer per "passenger mile traveled" but aren't as safe per "total journeys taken." If you crash a plane you stand to injure or kill hundreds of passengers at once.
There's no real need in a static environment, and much simpler ways to do it. Children's toys can follow a line painted on something; they just need proximity sensors and a basic signalling system (RF or also painted on the road) for where to stop and done.
There's no real need for the car to "see" beyond "am I going to run into something" and they operate at speeds where stopping is very feasible.
They're also a bad rival for light rail because they already have to dig a tunnel and the conveyance operates on a fixed path. They picked a domain that light rail is already incredibly good and efficient at.
Zoox has permits to operate autonomously on Las Vegas streets. Tesla is unable to get permits to operate autonomously on isolated, one-lane, one-way streets with no pedestrians, cross-traffic, or even vehicles not under their control. That should tell you everything you need to know about how far reality is away from their corporate puffery.
Not to disparage, but how did you come to that conclusion? A train will always be able to fit more people/m^2 than several cars of equivalent length, due to things like ability to stand, not needing to have multiple engines and trunks, etc.
I watched that video the other day, pretty sure it didn’t say that. What it did point out though is that in most of the system, other than the one main line, there’s just one single-lane tunnel so that when a car is in a tunnel going one way, cars going the other direction have to wait to enter the tunnel until the tunnel is clear.
The title of the video seems pretty accurate: “The Vegas Loop Is Getting Progressively More Stupid.”
Based purely on my own observations, I'd guesstimate that station sees about 50-75 cars per day.
This will require considerable progress in tunneling r&d, which is their primary activity
Takes most of the biking joy away tho.
Tens of thousands of riders when I was there and not a spec of dirt. Very far from perfect, but a long way from useless.
Most videos I've seen recently show a system that, while functional, typically only has a handful of vehicles running simultaneously, each with carrying capacity for one party of up to 3 people.
In 2024-05, they did passenger 2,000,000 [2].
So 1,000,000 passengers in 14 months or ~420 days. That is a average throughput of ~2,400 passengers per day.
In comparison, the Tokyo Marunouchi line averages ~1,100,000 passengers per day [3]. That is ~420x the rate. Every single day, they do what the Las Vegas Loop does in a year.
The peak capacity that they claim without evidence is ~32,000 in a day [4]. The Maruonouchi line does in a day what the Las Vegas Loop at maximum capacity could theoretically do in a entire month.
[1] https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-boring-co-vegas-loop-1-m...
[2] https://www.teslarati.com/boring-company-2-million-passenger...
[3] https://www.japan-experience.com/plan-your-trip/travel-by-tr...
[4] https://www.boringcompany.com/lvcc
You might be shocked to learn the first airplane couldn’t take passengers.
Things improve, or at least attempt to. Even if it fails, I’d rather live in a world where new ideas are being tried and tested and not always talking about how good my horse and cart is.
I have a hard time understanding this criticism. Why not do both?
It seems to me like underground highways make sense as an alternative to above ground highways in urban areas, not that they're an alternative to rail. There's lots of cities with excellent public transport that also make use of underground car travel (Melbourne for e.g.). If a company can figure out how to (safely) make underground highways more quickly and more affordably, it seems like that means we may need to do above-ground roads less frequently -- why would that not be a good thing?
Further, obviously Musk has a PR angle in facilitating tesla traffic here as the test bed in early days, but I don't see any reason that this couldn't be repurposed to rail use at scale.
Being able to make underground tunnels cheaper and faster is cool. Using them for cars is mostly a boondoggle with clearly superior alternatives.
I suspect in practice the actual approach is going to be a mix of all of the above. So my reasoning is primarily that if all cities won't give up cars anyway, it seems objectively better to make it easier to at least move more of them underground. I suppose one case where I would change my mind is if there was evidence that more affordable underground roads reduced the investment in public transit.
…what is it?
So essentially they made a ride comparable to Space Mountain that takes about 2200 passengers per hour.
How did you arrive at tens of thousands of riders?
Imagine framing up all technological innovation this way.
"All this so you can take slightly sharper pictures of your children."
"All this so a few people can go to space."
"All this so a screen be a little brighter."
Lots and lots of little things add up over time to make big technology gains. It is cool to companies like Boring trying shit in the real world.
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.
You need to free yourself from the agenda.
I hate this "if you're not doing the perfect thing don't do anything at all" mindset of the degrowth group.
> I hate this "if you're not doing the perfect thing don't do anything at all" mindset of the degrowth group.
800 environmental violations would suggest it's a little bit worse than "imperfect"
Freezing actual good mass transit progress seems to have been his goal, unfortunately.
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.
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?
People are against bullshit.
We KNOW how to build these type of things. We KNOW what it would cost. We KNOW how to do it right.
Musk had enough money to build something which is worse of everything we already know and dangerous.
You are ignorant and Musk didn't prove shit.
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.
Should we stop all other projects that are short of the perfect solution?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail#Hyp...
Musk literally admitted he wanted to block progress on new rail projects, and the Hyperloop was his PR project to do so. Snake oil.
There are many people who want new train infrastructure. Musk is not one of them.
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.
Looks like its mainly related to waste water and not cleaning up after themselves.
which means the snake oil tends to be called a lot.
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.
There's little to describe "progress" or "technology" in this.
Proper rail-based public transit has existed for centuries and its miles ahead of this.
The tunnels are cool and the technology is neat. I'm not in charge of anything, but no thanks.
Here's where I'm coming from: https://youtu.be/VPjODKUxV5g
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.
Do you all realize the problem here?
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?
Not really following if you're making some other point here.
It's not clear if these violations actually represent a real environmental hazard or are more reflective of NIMBY degrowth sentiment.
> Workers have complained of chemical burns from the waste material generated by the tunneling process, and firefighters must decontaminate their equipment after conducting rescues from the project sites. The company was fined more than $112,000 by Nevada’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration in late 2023 after workers complained of “ankle-deep” water in the tunnels, muck spills and burns.
That sounds like a "real environmental hazard" to me.
It was a chemical to speed up grout curing. I don’t know which one. I looked up a few and they were corrosive petrochemicals with like 20-letter-long names and an acute health exposure rating of 4 on the MSDS. They also didn’t provide PPE or instructions on what PPE was necessary. And have you ever gotten any significant amount of gasoline on your skin? It burns and it is not safe. Here’s a list of chemicals in common gasoline mixtures: Gasoline, Toluene, Hexane, Xylene, Octane, Ethanol, Trimethylbenzene, n-Heptane, Pentane, Cumene, Ethylbenzene, Benzene, n-Hexane, Cyclohexane.
Even if it was just the water in the tunnel — how about you try 8+ hours of heavy work in steel toed boots with damp feet, let alone standing in ankle deep water filled with corrosive chemicals. Even standing still in clean water, your skin basically turns to paste after not too long.
With the way the job market is trending in tech, you might have the opportunity to find out one day while someone sitting in a Herman miller chair in a climate controlled office building dismisses your pain as petty griping.
It's interesting, though, that your first impulse is to defend the robber barons that made this happen.
https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/?parent=acs-sa&or...
Since the year 2000, they've had 45 fines (and many violations per fine) by the federal Occupational Safety & Health Administration, and nearly $8 million in fines. And over $200k in fines just last year. There's separately 34 global violations totalling is over $50 million in fines.
This doesn't make Elon's company's violations excusable - it is however clearly the course of business in construction that these sorts of things happen. I think this is a good criticism of capitalist pressures in general rather than Elon being uniquely shitty in how he operates his companies.
obligatory Elon sucks, i'm just allergic to bullshit and ragebait
Something tells me it’s not NIMBYism.
Here’s an article that has some details on some of the violations [1]. The sound like things that the state legitimately should be regulating and that this would have minimal impact on growth.
[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/elon-musk-boring-company-...
Clearly, anyone who says [complex, multifaceted loose grouping of kind of related things] is [extreme, polarizing claim with no evidence] is not worth listening to further.
Please explain exactly what regulations in this context were 'crafted and utilized by NIMBYs'. Please cite agency and ruling for each supposed grave offense to your anti-NIMBY sensibilities.
it's not clear if you know what environmental regulations are or if you are just shilling for polluting billionaires.
What an acidic thing to fling. I want us to build infrastructure. Nowhere did I say we need do whatever Musk says.
I want us to use cost-benefit analysis to judge infrastructure projects rather than the heavy moral framing we get a lot.
>it's not clear if you know what environmental regulations are or if you are just shilling for polluting billionaires.
This is pretty clearly an escalation beyond what you're describing.
e: Because you did already read these lines, I guess I should spell this out: the former says we can't trust this datapoint as reflecting the issue we're concerned about; the latter says that the former person is either completely ignorant about the subject matter or lying due to corruption. The former is disagreeable; the latter is an ad hominem assuming bad faith against HN guidelines.
> The tricky thing about environmental regulations is that they are crafted and utilized by NIMBYs to block any infrastructure development
This doesn't just say we can't trust a datapoint, it starts with a position premised on bad faith motivations for all environmental regulations. Still not totally equivalent, but I don't think the original commenter was exactly being neutral or reasoned in their opening argument.
As you note, even the uncharitable interpretation isn't equivalent- you say 'not totally equivalent' but they're different quite critically in that the one is attacking a political position and some laws and the other is attacking an individual person on this forum.
The tricky thing about environmental regulations is that they are crafted and utilized by NIMBYs to block any infrastructure development. Even if, on balance, the infrastructure is a net positive.
The tricky thing about deregulating the environment is that deregulations are uncrafted and utilized by amoral capitalists who want to make money no matter what, including by poisoning the land and sea and air as much as they want.
Perhaps missing the point like this was not deliberate, but you nevertheless missed it.
latter says that the former person is either [...] or [...] [...] the latter is an ad hominem assuming bad faith
You went from characterizing it as an either/or comment in one sentence, to characterizing it as a bad faith assumption in the next. This is equivalent to: 'he says it's either odd or even...he says it's odd.'
And yeah, looks like I dropped an 'or' between 'hominem' and 'assuming'. My bad, I wasn't sure how long the edit window lasts and rushed it.
By framing a regulation as some ploy? You're just as ridiculous
I want to build infrastructure too. Just not at the cost of the destruction of the world we live in.
Instead of bringing up safety, I'd bring up the microplastics and other pollutants emitted by the technology of the elastomeric tire and which might be an intrinsic property of cost-effective use of the technology.
Cars get into accidents way more frequently. The American freight rail system derails at a more frequent rate because the private operators are incentivized to really not do any maintenance at all.
Trains don’t “regularly” derail. And when they do, they aren’t as fatal as the median highway crash.
There are unlikely to be too many fatalities in this system because it runs slowly. (Unless Li-on batteries cascade combust somehow.)
https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/d01045/#:~:text=Zero%20Fa...
Sounds like trains are pretty safe to me.
if you don't automatically assume bad faith when dealing with hypercapitalist private infrastructure projects, you're going to be taken advantage of. every time.
that, or you're on the payroll. there's not a ton of wiggle room here.
> A further three studies based on the data of about 200,000 individuals from 30 countries debunked these lay beliefs as illusionary by revealing that cynical (vs. less cynical) individuals generally do worse on cognitive ability and academic competency tasks. Cross-cultural analyses showed that competent individuals held contingent attitudes and endorsed cynicism only if it was warranted in a given sociocultural environment. Less competent individuals embraced cynicism unconditionally, suggesting that-at low levels of competence-holding a cynical worldview might represent an adaptive default strategy to avoid the potential costs of falling prey to others' cunning.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29993325/
GP explicitly specified such an environment. Musk is the epitome of a hypercapitalist - an outlier in terms of wealth, fame, ambition, and micromanagement.
Its also outrageous that companies have to pay for workman's comp insurance /s
That's not something I proposed in my comment.
It's not the boring process. It's the use of concrete curing accelerants producing toxic sludge.
Often, the accelerants would spill into groundwater and mix with concrete and other debris, creating a toxic mix of sludge, sometimes about two-feet deep, that workers would often have to trudge through. The OSHA report cited workers with permanently scarred arms and legs, and one instance in which a worker was hit in the face and seared with the chemical mix. Temperatures would regularly rise to 100 degrees as workers often toiled for 12 hour days, sometimes for six or seven days a week, at a worksite nicknamed “the plantation” by some workers, who spoke to the Nevada safety agency for its report. Workers also claimed having to ask for permission to use the bathroom.
That's the OSHA complaint. The environmental complaint comes from disposing of that sludge.
Sludge removal and treatment is a standard problem in tunneling. Usually, it's pumped out with "trash pumps" that can tolerate rocks and sand. Then it goes through some basic processing - screen out the big rocks, separate water from wet sludge, run the water through a mini sewerage treatment plant on site, squeeze more water out of the sludge, add bentonite as an absorbent to lock up toxics, and truck away the dry sludge.[2]
What it seems The Boring Company has been doing is dumping the wet sludge on a vacant lot in Las Vegas [3] and waiting for the water to run off or evaporate. The vacant lot isn't even out in the desert outside the city; it's in town, and the nearby mall is annoyed.
Reports of water two feet deep in the tunnels means they skimped on pumps and water processing. They're using a TBM, which makes a concrete tube as it digs. Most tunneling operations keep the completed tube dry.
[1] https://www.inc.com/sam-blum/elon-musks-boring-company-subje...
[2] https://www.blackrhinosep.com/application/tunneling-slurry-s...
[3] https://lasvegas.citycast.fm/explainers/boring-company-drill...
The fuck?
"You were driving so fast we gave you a discount on the speeding fine."
Fat Leonard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Leonard_scandal "Lets take the entire United States Seventh Fleet to the South Pacific for prostitutes and classified material handovers."
60 admirals got investigated. One, Admiral Gilbeau, got the first felony on active duty in modern history = 1.5 year prison, and continue collecting your $10,000 monthly pension (while in prison). There were admittedly some punishments, there was also a lot of community service, misdemeanor, $100.
This is ridiculous and why we have the problems with late-stage capitalism that we do. Fines are not high enough. No jail time for environmental crimes.
That's pretty much how courts work :(
The guy who gets busted for possession of 1g of cocaine might get 10-30 days, depending on jurisdiction, judge, and prior record.
Do you think the dealer who gets caught with 5 kilos gets between 137 and 410 years?
Source please.
Otherwise there is a significant difference between using and selling.
Google: how many days of jail time 1 gram cocaine california
As with many legal questions, the matter of jurisdiction comes into play. Possession of any amount in Texas, is supposed to dictate a higher length sentence on average. Florida, heavier than CA but far less than TX guidelines. In actuality, courts tend to sentence based on defendant history and current political climate.
• Cleaner air at street level because vehicle exhaust stays underground and can be filtered, which would have massive health and environmental benefits
• Quieter cities with most traffic noise eliminated
• Cooler temperatures since asphalt and vehicle heat are removed from the surface (urban heat island effect)
• More space for trees, parks, and gardens, improving urban greenery.
• Lower stress levels thanks to quieter, greener surroundings.
• Better physical health from more walkable, pedestrian-friendly spaces.
The only _real_ way to achieve the above goals are building bicycle friendly cities with diverse public transport options and less parking spaces. There are European cities that function more like this.
This is anathemic to the US of course.
https://www.sanpedromarbella.eu/san-pedros-tunnel-a-new-life...
What exhaust? These are all electric cars running in the tunnels.
I think we can do a little better while still reaping the improvements garnered by tunneling.
I can see several things I find _concerning_ about them...
Then we should stop with amatuer hour and outsource to China, where they've lapped us in tunneling technology. It will take more than one ketamine-fueled billionaire breaking laws in Vegas to catch up.
You're right that it's easy to mistake any statement like mine as being a blanket defense of Elon and dismissing valid criticisms, but this discussion as a whole has gone far afield of cement accelerators and chemical burns.
Or maybe there's another reason these high speed rail projects consistently fail. An insane regulatory and litigious environment where no technology progress can be made. Meanwhile, in Asia, rail is being laid at insane pace.
What do you think it'll take to match their progress? Do you honestly think Elon is the reason this is all failing?
Not what I said. I said he did it to try and kill high speed rail, not that he was solely responsible for its failure. And Musk did a whole lot more than tweet.
Just because you are ignorant of the significant evidence that this was (and remains) Musk's goal doesn't mean it isn't true. Ashlee Vance wrote about this way back in 2015: https://x.com/parismarx/status/1167410460125097990 . Just this year he used his involvement in DOGE to cut federal funding for what remains of the project: https://gizmodo.com/musks-doge-takes-aim-at-california-high-...
This quote is particularly telling of a billionaire's mindset when the fines are too small to matter.
What is an example of a regulation that was a "huge" hinderance to innovation?
Looking at the past 40 years of the US technological progress and the only thing I seen hindering innovation are the tech companies themselves through monopoly, monopsony, patents, and regulatory capture. (Unless the last one is what you meant, but that's a regulation put in place by a monopoly to maintain its monopoloy and not to protect the air we breathe).
EDIT: I am referring to "innovation" not "execution".
https://www.pbssocal.org/redefine/group-sues-to-block-new-de...
Complete de-regulation of a sector, say banking or medicine, would certainly encourage a lot of innovation. A lot of people would also be hurt in the process.
Not one (token) example, but "many". But I'm as curious as you are and thirsty for some well-researched and replicated numbers. ;)
- State by state money transmission licensing: Fintechs like PayPal and Stripe had to get 50+ separate state licenses, creating huge compliance costs and delaying product launches.
- FDIC De Novo Bank Rules: caused a collapse in new bank formation for nearly a decade (only a handful of new banks were approved between 2010–2016).
– Over 20 state laws restricted cities from building their own broadband networks, protecting incumbents and stalling fiber deployment.
- Slow spectrum auctions and rigid allocation by FCC delayed rollout of 5G infrastructure compared to countries with faster processes.
- State-based regulation patchwork for insurance: each US state has its own insurance regulator requiring 50+ separate filings for new products, slowing national rollout of innovations
- ACA: while expanding coverage, created heavy administrative burdens for smaller insurers and startups trying to innovate in plan design or digital enrollment
- Conflicting state laws and lack of federal standards created uncertainty for companies like Waymo and Cruise, delaying scaling of self-driving technology.
- Drone FAA rules: heavily limited commercial drone use, slowing the rise of delivery and mapping applications until modernized rules came into effect.
- California's recent, very nuanced "Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act" targeting frontier models and "safety" and "risk reporting" like "critical safety incidents"
Your work history will impact the way you view this issue IMO.
I for one have seen mid-5 figures spent on a dumpster enclosure, because of building codes.
Do you intend that isn't stifling, that a regulatory environment that requires spending 5 figured to house 2 dumpsters isn't stifling?
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-sector/our-insigh...
What? The Pyramids, Roman aqueducts, domes, et cetera weren’t innovations?
> Workers have complained of chemical burns from the waste material generated by the tunneling process, and firefighters must decontaminate their equipment after conducting rescues from the project sites. The company was fined more than $112,000 by Nevada’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration in late 2023 after workers complained of “ankle-deep” water in the tunnels, muck spills and burns.
In another part, the company is accused of dumping this water directly into streets (presumably without decontamination).
Because "Innovation" isn't the be-all-end-all of a regulation or shouldn't be one of its aims or concerns. As a hyperbole, I don't care about "innovation" if you need to throw 4000 people into an industrial shredder in order to do it.
Another day, another invocation of the golden mean fallacy.
If the truth isn't somewhere in the middle, then by definition it must be on one of the two extreme edges. That's a pretty bad (and ironic) fallacy to commit, unless you think everything in this world (or at least all regulations) are binary (either perfect or completely worthless)
In one dimension. If both sides are fundamentally wrong, the middle is probably also mischaracterised.
Pro-and anti-phlogiston theorists [1] weren’t validated by a little phlogiston. They were superseded by oxygen theory.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory
Not even in one dimension. But that is obviously also a categorization/composition issue and therefore subject to other, potentially fallacious and accordingly named, pitfalls.
Just because accurate results aren't to be found "somewhere (unspecific!) in the middle" doesn't mean that one a) finds them precisely in the (extreme) edges, or fringes, and b) that the middle is completely excluded, especially in the analysis and comparison of dynamic systems (e. g. macroeconomic analysis).
Not to mention a fine won't do much for people who get sick and die.
You see this from time to time with headlines like "$CORP fined fifty MILLION dollars for ..." And then when you look into the details the fine turns out to be about one week of revenue and the offense resulted in early death for thousands of people over the past five years.
Ever worked in a company where you need approval from 7 separate teams to land a simple change? Just can't get anything done, no matter how useful. This is a huge problem. People generally do not understand what serialized blocking does to performance.
On the other hand the fines cited in the article seem laughably low. I don't know how much ground water was discharged, and how big of a deal it is, but at certain pricetag even billionaires will say: well, it's cheaper to get a cistern and take that water to a water treatment facility or something.
But all he's saying is he wants to run his company the way tech entrepreneurs have been for a while - "It's better to ask forgiveness than permission" which they like because it's favored toward them, and, by the time a regulator has caught up, they have made a pile of money, or lost it all and gone.
https://fee.org/articles/how-the-faa-is-keeping-flying-cars-...
It’s telling that billionaires are human?
Fines being too small to matter are a phenomenon across the income spectrum. From delivery drivers dancing with New York meter maids to American tourists ignoring overseas traffic rules, the notion that inadequate fines stop deterring and become merely a nuisance is well know.
Would be useful to remember that if Musk or Bezos say something, it may have the same chance of being right as what a delivery driver would say.
IMO his statement is disingenuous at that higher level. It's telling that billionaires propose things that wouldn't personally cut into their liquid assets, but instead would come out of a company that shields them from personal responsibility.
But oh poor Musk (being the richest in the world) has to have his fine reduced.
Fine you say? Cool. That tells everyone that this is just a payment to continue as normal and to include this extra fee.
And that if this crime is a fine, then its only for the lower class.
https://www.ktnv.com/news/workers-allege-chemical-burns-from...
it's always privatize the profits, socialize the costs
he's doing the same thing with Starlink which is going to vaporize many thousands of toxic satellites out of LEO into the atmosphere
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-space-orbit-satellit...
imagine what he's going to do on the Moon or Mars
And re-entry is part of the cleanup plan. All satellites responsibly launched need a plan to deal with possible orbital waste. By decommissioning in this way, we're reducing overall impact of the constellation.
Given the immense possible good worldwide internet can provide, and the virtuous cycle it creates for the US launch industry, it's really hard to take these claims seriously.
Educate us on how methalox rockets are a significant environmental concern?
It's hard to take your argument seriously if you think that's more important than preserving the environment
Okay, go convince a few billion Indians and Chinese they should wait to industrialize because the environment can’t take it.
Growth versus preservation. India is trashing its air quality burning coal near its cities. Yet that power is lifting millions out of poverty and into the world's second-largest middle class.
Everyone would prefer clean air ceteris paribus. But for a lot of those people, economic security is "more important than preserving the environment."
Polluting the upper atmosphere with copper, aluminium and other compounds with unknown consequences is hardly a cleanup plan
Edit: I can’t find a source for any number for the increase. If you know could you share one?
Ah nevermind this seems solid https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02731...
The weather? Or the latest invasion that you've launched? That's probably boring, so it's a tricky situation.
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It's not really that, it's a weird parody of "modern subterranean transportation". They could do interesting things with it, but right now it's just private roads. It isn't more efficient than a subway, it isn't more flexible, but it's likely more dangerous.
I suggest you actually look into what the the Boring Company's roads in Las Vegas actually are.
What you image as subterranean transportation isn't even what BC is striving for.
Looks at Hyperloop. Looks at London subway. Looks at NYC subway. Looks at literally any other subway Yeah, a poorly-made tunnel with cars that fit 2-3 people at a time while requiring each car to have their own driver is very modern and definitely worth environmental violations.
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/california-dismantles-landmark-e...