Induced demand often happens, but certainly not always. It just depends on latent demand and network effects.
More importantly, the appearance of induced demand is not a general argument against building roads! People get value out of getting to places. If we build road B intending to relieve congestion on road A, but road A stays just as congested, we nevertheless have enabled people to get places with road B that they would not otherwise have been able to reach. That increases utility.
All of this applies to mass transit as well. The BART is currently at capacity during rush hour; if a parallel transit line was built, this would probably fill up with people without reducing congestion on BART, but it would still be creating value!
Certainly people get value out of getting to places. If you walk a mile in Paris, there are like 50 places worth going to. If you walk a mile somewhere around the middle ring road surrounding Houston, there's nowhere worth going to. Scale back car use to something reasonable, make the places smaller, move them closer together, and that way we can have nice things again.
Do you happen to have any examples of where induced demand has not happened? My understanding is that it is pretty much guaranteed, especially in larger cities. I think New York's bridges and tunnels are the canonical examples of this. I say pretty much because I assume there must be cases where it didn't happen, but I am unaware of them.
> More importantly, the appearance of induced demand is not a general argument against building roads! People get value out of getting to places. If we build road B intending to relieve congestion on road A, but road A stays just as congested, we nevertheless have enabled people to get places with road B that they would not otherwise have been able to reach. That increases utility.
There are cases where this doesn't apply, though. For instance, building motorways into the centre of cities. Yes, it means more people can get to the centre, but now there are too many cars in the centre for anyone to move around, including much more efficient forms of transport like buses. In that case, the city is going to function better if the road was never built, and people adapted their behaviour, either to move out of suburbs closer to a higher density core, or to work outside of the central area, or to use public transport. Unless you can have some other form of regulation, for instance to enforce a minimum number of people per vehicle, then an influx of inefficient vehicles in terms of road space to utility, will clearly damage the efficiency of the transport system, and the ability for people to move around.
Spot on with the "still creating value" stuff. With most things, creating more so more people can have it is seen as good. With roads, it's somehow seen as bad.
It makes sense if the roads have negative externalities, like noise, or ugliness, or pollution, or destroying pedestrian access. But none of that applies to tunnels used by cars running on clean energy.
Surely the total amount of resources dedicated to transport has increased, and potentially the number of people wasting time commuting. There needs to be some practical limit to how much "infrastructure" we build of all types. Especially in localities that are already completely dominated by roads and cars.
The problem is that people live increasingly elongated lives that lack a grounded sense of place or community. Whole neighbourhoods are just a nuisance in the way between place A and place B. What about place C that is stuck in the middle with the pollution, noise, and congestion?
That's the good thinking, but because it isn't intuitive it often gets kicked to the curb by bad thinking. More roads = less traffic, right? right? No?
One could also use tunnels to build subways and presumably Hyperloops. I wonder, though, about why big infrastructure projects so horrendously expensive, in America in particular.
There are developers, planners, consultants, politicians, unions, contractors, sub contractors, sub-sub contractors, and they're all out for all they can get. There are lawyers every step of the way. Nobody communicates well. Small hang-ups at the wrong place send the entire operation grinding to a halt. Can this be fixed? Is a big dumb tunnel digging operation the point of entry for infrastructure construction disruption in America? That would be nice. We're good at moving the bits around. We suck at atoms.
Or is Musk setting himself up to be the next Robert Moses? Someone with the capability to move mountains, but not terribly discriminating about whether or not a given mountain should be moved. Musk doesn't talk like someone who's ever had a discussion with an Urban planner about the real reasons as to why our transportation problems are problems.
US infrastructure construction costs are among the highest in the world. There appear to be multiple root causes including: extensive legal protections for private property owners, environment reviews and lawsuits, need to work across multiple government boundaries, labor laws, union work rules.
Tunnels will be required on Mars to shield from radiation. Getting a head start on the technology while on Earth only makes sense. Pretty much everything he plans is in perspective of having a dual use: will it be needed on Mars - SpaceX's true goal? I hate to say the word but, it's all about synergies.
If a restaurant started giving out free food, you wouldn't be surprised when more people than usual went to eat there.
Induced demand only happens when the road is underpriced. Any road can be made immune to induced demand by tolling at a price that reflects demand. Too much traffic? Raise the price. Looking a bit empty? Lower the price.
Car dependence is only common in the US because drivers do not pay the true cost of driving. Many people could not afford to drive if they had to pay market price to use roads and parking. By disconnecting the cost of transportation from its use, we have evolved a society that is overly dependent on transportation, and that is overly sensitive to increases in transportation costs. This applies to all modes - not just cars.
Then why build roads at all? If N + 1 means more traffic than surely N - 1 means less? So 0 roads, no traffic! Seriously though isn't this a related rates problem? Adding roads adds capacity and also induces demand. Are the two in lockstep? Can the capacity added be greater than the demand induced?
A tunnel doesn't have to specifically be for cars. Could run busses, trains, etc.. More electric cars on the road though wouldn't output more pollution around the road.
Infrastructure projects should respond to the density and context of the neighborhood. Don't build a low-throughput highway between high density Manhattan and high density western Queens or it'll immediately become congested. Build a train instead.
A bias toward highways in cities, which are inherently low throughput, has been the norm and also the problem over the last 80 years of urban infrastructure projects.
Induced demand is one of those things that always struck me as an abused concept. Yes, it happens, but it's impossible for it to be always true. New roads will attract more traffic, but only up to a point. There exist roads in the United States that aren't experiencing traffic jams at rush hour. If Induced Demand were a law, that wouldn't be true. So you can't just say that building new roads won't alleviate traffic, period. There are cases where it is true, and there are cases were adding new roads actually make traffic worse, but there are also cases where adding roads (or tunnels) will alleviate traffic.
One could view the US Interstate Highway System and its legacy of suburban sprawl as a massive, decades-long effort to reach that ceiling, but we don't appear to have run out of headroom yet.
If you know 285 has an extra lane now, you'll go ahead and run that errand at a certain time that perhaps you wouldn't have otherwise. Fascinating stuff.
If Musk had talked with any expert in transportation at all he'd know that building a tunnel highway won't solve traffic problems in the long term.
Either:
A) He hasn't talked with any experts at all.
B) He doesn't believe the experts.
or C) He doesn't think inducing demand is a problem because he owns a car company.
If you move into a bigger house, your hallways will not fill up with more traffic. Currently humans are required at least 1 per car. Thus the housing and employment of those humans is more of a limiting factor on road demand, or perhaps car ownership or desire to drive somewhere, more so than availability of roads.
If roads are clearer, then people tend to move farther from work, which increases the number of cars on the road at any given time. Then the roads clog up again. Increased highway construction has been enabling people to move farther and farther out into exurbs (which people think will be nice places to live, and cheaper, but that turn out create rather shabby quality of life compared to walkable cities).
My laymen's understanding (from various documentaries & articles) is that the expensive part of tunnel construction is managing the transitions between different materials. Boring through hard rock might be slow, but hitting pockets of mud, loose rock and other things (especially when unexpected) can seriously mess up the works, and cause massive delays due to machine damage or reassessment and reinforcement/collapse mitigation.
AIUI many (most?) big TBMs are heavily bespoke systems specifically built for their planned route, and it's not unusual to just scrap them after the job is done.
So, it's not immediately clear that speeding up the 'easy' part will have a huge impact on the overall outcome, if the bulk of the time & uncertainty is in the hard bits.
I wonder if there are any currently underused means of sensing some distance ahead get advanced warning of nasty transitions?
> big TBMs are heavily bespoke systems specifically built for their planned route, and it's not unusual to just scrap them after the job is done.
Would you say, they are expensive powerful machines built for a single use to be thrown away? Where much of the expense is due to the lack of re-usability?
I wonder if Elon Musk has any experience with anything like that.
I'm sure there are various ways the work spaceX has done on reuse could apply, perhaps in reliability engineering the most.
I recall a statement along the lines of 'we could reuse it, but if X, Y, or Z seriously fails in-situ, we'd spend at least as much as a new machine in trying to extricate and repair it. So we don't.'
No doubt bits of the machines are modular and can be salvaged and reused, but especially in urban tunneling, the initial bore access can be very tight, and machines are often assembled in-situ and could never be removed in one piece. That, and the sheer punishment they receive during operation makes an easy-to-dismantle design either more expensive or less performant.
Finally, my understanding is that the bulk of the cost (especially in overruns) has little to do with the TBM itself, but rather the delays incurred when the territory doesn't match the map.
So the solution would be to make a boring system capable of rapid reconfiguration to handle as many expected and unexpected regions as routinely as possible, rather than going for flat-out speed or ultimate machine reuse.
This is not correct. Most TBMs are advanced into a receiving pit or shaft, disassembled, and moved. Leaving tons of steel in the ground is not cost effective unless schedule is your main driver.
If uncertainty is such a big problem, aren't there any technology solutions for it? Can radar be used to tell the density of materials along the whole boring route?
I think radar is mostly impractical due to poor signal penetration into the sorts of material (and at the sorts of ranges) that would be useful.
Sonar or other acoustic-type seismic sensing (drill holes, place microphone/transducer array, fire small explosive shot, and analyse shockwave propagation) is more practical, but still slow (needs a lot of boreholes), not amazingly high resolution, and probably disruptive to the neighbours if you're in an urban environment.
Thinking aloud here (and for all I know, it already happens), something like using oilwell-drilling tech to push a narrow horizontal bore along the tunnel path, and then sending a semi-autonomous sensor robot to do these sorts of scans at regular intervals might be better than drilling the inspection bores from the surface. There's still a bunch of issues if you drill into a pressurised water or mud pocket, but hopefully less than if your 10m-dia main cutter hits same.
It's likely that Musk has a new technique in mind for tunnelling otherwise what's the point of going it alone?
What is the new technique? Well that would be laser drilling into the face on a slight downward slant; then fill that with liquid nitrogen. Wait for a half hour or so for things to freeze up and then smack the whole thing with a huge hammer and it'll all crack right open.
We can't afford to maintain the surface roads & bridges we already built, and tunnels are more expensive and require more maintenance by like an order of magnitude. (I made that up, but I'm pretty sure it's right, to within an order of magnitude... but if tunnels are 1000x more expensive, then I'm wrong).
I can admire someone who has the resources to exclude himself from the traffic problem instead taking action to try and solve the whole problem for everyone. He could do what other billionaires do and buy a helicopter.
Still, the only way that tunnels can "obviously" solve the traffic problem is if they're so cheap that we can easily build more of them than we ever need -- and we can't currently do that with roads, even if we have the space. New York and Boston and other places have some tunnels, and also terrible traffic.
If we really do have the resources to take on an infrastructure project of this magnitude, wouldn't it be worth re-evaluating why we're driving, and reducing that instead? The problem with traffic is the traffic. If there wasn't all the traffic, there wouldn't be congestion, we wouldn't need more roads & tunnels.
The contractor end of a tunnel building project might be a good deal though. Convince enough people it's a good idea, and you've got big business for decades to come.
Yes and no. The US is rich enough to where, yes, we could raise taxes and fund infrastructure better.
At the same time, some forms of infrastructure have been over-built. We've demonstrated a massive preference for (wide) roads over walking/biking/transit, and it turns out supporting mostly single-occupancy vehicles as the default transportation mode is extremely expensive.
For example, take this blog post analyzing why a poor area of town is a better revenue generator than a more affluent area; part of the reason is that the older, poorer area just has narrower roads, which reduced upkeep costs: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/10/poor-neighborh...
It should go without saying, but having low-density design throughout our country drastically raises infrastructure costs. The roads needs to be longer (and wider), you need more miles of pipes, and electric wire, and fiber, etc.
If that's true, what is the reason? Is it because roads are public spending and not private development?
I guess I do have to clarify that saying we can or can't afford it is overloaded. We may have the money to do it and still not be able to afford it for a variety of reasons including politics and higher priorities. I think it's fair to say we can't afford it when we have debt and we're not fixing the problem. All the money we have is currently going to other things.
So how do we make money fixing it? If we would make money, why are we falling behind rather than getting ahead, if it was such a clear win economically, why aren't we doing it already?
This article implies that our current annual rate of return on highways is less than 10%:
FWIW, I also think it's fairly easy to look at the actual scale of existing infrastructure and come to the conclusion that the magnitude of the problem isn't something that billions or a trillion dollars will put a real dent in; it looks bigger than that to me just looking at these maps:
The whole point is that he's working towards making tunneling cheaper. If he builds a cheaper tunneling machine, and a cheaper to operate tunnel via hyperloop, then what exactly are you complaining about?
Cars and public transport are vastly different in capacity. A tunnel for cars is obviously a crazy idea but what if it carried some sort of pods that carried lots of people at once, maybe in a vacuum, at fast speeds?
You couldn't make efficient pods while complying with US railroad regulations (the US high speed trains are the heaviest in the world because the laws basically require trains to be armoured. Comparison to the US love of SUVs left as an exercise to the reader). If you can find a way around those regulations that would work, but seems overcomplicated compared to just applying your way around those regulations to ordinary high-speed rail.
Perhaps, but in a tunnel you have to deal with preventing water leaks and pumping out ground water, maintaining ventilation systems, lighting, etc. Plus fixing things like potholes will be more costly in a tunnel.
Depends what you use tunnels for. Subway systems encourage density in cities. In a plane, you can see the Toronto subway lines based on the density around the stations. But new subways tunnels are the big expense that blocks more of then being built. (Though I've heard station construction also is a big cost). Dense areas lead to more walkers, less drivers, cheaper overall infrastructure.
It's not about having more infrastructure to maintain, it's about replacing the expensive stuff we have with efficient infra instead.
Yeah, totally. At least that's one way to look at it. There are multiple right answers. Lowering driving rates helps, flexible work hours helps, increasing public transportation helps. Any of these would diffuse traffic jams, and no there's no one single problem and no one single solution -- unless nobody drove at all.
But that's why building tunnels doesn't seem like the best first-line defense. It's expensive, and it's fixed and inflexible, and doesn't reduce demand. It could help, but it could also hurt unless tunnels are less expensive to build & maintain than roads.
I was trying to be playfully sarcastic by saying the problem with traffic is traffic. Most larger cities in the US, there's only a traffic congestion problem during rush hour, accidents, and road construction. (The city I live in does enough road construction every year, enough that it's widely considered to be a top contributing factor to traffic congestion.)
LA traffic, which is what the article referred to, is worse than that, it's density is getting high enough that traffic congestion lasts all day in some places, rush hour is not just slow but crushing, and accidents can and do routinely prevent tens of thousands of people from working. It does seem like there must be a large economic cost to LA's traffic.
Yeah, pursuing a culture shift that discourages pointlessly-standardized working hours and encourages remote work when possible might even have a tangible effect on traffic.
That said traffic is often one of those unfortunate predator-prey type dynamics, where congestion being reduced often encourages more folks to drive until the system returns to an (unfortunate) equilibrium...
Light rail solves urban congestion, too, and a city that doesn't already have a subway isn't all that likely also to be so densely involute that rights of way can't be secured for the trackage. Elevated electric trams are a thing, too, and require a much smaller ground footprint.
Not that I don't get what he's saying, and I do get that existing and well proven systems aren't sexy, but I feel like either of those is going to be an easier sell, and a much faster implementation, than an underground system. There's infrastructure down there! That's what "infra" means. Easier not to have to work around that, if you can.
There's reason why the US stopped investing in light rail.
>The social and physical construction of suburban America really was quite complex. It was a very elaborate system, and clearly a massive social engineering project that has changed US society enormously. [27] Incidentally, I don’t have a personal objection to suburbs, in fact I live in one, but suburbanization is a different question. [28] It starts back in the 1940s with a literal conspiracy. I mean a conspiracy that went to court. The conspirators got a minor pat on the wrist however.
>They were General Motors, Standard Oil of California and, I think, Firestone Rubber. The origins of suburbia reveal an attempt to take over a fairly efficient mass-transportation system in parts of California — the electric railways in Los Angeles and the like — and destroy them so as to shift energy use to fossil fuels and increase consumer demand for rubber, automobiles and trucks and so on. [29] It was a literal conspiracy. It went to court. The courts fined the corporations $5000, or something like that, probably equivalent to the cost of their victory dinner.[30]
>But what happened in California started a process that then expanded — and in many ways. It included the interstate highway system. That was presented as part of the defense against the Russians. It was launched under the Interstate Defense Highway Act of 1956, and was intended to facilitate the movement of people and goods, troops and arms, and, allegedly, to prevent overpopulation in specific areas that could become the focus of nuclear attack. [31] The slogan of defense is the standard way of inducing the taxpayer to pay the cost of the next stage of the hi-tech economy of course.[32] That’s true whether it be computers, the Internet or, as in this case, a car-based transportation system.[33]
>From the late 1940s, into and through the 50s, there developed a complex interaction between federal government, state and local government, real-estate interests, commercial interests and court decisions, which had the effect of undermining the mass transit system across the country. It was pretty efficient in certain areas. If you go back a century ago for example, it was possible to travel all around New England on electric railways. The first chapter of E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime documents it.[34] Subsequently, we saw the elimination of the mass transport system in favor of fossil fuel use, automobiles, roads and airplanes, which are also an offshoot of federal government.
The DFW area has built 90+ miles of light rail in the last 20 years (that's just under the total amount for the Bay Area which had older systems), and it is still expanding.
It's not my impression that light rail is done having regularly used the system
I think light rail is fantastic - in London we have the DLR which is fully automated (there is an assistant onboard who can override), and it's a thoroughly pleasant experience. We fondly call it the smallest rollercoaster :)
But it lowers property values close by, the noise is quite significant. So putting light rail in a tunnel would be the better option.
If Musk can really lower costs, London would be a good client. I'm sure that if he could reduce construction costs for new tube lines by 80% (costs are mostly tunnels), there would be at least 4 new lines that could be approved quickly. After that, they'd still have money left over from what they now plan to spend on Crossrail 2.
Same! You actually get to meet people and have conversations with people like a normal human being instead of a filter-bubbled Internet habitué. And it's much easier to be in the world when you don't spend all your time
looking at it through panes of glass.
This is just a wild guess, but could there be more to it than just solving traffic problems? I mean, the best solution for a permanent settlement on Mars would be underground, as to shield from radiation etc. It's a funny thought, but it would make sense to aquire experience with large earth-moving operations to improve on the technology and study the feasibility.
Ah, the underground Mars colony. It was confusing to me as to why this was so relevant to SpaceX that they'd not only take away engineering resources from other projects, but also start ripping up their parking lot to experiment.
If you want to build a radiation-shielded settlement on Mars, the best bet is to dig. But how do you dig on Mars? Just as Tesla & SpaceX solve the question of electric power in space, this project starts to solves the underground colony question...
I doubt it. Public contracts would be the bulk, if not the overwhelming majority of their business. Just like with SpaceX, which relies heavily on NASA and USAF contracts.
I think it'll be neat to continue to use the word "earth" as a quaint anachronism in some long distant future. A great opportunity to explain to kids that humanity was once limited to a single astronomical body...
This is a good idea, and I like to watch Elon be ambitious, but it's probably pretty annoying to work at SpaceX right now. One day you show up to work and, where you used to park your car, there is a giant hole in the ground. It's there because the CEO of the company you work for, who is already splitting his time between two companies, wants to put some of his energy towards a third unrelated company.
You are spending your time getting things into space and your CEO is literally heading in the opposite direction.
"A news report about three SpaceX employees who were hit by a car on Dec. 17 after leaving work. The incident occurred at 2:15 a.m. About three hours later, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk posted the following Tweets:
@elonmusk
Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging..."
Meh. He probably could have had a pedestrian bridge approved and installed by now for the same cost as the exploratory hole.
Or even built over a weekend, then deal with the consequences and approval process after. You can get a way with a lot when it comes to personal safety.
Yes, I'm sure that's at least part of the reason why he's doing this. He's trying to "learn" about digging (and reaching 5x, 10x higher efficiency) by doing a (hopefully) profitable business around it first.
Here in Munich, Germany, public transport in the city center is based on a very small number of tunnels for underground trains. There is one main tunnel for city traversal, and about 5 or so underground tunnels. Together they bear a large part of the commuters traffic. Currently, the construction for another large train tunnel is about to begin. From that perspective, one wouldn't need an extremely large number of tunnels to vastly enhance traffic across a dense populated area. So when Musk is building tunnels, they aren't direct replacements for highways. They are either train tunnels, or hyperloop tunnels, or if they are car tunnels, they are for autonomous electric cars, which are driving literally bumper to bumper across the tunnels. So they would carry much more traffic in a more organized way than the normal highway. So it all comes down to whether he manages to improve the boring process to a point where people would want to digg more tunnels as with current methods.
I've become completely disenchanted with Elon Musk over time. I used to be a huge fan and cheerleader, and enthusiastically pointed to him as inspiration.
But slowly I started to realize that I was buying a lot into carefully crafted propaganda. The way SpaceX used lawyers to keep PSLV at bay, all the while Musk gassed on about free markets and competition made me a bit mad. Then he had that quip where he said he was "nauseatingly pro American" and that America was the biggest force for good the world had ever seen. Then he said he was a proud centrist and donated money to anti-environment republicans. And so on and so on. Accusing employees of shilling for unions. Misleading people about his level of technical expertise. Calling lane-assist "auto-pilot" for profit.
At some point I realized that his "brilliant" approach to tech was essentially promising elite people that they could be ultra-green, better than vegetarians and hippies, while keeping the luxuries of sports cars, mansions with solar shingles, and rockets to mars. You don't have to do anything other than express support for him, and you're already better than people making personal sacrifices for the environment. Amazing!
I now think of his "luxury-first" approach as "trickle-down environmentalism". And I think it will be about as successful as its economic counterpart.
You've managed to let cynicism overcome the actual good his companies do. We now have good electric cars, we now can launch stuff to space at a fraction of the price.
Assume that you're right and he's not that nice a person: still because of him we're now somewhere we would not be otherwise. I think what he brings to the table far outweight any thing like "doesn't like unions" or "is an opportunistic campaign donor".
> I've become completely disenchanted with Elon Musk over time.
There's your problem: being enchanted in the first place. The tech world likes to build these epic hagiographies of people who never asked for them and then huff when reality—inevitably—fails to keep up with the myth.
Flawed human accomplishes great things is the story of most of history's pioneers.
> The tech world likes to build these epic hagiographies of people who never asked for them
This is not true. These people, by the very nature of their positions as chiefs of well-known organizations, have to maintain near untarnished super-human public perceptions (at least to the people that support their organization/company/ideals). They ask for it by accepting the position in the first place. You don't think Elon has a PR team?
It's good advice to not let one's self to become enchanted with these sort of figures, but don't act surprised when other people fall for it. All those people wouldn't have their jobs if it wasn't effective.
Which anti-environment Republicans has he donated to?
As for the rest, look at what he (or at least his companies) have actually done. Tesla has succeeded in making electric cars cool. Their stated mission is to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable transport, and given the many long-range EVs announced by major car companies in the past few years, I think they've already succeeded at that. SpaceX has succeeded in building a remarkably cheap rocket, has recovered them in a way nobody else has done, and is making great strides towards reusing them (although we can't count reuse itself under the "already done" umbrella).
Does he have some weird opinions? Sure. Does he sometimes do bad things? Yep. But who doesn't? Unlike your typical billionaire, he at least has some pretty awesome achievements to balance that out.
As per my last point, I don't know if Musk's "moonshots" will actually pan out. His businesses certainly are taking credit for just about everything that happens in tech, but I'm not convinced they're the ones leading the revolution.
I had a similar epiphany about Apple. Basically corporations are all profit seeking entities and we shouldn't look to them to be our saviour. It's not really their agenda.
His company makes the quickest, safest family car ever made. His rocket company has greatly reduced the cost of getting into space. Now he wants to revolutionize tunneling. Maybe it's good that you separate the man from the great achievements of the engineers that actually design and build the great things.
It's not the CEO's job to be an engineer. Seems like Elon is doing his CEO job fabulously.
Readit News
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
More importantly, the appearance of induced demand is not a general argument against building roads! People get value out of getting to places. If we build road B intending to relieve congestion on road A, but road A stays just as congested, we nevertheless have enabled people to get places with road B that they would not otherwise have been able to reach. That increases utility.
All of this applies to mass transit as well. The BART is currently at capacity during rush hour; if a parallel transit line was built, this would probably fill up with people without reducing congestion on BART, but it would still be creating value!
There are cases where this doesn't apply, though. For instance, building motorways into the centre of cities. Yes, it means more people can get to the centre, but now there are too many cars in the centre for anyone to move around, including much more efficient forms of transport like buses. In that case, the city is going to function better if the road was never built, and people adapted their behaviour, either to move out of suburbs closer to a higher density core, or to work outside of the central area, or to use public transport. Unless you can have some other form of regulation, for instance to enforce a minimum number of people per vehicle, then an influx of inefficient vehicles in terms of road space to utility, will clearly damage the efficiency of the transport system, and the ability for people to move around.
It makes sense if the roads have negative externalities, like noise, or ugliness, or pollution, or destroying pedestrian access. But none of that applies to tunnels used by cars running on clean energy.
The problem is that people live increasingly elongated lives that lack a grounded sense of place or community. Whole neighbourhoods are just a nuisance in the way between place A and place B. What about place C that is stuck in the middle with the pollution, noise, and congestion?
One could also use tunnels to build subways and presumably Hyperloops. I wonder, though, about why big infrastructure projects so horrendously expensive, in America in particular. There are developers, planners, consultants, politicians, unions, contractors, sub contractors, sub-sub contractors, and they're all out for all they can get. There are lawyers every step of the way. Nobody communicates well. Small hang-ups at the wrong place send the entire operation grinding to a halt. Can this be fixed? Is a big dumb tunnel digging operation the point of entry for infrastructure construction disruption in America? That would be nice. We're good at moving the bits around. We suck at atoms.
Or is Musk setting himself up to be the next Robert Moses? Someone with the capability to move mountains, but not terribly discriminating about whether or not a given mountain should be moved. Musk doesn't talk like someone who's ever had a discussion with an Urban planner about the real reasons as to why our transportation problems are problems.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-08/why-u-s-i...
http://www.citylab.com/work/2014/04/7-reasons-us-infrastruct...
Induced demand only happens when the road is underpriced. Any road can be made immune to induced demand by tolling at a price that reflects demand. Too much traffic? Raise the price. Looking a bit empty? Lower the price.
Car dependence is only common in the US because drivers do not pay the true cost of driving. Many people could not afford to drive if they had to pay market price to use roads and parking. By disconnecting the cost of transportation from its use, we have evolved a society that is overly dependent on transportation, and that is overly sensitive to increases in transportation costs. This applies to all modes - not just cars.
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A bias toward highways in cities, which are inherently low throughput, has been the norm and also the problem over the last 80 years of urban infrastructure projects.
Increasing the supply doesn't affect demand; it just changes the realized price and quantity to another place in the same demand relationship.
Either: A) He hasn't talked with any experts at all. B) He doesn't believe the experts. or C) He doesn't think inducing demand is a problem because he owns a car company.
None of these possibilities are very good looks.
Just think how bad the smog would be on a car tunnel. Unless they limit it to zero emission vehicles....
AIUI many (most?) big TBMs are heavily bespoke systems specifically built for their planned route, and it's not unusual to just scrap them after the job is done.
So, it's not immediately clear that speeding up the 'easy' part will have a huge impact on the overall outcome, if the bulk of the time & uncertainty is in the hard bits.
I wonder if there are any currently underused means of sensing some distance ahead get advanced warning of nasty transitions?
Would you say, they are expensive powerful machines built for a single use to be thrown away? Where much of the expense is due to the lack of re-usability?
I wonder if Elon Musk has any experience with anything like that.
I recall a statement along the lines of 'we could reuse it, but if X, Y, or Z seriously fails in-situ, we'd spend at least as much as a new machine in trying to extricate and repair it. So we don't.'
No doubt bits of the machines are modular and can be salvaged and reused, but especially in urban tunneling, the initial bore access can be very tight, and machines are often assembled in-situ and could never be removed in one piece. That, and the sheer punishment they receive during operation makes an easy-to-dismantle design either more expensive or less performant.
Finally, my understanding is that the bulk of the cost (especially in overruns) has little to do with the TBM itself, but rather the delays incurred when the territory doesn't match the map.
So the solution would be to make a boring system capable of rapid reconfiguration to handle as many expected and unexpected regions as routinely as possible, rather than going for flat-out speed or ultimate machine reuse.
Sonar or other acoustic-type seismic sensing (drill holes, place microphone/transducer array, fire small explosive shot, and analyse shockwave propagation) is more practical, but still slow (needs a lot of boreholes), not amazingly high resolution, and probably disruptive to the neighbours if you're in an urban environment.
Thinking aloud here (and for all I know, it already happens), something like using oilwell-drilling tech to push a narrow horizontal bore along the tunnel path, and then sending a semi-autonomous sensor robot to do these sorts of scans at regular intervals might be better than drilling the inspection bores from the surface. There's still a bunch of issues if you drill into a pressurised water or mud pocket, but hopefully less than if your 10m-dia main cutter hits same.
What is the new technique? Well that would be laser drilling into the face on a slight downward slant; then fill that with liquid nitrogen. Wait for a half hour or so for things to freeze up and then smack the whole thing with a huge hammer and it'll all crack right open.
Am I dreaming? :)
I can admire someone who has the resources to exclude himself from the traffic problem instead taking action to try and solve the whole problem for everyone. He could do what other billionaires do and buy a helicopter.
Still, the only way that tunnels can "obviously" solve the traffic problem is if they're so cheap that we can easily build more of them than we ever need -- and we can't currently do that with roads, even if we have the space. New York and Boston and other places have some tunnels, and also terrible traffic.
If we really do have the resources to take on an infrastructure project of this magnitude, wouldn't it be worth re-evaluating why we're driving, and reducing that instead? The problem with traffic is the traffic. If there wasn't all the traffic, there wouldn't be congestion, we wouldn't need more roads & tunnels.
The contractor end of a tunnel building project might be a good deal though. Convince enough people it's a good idea, and you've got big business for decades to come.
Expense is not the reason the US has infrastructure problems.
At the same time, some forms of infrastructure have been over-built. We've demonstrated a massive preference for (wide) roads over walking/biking/transit, and it turns out supporting mostly single-occupancy vehicles as the default transportation mode is extremely expensive.
For example, take this blog post analyzing why a poor area of town is a better revenue generator than a more affluent area; part of the reason is that the older, poorer area just has narrower roads, which reduced upkeep costs: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/10/poor-neighborh...
It should go without saying, but having low-density design throughout our country drastically raises infrastructure costs. The roads needs to be longer (and wider), you need more miles of pipes, and electric wire, and fiber, etc.
I guess I do have to clarify that saying we can or can't afford it is overloaded. We may have the money to do it and still not be able to afford it for a variety of reasons including politics and higher priorities. I think it's fair to say we can't afford it when we have debt and we're not fixing the problem. All the money we have is currently going to other things.
So how do we make money fixing it? If we would make money, why are we falling behind rather than getting ahead, if it was such a clear win economically, why aren't we doing it already?
This article implies that our current annual rate of return on highways is less than 10%:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/15/business/deal...
FWIW, I also think it's fairly easy to look at the actual scale of existing infrastructure and come to the conclusion that the magnitude of the problem isn't something that billions or a trillion dollars will put a real dent in; it looks bigger than that to me just looking at these maps:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/maps-of-ame...
[1] http://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_t...
Those are all things that damage roads.
It's not about having more infrastructure to maintain, it's about replacing the expensive stuff we have with efficient infra instead.
But that's why building tunnels doesn't seem like the best first-line defense. It's expensive, and it's fixed and inflexible, and doesn't reduce demand. It could help, but it could also hurt unless tunnels are less expensive to build & maintain than roads.
I was trying to be playfully sarcastic by saying the problem with traffic is traffic. Most larger cities in the US, there's only a traffic congestion problem during rush hour, accidents, and road construction. (The city I live in does enough road construction every year, enough that it's widely considered to be a top contributing factor to traffic congestion.)
LA traffic, which is what the article referred to, is worse than that, it's density is getting high enough that traffic congestion lasts all day in some places, rush hour is not just slow but crushing, and accidents can and do routinely prevent tens of thousands of people from working. It does seem like there must be a large economic cost to LA's traffic.
That said traffic is often one of those unfortunate predator-prey type dynamics, where congestion being reduced often encourages more folks to drive until the system returns to an (unfortunate) equilibrium...
Not that I don't get what he's saying, and I do get that existing and well proven systems aren't sexy, but I feel like either of those is going to be an easier sell, and a much faster implementation, than an underground system. There's infrastructure down there! That's what "infra" means. Easier not to have to work around that, if you can.
>The social and physical construction of suburban America really was quite complex. It was a very elaborate system, and clearly a massive social engineering project that has changed US society enormously. [27] Incidentally, I don’t have a personal objection to suburbs, in fact I live in one, but suburbanization is a different question. [28] It starts back in the 1940s with a literal conspiracy. I mean a conspiracy that went to court. The conspirators got a minor pat on the wrist however.
>They were General Motors, Standard Oil of California and, I think, Firestone Rubber. The origins of suburbia reveal an attempt to take over a fairly efficient mass-transportation system in parts of California — the electric railways in Los Angeles and the like — and destroy them so as to shift energy use to fossil fuels and increase consumer demand for rubber, automobiles and trucks and so on. [29] It was a literal conspiracy. It went to court. The courts fined the corporations $5000, or something like that, probably equivalent to the cost of their victory dinner.[30]
>But what happened in California started a process that then expanded — and in many ways. It included the interstate highway system. That was presented as part of the defense against the Russians. It was launched under the Interstate Defense Highway Act of 1956, and was intended to facilitate the movement of people and goods, troops and arms, and, allegedly, to prevent overpopulation in specific areas that could become the focus of nuclear attack. [31] The slogan of defense is the standard way of inducing the taxpayer to pay the cost of the next stage of the hi-tech economy of course.[32] That’s true whether it be computers, the Internet or, as in this case, a car-based transportation system.[33]
>From the late 1940s, into and through the 50s, there developed a complex interaction between federal government, state and local government, real-estate interests, commercial interests and court decisions, which had the effect of undermining the mass transit system across the country. It was pretty efficient in certain areas. If you go back a century ago for example, it was possible to travel all around New England on electric railways. The first chapter of E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime documents it.[34] Subsequently, we saw the elimination of the mass transport system in favor of fossil fuel use, automobiles, roads and airplanes, which are also an offshoot of federal government.
https://chomsky.info/20131001/
It's not my impression that light rail is done having regularly used the system
If Musk can really lower costs, London would be a good client. I'm sure that if he could reduce construction costs for new tube lines by 80% (costs are mostly tunnels), there would be at least 4 new lines that could be approved quickly. After that, they'd still have money left over from what they now plan to spend on Crossrail 2.
If you want to build a radiation-shielded settlement on Mars, the best bet is to dig. But how do you dig on Mars? Just as Tesla & SpaceX solve the question of electric power in space, this project starts to solves the underground colony question...
;)
(The optimist in me is leaking out.)
You are spending your time getting things into space and your CEO is literally heading in the opposite direction.
"A news report about three SpaceX employees who were hit by a car on Dec. 17 after leaving work. The incident occurred at 2:15 a.m. About three hours later, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk posted the following Tweets:
@elonmusk Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging..."
Or even built over a weekend, then deal with the consequences and approval process after. You can get a way with a lot when it comes to personal safety.
There's the problem.
On the other hand, boring technology is almost certainly going to play a key role in the colonisation of Mars.
But slowly I started to realize that I was buying a lot into carefully crafted propaganda. The way SpaceX used lawyers to keep PSLV at bay, all the while Musk gassed on about free markets and competition made me a bit mad. Then he had that quip where he said he was "nauseatingly pro American" and that America was the biggest force for good the world had ever seen. Then he said he was a proud centrist and donated money to anti-environment republicans. And so on and so on. Accusing employees of shilling for unions. Misleading people about his level of technical expertise. Calling lane-assist "auto-pilot" for profit.
At some point I realized that his "brilliant" approach to tech was essentially promising elite people that they could be ultra-green, better than vegetarians and hippies, while keeping the luxuries of sports cars, mansions with solar shingles, and rockets to mars. You don't have to do anything other than express support for him, and you're already better than people making personal sacrifices for the environment. Amazing!
I now think of his "luxury-first" approach as "trickle-down environmentalism". And I think it will be about as successful as its economic counterpart.
Assume that you're right and he's not that nice a person: still because of him we're now somewhere we would not be otherwise. I think what he brings to the table far outweight any thing like "doesn't like unions" or "is an opportunistic campaign donor".
That was driven more by the consumer electronics business than by Tesla.
Telsa is likely a quite smart option on the future demand for batteries though.
There's your problem: being enchanted in the first place. The tech world likes to build these epic hagiographies of people who never asked for them and then huff when reality—inevitably—fails to keep up with the myth.
Flawed human accomplishes great things is the story of most of history's pioneers.
> The tech world likes to build these epic hagiographies of people who never asked for them
This is not true. These people, by the very nature of their positions as chiefs of well-known organizations, have to maintain near untarnished super-human public perceptions (at least to the people that support their organization/company/ideals). They ask for it by accepting the position in the first place. You don't think Elon has a PR team?
It's good advice to not let one's self to become enchanted with these sort of figures, but don't act surprised when other people fall for it. All those people wouldn't have their jobs if it wasn't effective.
As for the rest, look at what he (or at least his companies) have actually done. Tesla has succeeded in making electric cars cool. Their stated mission is to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable transport, and given the many long-range EVs announced by major car companies in the past few years, I think they've already succeeded at that. SpaceX has succeeded in building a remarkably cheap rocket, has recovered them in a way nobody else has done, and is making great strides towards reusing them (although we can't count reuse itself under the "already done" umbrella).
Does he have some weird opinions? Sure. Does he sometimes do bad things? Yep. But who doesn't? Unlike your typical billionaire, he at least has some pretty awesome achievements to balance that out.
As per my last point, I don't know if Musk's "moonshots" will actually pan out. His businesses certainly are taking credit for just about everything that happens in tech, but I'm not convinced they're the ones leading the revolution.
It's not the CEO's job to be an engineer. Seems like Elon is doing his CEO job fabulously.