Elon Musk's Boring Company Issues Its Tunnel Manifesto
Elon Musk's latest venture, The Boring Company, has finally released details about its plans. Shocking nobody who has heard of Musk's prior ventures like SpaceX and Tesla, the company thinks big. This time, Musk wants to use tunnels and electric sleds to revolutionize traffic.
The company's manifesto starts off by identifying a problem-"soul-destroying traffic"-and gives a false choice in terms of a solution: flying cars or tunnels. (Never mind boring traffic solutions such as bike lanes, gas taxes, taxes on solo driving, or giving workers more flexible hours. It's far more exciting to deal with super-powered electric sleds and underground tunnels.) Instead, The Boring Company says traffic "must expand into three dimensions."
The company, which so far publicly includes Musk and SpaceX engineer Steve Davis, says that there "is no practical limit to how many layers of tunnels can be built, so any level of traffic can be addressed." Also, tunnels are silent from the surface, and they don't "divide communities with lanes and barriers." It's hard to say what TBC is referencing with that last point-gentrification? the highway projects of Robert Moses?-as the company does not get into the social nature of its tunnels elsewhere.
However, TBC does get into details of how it wants to improve tunnels. Musk's companies tend to excel in finding fields where technical innovation has gone slack, and the manifesto notes that "the construction industry is one of the only sectors in our economy that has not improved its productivity in the last 50 years." While productivity is difficult to gauge in the construction industry-the nature of building projects can differ wildly from one another-the general data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics offers credence to The Boring Company's claims.
The Boring Company's ambitions include reducing both the diameter of tunnels and increasing the speed of soft-soil boring machines to carve them. It wants to increase machine power and have them run on electricity instead of diesel, automate the process with fewer human operators, and tunnel continuously instead of erecting support structures. Noting that a snail is effectively 14 times faster than a soft-soil boring machine, the company says in bold that "our goal is to defeat a snail in a race." To highlight the point, it also links to a picture on Musk's Instagram of the company's mascot, a snail with a name and environs inspired by SpongeBob Squarepants.
Within the tunnels will come the electric sleds. These are perhaps the highlight of The Boring Company's preview video, seen above, which shows a car being whisked underground to travel at 124 mph on a sled without using a single drop of gasoline. There's very little information on what one of these sleds would look like, beyond the claim they will be able to turn into Hyperloop Pods, helping yet another of Musk's companies.
There are a few statements on environmental hazards, but nothing on how the company would incorporate itself into a community. SpaceX currently offers its services to governments and the rich, Tesla builds fancy sports cars. The Boring Company aims to change how thousands, if not millions, of people commute on a day-to-day basis. Godspeed, boring people.
Source: The Boring Company
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