This has a wonderful retro-science-fiction "what if we dug tunnels badly in the 1950s and drove around in them" feel to it. Like Asimov "caves of steel" but .. smaller. Because who has the time to make giant underground caverns for post-destructionist revolutionaries to meet in as autonomous cars whizz by. (what kind of a name is Elijah anyway? at least his wife had a decent name like Jezabel)
I have nothing in principle against tunnels, or even these tunnels except some things which should be simple like underground stations and passing places and making the thing buttery smooth-as seem to have been lost on the expedited need to do it cheap and fast. its CAP theorem for tunnels: you can have good, or you can have cheap and fast. you can't have all three. and if you want good you can't have two of them.
The boring company is a giant con job. TBM are well understood, as is the systematic processes to make tunnels at scale. LV is one of the cheapest places to dig, London used to be because the London clay was load bearing, waterproof and provided input stock for brick building. LV is at least not stone. London has so many tunnels they have to go deeper now. The clay is warming up too. You can't run trains for 100 years without dumping thermal into the system. If you have never seen the cleaner systems in the London Tube, think about what comes out of your ear and your belly button and then scale it up 1000x and add rats.
The main critique I have echoes things others will say better: It's just wrong to make this kind of thing private. Public transport should be built by the public for the public. Now, I know there's a heap of religion built up in that, but if you want to argue for private roads, go to the outskirts of D.C. and talk to any worker who has to transit over what Macquarie Bank calls the giant american cash machine. It's just wrong to do it this way.
Musk is a conman. This is shelbyville monorail class stuff.
Maybe it's changed. Friends who lived WV/VA and worked DC said the toll roads were a nightmare and they timed their drives quite carefully. Those toll roads were bought by Macquarie bank and provided a very healthy income stream.
Roads like the Dulles greenway. I read they had a requested 40% price hike rejected recently so maybe things have got better.
There could have been a lot of hyperbole in their position, but I think up to 5 or more roads around DC got bought by Aussie companies bankrolled by Macquarie infrastructure investment.
I don’t remember a single toll road I had to transverse in Maryland or VA or DC and I drove north south and then south north, including around the capital and pentagon. Most tolls are in the further northern states like New York , New Jersey etc…
I’ve never commuted to DC from Maryland for work though, so I can’t comment exactly what goes on there. In general road tolls are very low and reasonable in the US aside from super touristy spots IMHO
WV to DC doesn’t make a lot of sense … I expect the amount of West Virginians who commute to DC to be rather non existent…
Quick slightly-on-topic questions: I always read local press releases about how a major local rail or road or stormwater tunnel project "has gotten its TBM" and is assembling it in a portal dug for the initial staging.
It seems that a lot of projects decide on a diameter and then order a TBM for the expected materials that will have to be ground up [sic]. Would it be any significant savings (if you were in Great Britain for instance) to deliberately engineer your whole infrastructure design, and funding, and timeline, to use the exact same diameter as England's High Speed 2's TBM and then run that TBM after they are done with it? There must be a lot of single-use TBMs but I don't know what their builders reuse from one machine to the next.
I would think so, from every part of the supply chain it would make sense to use the same segment size, grout, rail method, even manufacturing yards if they're on a train network.
But I believe a lot of TBM dig themselves into a not so shallow grave and stay underground: it's expensive to remove them. They drill a headway off to one side and stop like a sad loco in the thomas the tank engine books.
They probably would need major refurbishment anyway, right?
Anything that is of value is stripped anyway, and.. the cutting shield is lost (but... who knows, maybe not, as that needs a lot of serviceability anyway, maybe the valuable stuff is removed even from that?)
As long as the planning, permitting, and logistics dwarf the unit costs it doesn't really matter how much one can theoretically save on linking up projects. :/
I have nothing in principle against tunnels, or even these tunnels except some things which should be simple like underground stations and passing places and making the thing buttery smooth-as seem to have been lost on the expedited need to do it cheap and fast. its CAP theorem for tunnels: you can have good, or you can have cheap and fast. you can't have all three. and if you want good you can't have two of them.
The boring company is a giant con job. TBM are well understood, as is the systematic processes to make tunnels at scale. LV is one of the cheapest places to dig, London used to be because the London clay was load bearing, waterproof and provided input stock for brick building. LV is at least not stone. London has so many tunnels they have to go deeper now. The clay is warming up too. You can't run trains for 100 years without dumping thermal into the system. If you have never seen the cleaner systems in the London Tube, think about what comes out of your ear and your belly button and then scale it up 1000x and add rats.
The main critique I have echoes things others will say better: It's just wrong to make this kind of thing private. Public transport should be built by the public for the public. Now, I know there's a heap of religion built up in that, but if you want to argue for private roads, go to the outskirts of D.C. and talk to any worker who has to transit over what Macquarie Bank calls the giant american cash machine. It's just wrong to do it this way.
Musk is a conman. This is shelbyville monorail class stuff.