Bonus video set to publish tomorrow

I was inspired to put together a quick video about The Boring Company and Elon Musk. This video should go out tomorrow, but you guys can have a sneak peak of the script tonight.

Script:

Hi everyone, I had to do this quick video because there’s big news from Elon Musk. On Friday he tweeted: 

“Adjusting The Boring Company plan. All tunnels and hyper loop will prioritize pedestrians and cyclists over cars. Will still transport cars, but only after all personalized mass transit needs are met. It’s a matter of courtesy and fairness. If someone can’t afford a car, they should go first.” 

This is a shift from his original plan, where cars would be the primary vehicle traveling through underground tunnels in urban areas. That plan had received lots of criticism from transit advocates and planners. What does this planner think of Elon’s change of course? Stay tuned to find out.

So maybe I should back up a little. For those who are unfamiliar, Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, the rocket company; Tesla, the car company; and Solar City, the solar company; has founded The Boring Company. 

This company will build narrow tunnels underneath cities that will carry cars and now public transit vehicles underground and pop up at thousands of destinations the size of parking spaces. It’s like science fiction come to life and it looks pretty cool, to be honest.

The Boring Company also makes other, hopefully unrelated, products.

This sounds like amazing science fiction; zooming through tunnels at such a speed that a 45 minute drive would take five minutes. And if anyone can figure out the engineering, it’s Elon and his team. I don’t doubt that a project like this could be built. I just question whether it’s really necessary. 

Here’s how Elon puts the problem these tunnels are trying to solve. The Boring Company website states, “To solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic, roads must go 3D, which means either flying cars or tunnels.” 

Now, first I have to say that that’s some great framing right there — roads must go 3D, as if there is no other answer. But he’s right; if you want to keep adding cars to the roads, you’re going to need more road. And it’s not really politically feasible to destroy more neighborhoods to widen streets and highways. His solution is to put more road underground.

This is the solution you would expect the founder of a car company to make. He’s thinking, “How can I put more cars on our streets?” City planners think, “how can we move people in cities more efficiently”, not cars. Cars are one way to move people, but they take up a lot of space on streets per person. You may have seen this graphic that shows the space it takes to accommodate the same amount of people in different vehicles. The point is, obviously, you can transport a lot more people on streets if they are not in cars. That’s why you hear city planners talking a lot about transit, bikes, and pedestrians. They just take up so much less space. If we can create cities where more people can use those modes of transportation, we need a lot less cars, and we don’t need an elaborate, privately built and operated tunnel system.

In addition, adding more lanes of road, above ground or below ground, would actually create more traffic. It’s a phenomenon known as induced demand. If you add lanes, in the short term traffic gets better. But as people notice that traffic isn’t bad, they take more trips than they would before. That clogs up the roads again, but now even more people are in traffic.

So that brings us to his most recent announcement that his system will prioritize pedestrians and cyclists by using “personalized mass transit.” I personally think this is a step in the right direction, though it would probably be a whole lot easier and cheaper just to add some dedicated transit lanes on city streets and use existing buses. It’s really interesting that he’s admitted transit should come first, and it may put him down a slippery slope toward re-inventing subways. 

I think the most challenging component of his scheme is the parking-space sized stops, which he plans to build by the thousands. Cutting a tunnel through the street, where there is electrical, communication, water, and sewer lines will prove to be extremely costly and time consuming, and no engineering magic will change that. Not to mention the political hurdle of giving away public space to a private entity. If he needs to cut costs on the project, making fewer stops would probably be the easiest way to do that. So now you have fewer stops. And if you’re going through the trouble of building a shaft, why not make it like two or three parking spaces long. You could build bigger transit vehicles to match. So now you have buses. And since you have fewer stops and more people per vehicle, it may make sense to have them operating on routes, rather than going from point to point. You can see where I’m going with this.

Time will tell, and again, I’m not betting against Elon Musk’s technical acumen and ambition. But I think there are far easier and cheaper ways to solve congestion than building miles of subterranean roads. Let’s just make city streets that better accommodate all modes, including efficient ones like transit, walking, and cycling.