hinkley 3 days ago

Because it’s boring.

  • alterom 3 days ago

    Not in principle, mind you.

    It's just that the company has stalled every major project they started, and, so far, completed a rather shitty an uninspiring one in Vegas that has no reason to exist in the first place (it's subway but with Teslas instead of trains).

    Its only purpose is to prevent the money from being spent on viable public transportation projects, and in that sense, it's very interesting that it got so far.

    • scottyah 3 days ago

      Or, digging tunnels is a lot harder than expected and there have been no big technical leaps to change that. The idea is great, but only if the cost goes down and digging speed goes up by a lot.

      I assume you got a cut of the $23bn my state took with the promise of a high-speed rail, which afaik is the only "viable(?!)" transportation project that could have been affected by this, or you just hate subways/subterranean transportation progress?

      • stephen_g 2 days ago

        The idea isn’t great, tunnels for cars or pods have really low throughput (low occupancy + safety margin headways, even at a high speed). And it hinged on them magically revolutionising an already highly mature field, which surprise, surprise didn’t work out.

        If it had been possible to speed up and reduce the cost of tunneling, the thing that would most make sense is running regular trains through them. But they never had any real ideas to actually make it cheaper or faster (apart for making it too small for proper emergency egress), just the idea that SV tech guys would be able to find a way to do it.

    • ianburrell 3 days ago

      Not to mention that keep getting fined for improper disposal of waste material. Just dumping tunneling fluid into the sewer.

    • panick21_ 2 days ago

      Their mistake was to go from tunnels to transportation systems. I'm sure there are some innovations possible in tunnel boring. But that's not going to be some massive growth market.

      But trying to reinvent transportation was stupid.

      • alterom a day ago

        > But trying to reinvent transportation was stupid.

        It's not stupid, it's weaponized incompetence to divert funding from actual transportation infrastructure to their non-solutions which are all about the company owner's biggest money-making product (cars).