Elon Musk's "Loop" - It's bad, folks

okay I'm finally finished with my autonomous cars episode now to just check the news before I hit the render button and take a big sip of coffee so the loop is pretty much the stupidest idea I've ever personally seen go to the proof of concept stage but you know second only to the Hyperloop so here's how it's supposed to work Elon Musk's boring company will dig tunnels under major cities and you'll be able to take your car through those tunnels at high speed the cars will be guided by little wheels on the front with brace into a guide way in the tunnel it's the same system as a guided bus but it's faster there will be a little elevator at each end which can bring your car up and down from the tunnel system this will once and for all fixed traffic ok right there will be no chance of overcrowding in the system because the boring company can just build more tunnels they can do this because they will make tunneling much cheaper by means of improved tunnel boring machine technology Elon says he wants to go 20 or 30 layers down with the tunnels sure ok Elon expects to move 4000 cars per hour at a speed of a hundred and 50 miles per hour through each - some of these cars will be pods which will carry up to 16 people thereby making it mass transit and so affordable to the masses ok right sure so there's something here which I want everyone to remember called am/fm this was originally a science fiction term referring to the difference between the boring clunky world of actual machines and the extremely sexy high-tech utopian world of [ __ ] magic now the loop system works extremely well in the world of FM but we live in the world of a.m. so that's the standpoint from which we're gonna talk about it so it seems like the only guy on YouTube taking a critical look at Musk's dumb idea at all is this guy named thunder zero 0:t who seems to have a bunch of videos which criticize pseudo-scientific [ __ ] and creationism okay and feminism and sjw's and he's the gamergate guy too okay well he doesn't seem to like carl of akkad either so uh i guess we can say thunderf00t is a land of contrasts but the problem with these right-wing skeptic guys is that you know they're not usually so good at explaining stuff like socio economics or policy or history and i guess that's why they're anti-feminist and anti sjw so we're gonna do this here without the anti-feminist or anti sjws baggage and also anita sarkisian is fine so i'm gonna talk about tunnel construction tunnel operation and i'm gonna talk about why it's important to criticize big miracle [ __ ] magic schemes like these okay so this is the part about tunnel construction and tunnel boring machines so for a long time you could only really tunnel through Hard Rock and it was a difficult and laborious process involving lots of explosives soft soil tunneling was very dangerous because of the potential of cave-ins so in 1825 a guy named Mark Brunell who was working on a tunnel under the River Thames in London and invented a tunneling shield to make work safer and easier it prevented the ceiling from collapsing while allowing workers to manually excavate through the mud under the river it worked slowly and eventually mark add lettuce Sun isambard kingdom brunel finished the work mark went on to be drafted by the Green Bay Packers in 1993 and participated in three Pro Bowls he got his first and only ring in Super Bowl 44 as backup quarterback for the New Orleans Saints okay so this tunneling shield was a predecessor to the modern towel boring machine the first successful mekin as tunnel-boring machine was invented by major Frederick Edward blackett Beaumont Beaumont okay I don't know how to pronounce that in 1863 it was used to dig about 1 mile a tunnel under the English Channel before work was stopped for fear that the French would use such a tunnel to invade this tunnel was later completed in 1994 shortly before Marc Brunel was traded in Jacksonville Jaguars okay so these machines haven't changed too much in basic concepts since the 1860s at the front of the tunnel boring machine is - cutting head this is the part dick digs through the ground cutting heads can be designed for soft soil or for hard rock or a combination of both though that can be kind of complicated on machines designed for very soft and especially wet soil the cutting head may operate at a higher atmospheric pressure to prevent water from flooding the tunnel as the TBM digs forward as well as to allow for safer maintenance of the cutting head this requires workers working on the front of the machine to sit in a pressurization chamber on the way in and out of the front of the machine you know sort of like deep-sea divers so behind that there's a shield which may or may not be necessary depending on how hard the soil or rock to be cut through is if you're dealing exclusively through hard rock you might not need it at all now following that or machines which automatically add the tunnel lining and usually either a conveyor belt system or a little train which carries away the spoil which is the rock or soil coming from the cutting head so the machine cuts into the rock or soil and then shoves itself ahead and cuts into it again and you know it moves fairly slowly right sometimes you got a stop it to replace the individual little cutting wheels on a big cutting head sometimes you need to do other maintenance that makes it stop big tunnel boring machine like Bertha in Seattle which is digging the new Alaskan Way tunnel moves about 35 feet a day so that's about 150 days to go a mile so a lot of really long tunnels have multiple TBMs which approach each other from multiple access shafts so the work can be completed within a reasonable amount of time okay so uh what is the boring company claiming to change about this they want to beat the snail which by my math involves speeding up the tunnel boring machine until it does a mile in 34 and a half hours instead of a hundred fifty days so you know something like 35 mile Gotthard base tunnel in Switzerland would take two months instead of ten years okay the pouring company's faq claims that part of this to be achieved by building smaller diameter tunnels but also by filling around with the operational specifics of the TBM and some abstract increase in power which I don't know means they'll spin the cutting head faster or something so I don't have any super firm technical criticism here to be honest from a strength of material standpoint it sounds fishy though existing TBM cutting heads have expendable cutters those are the little guys on the front which actually cut the rock or soil or whatever replacing them is an extensive manual process especially if as mentioned before the cutting head is pressurized owing to unfavorable soil conditions you're working in confined spaces at high pressures with heavy and dangerous equipment so you know the folks who do the work on the front of the machine get paid a lot but also you're spending several hours at the beginning and end of your work time sitting around in a pressurization chamber so you know a one-hour job has eight or nine hours of decompression or whatever so you need really durable cutting tools if you're gonna do 150 days of work in a day and a half so I imagine you're looking at frequent cutter replacements possibly multiple times for 24 hours of work and that will dramatically increase the time to tunnel any distance but as I said I'm not technical enough to really say much about TBM technology or its limitations and if they can actually dig as fast as they say they want to then that's great it could you know eventually be applied to actual useful tunneling like building sewers or subways what's a little easier to criticize is the idea of building dozens and dozens of tunnels wherever it's required so each of these things is a 14-foot bore that handles a single lane of traffic right now when you're tunneling especially in an urban area we have to deal with stuff and that stuff is utilities subway lines other tunnels and so on and not all of this you can avoid simply by digging deeper eventually you'll hit rock that'll require a different tunnel boring machine or even outright just blasting so if you're looking at the 150 mile an hour sustained speeds which are advertised you need some pretty broad curves so let me show you an example this is the Veterans Parkway bypass around Normal Illinois and Bloomington Illinois as part of historic route 66 and was designed before interstate highway system standards existed and that's around when we settled on speed limits of 60 to 70 miles an hour but since this was built before the designers planned for the future this curve in particular is designed for a hundred miles an hour it's radius is about a mile now let's overlay the Veterans Parkway curve over say Midtown Manhattan you can see that if you're trying to build a curve that's capable of even a hundred miles an hour you got a tunnel under a lot of buildings this is a problem in the city which say has a lot of deep foundations like Philadelphia or New York City or really anywhere with tall buildings which you know is presumably where traffic relief is really needed you pretty much have the existing street right-of-way to dig underneath potentially even less than that in some areas so broad corners for high-speed operation or out of the question in dense and congested areas in uncongested areas you have to dig underneath buildings with shallow foundations and that causes problems because property rights are generally accepted to extend all the way to hell that's the literal wording that's usually used in common law so easements have to be acquired from all the property owners along the route potentially a long and costly legal process and furthermore during this process you've got to monitor buildings and roads for subsidence and you're not going to have perfect knowledge of soil conditions since geotechnical investigation is expensive and imperfect so you could hit unexpected soil and rock formations which can damage or destroy your tunnel-boring machine which is what happened to the tunnel boring machine in Seattle digging the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement they had to dig a hundred and twenty foot shaft to lift out and replace the cutting head which delayed the project a full two years and even then straight up tunnel boring is the cheap part of tunneling what drives up costs are things like caverns and shafts so in Subway's that's four stations crossovers and switches and emergency exits and for the loop it will at least be four crossovers between tunnels and the car elevators and the ramps these usually have to be mined by hand since they don't have a convenient circular cross-section additionally fit-out and ventilation another work that make tunnels safe for human occupation are a very large part of the budget so these tunnels aren't as Magic is advertised okay this is the second part where we talk about operations so I tried to make an approximation of the loop here in city skylines it's really just a high-speed arterial road underground it's got perhaps four entry instead of elevators since City skylines isn't gonna support making car elevators now I think you all might be able to see one of the main problems here right now but I'm first gonna describe some of the safety issues before we get to the real operational issues so iran's idea is that 4,000 cars per hour can fit in this tunnel at a speed of a hundred and fifty miles an hour this is the easy problem assuming the tunneling is feasible and there are a lot of entrances and exits and you have some well-timed automatic merges this is doable the system to guide to cars is very similar to a guided bus except that instead of a big bus that can carry a lot of people you have a small car that can carry a very small amount of people so presumably the automation of the guided bus car would be much simpler than road-going autonomous vehicles which would be expected to work in many conditions but in addition to the easy problem there's the hard problem which is doing all that safely right so at 4,000 cars an hour that's a car every nine tenths of a second so they'll be spaced about 198 feet apart at a hundred and fifty miles an hour and if one of them has some kind of catastrophic failure which requires an emergency stop your rate of acceleration while stopping would be somewhere around 7 G's for nine tenths of a second to avoid hitting it ok right so this is not possible without an aircraft carrier style arrestor cable no conventional breaking system can stop that quickly antilock brakes or not though it's unlikely a car would have an accident that drops it from 150 mile per hour to zero in a second it's not completely out of the question so we have two options here which are a except that every accident in the loop system could easily result in a multiple car pileup at a hundred and fifty miles an hour and presumably horrific loss of life and a chemical driven inferno in a confined space like the Howard Street tunnel fire in Baltimore that burned for six days except there would be hundreds or thousands of people in this tunnel or be just assume no accidents will ever occur the boring company seems to have taken the second option the thing is that if you have four thousand individual vehicles in the tunnel per hour then however many points of failure on each car times four thousand cars is how many points of failure there are in that tunnel you know like a battery could catch fire or the AI screws up and does some erratic or a tire shreds you know how a NASCAR they switch out the tires pretty frequently that's because tire wear increases with speed in the loop system the cars are intended to run on their own road tires at 150 mile per hour for a sustained period of time or that's how it looks like at the moment I hope you like replacing tires six or more times a year right so other than safety what other problems do we have the big ones the capacity of the elevator system Elon has said that the system would probably need ramps for the busiest exits which are true it probably need ramps for pretty much all the exits in fact so all your issue here is going to be queuing in the tunnels and on the surface for the elevators you got to get the car on the elevator get the car to the surface and then get the car off the elevator which then either accepts another car for pickup or goes back down to pick up another car at the bottom so generously speaking that might take about 30 seconds from the tunnel to the surface which gives you 60 cars per hour per elevator each way as a theoretical maximum capacity now in actuality it probably be fewer since not all cars can pull into traffic immediately and you know they might block the elevator platform for a bit you know if you got a traffic jam or something so sixty cars an hour is a lot less than 4000 cars an hour getting cars in and out of the system with only elevators to where the system reaches anywhere close to its maximum capacity would require a hundred and fifty elevators at each end now presumably there will be some ramps then which require a bunch more real estate that real estate is of course at a premium in downtown's where most of the traffic would be sold the elevator idea which was designed to conserve space doesn't work in high traffic areas where the space is most of the premium right okay oh and by the way those hundred and fifty elevators are to probably displace about 300 surface parking spots at minimum which I'm sure would go over well with the neighbors that's to say nothing of the infrastructure for connecting all 150 elevators to the loop or space for accelerating and decelerating the car so they can join the bunch of cars going through the fast tunnel so we're stuck with ramps mostly which means effectively there's no functional difference between the loop system and a conventional urban freeway other than the guidance and the speed each ramp is going to act nearly exactly like a freeway ramp which means it's going to be subject to the congestion on the streets that it links up to like any other freeway ramp the way these tunnels are gonna exit it's not going to look like a little discrete one lane ramp it's gonna be a heavy-duty thing that needs to dump 1500 cars an hour on the local streets so it will need a fan out to multiple turn lions and probably in fall a signalized intersection now one thing you'll on mentioned was that the loop could empty directly into parking garages this is a good idea but it requires a lot of coordination it's not much use for you if the building next door to yours has a loop connection to its garage but you can only validate parking in your own building you'll have to use surface streets to avoid the extra charge so you're back at square one we have to widen the streets that are connected to the loop and that means demolitions and property line alterations for right-of-way acquisition which no one wants or needs and which is especially impractical in built-up urban areas ok so it's hard to simulate heavy traffic in city skylines because of the aging limit so for perspective this is the Ben Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia according to traffic counts from the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission this bridge moves two thousand eight hundred and eighty vehicles westbound during the peak of the morning rush hour so how much infrastructure is required to move two thousand eight hundred and eighty cars off the bridge it's a [ __ ] load as it turns out the infrastructure to move cars off the bridge takes up a full two and three-quarters blocks around Franklin Square all of which were previously occupied by buildings there are multiple bridges and ramps and signalized intersections which bring these cars onto surface streets and yet it still backs up during the morning rush hour this is because no matter how much heavy highway infrastructure you build it doesn't change dimensions of the streets you're emptying the cars onto you know there's only so many cars you can cram onto say Juniper Street so at best I imagine a real life loop system would effectively serve as an urban highway which may be very fast in certain spots but very slow and others especially near entrances and exits you know like a regular highway it'll be more expensive to maintain and build though and presumably we'll have user fees attached be limited to whatever vehicles elon decrees are safe to run in the tunnels transit vehicles may be included but they'll be subject to the same delays in the tunnel that regular automobiles are and thus there's not going to be a huge amount of incentive to use them you know sort of like a regular bus on a regular Highway this is the best case scenario I think and further cements effort you get a system with potentially a slightly higher capacity per tube than a regular subway line and that's assuming you know all the 4,000 cars an hour or moving smoothly and are fully occupied which again they may very well not be depending on traffic conditions at the exits Subway's don't have that problem right since they just run from station to station and they don't have to deal with any traffic they aren't scheduled to encounter people exit and entered the system via this high-tech technology called stairs or escalators or elevators because a DA accessibility is important but they don't need to drag two tons of metal with them on a ramp or giant elevator go down to take the subway okay so let's talk about how the loop and the sorted adjacent projects are affecting policy now first off you should be highly suspicious of any privately owned public transportation scheme what why is this the answer is of course because of capitalism the goal number one of any private corporation is to make money this is no matter how generous or altruistic the upper management says they are or even how genuinely concerned with public good they might be why is this because they're not in charge upper management reports the CEO the CEO reports to the board of directors and the Board of Directors is appointed by the investors and investors are really only concerned with profit right be able 401k your IRA or a pension you're generally not really interested in how each individual company you own stock in is serving the public or whatever you want returns so with that in mind the private sector can only provide transportation in areas where there's substantial profit to be extracted from the passengers you know that's one of the reasons why there's been a grand total of two new regularly scheduled private passenger rail ventures since 1971 there's bright line from Miami to West Palm Beach which is mostly a real estate venture and the auto train which went bust and was picked up by Amtrak most other private ventures you know the Texas bullet train that Desert Express and so on have yet to lay a single mile a track or run a single train despite existing for a decade or more effectively if you want to run high-speed high quality service between cities without government funding you need to pick the areas with the highest incomes in the greatest populations which have easily available room for the infrastructure needed and that's what bright line did they were owned by the Florida East Coast Railroad which owns the tracks on which the Bray line trains run which traveled through a large number of dense wealthy communities and the Florida East Coast railroad owned some very large parking lots in downtown Miami on the site of its former railroad depot of course but this is very much an exception very few areas like that exist so the rest of us get greyhound which you know can operate in many places at a profit because the government pays for its infrastructure backers of privately owned transportation or you know privatization in general call private industries in ability to serve underprivileged or otherwise expensive to serve communities and markets efficiency efficiency and inefficiency ultimately tend to come down to what can make a profit for the shareholders in privatization discussions but one of the problems with publicly owned transportation infrastructure is that while we live in the a.m world our politics can and do usually operate in the much more appealing FM world and it's uh this happens on the left and the right so like saying we'll stop undocumented immigration with the wall for instance is [ __ ] magic or say a green new deal that proposes to solve climate change by just giving everyone in an electric car and which doesn't address our unsustainable energy intensive land use policies is [ __ ] magic so politicians are pitched FM solutions to a.m. problems by both activists and private industry popular media is generally not smart or at least not technical enough to call out a [ __ ] magic solution for what it is so these projects are accepted uncritically a lot of the times except for some folks with technical knowledge and a few angry internet guys like myself even planning departments who ought to know better we'll go with it sometimes you know for instance Miami's current mayor ran on a platform of getting more rail lines built Danny pivoted to a policy of wait and see if autonomous cars get us out of this mess after the election once he realized he could get away with saying [ __ ] magic would solve the problem now obviously disregarding transit in favor of autonomous cars is pretty bad but that ain't the only way that [ __ ] magic solutions present themselves so the loop and other projects like it fall into a category a transit called gadget bonds now that comes from Anton to browse Catbus blog though I learned it from Levy's pedestrian observations blog both are you know pretty good and you should go read them put some relevant posts in the description anyway so gadget bond comes from gadget and the German word for Road or rail road which is bond so there have been many proposals for gadget bonds in the past I know they're all different they all share one thing in common they aren't trains and usually their backers go to great lengths to explain just how much they aren't a train how trains have nothing on them if you're traveling in the gadget bond you won't feel like you're on a train or how they've never even heard of trains before but crucially gadget bonds aim to fill the same niches trains do and as a result they have nearly all the infrastructural and operational constraints that trains have because you know as it turns out basically every kind of high-speed guideway has one thing in common low tolerances so you need wide curves both horizontal and vertical very straight and level track which can be only millimeters off over dozens of miles your guide way could be a monorail a guided busway with cars in it a maglev a hyper loop or something exotic we haven't heard of or whatever the geometry of the right-of-way is what drives up costs not the cost of constructing the guideway in that right-of-way the loop simply happens to use cars instead of transit vehicles and has a lot of techno miracle merging involved otherwise it fits in the same category as the Wuppertal monorail Morgantown West Virginia's personal Rapid Transit System and the Port Authority of Allegheny County's sky bus these are things which were not trains primarily for the sake of not being trains now nice thing about marketing gadget bonds is unlike trains most gadget bonds only exist in renders and on spreadsheets and stuff costs a lot less to construct in renders and on spreadsheets so you can easily tout your gadget bonds low cost of construction because all your construction cost estimates exist exclusively on spreadsheets while the established contractors with decades of experience building rail lines have to use you know actual numbers which were determined from prior projects that actually happened so proven practical solutions to transportation are discarded in the presence of a potential [ __ ] magic solution like the loop three loops are already at least in the permitting stage there's one between Baltimore and Washington DC there's one between block 37 in Chicago and O'Hare Airport and there's one between Dodgers Stadium and the Los Angeles metro station already one of them is replacing a viable conventional rail transportation project that would have been some kind of Express l service to O'Hare Airport another aspect of this is something called fear uncertainty and doubt or Fudd and I bring it up only because a gentleman on Twitter brought it up first in defense at Tesla so this was originally an open-source software community term for like what Microsoft did to undermine the spread of Linux in business and consumer computers 20:19 will be the year of Linux on the desktop but uh this is definitely also a thing which is being employed by Tesla and other similar companies to undermine investment in public transit why invest in trains today when you might have ultra efficient self-driving cars tomorrow and it's notable with the biggest backers of self-driving cars replacing transit are the same people who make a lot of money from selling cars or at least operating them so encouraging politicians and planners to avoid long-term investments in public transportation in favor of the status quo of car dependency is clearly in their own self-interest in a real world as we hurtle towards a climate disaster we can't really afford to increase dependence on the automobile cars even electric ones have far higher energy requirements than almost any other form of transportation per you know person mile simply due to the inefficiencies involved in having one motor hauling around two tons of metal for every 1.56 people that's the average occupancy of a motor vehicle what we need is public transportation and we need public transportation which is accessible to all which is fast frequent that goes where people need to go and which is publicly owned and the challenges to overcome and implement better public transit are entirely political in nature you know no one has to reinvent the Train but uh politicians don't generally understand this they don't use public transportation like you and I as a general rule and thus you know they don't intuitively understand the problems and solutions which are needed and which are practical to implement hence you know we get [ __ ] magic solutions so they have to be made to understand if that means just sitting outside their office and screaming build a [ __ ] train at them then so be it I'm no expert on organizing for better transit in every area transit is very much a local issue though there's no realistic solution that doesn't involve a level of federal funding similar to what the interstate highway system receives so you know find your local transit advocacy group or your riders union and find out what they're up to you may find yourself in strange company even with liberals but uh that's probably fine as long as you don't fall prey to their mostly garbage ideology now as for the loop I think one or two might get built I think they'll have enough problems that they won't be in service for long luckily Elon is built as tunnels 14 feet wide which is exactly the same diameter as London's deep-level tube lines with the little modification and presumably some moderately expensive excavation they could be repurposed for real rapid transit after falling into public ownership so maybe some good might come out of it what a successful loop system is not something to hope for it's just another freeway and no freeway has ever fixed traffic as Elon purports to want to do if we want to address the oncoming climate disaster we need public transportation we need lots of it and we needed quickly we can't rely on [ __ ] magic to solve our problems we need actual machines ok that was the episode so here is the commercial the first bonus episode on killdozer is up now you have to give me a dollar on patreon in order to see that episode or you could pirate it I guess but if your time is worth 15 bucks an hour and it takes you more than four minutes to find a link to it you're getting ripped off that patreon link is in the description as is a buy me a coffee link if you don't want to do monthly support but you don't get the bonus episodes there and I guess I got to do another bonus episode soon my schedule is a little screwed up right now and I don't think that'll happen until late January to early February it'll be on the Boston molasses disaster since I'm gonna keep the bonus episodes kind of light and frivolous well anything with social impact will be free furthermore we are closing in on the lobster guy in negraph tree on rankings we got 3,000 patreon to go as I record this so please give me a dollar if only to prove the supremacy of postmodern cultural Marxism over whatever it is that Jordan Peterson does and I don't know much about that guy I heard it has something to do with cleaning rooms and misgendering people so I think he runs some kind of transphobic maid service through patreon I guess I don't know it's really popular for some reason and the t-shirts are now available the links in the description thanks to Jeremy Hammond from the ballin out super podcast America's number one leftist anime podcast for designing them I think if you buy one I get like five bucks and follow me on the Twitter and do not eat one or if you don't like all the Nazis that are allowed on the bird site follow me on mastodons and do not eat at Mastodon dot social okay here are the credits [Music] you

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Views: 586,444

Rating: 4.5493293 out of 5

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Id: 4dn6ZVpJLxs

Length: 40min 5sec (2405 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 19 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/KaiserFogg]

Donoteat is a good channel about civil engineering and urban planning from a left perspective.

I recommend checking his stuff out!

[u/IntentionalMisnomer]

Train good, car bad, horse chaotic-neutral

[u/kyawsanmania]

It's just regular high speed train with extra steps... Too many extra steps...

[u/Troll4ever31]

Even as an avid car enthusiast I have to agree. Public transportation like buses and trains are the future, and the way to go forwards. I think governments should try their darndest to make public transport able to handle huge amounts of people, and then make it free. That's gonna be the best way to make it appealing.

[u/Kiruvi]

If you give him a dollar, you can see a great video about Killdozer.

[u/the-radical-waffler]

Honestly since he brought up fm problems brought from sci fi. Well honestly I've always seen the loop as something completely out of something dystopian. The rich and wealthy get to drive underground in this super expencive thing, where-as every other person is stuck in traffic and even more underfunded public transportatiom, if any. Not to mention all the parkingspaces, city maintanence , etc. taken by this thing that only the 1 % ever get to use.