Why Musk's cars in tunnels project doesn't solve anything

“I would put what Mr. Musk is saying today in the bullshit category,” Thom Neff, infrastructure consultant

The man has successfully launched the world's largest rocket into space, has made  established car companies like BMW gasp for air, is in the process of completing the world's largest building and largest battery factory and has sold 450,000 electric cars in one year, more than anyone else, who can tell him that something won't work?

Musk explaining his Tesla on a sled

Julianne Tveten for one. She wrote in Capital and Main that

"The Tesla CEO’s proposal to bore a high-speed commute tunnel under the Westside of Los Angeles may amplify many of the county’s most deeply entrenched disparities." 

The equity argument is frequently used against new technologies, sometimes correctly so, sometimes not. But she doesn't leave it there. Her other argument aims straight at the heart of Musk's project itself, the car, or in the case of the tunnel, transporting a car in rapid speed not on top of a rocket but on top of a palette. Before we go there, though here fisrt what Musk imagines as a solution to urban congestion:  In their January edition Wired described Musk's tunnel transportation ideas this way:

Musk came up with the Boring Company in late 2016 while stuck in LA traffic. He could destroy the scourge of congestion, he figured, by building layers upon layers of underground tunnels, each just wide enough for a personal car or a multi-passenger pod. Those vehicles would ride on electric skates that would zoom everyone along at triple-digit speeds.(Wired)

In Musk's Boring Company's own words the tunneling project sounds just as easy as Trump winning trade wars:

To solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic, roads must go 3D, which means either flying cars or tunnels. Unlike flying cars, tunnels are weatherproof, out of sight and won't fall on your head. A large network of tunnels many levels deep would fix congestion in any city, no matter how large it grew (just keep adding levels).  

Musk's Boring company has some plausible ideas on how to make tunnel boring cheaper by re-inventing the tunnel boring machine, currently an instrument that is slow and manufactured only by a very few companies.

But the crux of the matter doesn't reside with those machines:  Tveten uses Streetsblog LA editor Joe Linton's quotes to drive a deep spear into the weakest part of Musk's tunnel dreams:

“In the ’50s, highway builders, car infrastructure folks [said], ‘If we can build more capacity, if we can widen another freeway, build another freeway, congestion is going to get better.’ What we’ve seen is the opposite. The more capacity you have, the more congestion you get." Joe Linton 

Exactly! In order to deal with transportation problems one has to understand the intricate relationships between supply and demand and the even trickier ones of land use and transportation. Both are dynamic and dialectic relations, far from being liner or zero-sum.  Dreaming of shooting cars through tunnels is just as silly as adding toll lanes on freeways or building even more freeways around, across or under our cities. To make it extra clear Tveten adds:

Like freeways, the Boring Company’s proposal misses a fundamental principle in reducing traffic: limiting the number of cars on the road. (Tveten)

 Musk, like most start-up entrepreneurs is fixated on technology, and loses sight of the problem that needs to be solved: The problem of sprawl causing a need to cover great distances to get anything done, the root cause for all the traffic and cars. No matter what technology one uses, in growing high population metropolitan areas such as LA or Washington/Baltimore sprawl can only be made more efficient by scooting things closer together on the land use side until densities are achieved which allow effective transit.

But Musk is not kidding. He is already boring his test tunnels both in LA and in Maryland which makes the matter much less theoretical for us than one would think.

A Tesla on a sled gets transported into the tunnel: One at a time,
every minute one less car on the road. Wow!

In light of the complexities of transportation, the idea that  small palettes with one or two cars could solve a metropolitan traffic congestion problem is so naive that it boggles the mind. Anyone who has seen I-5 feeding into LA and imagines how any sizable portion of vehicles would be transferred to palettes, dropped into a tunnel and shot across LA to continue their journey on the other side can imagine the sheer size of the problem: At volumes north of 300,000 vehicles a day whatever Musk tunnel could make only the smallest dent, even if there were many of them. Managing those floods of cars with what amounts to a straw would create enormous lines at the entry points to those tunnels, congestion which would dwarf the largest congestion anyone has ever seen at either side of the Lincoln Tunnel where waits of 30-60 minutes are common before one can enter the four lane tunnel which still has a far higher capacity than Musk's sleds. It wouldn't be Musk's company if the Boring Company wouldn't offer an answer for the congestion at entries problem as well:

How will you avoid major congestion at entry/exit points? Unlike a subway, there is no practical upper limit to the number of stations that can be built along the tunnel route, as stations can be as small as a single parking space. Each station will consist of a bank of elevators and the number of elevators is only limited to the available land area. The electric skates will descend into a "spur" or tunnel offshoot before quickly merging into the tunnel network. Since stations require such a small footprint, they can be easily integrated in busy city-centers, residential communities, or any location along the tunnel route that can accommodate a single parking space. The high density of stations will help reduce congestion by distributing traffic across many access points. (FAQ)

Waiting time counts double

This is where the project veers completely into vodoo. A huge number of "stations" solving the capacity problem in the manner of  the new destination dispatch elevators? Just saying so doesn't make it so. There isn't a shred of documentation on how the high number of small stations would not create congestion at the station or in the tube and how so many stations and car lifts wouldn't drive the cost into the stratosphere and make the system extremely vulnerable. Ever witnessed how often the WMATA lifts at stations are defect?

Just as Musk is good at figuring out how to get to Mars, but is much less convincing in explaining what one should do there and why one would want to go there, he is also weak on explaining how "stations" at his tunnels would work, whether it is the car sled tunnel (with speeds just above 100mph) or the "hyperloop" system of pods shot through tunnels at speeds of just below the sound barrier.

Loop and Hyperloop are similar, with the major difference being that Hyperloop draws a vacuum inside the tube to eliminate air friction. Loop is used for shorter routes, when there is no technical need to eliminate air friction. (FAQ)

As any transit planner knows, trip times on a transit vehicle are one thing, but the time to get there or the wait to get into one is another, in fact those time aren't treated equal at all. Why?  Because transit riders don't count wait time and travel time in the same way. Once they comfortably sit in a bus or train, riders are much less impatient than during the wait in rain or heat when they have to stand still while the transit vehicle isn't yet in sight.  If one would take the psychology of travel into account, one would realize that the speed of the vehicle after departure is far less important than the door to door trip time. Which is why more people use Amtrak to go from DC to NYC than fly. The train moves much slower than the plane, but it is still comparable door to door thanks to the unpleasant waits that come with security, sitting at the gate and cramming passengers and luggage into the tight  planes. And that is even though most airports these days are fairly pleasant facilities with lots of offerings to kill time. By contrast, Musk hasn't shown how his "stations" would look and how they would fit into any urban context. His video shows just a hole opening up in the ground into which a single car disappears, a perrty unwelcome prospect. Its the idle waits that make people hate plane travel and they would precisely be  what they would also hate about those sleds in tunnels, especially if stations are no better than a hole in the ground.

Most people hate their local transit agencies. Riding transit isn't cool, Musk made disparaging remarks about it. Ironically the man himself makes almost all his Tesla 3 buyers wait much longer to for their vehicle than Musk had promised.

“I think public transport is painful. It sucks. Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people, that doesn’t leave where you want it to leave, doesn’t start where you want it to start, doesn’t end where you want it to end? And it doesn’t go all the time. It’s a pain in the ass. That’s why everyone doesn’t like it.” (Musk)

Actual Musk test tunnel (Photo: The Boring Company)

In a time when those in power are admirers of the ultra elitist libertarian Ayn Rand ("The Atlas Shrugged") some may be tempted to believe that heroic men like Musk can in the manner of Rand's Howard Roark ("Fountainhead") solve all the problems that "the swamp" couldn't.

History, though, is rife with examples which prove that those magic shortcuts don't exist. To our Governor one wants to say: It would be far better to make the icky transit better, than hoping for the Hyperloop.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA

 Musk's FAQ paper about his tunnel projects
Tunnel video showing how a mini station is supposed to work (Red Tesla 3 required)