Every time this system comes up it gets worse. The platonic ideal of the Musk tunnels is less efficient that a sensible metro system. Then they faced the real world in ideal soil conditions and delivered something barely suitable for a pedestrian walkway. Now they are draining more public money for a nightmare tunneling environment.
We need to get serious about how the Boring Company scam works. They have mainly used off the shelf and modified commercial machines to build tunnels that are under the specs other companies are held to for safe operation. Apparently they’ve finally completed a machine of their own design, only three years after signing cities up for their proposals, rather than companies with a history of actually building things. The hype musk generates gets government agencies to perform free advertising and market research for them, which is valuable to all of Musk’s other businesses (you want fine grained traffic data on the Great Lakes region have the Chicago and Cleveland MPOs do a hyperloop study). They can then use this hype and free advertising to raise venture capital. They haven’t yet completed a public project, that met the design spec, at all, but they’ve abandoned plans in LA, Chicago, and Baltimore.
