Los Angeles public works and Skanska Traylor have been building new tunnels across the city, to try and improve access to the metro system here. the problem is, the metro is already at capacity.
the regional connector corridor, or RCC, is building new lines at 6th street, crenshaw, 2nd &hope, and one that goes all the way to West Hollywood. this, combined with the newest Santa Monica Expo line means that an already overtaxed system will probably be brought to its knees by all the new traffic from these added stops.
Basically there are too many people living in this city for public transportation to be efficient. Buses already fill the streets, sometimes youll see 5 or 6 in a convoy on busy streets downtown. Ridesharing is reaching the level of an epidemic here, adding even more congestion to our roads.
I would say to use the Tunnel Boring Machines, the angeli 
( https://www.metro.net/news/simple_pr/regional-connector-tunnel-boring-machine-angeli-br/ )
to drill through all the damned hills in this town so that people wanting to go from burbank to Downtown could pass in a straight line, or straight from the Valley to Santa Monica without contending with the congested coastal highway or various winding mountain passes
But it’s far less inefficient than trying to pack even more private vehicles into an already overcrowded system, so it’s nonsensical to say that adding tunnels for private vehicles would be more efficient than adding tunnels for expanding mass transit.
i think we need both, frankly. Musk’s idea for the tunnels is myopic and feels like something that could only help out the very rich.
When all the RCC lines are open we will see if its truly worth the millions in development costs and years of planning and construction. Im hoping that it does help reduce private vehicle use but who knows what the actual outcome will be.
Most people going over laurel canyon, mullholland, Barham and other mountain passes are the only people in their cars. If we could open up some subterranean passes then the DAILY grind of people driving over hills just to get to work can be improved somewhat.
And even that was a cakewalk compared to what a tunnel system looks like for a municipal entity, let alone for a private entity which lacks eminent domain powers. Hudson-Bergen took less than a decade from first proposal to usable early sections, with the southern section coming within about 15 years. Compare that to the Second Avenue Subway. Even if we only count from the bond issuance, you’re still looking at 12 years to open phase 1. In contrast BRT systems have been successfully rolled out in such famously transit friendly cities as Cleveland, Phoenix, and Kansas City. A tunnel takes all the difficult aspects of surface construction and adds a few tons of rock.
I’d love to telecommute. Unfortunately, I can’t fix AMF 82-70 pinsetters at the bowling alley remotely.
I maintain that you could save massive amounts of emissions by drilling tunnels on that stretch of the I-5 that goes through the Laguna Hills. Not an improvement as the crow flies necessarily, but just to even out those hills that are an amazing sorter of human beings by power train and self-esteem.
I think the idea is to use transformative technology, rather than the same old way to dig tunnels. Surface work brings it’s own bag of problems. You seem to be familiar with Hudson County, the repair work on the 139 covered roadway and the Pulaski Skyway seems multigenerational at this point. I love the idea of BRT as relatively cheap to deploy, but like I said, existing stakeholders are notorious for opposing anything that changes their status quo, and no elected official wants to be the next Robert Moses, vilified for “destroying neighborhoods”. BTW anyone interested in Urbanism needs to read The Power Broker, the Pulitzer winning Moses biography.
I have no idea if Musk’s tunnels will actually work, but at least he’s willing to think outside the box that has locked down dense city transit development for many decades. Low density cities like Atlanta and Houston are easy to jam in new structures.
It is, but as long as autonomous cars aren’t designed to focus on texting while they’re driving, I feel like it’s a pretty safe assumption…
It’s the paradox of sprawl though, isn’t it? Too big and spread out for effective mass transportation, but too many people for private transportation to operate at anything but a standstill. What do you do? It seems like one puts in place new public transportation (which isn’t stuck with cars in traffic, as that defeats the point), and wait and hope that the city will eventually reconfigure itself around transit lines. I don’t know how long that takes, though. Generations, I presume, based on how slowly it’s happening in the SF Bay area. I wonder if anyone has managed to speed up the process?
You can do more than “wait and hope”.
In places that take this stuff seriously, the urban planning powers of the state are utilised to make it happen. If you want planning permission for building, then you make it dense and transport accessible or you don’t get to build it at all. If there’s high demand to build in an area unserviced by transport infrastructure, you build up public transit at the same time as the housing goes up, and make the developers contribute to the cost.
You can use similar methods to ensure that low-income housing is not forced out to the periphery. The state has the power to make this happen, if it chooses to use it.
The best use for ridehailing/rideshare is to get to the mass transit in the first place. I generally drive into town rather than using the mass transit because i have a few things to do, doing it all by bus/subway will take forever. However if i can uber to the subway, subway into town, then affordably uber my way from place to place, then back to the subway, then back to my house, I will do that. Right now I can’t do that anyway, because no uber in vancouver yet.
That’s not quite correct, from what I remember of the tweets. Musk called him an idiot because Walker started with a snide remark aimed at Musk, based on conjecture, instead of sticking to facts.
Isn’t that just a self-driving bus?
Musk doesn’t have any revolutionary tunnelling technology.
In short, Musk,
a) has little understanding of the drivers of tunneling costs,
b) promises reducing tunneling costs by a factor of 10, a feat that he himself has no chance to achieve, and
c) is unaware that the cost reduction he promises, relative to American construction costs, has already been achieved in a number of countries.
Considering the first elevator in an office building didn’t come around until 1870 and was, as I recall, powered by a steam engine (I think it was about 10 years later that the first electric elevator came around), it wouldn’t surprise me if somebody in the mid 19th-century called a 50-story building impractical. If that many people had to use the stairs to go so high up, they’d spend half their days just getting from the front door to their offices.
But here I think the difference is that new technology came along that enabled the new idea. Maybe I’m missing something, but the way I see Musk’s proposal is that he wants to use old technology (boring) to create more places for more private cars to drive. To me, it looks not so different from a private subway car for everyone. It doesn’t really seem very visionary to me, in fact it seems rather uninspired and, well, boring.
I totally buy this argument, and my own experience jibes with it really well. I live in a large city with excellent public transit and terrible gridlock. I have friends who live here and prefer Uber over public transit, and relatives who have visited and also preferred Uber over public transit. I honestly cannot think of one single time they have arrived on time somewhere using Uber, whereas I rarely arrive late (and often arrive early) on public transit. I also have a membership in a local car share service for those times I have more to carry than I can take on transit, and every single time I have used it in the city it has taken me at least twice as long to get to my destination. I will never view a private car as more efficient than public transit, ever, at least not here.
On the other hand, during a recent trip to Kuala Lumpur, I was kind of forced to use a ride-share service. My hotel was not far from a station on KL’s decent, but not extensive public transit system, nor from a couple of bus stops, but because of the way the streets are laid out, lack of sidewalks and crosswalks, etc., I couldn’t figure out how to get to any of them. And KL has gridlock bad. A ride that was supposed to take 5-10 minutes took 35 (though it did only cost $1.50).
You may have something there
And of course the very wealth are the ones who need access to transit the LEAST because they can already pay for as many cars or charter jets or helicopters. They are trying to solve transit for themselves, not for entire cities or regions.
Ignoring the underlying problems of transit and inequality will do nothing to solve the transit problem in America. Working class people will still have to ride the bus for 2 hours to get to work.
Yep… this is true. Some jobs still need people to be physical in a particular location to do their jobs and that doesn’t look to be changing for the majority of humanity any time soon.
