The Future of Transportation: Boring?

Did you know that depending on where you live, you could spend upto 243 hours in traffic every year? Yes, it’s true! This means that you may have wasted upto 10 days a year stuck in a vehicle. This may seem inevitable, but what if I told you that there could be a solution to the problem of soul-destroying traffic?

Elon Musk, best-known as the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, believes that the answer lies in underground transport. Since 2016, The Boring Company started by the American multi-millionaire, has been designing and constructing “safe, fast-to-dig, and low-cost” tunnels for transportation. Along with this, Musk has come up with an effective means of movement through these tunnels - a speedy yet safe system he calls Loop. If The Boring Company succeeds, the issue of traffic will be resolved for good. But is this success possible? It’s time to find out.

First, let’s understand what sets The Boring Company apart from other tunnelling corporations. The Boring Company, unlike most other companies in the burrowing business, is constantly modifying its methods to reach maximum efficiency. So far, it has iterated three generations of Tunnel Boring Machines - Godot, Godot+ and Prufrock. According to Elon Musk, each of these machines was “developed to further increase tunneling speed and reduce tunneling cost”. Most tunnelling companies spend between $100 million to $1 billion per mile. The Boring Company, however, has brought tunnelling prices down to 10 million dollars per mile, which is far cheaper than they have ever been.

The Boring Company dreams of not only improving the efficiency of tunnelling, but also revolutionising transportation today. Thus, its tunnels will be built to accommodate Elon Musk’s new transportation apparatus, Loop. Which brings us to our next question - what exactly is Loop and how does it work?

According to The Boring Company’s website, Loop is “an all-electric, zero-emissions, high-speed underground public transportation system,” that uses Autonomous Electric Vehicles (AEV), Tesla creations that can travel up to 150 miles per hour. These vehicles will “operate autonomously within the Loop system”. Every vehicle will carry a limited number of passengers, who can enter and exit the machine at surface stations, subsurface stations, and subsurface open-air stations. Each station will be approximately the size of two parking spaces, as it only needs to hold one AEV at a time. This is an advantage, as it means a station can be built anywhere from outside a school to inside a parking garage. Now, how is Loop different from a subway or metro?

Source: https://www.boringcompany.com/loop

In the words of Elon Musk, “Loop resembles an underground highway more than a subway system.” While in a subway, a train stops at multiple stations before reaching a final destination, Loop consists of smaller, car-like vehicles that, carrying upto 16 passengers per ride, travel directly to their terminus without stopping at each station on the way. For example, I imagine that if there were three groups of 16 people in a station, each group would be assigned to one AEV. The group travelling to the furthest location would set off first, followed by those headed for a midpoint, and finally the group going to the closest stop.

 Thus, using Loop is far more convenient than riding a subway train, for an equal or lower price.

 The Boring Company’s triumph would mean the eradication of traffic, which in turn would significantly lessen pollution, wastage of time, and road accidents.

The last question we must ask ourselves is, is “The Boring Company” a suitable name for this institution? My answer to that is yes, definitely. My mind almost turned to sludge while researching it. I have taken a major risk for your entertainment, and all I ask in return is that you share your feedback on this blog.