Although the likes of Uber see flying cars as the future of transportation, serial entrepreneur Elon Musk’s vision for congestion-free cities is a little more…boring.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO pitched his latest – and arguably his wackiest – idea to a TED audience: boring a complex 3D network of tunnels under cities, where, rather than drive, cars are transported via computer-guided ‘skates’ capable of travelling 200 km/h.
“We’re trying to dig a hole under LA – this is to create the beginning of what will hopefully be a 3D network of tunnels to alleviate congestion,” he told the audience.
“First of all, you have to be able to integrate the entrance and exit of the tunnel seamlessly into the fabric of the city. So, by having a sort of a car skate that's on an elevator, you can integrate the entrance and exits to the tunnel network just by using two parking spaces. There's no speed limit here, so we're designing this to be able to operate at 200 km/hr.
Musk, who last year launched the ironically named ‘The Boring Company’ (which so far has dug a test trench at SpaceX’s headquarters) anticipated and countered the ‘induced demand’ argument – that is, instead of solving congestion, extra roads will attract extra cars – by arguing that there is no limit to the layers of underground streets that could be built.
“There's no real limit to how many levels of tunnels you can have. You can go much further deep than you can go up. The deepest mines are much deeper than the tallest buildings are tall, so you can alleviate any arbitrary level of urban congestion with a 3D tunnel network,” he said.
Of course, digging underground is prohibitively expensive. Musk countered this by suggesting that by shrinking the diameter of the tunnel and designing a machine capable of continuous tunnelling and reinforcing, the cost of tunnelling could be reduced.
“I think there's a fairly straightforward series of steps to get somewhere in excess of an order of magnitude improvement in the cost per mile,” he said.
When asked why tunnels were a better option than flying cars, he countered with: "If there’s a whole bunch of flying cars, that’s not an anxiety-reducing situation. There is a challenge with flying cars in that they’ll be noisy."
Musk has, of course, delivered on his seemingly crazy ideas before – every car manufacturer in the world now dabbling in electric vehicles, to varying degrees.
Still, unsurprisingly, reactions to the announcement have been sceptical.
Wired’s Alex Davies
wrote:
"Frankly, people who actually understand civil engineering find the idea of building a network of highways below cities hard to fathom. It would require “at least decades and possibly on the order of a century, plus a lot of uncertainty, a lot of risk,” says Henry Petroski, a Duke University civil engineer. Plus, it distracts from other, more practical proposals, like carpooling, bus rapid transit, better subway systems, and telecommuting.
City planner and urbanist Brent Todarian went so far as to label the idea as “dumb, dangerous, distracting and traffic-inducing”.
Still, there's no denying that the slick video that accompanied the pitch is fascinating. Check it out: