The Boring Company on its way to a slow variant of the Hyperloop.
The tunnel drill hobby company of Elon Musk will give priority to pedestrians and others who want to travel without a car in the underground transport network. With this, the Boring Company meets one of the criticisms on the futuristic transport system.
The Electric Car and Space Pioneer announced the change of course last weekend via twitter. He placed a film in which a cabin full of travelers sank down the sidewalk and inserted into the underground transport system, which listens to the name ‘Loop’.
It is a slow variant of the well-known Hyperloop, in which capsules with speeds of 1000 kilometers per hour shoot through vacuum tubes. At ‘Loop’, the speeds will not exceed 200 kilometers per hour.
Those speeds are achieved by platforms on a special kind of 'skates'. In the first plans of the Boring Company were mainly cars to see, Tesla's of course, who parked on such a platform and through ‘Loop’ bypassed the traffic jams at ground level.
Traffic jam suffering was also the origin of this umpteenth company of the Tesla and SpaceX boss. When Musk got stuck for one and a half hour with his car in the traffic of Los Angelos, he launched the idea for the underground transport system.
But the starting point, especially cars on a platform through underground tubes, came to him from the beginning on the necessary scorn. It was not seen as an adequate response to traffic congestion that cities worldwide struggle with. In cars, especially during peak hours, often no more than one person is involved, and that does lead to a very inefficient and costly transport system. With the change of course to give pedestrians a first advantage within Loop, it will get more the character of a public transport system.
'Bertha' from the Boring Company becomes smaller and faster
Musk gains speed by starting to halve the diameter of the TBM. This is possible since The 'Loop' works with automatic guided vehicles. And with the halving, the costs shrink and the drilling speed also jumps up.
The Boring Company also strives for a continuous tunnel boring process where the drill does not have to be stagnated half the time for placing the concrete prefab elements of the tunnel wall.
As the world is accustomed to him, Musk did not grow grass over his idea of traffic jam. Within half a year, the Boring Company had managed to lay its hands on a disused tunnel boring machine, which drilled a section of about 80 meters on the SpaceX site in California. It is said that this is mainly used to test the electric skates over which the platforms have to slide. There are advanced plans to drill another one kilometer further. For that Musk had to apply for a permit, because that is no longer possible on the company's own premises alone.
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