Gadgetory

I've lived in LA for 16 years and traffic is gone from like just like seventh level of hell to like the eighth level of Hell and you know it's terrible finally finally finally there's something something that I think it's solved goddamn traffic problem things like want white tunnels you know sometimes people say what about like flying cars and all these other things or to be clear we're not opposed to mass transit we think mass transit is fine like let's try every solution possible but the thing about tunnels is that you can go 3 D underground the inherent problem with the way cities are constructed is that you've got all these tall buildings that are in 3d and then a road network in 2d necessarily this will result in traffic this is no way our two ways right no way around it you have to make Transport 3d you could go with a flying car but there are some drawbacks to flying cars they are essentially it's a helicopter with wheels and they they make a lot of noise there's a lot of wind force and the probability of suddenly falling on your head if if they're a bunch of flying cars around is much higher than if they're or not the great thing about tunnels is that there's there's no limit to how deep you can go they're weatherproof that's the other thing about flying cars if there's like snow or rain or hurricane or something suddenly you can't go anywhere but tunnels are immune to weather it does not matter if there's a tornado it doesn't matter if there's like an ice storm it doesn't matter what's going on above ground if you're a tunnel you're safe and secure so you will not hear see or feel the tunnels being created you can weave at the boring system tunnel network into the fabric of a city without changing the character of the city it can you'll have this revolutionary transport system and your city will still feel like your city so what's the problem with tunnels but there they usually take a very long time to build and they're very expensive in costs up to a billion dollars per my in fact the LA subway extension that just completed cost two billion dollars for two and a half miles so clearly something needs to be done to revolutionize tunneling technology we need to build tunnels way faster and for help less money there's a snail this is Gary Gary the sixth yeah it turns out snails don't live that long so this is Gary the sixth what are we doing to increase the speed of tunneling in a given hour of tunneling only about 10 minutes of the hour is spent actually digging then the other 50 minutes are spent erecting the the tunnel reinforcements laying down tracks doing logistics and a bunch of other stuff so just just automating the segment placement and solving the logistics issues will actually give you about a five-fold increase in tunneling speed with our design we've also tripled the power of the drone that that results in in a theoretical net speed increase of about 15 compared to the next best tunneling machine so and hopefully we'll beat our snail so aspirationally we should be slightly faster than a snail after doing those things and and we have three three tunnel products one is the loop that is for transportation pods and you guys will try it out later today and that's that does transport tunnel we're also seeing a lot of interest in just utility tunnels where a municipality can get a big tunnel and then put water mains and electricity lines inside the tunnel and then they can actually service like if their water main break instead of it flooding the main street in the city they can actually go in and into the boring company tunnel and fix the water main this but this fundamentally is what we're trying to solve UOP we've all been there many many times we must so solve the solve the soul destroying traffic situation so the the loop that we're talking about it consists of autonomous electric vehicles the combination of autonomous electric vehicles with a deployable guide wheels so that it braces itself against the side of the tunnel so that it's safe even if the car loses power or even if somebody if somebody goes crazy or there's like a mechanical failure those guide wheels keep the car centered in the tunnel and ensure that you can go through the tunnel very fast and still be safe but the thing about going 3-d is that you could have like three you could have six you can have sixteen tunnels going in the same direction so you can have as many tunnels as you want and I'm pretty sure everyone in the United States is not going to move to LA but you could literally build enough tunnels to transport everyone in the United States in LA there is no limit the way the loop would work is that you'd have them get up main arteries that are traveling at 150 miles an hour and only when you want to go to an exit where you have an off-ramp it's like a 3d highway system underground basically and and for the elevators the the way we during the elevators is we construct them off-site so the elevators are prefabricated self-contained steel structures and so the it went in order to insert the elevator all you do is dig a hole in the ground real fast then bring the prefabricated elevator in sections drop it down connect the sections and you're done there's not like some extended construction project but I think that's also important so you don't have these like construction projects that disrupt the city all over the place and and this it should say also we will have continuously operating cars in in the loop for those that do not have a cars this will be will actually give priority to pedestrians and cyclists with with cars that are continuously circulating in the loop so even if you don't have a car you can still use the system this is I really wanna emphasize that it's small but very important element is having retractable wheels that's when when you're driving down the road normally they retract and go under the car you don't even see them but when you get into the tunnel they deploy and allow you to go through a narrow tunnel very quickly and effectively like like a little train so this this even though it's like a small thing it's a small but very important element to the technology if this is not intended to be some sort of walled garden or just for Tesla's or something like that any autonomous PD can be outfitted with these guide wheels yeah and why autonomous well it means you can go very very fast and brake very quickly like we expect that you can probably do a one vehicle per second through the tunnel typically on a on a freeway you can do without autonomous vehicles you can do car every two seconds but with autonomy we think you can do a car at least every every second I mean you can think of these like they're sort of like wormholes and like it's just like you drop down the worm like you're driving around I need to get to the other side of LA or New York whatever drop down the worm will pop out the other side and then you can just drive lonely the elevator itself only takes as much as two parking spaces on the street so if you can just have a station in exchange for two parking spaces and that's what I mean that that's that's basically the size of a station so you can you can interleave these stations throughout the city throughout cities wherever there's you know a couple parking spaces or a little patch or road pretty much anywhere you can actually even have them come up in underground garages and then one day will connect to the highfalutin other-- time and what I think this really amounts to is is an actual solution to the soul-crushing burden of traffic this is just something that I think what will actually work it's scalable and we have a demonstration tunnel here and we expect to expand this over time to many cities all around the world and and give people more time for their friends and family and that concludes our presentation thank you