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I’m not saying America’s cities are turning into dystopian technocapitalist hellscapes in which corporations operate every essential service and pull every civic string.
But let’s take a tour of recent news from the metropolises.
— New York Times
Farhad Manjoo unpacks the extreme impact big tech companies have on US city construction citing cases from Amazon, Elon Musk's Boring Company, and Bird's electric scooters. Are these innovations simply breaking through the red tape of local government or are they dominating with no input from the... View full entry
Autonomous 16-passenger vehicles would zip back and forth at speeds exceeding 100 mph in tunnels between the Loop and O’Hare International Airport under a high-speed transit proposal being negotiated between Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s City Hall and billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk’s The Boring Co., city and company officials have confirmed.
Emanuel’s administration has selected Musk’s company from four competing bids to provide high-speed transportation between downtown and the airport.
— Chicago Tribune
Musk's Boring Co. beat out established engineering firms, including Mott MacDonald and JLC Infrastructure, even though it has famously been in business for less than two years and only has a test tunnel near the company's headquarters in the Los Angeles area to show for as construction experience. View full entry
Back in March, Elon Musk announced that his Boring Company would be selling LEGO-like bricks made from leftover dirt, excavated to make way for his Boring tunnels. Land excavation is a costly endeavor and the question of "where will 550,000 cubic yards of dirt go?" poses many economic and... View full entry
Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HyperloopTT) recently signed an agreement with Aldar Properties PJSC, a leading real estate developer in Abu Dhabi, to begin construction on the first commercial Hyperloop system in the United Arab Emirates. Rendering of HyperloopTT station in UAE, in... View full entry
Elon Musk announced that the Boring Company will sell LEGO-like interlocking bricks made from rock that his tunneling machines excavate from the earth. Musk stated these bricks will be sold in "kits" and will be rated to withstand California's earthquakes. ... View full entry
Elon Musk’s tunnel-boring project has received more vague government approval for its equally vague plans to build an underground hyperloop between New York and Washington, DC. Last week, Washington, DC’s Department of Transportation issued a preliminary permit to Musk’s Boring Company to start digging at an abandoned lot in the northeast section of the city, according to The Washington Post. — The Verge
The extend of the building permit for Musk's The Boring Company is still vague though and currently limited to an empty parking lot at 53 New York Avenue NE next to a Mc Donald's. As the Washington Post reports: "The District’s Department of Transportation is figuring out what other permits the... View full entry
Recently, Elon Musk shared his perceptions during a tech industry conference that public transit is both inconvenient and dangerous. “It’s a pain in the ass,” he said. “That’s why everyone doesn’t like it. And there’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer, OK, great. And so that’s why people like individualized transport, that goes where you want, when you want.” — Quartz
Elon Musk has had his sights set on various ways of 'disrupting' America's public transportation system for some time now. Most notably, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO has been experimenting with the idea of creating underground tunnels for a Hyperloop system that he swears cities are giving the go... View full entry
Still, the trouble with the Hyperloop is not its breathless gee-whizzery. It’s the fact that it mistakes the charismatic mega-project for a viable solution to current problems. If the Hyperloop’s purpose is to address large-scale urban mobility, then there are many other options already deserving of public funding and attention—ones that do not require a hard rebooting of the entire urban world to be realized. — New Yorker
Musk’s visions are valuable because they show that even people far outside the field of urban planning can be frustrated with the world others have built for us. They, too, should have a say. It’s great set design, but terrible city planning. Tunnels might abruptly end where investors fear to... View full entry
Just received verbal govt approval for The Boring Company to build an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop. — Elon Musk, Twitter
NY-DC in 29 mins?... View full entry
“It would be quite fun to be on Mars because you would have gravity that is about 37% of that of Earth, so you would be able to lift heavy things and bound around,” [Elon Musk] adds, predicting that journey times could eventually be cut to 30 days. — The Guardian
Aside from the money, specific technology, and solid timeframe, Elon Musk has figured out a way to get to Mars. The colonization plan, which is designed to place about 1 million people on the planet in 40-100 years using a yet-to-be constructed ship that would carry 100 passengers per trip, needs... View full entry
Since the company’s introduction, many (including Futurism) have speculated that the tunnels’ true purpose was to work in tandem with the Hyperloop. This is the real clincher here. It seems like The Boring Company isn’t just going to be for cars. “The electric skate can transport automobiles, goods, and/or people. And if one adds a vacuum shell, it is now a Hyperloop Pod which can travel at 600+ miles per hour,” the site explains. — Futurism
Back in December, the business magnate Elon Musk tweeted his frustration of being stuck in LA traffic along with a half-joking suggestion of building a tunnel to fix his gridlocked woes.Well as it turns out... View full entry
Elon Musk has received the go-ahead for another wild transit idea: a tunnel beneath Los Angeles. Intended to ease the city’s notorious traffic, it’s not clear where Musk intends to dig, besides that it will start near his Hawthorne office, about 5 minutes from LAX. Musk’s been railing... View full entry
Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk has a pretty good sense of humor, but sometimes we can't tell when he's just joking or mulling his next big idea.
For example, on Saturday Musk took to Twitter to say out loud what every traffic-plagued Los Angeles resident is silently screaming inside: The city is a gridlocked hellscape.
"Traffic is driving me nuts," wrote Musk.
But he didn't stop there. He also raised the idea of boring through obstacles to alleviate traffic woes.
— mashable.com
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status... View full entry
While solar panels have been subsidized in many cities for a while now, the blocky, rectangular panels aren’t heavily implemented in part because they tend to appear as, well, an addition, rather than a constitutive element of home design. That's about to change, as Tesla has announced a... View full entry
Why place individual solar panels on top of a pre-existing roof when you could just build an entire roof with solar technology integrated into it? Elon Musk, CEO of the financially underperforming Solar City and Tesla, sees it as an obvious solution. According to CNNMoney, he said that "If your... View full entry
