Elon Musk may have his new boring company that will build an underground transport infrastructure of the future, but the Victorian Premiere Daniel Andrews thinks his boring machine is pretty special too.
The new boring machine will be “a drill the size of the Hollywood sign”. The more than 4 kilometers of tunnel work will be created between 27 and 40 meters below the surface. The boring machine will have a drill face diameter of 15.6 metres, while the Hollywood sign (weird scale for measurement) is 13.7m tall.
Of course there’s a massive difference between Musk and Andrew’s solution. This ‘TBM’ or ‘The Boring Machine’ is one of the traditional, expensive and large boring machines. It’ll be wide enough to support multiple lanes of traffic which then needs to have all the associated emergency and safety aspects relating to accidents and vehicle emissions be included. These are exactly the expenses Musk’s solution will solve.
Don’t forget about the speeds. Once Andrew’s tunnel is in full operation, vehicles will avoid the congestion of above-ground city roadways, but will still be restricted by traditional speeds. In Musk’s version of the future, vehicles won’t be driving, instead they’ll be riding on top of an electric skate that’s capable of getting you from a-to-b much faster and with no emissions.
Like we’re doing in train infrastructure, the Government seems to be content with investing billions of infrastructure dollars on yesterday’s technology.
Andrews posted the video on Twitter, check it out below.
This is how we’re going to build the West Gate Tunnel.
With an underground drill the size of the Hollywood sign. pic.twitter.com/NDd8Up55qp— Daniel Andrews (@DanielAndrewsMP) May 29, 2017
