Universal Orlando's special district negotiating contract with Boring Company

I think there's a lot of hubris involved in thinking that you can build tunnels in the flat parts of Florida, including that part of Orlando.

I see zero benefit with creating underground tunnels in a city where there are already roads. Why not bridges? Or just add a road? Tunneling is so unnecessary.

And the reason Elon wants to make tunnels, like everything he envisions, is to prepare a technology that can send humans to Mars. Living on Mars sounds agonizing. Destroying our planet while dreaming of colonizing Mars is so counterproductive to our species. When an genius takes as much drugs as he does, it turns them into an idiot.

(Oops! I spilled the contents of this can. Now these worms are crawling all over the floor.)

There's a reason that homes in Orlando don't have basements. A tunneled shuttle between Epic Universe and the rest of the parks would be great, but that's got to be a phenomenal cost.

Yeah, that was my thought too---including the Magic Kingdom, whose "basement" is the ground floor.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea will return to Florida... Oh, wait, wrong park. But, yeah, with the water table in Florida, it better be a submarine ride through the tunnels.

Ok, let me get this out of the way, I hate Elmo.

beyond that, there is some validity to this project. Surface streets aren’t going to get any less crowded in the years to come. Creating a transit system connecting the two “zones” of USF (original parks and City Walk area to the new southern area of Epic and all that future development) makes perfect sense. It’s the only way to create an “on-property” bubble, and will be a necessity given the lack of “perceived proximity” between the two.

Elmo’s boring company is great at what they do, no question. What is still up in the air is how the system will work once the tunnels are dug. The Vegas proof of concept is a half-assed, inefficient transit system. It needs a huge tech jump to move from manned Teslas (holding 4-5 pax max) to some form of autonomous larger vehicle that would be efficient in an Orlando theme park tourist delivery system. Four people waiting 15 minutes for a manned Tesla to take them 1000 feet from a hotel directly across the street to the LV Convention center, using a disco tunnel, is a novelty, it's not a scalable "transit system". As it exists currently, and which is obviously not what is being planned for Orlando (I hope) it would fail instantly as a means of moving thousands of people at peak morning rush hour from hotels to theme parks. It would be chaos. Although I would buy FOTL just to watch it unfold in all its glory.

The world is full of tunnels under Rivers/Bays/Channels/Oceans so I’m going to assume that issue is resolved, although those go way down under the bedrock and I’m not sure what that looks like in Florida’s sandbar soil. I’m not a geotechnical expert, but again, I’m going to assume that part has been solved.

This thing will have to have larger vehicles than regular Tesla cars (Vegas), it will have to be fully Autonomous, and will have to connect to the hotels AND more importantly Brightline. If it can do those three, then it’s a GAME CHANGER and creates a hermetically sealed bubble around the expanded USF resort for many guests, and gets people into the USF bubble directly from the airport and back again. That’s huge.

LostKause:

When an genius takes as much drugs as he does, it turns them into an idiot.

You are presupposing that he didn't start as an idiot. I would say there is ample proof of that. His "Genius" moniker is certainly in question.

On the subject of autonomy, I was in Atlanta over the weekend and used Waymo for 2 Uber trips. I loved how it came up as an option in the app and, for both trips, the cars showed up less than 2 minutes after confirming. Both rides were event free and we were even able to get dropped off early during one ride when we realized it was going to circle a very long block to get us on the other side of the street. I'm not a fan of automation completely replacing people, but I enjoyed the convenience and the cost savings of not paying a tip.

Monorails are sexy. Tunnels, not so much.

Gunkey Monkey:

Monorails are sexy. Tunnels, not so much.

what if you drive the monorail into the tunnel. giggity

bigboy:

On the subject of autonomy......,

Vegas already has the Zook mobile transport pods (essentially same as Waymo, but cooler looking vehicles), and they seem to work well. They defeat the need for the Tesla Loop process other than the fact that TeslaLoop have their own tunnels and aren't at risk of road congestion. (hold that thought as we won't discuss the same Teslas now running on surface streets to the airport).

Again, the "Boring" part of the equation is actually anything but boring. They have radically reduced the time necessary to complete underground tunnels for transportation mechanisms. What they haven't perfected yet is anything other than a 5 seat automobile (with one seat taken by a human employee driver) going through tunnels that at the moment have 5 (6?) nodes all within a rock's throw of the (egregiously large) Las Vegas Convention Center. It's nothing more than a "people mover" of unsold Teslas that goes from essentially one end of the LVCC to the other (it does go one stop further across the street to 2 hotels and soon to be a third, and as of very recently they're taking side runs to the airport).

If you haven't seen how this works, imagine the loading zone for Radiator Springs Racers. Yup, that's it. Now, the individual cars are not anchored to a linear path like a train track, but they are confined to wherever the tunnel has been built, either a straight line or with multiple branches)

Now there is a wonderful opportunity for this entire thing to be very open ended (if you want to spend a metric f-ton of money on it). Imagine multiple arrays branching off of the main nodes at Epic and "original" USF). You could have three branches going from Epic to Helios/Stella/Terra each, and a similar branch off the main line which could go to the Endless Summer property , and then multiple branches off of the "original USF" station, going directly to HRH/Portofino,Royal Pacific/Cabana/Aventura etc. That way, people at Portofino, wanting to go to Helios, wouldn't have to stop at, or even pass, all of other hotel stops. They could (if built in this manner) travel directly along to main USF node, then the long (not really that long) path down to Epic node, then the spur to Helios without stopping.

However, the more expected path and most realistic would be to build essentially a strait line connecting (for now) any number of stations for Brightline, Helios, Epic, Stella/Terra, Endless, Aventura/Cabana/Royal, IOA/CityWalk/USF, then Hard Rock and Portofino, with each stop having a pull off area, so that load and unload doesn't interrupt traffic on the main line. The cars could travel the main link, but only stop at the specific pre-programmed end point(s). While the ability to pre-sort guests into appropriate vehicles for their intended destination helps immensely, it still doesn't solve (for me) the main need to get the Stella/Terra/Helios crowd up to the IOA/USF station, and the opposite crowd from north to south, all within the opening and closing crunch hours. If you're utilizing 20 passenger vehicles stuck in a single file one lane path along the main node, I just can't get the numbers to work in my head. It will fail miserably unless the vehicles are larger, or they can essentially run them darn near bumper to bumper at speed, and unless they spend the money to build the various pull offs. 20 passenger cars are not going to cut it if you're trying to move thousands of people from one resort area to the other at peak times? (what's the throughput on the Disney sky ride things?).

I'm very curious to see how this plays out because if you're playing the Long Game, and really invest in it up front, this could be a huge home run.

The bus route they currently have is about 4 miles end to end, with only three traffic lights. They optimized the crap out of that route with the bus lanes. I imagine if I could use those lanes, it would take 12 minutes. How much time would you shave off on that to make it meaningful? It takes at least that long to go from Epcot to Animal Kingdom, and there are zero traffic lights in between those.

A civil engineer friend of mine suggests that it's possible to do tunnels here... if money is no object. But practically, not so much. The water table is at best ten feet down. you'd need many layers of varying aggregate under the tunnel and some way to pump out massive amounts of water to keep it from sinking. It would probably be cheaper to build a monorail.

I agree with everything you said, Jeff. It would seem that it's a solution in search of a problem. I can only imagine that they view the "let's create a bubble" idea to be so overwhelmingly lucrative, that it's worth this investment. They may also be looking at the long term plans (25-30 years) and seeing that the growth of their resort areas (plural) is going to be so large, that they need something besides a bus lane between the two areas. The underground part, and the cost of it, is the part that is bewildering to me. I mean, we've all had that discussion about whether Disney would have been better off years ago extending/creating monorail links to all four parks. Maybe the numbers pan out. Especially if Elmo needs to have a bigger proof of concept than Vegas.

I put the term "perceived proximity" in quotes up above because as you pointed out, Epic to IOA/USF is shorter than the time between almost any of two of the 4 Disney parks (Epcot and Studios being the exception), even going on surface streets with traffic lights.

Gunkey Monkey:

Monorails are sexy. Tunnels, not so much.

Tell that to the people of North Haverbrook!

It is possible to tunnel under the water line. For exmaple, the Transbay Tube exists between Okaland and San Francisco.

It is definitely not cheap.

As I understand it, the problem is soil composition and water table. If you look at the current Google satellite photos of Epic, you'll notice that it all looks like a beach. That's because it's all sand. Everything is around here. The pilings for bridges tend to go 50+ feet, and major buildings downtown go 100+. We have sinkhole endorsements on our homeowner's policy, because it's too much of a gamble to not. The aquifer that providers our water is barely 100 feet down in many places. But the sand is the only reason we can have wrath-of-God rain and not be in a constant flood state. The areas that do tend to flood have more clay content. For a tunnel, you have to figure out how to not only keep water out of it, but redirect water around it. As Joel pointed out, that's why we don't have basements.

It can be done, at a price. The Henry E Kinney Tunnel in Ft Lauderdale sends US 1 under the New River. The Port of Miami Tunnel in Miami travels under an inlet of Biscayne Bay. It took 4 years to construct and opened in 2014.

Cost aside, I didn't think it was that big an issue considering the US has tunneled under waterways since the mid-20th century.

I was there too, but Jeff's point about soil composition is one I hadn't thought of. Having it be largely sand might also make things more complicated.