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.