Generally bid that is not "technically complete" .i.e. does not demonstrate a real ability to undertake and complete the project can be rejected. There is some engineering discretion to this.
Most large infrastructure projects have a large number of trades for a short amount of time
Contractors have people,experience and equipment that would be cost prohibitive to maintain full time but can be relatively inexpensive when hired for just their needed duration.
The kinds of work that you describe fall more under maintenance and basic repair, which most public agencies have full time employees that perform that roles. For instance the NYC subway has signaling workers for a constant stream of signal work, track workers to maintain track and sign workers for endless lifecycle replacement of signs. New construction work, like tunnels and stations is done by contractors.
There is a non-zero chance that May is replaced by a hard brexiter and they insist, by will of the referendum, that a hard brexit must occur. You can see UKIP bubbling back up in frustration.
When you consider what a soft brexit is, it's genuinely nothing of what leave wanted. The UK still doesn't have a solid border between itself and the EU because of the Good Friday Agreement, the UK still had to pay the EU and follow it's regulations and for all that it gets zero say in the EU legislature.
So there is a real chance of a hard brexit and it's going to be very messy.
As a random piece of trivia, in cab signaling was pioneered in the 1920's and implemented commercially by Pennsylvania Railroad the 1930's while upgrading their main line between New York City and Washington D.C. You can see in this photo that the engineer had one indicator that would light up for each signal aspect: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/31/85/83/3185833fba11b79498ff...
Okay, my bachelors was in civil engineering and I have worked in construction and engineering for just over two years now.
Most public projects today have generous structured incentives that are given to companies for meeting goals for time and budget. We work to these incentives.
Keep in mind that often you cannot be aware of the things that will go wrong until you actually do them. This happens in software development quite a bit.
I am not aware of any extensive private tunnel construction that has occurred without public financing inside of the U.S.
So here are the drawbacks to Musk's plan:
1. He may prioritize speed over safety, either unintentionally causing loss of life or limb because of construction practices or geotechnically destablize the foundations of the buildings and infrastructure that he's traveling under.
2. I firmly believe that it's going to cost far, far more than 1 billion. That leaves the chance of a big hole in the ground that may eventually fill with water.
A boring machine that could dig 10x as quickly (and hold all other desirable characteristics equal) would save tens of billion of dollars in infrastructure projects around the world and substantially increase the financial viability of tunneling globally. It would totally transform the sector, much more profitability and meaningfully than these tunnels will change transportation.
If the Boring company could produce a reliable boring machine that dug at 10x speed, the boring machine would far far more valuable than these tunnels. It makes me think that the claims are exaggerated or misleading.
If you have the kind of nice geotechnical conditions that permit the use of tunnel boring machines then tunneling isn't actually very expensive. What's killer is the cost of subway stations, which need to be dug out manually.
If your goal was to cut costs and your largest single expense was boring, you would choose two 14' bores over a single 28' bore, because a 28' bore has a cross section twice as large as the combined cross section of two 14' bores and variable costs for boring are roughly based on cross sectional area
One of the only things that I can agree with Musk in regards to this project is that larger tunnels are more expensive.
Building underground interchanges that include complete grade separation would entail building cloverleaf interchanges underground. Cloverleaf interchanges usually cost somewhere from 500 million USD to 2 billion USD above ground.
I don't think Musk's goal is to destroy public transit, but things like the hyperloop have been used as a bludgeon to attack high speed rail initiatives. [1]
I thought they were going to have a single track tunnel with passing sidings based on the 1.6 billion dollar construction costs, which would limit frequency.
Does Musk seriously believe he get two ~20 mile tunnels and terminals for $1.6 billion? I don't know if he's exceedingly ambitious or delusional, give that a underground that's depicted in the rendering would cost 1/4 of his budget.
> If I attempted to buy an ice cream cone with Bitcoin, will the money be transferred before the ice cream melts?
It will not.
>What costs more, the transaction fees or the ice cream cone?
There have been times where the average transaction cost was about $20. It's hovering around $0.80 cents now, to the best of my knowledge. So it depends on the market.
I belief that the current strategy is to convince others that bitcoin is a great transaction medium for everything under the sun (i.e. ice cream) and then cash out in dirty fiat once the price reaches a target so you can buy Lambos full of ice cream. It's really not a sincere attempt to create a currency as it is to masssively enrich early adopters by encouraging use by normal people.
Bitcoin could go the way of any number of other cyptos; back to zero.
In any case, nobody uses Bitcoin as a currency because it's logistically harder for 99.9% of people, and nobody uses it as a store of value because its insanely volitale. Bitcoin is really just a speculative asset.
