4 ms·
(If you're taking about inter-city travel) I really doubt one person on a lane can be faster than a freeway with 4+ lanes (in one direction) no matter how fast
by ktta 9y ago
(If you're taking about inter-city travel)
I really doubt one person on a lane can be faster than a freeway with 4+ lanes (in one direction) no matter how fast it is going.
Another thing you'll have to consider is that there will be a logistical problem at the exit stops if you want to take advantage of all the high speeds being talking about. I'm talking about passengers getting stopped off there.
There have to be atleast X/2 get-in/get-out stops for people to climb into the sleds or there will be a bottleneck. (Considering X is the throughput for the amount of time it take a passenger to embark/disembark)
(If you're taking about intra-city travel)
Building these tunnels would be very, very inefficient compared to say building another road over the current roads.
I'm not from LA but I believe the major traffic occurs at rush hour, and short stretches of roads are really the problem. So finding out the hotspots and mending them would do much better than digging out lots of tunnels under heavily populated areas.
Another point is that in intra-city travel, high speeds cannot really be taken advantage of, so they'll basically travel at subway speeds. Now, subways as you see are already filled up if you take a look at New York. How do you think a one man car would fare compared to that?
(off topic) Again, I'm a fan of musk, but to me, this seems similar to the 'Put man on Mars' argument because that's where we have to be in a couple centuries. Rather than that, putting money towards colonizing harsher places on earth like deserts or Antarctica would be money much better spend IMO.
- gfodor 9y agoPresumably we would get better at building more tunnels after the first one, and presumably once an existence proof is in place the economics will justify accelerated R&D, resulting in a technological feedback loop. You can only layer so many roads above ground. But as said in the post, tunnels have no such limit. 100 years from now one could imagine a very thick subterranean transportation network. The interchange and routing problems I'd guess are solvable iteratively over the course of decades, since you have a lot of free space to work in with minimal constraints once you are deep enough to allow "forking" the network as you build more advanced technology. Slapping two freeways together is not strategy that lands you ultimately in that future, but starting on the problem building cheaper tunnels is.
- ktta 9y agoTunnels might look more futuristic, but I can't imagine a world where building layers of tunnels will be cheaper than larger roads. We've already put the R&D into roads, and the cars that run on them. Routing problems have also been solved. No matter that feedback loop, it wouldn't get cheaper than laying a road. It's true that you can build many tunnels, but why? Congestion is really a problem in inner city roads. I rarely hear of any congestion in freeways, and I have to say, expanding to a couple more lanes sounds a lot more viable.
- gfodor 9y agoThe company is based in LA, a city known for its hellscape of congested freeways.