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I think the sled idea is really interesting. Imagine a conveyor belt like you have in airports. Except it moves cars at 150 mph through an underground tunnel in
by Tomminn 9y ago
I think the sled idea is really interesting. Imagine a conveyor belt like you have in airports. Except it moves cars at 150 mph through an underground tunnel instead of people at 15mph.
Traffic is often massively asymmetric so you can just reverse the direction it travels at noon.
It seems plausible that keeping a conveyor belt in good service is cheaper than keeping a fleet of railway cars is. It's also significantly less hassle as you don't need to figure out where to put railway cars when they get the end of the track. Finally it's costs would scale fairly linearly with distance, making short belts totally doable in a way that short railway systems are not.
The natural throughput of the system will be high. Like a new car on the belt every x seconds, where x is not a big number, seems totally plausible.
- kuschku 9y agoThe throughput of "car directly after car" is about 10 times lower than that of a railway with a frequency of 90 seconds.
- Robotbeat 9y agoHow about bus pods directly after bus pods? It'd be comparable or even higher (20 passengers/pod).
- ancientworldnow 9y agoCongratulations, you just reinvented the train.
- marcosdumay 9y agoYes, but it's a train that also carries cars. And quite possibly freight. Those aren't new either, but not common for urban transportation.
- ascorbic 9y agoGenerously assuming that it averages 150mph, and very generously assuming 1.5 people per car and estimating from the video a gap between sleds of 40m gives a capacity of around 9,000 pax/hr per line. The Tube in London has trains with around 900 pax capacity, and they run at around 90 second intervals at peak time, giving 40 trains per hour and 36,000 pax/hr.
- glenneroo 9y agoOne point people seem to be ignoring is that Elon mentions on multiple occasions that he plans to build in 3D, i.e. not just one layer of tunnel in one direction but multiple tunnels at multiple depths in multiple directions i.e. to get your 36k pax/hr will require 4 layers.
- ascorbic 9y agoWell, of course those tube numbers are per line, per direction too.