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Rail based transport on cities makes a lot of sense. In cities usually the only way to significantly increase transport capacity it to dig tunnels. Building on
by avianlyric 9y ago
Rail based transport on cities makes a lot of sense. In cities usually the only way to significantly increase transport capacity it to dig tunnels. Building on the surface is just too difficult.
When you build tunnels your cost proportional to the volume of earth you remove, which means your cost is the square of your tunnel diameter. Double the diameter, quadruple the cost.
This is where rail shines. Rail let’s you run faster, longer, vehicles in much smaller spaces, because the rails guarantee you won’t collide with the walls or each other. Just look at the London tube, with trains only slightly smaller than the tunnels. This means smaller cheaper tunnels, so you can build more of them.
In this system the tunnels already eliminate any real ability to reroute, so you may as well put the biggest vehicles in there and maintain them properly.
- closeparen 9y agoA system experiencing cascading failure has no capacity, and at this point it should be considered engineering malpractice to imagine that American democratic institutions will do the maintenance on anything, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
- avianlyric 9y agoI’m not sure what your point is. It’s not viable to build more roads, so tunnels it must be. Tunnels are expensive, so rail is a requirement. Maintenance is must, regardless of political will. Saying that US institutions can’t/won’t maintain things, thus don’t build things that need maintenance is just unhelpful. You might as well say we should all give up now and go home.