4 ms·
The equivalent of BART in Paris (RER) has 90 seconds intervals between trains in peak time - and thats the regional train system, not the metro. It carries 50k
by liotier 8y ago
The equivalent of BART in Paris (RER) has 90 seconds intervals between trains in peak time - and thats the regional train system, not the metro. It carries 50k pax per hour in each direction - that would be a lot of cars, like eleven cars a second at 1.2 person occupancy.
You mention "cheap tunnel boring" - maybe that is the keystone of Musk's plan that will change the paradigm... With a little knowledge of tunnel boring I fail to see how to disrupt its crazy complexity, especially in urban environments whose density extends underground already: in my neighborhood (La Défense business district) a whole new station is being build wholly under existing construction and interconnected to existing subterranean works, without any disruption - insanely good engineering and insanely expensive.
- kwhitefoot 8y agoOne of Elon Musk's ideas is that underground you can have a three dimensional system of tunnels and that this can help solve some of the capacity problems.
- liotier 8y agoAs dense and as cheap as Musk's technological vision becomes, a question remains: why carry a car at all instead of carrynig people ? Why carry mostly dead weight ? The denser the network, the more acute that question - if Musk's vision is an ubiquitous three-dimensional underground transport mesh, then why does it seem to conscientiously avoid being a public transportation system ? Does Musk believe that saturating the city with autonomous vehicles that use tunnels as network backbone can be more efficient than heavy public transportation networks ?
- noobermin 8y agoBecause Elon owns a car company. That's fundamentally why.