4 ms·

But 75 cars spaced 1 second apart...

• dmitriid 8y ago
  Somehow you assume they will be able to get into that tunnel at these intervals
  • Tiktaalik 8y ago
    haha yep. This plan is like when a city widens a highway but doesn't touch other parts of the road network? What happens? It just moves the choke point somewhere else in the network.
    • reissbaker 8y ago
      Agreed 1s gaps are too tiny — seems unsafe and that'd be a lot of elevator traffic. 5s seems doable though: assuming 5s gaps, you need an elevator system capable of moving one car every 5s, and then the tunnel is optimally saturated. That doesn't seem insurmountably hard: two elevators that take 10s each to go from surface to tunnel would be enough, along with a bit of on-ramp tunnel to allow cars to accelerate to speed before merging. Throw in a third elevator or a fourth for redundancy while you're at it because elevators are way cheaper than a mile of tunnel, and seems doable.
      • dmitriid 8y ago
        You're assuming you can get cars into the elevators at 5s intervals. Almost all assumtions in the discussion start directly in the tunnel, and sometimes at the elevator. Almost no one thinks about: how will cars get into that thing from the road, how the cars will get out of that thing onto the road.
        • reissbaker 8y ago
          Presumably they'd drive into the elevator on one side, and drive out of the elevator on the other side.
          • dmitriid 8y ago
            Even if you have a separate elevator for entry and a separate eleveotr for exit: how do you get to a 5s interval?
• zimpenfish 8y ago
  It's probably just me but I really wouldn't get into anything that was going to be travelling 150mph at 1s intervals. All you need is a tire to go (or something loose on the floor or a dead battery or ...) and you've got not only a huge twisted lump of metal and body parts to untangle, you've almost certainly ruined your tunnel.