4 ms·
Peak headtimes on BART are a train every 2-3 minutes, with trains carrying up to 1400 people (let's call it 1000 for the sake of argument). So at the low end, t
by mjg59 8y ago
Peak headtimes on BART are a train every 2-3 minutes, with trains carrying up to 1400 people (let's call it 1000 for the sake of argument). So at the low end, that's around 20,000 people an hour. If you had cars with a headway of 5 seconds then that's 1200 cars an hour, so you'd need an average occupancy of over 16 people per car. That's unrealistic, so yes, a subway tunnel has more capacity.
- zimpenfish 8y agocf London Underground - Central Line does ~260M journeys a year which is ~40k/hour assuming an 18 hour day. (I suspect peak times will be ~50% higher than that average.) Even the Waterloo & City Line, the most unloved of all lines, manages 3.5k/hr over 260 days (16M/year, 5 day week).
- reissbaker 8y agoThat's assuming there's only one tunnel. As the article mentions the point is to dramatically reduce the cost to bore tunnels, so you can bore more of them. If you could bore 4x the tunnels, you'd need a capacity of 4 people per car to match peak BART. And... hey, that describes pretty much every car in existence. But using the BART comparison: recent estimates [1] put each additional mile of BART track at over $1 billion. So if it really costs $10MM/mile for the Boring Co, you could bore 32x the tunnels and beat BART capacity by a factor of two assuming even single occupancy vehicles, at about a third of the cost. [1]: https://sf.curbed.com/2018/6/18/17464616/bay-area-subway-train-rail-costs-price-bart-muni https://sf.curbed.com/2018/6/18/17464616/bay-area-subway-tra...