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Absolutely. People are super confused about this. The reporting wasn't very good and you have to look beyond it. The original idea is - little 16 person passe

by joshe 8y ago

Absolutely. People are super confused about this. The reporting wasn't very good and you have to look beyond it. The original idea is - little 16 person passenger pods with bikes, wheelchairs, and luggage. $1 fare. - possibly sleds for cars - you can stack tunnels (think of them as car lanes in 3D), so you can have 20, 50 or 100 lane highways - you make lane changes autonomously, so the subway pods can have different destinations - it's all electric so there isn't poisonous engine exhaust This is just people boarding a bus, the throughput is super high. Even sled loading can be pretty fast, imagine replacing 20 street parking spots with sled elevators. Then accelerated to 100 mph, that too is a lot of throughput. Here's the pod part of the Boring company talk. It's worth watching to see what they are proposing. https://youtu.be/AwX9G38vdCE?t=1372 https://youtu.be/AwX9G38vdCE?t=1372 Elon and company got excited that they built a tunnel, which is a real achievement. So they drove a Tesla through it. The media knows what you want, which is max outrage, so they reported that the 1% will get tunnels with their Teslas. You will be stuck in gridlock behind a diesel truck. They should not have driven a Tesla through it, it was a PR blunder. Here is a Heathrow pod experiment: http://www.bbc.com/autos/story/20140910-hands-off-with-heathrows-pods http://www.bbc.com/autos/story/20140910-hands-off-with-heath...

bobthepanda 8y ago
These are just small trains. If it was built today you could automate the Boston Green Line too - the technology already exists. The main issue with building tunnels is cost. Tunnels aren't cheap and are hard to scale because soil conditions are extremely local and you have to tailor boring machines to ground conditions. Egress points are expensive, especially in dense urban areas where property values are sky high. You could use elevators instead of stairs, but the problem is that elevators are low-throughput and unusable in the event of unreliability. Even considering all that, Elon did build a tunnel, but the tunnel was quite short and also quite small. There's not really room for emergency ventilation, or egress walkways with exits or safety points every 300m, or really anything that modern fire codes would require. Once you add all that in the tunnel is not really narrower than a subway train, at which point you might as well build a subway train. And why not? The New York subway has a capacity of 60,000 people per hour per direction using signals from the 1930s. A highway lane only carries about 2,000 people per hour. And all of that's assuming your low-capacity elevator entry can handle all of that. PRT just combines the inefficiency of the automobile with the cost of actually building transit. There is a reason that PRT experiments have never been replicated elsewhere at large scale.

by joshe 8y ago

bobthepanda 8y ago

These are just small trains. If it was built today you could automate the Boston Green Line too - the technology already exists. The main issue with building tunnels is cost. Tunnels aren't cheap and are hard to scale because soil conditions are extremely local and you have to tailor boring machines to ground conditions. Egress points are expensive, especially in dense urban areas where property values are sky high. You could use elevators instead of stairs, but the problem is that elevators are low-throughput and unusable in the event of unreliability. Even considering all that, Elon did build a tunnel, but the tunnel was quite short and also quite small. There's not really room for emergency ventilation, or egress walkways with exits or safety points every 300m, or really anything that modern fire codes would require. Once you add all that in the tunnel is not really narrower than a subway train, at which point you might as well build a subway train. And why not? The New York subway has a capacity of 60,000 people per hour per direction using signals from the 1930s. A highway lane only carries about 2,000 people per hour. And all of that's assuming your low-capacity elevator entry can handle all of that. PRT just combines the inefficiency of the automobile with the cost of actually building transit. There is a reason that PRT experiments have never been replicated elsewhere at large scale.