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Let’s take the Elizabeth Line (Crossrail), where they run 24 trains per hour peak (every 2.4 minutes!) with up to 1500 people per train. That’s a theoretical ma
by stephen_g 2y ago
Let’s take the Elizabeth Line (Crossrail), where they run 24 trains per hour peak (every 2.4 minutes!) with up to 1500 people per train. That’s a theoretical maximum capacity of 36K passengers per hour.
Let’s say our four passenger Teslas can be dispatched every 10 seconds into the tunnel. That’s 360 vehicles per hour, four passengers per vehicle, or 1440 passengers per hour.
Up the pod size to 20 pax and you still only have 7,200 pax per hour. Halve the safety margin to 5 seconds and you still only have 14.4K per hour, 40% of the capacity of the conventional train. And filling and dispatching 20 people per pod every 5 seconds is a pretty tricky logistics problem!
- jillesvangurp 2y agoSo, increase the number of tunnels and remove bottlenecks where people are piling up by creating tunnels to where they actually want to go. What would the London underground look like with 100x more tunnels and stations? A lot less busy in each tunnel probably. Plenty of room under London. The issue is the cost of tunneling and building these massively huge stations. Smaller could be a lot cheaper.
- stephen_g 2y agoThat would be ludicrously expensive - again, they had that idea at the Boring Company, and it hinged on finding cheaper ways of building tunnels (beyond just making them too small to fit emergency egress). As we've already seen, that never came to be, tunnelling is pretty optimised as it is. With your 100 tunnels you could probably just reach the capacity of the Elizabeth Line (again, just one example) but at 75x the cost...