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The only reason it's interesting to share farts and bad breath with that many people is that subway tunnels in NY are really expensive to make. They cost many b
by jillesvangurp 2y ago
The only reason it's interesting to share farts and bad breath with that many people is that subway tunnels in NY are really expensive to make. They cost many billions to dig and even minor extensions to existing tunnels seem to to turn into multi billion$ projects. And then you need these massive subway stations that also cost billions. Doing things at that scale seems really expensive and ripe for disruption.
Your assumption is that there would be just 1 tunnel instead of many. Probably because you are assuming tunnels are super expensive and that that is something that cannot improved. The premise of the Boring company was that they would be able to cut cost by some orders of magnitude by doing things at scale. They haven't yet, obviously. But that doesn't prove the basic premise wrong.
Cheap tunnels mean you could have many more tunnels between many more destinations; not all of which need to be super dense cities like New York. Which means you don't have to squeeze millions of people through a single one of them. The cheaper the tunnels, the less the capacity matters. Just add tunnels to scale if things get congested.
And of course the model Y is hardly the final answer in pod design. There's no good reason why we can't have a mix of smaller and bigger ones. In fact, using a big lump of an SUV designed for road traffic for this seems not very optimal.