691–700 of 800 posts
I would have thought you'd say where you wanted to go, and if you had enough battery to get there, the car would just drive itself in the tunnel, eliminating the need for a whole other wheeled, motorized sled to move a wheeled, motorized vehicle.
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I don't really get the point of this comment. I'm also early 90's and I'm wondering why you're not more heavily for or against either side. You're living in an insanely fast paced world where, in 50 years, we will either be dead and roasted in Earth-Venus, or we will have carbon sequestration figured out and be on Mars. We need engineers to get option two, and you being neutral increases the chances of Earth-Venus.
Wait, there are actually people who think the Earth will be roasted in 50 years?
Not that it's not a problem - it obviously is - but it's not like the earth is going to be barbecue'd in our lifetime.
This is very, very wasteful compared to actual mass transit. A subway network is much more effective at delivering people. If he's looking for mega-good, Musk would do significantly better to drop a full subway network. edit: tunnelling is a broadly solved problem. It's difficult, expensive, slow, etc. But there's no engineering reason why a hole in the ground can't happen. Musk might be able to drive some significan…
Except the monoculture here doesn't account for just how terrible buses and trains are. Mass transit is fundamentally superior and realistically inferior. The second any rational actor has the economic advantage necessary to not ride in a box packed with people of questionable hygiene they'll chose option #2 no matter the negative externalities. I love this place but people aren't packets in your stream, they activel…
If he has any sense he would be bidding for these projects too.
It would be great if by default we could get bigger tunnels (if crossrail were bigger then we could get double deck train in the future for instance).
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I assume this is part of his motivation. The cost of LA's perpetual traffic clusterfuck must be immense. The car tunnels in the video were silly, but being able to build subway tunnels faster and for cheap would be a huge boon for everyone. I'm sure he's fully cognizant of the utility of tunnel boring technology on Mars though. There's no way he hasn't thought about it.
By the time a significant tunnel boring project gets planned, approved and built, cars will be self driving and the Uber model of rides on demand will be extremely prevalent. Traffic will be massively reduced and existing roads will be much more efficiently used. I agree with the theory that Musk is aiming these boring machines at Mars. That makes more sense than using them to attack the traffic problem when that pro…
PS I am ashamed of the current top comment (despite not having anything to do with it).
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So...they don't exist. The fastest ones are actually 40% slower.
Show me a working 600mph tube train and then you'll have a case of a superior technology. Until then it's just an idea on a napkin. China is building new, high-speed maglev trains and there's many lines already open for business. Maybe one day Hyperloop will get built and will be open for passenger travel. When that day comes it's possible that surface rail may have already achieved the same speed because third or fo…
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If places aren't dense enough to support mass transit, they are certainly not dense enough to financially support car-trains tunnels. The depicted tunnels have the same costs as building subways, and I imagine similar maintenance costs. On the other hand, they can only serve a fraction of the riders a traditional subway can, which means the cost per rider is huge. Not to mention it still requires owning a car, so the…
Why does everyone lack imagination on this topic? Problem: if you drive to the subway, then take the subway, then you have two problems: where do you park your car, and how do you get to your destination once you get off the subway if it's not walking distance? Currently - people just drive. And the surface streets get progressively more crowded. We could drill more regular roadways - but it's notable that one reason…
Solution for problem 1: Park and Ride. Giant multi story parking lots. Cheaper to build even underground than the tunnel Solution for problem 2: Local transit like Tram, bus, or bikeshare.
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But can you get a moving block signalling system such that they can follow each other with minimal separation? Until you can do that, a real train will always win at people/hour due to the fact that you can have more people per consist as ultimately the signalling challenges are comparable and you can therefore have comparable separation.
64 LA subway cars cost $176 million [1]. That seems really high to me, at about $3 million per subway car. Also people per hour is not really the metric the average person cares about. It's travel time to destination. [1] http://www.lamag.com/driver/l-s-subway-cars-will-definitely-...
That seems high to me, full-stop. The London Underground S-Stock order came to around £1 million per car (though was a much, much larger order); even smaller orders of Bombardier Movia family trains have come far closer to that than the $3 million per car.
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Because you are now more dependent on private cars for transport. Why would you use this instead of a system where you take a neighborhood bus to the local transit station & shopping center where you can pick up a light rail to the closest subway station, where you take the express train downtown to the high-speed rail station, where you take that to visit the next state for the day? No cars, and you can sit and read…
I really don't think cars are going away any time soon for several reasons. Cars offer individuals far more freedom, go anywhere when you want. Also people live in rural areas, I'm not going to wait 3 hours for a bus to take me to my mom's house in the country, I'll just drive. In addition there is probably not a bus that goes there. People go shopping, they don't want to carry on $200 worth of groceries onto public…