Comment by gsnedders
9 years ago
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.
With all my sympathy for metro - in many American cities it will never be good enough due to extensive suburbs.
In places where land is cheap, and there are single family houses, cars will be the most efficient way to commute for years to come. We'll switch to self-driving electric cars, but still.
But ultimately you aren't going to have tunnels dug by the Boring Company out into the extensive suburbs either. The question ultimately becomes whether it makes sense to give up large amounts of space (even if underground) in the centre for parking (for everyone commuting from the suburbs), or give up space further out where land is cheaper and less dense for large car parks at stations. (Obviously there's a cost in changing mode of transport, but that somewhat applies to the pods too.)
> But ultimately you aren't going to have tunnels dug by the Boring Company out into the extensive suburbs either.
The point of the boring company is to make excavation of tunnels an order of magnitude cheaper. [1] And if he succeeds, I suspect demand for the tunnels will push them out to the burbs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boring_Company
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Commuter rail is a thing. DC's metro goes a dozen miles outside the city in all directions and the MARC train goes further.
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-...
Those subway cars are used at all hours that the system is in operation. If you're trying to compare costs with Boring, note first that a personal car is used much less and second that Boring involves these weird platform things which will also cost money, so the equivalent is more than just the price of the Tesla that sits on the platform.
Also, each LA subway car can fit over 50 people seated and probably three times that standing. $3M divided by the price of the cheapest Tesla is about 85. So the number doesn't seem high at all.
> If you're trying to compare costs with Boring,
Actually I'm not. I just want to point out that public trains cost huge amounts of money for investment, they need special infrastructure which many US cities don't have, and the only way they work feasibly is if the population density is high enough so the taxes will support them.
In other words, there's a huge upfront cost to even considering building a system that most cities/governments will choose roads over rail.
A bus on the other hand is $300,000, holds around 60 passengers, and uses the same infrastructure the city already has, and doesn't incur the need to have right of way fights with land owners.
What would you realistically do given the choice?
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> 64 LA subway cars cost $176 million [1]. That seems really high to me, at about $3 million per subway car.
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.