Comment by bb88
9 years ago
>Musk would do significantly better to drop a full subway network.
In the same way a road offers private and public transportation, a tunnel can do both. Why can't the car be a bus, say?
9 years ago
>Musk would do significantly better to drop a full subway network.
In the same way a road offers private and public transportation, a tunnel can do both. Why can't the car be a bus, say?
Because that’s hugely inefficient compared to a subway network.
I live in Paris, France. 100% of its inhabitants have at least one of the 300+ subway stations under 1 km (0.6 miles) of their home. The subway system transports 5M people every single day. That’s twice the city population. That’s also 1.9B per year. During the peak hours you can have up to one train every 90 seconds for a capacity of 700 people each.
> Because that’s hugely inefficient compared to a subway network. I live in Paris, France. 100% of its inhabitants have at least one of the 300+ subway stations under 1 km (0.6 miles) of their home.
That's actually pretty awesome, but you may have noticed that Americans don't really care about efficiency.
Once the tunnel is built, you can put anything you want into it. But I suspect we would still choose cars over trains.
People in general don't care about efficiency, and it's not even irrational. Transportation planning tends to treat people as little AI zergs that are going to take the most collectively efficient route to their individual destination. It's best to have a system that's as agnostic to how people want to get where they're going as possible, but I have no idea whether tesla's idea is good.
Paris isn't on top of the San Andreas faultline!
Elon already responded to this concern: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/824300186834898945
Because cars, which are relatively wasteful spacewise, create negative externalities on the public transportation by causing congestion, which resultantly makes public transportation less efficient.
Not an issue in automated underground systems really.
Yes it is. Cars don't even begin to match the capacity of trains. Look at London or Singapore where trains arrive less than a minute apart at peak hour. Many of London's trains are autonomous and all of Singapore trains are fully autonomous. There is no way individual cars could even come close to matching that kind of people-moving ability.