Tesla /is/ investing in public transportation. From the Tesla Master Plan Part Deux[1]:
"In addition to consumer vehicles,... high passenger-density urban transport... in the early stages of development at Tesla and should be ready for unveiling next year. With the advent of autonomy, it will probably make sense to shrink the size of buses and transition the role of bus driver to that of fleet manager... It would also take people all the way to their destination. Fixed summon buttons at existing bus stops would serve those who don't have a phone. Design accommodates wheelchairs, strollers and bikes."
Indeed, strange how that's not mentioned at all. Or whether any transportation engineers have evaluated what kind of traffic reduction would occur from using all these tunnels for a subway system instead of just moving a few cars around.
Edit: The more I think about it, the worse it seems. Compare how much space is eaten out of the road above for a few cars... per minute?...to go up/down to this tunnel vs. how many a stairwell could take up/down to the subway. Even if the car's were relatively crammed close together in the tunnel, I can't imagine it would be anywhere near the density you could fit on subway trains. The economics of this make no sense.... unless you consider that this will be something that only the incredibly elite will be able to afford. The majority of people in rush hour LA traffic will remain stuck there, the rich will go down I guess.
>Even if the car's were relatively crammed close together in the tunnel, I can't imagine it would be anywhere near the density you could fit on subway trains.
Indeed. The problem always fundamentally reduces to geometry, and the only way to solve it is to increase density.
People always say, "we can just build more tunnels", but you'll just end up with congestion at interchange and entry/exit points, just like on freeways today. And the more tunnels you build, the more it takes for the operating company to recoup the costs, meaning higher fares to use the tunnels.
Best case scenario, this company reduces the cost of developing rail transit. Likely scenario, we just get the same awful freeway situation but below. Worst-case scenario is the unfortunate situation you described.
It costs 1 billion dollars a mile to dig subway tunnels in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Improving tunnel digging technology would help bring those costs down. The American solution to every problem is to spend more money as money is the universal and only sufficient remedy to all problems.
Eventually, you run into a situation where spending more money makes things worse such as with health care. Sometimes it's better to invest in lowering the cost of things instead.
San Francisco's new Central Subway drilled two bores at a cost of about 150M/mi. What makes these projects insanely expensive is not the tunnel, it's the stations.
If this technology truly can reduce the cost of tunnel boring by a factor of ten, subway systems can be created in many more cities and existing systems updated with a thicker network.
I also wonder if, because of the smaller diameter of the tunnels, a network of self-driving buses doesn't make more sense to deploy in these tunnel networks.
Because the decision whether or not to invest in public transport is a political one. A private company can't force society to allocate more tax money to public transport infrastructure. It can, however, provide more attractive infrastructure options, which seems to be what the Boring company is trying to do.
It could just build transit though couldn't it? Instead of sleds? Private companies operate passenger and freight rail networks, especially in the UK to my understanding.
At least for Buses this is highly regulated in the US. I would assume the same is true for everything else.
Free-Market people have long advocated for a liberalisation of buses and taxis. Uber has help breaking the Taxi monopoly, but the Bus regulation still stand. Eventually somebody will attack Uber because of too much ridesharing and accuse them of breaking the laws against private buses.
I believe they're usually heavily subsidized. Possibly, if a private company could reduce costs enough they could operate a transit system without subsidies and make money doing it, but I think ordinarily a private company running public transit is heavily reliant on government support. (Bus networks might be an exception, since they can use the roads that already exist and there isn't a huge up-front cost.)
It sounds like the Boring company is mostly interested in providing the capability to make small tunnels cheaply. The car sled thing is just one possible way to use the tunnels, but if some city wants to do something different with them that's up to them.
This IS public transit. Public transit without the last mile (or in LA, the last 5 miles) problem. This freedom-supporting tech also thwarts the tyranny inherent in public transit (schedules, robbing your life with all the waiting, limited load carrying capacity, forced interactions with antisocial individuals, etc.)
But there is still a last mile problem, you have to enter and exit out of the tunnels. That's the last mile. Or do you suggest that tunnel building will become so viable from an economic and engineering standpoint that everyone will have an entry point in their garage?
> This freedom-supporting tech also thwarts the tyranny inherent in public transit (schedules, robbing your life with all the waiting, limited load carrying capacity, forced interactions with antisocial individuals, etc.)
Funny you don't mention the tyranny inherent in single-occupancy vehicles: Robbing your life having to find parking. Paying to park your car (if you live or work downtown). The antisocialness of sitting in your car for 1-2 hours a day with just NPR as your only friend. The inherent inflexibility of SOV travel, where your car carries just 20% of the designed capacity most of the time. And finally, the infrastructure that has to be built to support cars, driverless or not, zipping around everywhere, making it harder to walk or bike to where you want to go.
I guess you missed the 125mph speed in the tunnel, thus decreasing that 1-2 hour commute to about 9 minutes or less. Or, 20 times faster than even the best crammed in a sardine can public transit.
The idea of public transit being redefined as 6-8 passenger vehicles you get paired with at the bus stop that then use the tunnel network to decrease transit time for those who need to use public transit is also absent from your retort. As is the honesty about the typical case for public transit, non-peak. This case in the tunnel system suddenly realized for a fraction of the cost because vehicles are on-demand instead of driving a mostly empty big ass bus (or light rail car) on a route according to a schedule. It's basically for public transit what streaming is for TV.
Also, all of the things you describe as "tyranny" are actually choices, making them "freedom", the opposite of "tyranny". I've lived in Los Angeles for almost 35 years and I've never chosen a 1+ hour commute, though you are free to if you choose. I also don't choose to go to the parking insane areas. Again, your choice. But there is little choice with current public transit solutions. You go where they tell you when they tell you and that's that. And don't forget your mandatory sampling of the, I'll put it nicely, culture du jour.
The last mile problem isn't about difficulty to drive, it is about congestion. Tunnels, however long they maybe to take advantage of the speed, must end. At the endpoint is where the problems start with trying to accommodate capacity everyone thinks it'll achieve.
nobody said that cars are the only thing that these sleds would shuttle around. use your imagination a bit and i think you can probably imagine how this can be use for a public transit system.
I do love the "freedom" of driving to Lake Tahoe once a year or so, but it's a patently silly adjective for describing people commuting between two fixed points (home and work), at a fixed hour, five times a week. Which is what all these urban traffic ideas are trying to solve, basically.
I don't think all those people stuck at I-680 have a deep love of staring at the next car's bumper for two hours every day. Re-branding it as "freedom" doesn't make the experience particularly palatable.
Yes, it's called a subway. Being on average 5-10x faster than a car in a city, having stops every 5min walking time, having someone else who always keeps it clean instead of you, and allowing you to still do something or read something instead of driving.
It's cheaper, faster (the time spent on the car elevator is a massive reduction in efficiency for Musks system), and you don't have to own or clean a car.
Go visit Tokyo someday, and try their mass transit.
> ...schedules, robbing your life with all the waiting, limited load carrying capacity, forced interactions with antisocial individuals, etc.
Reading this, the first thing that comes to mind is daily traffic in the city.
Rush hours are scheduled. You spend so much time waiting at lights, in traffic jams, etc. The roads are congested due to inherent capacity limits. And you're forced to interact with antisocial individuals speeding, texting, making dangerous lane changes, etc.
30 to 40 thousand people are killed every year in car crashes [in the US alone]. Millions are injured. I think I'd rather take my chances with the occasional "antisocial" person on public transit. Of course, given the ubiquity of cars and the massive (socialized) infrastructure to support them, they are useful sometimes.
There's also the fact that in many place you're practically forced to own a car (or at least are convinced that you absolutely need one (or two)). How is that not "tyrannical"?
