Comment by lorenzobr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lorenzobr | Hacker News Reader

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It's definitely a design choice.

Generally, every city has big transportation hubs - airports, train stations and so on - located at strategic places within the city. Musk's idea is to ditch these hubs and replace them with more frequent and much smaller stations which get you closer to your destination. On the other side if they don't have to move millions of people to the same hub but rather move a much smaller number of people, they can afford to dig smaller tunnels and stations which are way more easy and fast to build.

For instance, in London every time they build a new transportation hub, it takes years. These stations are massive, they literally dig in every direction for several meters.

I don't know if it's going to work but surely there's thinking behind it.

Edit: typo

I think if this tech proves to somehow work (aka actually reduce expenses by at least 10x) the real play becomes PtP tunnels that don't follow the traditional "heavy rail" subway routes, but connect to those stations for transfer.

This also could really only be the long time play anyways - it's the only reason using autonomous battery powered model X's as the "cars" makes much sense.

I think it's an interesting idea, Musk obviously likes his sci-fi. He is basically attempting to implement packet switching for human mass transport vs. the current circuit switching we have.

> On the other side if they don't have to move millions of people to the same hub but rather move a much smaller number of people, they can afford to dig smaller tunnels and stations which are way more easy and fast to build.

The actual cost of tunneling itself is generally fairly cheap--somewhere around $50 million / mile. The expensive part is the stations. You can probably save money without having to build mezzanines, but the lower utilization of the tunnel and the greater number of vertical access shafts needed (not to mention the challenges inherent in moving through that very crowded portion of real estate) is probably going to cause cost blowouts compared to subways. Particularly if you design the tunnels to move cars, not people (SOV cars being about the worst use of space possible).

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