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Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

The big idea here is to use small electric vehicles instead of a huge ass train pulling hundreds, thousands of people and speed up.

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But why? The smaller tunnels are the same diameter as the London Underground deep tube tunnels. Which run standard, if smaller, electric trains that can carry in two trains as many people as this will carry per day.

Why indeed. If someone were to propose a new airline that used 50 Cessna Caravans instead of one 737, people would rightly claim they've gone off their rocker.

But Elon is on record being no fan of public transport:

"I think public transport is painful. It sucks. Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people (...)" [1]

So I think its fair to say they're sacrificing capacity/efficiency for the sake of comfort and "the premium experience".

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-awkward-dislike-mass-t...

From my perspective, this could serve as a decent proof of concept for building cheap, barebones tunnels (the tunnel for this project is literally just a concrete lined tunnel with lighting - no additional costs like laying tracks, providing electrical third rails for the trains, etc) that self-driving vehicles can easily use.

If this works well enough for something like a car-sized, self-driving, self-powered vehicle, I could see it being scaled up to use bus- or train-sized vehicles, while still utilizing the cheap, barebones tunnels.

There are two ways to increase throughput of any metro or train system. Increase the length of the train, or decrease the headway between trains. In this case, The Boring Company is reducing the headways to probably 10-15 seconds.

The headway is already 30 seconds in modern underground systems. But a train will transport 1500 people instead of a mere 16..

Edit: apparently in the Crossrail it will be every 2.5 minutes, but I remember that in Moscow it is every minute.

I'm not aware of any underground (or above ground) system that has a 30 second headway unless you're talking about a gondola which is more close to the capacity that this system can handle.

Yes, trains can hold more, but that's not the point of this system. If you build a 1500 person train, you now have to build the stations and platforms to accommodate those kinds of crowds.

Because rich white people hate public transit

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Trains are pretty efficient. I wouldn’t bet against them.

The big idea is to make tunnels cheaper than they are. This will be a test for Musks' boring machines. We shall see.

And why this should be a big idea instead of a stupid one? All the passengers that they plan to transport in a day (and even more) are moved in a minute by two Crossrail trains. I can’t really see the advantage of taking 1440x the time to move the same amount of people...

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