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Comment by nickonline | Hacker News Reader

> besides getting a few folks home faster.

How is that not solving a problem? Isn't this the purpose of undergrounds/metros?

Depends on your standards for “problem”, which is conceptually a statement I myself find frustrating, so i can see where you’re coming from.

But, we should try and be considerate when we define “problem”. LA has no shortage of serious transportation problems. This solves exactly none of them. Outside of Startupland, a problem is usually something that gets acknowledged before you find it.

Yeah, it gets 5% of people home faster.

Faster, cheaper (than car) and with less emission right? Seems quite good to me.

It seems an awful solution compared to the worst underground line. Modern lines, as I said, can transport more passengers than they move per day in a mere minute... If you add the time to make 3.6 miles probably they will complete the journey in 10-15 minutes.

Yes, but full scale metro lines are very expensive and not every situation justifies that kind of spending.

If this system can be built more quickly and at much lower cost than traditional transit systems, then it could well be very successful.

It removes those 5% from clogging up the roadways and parking lot. If you attend games, why would that be a bad thing?

When they are building a tunnel anyway, why not run a normal metro line through it and be able to transport much more people?

Why would they waste the enormous amount of additional money it would take to construct a normal metro line, when the entire premise of the company is the proposition that it is possible to construct a useful underground transportation system which is much simpler and therefore much less expensive than a normal metro?

Don't underestimate that if those 5% instead of taking the car take this Loop, there'll be less cars and less traffic. So a higher % will be home faster.

Nr of cars vs congestion follows an S-curve with a very narrow/steep middle section. Removing a single digit percentage of cars/passengers can mean the difference between 'busy but only a little slow down' and 'complete stand still'. I don't know about the numbers in this specific case, but transport systems work in not very intuitive ways.

Indeed and adding this capacity could easily make things worse with induced demand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/

While induced demand is definitely a thing, they're not going to start selling more tickets to baseball games because the road to the park isnt quite as congested. Induced demand is because of the effects it has (encourages more spread out development and 1PV usage).

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