In most European cities, if you get off at train station, you're in the midst of (or very close to) the city center, office locations, touristy walking sites and plenty of choices for retail or food.

In the US once you get off at the train station, well, you're at the train station, and now need a car to go anywhere you actually need to go. NYC and SF are likely to be the only exception - train stations as close as LA or San Jose are fairly sparse and have limited connections.

You can run the fastest most frequent train you can handle, and California in fact is building one between Borden and Corcoran, but the "step 2" in US cities generally involves getting a car.

EDIT: embellishment due to baq, this tends to be true of cities which developed before the car revolution of the 50's and 60's. For example, my city has a pretty poor average walkability score, but for where I live in the city core, it is very walkable since it is the older part of the city.

This lesson seems to have been lost for some reason but infrastructure is to be built first, destinations second. Much of the New York City Subway system, like in the Bronx, was built through farmland. Once the infrastructure was built, destinations (dense residential) was built. It has to work that way. It's not practical to expect there to be any destinations available when the subway opens- people need a few decades to rearrange themselves.

Portland should probably join that list.

Depends what his goal is. Currently getting from A to B in a car at a certain time involves traffic jams.

If his goal is to get from A to B most efficiently in a car then it's one of the best ideas.

If his goal is get people from A to B via any mode of transport, perhaps trains. But he owns a car company, so that's not exactly in his interest.

Also with cars it's truly A to B. Not A to subway/carpark, wait, travel, walk to B.

That's why public mass transport was created and was so successful in the big cities. US big automotive destroyed most of this working infrastructure in the last century (E.g. Los Angeles, Houston, ...) but it's still cheaper to build mass transport than to support individual transport. Just ask a New Yorker or a foreigner.

Tunnels are a hazard for individual traffic. That's why pods do help. But trains are still preferred.

It's a good alternative idea to build long range tunnels. He is right. But the focus needs to be mass transport, not individual. It's a matter of costs.

You could rent your car back to the system to use as a lounge for people who want to travel but didn't bring a car to get on the network. Saves you parking costs, maybe an operator could work out paying you for that.

But for big cities trains are much better and cheaper.

Tunnels are great parking structures. Cars on sleds provide a great interface to said parking structure. Heck, NYC has automated parking structures with car elevators and sleds. The only imagination required is not having to dig a big hole down to the depth of the lowest level of the garage first.

Another problem is that all those people have to walk to and from the end station.

A "packet switched" system of sending individual cars at high speed solves both those problems, and going just by my gut feel, should have a quite high throughput too.

Then I sat at an intersection one day and counted how many individuals were being moved through two lanes of regular car traffic vs how many came through on the light rail.

I was shocked by how inefficient regular traffic is.

So now MY gut feel is that without any technological breakthrough, this sort of system would already be starting with an order of magnitude disadvantage: which is to say, shockingly inefficient compared to allready available technology and solutions...

People are walking from the station to these giant office towers in central London. The walk from the Tube station to the office must only take 5-10 minutes, total. My gut feeling says the throughput won't be high specifically because you'll have 800 or so people trying to get out at the same place at roughly the same time.

Where mass transit struggles is in getting people from one arbitrary spot to another at an arbitrary time.

There is a delay between each car which after 20 cars really adds up.

How would that work? Now it's true that there won't be any delays caused by drivers not paying attention, but unless the cars will go 125 mph with only a couple meters of space between them (eep!) the cars will require a non-zero delay "off the line" to allow them to spread out as they gain speed.

How fast they can fork and merge is more interesting, and I dare not have an opinion about that.

I think in the original video, they showed a pod with a group of commuters.

Furthermore, a solution that leverages personal vehicles is slightly more viable for a private sector company. Telsa can continue to promote their car sales without that having a negative effect on the Boring Company.

This idea that a company can replace our entire existing infrastructure with a train/bus system is just purely impractical. There is the solution that seems the most obvious (current public transit), and then there is the one that is actually viable from a business perspective.

I don't get it, where does that come from anyway? I mean America's mostly a country of immigrants; most inhabitants' forefathers, only a couple generations ago, abandoned everything they know to build up a new life. If that's not change, then IDK what is.

I think that at one point it's not about what they want - having the option even to drive anywhere is a luxury a lot of people don't have - it's what's practical. Driving in New York isn't practical, so people take the tube - regular services, high capacity, etc. There's no way a tunnel system with individual cars, which will have a much lower capacity than a regular road, will be able to compete, neither on cost nor capacity.

Of course, if you're rich then it doesn't matter. I'm sure it'll work in SF, where there should be plenty of people that can afford it.

The best answer I have: the more people are individualistic, the more difficult it is for them to coordinate. Big changes like fundamental infrastructure require collective buy-in, and when you have lots of self-interested individuals who stand to gain by introducing friction into the process, costs skyrocket.

The alternative ends of the spectrum (it's not 1D) of that is more social people (dream utopia, I don't know where it exists, if at all) and more authoritarian control (easiest way to coordinate people is to have someone unilaterally decide for them).

That's an excellent answer and I think you are right. Car culture is a big deal in the US and I think the perceived independence it represents is part of the reason why.

Let's:

* replace tipping with a minimum wage which helping working people get out of poverty

* make checks obsolete

* etc.

> Driving in New York isn't practical, so people take the tube

The what now? I think you'll find it's actually called le Métropolitain

  - Eliminate small coins
  - Move to metric in a practical sense rather than just official

Uh? What? Please explain - are you expecting everything to go fine the first time, because in the history of the world, that almost never happens.

The tunnels obviously don't make sense in places that have well established train systems, but a lot of places don't have that. Often in America, the only 'practical' way to get around is using a personal vehicle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_Rail_(Los_Angeles_County...