Re:The Boring Company FAQ
by ambicapter on Wednesday May 17, 2017 @10:57AM
(#14359025)
I was thinking the other day how sweet it would be if it was easy to take your bike on the subway.
The DC Metro lets you do this, and I've taken advantage a couple of times. It is pretty nice. It vastly increases the effective reach of the network.
Unfortunately, they don't allow it during rush hour due to space constraints, so it's not nearly as useful as it could be.
The MBTA allows this during non-rush hour times, and most buses have fold-down bike carriers in front.
Indeed. This was implemented here ~15 years ago. The initial fears "Just ride the damn bikes! Trains full of cyclists! Cats and dogs living together!!!" did not materialize, and it's a major improvement on a bike's radius.
A public transportation network's usefulness is roughly quadratic in proportion to its size, because it needs to cover both your origin and your destination. A small subway system is nearly useless, because even people who live or work near it probably don't live and work near it. You can mitigate this to an extent with busses, taxis, letting people park at stations, etc., but there's still a lot of friction.
By carrying cars, these tunnels will act as an extension of the road network, which almost certainly covers your origin and destination already. The tunnel part doesn't need to serve the ends, it just needs to exist somewhere in the middle to be useful.
If you build one subway line, it's pretty much "great, let's finish the system so we can have something useful." If you build one Boring Tunnel, it would be immediately useful for anyone whose car trips are vaguely in that direction.
I'm really skeptical it'll all work out, but I don't think it should be thought of as a lame subway.